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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Becoming Jane

9/12/2023

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Did you ever see the brilliant anti-racist video from the 60s called ‘The Eye of the Storm’? if not, rectify that omission at once, if not sooner. It is imperfect, of its time, and the teacher, Jane Elliott, is very like my mother, but don’t be deterred. I’ve seen it so often that some of its wordage is trapped in my lexicon. Good days I am Jane.

The film begins with a snowbound reporter in Riceville, Iowa, describing the small town as being a long way from the noise of the city, protected from protests elsewhere. Then Jane Elliott unleashes a storm and a white community can’t avoid confronting racism. I’d like to think there were many Janes still in those towns.

Have I told you I’m listening to Barack Obama reading A Promised Land? Its 29 hours long so this fact will be current for some time. He talks about such small towns and how well-disposed they were towards him at the start, but how the right-learning news media turned on him and made it impossible for those folks to hear him. Especially on health care, so mind-boggling to the UK listener. Most of all, he talks about leadership, and about steering his way through events and trying to carve out time to think about decision-making.

I know how he feels.  Planet Tallis is busy. What with talking to the Local Authority and governors about money, agitating on behalf of children with SEND, taking advice from our improvement partner about achievement, listening to other Heads’ woes (because I’m the oldest), making a video for Christmas, reinvigorating the national debate on ethical leadership in education, planning a conference, plotting next year’s staffing, talking to a visitor about Tallis Habits and a local journalist about adolescent crime and interviewing year 11s to check on their plans, I’m running to keep up. That’s not to mention perusing the Roman Villas in breakfast Latin (ok, that was a couple of weeks ago but I like mentioning it) or not managing to judge year 8 Dragons’ Den because the Secretary of State dropped by.

What? Calm down. It was the SoS for Science, Innovation and Technology not the other one, though she was SoS for Education for 36 hours earlier in the year. She came to visit our Cyber Explorers, part of a scheme ‘to support and inspire pupils towards a future career in tech and give them the foundational knowledge to pursue crucial subjects such as computer science for those striving to work in a range of tech roles, across social media content creation, sports technology and AI innovation.’  It was all very cordial.

But today I’m reading the reports on the inquest into Ruth Perry’s death. Which headteacher wouldn’t? I was particularly struck by some of the coroner’s remarks. She issued a ‘prevention of future death’ notice which, I learn from the BBC, ‘is a report that aims to stop similar situations arising again. It will be sent to people and groups in a position to reduce the risk of other deaths occurring in similar circumstances. Anyone getting such a notice has 56 days to say what they plan to do to mitigate the chances of deaths happening.’

I wonder what Ofsted will say? For a start, they’ll have to defend their claim that school inspections can be paused if the distress of a headteacher is a concern. Coroner Connor arrestingly described this as "a mythical creature created and expanded upon at this inquest". I wonder how they think that would work? At what point would distress become a concern? And what would they say publicly: ‘Sorry, this inspection’s been stopped because the Head can’t stop shaking?’ Where would that leave the Head? And truly, they’d hardly complete any. Their schedule would collapse.   

OFSTED is, frankly, terrifying, even to old warhorses like me. The framework makes perfect sense to inspectors who use it every day and, I suppose, in schools where they speak of little else. It doesn’t make that much sense to those of us who prefer plain English and approach it in the way I assume was intended, as a way of calibrating a snapshot of a school. Like a dipstick (in the engineering, rather than abusive sense). The biggest problem is that words can mean one thing in ordinary parlance and another to inspectors. And that Ofsted inspectors like that kind of thing so they don’t think it’s a problem at all. And that the hype around inspection -  which, to be fair, the current HMCI has tried to remove – makes it such an incredibly high-stakes event. That’s three biggest problems so I’ll stop there. 

I’ve been Ofsteded loads of time and have many a witty anecdote but actually? It’s the fear that stays with you: of being misunderstood, of saying something that’ll sink the inspection, of not being able to prove something you know to be true, of being holed beneath the waterline by a chance event.   
    
To cheer up, I wander around a bit at break and lunchtime. I like to see the board-game players energetically competing in the dining room, and the complicated cards that some of them bring. I’ve been keeping an eye on a little one who found it hard to make friends to start with – but now she has one and they rush to greet each other at break. Younger children still jump up and down when they see each other, they’re so happy. You’ve got to smile.
I don’t know if Jane Elliott would have done well in an inspection: it would depend on the team. One of her concluding remarks used in our household is ‘Do you know a little bit more than you did before? Do you know a little bit more than you wanted to?’ I think Ofsted could start there.
 
CR
7.12.23
 
  
 
 

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A Promised Land

5/12/2023

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I don’t listen to talk radio.  Not that I doubt the wisdom of my fellow citizens, but I’m not short of advice. Year 7 tell me how to save the planet, year 9 tell me I’m unjust, y11 that GCSEs should be abolished, y12 that I am personally complicit in all wars. Teachers have a view on everything. The local authority tell me what matters in Greenwich and the Department has views on whatever matters to The Party at the time. (Who’d have thought that the rather obscure matter of whether schools are using PSHE materials whose copyright means they can’t share them with parents would be such a cause celebre. What about other textbooks?). Him indoors has had an opinion on literally everything for the last 44 years.

So enough. I don’t listen to Any Questions or Answers and I don’t watch Question Time. Anything that requires viewer voting – off it goes. I’ll leave a room to avoid listening to any media discussion of schooling (that doesn’t involve me). I don’t even watch or listen to myself when I’m on.

However, I was sitting in a cab yesterday and couldn’t avoid LBC. James O’Brien, who I’m happy to read in print, was interviewing Jim Knight about the NEU’s Beyond Ofsted report. I like this Knight, Schools Minister a lifetime ago. I even took out my airpods (Barack Obama reading A Promised Land, if you must know) to follow the chat.  Headlines:  

Because Ofsted is no longer trusted and significant, change is needed. In a better future, every school will conduct its own nationally-set self-evaluation to report to stakeholders, working with an external school improvement partner (SIP) on an action plan. The SIP would also validate the school’s exam performance reviews. (This isn’t new, but we could do it better).

Inspectors would focus on this process, intervening where it goes wrong. They would not routinely inspect teaching or pupil outcomes but they would be sufficiently skilled to build capacity in school leadership teams. They’d be fully independent and hold government, policies and the effects of policies to account through system-wide thematic inspections. This would include teacher supply. (Bonza scheme).

Safeguarding audits would be conducted annually under the oversight of a different national body. (Ditto)  
So, routine inspections should be immediately paused to reset and regain the trust of the profession. A national duty of care is due to teachers so they may develop collaborative learning cultures which generate excellent professional skills and competencies. This should be at the heart of any reform. (Nicely put, Sir)

At the same time, another v interesting report landed from IPPR: Improvement through Empowerment. They start with:
Policymakers in recent decades have pursued a top-down approach to improving public services. inspired by new public management (NPM), which argued that the absence of market forces in public services meant they suffered from weak or misaligned incentives.
These seem to be able to change public services from poor to good enough, but not good enough to great. For example, teachers in OECD countries with excellent education systems get 100 hours of professional development a year. Us? 30 hours, left up to schools, so it tends to the idiosyncratic.
This makes it harder for them to do their job properly and undermines retention – damaging pupils in the process and resulting in unsustainable costs to taxpayer. 
They go on to make other, less radical remarks about Ofsted.

Both of the above reports offer simple solutions that cost a bit of money, but if they stem the tide of people leaving teaching or refusing to be Heads, it would be well spent.
​

I’m musing on ‘weak and misaligned incentives’. I can see that strong and aligned incentives are crucial to production lines but strong alignment to outcomes or Ofsted has skewed education over thirty-odd years. Besides, what are the incentives? Better pay’s only part of the story. Teachers leave because they don’t have time to think and they’re treated like fools. The incentive to being a teacher is deep in the heart. They want to serve children and change the world that way. They want to model a good life and give their charges the chance of reflection, self-motivation and – with luck – prosperity. It’s hard to systematise incentives around that.

I’d hope that Ofsted review and teacher CPD might be on the parties’ agenda as the election trots toward us. They could certainly do it in the time they’d save by decommissioning the banned lists of people who criticise government policy.

I looked out of the window as a visiting football team crosses the yard, looking slightly bemused. All schools are the same but so different. I hope these little chaps had a good experience while being kindly trounced. Later, I’m stopped on the corridor for a minor interrogation as to why I’m retiring. Age mystifies the young. I told them I was 62 but they’d have believed me if I’d said I was 50 or 104. They wanted the name of the new head, and were frankly shocked when I said the job hadn’t been advertised yet. How could such things be left in the air? 

Bigger things are left in the air, my dears. Education policy is only one of them.          
 
CR
21.11.23
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Their Fate Will Be Our Fate Too

9/11/2023

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The block four stairs and I are not strangers. I monitor safe passage, preventing foolishness including jumping, running, scuffling, bickering and attempts at back-facing ascent and descent. Therefore, I was glad when Paul Muldoon’s poem about bannisters plonked itself out of the ether into my face.
 
Our ornamental gates and railings that were melted down
for rifle barrels have gained some sort of posthumous renown
by unambiguously drawing a line in the sand.
The gates and railings are finally taking a firm stand
and even more emphatically bringing things to a close.
The exit wound is their approximation of a rose
or a geranium under gauze on the windowsill.
Gangrene. The green and gold of the first full-blown daffodil.
Also rendered, so it would even more tellingly rend,
was lead stripped from the gutters and flashing. For lead will bend
along a spine as it did along a walnut ridge post.
What was once an outer sanctum is now the innermost.
Shouldered as rifle stocks, after a mere three weeks of drill,
the bannisters are gradually taking another hill.
 
We’ve been thinking about war at Tallis, ten years after my first blog. It’s Remembrance, of course, so we’re preparing for that. This year we planned to focus on the contribution of the Windrush generation and public servants. Discussing it in the staff briefing, one said ‘This will be Carolyn’s last’ as if I were being called to higher service forthwith. I’m only retiring. I trust I’ll see another Remembrance.

Our young people are rightly worried about Israel and Gaza, for the full range of reasons. This conflict is very hard to educate about. Sometimes I wonder if there are things in the world that are best left to adult life – but that’s a hard message to hear when you’re seventeen or eighteen and rightly determined to change the world for the better. Our discussions haven’t been much helped by a letter to schools from the SoS and two government ministers which tells me what I can’t do on this particular global issue. In the absence of better actions, I’ve waved it at a lot of people.  

At the same time, I’ve been talking to new staff about what brought them to our door and I’m delighted by their stories. Most of them are fuelled with a desire to transform, built from their own experience or sheer determination. Many are strikingly dressed. All of them seem to love their tutor groups, which can be tricky when you take over a little family from someone much loved who’s left: as one said ‘they’ve just about warmed to me’. I doff my cap: I once took over a year 11 who didn’t speak to me until Christmas. We had a lot of frosty sessions together until they stopped hating me for not being Mr Harrison.

I’m talking to new teachers on the PTI Saturday courses and the good graduates of the Chartered College this weekend. I’m thinking about vision and motivations, why they wanted to be teachers, and what keeps them doing a frankly quite tricky job. I’m keen to be part of the solution that keeps good people in the classroom for the long term, not part of the problem that makes them leave. So I’m thinking about the teacher’s place in society: public intellectual, role model, advocate for the young.  Not everyone can live up to that every day but as long as most of us do most of it all the time then our hopelessly fragmented system will survive this bumpy patch and the children will be served well.

Which we do: from my forty-year standpoint, children are better taught and better looked after than they’ve ever been. Their betrayal, however, is two-fold: the poverty that blights so many lives, and the shockingly poor funding of schools which blights the choices of all but the most compliant and quick-to-learn.

It was war and teachers combined therefore which led me to a list of unbelievably brave teachers in the Second World War. These are people who risked everything to shelter and hide children and to keep them from the concentration camps. I’d not met them before and I think their names are worth recording:

Elizabeth Abegg of Germany
Amato Billour of Italy
Benjamin Blankenstein and Joop Westerwiel of the Netherlands
Vladimir Chernovol of Ukraine
Andree Gulen of Belgium
Jelena Glavaski of Serbia
Nuro Hoxha of Albania
Aleksander Kramarovsky of Russia
Gertruda Stanislawa Marciniak of Poland
Joseph Migneret of France
Gerda Valentina of Denmark
 
It was Sister Gertruda who said ‘once a child has come to me, their fate will be my fate too’. Words that any nation would be wise to heed. 
 
CR
9.11.23
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​From Terrible to Plummeting

20/10/2023

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A round-up, I feel, of the half term’s voyage so far. Weather unseasonably warm until it was freezing for a day. HMS Tallis generally seaworthy, crew and passengers know the ropes. Purser struggling to make ends meet. All hands look relatively tidy and we haven’t been troubled by croc boots with mock spurs yet. Sea conditions could be better. Nautical imagery runs aground at this point.

Time to round up some thoughts on education ideas emerging from the party conference season. Labour policies are not very clear, which at least has the advantage over their being foolish. The Conservatives want to end A-levels. This is theoretically interesting and it may well be time for us to melt down the gold standard into a different gold standard. The dominance of academic A-levels over our whole system is worthy of close scrutiny and what it does to the many hundreds of thousands of young people for whom A-levels are absolutely the wrong answer. Time perhaps to consider whether a qualification designed for a tiny minority in a divided education system still recovering from the war is really the right way forward in perpetuity. Blimey, my mother did A-levels.   
But this is not that time. Education is in crisis and we can’t rearrange these particular deckchairs. Especially as the tenure of the Captain is under serious consideration and he might not be around to steer through these icebergs.  The system is flawed, but it has many strengths and it’s not entirely broken. It can wait until we reach a safer harbour, or at least some plain sailing.

Rishi Sunak is admirably obsessed with maths. It's obviously done him well and I’m entirely in favour of this general drift. We denigrate maths in this country to a ridiculous extent, just like we denigrate proper nutrition, early years teaching and the state of the railways. All of these are emergencies. All of them need well-qualified, valued experts to lead and run them. Maths, inescapably, needs maths teachers. We don’t HAVE maths teachers to meet the needs we have now. Where are all the others going to come from? You can’t outsource it offshore, Prime Minister. The education associations are right: this won’t happen, so best not to think about it. They’re not just being obstructive. We have other things to worry about. First, money. Second, teachers. A lively observer described that yesterday as having gone ‘from terrible to plummeting’.  The third, or first depending on your school or your child is what we do about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. 

The number of children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) in England has gone from 220,898 in 2010 to 473,300 in 2022 to 517,026 this year. 17.3% of children have SEND, 13% need SEN support in schools and 4.3% have an EHCP. The biggest growth areas in SEND are Autism (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Children with these needs in particular often find school life quite hard. Many other children with SEND might not do so well with the monolithic curriculum we have in schools now and their results might not redound well on a school. Therefore, they are unevenly distributed. Some schools welcome children with SEND, others – not so much.

You would have thought therefore that the government might consider this a bit of an issue, especially as the SEND funding which goes to LAs doesn’t match the number of children or the needs identified on their EHCPs.  Many LAs are in deficit on their SEND budget and have had to be given ‘safety valve’ bail-out money. Some LAs balance their own books but push the deficit down to schools – who are meant to do what, precisely? Getting an EHCP is inequitable and the pointier of elbow tend to win. Getting any help can be a desperate battle for parents. And these are the nation’s most vulnerable children.

Well, the government has thrown its brightest and best at the matter. Frequently.
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 …and as you can see, have really prioritised continuity and expertise in this area. Hmmm. I wonder why the situation has gone from bad to worse?

In other news, we had a wonderful African Caribbean Come Dine with Me and concert last night with staff as well as student turns and enough food to fell an ox. Three Year 7 boy dancers went down well with a happy crowd and a small follower demonstrated his own moves to me at break. I was hotfooting to meet with some serious Year 12 and 13s to try to work out what we could do as a school about the middle east horrors. Worry, express sadness and work for peace is our best guess. I was able to read them parts of the letter I’ve had on the matter from Gillian Keegan, Nick Gibb and Robert Halfon but, being good Tallis students, they felt that the Trappist option (silence, not brewing strong beer, you understand) was not a guarantee of better understanding for all. And yet this is a particularly difficult issue. We’ll reconvene after half-term.

Tallis life is endlessly fascinating. We need a week to recover from each other, but who’d want to be anywhere else?
 
CR
20.10.23
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Trouble with leopards

4/10/2023

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tToday’s staircase was loud with red-faced and exhausted Year 7s after cross-country training. About forty of them told me they’d had to go round TWICE and could not therefore rush to French or Spanish. A second staircase for some was like the great north face of the Eiger as I chivvied and hassled. How could we be so unreasonable? I know how they felt: I’d just come from a Heads’ meeting on a third floor. But I have often been to a small pensione in Vienna with a sign affixed to the tiny ancient lift which says ‘Taking the stairs is also exercise’ so I was able to make helpful remarks.

So, forty-fifth in a series of things I never expected to write is a shout-out to (Sir) Dan Moynihan, high heidyin of the Harris academy chain. He’s said to be a bit of a recluse which only means that he doesn’t appear endlessly on social media. And when he does its usually other people talking about his salary, but that’s not on today’s agenda. No, Moynihan was on a panel at the Tory conference.

Trade paper Schools Week had it all:   

On Peckham: "Staff spent no end of time trying to get people into accommodation, night-by-night, and provide them food from a food bank because they don’t have cooking facilities".

On mental health: "Somebody needs to do something about the structure and resourcing of provision for mental health in local authorities and also for special needs. They’re stretched to hell, they can’t deliver. It’s not just about money, it’s about money and reform."

On outcomes: “For me, any government worth the title – whichever colour it is – would be addressing that head on and having a national debate about what we’re going to do with the underachievement of some key groups [he was particularly talking about disadvantaged white children] that do really, really badly".  This is a “perennial problem that clearly is a criminal waste of talent. If we’re going to be a country that competes with the best in the world, we can’t be writing off a large section of our population.”

On knife crime: "Endemic" in some London boroughs but “we don’t hear much about it other than we see the faces on the television of the latest kid who’s been stabbed. If this was in Surrey we’d be seeing it and hearing about it. We’re not seeing and hearing about it when it’s in Southwark or Croydon. What’s the strategy to tackle knife crime?”

On the whole boiling: “We now need more than education. We need the other services as well, and somebody needs to find a solution to that in policy terms rather than ignore it.”

Well, that covers the ground. I bet they’re sorry they invited him. I wonder what will happen next? Oh, sorry, we know: an announcement abut mobile phones that is years out of date, and something about reforming A levels, as if this government had time to eat that particular elephant. The whole will-he won’t-he HS2 debacle is calculated to obscure these concerns. As long as people are talking about trains, they’re not talking about any of the above. Hats orf to you, Sir.

Someone sent me a favourite quote from Kafka last week, from the Zurau Aphorisms of 1917-18:
Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening ; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.
Public service shouldn’t be Kafkaesque, but it is. Manchester delegates would have heard Moynihan while panicking at the desperate electorate but relying on the bread and circuses of culture wars. There may be an Elastoplast solution proffered to hunger, homelessness, violence, alienation and the squandering of human potential, but there won’t be a policy change and there won’t be money. Like the difficult leopards, the status quo will be accepted as inevitable and schools will be tasked to sort it or mask it, or vilified for failing. It's like the small boy I wrote about last year who told me there should be better foodbanks: no, there should be no need for foodbanks, no homeless children, no knife deaths and everyone should have a hand to help them flourishing. Schools and other services should be funded properly. Factoring despair and abandonment into the system is not leadership and it’s no way to run a country.

Mind, I’d better be careful. The Guardian’s found out that the DfE are keeping tabs on educators criticising government policy on social media and leaning on organisers to cancel conferences with potentially critical speakers. Have a look at this. Kafka? Orwell? Stalin? Mao? What do they think they’re doing? And who for? How will they cancel Sir Dan?

Head of PE leapt up the stairs behind the puffing Year 7s and I asked what on earth he’d done to them. He opined that some will need to work hard on their fitness, but that’s what PE’s for. It’ll take time and patience, good people and encouragement, thought and determination to help, but that’s his stock-in-trade.

It’s time to redefine what we want from education and what we hope for all our children. It's time to spend the nation’s money correctly, for the future. It's time to stop factoring in despair as an unavoidable part of British life.  

​We can get leopards out of the temple.

 
CR
4.10.23
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This way or that?

23/9/2023

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I’ve just finished Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy, written in 1958. I don’t know why I haven’t read it before. I apologise. But before we start, this Michael Young is not the same as the other Michael Young, of UCL, whom we know and love, mind. This Young was a sociologist, the father of Toby Young, the Free Schools obsessive who came a cropper at the Office for Students after having decided that a small school was too difficult to run. 

​Anyway. 

The Rise of the Meritocracy is a fable, a satire on the tripartite education system of the time which packed off the most schoolwork-adept children to grammar schools. If there were places – better not to be a clever girl in those times. It's written as if from the standpoint of 2024, describing a social revolution started in 1870 which led to completely different life experiences based on IQ. In this imagined future Britain is a ‘true meritocracy of talent’ where status is distributed according to a formula: ‘I.Q + Effort = Merit’. All this before algorithms had taken over.
The winners, the meritocrats, the lucky ones enjoyed high status and better salaries enhanced by free holidays, drink, servants, culture, restaurants and so on. Children were tested and chosen for this path younger and younger, and the unlucky were trained to be sportspeople or technicians or domestic servants. By the end of Young’s tale the meritocrats have become a distant, heartless and largely hereditary ruling caste. Like all satires, it was a warning. Hmm, I wonder.

We think we’re great at irony in Britain, but as someone else said, it’s a heavy freight to carry. Politicians of all sorts barnacled themselves to the idea of meritocracy as if it was a universal good, as positive cover for socially legitimate inequalities and not an invented word to describe a grave social mistake. David Cameron and Theresa May particularly loved it.

Young invents commissions and reports as part of his imagined history. The ‘Clauson Committee 1988’, for example ‘took the view that by that date about a third of all adults were unemployable in the ordinary economy’. Any social comment includes the words ‘a third’ seizes me, not because I’m triskaphobic but because of our current situation.  Grade boundaries at GCSE are set so that a third of all children have to score below grade four, the so-called pass level. Ergo, a third of them have to fail every year no matter what mark they get. Hmm again.
​
The book imagines a crisis in this meritocracy, led by women, in the 21st century. These protesters resurrect a previously-discarded vision of ‘common schools’ which:
should have enough good teachers so that all children should have individual care and stimulus. They could then develop at their own pace to their own particular fulfilment. The schools would not segregate the like but mingle the unlike; by promoting diversity within unity, they would teach respect for the infinite human differences which are not the least of mankind’s virtues.
I like the name ‘Common School’. Young’s bit above isn’t far from my favourite part of the Department for Education’s Circular 10/65 which promoted the development of comprehensives:
A comprehensive school aims to establish a school community in which pupils over the whole ability range and with different interests and backgrounds can be encouraged to mix with each other, gaining stimulus from the contacts and learning tolerance and understanding in the process.
Devoted readers will remember that I worried last time about the new Chief Inspector and whether he might take us back to a system based on exam outcomes. Which are of course important, but the way we measure them potentially gives schools a perverse incentive to favour children who will learn and progress easily towards a pass grade, and resist taking those who may struggle. Like meritocracy, any system that declares winners also identifies loser. You can’t have one without the other. And who wants to be a loser? How does it feel?

Meritocracy is a dog-whistle to the already-privileged. Last year I read philosopher Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. He says:

Those who celebrate the meritocratic ideal… ignore…the morally unattractive attitudes the meritocratic ethic promotes among the winners and also among the losers. Among the winners it generates hubris, among the losers, humiliation and resentment.
Why? Because those who benefit from a so-called meritocracy forget the good fortune that helped them. They believe they come out on top by their own efforts, and those who struggle deserve it. 
It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes
Education is going through a tricky patch at the moment. The system can’t meet the needs of children with SEND and there is a catastrophic shortage of teachers. The grading system we have is unjust to some children every year, while the successful are lauded as being of particular value to society. Schools are encouraged to have a narrow, cost-effective curriculum while a significant number of families aren’t that bothered by attendance any more. They don’t believe what we say about the link between GCSE grades and future prosperity.  

But what would happen if we really looked at the link between poverty and school success, between poverty and school attendance? What would happen if we, nationally, decided to put enough money into the system to resource it. What would happen if we had enough teachers, and an examination system that recognised endeavour and progress without fixing the grade boundaries so a third have to fail? What would happen if we never used the words ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ at school, ever? 

A Year Seven put me on the spot in exasperation at the end of the second week. Standing at the busy crossroads on the block four stairs he’d lost his bearings and demanded "Miss, is it this way or that way?" I needed furthers and betters in order to assist, but I liked his approach. Politicians and the nation have to make choices. Both directions are not acceptable. Keep an eye on this meritocracy word: it was never designed to help change the world for the better.
 
CR
​22.9.23
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Mazball

8/9/2023

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Enthusiastic in July, I made a note in my new diary about how I should entertain you in September. Sadly, teachers’ mental hard drives are semi-wiped clean over the six weeks and the clearest reminder might as well be in Sanskrit.  I think it was something about cricket, of which I know almost nothing despite living within earshot of the Surrey ground. What to do?

Step forward the Secretary of State and the concrete issue. Our concrete, being of a relatively up-to-date kind, is fine, but I’ve done my time in crumbling buildings and I sympathise most energetically with Heads who suddenly had to close. I taught in a room with a hole in a broken window for the whole of my first year, and in a school which had outside toilets until 1998 and sixteen rotting demountables until 2009.  I once lost 13 classrooms to an arson attack. This stuff happens, but its wearing.

One might ask why? Surely we should educate our young in buildings suited to the value we place upon them as our jewels, the holders of our dreams, our single hope for a better future? Schools should be palaces – or at least as nice as Tallis’s lovely building. The problem is that our school buildings are indeed matched to the value we place upon children, nationally. Children are messy and a bit unpredictable. They’re not much economic use until they’re grown and though they complain with every breath they also take everything in their stride so everyone can ignore them. Schooling is compulsory, so its not as if we have to lure them there.

I don’t know of a nation that spends the right amount on schools, but the Children Village in Brazil was declared the world’s best building in 2018. The three Building Schools for the Future-era buildings I’ve been lucky enough to head are each lovely in their way, built when much more money was spent on design as well as building (though I did have to skill myself up on post-torsioned concrete and nickel sulphide inclusion very temporarily). It's been sad to hear lazy glib talk of ‘wacky warehouses’, as if we’ve never known what we’re doing. I wonder how many fee-paying schools were built with holey concrete?

The Secretary of State gives the impression of being a practical woman. It is annoying to find yourself at the top of a heap that appears to have let something (literally) fall. It's embarrassing to be caught out venting on a matter that would best be kept between you and the dog. It happened to me – ahem – recently. But honestly? Getting a 95% return on a questionnaire should give you enough to go on. The other 5% might have been places like us, Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schools where you have to escalate any inquiry through Dante’s nine circles of hell before you can fill a form in. Cursing won’t alter the fact that everything in education needs more money and every chicken comes home to roost in the end. They’d better be careful which roof they land on.

Filling further inches with the lucky appearance of the new Chief Inspector of Schools designate, Martyn Oliver: I met him at a dinner last year and he seems a nice chap. He’s going to try to keep his own roost in the north, which is good too. I hope he values the considerable work Ofsted have done on curriculum and doesn’t revert to the easy but damaging single focus on outcomes. Despite considerable experience, I hope he isn’t dogmatic about the way to run a school, a real problem with the last ex-head who held the golden clipboard. No, my problem with Sir Martyn is purely linguistic. It is his claim, at the Select Committee, that he would ‘walk the walk’.

This stuff has been getting on my nerves for a bit.  Leaders are prone to say they ‘walk the talk’, demonstrating that they practice what they preach. Fair enough, but now its amped up to ‘walking the walk’ which doesn’t shed any light. What walk? How far? To where? Why? Does it mean that people have actually done the job that they’re supervising? But leadership isn’t just about solving practical problems. It needs vision, and articulacy.  If you spend your life with your sleeves rolled up, when do you think?

Am I worried or just irascible? Time will tell.

No more time for that as the cricket thing’s re-emerged as a tea-stained press cutting under last year’s School Plan. It seems I was gripped by an article about Bazball which told me about playing test cricket as though losing doesn’t matter much. Cricketers have apparently been encouraged to play as if they enjoyed it, without the fear of failure, remembering that it’s a game and that it ought to be fun. Instigators Stokes and McCullum (whom I wouldn’t know if they presented me with The Ashes) asked players ‘what if you don’t mind about losing, so long as you are playing your own style’. 

I’m not going to make an obvious and worthless point about Ofsted here. Children are too important to allow every school and teacher to do as they please, cheerfully failing them but having a great time.  We have to have a shared and clear vision and some assessment of success against it. But we need to get out from under the fear of failure, and allow everyone in schools to think and to enjoy it a bit more. Is Mazball at Ofsted Towers too much to hope?  

Happily seaworthy, we’ve launched the good ship Tallis cheerily this week. I hope we’ll enjoy the voyage for the next 38. I’ll keep you informed.
 
CR
8.9.23
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Realistic Utopia

20/7/2023

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Life on the block four stairs: two girls walked past and I heard ‘I said alopecia, but I meant arthritis’. Both are difficult enough, though naturally-balding knees would undercut the depilation industry, but I need more on the matter. Shortly afterwards a man told me that he loved stairs. Me, I love escalators but we don’t have any here. You?

I love John Rawls, the great American jurist and philosopher who died in 2002. Oh do keep up. Destined for the episcopal priesthood he lost his faith in the war and devoted his life to setting out the framework of a fair society. His books are – ahem – a little dense – but a sprightly young chap at the LSE called Daniel Chandler has set his thinking out afresh. Allow me. despite it being the end of the year we can’t let our brains go to mush. At least not before Thursday afternoon.

Rawls’ original position is that society should be fair, that we should design social goods such as law, education, employment and health care as if from behind a veil of ignorance where we didn’t know how we ourselves might benefit. Further, there should be intergenerational justice and sustainability. All of this is his basic liberties principle where a fair chance for everyone should be designed into every system.

However, equality is hard to get, so we have to work on it really hard. Equal opps just give the already advantaged an easier swim to the top so we need fair opportunities with some rightly getting more help than others. This is Rawls’ difference principle  which governs the distribution of income, wealth, responsibility, power and the social basis of self-respect.  Inequalities in the distribution of these goods should be allowed only if they benefit the least well-off in society. That’s very different from a dried-up stream of trickle-down economics. What rising tide?
Finally, the just savings principle spends public money on environmental stewardship in place to protect the material and natural environment.

For Rawls, education teaches subjects, of course, but it’s not just about future economic value. Schools should generate and uphold the political virtues of reasonableness and mutual respect. They should teach rights and freedoms, politics, the diversity of beliefs, social skills and expectations, analytical skills to tell right from wrong, communication to help all the above, basic liberal values and attitudes, good character, the encouragement of respectful debate, critical thinking, respect and tolerance, shared identity and a liberal patriotism that everyone can believe in. A pretty good manifesto for a diverse comprehensive school, eh? 

Young Chandler updates this with some priorities of his own, based on the original position. More focus on early years, the abolition of fee-paying and grammar schools, more targeted funding (like pupil premium), admissions decided by lottery and investment in teacher quality.  

He’d go further. He’d enshrine freedom in a written constitution, strengthen the judiciary, nurture an inclusive British patriotic identity, introduce proportional representation, remove money from politics, use direct citizen participation methods, impose climate protection laws, make much more effort on respecting protected characteristics, treat the lowest paid with respect, develop opportunities for fulfilling work that builds communities, and mandating good modern workplace democracy. A ‘realistic utopia’ that ‘avoids despondency’. Yes!
And yet, in a moment that calls for creativity and boldness, all too often we find timidity, or worse, scepticism and cynicism – a sense that democratic politics is hopelessly corrupt, that capitalism is beyond reform.  The result has been a surge of support for illiberal and authoritarian populists, creating a palpable sense of uncertainty about the future of liberal democracy itself. 
Too right, matey.
 
Is it easier to be upbeat or downbeat at the end of the year? It hasn’t been an easy one, perhaps the hardest I’ve known, for one reason or another. I’ve often (2014 and 2017, to be precise) signed off the year with this lovely bit of Charles Causley’s ‘School at Four O’clock’
​
At 4 o’clock the building enters harbour
​All day it seems that we have been at sea
Now having lurched through the last of the water
We lie stone-safe beside the jumping quay.  
 
I wrote to a coastal colleague yesterday and asked if all was proceeding swimmingly towards the end of term. He said he’d be OK if he could surf the tidal surge of the last week. I know what he means. Popular thought has everyone looking forwards to the holidays, but actually? Lots of children face real uncertainty once the inevitabilities of school are closed to them. Tired staff may be tetchy as the week telescopes. Exam results are the next engagement, and that relaxes nobody.
 
Inquisitiveness is a Tallis Habit so I asked the man why he liked stairs and he told me it was because he’d once been paralysed for a month in hospital. Now he just loves getting about on his legs, a private utopia. He said it kindly, but it put me in my place.  So before next year begins and election posturing ossifies let’s allow our minds to range on what we really want from our leaders and think about holding them to account for a better vision, built on fairness and respect, where none is enriched at another’s expense.  
 
I wish you calm waters, warm sunlight, a gentle breeze and everything it takes to  a better world. Thank you for sticking with us, and see you in September.
 
CR
18.7.23

​

 
(PS You’ll blessedly note no mention of the pay award. 6.5% is good, the funding poor and the spin insupportable. Of course there is more money than ever in the system: there are more children and prices are higher.  The level of investment still lags behind 2010. Whether it will solve the recruitment and retention problem remains to be seen.)  
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The Cultural Bruise

6/7/2023

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Today’s my birthday and many are the experiences lined up by fate and the Tallis calendar. It's Headstart Day when the year sixes who’ll be year sevens in September join us for the day. A happy squawking soundtrack to the day bodes well. Some current year sevens are on the Tallis History Walk – park, church, grave, Maritime Museum – and back in one piece. We had year assembly in the hall for the first time in aeons, which also went well. No lives lost as they returned to their accustomed roosts for an assembly on sexism in school and society, with a brilliant testimony from a male student on  the lines of ‘we can do better, guys’. Channel 4 news interviewed me on Labour’s education announcements, even taking cheesy shots of me writing on the whiteboard. (I was trained on chalk, you know). Tonight is year 13 leavers’ ceremony, always a good gig. 

So my text for the day is indeed the Labour announcement. Keir Starmer gives every impression of being a decent and honourable man. He is a good role model to young people as well as voters. That’s good news, a welcome change and a flying start. Here’s what they say.
  1. Vocational education should have parity with academic and the snobbery that surrounds practical learning is one of our national disasters. Big tick for this and a ‘well done’ in the margin. Perhaps if we selected our politicians differently, and had more people in parliament who had ever worked with their hands, we might look on vocational learning differently.
  2. Oracy gets a ‘good point’ in its margin. It is indeed important that all our children have the skills, confidence and experience to speak their truth plainly and clearly. It needs more prominence in school – we all do it, but because it doesn’t count on any performance tables, no one knows.  It's not just about debating, though debating is important, but about confidence in every lesson, every interaction.
  3. ‘A specialist teacher in every classroom’ is an entry-level aim though so far from the lived experience in many schools as to make it an impossible dream. I’d say ‘expand this point’.
  4. £2400 for every new teacher. Any money for teachers is good news but this is not the answer. First, find your new teacher. Only 55% of who we need are in training at the moment and the training targets have been missed for nine years out of ten. Second, even this won’t pay the rent in many areas. Third, even with the cash incentive they’ll be no more likely to stay for more than five years than any other teacher who can’t make the sums and the working life add up to anything other than a deficit. ‘See my comment below’.
  5. Creativity and the arts as an entitlement for all. Tick again. This seems to mean that an arts or PE subject will be included in the Progress 8 measure to force schools to do it. While better than what we've got (and identical to the Tallis TBacc) I’m queasy. Its an answer to a current problem that reinforces the current problem. ‘Think about this point again’
Starmer talks eloquently about the ‘class ceiling’ which limits our young peoples’ aspirations and acts as a ‘cultural bruise’ on our national life, a great image. But this class ceiling crushes all of the above. Allow me. 

People who work with their hands are as vital and important citizens as anyone who works with a pen (keyboard). To look down on such skill is shameful and only tolerated in a divided society that inexplicably takes its lead from scoffing toffs.

Oracy is posed as a problem because we all appear to believe that privately educated children get ahead because they’re more confident and articulate than state school children. No they don’t. They get ahead because we live in a spectacularly unequal society. Training in articulacy is a great idea, but will it actually result in more High Court judges or MPs coming from comprehensive schools?

Specialist teachers in classrooms are the norm in the independent sector. Funding, pay erosion and the recruitment and retention catastrophe has taken this away from the 93%.

A bonus for every new teacher: see above.

Creativity and the arts? I repeat, first, find your teachers. Second, fee-paying schools take this breadth of curriculum for granted. Third, funding undermines it while the teacher shortage hits it on the head. Ouch. 

What I mean is this. The full cost of underfunded schools is seen in the curriculum. When there’s not enough money to pay for teachers’ time, classes get bigger and the curriculum contracts. The workload becomes deadening and teachers leave or are made redundant when their non-core subject is the price of a balanced budget. If you can’t find music teachers, its easier not to offer music beyond the compulsory element at KS3.

Further, performance measures mean that heads will always have to prioritise the core curriculum of English, maths, science, languages and history-and-geography. It WILL help if more of the broad curriculum is enforced through this accountability route. I’d welcome this. But what I’d welcome much more are commitments about school funding, teachers’ pay and the incalculable value to us all of a broad, balanced and fully-funded curriculum for our children.

Sir Keir, you’re playing a long and careful game and at least Labour’s talking to educators. I look forward to your second draft.
 
CR
6.7.23
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A Small Light

24/6/2023

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A sunny day on planet Tallis with attendant challenges and opportunities such as increased sweatiness and excitability as the day proceeds. Coinciding with the last of the GCSEs (Further Maths, Portuguese, Polish), some staff are positively flighty. Golf was the topic on break duty, observing a little American football coaching, of all things, between the blocks, by a historian. Shirts and flowery dresses have broken out all over – giddy indeed with still two days of A levels to go (RE brings up the rear, as ever was) and four weeks of term. They’ll calm down again.

Nonetheless, the itinerant economists last reported at the bus stop are still at it in Block 4: ‘it all depends on the per person cost, though’ while their peers content themselves with whooping wordlessly at the weather.    

What could cloud our horizon? A visit from the regulators, obviously, as they’ve been roaming the fields locally.  However, news arrives that our window (for them to climb through) is open until September 2025. One takes this phlegmatically, with a pinch of salt, using the School Plan as a fan. I calm myself looking at the A level Art exhibited for the moderator in the gallery, and the occasional poem.

Not that this one was much comfort: Rue by Ian Duhig, poem of the day last Thursday:

Rue Jo Cox, Députéé Britannique
a street sign in Burgundy reads,
Assassinéé pour ses convictions.
 
No British road is named after her,
I found on returning home, for fear
it could have proved controversial.
 
I remembered in Shakespeare rue,
even for ruth, called ‘herb of grace’
because it was used in exorcisms,
 
by the angel, to clean Adam's eyes
and Gulliver, back home for his nose
against the smell of his countrymen.
 
For fear it could have proved controversial. Does the assassination of a politician, for her convictions, have to be marked in another country in case anyone’s offended? Do we give murdered French politicians such courtesy? What on earth has become of us? Who decides this stuff? He’s right about the smell of some countrymen: that’s been pretty overpowering of late.
 
Have we always been so easily offended? I’ve been watching A Small Light, an eight-part drama about the people who helped hide the Frank family in Amsterdam during the war. It’s an exhausting, stressful watch because you’re waiting for the ghastly ending, despite the desperate hope. I think its very well done, but you know what? The warning on the titles infuriated me each time. This is a drama about war, about the holocaust, about the murder of children, of whole families, about starvation and human wickedness as well as human endeavour. But did the titles cover that? They did not. The trigger warning was ‘contains images of tobacco use’. 
 
Tobacco use? I was raised among smokers and I know it kills millions and we need to be wary of its zombie death-dealing persistence or reappearance – but was that the warning we needed? Were smokers the villains of this piece? Should our response to murderous invaders be calibrated by their tobacco habits? What does this warning convey to the young, or to someone unfamiliar with these particular crimes against humanity? What regulator decided smoking might be the cause of offence in this drama?
 
Some of our young people were at the Carnegie Awards (for children’s literature) this afternoon, part of the great shadow judging scheme, filmed in their deliberations. They met with acclaim, almost passed out with excitement at meeting Lauren Child and negotiated canapés, not bad for a Wednesday afternoon. But the purpose of the event wasn’t any of these. The purpose was the literature, and reading whole books, and the lifetime’s learning and pleasure this can bring.
 
It's like the purpose of exams, they don’t define education, but plunge a dipstick into it. The grade is a judgement of memory, yes, but also of potential ability. It’s the same with inspection. The purpose is to see if children are being educated well, not to find out how schools can jump through hoops. The purpose of memorials isn’t to avoid offence, but to commemorate human worth. The purpose of drama is to cast a light on the human soul. The purpose of parents evening – where I write this - isn’t to present a seamless corporate image but to reinforce a meaningful relationship with children’s homes and families.
 
We had a great visit last week from two members of the Lords’ Education Select Committee on 11-16 curriculum, fact-finding. We talked deep and openly about the curriculum we want and try to teach and the things that prevent us, internally and externally. It was an uplifting experience. We didn’t have to present anything or account for ourselves using a particular framework, but talked of the purpose of schooling and the power of knowledge.
 
When the Lords asked for a sum-up from each of us, I said ‘suspect every proxy’, by which I meant – dig a bit deeper. What is this number or performance indicator or statement actually trying to measure? What complex activity might be skewed by this simplistic approach? What perverse incentive is launched into the system? Yes, we have a human duty to end smoking but we should be really careful not to undermine other duties. Anyone not watching A Small Light because of the smoking will have missed knowing something that, in a small and desperate way, tried to change the world for the better.   
 
I’ve often rather rudely compared regulators to barbarians, when terror and preparing battlements overwhelm daily life. But another tiny poem came my way this week:
 
The barbarians are rarely at the gate. They are usually living with you.
They will show you the invitations you sent. When you ask for it. Which you do.
 
We need to be very careful not to internalise the wrong proxies. Our young people need the truth.
 
CR
21.6.23
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96 Facts in History Paper 2

8/6/2023

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Carrying parsnip soup through the canteen door I became tangled in historians seeking last-minute verification.  What was the Marshall Plan? When was the raid on Cadiz? Thankfully Ms History was at the ready with perfect short answers, which is how I know about the 96 facts. The human brain’s a mysterious thing so while most of the youths will have forgotten 90 of them by now, Ms knows ‘em all. ‘She’s like a machine’.  
 
Hmm. Remaining stoical and optimistic means I avoid thinking about some stuff, from US politics to an unnerving dream about a giant thistle in a car. I’ve tried to ignore Artificial Intelligence thus: too technical, potentially boring and located somewhere in the future. But on a train down France last week I read a leader in the FT and, crikey, I’m thinking of little else. In fact, I apologise for not bothering you about this before.  
 
While the Internet, mobile phones and social media bemused schools in their time, generative artificial intelligence knocks them into a cocked hat. Humanity’s response will shape the future and struth, schools should be steadily panicking about this without delay.  
 
Forgive me if you’re already expert on this generative AI growing like Japanese knotweed. Building on published data, information, books, journals, wikis and social media it literally predicts the next word on any subject. This has mega-implications not just for learning, but the development of thinking citizens. And while folks are happily speculating on the drudge-work it’ll take off us, I’m captivated by two serious problems.
 
AI can fabricate facts and make up links and references. These ‘hallucinations’ or ‘confabulations’ give plausible-sounding falsehoods which are then repeated and become part of what people think is true.
 
Second, AI builds on what we already know, so stuff we’re trying to eradicate – the colonial past, misogyny, whether Joe Biden won the election or not – repeat endlessly. It’s not a tool designed to change the world for the better.
 
A relief, then, that the doughty Department for Education has produced a position statement.  A bit bland, maybe, but usefully covering stuff about AI opportunities and challenges, exam malpractice, data protection, cyber security, protecting students from harmful content and potentially freeing up teacher time.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. I like a nicely-turned phrase in a formal document and the following gripped my by the throat. The DfE note that AI
  • content they produce is not always accurate or appropriate as it has limited regard for truth and can output biased information.
  • is not a substitute for having knowledge in long-term memory
  • can make written tasks quicker and easier but cannot replace the judgement and deep subject knowledge of a human expert. It is more important than ever that our education system ensures pupils acquire knowledge, expertise and intellectual capability.
  • can produce fluent and convincing responses to user prompts [but] the content produced can be factually inaccurate. Students need foundational knowledge and skills to discern and judge the accuracy and appropriateness of information, so a knowledge-rich curriculum, is therefore all the more important.
  • can create believable content of all kinds
  • content may seem more authoritative and believable
 
And there’s an Office for AI squirreling away within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.  You’ve got to ask – who’s feeding it? Do they know it’s there?
 
Thank you, Secretary of State. Here are what’s on my mind, though.
  1. Schools have to be committed to the highest standards of knowledge, quality scholarship and truth as AI develops, to avoid misinformation taking root in teaching and learning.  
  2. This is particularly important when a crippling teacher shortage leaves isolated, young or unsupported teachers creating lessons content alone (not at Tallis). Especially those misled by DfE trends such as the sponsoring of online lessons through Oak National Academy. If you get used to downloading off-the-peg lessons, you’ll need to check the facts.
  3. Students of course need to learn about and work with AI, but they also need to understand its dangers and the debilitatingly skewing effect that sustained falsehood has on human society. We’re already seeing this.
  4. The ridiculously named ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ (what other sort is there?) is insufficient protection. As long as schools are cheaply assessed by exam results and snapshot inspections, some schools still face a perverse incentive to cover large amounts of knowledge superficially. Combined with a serious teacher shortage, the temptations of AI pose a real risk to the integrity of what children are being taught.
  5. Young people devote HUGE portions of their waking hours to AI-generated content. Adults, teachers and policy-makers need to understand and work very hard to bridge significant generational differences.
  6. Exams may be OK while they remain as memory tests fulfilled in handwriting in an exam room.  Unconsidered absorption of AI information, though, is a risk to independent student learning. Coursework becomes a nightmare and mechanised marking – cheaper for the commercial exam boards - could install hallucinations at the heart of knowledge. However, our examination system’s glued to university entrance, so the academy needs to think about this. Which it is.
 
So, what to do? At Tallis we’re writing a developing policy and thinking about the big issues. As the leader in the Financial Times 27.5.23 said:
Every technology opens exciting new frontiers that must be responsibly explored.  But as recent history has shown, the excitement must be accompanied by caution over the risk of misinformation and the corruption of the truth.
Blimey. Anything but dull, then. Do tell me what you think.

​CR

7.6.23
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What to worry about

19/5/2023

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A passing child said ‘my dad’s six foot but I’m really short’. I’m always intervening on this one. You are twelve, I said. How tall do you really expect to be? Give it time. Boys worry about growing. As the girls disappear upwards past them you can see them scanning the older versions and wondering if they were ever this tiny. Matthew 6:27, I say – but only in the King James. Fret not.

Older children are currently fretting about exams, which is to be expected, but there are three other worrying things floating about in the zeitgeist that they should be spared.

The first is hunger. One of our chaps (Timi Jibogu) is a member of the Greenwich Youth Parliament and campaigning for the council to provide free school meals for examinees.
Many students come to school hungry and are unable to concentrate on their studies and this has a direct impact on their academic performance. As a community, we have a responsibility to ensure that every student has access to basic necessities, especially during exams. Providing free school meals for students taking exams would ensure that every student has the opportunity to succeed, regardless of their background.
He's right – but why have we got into such a state?

The second is the furore about this week’s year 6 SAT reading paper. Exams are hard to set, so I don’t have a view about the hardness of the questions, but this comment from a father on the BBC made me bang my head on the desk. 
Of the 15 or 20 that he's done over the last couple of months, the only one he hasn't completed or been able to complete is the one that he did last week, which makes it feel like something went wrong with that paper.
Fifteen or twenty papers over a matter of weeks? Is this a sensible way to educate eleven-year-olds? Why have we got into such a state?

Third, a YouTube experience that’s an absolute joy. It’s the magnificent Phil Beadle talking to someone I don’t know, about SLANT. SLANT’s a zombie classroom management technique dressed up as good teaching, invented and abandoned in the US, that won’t die here. I’ve written about it before, but to recap, it stands for something like sit up straight, lean forward, ask and answer, nod for understanding and track the speaker. It’s in the news because an academy chain is making a big thing of it and some of their teachers and parents are revolting. Beadle destroyed it in his magnificent 2020 book The Fascist Painting but you can’t help some folks.

At the end of the film, having been laughed at more than once, Beadle departs himself abruptly, advising his interlocutor that he needs to up his intellectual game. He’s a genius and an English teacher so why would you want to film yourself arguing with him? Yet the enthusiasm for this kind of short cuts persist in English schools. Why have we got into such a state?

Allow me to posit some views. First, the government doesn’t really believe that people are actually hungry, and besides, it’s the economy, Tina. There is no alternative so everyone has to wait for things to pick up. This is fine if you’ve just unpacked your Waitrose order but its not so good if you have to live on expensive terrible non-food from the only shop you can get to, or the food bank.  
 
Second, as a result of target-setting and an obsession with cheap measurement we like to test our children. This is sort-of OK, but test-driven teaching only measures how well children have imbibed the test-related materials they’ve been taught. Its not real education, and it doesn’t last. Set a tricky paper, but all means – but don’t give child-level results. Use it to test teaching levels and keep the results at school- or national level to inform detailed, longitudinal school improvement work. Let the children learn widely and excitingly in primary school. 

Third, building on the above, put some effort into behaviour management by making relationships with the children. Don’t interfere with their bodies by telling them how to sit and don’t interfere with their thinking processes by telling them what to look at. Did the school leaders who love this stuff have to learn like this?

Last week we said good luck to year 11 as the GCSEs started. A highlight of the day was a youth who’s photocopied seemingly hundreds of A4 portraits of himself which he handed out to anyone who’d take one. It was a kind-of art installation in itself, a performance. He was encapsulating our mutual loss and his own happy confidence in the future, as all children should.

This stuff is hard to get right and we all make mistakes. We really need to find a new way of living that doesn’t pit flawed crass certainties against each other at the expense of our young. We dislike serious thought in this country but we need some new paradigms. I  hope that, despite the way we conduct schooling, our young people will still be able to change the world for the better.
 
CR
18.5.23
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Shaping the World

6/5/2023

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It is impossible to know what young people are thinking. While popular convention imagines they think only subversion and mayhem, the evidence is different. What with food, love, football, hair and a bit of learning, teenage brain space is disputed territory. I’ve just overheard one talking to three captive mates about gravitational fields. Another passed me on the stairs deep in a conversation about betrayal. One asked me what day it was. Best of all, I was sitting at the bus stop two weeks ago, seeking Penge, when three chaps in year 10 or 11 walked past.  Their topic was unexpected for 1710: ‘the Irish economy’s a different matter. You have to understand what’s going on there, regarding growth.’

I’m thinking about this because as well as anger over Ofsted and despair about funding there’s a worry about behaviour in schools. Hold onto your hats: that’s not to say that there’s general mayhem in the corridors and classrooms of Tallis or the nation: 95-odd percent of children still behave well at school and largely enjoy it, whether they admit it or not. But all institutions are feeling the pressure post-lockdown. Some are anxious, many are absent and a minority have got the idea that aspects of school are negotiable. Its happening everywhere: we’re all having to dig in extra-deep and re-establish boundaries. One of the Heads’ unions has gathered information nationally about behaviour this week, and the picture is – unnerving.

So I find myself asking: was it right to close schools during the plague? It seemed unavoidable at the time. But looking back? How can we balance the damage done to individuals’ learning and institutional integrity with the risk as it turned out? This isn’t a rhetorical question. There’s a 15 year research programme needed to assess the impact on learning, life-chances and social cohesion. If 5-10% of young people and their families have decided that schooling is optional, how will that play out in the next generation? 

The context is further complicated by two boggy factors. One inevitably is funding, more below. The other is the way we see things now. Hard to express, here goes, sorry if I get it wrong.

The nation expects schools to be stable, bulwarks against the exigencies of life. The fundamental truth of safeguarding practice is that children are safest in school. So we have to get them all there, not 91% of them.
Schools are bulk institutions with baked-in economies of scale. We have classrooms of a standard 30-seat size, teachers trained and skilled in working with large groups, standard operating procedures that rely on consent and compliance, backed up by parents and society. A liberal outfit like Tallis is like all other schools in these respects. 

We all need children to follow instructions: the difference between schools is how the instructions are given.
That means, necessarily, that the amount of individual negotiation any school can manage with a child is limited. A child with a severe, diagnosed need might be excused Spanish. A child who just doesn’t fancy it and would prefer to wander about …. hard luck, in you go. However, as a society we are much more likely now to take account of individuals’ needs and choices, and we are more likely to give some of those needs or desires a name. That means that some children and families wish for special treatment that schools will not and cannot give. It's not that we don’t care, and it's not that we see children as cogs in a machine. We’re literally built to function in a particular way, in communities where everyone has to play their part and children’s singular wishes usually have to be subsumed to the common good. we don’t just do it because of economics, conservatism or cussedness. We do it because that’s how the world works.   
 
This is particularly difficult in secondary schools because between 10 and 19, those parts of the brain involved in planning and social interactions are still maturing. As the scientists say, this lengthy period of our lives is unusually challenging. Challenging for the adolescent, and challenging for everyone who cares for them.
 
You know that I believe that schools should be model communities of learning and social good, and that comprehensive schools in particular should demonstrate the best kind of equal and equitable society. It only works if everyone’s there, and we all work together. Some of our young people have suffered from the disruption of the plague in a particular way and perhaps do have a time-constrained special need that needs a particular kind of response. There was much money spent on the architecture of disease – testing, vaccinating and the economic support that sort-of followed – but now we need similar spending for the follow-on. We need attendance officers, behaviour staff, welfare teams, family liaison workers, counsellors, mental health specialists and educational psychologists. And we need teachers who have time to think, and plan. Currently – well, you’ve heard me on this before. We don’t have them and soon we won’t be able to afford anyone. And there’s hardly anyone to appoint even if we had the money.

I have a mixed relationship with The Guardian these days, but Zoe Williams wrote an interesting piece a couple of weeks ago about how the public schools reshape themselves every generation to produce what  society wants from them: colonists, soldiers, politicians of a particular kind. I don’t think our public-school-dominated government is deliberately running state education into the ground, but I know plenty people who do think that. I just think they don’t know what we do, or what will happen when we can’t.

Many young people are still reeling from the brutal withdrawal of the major structure in their lives during the massive brain re-ordering of adolescence. They need enough good adults to support and manage them.  Government, for the love of God, turn your thoughts to us, the universal service for children. If you destroy us, you destroy the future.
 
CR
5.5.23
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Seeing past gloom

22/4/2023

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How the years tick by.  It’s five years since we launched the Ethical Leadership Commission, and now it’s time to reconvene.

What am I on about?

Older readers will remember that this commission was a thing I chaired on behalf of a load of people way more important than I. It was a group of 18 leads of all sorts of organisations, from Ofsted to the National Governance Association, the professional associations, the C of E, academics and suchlike. We even had a resident philosopher.  After what felt like aeons of deliberation – but which was actually only 6 meetings – we devised the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education which was then enthusiastically adopted by hundreds of schools. It challenged school leaders to know and follow the Principles for Public Life (selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership) and adopt seven professional virtues (trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism). It even featured in the year’s annual report of the national Committee for Standards in Public Life, as a good example of a sector getting to grips with responsible behaviour.

The original commissioners (it sounds as though we had gold braid and bag-carriers) hoped it would make a difference to schools.  We hoped the values and virtues would help leaders in times of trouble - but so much of the world has changed since we launched our report in 2019. Retrospectively, we were clueless about the full range of actual troubles that were about to fall upon us. 

So we may well have some meaty questions to ask.  Here’s a few that spring to mind:

  • Did closing schools during Covid demonstrate holding trust for children?
  • Did honesty stand up to the pressures of Centre-Assessed and Teacher Assessed Grades?
  • What is the balance between accountability and wisdom in the current furore about OFSTED, its grades and its approach?
  • Why didn’t we include equity, or anything about diversity? How diverse was the commission? (not at all, is the answer).
  • How does justice help Heads make choices without funding?
  • Do we have the courage to defend our broad curricula when the shouty orthodoxy is to retreat into a narrow range of courses?
  • What does it say for the national understanding of the Standards for Public Life when the most vulnerable children – with SEND – are served by such inadequate funding and services?
  • What use is a commitment to kindness alongside year-long waits for CAMHS assessments?
  • Does the adoption of such airy principles help teachers stay in teaching?
  • What might the framework say about teacher strikes?

And so on. You might have questions yourself: I’d be glad to hear them.

Unlike my co-meeting-ites in Woolwich this morning who were too kind to tell me how sick they were of hearing me going on about stuff. In the end I apologised after my fourth gloom-laden intervention. If I’d had my diary with me I’d have quoted a brilliant assessment of the state of the world that I cut out of the London Review of Books magazine in March. Philosopher and art historian Lorna Finlayson wrote:
If the educational costs of all this are great, the human ones are greater……What is needed is something quite unlike both past and present.  But you don’t have to be a nostalgic to see that the present is worse than the recent past, and that for many it is scarcely bearable. Whatever success looks like, this is failure.
But the A-level Dance showcase last night was an hour of wonder, young people throwing themselves all over the place with grace, wit and artistry. We’ve watched some of them dance for years and wallowed in the brilliance of the mature product, as we do with sport, and drama, and everything else we uncover or draw out over the years the children loan us.

I’m watching them go home at the end of the week. They’re rushing to see their friends: some charging backwards through crowds to embrace a long lost (since lunchtime) mate. Some walk backwards hazardously to declaim the exigencies of the day to their group. A beanpole-type grasps a chum half his height. Two more gallop like elephants. One is entirely enveloped in a hood, another laden with a vast birthday badge. Every year is different to them, but some things stay the same for us. Despite difficulties we try to make it all fresh, living and breathing the optimism we treasure. 

Friday is usually worth celebrating. The dramas of our lives need attention, and institutional troubles can wait until Monday. We handed out tiny bits of chocolate on beautiful strings this week to recognise good deeds in the holy month. Eid Mubarak!
 
CR
21.4.23
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They May Cast the Lot Against You

24/3/2023

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I want to write about the terribly sad story of Ruth Perry, the Headteacher who killed herself after an Ofsted inspection, but I don’t know how. I’ll start with Tallis life this week and see where it takes me.

Well. Last week’s top news was the Geography Department winning a national award from the PTI, the curriculum training charity from where we get the bulk of our external training. The judges were blown away by the vision, the enthusiasm of teachers and students and the vast range of extra-curricular activities. Top sausage!

We had a wonderful music concert on Monday last with superb performances. I wrote my report to Governors for the spring term and had a phone call from the Chair. We had a grilling from the people who look over our results. I talked to a former colleague who’s now a Head. I went to a few meetings and advertised some posts for September. We’ve dealt with staff absences and crises. We had a visit from the Leader of the Council, to find out about the pressures in schools and how we’re doing. There was a Governors’ Achievement Committee meeting and a touring dance performance form our friends at Trinity Laban. Year 8 have been weighed and measured. I’ve had countless cheerful conversations with staff and a couple of trickier ones. We had a virtual meeting with a school who can help us improve our TOFFS project. We’ve absorbed the fallout from some nasty incidents in the streets after school and tried to balance next year’s budget. We’ve put a few children right on some misapprehensions.  We’ve taught, marked, planned, monitored, worried and celebrated. We’ve sorted out scuffles and rumours and home lives breaking up. I’ve responded formally to a long complaint.

On one of the teachers strike days I looked out of the window on the glorious sight of a year 11s progressing coolly from one thing to another whirling his jumper around his head like a toddler pretending to be a helicopter. He may have mastered the vertical take-off by the time the examiners call.

And  throughout all this, every time the blessed phone rings in the morning I leap from my moorings. Why? Because mornings, Monday to Wednesday are when Ofsted ring telling us they’ll be in tomorrow, and we’re sort-of due. That’s worrying in itself but nothing compared to sitting in the daily meeting with the assembled clipboarders while they attend to their idiosyncratic knitting and assemble a judgement in one word or two.

And so to Ruth Perry, a victim of the system: not the only one. What are we to make of this? No-one knows what’s in the mind of a person who makes this decision, but there’s context that’s now becoming more widely known and, unsurprisingly, I’d like to offer my two penn’orth.

It’s perfectly reasonable for the state to inspect its schools, but they need to do it properly. Inspection can’t be done properly on the cheap. It should take time and combine critical analysis with expertise and support. Large expert teams should visit for longer. Areas that need improving should be explained and the school given a chance to work with inspectors on the headlines of a plan. The final report should assess all aspects of the school and be expressed clearly in a balanced, detailed and rational manner. Parents are perfectly capable of reading.         
Inspectors perform a public service and they should be valued. I understand the argument that values school leaders as inspectors, but I’m no longer convinced. Inspection is a profession, with its own expertise and body of knowledge. The consistency required to inspect a whole system cannot be achieved with an army of contracted folks temporarily out of their schools, no matter how brilliant they are. The costs – standardised language and template judgments - are too high and the quality control of rogue inspectors too weak. I’d perhaps put one serving leader on a team, to give practical advice to inspectors and support to the inspected head.  
     
Obviously, urgent and dangerous issues in a school need swift restorative action. No one would argue with that.  Some schools will get bad reports for good reasons and no one would want to prevent that. The problem with the current system is that, in the name of public accountability and easy reading, a complex and critical universal service is reduced to terminology that cannot possibly convey its fullness. As the writer of the Book of Sirach (fka Ecclesiasticus) said of judges in the second century BCE:
They may cast the lot against you…..and then stand aside to see what happens to you.
Our current system was designed before social media took over and the quality of public discourse downgraded. It doesn’t serve schools, families or children well. It fuels twitter trolls, public shamers and the sensationalist newspapers who habitually hate teachers, and perhaps that’s where Ruth Perry found herself, overwhelmed with guilt, or bewilderment, with nowhere to turn. Actually, much of our accountability system looks as though it is designed precisely for this; accountability dreams of the 90s have become fuel for the frenzy. It’s no way to improve public education.  

When we wrote the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2019 we couldn’t express the ‘wisdom’ briefly. We said that leaders needed to use experience, knowledge and insight, moderation and self-awareness, and act calmly and rationally serving schools with propriety and good sense. That’s what we need from our inspectors.  It costs, but the price of the alternative is too high.

CR
24.3.23
 
 
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Not Penguins but Pilgrims

11/3/2023

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Rain and wind, snow, even. I greeted a colleague at the door in a coat he’d brought from his years in Ukraine, which gave me something to think about, but that’s not what the title’s about. Read on.

It’s conference season so I’ve already been to Eastbourne for the Greenwich Heads and tomorrow it’s the Association of School and College Leaders in Birmingham. At Eastbourne we focused on the link between reading and educational disadvantage and what we can do about it. Also staff wellbeing – for reasons I’ve ranted about before - in the hope of keeping our staff, our hair and our sanity.

The ASCL conference has been rocked by the Secretary of State giving backword and pulling out of the programme. This is newsworthy.  It will be my 26th time at the great gathering and I can’t remember the last time the SoS didn’t come.   

Our illustrious leader, former Headteacher and reading expert Geoff Barton expressed himself more in sorrow than anger: 
We are disappointed that Gillian Keegan has decided not to come to our conference. We very much hoped she would use this opportunity to thank school and college leaders for everything they are doing in what is proving to be yet another extremely challenging year. It would also have been a good opportunity for her to set out her vision for education, to talk about how we can work together to shape a better future for all young people, and say something about how the government intends to address the teacher recruitment and retention crisis which is at the heart of the current industrial dispute and which our members have to deal with every day. But nevertheless we will continue to engage with the Secretary of State positively and constructively and look forward to a time when she will feel more able to talk directly to our members.
Ouch. Given the Gavin Williamson tweetgate (‘heads really really hate work’) you’d have thought she might come to soothe. Or perhaps that’s why not? She should calm herself: it’s not as if we’re unruly. Mr Barton manages the thousand or so delegates like a big assembly and gives us a look if there’s even any rustling. Heckling would be unthinkable.

Back at freezing Tallis, much afoot. We’re talking with good folks who fancy governing. They express an interest to the Chair for which they’re rewarded with a visit and, special gift, a conducted tour with year 9. These youth fling themselves into the task, devising long routes and answering questions freestyle and at length. Today’s visitor got the full service, including being taken to places with which the guides were unfamiliar. ‘What happens in these rooms?’ ‘We don’t know’. I’m hoping this was, perhaps, the sixth form silent study area rather than the boiler house.  

And on Wednesday, year 13 parents’ evening, the final countdown. We made some innovative changes to the distribution of teachers which confused everyone, especially the most experienced. Someone still complimented me on our efficiency, which was perhaps an aggregated kindness. I’m thinking now about something to mark this passage, the end of some 2-year but many 7-year relationships. The commitment of your beloved child to a neighbourhood school that you support and value – with eyes open to our limitations and alarums -  is a social action that builds up the common good.  We can’t afford to have medals struck, but we might run to a card.
Which brings me to Community Day today, where the whole school thinks about a theme.

Using and strengthening local and community links is one of the aspects of our School Plan so today we’re all thinking about A Sense of Place, about being formed by, and our relationship with a particular area. This we merge with aspects of the history of Greenwich and our immediate locality to give us all a better understanding. So many young people without cash or confidence to spare rarely stray from their immediate locality. It’s the same in London as on the estates of the north and the bus-deprived rural villages. We try our best to help them live on a larger map, but seeking richness and understanding on your doorstep is also valuable and validating.

​This is one of the quotations we’re using:
You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
​

Perhaps this is especially poignant for year 13s, within six months of adult life? They may lack the head-space for this kind of thinking, this side of the exams.

There is significant power for change when a community discovers what it cares about. We try constantly to give the best service we can to this place.  We know what we stand for and our young citizens tell us what they care about. We listen and we try together.

Which is why I can’t fathom Gillian Keegan’s decision. I don’t know why she won’t go to ACAS. I don’t know why she wants to look as though she doesn’t care. Do we not travel together through this currently rather barren land?

Which brings me back to the title. It’s from a reported conversation with a young person searching for ‘pilgrim’ as the correct term but stuck on, y’know, those small animals, what are they called, 
penguins? And which are we? Journeying together or frozen out? Stolidly waiting and guarding our young until the storm passes? We need our community around us for that. Thank you.  
 
CR
9.3.23
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How are we?

24/2/2023

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I’m unreasonably irritated by people asking me how I am. I don’t mean people I know, but people with whom I have no relationship but want a piece of my day to tell me how to do my job better. My mother, concerned that I was brisk to the point of rudeness even as a child trained me to answer ‘how do you do?’ with ‘how do you do?’ which I can cope with. It’s the expected disclosure (‘fine’, ‘mustn’t grumble’, ‘chugging along’) that annoys. I’m pretty stoical in temperament, so how I am is pretty much the same all the time. That means that the answer I long to give is ‘I’m here, so assume I’m able to do a professional job. Declare your business.’ I realise this reflects badly on me.

Which leads me into wellbeing and workload, about which I was interviewed by a think tank earlier in the week. I’m a veteran of the teacher workload reforms of the early 2000s and the development of support staffing which genuinely changed our lives for the better. However, every secretary of state since 2010 has paid lip service to teacher workload while every budget since 2010 has made it materially worse. Professional wellbeing is dependent upon having a manageable workload. Workload is dependent on time. Time is money. Teachers’ hours are squeezed and class sizes inflated when schools don’t have money. Workload goes up and wellbeing takes a hit. People are exhausted and overwhelmed. Tackling teacher workload is expensive. Talking about teacher wellbeing is cheap.  Forgive me, it’s not the first time I’ve ranted about this.  

Anyway, the Department has it in hand. The DfE Education Staff Wellbeing Charter was interpolated between the pandemic and the current financial and political collapse.  Supported by unions and schools, it claims that:     
​Signing up to the charter is a public commitment to actively promote mental health and wellbeing through policy and practice. It is a way to show current and prospective staff that your school or college is dedicated to improving and protecting their wellbeing.
In the spirit of asperity I’ve adopted so far, I object to showing people something that can only be demonstrated by doing. Our sixth form would call that performatism.
 
Protecting the wellbeing and mental health of staff is:
  1. essential for improving morale and productivity
  2. critical to recruiting and retaining good staff
  3. a legal duty: employers are required by law to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees
  4. taken account of as part of Ofsted inspection   
 
How’s that going? Is morale improving? What, precisely, in education is productivity? Student progress? Attendance? None of these are improving, and recruitment and retention is catastrophic. Of course we have to do what the law requires to look after our people, but OFSTED? Here I skid to a halt. That’s why people have signed up to it. It’s certainly why we have.
 
Here’s the wording from OFSTED’s ‘evaluation of leadership and management’. Inspectors will look at the extent to which leaders take into account the workload and well-being of their staff, while also developing and strengthening the quality of the workforce. (para 313)
 
Which might get you the ‘outstanding’ grade descriptor where leaders ensure that highly effective and meaningful engagement takes place with staff at all levels and that issues are identified. When issues are identified, in particular about workload, they are consistently dealt with appropriately and quickly. Staff consistently report high levels of support for well-being issues. (para 416)  
 
I’m not decrying schools’ attempts to make the difficult bearable or even enjoyable. Lord knows we try. But what does it mean? Proper HR, of course, a bit of flexibility when family life bangs on the door, respect in the workplace, evidence that discussion is welcomed, free tea, umbrellas and a decent behaviour policy, a dress code that doesn’t require you to look like an idiot, plans, policies and leadership that explain themselves. Email curfews. Kindness. Wisdom.
 
But all of these should be normal. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if a school was being run madly and badly, by people hooked on robust leadership tropes. It would be good if Ofsted could uncover some of that, as opposed to lauding it, which they used to.         
 
What teachers really need, as well as decent pay that respects their training and professionalism, and their value to society, is time. Time to think, collaborate, learn, plan, keep up with their subject. Time to care. Time to have fun in the classroom. All of that costs money. What I need is funding that allows me to put at least an extra hour of professional thinking time back into teachers’ weeks.  And, if there are really going to be no other services available to children and their families, another hour on top of that to listen and talk to children about their lives.

I need that money now, and I need it on top of the budget I already have. An uplift of about 5% would do it. The last budget settlement just postponed disaster: it didn’t allow any of this.

What really drives teachers, social workers and medics out is moral injury. That’s when the workplace doesn’t match the vocation and good people have to make bad decisions either because they’re told to or because there isn’t the money to do better. When learning is secondary to outcomes, when compliance is substituted for character, when recruitment and training is bungled and cheapened again and again and again: it’s no wonder people leave. 

Don’t ask us how we are. Don’t lodge the system’s failures in the hearts of teachers. Don’t pretend there are cheap alternatives. As far as I’m concerned, teacher wellbeing is all about the money. 
 
CR
23.2.22
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If I ruled the world

4/2/2023

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An interesting week in schools all over the place and also on Planet Tallis. I, however, had the chance to talk to a very affable bunch of year 7s: approximately the top 10% of the industrious, those who’ve thrown themselves into school life and are really, really enjoying it. I congratulated them on their production and assured them that effort was a very reliable route to success. After that, I trespassed on their good nature to ask questions three.

First: what could we improve about school? Sadly, this stumped them because they think it’s great. When pressed they said that they’d like to have their own week in the Library, that the water fountains could be cleaner and that the bridge got a bit crowded at lesson change. Oh, and on the matter of lesson change, how could they get from one to another without any travelling time? How indeed. A conundrum of school life. We need another library, cleaner plumbing, a wider bridge and, I believe, physics. (We don’t give travel time because it encourages loafing.)

Second, what did they think we did well? Clubs, trips and visits. The opportunity to do extra things (like Latin), the food, rugby. And subjects, they’re really interesting.

Having expected the first question to take longer, which it certainly does by year 9, I hastily invented a third. If you ruled the world, and who’s to say you won’t one day, how would you make it a better place for young people? They talked to one another – quite loudly – and wanted to solve the following. Ending knife crime so fewer young people die. Lowering the voting age so old people don’t make bad decisions they won’t have to live with.  Better free facilities in local areas, like swimming pools and wildlife parks. Ending discrimination and racism so that everything is fair. Stopping littering. Helping people with rent and food costs. Not cutting down trees. Teaching black history. Sign language a compulsory part of the curriculum. More poetry. More food banks so that everyone can get what they need.

Hold on, I said, trying not to be too tough on a young altruistic thinker. Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world where we didn’t need food banks. He had to think a bit. Yes, obviously, he said, with the air of youth kindly tolerating dotage. But ... It doesn’t have to be like this, I said. Food Banks used to be very, very, rare, for people on the very margins of society. Not in every community, not for people in work. Note to self: remember this conversation.

Later the same day I read the Leading in Practice review by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, just published last month. Ethics remain in the news, with the report on the former Secretary of State and his subsequent departure from his subsequent role, and there’s at least another one on the stocks. One would hope that the Committee for Standards in Public Life was buoyant.

​Page 15, however, is terrifying:
for some civil servants, working at the centre of government on policies that are pushing at the boundaries of legality, this presents more of a challenge than they have experienced under previous governments [...] the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case noted: ‘The government of the day are not remotely afraid of controversial policies. They believe that have a mandate to test established boundaries.'
I really enjoyed watching SAS Rogue Heroes when it was on the telly. Guilty pleasure. There was a great moment when someone said something like ‘This is the desert, no place for realists, pragmatists or believers in common sense.’ Swashbuckling stuff. But where they were trying to turn round a war that was going badly, the current swaggerers do it just for the love of swaggering.

Last week I tried to write something serious on the day that Donald Trump was allowed back on Facebook by Nick Clegg. A global platform for a man who proudly can’t tell truth from lies facilitated by a man who couldn’t keep a promise.

I’m sure boundary pushing is a jolly jape, a wonderful debating point, and feels very exciting in the corridors of power. Iconoclasm, a mention in the history books and all that. But where do the boundaries go? Right into the head of an intelligent and good-hearted 11-year-old who’s going into adolescence thinking that food banks are normal and should be more widely available. 

If I ruled the world I’d want to change it for the better.
 
CR
2.2.23
     
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Step Inside

20/1/2023

1 Comment

 
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I was at a meeting with civilians where the teachers’ strikes announcement generated tutting and eye-rolling. Intervening would have prolonged an event form which I needed to scuttle at the end, so I kept my peace. Or I think I did. Who knows what the body language or the studious avoidance of eye contact may have conveyed? It did make me think, however, about how to explain the action, so I thought I’d experiment on you, dear readers.

Today brought another meeting where we chewed it over, a professionals’ gathering where the image of the Front Door is often conjured, so I thought I’d press this rather exhausted metaphor into service.

Schools, like other services, are sometimes called the Front Door because that’s the place you go, the one-stop-shop, if you’re lucky, to get the support and the entitlement the state has decreed, devised and funded. The GP surgery is the front door of the NHS, the desk sergeant is literally at the front door of policing and the school is the front door to education. Our Tallis front door is rather nice, approached under a canopy with brightly decorated pillars and sometime festooned with flags for whatever we’re celebrating. We hope this is a welcoming place, where our warm friends behind the desk will try to meet your every need. 

The school is the front door to the belief in and investment of the state in the future of our young. It is the place where accepted and verified knowledge is taught and the community where acceptable social norms are transmitted. With luck, it’s also a place where a good experience of growing-up may be gathered and from where a happy adult life may be approached. That’s quite a lot for one building, let alone one door, to represent.

It is reasonable, therefore, for the tax-payer to expect that, once the door is broached, the service behind it will be top-notch. In the case of a school, that should be everything that the good parent would want for the child, in loco parentis. It’s a contract made between education, the state and the population. We will take your money and your dreams and use them wisely and well. We will look after your children as well as you could possibly want, and do our very best for them. This compact is the foundation stone of our system. We fail in our duty if, once the shiny front door is opened, the education and the experience behind it is patched together, fragile and unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. It's no way to run a health service and its no way to run a school.

So teachers are striking because they have run out of other options to bring the parlous state of our service to the nation’s young to government’s attention. They are not just striking about pay, though that is a huge part of the problem. Poor pay for a highly trained and skilled graduate profession working in high-pressure settings means that fewer and fewer people want to do the job. Even a recession, historically the teacher workforce’s friend, hasn’t worked this time. The workload and remuneration are so out of kilter with other career options that no one wants to be a teacher. Under 60% of secondary recruitment targets have been met this year in most subjects, again, in a ninth out of ten years of missed targets. Only the first lockdown brought an upsurge in interest in teaching as a career, and that quickly failed.

And last year’s pay rise, announced in the last week of term without funding to pay it? It nearly broke us all.

Workload and burnout are significant pressures of the job. Each is inextricably linked to funding, and this is the root of the strike action. Because there aren’t enough teachers, the teachers we do have have to shoulder more of the burden. If, for example, and this is not the case at Tallis, a school can’t get maths teachers and so must rely on graduates in other disciplines to teach maths, that’s a triangle of problems (maths teachers love triangles). The French or PE or whatever teacher will find the teaching stressful, the Head of Maths will find the constant setting-of-work for a potentially floundering colleague exhausting and the children will inhabit the teacher’s anxiety, every single lesson. Behaviour will be scratchy, outcomes poor and enjoyment absent. The teachers’ strikes aren’t just about pay, they’re about recruitment and retention, SEND promises made that can’t be kept, unpalatable choices made to keep or scrap curriculum areas or behaviour support, no educational psychologists or speech therapists and six-month waiting lists for mental health services for desperate teenagers. 

They’re also about better funding and a way out of crisis management and the constant attrition of the things the reasonable citizen believes we have promised and expects us to do well. It’s a crisis a dozen years in the making.

But last night was Year 7 parents’ evening, the contract in motion. I perched as ever near the front door (in many jumpers and then my coat), ready to chat helpfully and absorb complaints. I heard about a child who’s lost four jumpers so far (we’ll provide a stock of pre-loved garb) and another who’s only lost his Spanish book (we have spares). But most of all, I heard compliments and thanks from parents who trusted us with their beloved, who decided that we meant what we said about a broad curriculum and an inclusive vibe and are grateful and happy for what we’re doing. They were glad they’d found our door.

Given the prevailing gloom of the foregoing, it was a lovely experience. I just hope that we can find the funding to keep it all going, and to keep our promises. Our door is always open.
 
CR
19.1.23
1 Comment

Sorry Guys

5/1/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
How’s your New Year so far? Jaunty, optimistic, full of the joys? Lots of useful resolutions? Giving up drink, taking up yoga, running a marathon, re-reading Proust, learning Polish, eating fewer sausages, painting the landing, psychoanalysing the cat? Sorry if you’ve got more pressing concerns, like heating or food or the unsettling weather or what on earth the future holds for the children or any of us. But we live in the days as well as the years and we have to be optimistic. That’s why resolutions, after the festivals, help us through the winter. We can change, and we can do it ourselves. Or with a bit of help.

Just before we broke up I’d wearied of a little troupe of year seven boys who found the long first floor corridor joining blocks four, five and six irresistible for time trials. Despite the impediment of fully four sets of fire doors, they bucketed along every lunchtime like cheetahs in clogs, guffawing all the while. It's not a corridor with classrooms opening directly onto it, and by the time I heard the clatter of tiny feet I couldn’t get out fast enough to seize them. Curses. Possible solution? Involve Mr Parris, more devious and fleeter of foot to catch ‘em by the simple expedient of being able to apparate silently through the lino at the requisite time. Imagine their surprise.

On being ushered into the presence to account for themselves, they took a telling and demonstrated sufficient remorse. When nudged to apologise, the Usain Bolt of the outfit did his best with ‘Sorry guys’, thereby devising another problem for himself before being taken away for reprogramming. In his favour, he’s 11 and foolish with more energy than sense. He’ll learn. As might the year 9 girls who absented themselves from their legitimate berth to flounce about in righteous indignation seeking an audience for a grievance. They progressed southwards with hands on hips, and returned northbound with outraged gestures before being posted into place. It does take time to settle back in. Mistakes are made.

And I do approve of vision-informed planning. We should all be clear about what we want and work systematically towards it. Some temperaments are better at systems than others so sometimes it goes a bit wrong, but a sincere apology is remarkably cheap and helps all parties.

Which brings me inevitably to Mr Sunak and his plan for everybody to study maths up to 18. I think it’s a great idea, especially if it can be made really practical, for those who didn’t really enjoy it much up to year 11. If we believe (and we do at Tallis) that education gives young people powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world so they are not dependent upon those who might misuse them, then it is obviously a change for the better if everyone’s abreast of the numbers. In his speech Mr Sunak said we must "reimagine our approach to numeracy" so people have the skills they needed ‘to feel confident with finances and things like mortgage deals’. Yes indeed. As long as they don’t actually apply for a mortgage in London or look too closely at their finances anywhere I’m sure they’ll all feel confident. They’ll be able to sort out their heating and food bills, their taxes and their likelihood of getting a doctor’s appointment, having an operation or matching their parents’ standard of living. 

The PM goes on. "In a world where data is everywhere and statistics underpin every job, letting our children out into that world without those skills is letting our children down,.

Yes, it is. But who’s doing the letting-down? It’s a great idea, but who’s going to teach it? We don’t have enough maths teachers for our current courses, let alone invented new ones. Teacher recruitment targets have been missed nine years out of ten, only 59% of secondary training places are filled this year and 47% of schools use non-specialists to teach maths. And I’m not talking about obliging physicists or economists. I’m talking about willing French or PE teachers, anyone with a GCSE and a couple of spare hours. Schools in areas of real hardship don’t have the luxury of a stableful of pedigree mathematicians happily loving algebra together. Dreaming the extra-maths dream is meaningless unless there’s a plan to make it come true.

And a plan to stop preventing it coming true. So while schools are underfunded and teachers leaving in busloads, while the DfE promote online programmes rather than investing in time and training for real people, while recruitment’s skewed by try-teaching-for-a-couple-of-years-before-settling-for-something-easier-and-better-paid kind of talk, Mr Sunak’s dream will float off like those of his many predecessors.

Even a ‘sorry, guys’ would have made this wafty thinking more palatable. Sorry that education funding as a percentage of public spending has dropped to 1992 levels since 2010. Sorry that there aren’t enough doctors, nurses or teachers. Sorry that people are going on strike. Sorry that people die waiting for ambulances. Sorry that there still isn’t a plan.
​
My last maths lesson was in 1977, but even I can work out that this isn’t going to change much.
 
CR
5.1.23
0 Comments
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