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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

You heard it here first

7/1/2021

2 Comments

 
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How are you?

Fine, thank you. What difference would it make if I wasn’t?

May I call you Caroline?

No.

How many children do you have in school?

Usually over 2000. Between 30 and 60 since Monday.

Weren’t you annoyed at the sudden closure? How could you get ready for remote learning overnight?

All schools had to be ready for lockdown from September. It’s been a long night.

What about the exams?

That’s a vg q. The PM cancelled the exams on Monday and Mr Williamson says they’ll be replaced with teacher-based assessments.

How do you feel about that?

Fine and dandy. It’s the only remotely fair possible solution. As a teacher it's good to see someone learning from their mistakes and trying to improve.

Won’t teachers inflate the grades so that they’re meaningless and no one has a proper qualification and the world ends?

No, calm down. As long as results are used wisely everyone will play their part honestly. Since you’ve asked, might I rant on about this for a bit?

The ring is yours. Knock yourself out.

Thank you. Problem A is how to grade the children. They’re not less clever than children in previous years, they just know less stuff.  Problem B is that our exam-based system uses memory as a proxy for intellect so we struggle to decouple exams from learning. Problem C is that this particular exam-based system rations grades so you can only get a grade 5 if someone else doesn’t. Problem D is that you’re much more likely to get a grade 5 if you’ve been really well taught and you’ve done all the homework, which depends on your school and home life. Problem E is that there is a teacher shortage and the schools serving the poorest have trouble recruiting teachers. Problem F is that if you are poor, you’re less likely to have the space to do the homework or parents with the time to help you or a good laptop and connection for the online stuff, so you might get a worse grade because you haven’t been able to keep up. Problem G is that government describes a third of grades as a fail. So, you might be trying really hard against the odds and end up with a fail.  

That’s why schools have to stay open! It’s all fair then!

Had I finished?

Sorry, carry on.

None of this is new. The achievement gap between poor children and richer children is hard-wired into our system.  The current GCSE model makes it worse. We’ve been campaigning about this for years, but the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said that proved that Heads were enemies of promise with the soft bigotry of low expectations, also enslaved to The Blob.

Harsh?

Shameful.

Hopeless?

Mr Gove? I’ve seen worse. The exam system? Hmmm. We need a different way of assessing learning. We could start by agreeing that exams are a measure, not the purpose, of education. Might we do that this year, as part of all this, d’you think?

Search me. Ahem. What about the Beetex?

They’re more flexible. The school or college can decide on the configuration of exams and coursework for each candidate, within reason, although since 2016 there are more exams in it. We don’t really understand why. 

Really?

No, sorry, that was a lie. We absolutely understand why. It’s because there’s a doctrinaire elitist view afoot at Sanctuary Buildings that all learning has to be validated by exams which a portion of the cohort have to fail, or else they look too easy.  Are you sure there isn’t another question you should ask about this?

Curses, you rumbled me. What are Beetex?

Well done, I thought you were struggling. It’s always best to ask when you don’t understand. First, snappier pronunciation please – Be-tek. No bees. Second, BTECs are the qualifications organised by the Business and Technology Education Council. They run alongside GCSEs and A levels, you can mix ‘em up, and they’re based on the world of work. They’re modular, and you can resit bits of them. They’re useful qualifications and most universities like them.

Why don’t I know this?

Same way that the PM and Mr Williamson didn’t appear to know or care that they existed. Because of our ridiculous system that prioritises academic qualifications over anything with a vocational slant.  Your editor probably thinks they fall into the category of ‘courses for other peoples’ children’ but then he may be a fool.     
I’m not allowed to think like that, but thanks. May I move on?

Knock yourself out.

Shall we have mock exams?

Yes. We need to find out how the children are doing so we know what to remedy.

Isn’t that too stressful?

Not for most. We can make arrangements for others.

Are you Covid-testing at school? Who?

Yes, we’re all ready. Tables, screens, swabs, people, the lot. Staff, at the moment. Children who are in school next.  The Local Authority is helping us.

What about the children who’ll be really frightened by this?

What do you take us for? 

What do you think of the PM?

I’ve seen better.

How stressed are you?

Not very. I’m pretty old.

How annoyed with the government are you?

On a scale of 1-10? 400.  

Can I ring you up?

Happy to oblige. Ask me about the National Tutoring Programme.
 
CR
6.1.21 
2 Comments

Kipling again

3/1/2021

0 Comments

 
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For a man who seems likely to resort to Kipling at any point, the PM’s been a bit remiss, in this our hour of need. People quote If at the drop of a hat, except when it might actually help, it seems.

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
 
I’m happy with the first verse which brings me succour. The chances of my ever looking too good or talking too wise are vanishingly small at the best of times and hopeless now when the guidance I get changes each sixty-second minute. I’ll steer clear of the third and fourth verses abut gambling and being a man, but the second part of the second verse is helpful, situated as we are in the middle of an almighty fight between the DfE and the teacher associations and unions. 

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
 
A word on nomenclature here. Unions are precisely that. They are affiliated to the TUC and exist to get the best working conditions for their members commensurate with the job actually being done. I’ve been a member of both the big teachers’ unions: the NASUWT because I qualified in Birmingham and worked in the north-east, both NASUWT-dominated areas. I was a member of the NUT (now NEU) when I worked in London in the 90s, because that was stronger there/here. I was appointed a Deputy Head by John Dunford, and dragooned into membership of SHA, the Secondary Heads Association, of which he became General Secretary and which later became ASCL. I held office in ASCL and have come to know office-holders in the other unions: all good people, all committed to children and schools.

One problem in education is that the same organisations end up trying to speak for schools, teachers and children.  This is confusing and it’s why the Charted College of Teaching is so important. The CCT should be able to work tirelessly to improve teaching without having to foreground protecting jobs and improving working conditions.  Unions can think about those while the DfE then runs the schools in the way that the nation thinks best for children and all our futures.

It’s a pity that it doesn’t quite work like this. The CCT is young but strong. It will play the part of the medical Royal Colleges for us in the future. The unions are trying to protect their members’ physical health in a global pandemic – and trying to get someone to speak for children. The department are trying to keep schools open no matter what. 
While a three-legged stool is extremely stable (even according to the Foreign Office, you’d think they had other things to worry about), a two-legged stool is a ladder to nowhere and the one-legged version is just Gavin Williamson hopping off as fast as he can. Despite the significant collective brain power available in the teacher associations and the Chartered College, the department prefers – or is forced – to make predictable doctrinaire pronouncements that don’t move at the speed of the virus. Of course it is better for children to be at school but that’s only true while it can be done safely, which has to include the safety of the adults who look after them.

I was a member of ASCL executive for four years and I take my hat off to Geoff Barton and his colleagues trying to steer a typically moderate course through this hurricane. ASCL and the Chartered College are right about the questions that need answering: what did we learn about infection rates once schools were fully re-opened in September? What is the risk to children and teachers of different ages, in school, now?  Why not vaccinate all school staff immediately after NHS staff and keep schools open that way? To which we have to add: what is to be done about the department’s new focus on poverty, disadvantage and children’s mental health in the immediate, medium and long-term? And why, oh why will no-one make a sensible decision about exams in 2021? 

I know that children and teachers don’t come very high in the government’s priorities but it has to be possible to do better than this. Shouting at schools through a megaphone then running off and hiding behind a curtain for a few days, releasing the press attack-dogs when the unions patiently explain why it can’t be done that way then bellowing another, contradictory, muffled message a couple of days later that has to be reacted to all over again is not good for any of us. 

Mr Williamson, work with schools. Work with teachers. Work with those of us who have devoted ourselves to this corner of the nation’s vineyard for years and let’s try to sort it out peacefully together. If you can’t, then hand over the job to someone who really can keep their head.

Hoping the New Year gets happier.

CR
3.1.21
0 Comments

Interference

12/12/2020

2 Comments

 
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Do you remember interference? It was a big feature of my childhood. You couldn’t hear the radio when the hoover was on because it went all crackly. The telly was sensitive to interference too and even the sharpest of slaps on the top or fiddling with the vertical hold knob didn’t always fix it. Happy days. The car I sometimes drive is ten years old with an FM radio. Reception is crackly between Deptford and Peckham. I’ve got used to it and – as if you couldn’t hear this analogy galloping towards you out of the squiggly mist of a 1960s television screen – I’ve got used to government interference too.

May I set out a few thoughts on the surprise announcement to finish this term a day early, and how irritable everyone has been about it?

First, the government needs to be pulling out all the stops to tackle Covid. Whether you think they have or not is up to you. Whether you think they can or not is more worrying. However, like the geography of Derbyshire, that is not the purpose of this piece. 

Second, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to have a view on the purpose of education, a national curriculum, an inspection process and a fair funding mechanism. Whether or not this can all be achieved smoothly when the focus for the last 20 years has been on a spurious ‘autonomy’ for Headteachers is more worrying. However, like the poetry of Thomas Hardy, that is not the purpose of this piece.

Third, it is reasonable that decisions about schools will have to be made quickly in a pandemic. Whether the Secretary of State’s pandemic-handling so far gives one confidence for future decision-making is worrying.  However, like the exams debacle, the laptop promise, the food vouchers, the BBC lessons, rotas and the October firebreak, that too is not the purpose of this piece.

What is, then? you cry, put us out of our misery, would you, please? No, the focus of this piece is how schools have once again been cast as shiftless villains only interested in a day off, in some parts of the media, this week. Given we’ve been working flat out, how did this happen? Might I try to shed light?

No one asked for a day off. Unions, professional associations and other groups made the point severally and singly with evidence and justification that it was no surprise that when schools reopened, infection rates among children rose. Therefore, once Christmas was declared open and restrictions lifted from the day before Christmas Eve to the day after Boxing Day, schools spotted an issue. Covid-infected or Covid-carrying children may be a risk to older people. As Christmas is invariably spent in multi-generational close proximity, young people may well endanger the health of older people. Gran and Max may have missed each other desperately since the start of lockdown, but it would be a pity if the visit had to be summarily cancelled, made her ill or worse. Therefore, schools’ tribunes said, since we are all capable of remote learning now, had you thought about making the week beginning 14th December a remote learning week and protecting everyone?

A further complication was schools’ responsibilities for contact tracing. If the end of term broke into the 6-day incubation period, schools would need to be making phone calls about infections on Christmas Eve, or later.  This required schools in some way to be open to do that – even if it was just the Head, or the Business Manager, or whoever has been in charge of the process.

And now we get to the bit that enrages the public. Heads said: everyone is exhausted and working over the actual Christmas Eve-Day-Boxing-Day stretch is hard to bear. Some of us (not me) haven’t had much of a break since March. Is there a way of avoiding being responsible for contact tracing all over Christmas?

The solution, declaring Friday 18 December to be an in-service training day must have seemed like a reasonable one to the government. We’re not giving a week of remote learning because everyone has had enough of that, Mr Williamson might have thought – though I suspect it's Gibb the Schools Minister who does the thinking at Sanctuary Buildings. Friday the 18th removes schools from contact tracing over the actual heart of the festivities.  Excellent plan! So why was this not met with general applause?

Well, the difficulty is in the nature of training days. These are not invented on the hoof and they are not meant to be a time when everyone catches up on their marking. They are for actual training to improve classroom practice, planned as part of the school’s improvement planning over the course of the year. They are to be taken seriously. If the training is not done that day, then it is acceptable for the equivalent number of hours to be made up at other points in the year, in planned after-school training time. What the DfE should have done is to declare that this Inset day is a one-off under extraordinary circumstances, unlike others, with other rules. What they have done is to tie everyone up in knotted red tape.

Worse, lots of schools – especially primaries, I suspect - had planned some appropriately-distanced festivities which couldn’t easily be reorganised. We don’t do a lot of that here. The tree’s up, Christmas Lunch is on Tuesday, I’ve recorded a verse of the song we’ll broadcast on Thursday and I’m writing this in a Christmas-y jumper wearing antlers, but that‘s as far as it goes. But now I’m embarrassed that the nation thinks we’re slackers. ‘Teachers say not enough time off’ shrieks the headline.

Everybody’s tired. Children of all ages and dispositions have found the last 15 weeks exhausting and so have the adults around them. The zoning separation of year groups eats away at the teaching day and at any semblance of freedom that the children had. This is hard for adolescents to bear who are wired for developing independence in these years: tempers are frayed. It is immeasurably worse for those who’ve had to isolate, some of them, by the cruel hand of fate, for weeks on end. We understand that many parents are struggling. Some heads and teachers have said regrettable things on social media – but that’s tired human nature broadcasting out loud in the modern world.

Which brings me back to the crackle of interference. Fourth (for those of you who haven’t fallen off the chair with boredom yet) it is shoddy for a government to conduct business by press briefing. Whether the current leaders of a parliament which used to be the model and envy of the world can get over this is debatable. However, like Paine’s Rights of Man, that is not the purpose of this piece.

I trust that these extraordinary circumstances will end some day. Until then, we need to look after each other and try to be kind. So, finally, fifth: it is a pity that so much of the media can’t abide teachers and attack schools at the drop of a hat. However, like the apparently perfectly acceptable decision of Eton to close early to protect families at Christmas, that is not the purpose of this piece. But perhaps it should be?     
 
CR
11.12.20
2 Comments

Befogged

28/11/2020

1 Comment

 
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It was foggy when I set off this morning but the streetlights were pretty and the great illuminated buses big enough to see. By the time me and my bicycle got onto to Blackheath it was pitch black. I said ooh-er out loud a few times and hoped that the cross guy who mutters wouldn’t appear for me to run over.
 
Fog and early darkness always remind me of a conversation in a Head’s office on the edge of Sunderland at the end of a day, when the dark sky was all-enveloping. We talked about what it must have been like in mediaeval times, with the same sky, no lights, just the cold and the hills, and eventually, to the west, Durham Cathedral appearing looming above the city as if it had descended directly from heaven.
 
Safely indoors, the clock ticked round to year 11 assembly: Instructions for Mock Exams. These will be important but we don’t know how important. I noted with interest that the Queen of the Mocks referred to the pre-exam gathering place as the Green Canteen. This is catching on, though I call it the Dining Room and one of the chaps on the top floor calls it the Bistro. It doesn’t matter.
 
The curriculum we offer does matter, which may lie behind the continually condescending tone of this week’s post-lockdown briefing from the DfE. While announcing a pay freeze for teachers and public spending cuts that will make learning re-stabilisation harder, they remind us of the blindingly obvious: I condense
  • the curriculum must remain broad and ambitious
  • remote education must be high-quality and safe,
  • schools should plan on the basis of the educational needs of pupils.
Duh. They wrote this in July and trot it out every time. It was annoying then and gets more annoying the harder it is to keep schools going and offer a curriculum that is the same for everyone, the necessary condition for an exam-based system. The tone lacks respect, treating us as idiots.

Which appears to be the Home Secretary’s preferred register, manifesting itself ‘in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing.  This may not be done intentionally to cause upset, but that has been the effect on some individuals’.

And later in Alex Allen’s belatedly published independent advice ‘Her approach on occasions has amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals.’

And then! ‘There is no evidence that she was aware of the impact of her behaviour and no feedback was given to her at the time………I note the finding of different and more positive behaviour since these issues were raised with her.’

Yet she remains, as the PM has insisted that the wagons circle around ‘the Pritster’.

I am in a Blackheath cycling fog about this and mediaeval darkness has descended on my comprehension. How can someone of such eminence, the Home Secretary, have to have bullying pointed out to her? How can it ever be right to shout and swear at colleagues, especially those whom one is expected to lead? How can she command any respect?

I have long clung to the existence of the Committee for Standards in Public Life as a guarantor of standards of conduct for public officials, from the PM down to lowly ole me. The ‘Nolan Principles’ of accountability, selflessness, honesty, objectivity, openness, integrity and leadership have bound us all since 1994. The current Chair spoke on 12 November and said:

‘The bullying allegations made against the Home Secretary were investigated by the Cabinet Office but the outcome of that investigation has not been published though completed some months ago…..this does not build confidence in the accountability of government.’

He goes on, further, to talk about cronyism in appointments and the awarding of public contracts, the firing of civil servants when the resignation of a minister would have been correct, the avoiding of parliamentary scrutiny by media announcements and the use of ‘just vote us out if you don’t like us’ as a way of brass-necking wrong behaviour.

The system depends on everyone choosing to do right, Evans says. High public standards rely on the individual. ‘It remains that case that in politics, public service and business, that ethical standards are first and foremost a matter of personal responsibility.’ because 'few systems are sufficiently robust to constrain those who would deliberately undermine them’. 

This is a dense area and the argument is nuanced. We are not living in a post-Nolan world nor should any of us wish to. We want high standards of conduct in our politicians because we want them to be good people determined to do the best for their constituents. We don’t want to be saddled with people who, as educated adults, have to be told how to behave. We want government to be built on a foundation of goodness and altruism, not self-interest and showing-off. We expect it of children and ourselves and we have a civic right to expect it of our government.

When we devised the national Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2016-18 we realised that Nolan wasn’t enough, but we needed clear personal virtues to underpin all of our actions. We therefore also committed ourselves to trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We check our own behaviour to make sure it sets the right example to children, and to other adults. This enlightenment didn’t descend from a mediaeval heave, we worked at it.

The PM is lost in a fog of his own obfuscation. He has made too many personal mistakes to want to shine the Nolan spotlight on colleagues. He looks as though he can’t tell right from wrong and worse, that he doesn’t care. Our children deserve better than this.

CR 27.11.20

1 Comment

Are we alone?

21/11/2020

0 Comments

 
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I used to work in a central London school with a wonderful indoor concourse that served as a yard because we didn’t have much outdoor space. The senior Deputy Head there used to work in a corner of the staffroom, probably to keep abreast of the temperature therein as we tended to the excitable in the early 90s. Anyway, I needed counsel from this kindly geezer on managing a colleague. I may actually have used the words ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ ten years before Lionel Shriver made her fortune from them. My share, please, Madam.

He suggested we talk without flapping ears so we went onto the concourse and leaned on a banister. ‘We’re alone now’ he said, looking at the – perhaps 400 - children swirling fore and aft. I remember laughing out loud and thinking, yes, we are.  None of them are paying us the slightest attention and the noise covers everything. It’s part of my repertoire now, of course.  
 
I moved on after a bit and didn’t see him again until the day London got the Olympics. He was the Head by then and we were being briefed by the Specialist Schools Trust at a hotel in Chelsea to which I’d made the trek from Durham. It was nice to talk but he looked shattered. He resigned a couple of years later, the school was academised, knocked down, rebuilt. Story of our times.

When I read of Heads deciding stop, to leave, I often think of the man with the exhausted face I met among the happy car-horn hooting of that July day. As an inexperienced Head of Department he was my go-to guy and if I had any success, it was with his calm and constant support.

It's easy to feel alone as a Headteacher. No matter how friendly the staffroom or how long you’ve been there, decisions stop with you and if things are going wrong, its you that has to find a way to put it right. I work hard to gather good people around me, whose integrity and expertise can sort the trickiest problem. If you don’t have those people to hand, or if you’re in a really small school you can feel desperately isolated.

The man above’s movements coincided with the decline of the Local Authorities. I’d worked with a gifted RE advisor in that authority and moved to a city where there was still a full stable of advisors, and then again to another.But those were in the municipal socialist red wall authorities of the north east where the erosion of local capacity took longer. In my first headship, in a tiny authority, there was still good cover for a new head. When I encountered problems – with staffing, with violence, with an arson attack that wiped out a third of our classrooms overnight – there was someone on the end of the phone less than a mile away who would come and, as it were, talk about Kevin. Indeed, when I encountered my first budget deficit I actually sobbed over the phone and the help I needed was there within half an hour.  

I’m not a young or a new head (I say that in case you mistook me for thirty-five) and I don’t know how it feels now.  I’m not surprised that the current circumstances make people want to give up. We’re all reeling from the sheer quantity of previously undreamt-of actions that need to be taken. Not just trying to prevent children or staff getting the damn thing, but then what to do once there is a case. Sending children home en masse used to be something that happened once every ten years for a boiler or water failure, once every couple of years for snow if you were holding the north. We’ve done it twice this week.

It's November, so all schools will be looking at their finances, especially those whose budgets run with the calendar year. There is no money promised for Covid, so we are all looking at unsustainable levels of spending. Some Heads of tiny schools have already spent more than their whole budget on the Covid response.

So imagine how beleaguered, lonely and worried heads, new and old, read this on Tuesday 17 November:
The new UK Border Operating Model will apply to all goods entering the UK from 11pm on 31 December 2020.  It is important for all schools, FE colleges and local authorities to prepare for potential changes to food supplies so they can minimise the effect on pupils and young people in their care……You should contact any food suppliers before 1 January 2021, to check whether….changes are necessary. These might include:
  • • varying the timing and number of deliveries to allow for transport delays
  • • being as flexible as possible on delivery times during the day
  • • ordering longer shelf life products during this period, such as frozen foods or foods that can be safely stored at room temperature
Imagine yourself the new Head of a standalone academy – that is, a school which did exactly as the government of the day wanted and broke free of the LA – without a trust or an LA to help you. Imagine yourself the Head of a small school which manages its own catering. Imagine yourself the Acting Head of a school that can’t get a Head. Imagine yourself surrounded daily by children you know to be at risk of going hungry.  Imagine yourself with a Cook who is isolating. Imagine yourself already at your wits’ end. Is it any wonder that half the heads in the NAHT survey thought they might retire early, or just leave teaching? What kind of government is this?

On the same day a very large child loomed at the door of our office and asked my PA for a mask, please. She was all for packing him off, our office not being a general depot for the disorganised. But he was being pursued by a very determined teacher and when he looked soulfully at me I saw a pleasant and diligent 11-year old with whom I’d whiled away happy hours back in the day and provided the face gear. ‘Bless you, Miss’ he said. I wished God’s blessings on him too but told him to provide his own masks in future. He didn’t need to be alone to be savaged by the wrath who was gaining on him along the corridor.  I was glad to help.     

The great Irish poet Derek Mahon died in October and you’ll have been waiting for me to quote Everything is Going to be All Right, his best-known poem. Not this week, mateys. Here’s the last verse of his beautiful Day Trip to Donegal which I quote in sympathy with everyone despairing of doing the job right, this year, under these circumstances. 
​At dawn I was alone far out at sea
without skill or reassurance – nobody
to show me how, no promise of rescue –
cursing my constant failure to take due
forethought for this; contriving vain
overtures to the vindictive wind and rain 
May we all protect each other from being alone, for blaming ourselves, for calling out for help and hearing no answer. Time to change the world for the better.
​ 

CR 20.11.20
0 Comments

Lest we forget ourselves

7/11/2020

0 Comments

 
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I’ve been guilty of appalling double standards this very day. I took a turn around the estate at break and had five very interesting encounters. 

The first was with a colleague. We’ve been considering de-gendering some staff loos to reduce travel time. This colleague had expressed concern and we had an unsurprisingly frank exchange on Lavatory Habits I Have Known.
The second was with my old friend the political correspondent who is now, can you believe it, in year 13. We stood together to discuss the US presidency when she was a mere stripling in year 9 and were happy to pick it up again. We speculated on the Electoral Colleges – as if either of us knew what we were talking about – and the international coarsening of public discourse. We were foxed by the simultaneous demands of agitated groups to count votes and stop counting votes and agreed that a hallmark of democracy was probably counting all the votes. 
I then pottered over to the year 7 zone where some smaller youth were egregiously not learning from previous mistakes. While Head of Year was dealing with it perfectly accurately, it attracted the attention of me and a Deputy Head.  Outrage and the summoning of parents were mooted.

Proceeding in an easterly direction to block 5, my ear was assaulted by a shrill and regular dinging sound. I raised an eyebrow at the culprit who’d found a nice magnet and was trying it on the sturdy metal pillars of the canteen verandah. All of them. We agreed that the magnet should be returning to its siblings in block 2 while he, it transpired, was needed elsewhere.

Then I smiled at two colleagues on toilet duty (student loos, you understand, we don’t monitor the staff ones) as I headed through the door. We noted that masks require more eyebrow effort when greeting with a smile. They managed it elegantly and with some subtlety, I look like a goggling lunatic.

Then I found myself alone on a deserted staircase with metal handrails and a confiscated magnet that itched in the palm. I may have done some dinging of my own and I may have experimented with picking up my keys with it when I should have been concentrating on a budgetary matter. It may still be on my desk in a paperclip sculpture of my own devising.
       
Later still I taught my year 13s and made them chuckle more than once and saw a child pelting across the grass, arms wide as if practising for flight in the same was as my tiny granddaughter does. (Though she may be being a duck, toddlers keep their own counsel on these matters.) It was a good day.

Earlier I’d recorded a Remembrance assembly piece. I looked at images and words, what we see and hear when we look at or listen to Remembrance. Setting the record straight on who fought in the wars of history is easier now: the archive is unfolding its treasures and all of our young people can recognise themselves in the house of remembrance. The words are more difficult: I talked a bit about Binyon’s 1914 For the Fallen, the Kohima Epitaph of 1944 – and Kipling’s 1897 Recessional because all of them are used, all over the place.    

You go too far! you cry. Invictus was bad enough but Recessional? Ghastly Empire Stuff. Yes. It is, but as long as the Remembrance people produce flags, car stickers, mugs, hats and so on with ‘Lest We Forget’ on then I’ll carry on trying to explain precisely what it means. 

Kipling wrote Recessional in 1887 for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It’s a eight-line five-verser with the refrain ‘Lest we forget – lest we forget’. That echoes a bit of Deuteronomy which, in the old version reads, ‘then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.’ So the forgetting which we should be lesting not is not the dead, but the hand of God. Here endeth.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that this may not be exactly where the thoughts of youth may tend on Wednesday.  Maybe so, but the sentiment of lest we forget is about the fragile foothold each generation has in history. That empire, those wars were huge, terrible, brutal and costly – but they passed away. No one is alive who read Kipling’s poem in the Spectator in 1897, no-one who fought in the Great War, barely anyone who survived Kohima. Did any of it matter?

We are rightly obsessed with our own terrible times – the virus, furloughs, lockdowns and the US election. Our grasp on the present feels so weak that we might cling to alleged certainties of the past. But as Kipling said - "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre." What will remain of us? Looking into the future, what have we got?

No previous generation has ever tried educating so many young people for so long. We’d better hope that it will help them to understand the world and change it for the better. It will be through them that our best hopes survive. Love, I hope, and goodness. Fairness, honesty, respect, optimism and kindness. Inquisitiveness, discipline, collaboration, persistence, and imagination. No matter what else we lose in the current battles, surely these must never pass away? Lest we forget.   
 
CR
6.11.20
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The Menace of the Years

18/10/2020

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Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Protection of Invictus. Someone has to act: things have got out of hand.

My mother didn’t care for poetry, but she furnished my habit from youth and provided the Oxford Book of English Verse from the Literary Guild Book Club. I liked gung-ho stuff and learned a lot of it. Invictus was a favourite as I was all for self-realisation – though she had another term for it. It drives me MAD when I see it misused.

When I read of a school where everyone has to ‘follow Invictus’ and the children are encouraged to learn it by heart I nearly had to self-isolate with rage. I may be misinformed but apparently they suggest that children choose their friends by whether or not they’ve committed this Henley to memory. You can picture the windswept coastal playground chat:
I say old man, have you learnt Invictus yet? It’s bally good, you know.

Sorry, old thing, don’t think I’ll bother. Prefer to focus on the ladies, what?
​

Well I’m the sorrier, old fruit. I’m afraid it’s curtains for you and me. Can’t be seen with chaps of your sort. The Chief wants us all to make our own path by following his every instruction and you just can’t argue with that. No need to make a face, it’s perfectly clear to me. Toodle-oo.  â€‹
What kind of person wouldn’t take up this challenge? asks the school. Well, one who had read the poem. 

Invictus is a great piece of Victorian rhetoric written by someone who had a terrible early life (and incidentally may have been the model for Long John Silver). It speaks of the undefeated human spirit and is where we get the phrase ‘bloodied but unbowed’. Allow me to quote the last verse:
​It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
      I am the captain of my soul.
Schools are pretty hot on charging scrolls with punishments. We call them detention lists, or sanctions or corrections. Children who do their own thing no matter what are prone to end up on these scrolls. If they persist in being master of their own fate they will, sooner or later, be shown the door and invited to take their unconquerable souls elsewhere. Invictus is not about conformity, uniformity or obedience. It is about taking a long view of the difficulties of life and deciding to win through endurance. 

Don’t misunderstand me. Telling children that they can escape the grinding poverty and hopelessness of their birth is an entirely good thing. I’ve led a school in those circumstances and I sympathise with the aim – but it can’t be at the expense of truth. Captaining your soul to a good berth requires a following wind and predictable seas. 

The photographer Chris Killip died this week and his collection In Flagrante has followed me from house to house.   They’re photos taken in the north-east between 1973 and 1985 and illuminate my memories of the same time in the same place. ‘Youth on a wall, Jarrow, 1976’ was for many the definitive image of the time, but as a work of art it is itself timeless.

The school that the boy on the wall went to wouldn’t have bothered much about Invictus. The education he got might not have been up to much and he was probably selected for it, luckily or unluckily. In Jarrow in the seventies his prospects would have looked pretty bleak at 16, but he’d have been used to bleakness. Would it have helped him to go to a school where he had to learn Invictus by heart? Hard to say. If the school was well-run and kindly, energetic in finding jobs and filled with skilled teachers then the poetry could have been an added bonus, a consolation in troubled times to come. If not? Would he have turned the blame in on himself for being insufficiently unbowed? What does the picture say to you?

And now? He sits on the wall rather than going to school. He missed 6 months of education last year and ran wild in that time, with criminals. He might get a grade 3 in English if he works hard with a gifted teacher, but its still a fail.  He can enrol at a college with next-to-nothing, but he’ll have to carry on fighting GCSE maths until he’s 19 while youth unemployment heads for 20%. With what does he captain the small ship of his fate through these menaced waters?

Children deserve to be told the truth. They are free to read poetry and they are the master of their souls but neither puts food on the table. Learning Invictus and repeating it in a community of Invictus-chanters will not prevent you from failure in a system that requires 30% to fail. We can choose as a nation not to provide for the most vulnerable but we cannot escape our responsibility. 

It is shameful to download the failure of the state into the hearts of our children and mask it with the 19th century equivalent of ‘just follow your dreams’. They deserve the truth – and they deserve an education system that cares about them all.
 
CR
16.10.20      
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The falling rain's own sons and daughters

3/10/2020

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I wrote to parents some time ago with the happy news that we didn’t have a plan B for social distancing, keeping year groups apart and rain - except for coats and umbrellas. Today was monsoon protocol day and thankfully, children turned up in the coats, largely. We’ve got the umbrellas for staff, new, highly visible, personally labelled and carefully branded. Only 2% of them fell apart at the first gust, so that’s not too bad.

However, our senior folks are logisticians to match Heathrow, Disney or the Army and when we saw the forecast they jumped to it like good ’uns. Our devised routes and wet weather zones worked a treat. Year 7 in the canteen, Year 8 at the east end of the sports hall, Year 9 in the dojo, Year 10 at the west end of the sports hall curtained off from Year 8, Year 11 in the main hall.

We have routes. Routes to get them to the zones, out of the zones, to the toilet, to the lunch queue and back again. We have routes to detention and places for anyone who gets too excited. We have different rules for packed lunches, sandwiches and Friday fish and chips and a DMZ between Year 7 and 8 dining. We have routes to the prayer room and the library. We have more routes that you could shake a stick at. And we adjusted them all so that Year 11 could have a live assembly in the sports hall about Year 11-y things: exams, working hard and what they might do next year.

We have staff. Heads of Year who didn’t sit down all day, teachers who volunteered to manage zones even though they taught all day, support staff who hold the world together.

And we have children, who did what children do, at various heights. They sat on the floor and chatted, they leaned against the walls and read, they speculated on romance and annoyed each other quietly. They ate tidily and asked teachers how they were. They had elastic bands to confiscate and water bottles to spin, but they held it together.  They lined up indoors and waited patiently to be led away. Some of Year 8 didn’t cope so well with a whole day indoors, but they’re at an awkward age. Some will need a bit of re-setting next week, nothing new.

And as I passed thought it all, I saw how open and inclusive they are, how friendly and accepting of the foibles of others – including the bizarre rules seemingly normal adults dream up for them. ‘We have to get there how?  Really? Oh, ok then.’

I love Don Paterson’s poem Rain. He talks about looking at lives as if they were in the kind of film that starts with rain and follows its effects on the characters. The last verse moves me every time I read it:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood –
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.

The mess and the damp, the mildly frayed tempers and the setting-rights, the silly acts and the overreactions are all bearable, containable if we can rise up. None of this matters if we have hope and kindness, if we have love. It could have been the worst, but at the end of it, in an empty school, it’s been the best wet day I remember. 

Thank you Tallis.

CR
2.10.20
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On Time and Money

28/9/2020

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I was invited to be an on-screen pundit for the launch of two reports commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation into the effects of CV-19 on schools and children, and on the efficacy or otherwise of home learning. If the session had gone according to plan, this is what I would have said.

Schools are where children look after their young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship. They should model a better world. If we want a better future, we need to care for our young people better. Schools and their classrooms are test-beds for this and they should transmit and embody three things. First, the learning we value and want to pass on. Second, the attributes that children need in order to prosper as adults.  Third, the characteristics that build up the common good.   

However, in recent times education has become skewed so that it is synonymous with assessment. That’s why we hear this bizarre and despairing language of children being ‘left behind’ and needing to ‘catch up’. Behind what?  With whom? Time and learning are not inextricably linked. Children missed six months of school, but that doesn’t make them stupider. They just know less stuff. So, examine less.

Further, the national outrage about the disproportionate effect that missed schooling has on already-disadvantaged students is just disingenuous. Of course they were affected more, because poverty is expressed in housing, stability and possessions. But they have always suffered. They have been left behind their prosperous peers for a very long time. Let’s not pretend that this is new, though a bit of national self-flagellation for our studied refusal to look the problem in the face is long overdue. Keir Starmer has called for an inquiry into this achievement gap, and he’s right. 

Children need schools that represent and strive for what’s best in life. At this particular time, we need intelligent, sensible and centrally-driven adjustment to exams and assessment in 2021 and an acceptance that remote learning cannot replace school not just because lots of children don’t have a laptop, but because the value of the relationship with learning brokered by the classroom experience is irreducible. If schools close, teachers are remote, in every sense.

Robert Halfon, King of the Select Committee described school closure as a national disaster and put out some sensible challenges to government to do better. He’s always worth listening to, but sorting this out is a wicked problem, where every attempt to help seems to make it worse.

So many disadvantaged students are part of the ‘forgotten third’. No matter how hard they work, they’ll only get grades 1 to 3 at GCSE. We’ve decided, nationally, to call that a fail, insofar as grades 4 and above are passes. What’s their motivation to tune into complicated remote learning? Why should they fight with their families for the single device just to be told that their work won’t ever meet the grade? From where do they get the resilience in circumstances with which most adults would struggle? What can we learn from this to change an assessment system that demands self-directed learning while discarding a third of its learners?

The demands on schools to sort out the effects of lockdown in terms of young people’s mental health as well as attendance, on top of their learning are next to impossible. There is no capacity in the system because there is no money. Money buys time in school, of extra teachers to make classes smaller, for IT technicians to manage the huge number of extra machines needed in schools and attached from home, for teachers to have time when they’re not teaching to plan their remote learning, for counsellors and attendance officers. The blessed National Tutoring Programme about which we are being bombarded with dense information this week will be hugely challenging to run. Who will supervise inexperienced strangers trying to encourage the disaffected to renew their relationship with ideas? How reliably will they do a very difficult job? Where will the time come from to chase up the reluctant and the defaulters?  

And in the meantime, what am I to do about the extra hundred year 12s we’ve taken on, about the space and time they need?

Anyway, the timings went a bit awry so I had to say all this in a minute and a half.  I probably didn’t even need that long to say that what we really need are policies to end poverty. 

When it was over I managed a line-up and fired a class of year 7s towards lesson 3. One of them literally jumped for joy. ‘Computer Science! They have spinning chairs.’  Oh, to be 11.
 
CR
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Finding my mojo in Block 3

19/9/2020

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I apologise for the quality of last week’s blog. I was suffering from a surfeit of exercise and the old bones were struggling. Yesterday I rallied miraculously, which I will explain in tedious detail below. Oh yes, worth reading all the way.

The lines are going well, thank you, on Planet Tallis and must be visible from space. Youthful exuberance in the line-ups is being suppressed and the crocodiles meander across the swamp largely elegantly and without snapping at the legs of others. Some old folks are relatively enthusiastic about them and the sheer number of steps being taken has generated mild competition.

One way to get the steps up is to teach year 9 who are banished to the MUGA, a 3-minute walk away. I got down there on Tuesday to encourage the lines when a youth called me into a goalmouth. ‘Look miss, spider’s eggs’. These were undoubtedly large seeds from a nearby shrub so I asked him to think about the size of the spider who laid them. Unconvinced, he threw me a challenge: ‘You stand on them then, I wouldn’t’. 
 
Tuesday had sadly started with a terrible accident close by, the aftermath of which several hundred children saw. I was at the front gate, interrogating. A Year 8 assured me that it was all right because ‘there are literally millions of police cars and all the helicopters’. A word to both maths and English required, perhaps.

Conkers also hove into view, in some cases at a considerable velocity. We have a couple of what I refuse to call conker trees as the Horse and its Chestnut are worthy of the name. Piling children up in very particular corners of the site have focused our minds. Children have probably always behaved foolishly with conkers, but now it’s in plain sight and annoying everyone. This too will pass.

Wednesday brought a furniture tussle in the outer office here. Removers counselled us to be sure we really wanted their services. ‘There’s a shortage of cupboards. They’re like gold dust’. Cupboards? The day declined further with a reasonable complaint from a local resident about children fly tipping in her bins. Good that they were looking for a bin, actually, but annoying nonetheless when the resident was fined for poor bin habits. We grovelled. Our own training session crowned a perfect day with muffling and blurrs as we enthusiastically but imperfectly broadcast building to building.

Thursday Governors came to look at the lines (and other procedures, obviously). They declared themselves satisfied. Spilt sanitiser was categorised as a hazard – very slippy, don’t try it at home.

By this time I felt as though I was about to breathe my last. What with the cycling and the zooms, the lines and the walks, reading the matchless prose of the daily DfE, agonising over what the government like to call ‘systems of controls’ and remembering my face mask I’d seriously lost my mojo. I’m experimenting with personal decaffeination at precisely the moment I need it most and I was aged mutton rather than spring lamb as I trudged down to pick up my Year 7 class from a year group disgracing themselves with an insufficiently serious approach to lining.

When I was a deckhand in the schools of the 80s and 90s I scoffed and chortled when ranking officers said that they found teaching a tonic, a break from the other business. Not 9F3 on a Tuesday afternoon, mateys, I thought. But I got just that tonic on Thursday from two groups of sweaty and dishevelled eleven-year olds. There’s just something about the Q and A, the back and forth, the uncovering of knowledge that reduced my age by about 200 years in the course of an afternoon. Having spent six months not really being able to answer any question with any certainty I was surfing a wave at the black of Block 3: ask me another – I know this stuff.

And so I look out of the window and see a retro sweet cart and perhaps the skeleton of a pigeon cree being ferried across the yard by fine specimens of Block 2. I’ve no idea what that’s about but I don’t mind. Board marker in one hand and seating plan in the other, I’ve remembered what kept me going with 9F3, and its wonderful.
 
CR
18 9 20
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Lines

12/9/2020

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An old hand dropped by to muse ‘It’s always useful to throw our processes in the air and see what we can do better’. Good grief, matey, I said. We’ve done nothing else since March. I distantly ran into another of similar vintage on the stairs later the same day. His view was that ‘It’s best to keep things as normal as possible’. Scowling at myself for inconsistency, I agreed warmly as he rushed upstairs to barter with the timetabler. Stap me, but both of them are right.

The things that really matter in school are very simple. Safety, good teachers and good relationships cover it all. Safety is foremost now and our response is rooted in my love of a queue. Lots of lovely lines in zones that keep year groups apart as best we can and every class has to be fetched and returned, like a very unwieldy library book.  The lines are a nice way to start the day in nice weather, The solution to not-so-nice weather is best described as a work in progress involving umbrellas. Students being towed from place to place by teachers means they don’t all get jammed in doorways with other year groups.

Its 0905 and from my eyrie there’s a beautiful sight of different aged-lines fanning out like a sunburst from the entrance to block 2, waiting patiently and chatting happily.  Some schools do this all the time. It's popular in the newer schools where young peoples’ unquestioning compliance is highly valued. There’s never one solution in schools, though, which is why governments find them so infuriating to run. Safety and compliance are central, but so are questioning and individuality. You can prevent harm, but you can’t prescribe brilliance. Speaking of which.
One of the most irritating training sessions I ever sat through was from a person who billed himself as an iconoclast. He’d written a book that had its moment in the sun so we shelled out for a session. He began with a line-related expansive flinging of the arms. ‘If you imagine a continuum with Ken Robinson at one end, Michael Gove is at the other’. Oh dear. We were partial to Sir Ken, may he rest in peace, at Tallis, not just because of his TED talk (‘Do schools kill creativity?’) that everyone in the world watched, but because he talked sense that reached deeply into our history at Tallis. He wasn’t at one end of anyone’s line.

Robinson was a former teacher and distinguished education academic who finally ended up working for the Getty Foundation. He argued that children do not grow into artistic creativity but are educated out of it by school systems that focus on academic achievement and conformity instead of liberating imagination and initiative. He feared that ‘our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity.’  He wanted a system that didn’t treat children as the same or try to ‘over-programme them’. He wanted all children to be able to to find their talents by being able to try things out at school. 

Robinson wasn’t opposed to academic learning or a national curriculum and those who say he was are just wrong. He wanted a curriculum judged by different priorities with parity of esteem between core subjects and the arts.  Tony Blair asked him to chair a National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education and the 1998 report ‘All Our Futures’ argues:
that no education system can be world-class without valuing and integrating creativity in teaching and learning, in the curriculum, in management and leadership and without linking this to promoting knowledge and understanding of cultural change and diversity.
Michael Gove trashed him in his puerile ‘blob’ rhetoric, rather than saying: this is best but fiendishly hard to get right. Let’s look at it seriously and build up a wonderful education system, rather than a cheap one that easier to measure.

Ken Robinson used Mick Fleetwood as an example in one of his books. Our Fleetwood Mac man was written off at school, distracted, unfocused, always thinking about something else – but what a legacy. Is there anyone over 40 who wouldn’t recognise Albatross, or whistle along to Rumours, if whistling were permitted?

Which reminded me of the Norman Rockwell picture of the Soviet schoolroom. Look at it carefully. The children are tidily uniformed. There’s an exhortation on the wall about ‘study and learn’ and everyone is focused except for the child looking out of the window. Is Rockwell just making an obvious cold war point about the crushing of individuality and the yearning of the human soul? Or is he saying something about a universal experience of children? About the child who’ll still think his own thoughts no matter what the classroom climate – and the teacher who recognises it?

Yet this picture illustrates much of what’s currently praised in secondary education: absolute conformity, even down to the level of all eyes ‘tracking the teacher’. That distracted thinker would be sanctioned in many schools, and his teacher would certainly be criticised by inspectors. But what is he thinking of? What memory, what experience of school does the picture bring back to you? (Ignore the bust of Lenin, though I did serve in a County Durham school with a bas-relief of Peter Lee on the hall wall who could easily have doubled for Lenin. I thought it was him until I got up close.)

We are constantly distracted by easy ways to fix education or loud ways to argue about it. Robinson wasn’t at one end of anyone’s continuum but wanted a way of combining the best in a good and lively system. Responding to the virus doesn’t meant that we start from scratch nationally, but it doesn’t mean that we pretend nothing’s happened. Learning lines at Tallis doesn’t mean that we’ll always do it – but we might learn something new that helps us. Both of my chaps are undoubtedly right.

I followed a matching pair of year 10s along an orderly and well-spaced-out corridor. As they went outside I’m certain that one said to the other ‘my mask smells of roman numerals’. If he did, what wonderful poetry and maths awaits us in the future?
 
CR 10.9.20
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Fare Thee Well

19/7/2020

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A three-part blog this week.

First: this one is some of what I said in the final assembly – do watch it if you haven’t already. It contains singing and everything!

This is what I said to the children:
We said goodbye in winter, and now it is summer and we say goodbye again.  The word goodbye is a contraction of ‘God be with you’, a blessing or wish from one person to another as they part. It’s a hope of protection in uncertain times. Farewell means the same – I hope you do well, that nothing terrible happens to you until we meet again. All the other languages you speak will have similar words, usually based on an ancient ‘go with God’ or ‘until we meet again'. Although where I come from people say ‘ta ta’ or ‘ta ra then’, which doesn’t really mean anything, to be honest.

Since March, the words ‘stay safe’ have appeared instead of goodbye, all over the place. That’s very specific in some ways, it means ‘I hope you don’t catch the virus’ or even ‘I hope you don’t die’. It sounds new, but it’s really just a way of saying ‘God be with you’ or ‘until we meet again’ in a modern way.

When we said goodbye we didn’t really know what was about to happen. We didn’t know if we’d all be safe, or if we’d all meet again. Some of you, sadly, have lost people you loved to the virus, and that’s tragic. No one at Tallis has died. With the exception of year 11 and year 13 all of us who left in March will be back in September. That makes us very lucky. 

We don’t know if the virus will come back and we don’t know what it will do if it does. We all have to be careful, so when you come back in September you’ll find a whole new range of routines and things which are designed to keep you safe, designed to fight it off. Be prepared for change!

And speaking of change. We know that the virus hasn’t been fair in the same way that lots of our experiences as humans aren’t fair. Most of the 60,000 people who’ve died have been old or ill. People were also much more likely to catch it if they are poor or live in overcrowded housing. Too many black and minority ethnic people in England are disadvantaged in these ways, so they were more likely to get sick than white people. And that’s not fair. The Black Lives Matter protests point out the other ways in which the way we live is unjust, and we all need to do something about that. 

Fairness is big for us at Tallis. You expect your school to be fair and with your help we try to make it so. We are one big family from all sorts of backgrounds, but we’ve been lucky and we’ll all be together again.

As a way of celebrating our good fortune we should commit ourselves to fairness, to understanding injustice and to rooting it out. Be ready in September to change the world for the better.

Enjoy the sun.  Stay safe. Fight injustice and come back to us fit and well in
September.
This is part of what I said about Mr Tomlin leaving us:
When I was clawing my way up the greasy pole, what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a Deputy Head. I worked with 11 before I got there and they ranged from those who never left their offices or the staff smoking room to those who did absolutely everything, but who you didn’t dare ask a question because they looked as though they were about to burst. I became a young Deputy in a stable of three on a split site school: I learned the most when I went to manage the lower school site alone. In 19 years as a Head I’ve had 10 Deputies.

For me, the biggest wrench returning to London in 2013 was leaving a brilliant senior team behind which had taken me 6 years to gather. The Tallis I joined was emerging from choppy waters: I inherited 4 Deputy Heads and made some adjustments during the course of the year. Ashley Tomlin was Head of Sixth at the time, but I changed that to Pastoral Deputy at Easter 2014 – minutes before Ofsted appeared – then again to Curriculum when Douglas Grieg first took on Plumstead Manor in October 2014. I changed it back to Pastoral in September 2018: he has had a full training programme for headship here.

With typical thoroughness Ashley came to visit me in Durham before I started here. Ostensibly to see what we did with our sixth form but probably actually to see if the school was what I claimed it to be. He’d decided by then to give me a year and move on if I didn’t suit.  It is with a certain amount of pride therefore that I say goodbye to him after 7. [The full contents of that speech contain anecdote, rambling, some violent references and occasional coarse language and are therefore unsuitable for the website!]

However, on behalf of us all, I’d like to say thank you for all of Ashley’s incredible hard work and determination, his tenacity and commitment – not only exemplified in his hands-on strategic work in school but also in his appearance at the Dover night after night: a feat of courage and determination to help our young people to live safer lives.

As you’ve gathered, I like to be busy in the wider school system in one way or another. This would be impossible without someone very reliable to hold the fort, someone whose judgement I trust completely. Without Ashley, the Ethical Leadership Commission would never have happened: the whole system owes him a debt for this. He’ll tell you that he’s moving largely because of the journey form Gravesend, but that’s not true. Ashley has been more than ready for his own school for years now but stayed here through loyalty to the children. Borden School don’t know how lucky they are in their new Head. We thank him for everything he’s done for Tallis.
And finally.

On my desk this year I’ve had two small bits of paper. One is a newspaper cut-out of an artwork by Douglas Coupland. He has others more apposite in this year, but I like this.
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It keeps me calm when the national leadership and advice we get doesn’t quite hit the spot.  

The second is an extract from a David Harsent poem – I can’t remember which one.
            ‘
If nothing’s changed

An hour from now, we’ve won:
Survivors of the wind, the streaming glass,
the life outside.
 
The hour has come to us survivors of the virus, the empty school, the life online. We hope for a different year in September, but if we don’t get one, it won’t surprise us: we know what to do.    
 
Have a happy summer, whatever it brings and thank you for your support.
       
Carolyn Roberts
17.7.20
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On checklists and their use

12/7/2020

1 Comment

 
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Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Thank you for the guidance which arrived last week and then, oh joy, more today. The 35 pages on full reopening is pitched well to annoy heads who want more guidance and heads who want less, so it is probably about right.  Apart from asking us to do the impossible, it is a reasonable effort. Separating year groups is a great idea – if you have a 1970s building with year bases, like the old Tallis or the old Pimlico. That was a lesson from the past that no one wanted to revisit during Building Schools for the Future, where we all had to cut down on communal space and no one has anywhere to put children when it rains at lunchtime.
 
So dining is on my mind. I get up early so there’s a long gap after breakfast. That means I go to first lunch with y7 and 8, the bonus being that I can see over the littlest ones’ heads. First lunch is a melee of 500-odd 11-13s, organising themselves pretty well, grasping food and cackling happily as they review the morning, perfectly safe and orderly while making an ear-piercing racket quite different to the rumbling of older children. Second lunch is more crowded with over 800 bigger and hungrier diners reading, tutting, strutting and preening.
 
Let me tell you, we can solve ordinary lunch with no year group mingling but wet lunch? Oh my. Several people have suggested, helpfully, that we could roof over the spaces between the blocks. Well thank you. What? How? And have you seen the cost of a PFI building adjustment? OK, they say, saddened by my mindset: what about a big gazebo? It’d have to be semi-permanent: we’re built on a swamp like Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs and an hour’s rain gives us trench foot and quacking. Umbrellas?   
 
An email enticingly titled ‘toilet amendments’ has just hopped into view. Anyone for latrine detail?
 
The School Council have been reflecting on weightier matters, reviewing our performance since March. They liked the work set and the support, they like Teams. They didn’t like timetable clashes or other students being late for lessons.  They’re doing but missing learning. They want to see their teachers and their friends. Most of all, they want to be together to do something about Black Lives Matter, to talk about it, to demonstrate, to learn about institutional racism and to hold us to account. Other things can wait: ‘all of the focus at the moment needs to be on Black Lives Matter.’  We expected no less and we’re on it. See what happens when a school focuses on understanding the world and changing it for the better?
 
Returning to the matter under advisement, Mr Williamson, I cannot tell a lie. Your other guidance has annoyed me.  Today we got 4 pages: a Checklist for school leaders to support full opening: behaviour and attendance. First, a quibble. A checklist needs boxes to tick. Scattering it with bullet-point ticks makes it instructions. Second, its really annoying. 

Simon Hoggart, may he rest in peace, invented his Law of Inverse Absurdity one Saturday morning in the Guardian for just such a document. Let me entertain you.
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(*This is new. Is it the tradecraft of Smiley’s people and picking up rumours on the street or me ringing the Head next door and asking how attendance is in their castle?)

So at the end of a long struggle since March, you decide to issue a statement of the blindingly obvious?  Is that time well spent?  Some heads are really agitated about Ofsted kindly offering to do some checking visits to see how its all going next term. I’m not that bothered, they have to earn their keep. But I’ve said it before, Mr Williamson, you’re putty in the hands of your leader. The PM’s flinging blame about. He’s started on the care homes and it’ll be social workers next. He daren’t blame the NHS but no one in any government has ever batted an eyelid at blaming schools for anything and everything. 

Austerity, poverty, elitism, the Hostile Environment, racism, Brexit and an education-as-exams policy which sacrifices a third of children are the problems that lead to disengagement, poor behaviour and truancy. Our systems work pretty well, but they cost a lot and I’m worried about what Rishi Sunak will do when he’s finished carrying plates about for the cameras. You’re all limbering up to blame schools and then you’ll turn the screw.  What will it be? Further reduced budgets or super-strict behaviour policies? Both?

Me, I’ve got to reopen a school that keeps children safe and helps them think about the state of the world. I have to be ready for rain and shine, for anger as well as relief. I’ve got to keep everyone with me while we steer this supertanker around the rocks. If you’re going to advise me, make it useful. If you can’t do that, leave me alone. The children expect a better world, and I must look to them.
 
CR
10.7.20
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Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

29/6/2020

3 Comments

 
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Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Part 1: Thursday 25 June
You were spotted in SW1 earlier this week and the fieldman’s report (I’m reading Le Carré) classified you as ‘preoccupied’. I’m not surprised. I feared for your state of mind before the current shenanigans began and I can’t imagine what it’s like navigating the corridors of power with your colleagues. Seeing them on the telly requires nerves of steel.

Unlike watching us! Tallis was on the box on Monday. BBC London came and filmed a newly-regathered half A-level Psychology class, interviewed Mr Smith, four thoughtful youths and me. They said that being back helped focus their minds: I said that having no children was scrambling mine but that the 2m rule would need to be gone – and all the bubble talk – before we could reassemble.

So we plugged the gogglebox in the dining room in on Tuesday lunchtime to watch the PM forecast the future. Social distancing meant those at the reception end needed binoculars, but never mind, I had a front seat. Good news: everyone back to school in September! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear and I tried to encourage moderate cheering. Some HTs are worried about the detail, but I’m sure you have it all under control. In fact, my pavement artist (Le Carré again) said it looked as though it was all in your bag.   
 
Perhaps one of those bright young things who nip around ministers fore and aft could sort it out a bit for you, though? Headteachers are fussy and we like things to be clear. It would be great to see which rules we have to follow in school, which are optional, which just occurred to a front-bencher while they were cleaning their teeth, which have been abandoned, which denied and which are ideas being road-tested before becoming policy which may never be heard of again. My primary colleagues, blessings on their tiny furniture, were certainly shocked this week to be told that 2m in school had never been a rule for them. Are you sure? 

And what about this rumour afloat that the exams might be pushed back a few weeks next year to maximise teaching time. That’s partially a good idea – but oh my, wouldn’t it have been better to test it out below decks before musing from the bridge? Now everyone’s asking about it and no one has the foggiest.

And without wishing to reopen a wound, since The Drive To Barnard Castle the whole cabinet’s seaworthiness is questionable, like a teacher who lost control of a class in October but has to survive until July. Was he worth it?    

Mr Williamson, I’ve been thinking about exams too, nursing a fond hope that the experience of this year might usher in a better future. Why have GCSEs at all?  Why not base the 16-year-olds’ passport on teacher assessment, moderated in the way this year’s will be, properly evaluated and monitored by nerdy subject-based inspectors who really know their stuff? That’s who Her Majesty’s Inspectors were before Ofsted was invented. Wouldn’t it be great to liberate learning by dispensing with GCSE? Wouldn’t it be great if year 11 marked their transition without the examination hall as the rite of passage? Remember, it only remotely works for two thirds of them.

Like the hapless October teacher we’re not very good at some kinds of learning so we end up having to keep promising the same changes time and again. I took two years out of teaching before I had my children and worked as a Community Relations Officer in the midlands. The 80s were a time of disturbance in Birmingham and London which resulted in a significant amount of Home Office funding for projects to tackle the racism and social exclusion. Most of the focus was on anti-racism training for individuals, but we understood about institutionalised racism and encouraged institutions to scrutinise their processes to combat it. Fifteen years later there was the McPherson Report. Now, twenty years after that, ten years after the Public Sector Equality Duty, where are we, exactly? And how can any government mired in the Windrush depatriations and the Hostile Environment be believed?

I saw a photo in the paper of a novel idea in a Chinese school to keep small-ish children apart. They had very serious expressions for persons in purple paper wings but it just goes to show that children will accept anything as normal if an adult tells them so. Children will believe a lie if someone they trust tells it. That’s why we have to tell them the truth and that’s why we can’t keep fobbing them off with change tomorrow.

Education, equality and justice are really hard to get right. Your Shadow has fallen today. You’re picking your way, Mr Williamson, through very difficult circumstances and you don’t look very steady on your own feet. Tell us the truth, talk to us and trust us and we can rebuild something righteous and grand, together.

Yours, at some distance.
 
Carolyn Roberts
26.6.20 
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Hancock's Half Hour

13/6/2020

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Hancock’s Half-Hour
 
Dear Mr Williamson,

You look more than usually frazzled at the moment so I thought I’d try to cheer you up. Would you like a joke about the Marmite shortage? It’s all stuck in a lorry travelling yeastbound. Sorry, perhaps that’s the wrong joke for someone accused of being asleep at the wheel this week.

Perhaps an undemanding film would help? Steve Martin’s 1987 Roxanne has long been a favourite on the Roberts sofa. He plays the frustrated Fire Chief of a small town whose crew are hard to train. At one point he says:

I  have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.
I have a sinking feeling when the Department’s daily briefing flops into my inbox that it’s not quite the first place I expect to find clear and precise advice. Sorry. 

Maybe a political Drama? I’d steer clear of The Thick of It, to be honest, under the circumstances, but there’s a favourite episode of The West Wing where a briefing goes all to pot. (Series 1 Celestial Navigation). The Deputy Chief of Staff takes the podium instead of the usual spokesperson and ends up saying that the President has a secret plan to fight inflation which he’s not going to tell anyone about. I think a secret plan’s probably on a par with a ‘very big plan’ for getting everyone back to school or a ‘huge job’ to catch up disadvantaged children. The PM’s such a joker, isn’t he?   

Children’s laughter is missing from HMS Tallis at the moment. While teenagers can be hard to amuse its great fun when you manage it. Even the coolest adolescent will eventually let a chuckle slip and the rolling eye and weary sigh is just a different sort of belly-laugh. Classes love to be diverted with a groan-worthily predictable witticism that makes a teacher memorable and a ridiculous joke can make the driest content palatable. I once heard a lunatic maths teacher declare that ‘fractions make you taller and more attractive to the opposite sex’ to year 9 and I worked next to a gifted mimic twenty-odd years ago who could do a whole lesson in a voice of the class’s choice. Myself, I use the Billy Conolly method and laugh immoderately at my own jokes well before I tell ‘em.
Of course, this only works if humour adds to the security and quality of the classroom. A good teacher keeps it witty and prevents sarcasm or unpleasantness. Children soon twig on if jokes are a distraction from a teacher not knowing their stuff: chaos follows that. No amount of droll banter appeases a class if their books are never marked or the lessons are rudderless and drifty. You have to earn their laughter.

We keep it light at Tallis and we try to look as if we’re enjoying ourselves, because we usually are. Sometimes levity’s just wrong – this isn’t a piece about racism, for example. Judging content and tone takes skill and experience. Everyone remembers cringeworthy moments when you’ve got it wrong, and can issue a quiet shudder. Leaders need to set the tone at every gathering, and I wonder if that’s what troubling you, Mr Williamson? You know, I don’t think it’s entirely your fault?

What about some poetry, then? One of my favourite recitations is Siegfried Sassoon’s The General which if you don’t mind I’ll quote in full:

Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
 
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.    
 
Oof. I wonder, Mr Williamson, if this strikes a chord?

One of my personal cringe regrets is laughing at Boris Johnson when he used to be on Have I Got News For You. Sober analysts at the time warned me this was a ploy to get into the nation’s easily-amused hearts, but I still chortled through his blundering routines. He’s harmless, I said. A frothy cross between Stephen Fry and Bertie Wooster, a buffoon in the English upper-class-twit tradition.   

But where has it led us? The CV-19 crisis lurches between underaction, overpromise and retreat. The star turn is exposed without the braying laugh-track of the Commons and his flannel misses the note nearly every time. It’s too painful to watch. A cheery old card indeed, and he may have done for us all, in one way or another, by his plan of attack.

Mr Williamson, there’s a time to weep and a time to laugh. For so many reasons, this is the weeping time. You look as though you might know that. Your colleague the Secretary of State for Health certainly does. He could have been the man of the moment. In March he looked reliable and on top of his brief but now he looks exhausted, all at sea. In his half-hours at the briefing he looks like he’s given way more than an armful. 

I’m grateful to a colleague for this witticism, but it’s not really funny, is it?     

Yours ever,

​Carolyn Roberts
12.6.20        
       
 
 
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Warning: Adult Language

22/5/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

It’s a while since I’ve bothered you with my thoughts, so I expect you’re pleased to hear from me. I thought you’d like to know a bit more about my childhood?

I may have mentioned that my mother was a teacher, and her mother before her, und so weiter. This, combined with very fixed views on child-rearing much less common in the early 60s than they are now, lent a particular tone to my upbringing. I never had a book that reinforced gender roles or a pink toy. Dolls were out, and she once gave a present back to Santa in Robinson’s department store because it was a girlie one and took one from the bin marked Boys. (A plastic Tommy gun, a story for another day). She particularly objected to the reinforcement of middle-class values and twee-ness in children’s literature. You can imagine that I never went to Narnia, but I did smuggle school stories in when I was old enough to buy them myself.

This has obviously set me up for life pretty well but with attendant scarring. One such is that I cannot abide childish language in adults: the word ‘yummy’, for example, brings me out in a rash. It was this phobia that made me so cross all last Saturday to the extent that one of my housemates took to the cocktail handbook to find a cure.  What am I blithering on about? This:
It is now up to the Government and the teaching unions to work together, along with the many teachers who are not in unions, to find solutions in the best interests of children and make this work – while doing all they can keep children and staff safe. We cannot afford to wait for a vaccine, which may never arrive, before children are back in school. It’s time to stop squabbling and agree a staggered, safe return that is accompanied by rigorous testing of teachers, children and families.
This was the final part of the Children’s Commissioner’s press release on the controversy about reopening schools. You can read it all here.

I could be annoyed by the inference that the teacher unions don’t represent the huge majority of teachers, or the outrageous suggestion that they – and schools – are not trying to keep children safe. I could be annoyed about the assumption that the government are foolishly relying on a vaccine: they can defend themselves. I’m absolutely incandescent about ‘squabbling’.

The Children’s Commissioner’s role is to advocate for the most vulnerable and she and her predecessors have done it admirably. It is an important and distinguished public office and a hallmark of a civilised society. So why denigrate, belittle, ridicule the efforts of the only universal service for children? Why use baby language, as if government and those who represent teachers were naughty toddlers, or just need their heads banging together, taking one to bray the other as we used to say in the peace-loving Republic of Teesside? I’d have tutted at the radio if she’d used ‘arguing’ but I wouldn’t have been grinding my teeth about it nearly a week later.

Why? There is an assumption perpetually lurking just under the surface in England that almost anyone could run schools better than teachers, that almost anyone has the best interests of children closer to their hearts than teachers and that teachers are only after long holidays and lounging around being retro-Communists. This assumption has popped its head above the grimy water in the last week, fished up by Gove, and added absolutely no nutritional value to the discussion. Primary Heads are being asked to do the impossible with such weak guidance that it is negligent. Secondaries haven’t had any guidance at all yet – and all this because the PM had to have a sound-bite a week gone Sunday rather than a plan. Were you warned, Mr Williamson?

I’m very willing to admit that this is misplaced annoyance. I warned you about my upbringing in the first paragraph. It's just a word. But to me it is a word that plays to the gallery, that treats teachers as if they were children and just need to stop being silly. That imagines that people who work with children do it because they’re immature in some way and need to be told what to do by people with proper jobs. 
           
The teacher unions have been around for a long time. They represent an educated workforce that is professionally incapable of being fobbed off. I’ve written endlessly that teachers are both public servants and role models in society: in neither of those roles can we take instruction or information on trust without questioning it. It’s just not in our DNA. At our best, we cannot stop questioning until we reach the truth – because that’s what you want us to instil in all our children. Yes, the conversations are, I believe, very difficult for all concerned, but as they concern the health of the national children, why shouldn’t they be, Mr Williamson?

We’re nearly done for half term and we’ll be closed on Monday for the first time in ages – before being open for the rest of the week. It’s the kind of weather that would make for a lively Friday afternoon before a holiday in normal time. Our young inmates finish the week cheerfully, rushing around the daily mile today circling and chasing each other like lion cubs in the wind. Our buildings stand clean and quiet. We’re waving at a distance until we welcome them back, safely. Are you waving or drowning, Mr Williamson?

As ever,

​CR
22.5.20
1 Comment

Rainbows and other symbols

7/5/2020

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I don’t object to a rainbow. There’s a rainbow flag in the pen-pot on my desk that I crossed a rainbow zebra to get from Harvey Milk’s camera shop in the Castro in San Francisco. Our rainbow zebras in London remind us to be kind and fair while they brighten up the streets. Desmond Tutu gave Nelson Mandela ‘rainbow nation’, a vision of peace and hope. There are rainbow lanyards at Tallis. The current rainbows are cheerful and help us share a feeling. It’s nice to see them from my bike as I pass speedily along bus-free bus lanes. Can you feel a ‘but’ coming on?

I spent a lot of time in church in my youth and sometimes had to memorise bible texts including, as a small child, the end of the Noah story. In this the rainbow appears as the covenant between creator and people following the promise that – as I remember it - while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. This troubled me. I’d been shocked by TV pictures of Biafra and it seemed to me that seedtime and harvest were particularly unreliable in some places. The question is still indelible and unanswered in my head: what sort of promise was this?  

Well, rainbows are about hope, both in the present and the future. A rainbow says, ‘there’s a problem here which we can solve with goodwill on all sides.’ So, given the scale of the current problem, how do rainbows help? 

It's good to show solidarity with fellow public-servants working very hard to mitigate our problem. Thursday night pan-banging does the same. But forgive me for saying that neither rainbows nor pans solve the pandemic nor should they be used to distract our attention from sober analysis of its lessons. I can’t watch the news at the moment because it’s heavy on speculation and distraction and light on science, supplies and politics. Even with a pan in my paw and a rainbow shopper on my head on my doorstep, I’m still furious - if a ridiculous sight.       

Why? If you look on their website, the NHS describes its foundation thus:

‘the NHS was created out of the ideal that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth. When it was launched by the then minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, on July 5 1948, it was based on 3 core principles:
  • that it meet the needs of everyone
  • that it be free at the point of delivery
  • that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay
 
The NHS Constitution of 2017 says goes on: the NHS belongs to the people and:
‘
It is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives. It works at the limits of science – bringing the highest levels of human knowledge and skill to save lives and improve health. It touches our lives at times of basic human need, when care and compassion are what matter most.’


The NHS is founded on a common set of principles and values that bind together the communities and people it serves – patients and public – and the staff who work for it.’

Yes, that’s what rainbows and the noise celebrate, but funding’s been an issue these ten years and no amount of clapping should distract us from that. There are too few staff and not enough money in the hospitals and surgeries of the land. No wonder government love us using ‘hero’ rhetoric – treating anyone under these circumstances is heroic, but that’s not how public services should function.

My last blog mentioned the silence of Tallis-the-building while Tallis-the-school works from home. I heard Larkin’s Churchgoing on the radio last weekend, about an empty building,  and it spoke anew to me. While the opening line ‘Once I am sure there’s nothing going on’ is true for vast tracts of the Tallis estate, it’s this last verse that speaks to my rainbow fury. 

Imagine the poet speaks not of churches but schools and hospitals:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

We have full hospitals and empty-ish schools. We want to get to a position of emptier hospitals and full schools. We need so to fund and respect both of them that their founding purpose can be fully realised, day by day, in a better world, not glued together and patched up for the short term in every crisis. Our schools and hospitals are serious sites, proper to grow wise in.   

I sit quietly in London sunlight. Parents email me, teachers phone and our little band of children go by on their daily mile. I’m loosely listening to a leadership webinar and reading the Department’s daily briefing. I think we’re doing a decent job under the circumstances but if we took our public services seriously and funded them accordingly when all this is over, we’d do better than that.  We’d honour the hopeful rainbows with better hospitals, a serious memorial to the so many dead.
 
CR
7.5.20   
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Becoming thankful

24/4/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

You’ve got a lot on and it looks as though it’s getting on top of you. If you need some peace and quiet to think, Tallis-the-building has got that. Tallis-the-school, however, is trying to keep itself going.  
 
Let me tell you about the building first. There are so few people here that any movement catches my eye. I looked up yesterday to see a colleague going into one of the blocks. She turned and looked wistfully at the empty concourse before heading into the dark to lead a live A-level lesson. She’s lost family in the virus and may have been thinking about that, but she looked like she was hearing what I hear, the hollow sound of a building holding its breath. 
 
Teachers laugh about school without children being peaceful and tidy, but it’s not new. Anyone who comes in to work in the holidays hears a silence, but it’s different to this silence. Holiday silence is about taking a breath, settling and regrouping ready for the next foray. This silence is different, an absence, not a breather. It’s as if the bricks, the glass and the mighty steel frames are asking what’s happened? Where are they?

We know where they are, but it isn’t here. So I’m wondering about what it’ll sound like when they’re back, and trying to analyse what I’m missing. Noise and busy-ness obviously. The particular sound of the little crossroads outside my office at lesson change contrasting with the purring motor of the main office next door; the racket of 11RA seizing and gathering for afternoon tutor and the Deaf children talking and signing as they go for support.  The personal leitmotif of a colleague’s keys and whistle, of another’s heels and the clatter of the fire door against my wall because the doorstop’s in the wrong place. 

The work we’re doing at the moment is all about maintaining the bones of a school: checking children are OK, sending work, teaching lessons where we can and sorting out work to keep people going. Governance, budgets, teacher recruitment for September. We’re just about holding it together under the circumstances and we’re waiting to hear what happens next. We’ll hear it from you, Mr Williamson, but we’ll hear it from the children too.

And there’s the problem. Schools are designed to be full of bustle, even a bit squashed in parts. They’re designed to be community crucibles in which children learn how to deal with themselves and others. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to look after themselves, and we do it in batches. Social distancing is the opposite of what we do and the infrastructure is all against it. 

Practically speaking, we could keep children 2m apart in class if we had 10 (out of 30) to a standard classroom.  We’d be hard pressed to do it in the corridors and we could probably only feed 60 at once. Children would have to be kept indoors all day to enforce it, being taken out for walks occasionally. We could do this – we could do whatever it takes - but we could only do it for a small number. Even on a giant site like ours that would perhaps be 500 at most – 25%. Which 25%?

Lockdown’s five weeks old now and it's hard, very hard for some. We need to remember why we’re doing it and take care that our next actions are measured and rational. Life will never be the same again and we can’t make up the time we’re losing to Covid-19. We mustn’t unpick the good that’s been done by our unusual national self-discipline and we must especially guard against controversy-as-an-antidote-to-boredom that panics shaky politicians into making bad decisions. This disease kills people who are unprepared, and both our national health and National Health remain at the mercy of national unreadiness.
 
Whatever happens to bring us out of this will have a cost, which we’ll pay for a long time. Some children will learn less than they expected over the course of their school careers, but if we get it right they’ll have the rest of their lives to learn in. If we get it wrong, some of them, and their teachers, won’t.

There are 53 Thankful Villages in England and Wales who lost no one in the Great War. There are tens of thousands of villages and towns who lost people, singly or in big numbers, whole street-fulls in the Blitz, of course. Whatever happens next, we need our schools to come through this Thankful. We need our young people for a better future.  We need to keep them safe now. 

Take care, Mr Williamson.

Yours in hope

CR
24.4.19
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Stairway to where?

27/3/2020

1 Comment

 
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Dear Mr Williamson,
​
It was the staircase that did for me on Thursday the 12th, the morning after the announcement that schools would close and the exams were cancelled. We had a mock GCSE Physics exam and proceeded as usual, corralled the youth into the dining room, instructed them about examiners’ wheezes and checked them for pens. Then we send them up to the sports hall in batches, a trip involving four sets of double doors, six sharp turns and two flights of stairs. Old folks position themselves on the stairs encouraging the youth to approach the exam hall in the zone, silently, thinking about physics or whatever tasty dish is on the menu.  

I was on the half landing and frankly, unimpressed. I said to myself ‘This’ll have to improve before the real exams start’ until, as they say in the six counties, I caught myself on. This was it. There weren’t going to be any real exams. It was a miracle of muscle memory and instilled habits that they were walking quietly up the stairs at all. They’d never take Physics GCSE again. Or any other. What? How could that be? What vacuum were we about to enter (as the physicists say)?

For the record, I think the closing of schools and the necessary cancelling of exams was done well and briskly. It gave us just enough time to organise and to talk to year 11 and 13 in particular about their futures. It gave them the chance to see how adults have to mobilise rapidly and change quickly when crisis headbutts the door. At least, I hope that’s what they saw. We’d been doing Virus Q&A in assemblies and had y11 on Wednesday afternoon, two hours before the announcement. The first Q to Roberts was ‘What will happen about the exams?’. ‘Keep working!’ quoth I – ‘Exams will happen no matter what’. When I climbed onto a bench to address y11 the next day had to begin with ‘so you remember the question about the exams?’. They were kind enough to laugh.

Trusting in your skills, sir, to make sure the solution this year is fair and good, this break in the cycle could be a great opportunity to improve education. You’d probably welcome my advice. Are you sitting comfortably?

There are many things wrong with GCSE but the biggest is that it’s completely unnecessary. Until 1951 children who stayed at school past 14 got a School Certificate. That was replaced by GCEs in 1951 for those who stayed on until they were 16. The GCE pointed towards ‘matriculation’ or university entry. Indeed, the exam board AQA was, in my time, the Joint Matriculation Board of the northern redbrick universities. OCR was Oxford and Cambridge, Pearson the London Board. The blessed GCSE was born in 1988 of GCE O-levels and the CSE. They were both qualifications for further study or the job market at 16. A-levels remaining unchanged for nearly 70 years were designed to assess whether a tiny minority of young people were university-ready. We scaled them up but didn’t change their purpose.   
May I pose three questions? The first is: why does everyone have to take an exam that is essentially a filter for university entry two years later, for a minority of students? The second is: If no one can leave school until they’re 18 why does everyone have to take an exam at 16? The third is about the forgotten third. What possible justification is there for an examination that a third of students have to fail?    

You’ll be desperate to hear my solutions so here they are. First, we need to rethink what we want for young people and the nation. University is only one pathway and many, many (most?) jobs are better served by apprenticeships or on-the-job learning at 18. Not everything is examinable by examination. If we finally, formally decoupled most of our assessment system from its elitist past we might also put ourselves in a better position to seek the holy grail for English education, proper parity between academic and vocational strands. Second, we’d still need some kind of assessment because we swap a lot of students around at 16. This remains sensible because they’re old enough to make choices about their aims in life. They need a passport to the next stage. That should be a reliable, trustworthy and standardised set of grades with a particular focus on proficiency in English and maths. Third, that passport needs to be fair and to assess endeavour, not advantage. A child who works very hard but achieves proficiency slowly needs a qualification which tells the receiver what she can do, not what she can’t do. 

The current system which officially uses the word ‘fail’ to describe the school careers of a third of children is not only wrong, but wicked. But my solution is rooted in something much, much bigger.

My passport at 16 would be assessed by teachers, the same teachers that taught the children. Why? Because they’re already there, thousands of skilled education assessors. How? Through assessment based on our current expertise, standardised through the National Reference Tests. These are maths and English tests that a selected sample of children take each year – Tallis did them in 2019. Teachers don’t see those tests or find out the results, but they’re designed to estimate the range of abilities present in a national year group. We have the data we need to do something completely different and much better.

It will require a leap of faith from some earthbound factions. Politicians and policy-makers will have to trust teachers. School leaders will have to trust teachers. Parents and students will have to trust teachers. All of them will have to understand that teachers have a particular skill in assessment that only fails when too much weight is put on it. That skill can easily bear the weight of a single child and it can stand firm under scrutiny, but it can’t be used to measure the success of a school. That needs to be done another way, by a properly funded expert inspectorate using serious longitudinal studies into what helps children learn and what doesn’t. 

Teachers will be honest about assessment if school leaders let them, and if we all agree to lay down the petty rivalries that brought our system to its knees. We can hold each other to account using a nifty little tool that’s live in the system already, the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education. That requires school leaders to show selflessness, integrity, optimism, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. It demands that we do it showing trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We could build a better system on a new level of professional trust.

Out of this terrible experience a better world might be born for our children. Future years might not equate education with exams and exams with failure. They might enjoy school a bit more and love learning for its own sake.  We might train and keep more teachers. Keep an eye on this year, Mr Williamson and have the courage to think big. Sure, we’ll still need some exams at 18, but they’re big enough to walk up the stairs on their own then.

Yours ever, CR   

27.3.20    
1 Comment

Tell it to the Bees

12/3/2020

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Picture
Well, Mr Williamson, I’m disappointed. Months of waiting and what do we get? Silent corridors and phone bans?  Really? When I wrote two weeks ago that I’d recognise what you were going to be like by the first things you said I didn’t expect them to be quite so, what shall I say, dog-whistly. Oh dear me no. When we think of the virus and the curriculum, the scrap with Ofsted, the funding, the reappearance of teaching-as-a-career adverts, the recruitment crisis and the sad state of our zero-sum, zero-tolerated young I had hoped for something a bit more hopeful.

Phones are still an open debate in my head but not the corridors. Let me dispense with this. Children talk. They have a range of volumes available to them and a plethora of topics. Some of the foregoing are more acceptable to the genteel adult ear than others. If they’re too loud this can easily be fixed by saying ‘shush’ while applying the finger to the lips. If their discussion lacks civility that can be dealt with by removing them into a corner to offer counsel and issue instruction. However, most of the time they’re talking at a reasonable volume about music, love, books, lessons, teachers, sport, gossip, animals, wars, food and Playstations. You might not tackle to their taste, but civil conversation is good for them and offsets all kinds of problems, from inarticulacy to isolation. Since I last ranted about this I’ve visited Roedean which I’m sure you’ll think is a model to us all. Their corridors sound like ours, full of children talking. What does silence bring? Control, is all. 

Enough of this. I heard the wonderful Will Gompertz talk last week and he told a great story about children describing their GCSE results to each other. One told of a string of A*s and As, another chirpily claimed to be able to beat that because ‘I can spell BEEF DUDE with mine’. How I know that child and how I can picture them falling about with laughter and tears, clutching each other for support. What a racket, what a memory, what a lesson. Both men are successful now, the dude richer than the A, if that’s what matters.

But he also talked about the twin pillars of teen life: social media and exams. Both are solitary, isolating and largely uncontrollable, especially under comparable outcomes and the requirement of a third to fail GCSE. What are we doing to our children?

Anyway, back at Tallis, I was summoned into action by Head of Year 7. ‘I need you to finish off assembly. I have to go and teach and it’ll overrun because of the bees.’ Happy to oblige and make myself unusually useful, I started it off too. Depositing year 7 neatly in rows on the Sports Hall floor we started with coronavirus and the handwashing-Happy Birthday thing. One of the great things about year 7 is that they are young enough to be openly curious and uninhibited enough to prefer an answer to anonymity. A hand shot up. ‘How long it lasts depends on the person’s name, doesn’t it?’ Yes indeed. Let’s call her Eglantyne and practise that.

However, the bee man was unpacking his affairs by then and attention was elsewhere. He had bees, he had hives, he had boxes and he had honey. At some point I ended up holding bees while the younger element asked questions. Some got to hold bees too and some were rewarded with honey. Loads of previously bee-indifferent city dwellers asked detailed and imaginative questions. We frequently had to pause while they discussed bee-related issues with one another and when I finally handed my green parcels back and shooed them off to class the bee-debate was stretching from block 5 to the furthest reach of period 1. (Oh, the green parcels were the bees.  Hibernating – do you think I’m mad?) As I remarked to the meeting I was 20 minutes late for and the phone call I forgot altogether until break – never work with children or bees. All your best lines are lost.

Mr Williamson, wouldn’t it have been a waste if the children had had to be quiet all the way to Art? They were so excited, astounded, bemused about what they’d seen they wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves talking. We’d have had to shush them and tell them off, some might have needed punishing, for talking, about an endangered wonder of creation. Who would have benefited? The bees lived again in the retelling as well as in the buzzing and flapping and the silly laughter as 270 11 and 12-year olds swarmed across the yard. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Well, I suppose that if you’re frightened of children, or if you’re not confident in your relationships with them, or if you think they have nothing to say or nothing to share, or if being in control is more important than teaching children a good way to live you might want it, but it still wouldn’t make sense.

And I suppose that when your corridors are silent you’ll never here the quiet admissions, friend to friend. I’m frightened to go home. I’m hungry again. I don’t want to stay alive. I know something dangerous. I don’t know who to tell. And you don’t get the friend’s advice: tell Miss, tell Sir, come with me and I’ll help. 

It’s not just bees who hold us together. Children’s voices frame the world for some of us, and we count ourselves lucky.
 
CR
12.3.20
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