It is the end of the year.  Let me tell you we have had the best end of year. The greatest. So good, the top end of special.

I apologise if this sounds Trumpery but fear not. When I say we’ve had the best end of term that’s what I actually mean. I don’t misspeak and say that we have had the worst end of term, depending on the audience. What are we meant to do with this stuff?

We have surely crammed a lot into the last weeks. Bugsy Malone was huge, over a hundred in the cast and running for four nights. Some parents came every night. Primary schools come to watch the show’s dress rehearsal and we got them settled. Then we offered a toilet opportunity, 100 of them take it up and we have to start all over again.  Then the microphones don’t work – but it’s alright on the nights. The set is all-conquering. We certificate the sixth form leavers from Fat Sam’s Speakeasy, above the bar.

Our routines are a little affected. Year 10 line up for assembly tidily but I decide that occupying the hall on the morning of the first show might be best avoided. We walk year 10 in silence to the Dojo just to find the outdoor and adventurous activity briefing underway. We perform and about turn and walk up to the sports hall where muscle memory triggers crossed legs on the hard floor. It’s a surreal experience: 270 children and a dozen staff in search of an assembly. We could have kept walking until we’d done our daily mile: the yard was my last resort. 
A colleague warns me she’s annoyed, but goes for a run and cheers up. A musician works with a dancer on Motion Sickness, cello and Bach as part of our practice-based appraisal option. A leaver sells his paintings for charity. New teachers visit. Newly-qualified teachers breathe a sigh of relief at another hurdle jumped. I follow a small child rushing over the bridge in pursuit of a youth too cool to listen to her frankly impertinent cry of ‘Alice’s brother! Alice’s brother! Come to me’.

Parents contact me: some to complain that early holiday isn’t authorised, some to congratulate on specific things we’ve done or the general way of things, some to ask questions, some to advise, some helpful ideas, some impossible, but all welcome. 

There’s only one taker for Waistcoat Wednesday, though we like young Southgate who appears to value character.  Others say allez le bleus, insouciant.

We celebrate too, assemblies with certificates for attendance, endeavour, habits and character with advice on how to be a good audience thrown in gratis. Some prizes come with a pre-installed learning experience. I encounter Ms S on the yard with her form: a prize box of chocs caused 12 wrappers on the floor so now everyone’s tidying the yard.
 
And a final visit from Mr Brown’s dog. She enjoys the sleep of the just in a leadership group meeting but wakes to snuffle around a bit, startling a member who suspects one of the blameless brethren of unprecedented inappropriateness. Mr Brown himself departs. I’ll miss his comprehensive range of opinions and barely-concealed righteous fury on behalf of the nation’s young.

Which is justifiable if for no other reason than we head into the hols with no word from the School Teachers’ Review Body. This affects everyone’s budgets: discovering in September that a proposed teacher pay deal might or might not happen, or be funded will make for an excitable start of term. Perhaps they’ll put out the news on the same day as the results in the hols, in the hopes Heads won’t see it. Or next week, when we’re all having a lie down. As the unions have said to the Secretary of State:

I’m humming Bugsy as I potter about our scorched landscape. I love this show. It’s a perfect school musical: very little plot, and lots of opportunities for outrageous accents and hamming it up. Much like….anyway, Bugsy next week, get your ticket while you can.

This week was taster days for the New Year 12s and Headstart Day for the new year 7s. Taster day is the only time year 12 spend break and lunch on the yard.  Once they get into the swing of things in September they stay indoors, basking in a very small privilege and an even smaller canteen. Year 7 get an even less realistic experience. They’re met late at the gate, guided to where they need to be, ushered round by current year 7 sheepdogs, given a snack at break and lunch without others looking on. They don’t need to carry or remember anything other than their manners.
​
Just as well we keep them a bit apart so they can get the feel of the huge building, protected from fearsome sights. Mr Pape raising money for his tutor group’s trip using the wet sponge method: as a Mackem he’s used to cold.  Or the small youth I encountered last week with his jacket over his head, ruler in teeth, pencil case under one arm, water bottle between his knees, bag on back, and football under the other arm, looking for all the world like Jagger’s Great Western Memorial soldier at Paddington. ‘I’m a bit overloaded’ he remarked as we tried to rationalise his accoutrements.

And in a fit of forward planning we’ve actually been thinking about the Great War, and how to mark the 100th anniversary of its end. We’re inspired by work with the Imperial War Museum and we’d like to broaden our remembrance to fit our community, so if you know people who’ve served in any war and would like to help us, do get in touch.

Our curriculum consultation is spreading too. We had a meeting this week about the issue of the EBacc and whether the Tallis curriculum should change so that all our children take French or Spanish and history or geography to GCSE as well as English, maths and science. The government have an ‘ambition’ for 90% of children to do this by 2025. We are some distance from this figure and even further from liking it. We’re not convinced it’ll help children be anything that they wanted to be. Anyway, there’s a targeted survey out to 300 parents so if you’ve had one please fill it in.

Back to the year 7s. I passed a bunch of them on the stairs outside block one beside themselves with excitement, Sir bringing up the rear. A veteran of many campaigns he’s pleased to get some little ones to lick into shape. Other tutors will themselves be new so have the double bewilderment of guiding new children round a strange land. If you’re newly-qualified there’s a third confusion of quite reasonably not knowing what you’re doing at all, with children, who you’ve just met, in a building you don’t know, where the room numbering is like Esperanto (looks clear but is actually really foreign). Hence the 12-year-old sheepdogs.

However, there’s nothing like a year 6 for finding out information. We had a minor glitch before lunch was ready so the assembly-training needed to stretch a bit. Head of Year sought my public wittering skills but once I’d covered sleep, breakfast, bag-packing, buses, homework and queueing even I ran out of steam so threw it open to the floor. Unsurprisingly, this knocks all other methods of information-sharing into a cocked hat. We’ll build in henceforth.  ‘What do you do if you fall over?’ ‘When is the library open’ ‘What clubs are available?’ ‘How do I start my own’ ‘What if I forget something?’Go to reception. Morning, noon and night. Wait for announcements. Talk to your tutor. Learn to remember. The same answer really: time to stand on your own feet, but we’ll help you to do it. Like our chap with the kit crisis.

So after an afternoon’s whole-staff training on speech, language, communication and memory there’s a gap between school and Prom. Wednesday was the year 13 party, Friday the formal leaving ceremonies for the 16- and 18-year-olds who represent our finished product, our gift to the nation. Thursday a gaggle of staff in various levels of party gear await the antepenultimate viewing of year 11. Mr H has secured bling for the occasion. New year 7’s new Sir is year 11’s Mr Chips. 

This year: more navy or red dresses, a minor outbreak of burgundy suits, three pairs of velvety trainers covered with little spikes, gents’ jackets worn short and tight, one pair gold-tipped loafers, one newly-purple hair (previously blue), one surprisingly impressive beard, Head of Year regretting changing out of her trainers. At the door, the usual security, Ms Gallagher’s speech ‘You look great, we’ll check you over, have a great night’ and me gawping.  No horse and carriage, I’m sad to report, only a Tesla that wouldn’t oblige with a dance. Some of the suits don’t fit and the heels are more trouble than they’re worth, but that can happen at any age.

They could be anything that they wanted to be. Next week is Bugsy Malone, then the final week, then we stop, reset, and start again.
 
CR
6.7.18

A year 9 said to me exasperatedly on Wednesday: what exactly are schools for? It nudged me to presume upon your good will to ask a question about some work I’ve been doing. Would you mind?
 
I’ve spent a bit of time this year chairing a national group called the Ethical Leadership Commission. It’s a set of people from all sorts of groupings in education, including Ofsted. We’ve ben thinking about the fundamentals of school leadership, to see if we could help hard pressed folks to see beyond the daily things-to-do, things-to-worry-about and things-to-try-to-forget-about-for-now lists. We wanted school leaders to think about what schools are for and how they should act. Governors, as well as Heads.   
 
This seemed important not just because I like to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s important because the world has changed quickly in education. Now that different people and different organisations run schools, who is keeping an eye on the purpose of schooling, as well as its outcomes? Tallis is a straightforward case, still a community school run by the local authority. Other schools run themselves, are a part of an academy trust or a larger chain, some are church schools, some ‘Free’. I wonder if this confuses taxpaying citizens?
 
Despite differences in the system, we all have a one crucial thing in common: children. Tiny children, large children, noisy children, silent children, children who love school, aren’t so fussed, like big crowds, prefer to be alone, arty, music-y, scienc-y, mathematic-y, sporty, happy, thoughtful, angry and sanguine children. Parents send children to our schools – all sorts of schools – and trust teachers to do a good job with them. Largely we do. Sometimes there are blips.
 
Parents and society therefore trust us to do two things. First, to be diligent and trustworthy public servants.  Second, to model the behaviour of a good society to children: to show them how to be good citizens. Both of those are huge responsibilities. The first is carried out at work: doing a good job with teaching and results, for example. The second is harder to pin down. We teach character and values, but do parents see that in the way our schools run?   
 
The Ethical Leadership Commission has been working on three things. First, agreeing some key language that school leaders and teachers might use to talk about this. Second, to provide some training materials so that we can all think about this responsibility together. Third, to set up a structure so that there is a space to think about ethics and the pressures that sometimes constrain our decision-making. It’s interesting work, as you can imagine.
 
I’d be interested to know what you think of the draft words. The first seven are based very closely on the Seven Principles for Public Life. If you work in the public sector, you may know them.
 
The Framework for Ethical Educational Leadership
Ethical educational leadership is based upon the Seven Principles for Public Life.

1. Selflessness
Leaders should act solely in the interest of children and young people.

2. Integrity
Leaders must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. Before acting or taking decisions they must declare and resolve openly any perceived conflict of interest and relationships.

3. Objectivity
Leaders must act and take decisions impartially and fairly, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias. Leaders should be dispassionate, exercising judgement and analysis for the good of children and young people.

4. Accountability
Leaders are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.

5. Openness
Leaders should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from scrutiny unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.

6. Honesty
Leaders should be truthful.

7. Leadership
Leaders should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs. Leaders include both those who are paid to lead schools and those who volunteer to govern them.
 
The second set of words try to explain what we think makes up good leadership.
 
Schools and colleges serve children and young people and help them grow into fulfilled and valued citizens. As role models for the young, how we behave as leaders is as important as what we do. Leaders should show leadership through the following personal characteristics or virtues.
 
a. Trust:
Leaders should be trustworthy and reliable. They hold trust on behalf of children and should be beyond reproach. They are honest about their motivations.

b. Wisdom: 
Leaders should use experience, knowledge, insight understanding and good sense to make sound judgements. They should demonstrate restraint and self-awareness, act calmly and rationally, exercising moderation and propriety as they serve their schools wisely.

c. Kindness:
Leaders should demonstrate respect generosity of spirit and good temper. Where unavoidable conflict occurs, difficult messages should be given humanely.

d. Justice:
Leaders should be fair and work for the good of all children from all backgrounds. They should seek to enable all young people to lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives.

e. Service:
Leaders should be conscientious and dutiful. They should demonstrate humility and self-control, supporting the structures and rules which safeguard quality. Their actions should protect high-quality education. 

f. Courage:
Leaders should work courageously in the best interests of children and young people. They protect their safety and their right to a broad, effective and creative education. They hold one another to account courageously. 

g. Optimism:
Leaders should be positive and encouraging. Despite difficulties and pressures they are developing excellent education to change the world for the better.
 
None of us is claiming that we are perfect. All of us know that the responsibility is huge.
 
Are these the right principles? What do you think?
 
headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
 
CR
22.6.18

​There’s a wonderful moment on a sunny June afternoon at about quarter past two. Lunchtimes are over, exams are settled and everyone is posted into their allotted slot. Overheard on the way up to an exam, four boys not previously noted for devotion to study ‘We’re doing all these exams but this place is full of little kids just running about in the sun. They don’t know our stresses, man.’ Anyway, teachers are teaching, students are learning, people are meeting, children are thinking, candidates are writing, technical staff are pottering about and pigeons are doing their pigeon thing.
 
My thing is Radio 4 so it was fun to open the day with a visit from a journalist from The Westminster Hour. He was interested in the way we’ve responded to the London knife crime issue and was recording a piece on our wanding of tutor groups after assembly to check for weapons. As parents know, we decided this was the better way of doing it. Rather than having a big set-piece with knife arches and lots of police outside school we have Mr Brown and Mr Sheedy with a wand each giving a randomly selected tutor group the once over, one at a time. He talked to some of the children and then to the three of us. It was intended to take 15 minutes, but he was with us for another hour once we got started.

We talked, as ever, about safety and keeping everyone calm and happy. We talked about security and the different ways we find out Stuff We Need to Know. We talked about the kind of public spending cuts that means that youth work is disappearing and the Police struggle to respond. We talked about the effect of highly academic curricula on students who need another route into lifelong learning. We talked about the pressures on schools and the cost of student support services and the other things that parents now expect us to do that we don’t get any money for. We talked about schools as model communities and our responsibilities to demonstrate the actions and calm responses of a good citizen.

We also talked about old fashioned teachering. The way that schools build up good relationships with students and families so that everything is do-able and nothing ends up as a big fuss or a stand-off between the fearful and anxious on both sides. He’d seen 300 students walk quietly into the Dojo, half of them with their shoes in their hands and sit listening to a range of announcements followed by a poem. He’d seen us chatting to the chosen form group about the wanding and the sensible discussion we had.

If he’d been in earlier in the week he’d also have seen Sir and Sir so absorbed in the experience that they then set off purposefully through school in just their socks. A third Sir suggested to them that they’d need shoes at some point in the day. Especially as they were wearing four different socks between them.

Cogitating on the days, I’m brooding not so much on all of the above, but another conversation with a visitor. She was with us from A Notable Teacher Training Organisation and had some questions for me. She was bright, keen, open and honest, excited and apprehensive about what she’s taking on. Good for her. But the questions annoyed me and we had to laugh about that: it wasn’t her fault.

For a start, teacher training is teacher training. It’s a worthy and honourable undertaking: why does it have to be called ‘leadership development?’ Doesn’t that undervalue the older folks who’ve been at it for a bit, learned the craft skills and are now actually doing leadership development, rather than the most difficult initial learning of all, how to survive the classroom?

Another question was ‘What are the barriers to raising aspiration’ which almost begs the answer‘My own mediocre leadership and determination to do a bad job’. Yes, we can all do better, but aspiration is a social issue. Poor children, unhappy children, stressed and sad children, hungry children and those whose parents have to work zero-contract, gig-economy jobs to make ends meet and can’t spend any time supporting their school work may find that aspiration comes second to surviving. Poverty and a massive teacher shortage don’t help. Can I reiterate that: a massive teacher shortage? 

Combined with no youth workers and fewer police, what picture does that paint of the way we care for our young in this so-called advanced society? Why are serious, aspirant young professionals being sent out with loaded questions before their bewilderingly quick training? They need an understanding of detailed, thoughtful, long-term solutions, not blame-laden soundbites.
 
I’m a third generation teacher and I’ve been at it for a bit. I’ve seen things change and develop. None of us in the past set out to do a bad job. It’s not just the bright and shiny new intake who’ll want to change children’s lives, it’s all of us. And it has to be government too.  

That’s an old-fashioned teacherly view. It doesn’t mean we’re wrong.   
 
CR 6.6.18

A practical lesson today as I thought you’d like to know what we do at GCSE time. We teach them, obviously, for years on end and practice exams, you know all that. We nag away at them and warn them about deadlines and tell them how to revise. But how is it actually done, in the Sports Hall, on the day, child v examiner?

A big school has a well-staffed Exams Office so they do the legwork with the boards: Pearson, AQA and OCR.  They’re huge businesses. We spend towards £200k a year on exams alone. If you were starting from scratch, is that how you’d do it? Private companies, who also write the textbooks? Isn’t examining compulsory education part of the state’s responsibilities so shouldn’t exams come down with the rations? If they did, would it be more flexible? Could we make educational choices that weren’t affected by business interests and competition? Do we actually need GCSEs now that everyone stays on? 
    
Sorry, anyway, exam boards have rules and we comply with all of them. The Exams team has an army of hourly-paid invigilators trained up and ready to be set loose in the exam rooms. Teachers used to do this, but workforce reforms of the early 2000s decided it wasn’t a very good use of their time. (Despite many of us fearing that unfamiliar faces would lead to mayhem in exam rooms, it didn’t. Mind, it’s an extra unfunded expense.)
​
Timetables are devised once we have national timings and rooms allocated. We have a lot of children who need extra time or special provision. Some need scribes to write down what they know, some need readers and writers.  Some need amanuenses to help them or nudge them to complete. The basic extra-time children are in the main exam hall with the others: the special provisions are spread out around the school.  We’re very full with a high room-use ratio so every room used for an exam displaces a class. Is Spanish in English? is an entirely sensible question in May. 
  
Every exam room needs equipping. The desks so far apart, wall displays covered or removed, exam warning notices put up, corridors outside festooned with QUIET PLEASE, shushers activated.

Immediately before the exam candidates gather in the dining room for counting, sorting, and calming. The subject leader reminds them of the dastardly tricks examiners play, and which questions they should answer. Odd but important - we don’t want a child to take a sudden notion to answer on Buddhism instead of Christianity, or Richard the Third instead of Romeo and Juliet. This morning Madam French said remember the van and while I was in a retro Citroen bucketing around the Peripherique in my head, the youth were nodding sagely and thinking verb, adjective, noun agreements.

We walk them up the stairs in silence and they dispose of phones, bags, watches, waterbottle labels, opaque pencil cases. There’s a photo on each, and berth-finding takes a while. We allow time for the checking of pens, calculators or not, extraneous items on the floor, right papers in the right places. Head of Year is despatched to find latecomers (30 minutes or no exam). Finally, final instructions: don’t sniff, don’t gaze about, don’t ask to go to the toilet, Good Luck and the big number for the finish goes on the board.

Even exam time passes, the standard-time finishers tiptoe out and all flop about a bit on the yard before going to class, a revision session or home. Phew. 
   
Teachers aren’t allowed in exam rooms anymore, so often the first they hear of what was on the paper is when children debrief each other. This can cause palpitations. Is it worse to hear that the paper was easy or hard? Is it helpful to spot a child banging his forehead with a cry of energy, not glucose, aargh?

Last week’s Guardian had a piece about GCSEs and the effect of the exams on the young. It included all sorts of worrying things about stress and the physical effects of exam terror. It cited schools where character education is all about resilience so that children cope with harder, linear exams, and I don’t like the sound of that at all. It talked about the pressures schools pile on and how ticking countdown clocks turn stout young souls to jelly.

I can be smug and say that we try not to be too, well, extra about it. We don’t have pictures up of children who do the best and we don’t spread terror stories about what happens if you don’t get a 4. Life doesn’t actually end at 16 and some of that stuff is just disrespectful to people who aren’t doctors or high court judges, which is most of us.
It’s a really hard circle to square. Post-16 life requires results so GCSEs are a gateway, for good or ill. Has the pressure got worse? Undoubtedly. Does it cause mental illness? Yes. Can we do anything about it?  I’m not sure, if we insist, as a nation, on judging children by educational achievement. For every school panicking about its results there are parents who also have their hearts set on particular grades. For every stressed child there’s an indolent one who needs to be coaxed and hassled to work.

When does raising aspirations turn into unreasonable pressure? When does a reminder of how long there is to go turn from a countdown to a time bomb? How do you deliver different messages in classes of 30 and assemblies of 300? How do we balance the cost of student support services against the price of maths teachers? One hour 45 to answer, use both sides of the paper, show your working.  
 
CR
18.5.18
 
 
 
 
Who’d put children through this?

It’s a large site so there’s a time lag when it comes to gathering everyone up after break and lunch and posting them into the right rooms. The whistles go in order, canteen disembarking first, basketball courts, fields then everyone else. Whistling is creative here so we do it enthusiastically in fancy rhythms. We could set up a Thunderers Orchestra, the acme of creative crowd control.

A whistle makes shouting unnecessary. In a particular context and time, the whistle means: do the next thing, reset your expectations, desist. I happen to know there’s a nautical signal flag that means ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instruction immediately’ but a whistle is much quicker than that.

Long before the end of lunch one wet day this week I wandered into the canteen in search of hot food and found two sirs chuckling to themselves. A child had been running (indoors! near cutlery!) so a desist and reset whistle was sounded. Upon which 200 children gathered their affairs, put their hoods up and went tidily out into the rain, which wasn’t really the intention at all but made life a lot simpler, if wetter. An old grey whistle trick.

On the other side of the freezing yard, this penguin weather has made the year 11 study hall suddenly more popular - or it may just be the ides of May. So, I write in the silent company of 28 boys and 1 girl, all allegedly working. 9 have headphones in - could be GCSE Pod, could be Tassomai, could be Shostakovich for all I know. 17 have eaten sandwiches, one a large bar of Fruit and Nut. As it's spring and the heating’s off, 20 of us are wearing coats. Two are trying to discuss the work silently because I won’t let them speak, one has been gazing at a strand of his hair for 10 minutes as if all the knowledge in the world was written on it in very small print. They’re a rainbow nation, fidgeting through revision, silently. Borrowing a pen silently, reading poetry silently, sharing revision cards silently, not-before-time silently, satisfaction-of-a-job-well-done silently, 2-weeks-to-go-panicking silently. Blowing a whistle would be cruel at the end so I tell them the time quietly and they too gather their affairs, put their hoods up and move tidily into the rain. They’re still working as they go: It’s hydrogen, man; there’s a gothic theme to Jekyll and Hyde; these equations don’t stay still; I’ve done the reading for next lesson, have you? She’s setting us a twelve-mark question. I’m going Library after school.

It makes a change. On another matter, during the morning I’ve been involved in a phone discussion about why we don’t have a schools ombudsman. Did you know that? The Office of the Schools Adjudicator just looks at admissions, we have tribunals galore, but no ombuds. Because of a deal done in 1972 we can’t even complain about that to the Local Government Ombudsman. There’s no importuning route for schools about local government or about schools for anyone.

It’s not as if we don’t need it. The new landscape of schools is, to put it politely, disparate. One might even say fragmented, confusing, chaotic, perhaps unplanned. It’s hard to know where the gatekeepers are when it’s not obvious where the gate is. Or if there is one. Either way, in the ungated field of a thousand blooms who’ll hear a whistle when it’s blown? Where does the frustrated taxpayer get justice or just a hearing?

Whistleblowing is real whistling. It needs people to stop, consider their actions, desist, reset and do the next thing right. It searches for shared and valued norms and expectations and a common language. It longs for quality in consistency, predictability, effectiveness and diligence. That’s not to say a whistle can’t be blown in anger, malice or delusion but that’s seething humanity for you. Access to support, a fair hearing and justice is a human right. As a rallying cry it’s a little arcane but Bring on the Ombudsman.

The DT showcase last night brought the sun with it, and wonderful work beautifully displayed, canapés and music.  I went to look again this morning and found a smallish youth on his knees scrutinising the underside of a Bluetooth speaker in half a basketball, to see how it worked. I’ve commissioned the Black Lives Matter posters for my room and other public places: professional-standard stuff with a necessary message.

And overheard on the bridge: No, you can’t just crack open any egg and a chicken comes out. It doesn’t work like that.’  I assume this was a Biology or Food issue, not a comment on the local elections. It may form part of a campaign: School Ombudsman, because not every egg produces a chicken. I’d give the job to the little chap studying the speaker, he knew what he was looking for.
 
CR
4.5.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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8.3.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A young inmate with an eccentric gait came to see me because his trousers had split 'picking up a pen in Geography'. Keeping him at a distance I said it wasn't obvious and he should carry on regardless. He thanked me kindly and rushed off. I think parents expect much the same: they need to trust us to make sensible judgements and carry on. The old and the new combine here too I suppose: we worry about our service to children not less than all of the time, and we deal with each new challenge as it comes along. It's an intense game, and we laugh when we can, but only the young ones roll on the grass. 
 
CR 28.9.17 
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I was goggling at the injuries our Head of Geography returned from cycling round the world was laughing off, while she talked about plans for the year. Her team can look forward to some quality time together with all the affordances and accoutrements of the modern department. Rounding off the list she declared happily ‘We’ll all be singing from the same hymn sheet’. And I was off.
 
Hannah may not get very close to an actual hymn sheet, but I’ve done my time with them. I’ve been around schools for such a long time I’ve done hymns in assembly and hymn practice as a punishment. From Victorian doggerel to fancy modern jobs reeking of substitutionary atonement Ive shouted ‘Louder!’ with the best of them. Having a full set of the same hymn sheets was a luxury. Some partially eaten, many illegible. Some had hymns under different numbers, others unpredictable new words. Hymn sheet rustling was another irritant: rehearsals for cathedral events involved training hordes in picking up and putting down a hymn sheet QUIETLY. We moved on to projectors, overhead then digital, with a trusty child to move the words on while everyone looked upwards angelically to sing from one glorious hymn sheet with ginormous writing.
 
If you’ll bear with what’s obviously a metaphor extended beyond endurance, there's a further complication on Sundays.  Hymns have been rewritten or adjusted to improve or take out the gratuitously offensive. A lucky congregation has a full set with the same words, but people remember the old words and sing them instead. Or do it from memory and ignore the hymn book altogether. I may be one of those people. Then there’s the curve ball of Right Hymn but Wrong Tune.
 
Singing from the same hymn sheet with up-to-date and acceptable words to the right tune is obviously the harmonious way to go. The Geographers above will do it naturally. Doing it across school is a sine qua non of effective leadership, every procedure clear, everyone knowing what they're doing. I love an agreed procedure, but only where necessary. If all of life is scripted, when do we write our own lines?
 
Single hymnsheet-ness is big in schools. We are trusted to look after the nation’s young, so we shouldn’t do it randomly. We’re paid by the state so we should plan it carefully. We’re highly educated so so we should do it effectively. We're human, so we should do it humanely.
 
There’s been a bit of a to-do this term about schools with fixed rules. One was about trousers in Houghton-le-Spring. I was Head of RE there for 3 years, and once had a conversation about lecterns with a child that I still can’t fathom. (How exactly do they run up and down the street all night, banging on doors and windows?). Uniform in most schools is the uber-hymn sheet, but you’ve heard me on that before. The second, Great Yarmouth, story which has attracted so much interest it could almost be upgraded to a hoo-hah, is about the single hymn sheet for everything. Uniform, listening, pencil cases, walking, going home, bed time, coat hangers, sitting up straight. It's a bit extra, but schools have always had different ways of going about stuff and what appears oppressive to one child may be liberation to another.
 
However, given that the unexamined life is not worth living, we have to be prepared to live with the examining. Where is the line between wanting to enable children to escape generational poverty, and denigrating the efforts of those who have loved and supported their children despite it? If a school wishes its children to transcend their parents lives, what are we saying about our fellow citizens’ choices? If uniform is exposed as being all about conformity and conservatism, what to do with the child wired as a rugged individual? Is the single hymn sheet always a good thing? What if the words don’t make any sense? What if there’s another tune?
 
I'm a tidy soul and can see that purity of heart is to will one thing, but I struggle when that becomes a red line. We all have our fancy rules to keep one another safe and make it possible to teach and to learn but further than that, what? We can’t claim we’ve learned anything about social justice, that’s for sure. Or defeating poverty. Or making children happier. How is a zero-tolerance hymn sheet riffing on conformity and conservatism the answer?
 
The best school hymn was written in 1931 by the agnostic Jan Struther to a folk tune called Stowey, a three-verse metaphor requiring no faith assumptions. When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old ends with
                  And let me set free with the sword of my youth
                  From the dragons of anger, the power of the truth.
 
It’s a hymn worth learning off by heart to sing on your own no matter what everyone else has on their hymn sheet. What kind of school enables children to embark on battle and adventure to understand the world and change it for the better?
 
CR
15.9.17