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:

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

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!

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

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

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:

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

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

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:

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 arm