Everything’s cheerier in the sun so I wandered aimlessly around the yard at break to join the general mellifluity. Even teachers whose duty day it wasn’t ventured out for vitamin D, so we discussed Hot Weather Dress For Men.  Does a formal shirt look unfinished without a tie? Is it better if your sleeves are rolled up? How about a shirt with toucans on? What do you wear on the feet with tailored shorts? Meanwhile, half the boys were still wearing puffa jackets and one a pointed woolly hat, the chapeau of choice this season. ‘Must be malaria’ said PE Sir. DT Sir, still in jacket and tie, reminded us this would barely pass as a warm day in Jamaica.

Today’s yard was too hot for a serious discussion of the state of the world, so it was just as well that my political correspondent and I had already met. We revisited the quality of world leadership and the internal problems of our domestic political parties and found them unimproved since we last convened. She’s particularly worried about Brexit ‘Everything’s bad, but this is significant’. Good to be able to tell the difference.

Its recruitment season again and the timescales have concertina-d again. In the old days you put out an ad in the trade press, waited two weeks, read the applications and organised an interview day. Now we put things out very quickly – paying through the nose to do so, incidentally – with a short turnaround. If you’re lucky enough to have anyone apply for a job you invite them the day after the closing date, and sign them up if they’re plausible. We used to get frantic at the end of May, but now we panic in March and April, terrified of posts still filled by supply in September.

And that includes Geography. Geography! Ten years ago you could shake the tree and get 20 applicants, six to shortlist and every one of them appointable. Now Geography is a shortage subject, Teach First ranking them with maths and Science for scarcity. How? Well, part of it is the incompetence of a DfE strategy since 2010 which means that no one is in control of the number of teacher training places any more, yawn because you’ve heard me on this before. Part of it is the result of perverse incentives in school league tables which meant that fewer young people studied Geography in the early 2000s. That should fix itself, as long as the university places also haven’t been cut back. It takes time to grow a teacher, it starts in school and it’s a circular process.  What with not being able to afford to buy anyone in any case, this combination of budget issues and teacher shortages is, as the lady says, not just bad but significant.

As I write the GCSE Art exhibition is on and I’m off to see the A level Dance showcase. Our young people produce wonderful stuff as a result of wonderful teaching and their own intrinsic motivation to create. Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher, especially on a sunny day?

And the sunny day brought a poem into the inbox from a parent, a lovely evocation of a happy trip to school and the perils of teenage road-crossing. We’ll get onto the road safety, but thank you for the poem, which I share.

Sunshine & Music Close to the Edge
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
agree to a lift to school
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
cosy front-seat-chat with my “Tallis Blue”
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
navigating speed-bumps, twists and turns
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
all our “Blues” converging on Tallis
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
your Tallis Blue on pavement
head phone cords connecting ears, heart & soul
 
One sudden, diagonal step off the edge 
Shock-waves through sunshine & music
Shock-waves through three hearts and souls
Your Tallis Blue, my Tallis Blue and this mother count our blessings 
as we shiver at what might have been
 
CR
19.4.18 



​Image credit: Nicky Hirst 'Elemental 209 2017' currently on show at Domobaal Gallery until 26 May.

While I’m very glad for the NHS that extra funding has been agreed, you can imagine me waiting for the second shoe to fall in the public sector. I was at the annual school leaders’ association conference last week where a wise person described schools as being in gridlock. I think our problems are difficult to make simple, but it was an apposite image and I’m going to have a go at explaining it. Yawn if you’ve heard me before.

Schools’ biggest problems are funding and the teacher supply. Our funding problems are a result of national austerity measures, a much-postponed decision to move to a national funding formula, and the London issue.  
National austerity means that funding has been stagnant for some time, the increased spending that the government claims being because of more children in the system (schools are funded per child). The national funding formula combined with austerity means that the total existing money is to be shared out more fairly. 

That’s good, but there are as many losers as winners. We would be losers. This combines with the London issue.  London schools were funded more highly because of higher costs, of course, but also through the London Challenge, the initiative which improved the achievement of London schools so radically this century. On top of that, there were pension and NI changes which were unfunded, costing school budgets more.

The teacher supply issue is a real nightmare. Routes into teaching are very complicated and have been decentralised. This combined with static pay and publicity about unmanageable workloads to deter applications, so its many years since government teacher recruitment targets were met. In London, teachers leave to move to areas where they can afford housing.  

The link between funding and workload is harder to explain. Schools spend most of their money on teachers so when budgets have to be reduced, we employ fewer teachers. That means three things. Each teacher teaches more of the week, each class is bigger, and schools discontinue particular courses. Or all three. All those add to the work of remaining teachers. Recruitment does the same thing: an unfillable science post after Christmas led to existing teachers getting more classes and some classes welcoming more students. 

All those affect the service parents expect from teachers. More and larger classes mean less non-contact time and more marking. More marking leads to less frequency, and parents worry about that. I worry about everything.  Hence the gridlock. We sit in our schools hooting wildly, but no one opens the flow in any direction. The answer is more money, but will that ever be the message?

I look out of the window and espy a child, teacher and standard lamp combo. It looks like a nice DT product, so I can only speculate on why it’s been taken for a walk. An inveterate shorts-wearer skips past, obviously feeling the equinox to be satisfactory. Two sirs seek a child who left me in the regular manner but is now elsewhere from where he should be. Year 10 are doing mock exams and so we are still in shushing mode. In fact, next year I might instigate a rule where everyone may only say shush on the first floor of block 4 between December and June. Beat that with a stick, silent-corridor schools.

I tangle with some year 10s who let us down badly earlier in the week, and I’m reading a journal about all the things we ask of the adolescent brain while it’s still rewiring itself. However, it doesn’t excuse these malefactors. I’m daunted by the papers’ erudition but that may be faulty wiring affected by my own adolescence downwind of a chemical works. There’s a whole chapter on myths, and I know a bit about those. Especially the ones about running schools without teachers or money.

Unexpectedly, a second pair of shorts crosses my vision while I have a cordial and witty row with a trusted colleague. His parting shot is that it’s not worth carrying on a fight he’s not going to win. That’s just defeatism. Many human myths are about battles of endurance and he might yet win, unlike the children of austerity with no teachers. That’s a battle against the odds and it’s just not fair. 
  
A youth renowned for Irish dancing scissors across the bridge in the between-lunch quiet, thinking no one’s looking. He’s a fine sight. You’ve got to love it.
 
CR
22.3.18  
 
  

I could talk about Ofsted or the snow but I’d rather talk about year 9. If you’d rather think about the other things, please see last week’s or this week’s newsletter.

We’re looking at what happens in tutor group time this half-term. There’s a programme for each year group that involves reading, news, equipment, revision and so on, according to age and proximity of examination and we extended the time to make it better last year. I’ve been allocated year 9. Year 9, as I’ve said before, are always a bit odd. They lack the winsome charm of year 7, they’re more sluggish than year 8 but they can’t quite focus on the future in the way that year 10 nearly can and most of year 11 do. Year 9, against all the evidence, believe themselves to be quite the models of maturity.

Tutor groups are eccentric beasts too. They’re like a large family of up to 30 children with only one parent (perhaps a second if other adults hitch their caravans to this particular train). Tutors demonstrate a range of parenting skills in this rather challenging task. I scuttled round all nine groups one week to assess the weather and this is what I found.

Two groups were watching Newsround and there were the makings of intelligent discussion on current affairs. Two groups were reading the year group’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. What joy to start the day thus! One group was competing ferociously in an on-line book quiz and couldn’t spare the time to be interrupted by me. One group’s tutor had just returned from a residential trip so the family were going through notices that might have been missed. Another group’s tutor was on jury service so the atmosphere was a bit different. Groups like to see the same community parent’s face every day and don’t really like substitution.
One group was having an equipment inspection. This was being done in total silence and, the merest twitch of the tutor’s eyebrow cause the requisite items to be brandished. ‘Two sharpened pencils? Calculator? Two working pens?’ Tutor was just about satisfied by 99% compliance. The shirker didn’t even convince himself that he’d looked hard enough to find his planner.

Next door, however, there was much in hand. Tutor posed the question ‘Why are we so useless at Sports Day?’ and got many answers including the perfidy of other groups, lack of girls or boys of sufficient prowess in all the events, most of the form being too short, tall or weak or having the wrong kit, inclination or motivation. Dismissing all this as losers’ thinking, Tutor then showed a bit of Coach Carter and set out his plans for world domination.  Introducing novelty concepts entirely in line with our Habits ‘We are going to train’  he said ‘We are going to practice’, to a chorus of much groaning.

We assign tutors at the start of year 7 in the hope that most last until year 11. It’s a wonderful thing to be the school parent of a group of growing children, though it doesn’t necessarily feel like that every single morning and afternoon. Children make mistakes, and personalities change through hormones or circumstance, just like at home.  Friendships emerge and disband, some thrive and some don’t. Some like the relative informality of form time, some hate it.

We try very hard to make tutor groups balanced but aspects of adolescent character are unpredictable. Sometimes groups become collectively unhappy and hard to manage, so we move people around. Some groups stay the same for five years and their sense of family and nostalgia when they part at the end of year 11 is heartbreaking.

I had a tutor group for years in a different part of the forest in another century. Our tutor room was a demountable classroom (hut, terrapin, call it what you will) on the far periphery of a single story site housing a 10-form-entry 11-16 school. Tutorial lessons for PSE happened on Friday afternoons for year 9s but we had RE together after that. Including afternoon reg, that was two-and-a-half hours together to round off the week. We had our ups and downs, but we knew each other pretty well by the end of the year. I can’t say that I begged the timetabler for a repeat in year 10, but when we all  left I was touched by the group memories of long cosy afternoons in a warm room with the rain coming down outside. We planned some cracking events that year for team building and charity: car washing, kayak trips, abseiling. We celebrated birthdays and I visited the reluctant attenders. I saw shocking poverty in some of their homes and learned a lot from all of them.

Schools have different traditions and use different language for the same things. I range through form tutor, registration and tutor group to the bewilderment of children I’m interrogating. Tallisees call the group and the person by the same name: ‘Tutor’. As in, ‘I’m off to tutor to see my tutor’. I like that, the group and the person as one thing with one purpose.

So here’s to the form tutors of the land. May you be a good parent to your many children in your busy rooms. May you build up happy memories. May you know them as they want to be known and smile at them every day, even if they’re useless at the shot putt.

CR
8.3.18

If you can name that song you’re at least as old as me, so well done twice. Though it didn’t feature in Band Night this week, unlike Hendrix, Clapton and a bit of punk.

Its jolly nice to be back after half term. Holidays are funny things: we press pause for a few days, then start again exactly as before, knowing what we’re doing and when, pressing play on the second half of the year. Schools are always running. No matter where in the world you are, someone is teaching fractions, someone is asking a child a rhetorical question, someone is mopping a tearstained face and someone is irritably counting back scissors.

We’ve had a visitor this week to the show that never ends, another civil servant on the DfE Immersion Scheme. It’s good to be put on the spot by an intelligent stranger who’s come to learn. The first thing they say is ‘I thought it would be different’ meaning ‘inner-city, multi-ethnic, big, sweatshirted, I expected to be terrified’. The second thing is to try to make sense of what they’re seeing through the lens of their own experience at school. We all do that and it’s a besetting problem in education policy. Everyone’s been to school, so we carry our bags, heavy or light, from that experience for the rest of our lives. Adults either want schools to be better for children now, or as good as they used to be. Generally, it doesn’t make for clear analytical thought.

Despite that, we had lots of long and really interesting conversations. Our guest met with Head of year 11 and learned some pretty arresting facts about children who don’t have much English. He tangled with our budget and the flexibilities (ahem) of the PFI scheme that maintains our building. He spent time talking about teaching quality, and teacher workload, and reflecting on the pressures that social media bring to the nation’s young. He did a walkabout and couple of break and lunch duties, and some A level philosophy. He heard an options assembly and spent three hours in the same seat in a classroom watching a skilled teacher swap from A level, to mixed ability year 8, to a group of children for whom learning is more slowly acquired. And he asked a lot of questions about policy, and why we aren’t an academy. And while he watched and asked, the show went on.

The sharper readers will have spotted ’walkabout’ above and might have raised a quizzical eyebrow. We have a timetable of senior staff who use non-teaching time to keep an eye on the place and monitor behaviour and learning. We literally walk about, covering the whole building every hour, all by slightly different routes and methods. It takes me nearly an hour to get around, but I am shorter in the leg as well as longer in the tooth. Others nip around quicker, other stop to chat. Sometimes you can be waylaid by an incident that means you don’t get very far: a truculent child, a seagull in the building, a nasty smell. Usually everything is quiet, the show running smoothly.

In school there’s always something to do next and somewhere to go, something to discover and something to achieve and the show is multidimensional. But as you leave block one and go to block two, art and English don’t stop existing because you’re looking at science and tech, and the children you see in year 10 are still the same people you taught in year 8. ‘Walkabout’ isn’t a derogatory use of an ancient spiritual quest, but a vital experience for all of us who do it, convenient or not. As we walk we interpret the school as it develops and the children grow around us. The show is never-ending and always the same, but the children are all different from the others who have gone before and from who they were themselves a year ago, a week ago, a day ago. Our institution protects them because we’re unending and stable, always the same but always changing too. With all that going on, we walk it because we have to know it.

When I set out on Tuesday I saw a pair of year 8 girls whom I love to watch at play. Both had an awkward and difficult start to year 7. It took time and tears to settle, too much of it alone. Somehow, someone put them together and now, utterly inseparable, gloriously happy in each other’s company they laugh all the time and it make me smile just to see them. I hope their friendship is a show that never ends.
 
And I hope our guest remembers the never-ending show when he’s back in Sanctuary Buildings. When I waved him off I told him to come back any time. He’s been on walkabout too and he can come back to check out his thinking.  We’ll all be the better for it, now and into future. Come inside, come inside.
 
CR
23.2.18

How often do you walk backwards? I was accosted by a toddler last week keen to demonstrate forward and reverse gears. I thought I should tell him that reversing has limited utility, but now I’m seeing it everywhere. Teenagers walk backwards as much as forwards given half the chance because, like toddlers, they are unbelievably nosy. They can’t tolerate conversation without their input and when space is limited try to walk in a clump with a couple at the front walking backwards to maintain the circle of discussion. That’s all very well, but eyes are located at the front for a purpose and reversing in a group through a door while holding a football, arguing about love or PE and not knowing how big your feet are is positively hazardous. Face the direction of travel, I cry. Save yourselves.
 
People have been dropping by just to tut and roll their eyes and tell me how long January’s been. This is strictly unnecessary as it’s the same blessed length every year, but coming back to school before Twelfth Night makes it seem interminable. And then there’s February to contend with, which is no better except for half term. It would make perfect sense to have a moratorium on any excitement this half term and just concentrate on getting through the days and heading home before nightfall.
 
However, we are gluttons for punishment. We’ve had a pretty constant stream of visitors (apart from Them) attracted by our website and our general stuff. A much-visited colleague reasonably asked ‘Do we ever say no?’ Yes, but not very often and perhaps I should. Fine words from someone who’s arranged another Civil Service Immersion visit straight after half term.
 
Anyway, yesterday’s visitor was again impressed by the self-regulating multi-directional traffic on the bridge. Like an elderly 14-year-old I can’t leave a good thing alone so went forth to hassle the crowds today. Feeling sprightly for my age, I didn’t grab the trusty anorak. I shuddered theatrically therefore and a forward-facing youth asked if I was cold, as if being cold was an unacceptable sign of weakness. In February. In a thin jumper. Post-Ofsted. Perhaps I needed Clara’s spotty headscarf?
 
Unacceptable weakness was exactly what was being tested (I think) by an enthusiastic group throwing eggs off the bridge after close of play on Wednesday. No, not that kind of egg throwing, we don’t hold with that here, but something sciency. Eggs with parachutes, accompanied by groans, howling, derision and cheers.
 
Much like this week’s staff briefing which included gardening, birthday parties, fidget toys, slime, year 11, year 13, a knockabout double act between me and Gov & Pol, but thankfully no mention of parking. I’m pretty intolerant about fidget toys, but hypocritically so. I can’t sit still to save my life and invariably pick at my face, hair, teeth or just get up and wander about in meetings. Rank has its privileges. HMCI knits: I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
 
But this week also brought us Year 13 parents' evening, the end of the road for some long-term parents. The former Chair of Governors, for example, with child number three now in the final furlong. It’s a strange experience and I’ve said it before: we should print certificates, or strike medals.
 
Except that parents do it for love and generally don’t begrudge the time spent queueing and arguing (usually with the child, occasionally with a teacher and we try to resolve that). We do it for love too, in our own way and we try to give our time freely. A new support colleague asked if she should make an announcement to hurry parents along as time wore on, but we tend not to do that. Parents’ evenings overrun, its part of the warp and weft of school life. I can usually predict who’ll be last. Yes, Bradshaw.
 
Even when everyone’s gone, a handful will remain picking over hard cases or the unexpected upsets and wondering about how we could do it better. Then we all go home. Children and parents to happy or sad homes, filled with pride or regret. Teachers likewise. Mr Smith rewards himself with a kebab after parents’ evenings, and why not?
 
When we get back we can turn to face the second half of the year with confidence and commitment.  Our Platinum Artsmark award buoys us up that our holding onto creativity is valued, and a super conference yesterday sharing practice on transgender young people went really well. It’s getting lighter! Have a nice half term
 
CR
9.2.18

I do love clear and specific communication. The best notice I’ve ever read was on a ferry from Orkney to Papa Westray. A large handwritten sign above a pair of laundry machines read ‘Do not tumble dry other peoples’ overalls.’ There’s human pain behind that. I was reminded of the ferry while afoot in block one during the straightforward part of the week. On the Broadcast Studio door a (typed) sign reads ‘Do not put broken chairs in this studio’.  Broken chairs are a hazard to shipping in schools. There isn’t room for them in a classroom and if you put them in the corridor people sit on them and break them further or slide them around or use them for fencing practice or just trip over them. Putting them in the studio is a bit extreme. I trust the notice worked.

Did anything more exciting happen this week? Oh yes, OFSTED. You know I can’t tell you the result until it’s gone through their knitting. I can tell you about the effect on the good ship Tallis, though.

Ofsted has a communication methodology all of its own. We’ve been due an inspection since May last year so I don’t like any phone calls immediately after 1130 because that’s when they ring.  It used to be at 12, but it’s crept forward. Perhaps by the time I retire it’ll be breakfast time, early enough to spoil the whole day. So, just as our Business Manager was starting to explain further catastrophic developments in local parking regulations, the phone rang and the dread word mouthed through the door at me. I may have cursed the blameless instrument.
Ofsted obviously employ people with calm and sepulchral voices to deliver clear but unwelcome news to scrambled Heads. They must be used to having to say everything seven times. I was so shocked I couldn’t remember how many children are currently on roll. The first phone call warns you you’ll get a second one from a Lead Inspector who’ll tell you what’s on the agenda. You sort out a base room and parking spaces and they turn up the next morning at 0800 and do their thing. I’ve called them the clipboard brigade, but actually they carry these large zippy-up A4 leatherette affairs. It’s all done on paper, which you may find mildly interesting.  

Wandering about during our time of trial I was accosted by a youth. He and I have not always seen eye-to-eye on coat-wearing in the dining room, but he was onto the matter under advisement. ‘Miss, when does the thing come out?’  I requested further particulars.‘The thing, you know.’ We’d reached an impasse when, with a sudden rush of blood to the head he rephrased: ‘When is the inspection report published on the OFSTED website?’ ‘About three weeks’. I need to keep an eye on him: he may be a plant.

He was certainly more articulate than the girl exasperating the calmest Head of Year as I passed. Attempting to justify what sounded like pretty foolish actions, she turned to extra verbiage for cloud cover and had to be restrained. 'Don’t start every sentence with ‘basically’. I’ve got to go and teach in five minutes’. She had to strip her explanation down to the bare facts without added rhetoric. Ofsted’s bit like that too. 

The long week is finally over and I gaze at the whiteboard in my office. The priorities are still the same no matter who’s visiting, but I sometimes add a line of verse to make me think. This week it was from a poem by David Harsent called Tinnitus. The first line, which I like, would have been best:
                  ‘Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will’

What I actually had written up, thinking about a likely visit, was the last line:
                 ‘Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will’.

but I rubbed it off when we got the call.  It might have seemed rude. We’re all public servants.   
  
In school you can always hear Ofsted either approaching or departing, but the day was sunny and everyone worked together beautifully. We had Danish visitors and lots of messages of support from our friends. Sorry this is rushed.  You’ll be the first to know when we get the report.
 
CR
26.1.18

The White House book sounds gripping. I picture the Wolff man sitting quietly in a corridor smiling pleasantly so that people stop for a chat. Perhaps he had cakes. Who can resist someone listening sympathetically when you’re tired and irritated?

If OFSTED had any sense, that’s what they’d do. A day spent in reception with an open smile and some fancy biscuits and you’d learn a lot. Who’s late, who’s angry, who’s ill, who’s in tears, who’s got time to talk, how many supply teachers are signing in, why are the Police there, who is that bedraggled old soul who never remembers she needs her keys to get back? Ah, that’s the Head. 

Daily sights are available to any watcher. Monday Mr Springall had trousers on. (Not that he’s usually overexposed, you understand, just that he lives in shorts and generally only wears trousers for awards ceremonies. I didn’t think he’d been issued with tracksuit bottoms.) Tuesday I admired a matching pair of hair ribbons and the wearers gave me the biggest smiles. Wednesday I took issue with a camouflaged hat. Thursday the police came to tell us something we’d told them. Friday I returned to the classroom as a rusty supply teacher.

So that means that Monday everybody was cold, Tuesday year 7 are still perky and charming 16 weeks in.  Wednesday ‘It’s been a week now. No hats indoors no matter how new.’ Thursday nearly working in partnership with external agencies. Friday another nasty case of bronchitis so Roberts had to dust off her Religious Attitudes to Crime and Punishment.

This at least demonstrates I’ve put in a whole week. We came back on Wednesday last week but I spent Thursday to Saturday at a conference in Oxford, talking with philosophers and ethicists from around the world on Civic Friendship. It was the intellectual equivalent of a Christmas Dinner and I’m still digesting it. In particular, from Berkowitz of St Louis-Missouri University’s nugget ‘Children are the only known raw material from which adults can be made.’   
 
So Tuesday wasn’t just hair ribbons. Tuesday was early close for training, on trauma, on understanding the causes and damage of early childhood trauma and looking at how this might affect young people’s approach to adults, to school, to experiences, to life. Once you’ve grasped that, some inexplicables start to make sense. Why might some children be fearful and angry all the time? Why does the slightest change to routine throw some completely off kilter? Why is it important for teachers to be predictable, consistent, reliable, calm and – to return to the White House – stable?
 
It’s important because kindness and empathy can repair some of the damage already done, and even if it couldn’t it would still be the right way to live. When I looked round Tallis one of the things that made me want to come and serve out my twilight years here was the sight and sound of teachers talking calmly, firmly and kindly to struggling souls, about a better way to be. It permeates the place. Civic friendship indeed. 

I try to show this to visitors so I make them look out of my window at lesson change. It’s a bit of a risky strategy as you never know what might emerge in human community, but as a spectacle it’s never let me down (though Toby Young didn’t quite know what to make of it when he watched in May). New governors yesterday had been on a guided tour with some exceptionally loquacious year 8s who’d even commissioned a dance performance en route, so could be forgiven for wondering why it took 55 minutes to get around the building when 1900 people could emerge and disappear in 4.

But the best uncapturable moment of the week was Thursday in the quiet of the after-school gloaming, hearing George whistling Auld Lang Syne as he crossed the yard. 
                 
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne. 
 
Don’t be anxious about willie waught. Loosely translated it means ‘take my hand in friendship and make a toast to the times we’ve known’. That’s as good for a new start as for an ending, for a reunion as for a parting. Here we are, the raw materials of civic life, holding out a hand to each other as we reboot Tallis for 2018.    
 
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12.1.18

We know it’s Christmas at Tallis when the red tags are issued to decorate the trees with messages of hope and happiness. Thursday was Christmas Show day with lots of excitable Tallisees running about in dancing gear and suchlike, feeling important by being on the wrong lunch and performing while their compatriots are slogging through the curriculum. 

Yea, even unto week 14 and in these last two weeks, mock GCSEs. The new exams have a lot of stuff in them and year 11 looked distinctly queasy by Wednesday. We teach them the right behaviour for the task so lining up in the canteen, ushering upstairs in silence to the be-desked Sports Hall, shushed by Sir on the landing, Miss on the stairs, Sir at the door. And me, hassling thoughtlessly raucous small inmates: ‘Stand aside! These people are going to an exam!’ as if they were slightly bemused gods progressing to a test on Mount Olympus. Anyway, its back to basketball in the big space now, until we gather as a whole village on Wednesday for the Christmas Assembly.
Likewise the Gallery, a much-used space. Exams this week, governors’ meetings, anti-Gangs work and a visit from a team of researchers at the British Museum interspersed by tetchiness ‘who left the tables like this?’. And the hall: exams, staff briefing, assembly, and tonight the Christmas show Tallis in the Woods. Spaces have specific meaning in schools but flexible spaces are where we train our young for the unpredictability of the outside world. This is what’s expected, these are the conventions, don’t worry about how to behave, we’ll teach you to be secure so we can teach you to be confident. That being said, in the last staff briefing of 2017 I amused myself gathering views through the medium of head shaking and nodding. Funnier for me than them, I said. Sorry.

‘Something Christmassy?’ requested Heads of Year 7 and 8 so I was away. Having watched Cressida Dick on the news, I was impressed by the quantity and inventiveness of her hand gestures even when sitting with a select committee. So we gathered in the Sports Hall, I waved my arms about a lot and got 540 11-13 year olds to think about the shape of the school year, festivals of light, nativity plays in their past and how all the characters in the ancient story behave unexpectedly. I asked them which parts they’d played and then had to stretch my interpretation to cover ‘trees’ and ‘bales of hay’, let alone donkeys. Bales of hay? That’s a primary school with more actors than useful parts.

Something Christmassy in maths too this week. Venn diagrams: what’s warm, what’s festive, what’s made of fruit? Lee was away with dreams of a warm mince pie: Tommy trying to persuade Sir that turkey is fruit-based. What falls outside the circles? Shoes! Dogs!  Another maths lesson, another set of sets (vets’ clients) and Mario’s howl ‘I’m having trouble with the dogs’. We teach children to categorise and analyse so they can contain the world in their heads, but sometimes stuff doesn’t fit and we need to find a way through uncertainty.

Which is why herself had to forage in the archives for a new box of hankies. My room has multiple uses too: meetings, interviews, book looks, arguments, crises, exasperations and the imponderables of human life. Hankies provided, if we can find a new box. I’m writing our Christmas cards today. No winsome drawings of robins and Santa by a perky year 7 for us. Christmas is about a baby, the only character who behaves as expected in the nativity play, the eternal symbol of hope. Our card this year is another lovely sixth form portrait of a young person, and a line from Eglantyne Jebb whose work founded Save the Children: all wars are wars against children.

So as their government forget to count the Rohingya refugee children we look on the clear-eyed face of a girl and try to think about a better future. Tallis in the Woods combined all sorts of music, dance, film and drama with Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and a mystery demon caretaker in an anarchic feast of harmony and wit. As the song says, how do you measure a year? 525 600 minutes? We measure it by hours, lessons, breaks, queues, jokes, plays, trips, events, detentions, quiet, nudging, scuffling and forests of hands up. It’s a training for life until they’re old enough to put it behind them and change the world for the better. Who says that won’t require dancing?  
 
CR
15.12.17

Funny how the world turns when you’re not looking. Distracted by turquoised youths and unable to use technological social megaphones I have a limited world-view. For example, I try not to think about academies but that doesn’t alter the fact that 70% of secondary schools are academies or Free Schools now, and that those of us who stood still are in a minority. 36% of schools are part of MATs (multi-academy trusts), many of them big ‘uns. This is interesting (really, bear with me) because the larger MATs are developing their management and their economies of scale. The most successful in terms of GCSE outcomes - because that’s the only way success is measured – have developed very safe ways of getting results. As you’d hope.

First among those methods is standardisation of processes across schools. So, a large MAT will employ a Director of Curriculum and subject specialists. They design and write the curriculum for, say, History, or Science, and how it is to be taught in the MATs schools.

In the old days, Local Education Authorities kept a stable of such folks, and schools used or adapted the materials according to need, inclination or diktat. When the funding went, the Advisors and Inspectors disappeared from County Hall. Once performance tables became the only measure of the system, curriculum design merged with the GCSE syllabus.
  
This didn’t do anyone any good because exams measure knowledge, they don’t define it. That’s a different rant, however, and my point is that we are now in interesting times If by interesting you mean ‘things that make me chew off my fingerends’. The big MATS (I said MATs, not Macs, do pay attention) don’t just appoint the expert and issue the curriculum, but they also give teachers scripts. Scripts, like in a play.

What kind of news is this? It might help the workload crisis that we face: teachers don’t have to prepare the teaching materials or write or adapt the curriculum. They just have a script and then can concentrate on making sure that children are progressing, intervening when they need to. Given that for the third successive year we’ve nationally failed to meet teacher training recruitment targets by a mile, we could perhaps do with some scripts. And someone to read them out.

Or it might be terrible. Pundits luurrve to say ‘we don’t want teachers reinventing the wheel’ which is head-bangingly obvious, but it doesn’t cover it. The best teachers burn with a love of their subject and take intense satisfaction in devising new and interesting ways to teach it. They create, experiment and refine. They recycle stuff that works and ditch stuff that doesn’t. They tinker and tune, and get the results. They use their learning and their own habits to lead and support the little learner in front of them. They share and steal, they revel in the stuff.  Some of them take over the department and write their own curricula and give it away to others. Some take over schools, and put knowledge and creative learning at their heart

All of that takes time, which, in a horrifically underfunded system, is beyond rubies. So the big MATs with their Curriculum Directors work one way, and we try to do it the old way: good schemes of work, good shared resources and planning, freedom in the classroom to adapt and adopt, as long as it works. Would workload be reduced if we handed everyone a script? I don’t know. What would that cost? What kind of people would we become?

Which takes me back to last Wednesday when I went to a gig for my dear chum Prof Michael Young, to celebrate his 50 years at the Institute of Education. He’s see a lot, and he’s worried about the future for schools when teachers don’t have to think it through for themselves from first principles. Worried about the scripts.      

Another Prof, our school chum Bill Lucas, has been namechecking us this month, thank you kindly. He’s worked with us for years on our habits and dispositions, on our creativity and love of learning. Now he’s working with PISA to get that into the international measures. I’m pretty sure there won’t be a script for it. 

Anyway, we had Community Day this week, thinking about our futures with lots of career-friendly activities: planning, debating, collaborating, thinking. Year 11 did yoga and spacehoppers as well as thinking about their Tallis legacy and revision timetables. Everyone branched out a bit, and thought expansively.

I walk out into a snow flurry at break and everyone was ridiculously squealing and shrieking. Teachers who get them into class afterwards need to use all their skills to dial down the excitement and turn their minds to thinking hard. Would you have a special script, for a snowy day in London?

I don’t know where this curriculum path will lead us all and I might be worrying about nothing. The MATs are dominant, though, and big enough to sit an elephant on. And you know what happens when they get into the room.
 
CR
31.11.17   

I was heading for the big room outside at break but had to wait for a semi-feckless youth to tell me how hard he’s working. The fecklessness translated into not-turning-up-at-all but that was just as well as there wouldn’t have been room. In the end I had School Improvement partner dropping by mid-visit, Sir receiving feedback, Miss who was next, a maths man to be introduced, four year 11 ladies talking Prom and a phone call from the union. One of the office staff wanted to give me some papers but she couldn’t physically get through the door.

A shame, because today is coat exchange day. A duty colleague nearly as old as me, steeped in age and treachery, borrows a coat each week for duty and he doesn’t much care what it looks like. I twigged this the day he was wearing a pink sprigged affair which even in these gender-fluid days could only be described as a ladies’ mac.          
My year 10 political correspondent caught up when I managed to get out yesterday. Turning our attention temporarily away from the parlous state of the nation, I put her onto the Philippines and she’s not at all happy with what she’s found. ‘Peoples’ rights are being trodden on’.

Not just in the Philippines. I’m heartened by Emma Hardy, a Hull MP who in her maiden speech in the summer said,

The commissioner agreed. She pointed out that some schools – the neo-trad uber-schools and their copies – have policies that violate those rights. I’ve been saying this for years. Zero tolerance and all that malarkey is superficially attractive, as are all easy answers, but children aren’t adults and the most difficult children to manage are usually the ones whom adults have messed up so much that they need subtlety in the protective boundaries that will help them. I fervently hope this line of argument goes somewhere. Perhaps I’ll prod it a bit.
 
Don’t misunderstand me. Behaviour in school needs to be good, systematised and consistently enforced. It’s not easy. Behaviour Policies are a very particular kind of document, statutorily on the website but really a document of last resort. Ours is immensely long and tries to cover almost any eventuality upon which the Policy might be brought to bear. Actual behaviour on the ground is simpler, modelled by teachers and supported by praise and sanctions where needed.   
 
Our problem as ever is that we mistake our proxies for our goals. Schools bear many of the nation’s proxies: examination results are a proxy for learning, super-strict behaviour policies a proxy for developing good character. Both try to measure something that’s very hard to measure. Exams help us tell if a person is able to remember and process information in such a way that will make us be able to trust him or her as an adult ; you wouldn’t want an innumerate accountant or a doctor who was clueless about chemistry. Behaviour tells us if people can regulate themselves and be kind to others because we don’t want selfish and vindictive adults. But what if our exam accountability measures actually don’t measure learning, and our behaviour management just generates compliance or anger?
 
Accountability is really important but really hard. Every change in the GCSEs is part of our national attempt to get the examinations to prove something and we’re still way adrift. There aren’t any easy metrics for character development because we don’t really know what virtues we value as a nation.  Is it quiet kindness and reserve, our bottomless creativity or the shouty skills of the marketplace?  If we could just take the time to set out what we value, what we hope our young people will be, then perhaps we could set about generating schools that actually produced them. Monitoring and accounting for that would be very expensive to generate, but what a difference they’d make to all of us.  
 
It’s not that our young can’t show us the way. When the Salvation Army food bank in Catford ran out of food and clothes two weeks ago, RE set sorting that out as year 8 homework. They staggered under the weight of generosity and kindness as our families gave them good measure, pressed down and running over. There’s no policy for that.   
 
CR
17.11.17
​

Roll your eyes if I’ve told you before that I'm a third-generation teacher. Therefore, I wear around my aged neck an ancestral whistle. Despite straitened finances Sir begged leave to buy whistles for mute duty teamsters. For prudence's sake he proposed an economy plastic version which offended my DNA, so I authorised a batch of genuine Acme Thunderers, literally old-school. A charming colleague earwigged this esoteric exchange. ‘Can I have one of those please, the name sounds pretty cool?’ Some days it's easy to oblige.

Some days it's easy to get along. I followed two smaller learners as they trotted along the green upstairs corridor between blocks 5 and 4. 'How do you know we'll get to Drama this way?' 'I'm following my gut'. ‘OK then.’

We entertained a journalist on the day of writing. She wanted to hear from the youth so we plucked a few out and let them loose on her: 'Why do you like it here?' 'People help you. They hold your hand through stuff'. Then they took pains to explain that the handholding was of the metaphorical supportive type, that it wasn't babyish or a soft option, but a way of enabling them to learn really hard stuff in a kind and supportive atmosphere.

I wandered out and Crocus was lying in wait for me again. She's taken against her options and appears to want to try them all out to find a set that suits. She's come to me because her Head of Year's told her that the trial period's over and she needs to love the ones she's got. She wanted to put her case before another judge, but really once it gets to me there's nowhere else to go, and I'd said no before half-term. There are things to battle for in life, and changing options for the third time isn't one of them. I threatened to blow time on my Thunderer if she lurked around me again on the matter.

After that I nearly tripped over some sixth form who were waiting tidily on the floor. I put it to them that, despite the hi-vis attributes of red tights, their proximity to the door constituted a trip hazard. They happily entertained themselves shuffling along until they were fully visible. Another visitor remarked: it's very calm here.

Boundaries, gut feeling, calm and a bit of support and kindness go a long way in a human institution. Children push their luck because they're full of hope that the world will bend itself to their personal needs. We can love their importuning while teaching them that persistence and discipline really requires them to get stuck in, that a best fit might be the best fit and that if something's hard, well, perhaps it'll get easier. Good habits are the basis of the good life and perhaps, a better world.

Which is why the news from Westminster is so grim this week. Not because it’s a surprise that things go wrong but because such wrongs have lasted into the modern world. When I was growing up the owner of the ancestral whistle was pretty clear that gender relations were apt to go awry and that women should have their wits about them. Over years as a Head I've packed brilliant and lucky young women off to be interns in MPs' offices and have never heard a word against the members for whom they worked, but plenty about unreconstructed attitudes in the febrile air of the crumbling Palace. Who says that the prize of survival in a political party is so great that a young person has to allow frankly stomach-turning, outrageous, not to mention illegal, assaults upon her dignity and person? We’re not talking about louche and left-over Edwardians who don’t know any better, but men of my own generation who very certainly do. 

Where's the common-sense politeness, respect and good behaviour? Where's the kindness and support. Where's the example to the young, for goodness' sake? For shame.

Which brings me back to the young chaps in the corridor helping each other through the day, Crocus wanting to shape her own destiny, and the year 11 physicists I saw on Thursday morning. They were all smiles and kindness to each other and their teacher. They smiled when they found out they didn't have to learn THIS equation. They smiled when they commented on each other's graphs and they chuckled quietly in appreciation of Sir's liquid pressure demo with three holes in a tube. It could not have been more cordial, pleasant and respectful. 
    
Some of the rich and powerful could learn from this, as they're finding out. Who'd have thought the ship of state would be so storm-toss'd by these young people? Bring it on, ladies. Acme Thunderers all round. Blow those whistles until we find a better way to be.
 
CR
3.11.17

Due to my advanced age and objection to any kind of cold weather I’m offered a lunch duty slot in the year 11 study hall. We say hall, but it’s actually 0311, a geography room of average size. 20 young comrades join me for 45 minutes of absolute, blessed silence. ‘It’s like a rest cure’ I remark to Sir as he barrels in at the front of a tidy line of 30 year 9s. We pause to retrieve a football appearing in entirely the wrong place. The ball’s owner is aggrieved: they took it off me, not my fault, not fair. He eventually agrees that all concerned should participate in brisk questioning after school and the resultant culprit issued with the appropriate sanction for the activation of a football indoors.
 
Fairness is one of our Tallis Character traits and particularly valued among the young, understandably as powerlessness attracts injustice in our flawed world and who has less power than a child? Football manager above didn’t want the indignity – or the football-affecting inconvenience? – of a conversation to establish how he got into trouble. Or perhaps he was wary of those whom he’d dropped in it. Perhaps dear readers are gnashing their teeth now. What a performance about a football  Haven’t they got something else to do? What about Sir’s lesson?
 
Don’t fret. While this 30-second legal wrangle was going on outside the door I was inside the door purring over the geographers, many of whom I’d known as puppies. I admired their height and wisdom and what a pleasant combination the gods of the option blocks had thrown together. I reminded a huge specimen that he’d been foolish in assembly and he had the grace to look sheepish. Books were given out, everyone settled. I didn’t even have time to ask what Zoe was reading before Sir, with a parting shot of ‘This is me being reasonable’ returned to the earth’s crust.
 
We’d had a furious complaint from a parent the previous night about our method of dispensing justice. Why must the innocent be questioned? Outrageous infringement of human rights. Well, we take rights seriously and the innocent must be questioned so that justice is dispensed fairly.  Innocence and justice must be protected and supported so that the community is safe and happy. We actually staff this. We spend money on it so there’s always someone to hear a story, take a statement, and, where possible and reasonable, broker restoration. When a youth comes blundering back into class late with the excuse ‘I had to have an RJ’ that’s what she means. Restorative Justice: a bit of a trade name, but useful none the less.
 
On Tuesday Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector offered reflections on the difference between education and examinations. She talked about the need to offer children real learning and the value of all the grades at GCSE. I’ve been arguing this point for years so I can’t disagree. What she says, however, feels different at the sharper end: fine words are bowdlerised into tick-lists for inspectors. Ofsted have tried to deal with that too. But HMCI can’t address the high-stakes accountability in which a confused system is mired and someone needs to be honest about that. But we can’t until we have a clear view of what education is and isn’t for, and what a civilised and developed democracy actually wants for its young and sets about doing it as fairly as possible. There needs to be a restorative process between the regulator, the department and the profession, which will take time and good will. At least she’s not calling us enemies of promise.
 
(I’ll return to the Ebacc argument in the piece when I can summon the strength. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.)
 
I’m a fan of the American philosopher and jurist John Rawls, insofar as I understand him and in particular, his fundamental principle of justice as fairness. Justice must not only be done, but must have a fair effect. Rawls underpins this with his concept of the veil of ignorance (I’ve have written about this before, sorry dear readers).  Imagine that you were setting up a system in which you have no idea about the characteristics of the people it serves, or your own characteristics. Will it work as well for rich and poor, for all genders, ethnicities, aptitudes? If it won’t, then its not fair. Try again. Try again DfE.
 
There’s a marvellous scene in that film of high art, Nuns on the Run. A hapless policeman lurches into a convent looking for the villains who are having jolly adventures disguised as nuns. After being unable to tell the Superior who or what he’s looking for, or why, she says ‘We’re all very busy here. When you know what you’re looking for, come back, and we’ll tell you if we’ve found it’.
 
It’s like that in education at the moment and all we can do in schools is to get on with the day job and account for ourselves as best we can. I’m trying very hard to persuade educators to think about the purpose of schools and our social role in loco parentis before we think about examinations and assessments. In the meantime, we’ll work hard like year 11 and try to be fair, like Sir and the indoor football.
 
CR
12.10.17
 
 
 
 

I'd been in town pestering the great and the good and pottered back from the station at break time. Children often imagine that the road elevation of the grassy knoll to the east of the site is invisible, despite the see-through fence, and can be startled by a known person apparating in front of them.  

Not so the cheery year 7 boys I chanced upon, sitting in a row, phones in hand, chortling and shoving each other hilariously. I asked if they were spying on the road and they leapt up and gestured through the bars at me, explaining enthusiastically that they were 'playing a very intense game'. Parents fear that phones mean the loss of all social skills but not with these chaps. While it did involve phones, the intense game also seemed to require raucous laughter, throwing themselves about on the grass in the way of 11-year-olds, and much rolling around. The old and the new. 
 
Last night was Open Night and we had upwards of 1500 visitors through the doors. Head of Year 7 and I did 6 hall-fulls (with extra chairs). We also combine the old and the new as she's a lot younger than me. Our hall is pretty nice, being newish, and with a film of year 7 at work running on the back wall, flowers on the Tallis turquoise cloths, the stage lights and Freddie on the old Joanna, it's a stylish venue. We don't do the PowerPoint thing, so we talk about what parents worry about: transition to a big school, pastoral care, curriculum choice, break and lunch, form groups. Of course we cover the other things, but we talk about the whole child before we break him into constituent parts.  We'll take care of your little one and try to give her a memorable, happy education.  

This neatly leads me to tell the people about our new school plan's 3 parts: curriculum, inclusion and community. Curriculum: we want to preserve the broadest offer, it's a struggle predicting the future, this is what we do at KS3. Teaching's good, staff are stable (no reflection on their mental state, I mean that we don't have a high turnover). A level and BTEC results are very good, young people come from miles around to study with us in the sixth form. GCSEs need to improve but who knows what this year's results actually mean. So many re-marks, so much alteration. Inclusion's nex, in four parts: provision for learning for everyone and the wonderful work of our Deaf Support and Speech and Language centres. Wellbeing and our concern for mental health. Safeguarding and the time we put into it, and behaviour. We're relaxed but not sloppy. We're fussy about relationships and their development and maintenance. Finally, Community: we want to serve. Join in with us, please.  

I don't know if that's what parents expect to hear but it seemed to go down well. Behind the scenes, we're tussling this week with the progress accountability score. Context is everything here: we have room to improve but we took a principled stand with the year group when the new measures came in and didn't force them to change options so the school would score better. Oh for a national accountability system that's risk-assessed for its impact on children's experience of school. 

(The adults' experience can be mixed, mind you. There was huge excitement - everything's relative - about the Tidy Staff Room competition. You may be interested to know that Visual and Media Arts won the silver Desk Tidy for Most Improved, but Design Technology took gold for Best in Show.  

But reflecting on the week, it's the tensions that stick. We'd been waiting for the progress information so that we could get stuck into the metrics. We're committed to our support services but there's no money to fund them. We'd like to represent our community better.  

When parents come to see us, what do they want to see? How much information helps them choose? We talk a good game, but we're not complacent. We don't stop picking over results in good years or bad until October. We plan for the short and the long term. Do they want to look under the bonnet?  

A young inmate with an eccentric gait came to see me because his trousers had split 'picking up a pen in Geography'. Keeping him at a distance I said it wasn't obvious and he should carry on regardless. He thanked me kindly and rushed off. I think parents expect much the same: they need to trust us to make sensible judgements and carry on. The old and the new combine here too I suppose: we worry about our service to children not less than all of the time, and we deal with each new challenge as it comes along. It's an intense game, and we laugh when we can, but only the young ones roll on the grass. 
 
CR 28.9.17 
 ​

I was goggling at the injuries our Head of Geography returned from cycling round the world was laughing off, while she talked about plans for the year. Her team can look forward to some quality time together with all the affordances and accoutrements of the modern department. Rounding off the list she declared happily ‘We’ll all be singing from the same hymn sheet’. And I was off.
 
Hannah may not get very close to an actual hymn sheet, but I’ve done my time with them. I’ve been around schools for such a long time I’ve done hymns in assembly and hymn practice as a punishment. From Victorian doggerel to fancy modern jobs reeking of substitutionary atonement Ive shouted ‘Louder!’ with the best of them. Having a full set of the same hymn sheets was a luxury. Some partially eaten, many illegible. Some had hymns under different numbers, others unpredictable new words. Hymn sheet rustling was another irritant: rehearsals for cathedral events involved training hordes in picking up and putting down a hymn sheet QUIETLY. We moved on to projectors, overhead then digital, with a trusty child to move the words on while everyone looked upwards angelically to sing from one glorious hymn sheet with ginormous writing.
 
If you’ll bear with what’s obviously a metaphor extended beyond endurance, there's a further complication on Sundays.  Hymns have been rewritten or adjusted to improve or take out the gratuitously offensive. A lucky congregation has a full set with the same words, but people remember the old words and sing them instead. Or do it from memory and ignore the hymn book altogether. I may be one of those people. Then there’s the curve ball of Right Hymn but Wrong Tune.
 
Singing from the same hymn sheet with up-to-date and acceptable words to the right tune is obviously the harmonious way to go. The Geographers above will do it naturally. Doing it across school is a sine qua non of effective leadership, every procedure clear, everyone knowing what they're doing. I love an agreed procedure, but only where necessary. If all of life is scripted, when do we write our own lines?
 
Single hymnsheet-ness is big in schools. We are trusted to look after the nation’s young, so we shouldn’t do it randomly. We’re paid by the state so we should plan it carefully. We’re highly educated so so we should do it effectively. We're human, so we should do it humanely.
 
There’s been a bit of a to-do this term about schools with fixed rules. One was about trousers in Houghton-le-Spring. I was Head of RE there for 3 years, and once had a conversation about lecterns with a child that I still can’t fathom. (How exactly do they run up and down the street all night, banging on doors and windows?). Uniform in most schools is the uber-hymn sheet, but you’ve heard me on that before. The second, Great Yarmouth, story which has attracted so much interest it could almost be upgraded to a hoo-hah, is about the single hymn sheet for everything. Uniform, listening, pencil cases, walking, going home, bed time, coat hangers, sitting up straight. It's a bit extra, but schools have always had different ways of going about stuff and what appears oppressive to one child may be liberation to another.
 
However, given that the unexamined life is not worth living, we have to be prepared to live with the examining. Where is the line between wanting to enable children to escape generational poverty, and denigrating the efforts of those who have loved and supported their children despite it? If a school wishes its children to transcend their parents lives, what are we saying about our fellow citizens’ choices? If uniform is exposed as being all about conformity and conservatism, what to do with the child wired as a rugged individual? Is the single hymn sheet always a good thing? What if the words don’t make any sense? What if there’s another tune?
 
I'm a tidy soul and can see that purity of heart is to will one thing, but I struggle when that becomes a red line. We all have our fancy rules to keep one another safe and make it possible to teach and to learn but further than that, what? We can’t claim we’ve learned anything about social justice, that’s for sure. Or defeating poverty. Or making children happier. How is a zero-tolerance hymn sheet riffing on conformity and conservatism the answer?
 
The best school hymn was written in 1931 by the agnostic Jan Struther to a folk tune called Stowey, a three-verse metaphor requiring no faith assumptions. When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old ends with
                  And let me set free with the sword of my youth
                  From the dragons of anger, the power of the truth.
 
It’s a hymn worth learning off by heart to sing on your own no matter what everyone else has on their hymn sheet. What kind of school enables children to embark on battle and adventure to understand the world and change it for the better?
 
CR
15.9.17
 

0700     Head of Y7 and I arrive at the same time. We discuss the day (all set) and a gripping drama we’re both following. This may be live or on telly, you’ll never know.
0745      There’s a new time rule on the gate so that children aren’t unsupervised in school from crack of dawn. Mr Sheedy has his beady on it. Some tearful parents, slightly nervous but up-for-it new starters.
0820     Year 7 lining up very nicely ready for
0830     Year 7 assembly. A perfect start: hall entrance and departure software successfully installed in all. Assembly on Thomas Tallis, the great survivor of Tudor bloodshed: a long, successful and happy life well lived. Y12 Assembly in the sports hall.
0900     Year 8 assembly very nearly perfect. They’ll do. We considered the state of the world and how our Tallis values could save us from war and wickedness
0930     Year 9 perfect. Assembly as above, repeated twice more later. Y13 do their assembling in the Sports Hall.
1000      Everyone to lessons, year 7 typically rush wildly, brandishing new timetables. Room numbers are explained several hundred times: floor, block, room. Great if you know which block’s which. 
1100       Break: more consultation on room numbers. 
1205       First lunch, very orderly and happy. Fingerprint machines not working very well, so MUCH slower than it should be. Still only a few still eating at
1305       Start of p4 for year 7, 8, 12 and 13. More directions, including for new year 12s, only some of whom are happy to be uncool enough to ask.
1320       Lunch for y9, 10, 11. Old hands.
1405      Year 10 assembly! As above,
1435       And finally, year 11. Get your work skates on: GCSEs are tough. Some reminding of lining-up rules, but perfect the second time.
1515        Goodbye at the gate. First day over, everything’s normal now.
 
So, if they won’t tell you what happened, this is it!
 
CR
6.9.17 

Welcome to new readers. I write a blog at least once a fortnight and more often if I feel particularly opinionated about something. Some blogs contain useful information, but there’s a lot of that elsewhere on the website, so these pieces are reflections on the state of education as seen, 39 weeks a yea,r on Kidbrooke Park Road.
This week’s piece is in two parts. Part 1 is before our children come back to us, part 2 after. I’ll tell you how the day went!
 
September 6th 2017 part 1

We’ve talked and tidied and ourselves for two days since the holidays ended and now we’re ready to welcome our young people back. We think we’re ready now, so we’ll fling wide the gates and get the show on the road for another year. Term begins with welcomes to new starters – largely year 7 and year 12 – lots of assemblies, raucous and refined reunions, some tears (from anxious parents) and a lot of hugging. Day 1 is peak hug, which is saying something.

Saying goodbye in the summer term is a really strange experience. We have a lovely last morning, a bit of a celebration and then everyone walks away and disappears back into the undergrowth. People joke about schools being very peaceful without children but actually, they’re not schools at all without children, just big public buildings filled with emptiness and unanswered questions. Two odd ones today. What’s the difference between a noticeboard and a sound baffle? and Have we enough desks?  I’ve never given the former a moment’s thought or thought to worry about the latter. I expect it’ll all be fine. What if I’m wrong?  No-one’ll be able to hear anything and everyone’ll have to squash up for a day or so. Of all the things I lost sleep over in August, they didn’t remotely feature. Cripes.

September is simultaneously the best and worst time to do new things in school. It’s the obvious time because it’s good to make improvements with a fresh start, and the worst because the holidays wipe your memory and you can’t remember the motivation for arcane changes. How did we say we’d avoid that bottleneck? No, really? Cor blimey. A new rota, please, pronto.

I’m not so cavalier about the other questions we think about before the year begins. Why are we teachers? What are we doing it for? What do we really want for our nations’ young people? Do we have any way at all of measuring it? I’ve not written yet about this year’s exam results, apart from the information on the website here. In a nutshell? Sixth form results were jolly good again, with lots of young people getting a great boost into next thing. Year 11 results are a bit impenetrable this year, as Mr Tomlin’s Q and A document explains here: everything’s changed again and will change again again next year. In both sets of results some amazing achievements at all levels, some triumphs against adversity, some just deserts, some inexplicables, some wild inaccuracy, some re-marks. Is it too soon to hope for a new emphasis on our children as children, not examination yields?

If only other education stories in the news had been so equivocal. In what seemed like three ghastly days we had scandals about pay, exams and sixth form admissions. I expect that parents are at a loss as to what Heads think they’re doing?  May I offer a thought?  If, nationally, we can’t agree whether it’s important to hitch up our international PISA scores or worry about children’s mental health, in a system so deregulated that no one can speak for anyone else, we shouldn’t be surprised if people make odd decisions. Confused? Who isn’t? Let me get back to my sound baffles.

We’ve committed ourselves at Tallis this week to keeping our eyes firmly on our children as children, on what they need to fulfil themselves today and this year. We’re thinking about our broad curriculum, our commitment to inclusion and our diverse community. We’re thinking about persistence, discipline, imagination, collaboration and inquisitiveness. We’re concentrating on kindness, fairness, respect, honesty and cheerfulness. We’ll do that all year, every year, and we’ll teach our young people everything we know. At a time of nuclear threat and wickedness the world over, we’ll strengthen their hands through education so they understand the world and can change it for the better. 

CR 5.9.17

Just for excitement as we swim for shore, a fire drill. We hadn’t had one for a bit so it was beyond exciting for the hordes. Consequently, squealing at the start. Subsequently, a repeat next week, quietly. 

On my way to my appointed perch I was introduced to a famous photographer, a distinguished-looking chap. On my way back, I reprimanded a small child for practicing leaping right over benches while 1600 people were moving around. I may need to return to him, but he won’t be hard to find.

Last week was busy busy: a super-cool concert for the Greenwich Music Trust, a day out at Tate Exchange for Curriculum Leaders to think, sixth form taster days, Headstart Day for year 6, a visiting author, a Holocaust survivor, the Visual and Media Arts Exhibition, Sixth form Party, Year 11 Prom (including pink and white carriage and horses), a community day on food, year 11 and 13 leaving ceremonies and the early close that went with them and a new curfew at the shops to enforce.

This week so far: new staff induction day, a piano and singing concert, governors, a tea party for older folks, more camping (further afield, wetter), university visits, UCAS clinics, teachers’ research projects deadline, year 10 careers events, non-uniform day for the Red Cross, a controversy about gazebos, as I write, the Piano Recital. Tomorrow the last internal interview of the year and a governor visit about student anxiety. Next week: an international food fair, the year 7 disco, a farewell barbecue, the Curious Incident, a visit from another school’s sixth form team, four awards assemblies and finally, the big gathering that marks close of play. 

All this, you understand, on top of the teacher’s day job, teaching and learning, timetabling and planning, rewriting schemes, tidying round, assessment and testing, sharing skills, worrying, supporting, negotiating with the world and more trips and visits. Next year’s plans not just to write but set up. Building maintenance, and wondering what to do now so many budget headings are empty four twelfths of the way through the year. It’s no wonder when the dog visited again before camping in Kent we fell on her as if she was a therapy animal.

So you can imagine I’ve had a few thoughts about the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendation that the 1% cap on teacher pay stays firmly pulled down over the ears of the profession. No money, they said, but we’re ‘deeply concerned about the cumulative effect’ of five body blows teaching’s sustained:

1. 35,000 teachers left in 2015, and it’s a bigger number every year
2. Retention rates are plummeting (and there are more children every year)
3. Teacher pay’s fallen behind other graduate sectors
4. Recruitment targets for teachers have been missed for four years
5. There’s no money in the system.  Even the 1% is unfunded.

Schools therefore are ‘expected to make choices’ about who gets a pay rise and who doesn’t, based on performance. This makes perfect sense except that in the best schools all the teachers will be performing well, and there’s not an education system in the world where performance related pay’s changed anything. The raw materials teachers work with are too unpredictable, the outputs notoriously tricky to measure: put pressure on one part of the system and other parts suffer. The STRB opined that falling teacher retention rates and missed recruitment targets present ‘a substantial risk to the functioning of an effective education system’. Isn’t anyone worried about that outside teaching? We’re the lucky ones. Few new posts, few leavers. 
  
Here are some other things we’ve done this week. Engaged with the process of enabling young people from other schools to have a fresh start, from both ends. Waited for the phone to ring from the clipboard brigade. Tried to do our best for angry, unwell, distraught children and their parents. Tried to plan for examination courses where the specifications are barely approved. Taken part in the inspection of the local authority’s special needs work. Followed instructions from Operation Sceptre to tackle knife crime, in a context of no funding for youth work. Thought about money not less than all of the time. 
   
I quoted Causley’s great poem about the end of the school day being like a ship re-entering harbour in July 2014, after our first Piano Recital. After this, our third, it feels as though we’ve been out at sea all year on government storms. Do we long for doldrums?

Saxophone music drifted across the concourse as performers rush to hug one another before the concert and the young chefs prepare nibbles. Pianists gather in shirts and ties, unusual for Tallis, and discuss formal wear. I don’t mean to sound as if it’s just perseverance or endurance at this time of year or that misery dogs our days, far from it.  

It’s a joy. Thank you for sharing your children with us.
 
CR 14.7.17

My brooding on the freedom of the press was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of 12-year-olds legging it down the corridor. By the time I’d leapt from my reverie, found my shoes and set off in pursuit, my admonitions went unheard above shrieks of joy. What I lack in speed I make up for in determination and tracked them down to block 3 where I found previously blameless children excited beyond containment by water squirting ‘outside the library Miss that corner near drama’ as if I needed a 6-figure map reference. That made it worse (Books! Water!) so they got some thoughts at old-fashioned volume about the dangers of running in the corridors. 20 minutes later, letters of apology appeared, nicely written and heartfelt.
 
I was out the next morning learning about empathy (really, you couldn’t make this up) and felt rather ashamed of myself. I trotted off at moderate pace to apologise at afternoon tutor. I shared my nightmare vision of a tripped-up child’s head trodden on accidentally and we nodded sagely to each other and looked sad. Then we perked up again. The squirtee grinned happily at me at parents’ evening and I kept my counsel when other parents hoved to.  
 
There’s a covenant between teacher and child which shouldn’t be overlooked no matter how closely school and home work together. You make mistakes at school and sometimes the sheer joie de vivre of being young takes over. As long as you’re not doing it all the time, we deal briskly with a first minor offence. Forgetting homework, being late once, running in the corridor, wearing the wrong jumper, not having your kit, trying to subvert the dinner queue – all can be quietly nipped in the bud.
 
Parents might hear from us for a first offence if it’s cruel or anti-community: oppressive language, spreading rumours, fighting, undermining teachers. Whether you hear from us or not, we’ve made a judgement about the severity of the incident and we’re either just raising an institutional eyebrow with a bit of a glare or we’re pressing a reset button and we’d like it pressed at home too, please. 
 
I think most parents are happy with that – it’s a matter of us using our judgement. Sometimes we’re challenged for not reporting every infringement, and allowing things to stack up before parents know about it, so the first conversation between school and home is more difficult than it might have been. Hard to know what to do.
 
Some schools are really big on sweating the small stuff (not that I really know what that means) and believe it makes all the difference to children’s self-regulation. Like uniform, it’s a matter of school ethos. I was out and about at an unusual hour today and passing through communities at school’s out time. Young people everywhere, happily drifting around the pavements, walking backwards, shoving each other a bit, grasping each other doubled up with laughter. And if I was to go into any of those schools in the morning I’d get a feel for the way it is and how it holds together – and if that’s missing, you miss it straight away. I can’t explain that either, but a safe and happy school makes you smile when you walk into it, and the opposite makes you look for the door.
 
Upstairs, year 10 are practising exams-in-the-hall while we all practice what-will-the-marks-mean? I take a guest to lunch and we chuckle at year 9 alone, vaguely wondering where everyone else is, as if year 10 and 11 might be hidden behind a pillar. They’re growing up, my dears, examined and gone, or under invigilation. Yes, even at lunchtime. The guest is blown away by the articulacy of the chat and the quality of the sausages. We’ve Jamie Oliver to thank for the sausages, but we do the chat ourselves.
 
A tall colleague comes and takes me surreptitiously by the elbow. ‘Press photographer outside’. But it isn’t and after a pleasant chat I wander back through reception. The sun shines through the back windows as if we could disembark onto the happy lands and I pass some drama rehearsing in the corridor. ‘Come and see our piece, Miss, we all die’. Later, we look out of the window and see children dancing wearing cloth and bamboo structures, being photographed by their peers. Very Tallisy, all’s well.
 
Learning and kindness are important, happy schools are important, freedom of expression’s important, space to make a mistake’s important and the freedom of the press is important. With children, every day’s a new one.
 
CR
28.6.17 

Two year sevens career towards me lugging a bag big enough for two more. ‘This is too heavy, Miss, can we use the lift?’ ‘No’. They whoop as they lurch off up the stairs. I’m not worried about the bag.  Its OAA time (Outdoor and Adventurous Activities) so they’ve got their survival gear in it: camping, skinning rabbits and suchlike. I encounter more near the block five loos where a young chap who obviously knows a thing or two makes a point:‘That’s not a camping mat’. The girl flounces a bit ‘I know! It’s a yoga mat! It’s all I’ve got! Don’t judge me’. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Tallis life. Let’s see how the double French plaits survive the night.

Thursday brought a visit from Anthony Horowitz. He held a crowd of 300 sitting on the sports hall floor for 2 hours, not an easy gig, captive. He talked about his awful boarding school experience and how villainous versions of his teachers die gruesomely in his novels. He said: what if the ghosts of the RAF pilots and the cold war spies once based here appeared in school?

I’d like to see them. I think they’d wonder what the hell was going on.  I wrote the last blog after London Bridge and before the election. Since then, the election, Grenfell Tower and Finsbury Park mosque. I’ve never known what to do about angry men loving violence except to try to educate them out of it and encourage girls to walk away.  I do know a bit about public services, though, and I’m up to my neck in compliance. Throw me a rope, would you?
Housing is difficult because no-one’s making any more land and the public’s assets were stripped a generation-and-a-half ago. It’s expensive to build, takes skill to manage and relies on assumptions about the common good that appear to be fading into the past. When Beveridge fought the Five Giants of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease housing was a key solution. We decided that people should have safe homes to live in and that the state would provide them. After that, we sold off loads of the stock, stripped councils of the money and the powers they needed to keep it safe and available and lauded those who reduce council tax so that the stock and the staff crumble.  
   
And piling Pelion upon Ossa, compliance. That cladding might have been cheaper, but it was OK because it ticked a box, and another box marked ‘value engineering’, no doubt. And the response: it looked like chaos but it probably ticked its boxes.  And the fire escape plan? Well, there was one. And the PM’s visit? Best described as a box left unticked. Good job the Queen knew what to say. On which part of planet Conservative and Unionist does that make sense? 

Public services can’t be replaced by box-ticking. Targets are important, perhaps even necessary, but never sufficient. When you strip away all professionalism, all respect for the job and most of the money, and leave civic institutions with compliance matrices rather than public values then we’re all, literally and terrifyingly, at risk. Literally in schools where the cheapest and easiest exams became the system’s calibrations, terrifyingly in tower blocks where no one’s job was to worry about the welfare of the people. The strongest survive such blinkered negligence but the vulnerable suffer. Children always suffer. 

Schools are model communities where we look after society’s young until they’re old enough and clever enough to fend for themselves. We have to chug along regardless while the world outside falls apart, so we’ve been entertaining ourselves in the mornings. One of the problems in exam season is that the big spaces are full of desks and anxious young people with see-through pencil cases and you can’t assemble for weeks. Assembly is the glue of a big school and things fall apart without them. So, brainwavingly, assembly in the dojo. Notwithstanding the awkward access, potential bottlenecks and the matter of the shoes, we’re loving it. Half a year squash up on the seats and the others sit barefoot and bootless on the mat.  All facets of assemblies (uplifting thoughts, Byzantine instructions, the Reading of Lists, expressions of grave disappointment) are delivered in socks. Normal, even with year 9. We stand together and think about the lives of others. We did it on Thursday last, in assembly, because that’s what’s best to do. We didn’t need to be told.

Beveridge’s last words were ‘I have a thousand things to do’ but I worry that we’ve replaced symbolism with action. I worry that declaring a minute’s silence is intended to hide a tragedy of negligence in the clothing of a natural disaster. I worry that crowdfunding and selfless volunteering are expected to fill a vacuum left by an austere and individualist state. I worry that we value economy over responsibility and I worry all the time about the example set our children. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pilots and the spies decide to haunt us all.
 
CR 21.6.17 

How time flies. I went north in half term to reconnect with the haggis, the midge and the tent, returning for a wash and to finish off maths revision week before the exam on Election Day. A steady flow of revisers all week, checking and remembering, worrying and planning.  

We also had a week feeling the pinch of reduced public services: school staff who should have been on holiday actually on the phone all week for and with parents and children, trying to get referrals into overstretched social care and mental health provision. These good colleagues take calls everywhere: on holiday, on balconies, at relations, in supermarkets, in despair that there’ll ever be a service sufficient to need. Is this how the taxpayer imagines children should be cared for?

Still, summer’s apparently here so we come back to school and it’s like jumping into one of those lifts from the 80s that just kept rattling on round a loop. 6 weeks to go. Good grief.

Our Business Director hasn’t done a whole year in school before. She fears September careering towards her with so much to do.  I try to explain the dreamtime myth of ‘in the summer’ in schools. We imagine there’s world enough and time to do everything we postponed until after the exams, knowing full well that the half term vanishes and the gap between July 21st and September 4th is telescopic, actually only a few days once the August excitements are over. I’ve said it before: September’s about 7 weeks away and time’s a funny thing.

All the more so as the clocks (and inexplicably, my watch) have all slowed down and we’re a bit adrift. We don’t have pips and we can’t use the tannoy during exams. I led the minute’s silence on Tuesday after the English exam and it took us a while to settle on when 11 o’clock actually was.

At sports days on the back field, time is success. 270 year sevens buffeted by the wind.  Rain drives us indoors at lunchtime and Lake Tallis reappears on the yard (No Swimming). We fill the unforgiving hour with 60 seconds worth of distance run. And despite the unpredictable new exams and inexplicable cuts about to ruin us, we throw ourselves at every day. We live as if we are immortal.

Which is just how the people on London Bridge approached Saturday night. While I was cycling back over Lambeth Bridge from watching our violinists at the Albert Hall, guests to our city and locals died crudely and cruelly. ‘You are the best of us’ the Mayor said of the public servants who responded so quickly. Good people, doing what they can, cheerfully or fearfully getting through the minutes as well as the years, never knowing when darkness lies one step ahead. They didn’t enter the public service to be the best, but because they know that life is short and it could be better.

Which is why this election, like the European vote before it, has been such a monumental exercise in hubris. Quelle distraction. We all have jobs to do and impossible decisions to make because government sentimentality about public service doesn't extend to financing it properly. Persuading people to concentrate on froth and verbiage for 8 weeks doesn’t stop the young, the old and the sick needing more spent on them. Hollow election rhetoric doesn’t put police on the streets and it won't get a sick teenager a doctor. We didn’t have time for this vain campaign.
Our year 9 political correspondent and I convened on the stone stage on Tuesday.  She’s enjoyed the campaign, which demonstrates the optimism of youth. She predicted a hung parliament: Hayley for PM. Tallis, as usual, had a Labour landslide. We know what we value: fairness, and decent public sector funding giving a helping hand for those in need.  

Do we know what the future holds? Grammar School expansion should return to the grave and the Funding Formula enabled to work by dropping a whole lot more money into the pot. Perhaps someone will be put in charge at Sanctuary Buildings who’ll sort out the teacher shortage – but I mustn’t get carried away.  

So while the parties fight it out in the Palace of Westminster we need them to look hard at what they say they value and think again about the state of the nation. It's time to start governing for the people not the politicians.  Get on with it, would you, please?
 
CR
9.6.17