A brief history. After school in Stockton-on-Tees I read theology at KCL and then did a PGCE at Birmingham, including the chalk, though we did have a session learning how to write in straight lines using whiteboard markers in case we ever went to a school where they could afford them. I taught in Birmingham and Leicestershire, and then gave up. I spent two years in race relations and then had two children. By the time I went back into the classroom as a ‘woman returner’ the National Curriculum and ICT had been invented. I taught in Peterlee, the only town named after a miners’ leader, on the former East Durham coalfield them moved back to London to Pimlico, moving back to another part of the coalfield two years later. After that, Deputy Head in Durham City, Head in Hartlepool, back to Durham to be a Head again and to Tallis in 2013.  

I was lucky to become a Head after relatively little experience, at 40, in the Labour building-boom years and rebuilt first one school and then another. When that was done, we’d got the outstanding badge and I’d decided not to be a National Leader of Education, for which you got an embossed notebook and went about advising poor souls deemed in need of it - my potential referee said ‘Don’t do it. You’d hate it.’ - I wondered what to do next. A friend once asked me what my ambitions were and I said I’d like a go at one of those big London schools.

So I applied for a job in the centre of town I didn’t get. The Chair and I had a long longlist interview after which they decided that my last school wasn’t impressive enough and I decided they didn’t know a damn thing about life outside London. Tallis had been advertised for the second time and I pushed in an application just ahead of the deadline. I manufactured an excuse to come to London and came for a poke about one Friday afternoon. I fell in love with the place as I walked through the door, just the feel of it. This is interesting, I thought. This is different.
Which is just as well because the paperwork was deranged. Half of it was the technical language of raising achievement – ‘relentless’, ‘laser-sharp’ - and half of it a paeon to creativity. The documents told one story, the website another. On holiday in Orkney I wrote a 20-point development plan, then came for two days of interviews. I was offered the job on the train between Doncaster and York on the way home. Everyone in Durham thought I was the deranged one – why leave Durham Johnston and a house with a view of the World Heritage Site? Why? Because somewhere in that paperwork was the phrase ‘to understand the world and change it for the better’. Who wouldn’t want to work with people who thought that?

So thank you to all those of you who were here at the time who made me so welcome.

Thank you to the LG survivors from then and for the great people who joined it subsequently. I’m very proud of the former members who are now Heads themselves, of course, as well as the one who’ve stayed. The current team are the strongest I’ve ever known; expert, clever, efficient and humane. An especial thanks to my redoubtable PA, whose organisational standards are unequalled. As she once said to a hapless colleague ‘only German standards in this office’. Quite so. We’ve had a great time together.  

Thank you to the LA team under whom I’ve been glad to serve and whom I respect enormously for their openness, honesty and collaboration – but I remember when support came in a different form. It was probably 2015 when the former Chair and I were summoned to account. At one point he passed me a note saying ‘I’m going to jump out of the window’. It was the only sensible response.

Thank you to governors old and new, especially the Chairs. I’ve never met such a strong board: seriously impressive public servants themselves. The (national) Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education wouldn’t exist without you.

Thank you to the Greenwich Community Schools Partnership, originally formed when it looked like we’d all have to become academies. Lifeboats need maintaining.   

When I arrived I wanted to make this school the best it could be, not to change it into someone else’s idea of a good school. We do that individuality pretty well and we are successful. Staff stay, parents fight to get in and post-16 is so big you can see it from space. The building is beautiful, the children are happy and the staff interesting, committed and scholarly. The curriculum is broad and balanced in the best old-fashioned sense, based on powerful knowledge, strong teaching skills, signature pedagogy, threshold concepts and proper cultural capital (which, like powerful knowledge is much misunderstood. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s teaching to the test.) Our systems are good: the place runs itself with time for staff to deal with the serious, rather than the trivial. Most of all, there’s a place for the awkward or unwieldy child and the one who’s - within reason - trying it on during adolescence. We weren’t all perfect at school ourselves, remember.

So thank you to the teachers and support staff. Thank you to everyone who makes it possible to hear the Rolls Royce purr of an experts’ classroom every lesson in our mighty buildings. Thank you to those of you who hold the Tallis flame and bear it high.   

However, there is much still to do. Although it’s hard to meet a narrow metric squarely when you’re trying to change the world, we all have a duty to try and, at the very least, we want all of our children to have valid individual passports to adult life.  Tallis remains a work in progress.

Someone asked me this week how I kept going, and finding new things to do. I usually says it’s because of my tragically short attention span, but there is a serious answer. If you believe, as I do, that comprehensive schools are a vision every bit as vital as the NHS, central to this country’s future and a model for a better world you have to keep going when the principle is being nibbled at – if not attacked. We cannot take anything we believe in for granted, not the broad and balanced curriculum that enables every young person to make sense of their lives, not the inclusivity which educates every child from the local community, not the adult behaviour that gives a strong role model to the young. We need to guard it all. We might have finally got a government that’s not likely to repeal the Human Rights Act on a whim, but we cannot relax.  We are children’s advocates and representatives. We speak on their behalf and we have a duty to them from which we will never be relieved.

My thinking was formed by liberal Christianity, which has its advantages. It gives you a broader frame of reference and an entirely sceptical view of all kinds of narrow and simple answers. It forces you to consider love and hope. It enables you to look coolly at panic and demand and think about the long-term potential for good. All of us must sustain our own reasoning and resist becoming drones in a clone-y education future. Take nothing on trust without thinking it through. If something’s right, do it anyway. If it’s not, don’t. For me, in the end, it was never been between me and the LA, or me and Ofsted, or me and the Department for Education. What I’ve done I’ve done anyway, because I thought it was right.

That’s not to say I might be wrong, or I couldn’t have done better in so many ways. I’ve often described myself as inadequate with outstanding features but I found in Tallis a school that needed me, and I’ve had the time of my life.  Haven’t we had fun?

So thank you to everyone involved in Tallis here now and over the eleven years. And in particular, to my dear husband whose own organisational skills have kept me going for 23 years of headship.

I’m sorry to leave but its time to go. Keep on modelling that better world and, for the love of God, change it for the better.
 
As ever
 
CR
18.7.24

This may be sort-of my last blog, though the election may be irresistible and there’ll be no escaping my leaving speech. I started writing them to order for a newspaperman who happened to be a parent, and I just kept going, yea up to about two hundred, way more than any reader should be expected to endure. Thank you.

Two columns of children crossed the concourse while I was seeking an old buffer to polish a trophy for assembly. I followed them to their briefing on Voting in a General Election. Year 12 Poll Clerks waited for them in the back of Reception, directing them to the booths, shushing discussion or other undemocratic behaviour and turning away sixth former students without lanyards (just or unjust, they have to learn). Not that there hadn‘t been canvassing in a rather odd way according to a conversation that passed me in Block 5. ‘If I vote Reform, you have to vote Green to give them a fair chance’. Ah me, Tallis Character misplaced, in so many ways. 

A small boy was confused: ‘I thought we weren’t old enough to vote?’ so we explained that this was a mock, training them for adult life. An older girl wondered ‘Do they vote the same in America?’. No, I said, forbearing to wail that their poll seems certain to bring catastrophe for all.

Perhaps by the time you read this the result will be abroad. The canny trainer-clad folks of Newcastle or Houghton and Sunderland South will have won the fastest count race and we’ll be set for another five years. I taught in Houghton-le-Spring for 3 years so I have a pride in their speedy tellers. You know my politics. I won’t belabour you with them.

Someone was so kind as to ask me about my career yesterday and what I thought was important for the future of English schools after the election. Inevitably I said that while money is the big problem, recruitment and retention of teachers is bigger. Something can be done about the latter while the former is recovering from our own catastrophes.

How? Simple. Teachers need an even break. They need to be valued, talked up, recognised. Teaching as a career needs to be rebranded and readvertised. Its fundamental motivations – to do good, to change the world, to make a difference, to share knowledge, to build an educated citizenry, to set a good example of adult life – need to take front and centre stage. Teachers need to step out from the shadow of the NHS and fill the space. These people preserve and save lives too: they turn your children into adults.

The Festival of Education is happening today and tomorrow at Wellington College and loads of teachers will be there. It’s a big gig that I spoke at about 5 years ago. I got off a packed train from London and walked in a huge crocodile of bright young things, all keen and excited to hear the latest. They’d been lauding it loudly since Paddington. 

This year I note that ‘Artificial Intelligence, Ofsted, Cognitive Science, Great Teaching, Coaching, SEND and sustainability’ are themes. Nothing wrong with any of them but – unless they’re part of a bigger vision for education they’re just so much glitter and gloss. 

If I may gloom? AI could completely undermine teaching and the nature of knowledge, Ofsted is just a regulator with a snapshot camera, cog sci is interesting but not sufficient, great teaching is an art that can’t always be mandated or taught, coaching is part of any sensible leadership system, duh, SEND needs a week to itself and the climate emergency can’t be solved by schools. None of these solve our problem because none of them get to the bottom of what hooks and keeps teachers. No-one’s asking what schools are for, what childhood is for and how they might best be provided and served. Where’s the learning? Where’s the love? 

I’ve just rediscovered Arlo Guthrie’s 1969 song Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. Do listen to it if you have a spare 19 minutes. When he finally gets around to talking about the draft he describes the office as a place where they’re ‘injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected’. It’s a bit too close to an accurate description of client, compliant English schools for my liking. 

If the people who look like they’ll win tomorrow win tomorrow they’ve got a mission. While nodding to the regulation surface dressing, they look like they’ll dig to the bedrock of the problem: ending child poverty, solving chronic social insecurity and ‘supporting a profession of excellent teachers, encouraged to develop as experts in their field, and valued for the work they do’. Only words yet, I know, but some words are worth more than others.
We know about the worth of words at Tallis. We talk about values and virtues, powerful knowledge, habits of learning and character traits, about signature pedagogy and threshold concepts, inclusion and creativity, a broad and balanced curriculum and about making sure every child is seen, known and loved.  We try to be a model community and a blueprint for a better world.  We want to understand the world and change it for the better. We resist the gloss and embrace the risks required to serve our children well.

Educators everywhere are in a desperate state, clinging on by our fingernails for a glimmer of hope. Everywhere democracy is under threat from people peddling dangerous glittery answers to serious human problems. As I look out of the window there are still columns of children going to the poll. At this moment, they think they’ll always vote and that no adult cynicism will make them reluctant to leave the sofa and demand a better life for themselves and their children. 

My teacher grandmother didn’t get the vote until she was 27, so she took it very seriously. I hope that these children will too. That better world is in our hands and theirs. I hope we all have the courage to make the most of it.
 
CR
3.7.24

I watch year 10 on their careers interview practice day, coping with the formal clothes they’ve opted to wear, unusual for us. Two boys have added a tie to their polo shirts and I mildly observe that this might seem eccentric to an interviewer. One is affronted: ‘it’s my rugby club tie’. Some girls are discussing others’ choices: ‘a school skirt with a white shirt is sensible. Smart and economical, you can’t go wrong’, although none of them are garbed thus.
Things we roll with at Tallis that bring other schools out in a rash include blue hair, nose rings, trainers, a very broad curriculum, student activism, noisy corridors, staff in shorts and skirt length. Things we grit our teeth about and smile through include Progress 8, SEND funding and financial terrors. Things we’re really fussy about include inclusion and respect for everyone. We look and feel different from a lot of other schools. We have our own vision and our own ways of working.

Readers from other schools will be foaming at the gills and shouting at their machinery. All schools are different.  We all make our own weather. The silly old bat’s making a fuss about nothing. Who’s rattled her cage?
At a lunch bidding farewell to a colleague more experienced than I, she put down her cuttles, looked me in the eye and bowled a poser.  ‘Whatever happened to the self-managing school?’ Struth, a distant echo. Gorn, I said. But when? and why?  

My co-eater’s to blame for this blog, about a memory of an idea that turned itself inside out and ended back where it started.

Everyone talked heartily about self-managing schools between the Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988 and the domination of deliverance from the early 2000s. I was prancing off to conferences at that time the better to claw my way up the greasy pole and heard a lot of chaps called David. Reynolds of Exeter, for example. He opined
Experience of past top-down change programmes or improvement schemes was one of dismal failure….it is also clear from the various school improvement programmes that commitment to personal and institutional change is greatest where the individual school is in charge of its own schemes. 

The belief was that schools’ capacity and vision had been let down by sclerotic structures, notably the Local Education Authorities (LEAs). The ERA had introduced Local Management of Schools, which largely and radically meant schools managing their own budgets. From then onwards, the push to manage more was obvious, inevitable and righteous. Why wouldn’t Heads, long experienced in curriculum design and management, free to spend their own budgets, want to shape the entire direction of their schools, including their core purpose, teaching and learning?

Initially, expertise developed and was shared across and between the LEAs who still ran (almost) all the schools. Self-managing schools became part of the ‘self-improving school’ system. Enterprising Heads joined forces in broader groups such as the Specialist Schools Trust, perhaps lured by the cash premiums attached to Specialist School Status and the quasi-business language of entrepreneurship which became common parlance. The National College for School Leadership was the flagship of the self-improving system and another David, Hargreaves of the SST, wrote for them on ‘Creating a self-improving school system’ in 2010.

It has long been known that the most powerful influences on teachers are other teachers, but policies have rarely built on the fact. The best way of exploiting this phenomenon is through regular, face-to-face encounters among professionals that focus on the improvement of teaching and learning…… In a self-improving school system, more control and responsibility passes to the local level in a spirit of mutual aid between school leaders and their colleagues, who are morally committed to imaginative and sustainable ways of achieving more ambitious and better outcomes. England is part way there. Will it now decide to travel the rest of the journey?

Well, yes. Vocal self-managers were highly influential with New Labour and the development of academies. That single policy snowplough cleared the path for the doctrinaire demolition of the Local Authorities from 2010 onwards under a government of an entirely different kind. The self-improvers became ‘system leaders’.  Collaboration laid the foundations for the MATs, whose self-managing blueprints became the orthodoxies of their schools and the drivers of the current system.

So do we now have self-managing schools? Was I wrong to say they had vanished like eight-track cartridges Hargreaves’ vision, of a system led by school leaders, by teachers for teachers, is where we, apparently, nearly, are.  Academies and MATs are run by the leaders and teachers who seized the day (along with some former civil servants and LEA folk, and some very rich people linked to governments). Has it worked? Yes and no, perhaps - but I speak from a particular vantage point and I may be wrong. 

The MATs committed themselves, as good public servants, to the deliverance of public sector targets for the good of all our children. They found particular ways that worked in particular contexts which were shared and copied.  Trends developed. None of this is new and none of it is wrong. But if funding collapses while accountability measures are keenly sought and assessed by high-stakes inspection, cost-effective models becomes accepted or recommended models. Many schools teach a more limited curriculum for exactly these reasons and a terrifying 60% MORE intend to reduce their curriculum.  

Perhaps this is a principled response to the prevailing circumstances? We can only do what we can afford, and we must fulfil expectations. The children need to pass exams in the subjects apparently valued by the nation, so this is what schools are for, and here’s how to do it. it’s a national scandal as well as a tragedy. But, returning to my question, I have to observe that some leaders in the dominant MATs appear to have significantly less freedom to self-manage than I’ve enjoyed as the servant of three Local Authorities. What self-management became seems to have led to greater control.

I don’t quote a lot of Eliot, but I can’t avoid Little Gidding.   
​

The canteen was busy this morning. A trip going out, and the last English GCSE, so the whole of year 11 were gathered to panic and make resigned huffing noises while being counted and sent upstairs. Simultaneously, four A-levels in the Hall - physics, business, drama and Russian. I’m interested in how the gods of Ofqual organise the timetable to minimise clashes. Do they sit back in their chairs, feet on the table and conjure up possible candidates? Do they ask each other ‘What kind of 18-year old is likely to take physics, drama and Russian? Hmmm.’  I read a lot of spy novels, so it seems a likely combination to me. The gods probably use an algorithm, which is less fun to picture.

In a big school every child is known by lots of adults, but no one is known by everyone. The same goes for adult-to-adult recognition, especially of valued colleagues amongst us temporarily. It makes for a different dynamic to smaller schools, and certainly to primary schools. People know their team: the department or tutors, the senior team and support staff they work alongside or call upon for specialist services. We can go weeks without meeting people outside our usual ambit, I really need staff briefing every week to scan the room and make sure I recognise all the faces. Like absolutely everything else this is difficult at exam time because briefing is squashed into the staffroom, which has an actual wall across the middle, and spills out onto the corridor.

Recognition has come up in discussions about site security of late. Apparently 2% of the population are super-recognisers who can recognise faces fleetingly seen, even in a crowd, years ago. I wonder if teachers are better at it? Perhaps the fact that the average age for a teacher in England is 39, the fifth-youngest in an international study – might help us. And as if you’re interested, Italy and Estonia have the oldest average teacher age, at about 50, Singapore the youngest at 36. The global average is 43: Finns, Czechs and Norwegians. These facts may be useful to you, though I don’t know how.  
             
If we’re serious about schools being microcosms of society, little communities in which children may learn, make mistakes and put them right, then its good if teachers look like the outside world. All ages and  backgrounds and – within reason – all kinds of personalities. It’s important for children to know that there’s not just one kind of person who’s learned, or who’ll care for them, and very important for them to know that all types of folks can be teachers. We need everyone we can get.

There’s an article on BBC News today asking ‘Would a 1.40pm Friday finish stop teachers quitting?’ alongside two stories about how impossible teaching is and another one about a bright young thing who loves it and will be deputy head of English in her second year of teaching. All these stories are depressing. The week doesn’t need changing, the job shouldn’t be impossible and someone in year two might not have the experience and understanding to help lead one of the two big departments  and guide other teachers. However, schools have to appoint the best they have, and when no one comes to interview, good souls in school are promoted early, which leads to a different set of problems and a different kind of burnout. But good for her.

I don’t think I’m a super-recogniser, though I did used to know 450 names by October half term when I was in the classroom, and it was only when age addled me that I had to forget the previous years’ in order to store new ones.
I wish I knew more. I wish I knew the name of the young person commanding an audience in the Block 1 airlock today, lecturing her friends on enzymes. She’d be a good teacher. Another sits and reads quietly. He might be good at it too.

Yesterday I was mildly concerned by whooping outside at first lunch. From my angle, it looked as though small children were hurling themselves against a wall at speed, though the adults seemed entirely unconcerned so I didn’t investigate further. This morning, I spotted a Head of Year with a stepladder, and noted at break that horizontal red lines had appeared on a wall for children to leap at, yelling with laughter as they fly through the air. It’s an alternative to skipping: I’d like to know more of their names.

Perhaps an elegiac tone in this, my last half term, where everything is normal but underpinned by oddness. How to cope? Poetry, obvs. The sad death of John Burnside sent me back this Scotsman who was ‘shamelessly in pursuit of the invisible’. When he wrote, he listened quietly to himself and waited for stillness: ‘the traditions of my reading and of my true kinfolk, the native urges of my blood, the sense I have of being anchored to gravity and light. All those frequencies’.

That’s what I feel about being in a great school: the traditions, kin, gravity and light and the particular frequency that’s the feel of the school, that blows you over when you walk through the door.  
 
So I give you the last verse of ‘The Night Ferry’, which speaks to my condition:

The rain having momentarily stopped, there are skipping ropes on the concourse to encourage year 7 and 8. Not just to leap about but to cooperate with one another. Staff gamely tried them before lunch earlier in the week with frankly disappointing results. Unsurprisingly, children are better at it: bouncier, freer, closer to remembering skipping in primary school. It’s a glimpse of play-based childhood, and I’m thinking about that as my transit listening is Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.  

I’m only halfway through, but the thrusts of the book ring bells with anyone who spends time around young people. He argues that smartphone use (I have my own two on my desk as I write) has rewired children’s brains since 2010 and that we have moved – globally, but especially in rich countries where children get smartphones young – from play-based to phone-based childhood. He believes that the parallel steep rise in anxiety and depression among young people, especially girls, is caused by all-pervasive social media to which girls devote 8-10 hours every day. For boys, the risks seem different: isolation caused by excessive gaming where a community of live friends has been replaced by online friends, and of course the ghastly risk of endless pornography and dangerous role models. All of which, for boys and girls, is exacerbated by the sleep deprivation caused by smartphones.

What to do? Haidt’s proposals begin with enforcing the laws we already have about children and social media, therefore not allowing profit-makers to rewire children’s brains. As I say, I’m only halfway through and this is a paraphrase. There are other views. What will we do at Tallis? We’ll think, and then act. 

One of the most troubling aspects of social media, to which Haidt may well turn in the rest of the book, is its bizarre effect on freedom of speech. You’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that unlimited access to all the knowledge and all the opinions in the world would spread openness and informed judgement – and yet we find ourselves at the other end, beset by tribalism and blinkered thinking.  So many children believe they have to plump for one side so schools have to work against this. Teachers have to plonk themselves on the threshold of freedom of expression to prevent the door from closing.

Why? Because good learning requires information of all kinds, open discourse, free expression and the willingness to discuss any problem that presents itself. Education is not designed for comfort but for thinking, to fortify courage and empower the learner to deal with complexity, to became an informed and active citizen. Free speech can be hard to hear so it’s tempting to call for some speakers to be silenced, or banned – cancelled, as we say.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for demagogues and rabble-rousers. Citizens have the right to be safe and treated fairly. But there must be a forum for reasoned debate even with people whose ideas are – to the liberal mind – intolerable. People with harmful opinions have to be refuted, word by word, put right and even pursued by the law. Its what civilisation requires. It’s certainly what universities are for.  It’s also what schools should do.   

Tallis expects young people to learn to be open-minded:  inquisitive, collaborative, fair and respectful. At the same time, they are young people who should want to change the world for the better and might be justifiably frustrated at the time that older generations take to sort stuff out. They are inclined to be revolutionary. That fervour needs to be focused on what will make the world better and more inclusive, not on what will make it worse and more bigoted.

We love an election at Tallis and will throw ourselves into the national frenzy. Education groups are already making their pitches: the social mobility charity The Sutton Trust emailed earlier today. Their General Election wants are:

• High quality early years education for all
• A national strategy to close the attainment gap
• A more progressive higher education funding system

My general election wants are:

• Education funding at a level that demonstrates children matter and which allows schools to give teachers time to think, collaborate, plan and develop
• Funding for health, social care, police and justice so that schools don’t have to try to do everything and that every citizen is protected
• A return to civility and truth in national discourse 

I’ve just been with the Sixth Form Thinking Aloud group. These good folk tussle with hearty questions and like to be made to think. I presented them with Archbishop Welby’s conundrum about Christianity and sexuality in global Anglicanism. Can he save the communion? What should he do? It’s a super-wicked problem if ever there was: every action taken to solve it seems to make it worse.

In the end, scripture, tradition, politics and national laws notwithstanding, the young people were optimistic that the positive inclusive messages they read and they post on social media would work this out. Old people will die, and their exclusive conservative views with them. Religions will survive or perish but young people will uphold inclusivity.
​
It’s a different argument to Haidt’s.  What did the old person in the room think?  I fear, but I hope.         
 
CR
23.5.24

I was 16 in 1977, I said to year 11, which caused some of them to laugh out loud and others to look sceptically at one another, as if I was making it up. I’m not sure shirt-signing had been invented or, if it had, it hadn’t reached north Teesside. Nor had the level of care and entertainment that we think is usual on what is still euphemistically called Leaving Day, which doesn’t mark their leaving and isn’t a whole day.

As the small child who’s been wearing a hat which seems to be made of cloth bananas, the better to protect himself from the scorching heat of May in SE3, may have observed, we did shirt-signing proud this year. In recent years we’ve poured cold water on saucy drawings, salty language and minority mayhem as traditions reasserted themselves after Covid. We rethunked, and prepared. Rather than risking them grasping freedom to roam while they were meant to be in lesson two we ushered them to one end of the concourse to sign to their hearts’ content without disturbing the peace. I stood on the Block 1 outside stairs and surveyed the melee.    

It wasn’t just the adults who’d been thinking. This year, so many pre-signed shirts were sumptuously embellished works of art. I saw sequins, embroidery, paintings of Batman and other mythical creatures, iron-on names and feathers. One group were covered in pink bows. This had all taken preparation, and so traditions develops: no longer the felt pen and shirt scribbled spontaneity but an expression of a kind of identity, something to keep, and through which – one hopes – remember happy times.

I’m moving house soon, somewhere smaller, the ninth move in forty years and I can up-and down-size with the best. My children being in their thirties and the next hutch smaller, a decree has gone out – no family storage. This includes signed shirts from years 6, 11 and 13. One loved school and has loads of room so wants it all, the other, who found school irksome and lives in London so barely has room to arrange a thought, allows me to dispose. But memories persist, for good or ill and both had school friends at their weddings.
​
Subsequent to sunny shirt signing we herded year eleven into the canteen where they sat amiably in tutor groups and were even allowed chat and modified whooping as they went into the hall. After that, a few words from me, some emotional farewells from tutors and year team, a band, thank yous, and – most of all – the hysterical photos of their eleven-year-old selves. Goodbye is at lunchtime and off they go, wreathed in their own graffiti, to dip their toes into the world. Exams, Prom, Leaving Ceremony, long holiday, results, next steps. Then what? The signed shirts go into a drawer or under the bed ready for the day twenty years hence when a parent begs for its removal.
It was my last year 11 leaving day so I thanked them for making me a pleasant memory.

Perhaps it’s the atmospherics of the year that I’ll miss the most: the bustle of September, hassle-y behaviour in the November cold, darkness enveloping the week before Christmas, the leaving day before study leave, the last exam, sports days and summer on the grass, the euphoria at the end of the year. Year after year, every school the same. Every child prepared for adulthood through these local rites of passage.  

I’m thinking as usual about the part schools play in society, to unite or divide, and the comprehensive dream. I’m thinking of conversations with parents about the clash between the needs of the many and the individual. I’m thinking about fake news, gullibility and hatred. I’m thinking about the strain that meagre budgets put on everything we do to excite children, bind up their wounds and fit them for the future. I’m watching the way we make the weather and listening to the music we make together.

Marie Howe’s new poem The Hymn describes an ‘almost inaudible hum’ of humanity in the cosmos, getting louder and louder until humanity breaks into

Given the state of things, I thought you might be interested in – or at the very least be able to bear – some thoughts on The Khan Review Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience which landed just before Easter. I wrote a thing for another audience and have, believe it or not, condensed it a bit. It's long and there aren’t any jokes, so don’t feel obliged.

Sara Khan says:

It aims to ensure that all pupils acquire a sound knowledge and understanding of how the UK is governed, its political system and how citizens participate actively in its democratic systems of government. It also covers the role of law, justice, volunteering, and political debate.

The key stage 4 programme also expects children to be able to make persuasive arguments and substantiate their conclusions, experiencing and evaluating different ways that citizens can act together to solve problems and contribute to society. There’s a GCSE, but if students don’t do it, Citizenship must be embedded in Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship education (PSHCE) or some other experiences. That’s what we do at Tallis.

Only five universities offer PGCE Citizenship training courses and there are few specialist Cz teachers.
That’s only one aspect, though. Fundamental British Values (FBV) above, were given to schools in promoting-british-values-in-schools 2014. Schools have to promote them and Ofsted inspect ‘em.

They are, in their entirety,

• Mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and without faith
• The Rule of Law
• Democracy
• Individual Liberty

While the National Curriculum isn’t binding on academies and free schools (80% of secondary schools),Ofsted still look at it, though under ‘Personal Development’. Doing it this way rather than under ‘Quality of Education’ means that inspectors are judging children’s soft skills rather than knowledge. They evaluate whether pupils become responsible, respectful and active citizens who are able to play their part and become actively involved in public life as adults. They want to see if children know the FBVs, and if the school promotes equality of opportunity so that all pupils can thrive together, understanding that difference is a positive, not a negative, and that individual characteristics make people unique.

The FBV were established at a similar time to Prevent, part of the national anti-terrorism strategy Contest, which was originally developed in 2003 as a response to 9/11. The Prevent Duty requires all education providers ‘to help prevent the risk of people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. This includes safeguarding learners from extremist ideologies and radicalisation. 

Prevent has been viewed with some concern. Its appearance after 9/11 lent it a particular political tone which, allied with police involvement, was a new area for schools. Perhaps this was the reasons for the setting-up of an associated a website in 2016 called educate against hate.  

The Khan Review observes:

• This unit should support schools and teachers when being threatened or harassed, including immediate support for ‘flashpoint incidents’.  Data on these should be collected.  It should also collect cohesion data to assess the progress of key indicators such as segregation – ethnic and other – and other relevant issues. A new Office for Social Coherence and Democratic Resilience (OSCDR) would ensure this.Hmmmm.

I must observe that the DfE’s forerunner, the Department of Children, Schools and Families required schools to undertake community cohesion work, which was inspected by Ofsted from 2007. I was on the national reference group in 2009-10 and have a photo of me talking to Gordon Brown on the very matter. The Coalition immediately disbanded both policy and group ‘to let schools focus on their core mission’.

The current mishmash is the parent of many problems and confusions.

1.  Democracy and voting
If democratic processes are taught under a personal development banner in a country where voting isn’t compulsory, there’s a risk of their seeming optional in adult life, for people who like that kind of thing. Do all teachers vote? Should that be a clear expectation of public service?

2. Democracy and character education
Schools espouse and advocate character traits, but they are often personal, such as ‘hardworking’, ‘honest’ and ‘respectful’. Ofsted makes it possible for character to be defined without reference to the common good. Unless schools are explicit about the practical outcomes of fairness, decision-making, kindness and reciprocity, for example, and the purpose of voting, students may be left with an entirely solipsistic worldview (already a feature of adolescence) in which active democracy is unimportant.

3.  Democracy and achievement
Schools entirely focused on academic achievement may wittingly or unwittingly focus on competitive GCSE or university entrance outcomes. This does not build up an understanding of the value of democratic life in co-operative communities.

4.  Democracy and behaviour    
Even the most liberal schools are not democracies. As very strict behaviour management becomes more popular (elsewhere), adolescents may be forgiven for assuming that there is no role for their thoughts and views, which may carry on into adult life.

5.  Democracy in the news
Children are consumers of social media in a way that few formerly consumed print media.  The example set by politicians is critically important to children’s understanding of what makes for a healthy democracy. The decline of local news media and the underfunding of local government make this necessarily dull but vital foundation of democracy seem arcane and unattractive. 

So what to do? As democracy decays, schools have to teach to save it. This needs to be factual and preparatory (‘how to vote’) as well as focused on collaborative soft skills. Sadly, unless Citizenship is made compulsory or its content inspected properly, this is unlikely. The Khan Review doesn’t cover this.

If I was asked for a Civics Manifesto (which, inexplicably, no one did,) I’d suggest:

• making the Citizenship national curriculum programme compulsory in all schools in KS3 and expect that all students are offered it as an option as well as its content being embedded in KS4. 
• enabling this by adjusting the accountability measures to force the issue by including Cz as an EBacc alternative to History or Geography. The content is academic and serious. (as long as the EBacc zombies on, of course)

These would need to be hand in hand with national developments: politicians should be mindful that their every act is an example to children and they should not bring democracy into disrepute. And while I’m at it, news media independence and balance should be strengthened and legislation introduced to protect it.
 
Daniel Chandler’s fabulous book Free and Equal covers this much better, if you fancy a long read.
 
So, if you’re ever stuck in a lift with someone who asks you what schools are doing about the state of the world, do tell them this. Of course, if we had a national understanding of what schools are for, these problems might be solved. Ask them to work on that, then send them to me.

Can schools save democracy? It’s important to think we can. 

CR
25.4.24

OFSTED always catch me on the hop. Believing that education is about more than jumping through hoops, I usually carry on as if they don’t exist. There’s nothing wrong with inspection in principle, but it’s a snapshot of what a school habitually does. If that’s OK, the inspection should be OK. No need to panic.

Which is easier said than done. They always ring in the mornings so when your turn gurns over the horizon, you do tend to jump when the phone rings before noon on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Thursday and Friday it can ring itself silly while you giddily ignore it (they need two days). Unless, of course, you’ve fallen foul of something and they ring you from the car park to announce their immediate apparition.

When Ofsted last berthed alongside in December 2018 I was temporarily hard of hearing and had to have a deputy (Mr Tomlin, remember him?) with me in the meetings to shout their comments down an ear-trumpet. This year I went one better and was 150 miles away, visiting a school in Poole. Ms Shaldas had the pleasure of picking up the phone and asking them to bear with while I bucketed back on the train.

Inspections these days start with a 90 minute phone call, which is a very good idea. You can say what you want to say without having to gabble as you pick them up from reception. Other improvements include the abandonment of that naff implement, the clipboard. Given recent events, they were very keen to check that everyone was happy, which is a bit like a dentist asking if you’re comfortable, but it’s the thought that counts. Me, I respond badly to being asked how I am. If I’m here, you can assume I’m bushytailed with the shiny coat of a Crufts Supreme Champion, but that’s just my antisocial old-gittery, not their fault.

Anyway, it went well. They charged about inspecting maths, English, art and geography, met curriculum leaders, teachers and students, heard children read, checked attendance, behaviour, mental health support, careers, PSHE and safeguarding. They got what we’re about and took pains to report accurately using our language. You can read the report. It's heartening.  

They also talked to governors, of whom we fielded a five-a-side team. This is a crucial, unsung part of inspection. Schooling is a national communal activity, a public service. Governors represent that public interest and their job is to make sure that schools are as good as they can be. They don’t get involved in the day-to-day, but are responsible, with the Head, for setting strategy and checking progress. Ours are great: committed, intelligent, hardworking and insightful. They’re both a support and a challenge, top-notch.

​As the superb National Governance Association says:

I saw a unicorn on the bridge last week. There was no need of it, and it hadn’t been summoned up by World Book Day or Red Horn Day or whatever. It was just a child, older than you’d think, calmly and happily wearing a home-made unicorn headband, making their way to Block One. Not a hallucination. They avoided being knocked over by a small child yelling FRENCH TEST, but he was at least rushing towards it, like a trooper.

No rushing for me. Bit tired, since you ask. Lots of weekend work in March and I am getting on a bit. Yes, I was in the room when G Keegan said that she’d have punched an Ofsted inspector who was rude. She’d got overexcited talking to 1000+ school leaders in a great big auditorium and mistook polite attentiveness for approval. The atmosphere sank to frosty after the remark, in a roomful of people who’ve devoted their lives to teaching young people the norms of civilised behaviour. We all have signs up in our reception areas asking people to be pleasant.  All public servants are at the mercy of national anger at the moment so her offering to punch the regulator is – I can’t dress this up – a really bad thing to say. They report to her, for the love of God. Words fail me (apart from the preceding 150, that is).

Another conference’s post-match discussions were beset by people starting their remarks with ‘I’m going to be a bit provocative’. Let the hearer be the judge of that. You don’t know how wide might be the range of listener’s views on the matter. Your provocative may be tediously predictable to people who’ve put in the hard yards. I roll my eyes quietly.

The actual speaker had been brilliant, posing a simple question: shouldn’t all schools be the same? What does it do to children and our system that we have local authority, comprehensive, grammars, faith, free, matted and so on. At the least, it means that central control is missing and admissions are a cat’s breakfast. Schools are enabled to do their own thing, or what they believe to be best, and children miss out. It’s a rare school that seeks out the least attractive children (by outcomes measures) and everyone misses out on the social vision of education as a model for a better world. Yes, sorting it out would be painful in one generation, but would be of immeasurable benefit for the rest. And yes, he’d manipulate admissions so that every school was genuinely comprehensive. 

This glimmer of hope for a better society flickers in and out. Just when you think no one cares, or no one is willing to be bold, someone with all the facts, the research and the economics pops up and calmly revolutionises the future. Wouldn’t that be a great leap forwards?

The previous day I’d heard another good speaker who talked about bad leadership based on compliance, socialisation and internalisation. Stop me, I thought, that’s where we’re at. The Deliverance revolution of the Blair years brought easy-to-measure national targets. Teaching trimmed itself to meet those targets, so the purpose of schooling changed into compliance. A child at school taught that way could easily be a school leader now. Post 2010, the EBacc and other controversies have been constants and that young leader might well ask – ‘but hasn’t the Department always controlled the curriculum choices schools make?’ ‘Why bother with the arts, no-one’s measuring their uptake?’ Thus, compliant schools socialised the next generations and now that compliance is internalised to this narrow focus. Don’t say we don’t know what schools are for: we know very precisely.

My biggest fear for the future of education is that poor-quality, short-term, politically-motivated thinking becomes ossified into structures that no one sees any more. So to return to the question: Why do we have so many different kinds of schools? Because we started mass education early and then had to fit the existing small and experimental systems into bigger ones. Church schools were absorbed in 1870 and again in 1944. Grammar schools carried on locally after the 1965 push to full comprehensives. City Technology Colleges and academies took control of schools away from local democracy deemed to be insufficiently responsive to children’s needs. Free schools came out of an ideology that parents would run schools better. All of these were – at best – sticking plasters on a system that needs recentring, like a navigation system that’s lost its satellite.
​
We need a school system that works for everyone, in schools that hold communities together and make them better places to live. As Harold Dent, Editor of the TES until 1950, said of the wartime plans:   

I wrote about teachers and thought I’d finished, but my poetry correspondent sent something to share. What? Well, I’m truly sorry if you don’t have a poetry correspondent. They’ll serve for a small retainer or a large drink and will hold you to account for Every Thought. 

This poem’s by Roger Garfitt, who I’ll grant isn’t a household name. Even more obscurely, it’s about another similar, Paul Francis, ‘on his retirement as Secretary of Border Poets’. A niche, I know, but we need nice niches in terrible times.

Tunnelling determinedly into obscurity, the poem’s about a conversation between two other poets - but now we’re motoring. This pair are favourites: the magnificently impenetrable Geoffrey Hill and the slightly-less-so David Harsent. Hill’s departed to hassle the hereafter, but Harsent’s still among us, with a lovely mane. Here is it in full.

You and I come from the same stock, David. What changed
your life? Geoffrey asked. For me it was the 11-plus.
Not so for David, who’d fallen downstairs the week
before the exam. And the 13+ only took him to Aylesbury
Tech, chose by his parents over the Royal Grammar School,
High Wycombe, because Aylesbury was where they did
their shopping. What changed David’s life was getting a job
in the local bookshop after he’d left school at sixteen.
 
And so they chatted, the policeman’s son and the bricklayer’s
son, at the Reception at the Palace for Fifty British Poets.
You and I were not among them, Paul, but I remember
the passion with which you spoke of the vision that led
your generation to teach in comprehensive schools,
the sense that change was there for the making – the chance
you took again with the Border Poets, to catch the undertones
in the landscape, the lives lived almost out of earshot.
 
Why am I inflicting this upon you? Let me count the ways. 

I’m delighted by the semi-debunking of the rosy post-war Grammar School story. It didn’t work for everyone, and the injustice of a child’s future being decided on one day – stairs notwithstanding – still shocks. I love the move to the passion for comprehensive schools and the vision of a slightly younger generation, of people throwing themselves at a better world. I’m poleaxed by the last line.

These febrile times allow the loud, the powerful and the wacky to dominate national discourse. I write just after the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister, disparaged the nation to the rest of the world, saying we’ve been highjacked by extremists. Our eardrums can barely bear the dog whistle frequency. Last week the Chancellor offers tax cuts despite wrecked public services clearly visible to the rest of us. No money for education, bar drop-in-the-ocean funding for twenty special schools and a terrifying trailer for a public sector productivity plan.  No living soul knows what that means, but it lands with the authentic klump of bad news.

The dream of the comprehensive school is for everyone: the quiet, the shouty, the struggling and the successful: the advantaged, the lost, the quick and the thoughtful. It gives everyone a chance, and puts change within reach of the whole community. That’s not just exam results but through knowing and being embedded in a community within a community, of living as well as learning.

So, thank you to the poets who illuminate our lives and the teachers who devote themselves, their love and their skills to the potential lived just out of earshot. They make sure that children are seen, known and loved. Despite everything, they know that change is there for the making, if not in this generation, then surely in the next.
 
CR 6.3.24               

Working through the list: teacher this time.

I’m incapable of seeing teachers objectively. Given that I’m the third of four generations of teachers and I’ve been embedded most of my life, I have little idea what they look like to the outside world.

Within sight of me at the moment is one such wondering over an art display and another standing on a concrete bench supervising mass coat removal. I’ve met them today unblocking doorways and temporarily impeding access to a toilet. All the while, of course, a hundred-and-ten or so of their colleagues are sharing knowledge imaginatively, going through mock exam papers or giving someone the cease and desist look. All are inhabiting the slightly too-obvious persona required of teaching, with exaggerated facial expressions and bizarre semi-dramatic hand gestures.    

Many Ofsteds ago, I watched a young PE teacher, slightly anxiously, with an inspector. I had hopes of the lad and didn’t want him battered to death with a clipboard in his first year. No fear, the wielder made a just and useful assessment: ‘A lot to learn, but a nice old-fashioned teacherly manner’. He was right. Adam was serious, kind, very organised and with high expectations. He made the children feel comfortable and ready to participate because he exuded security. Nothing was going to go wrong in the lesson, and he knew what he was talking about.

Teachers are bound by all kinds of expectations. There are Standards (OK but a bit weak) and all sorts of national professional qualifications, but nothing now that really gets under the skin. It’s all a bit functional. Why so dull? My Grannie’s 1916 copy of the Board of Education’s Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Schools has a lovely ‘general direction to teachers’. Advising that PT should be ‘enjoyable and interesting’ they say this will depend
        

My own training was influenced by a great headteacher of the past, Michael Marland. He wrote a little book in 1972 called The Craft of the Classroom. I bought it ten years after at Hudson’s bookshop on the Birmingham University campus, for £1.75. It's 100 pages long, starting with four unarguables: teachers need to care about the job, care for the students, explain their knowledge clearly and be very, very organised. You can’t say fairer than that.

Obviously, every offering is of its time. The 1916 PT book is in the context of the public health crisis uncovered by conscription for war. Marland’s genius includes the jaw-dropping lines ‘….we are all human and tempers can be lost.  There are very few teachers who have not struck a pupil at some time or other in their career’ followed by useful advice on what to do next. 

We improve. We’re educators, so we should be able to learn from the past, unless you’re Michael Gove whose shameful disrespect of university teacher training departments tried to turn the clock to a strange year zero where the only quality assurance was his journo rhetoric.  

Where are we now? I bowdlerised the best of Marland into ‘The Craft of the Tallis Classroom’ some years ago to make it more accessible, and we have our fabulous Tallis Praxis handbook. The overall tone of teacher education, however, is functional and delivery-based. It talks about the how and the what but not the why or the who-ness of teaching. Nationally, classroom practice is prescribed minute by minute in many schools with ready-made teaching materials and a pre-agreed curriculum decided way over the heads of practicing professionals. And so we are where we are, with a recruitment crisis for this, the best of jobs, and oddly scratchy relationships with parents, nationally.  

We work hard to avoid either at Tallis, but we may be odd.

Why? Teaching has very nearly become a public service delivery force rather than a profession or even vocation. Every conversation in some schools has to be measurable and is therefore likely to be scripted to increase efficiency and reduce variability. Bright young graduates don’t want that cardboard life: who’d want to be a teacher if you can’t bring your personality and judgements into your practice? Parents at schools where all the contact is about uniform infringements and detentions might understandably withdraw a bit of goodwill, partially generating the terrible attendance crisis. In sixties terminology the transactional relationship has lurched from ‘we’re OK, you’re OK, let’s work together for the good of your child’ to ‘we’re not OK because you’re not OK. Follow our instructions at once and don’t answer back’.

You know I’m reminiscing in these last blogs, so bear with.

The application forms I filled in as a new teacher in 1983 invited me to include war service, national service and full-time parenting, for each of which experience there was the chance to start higher on the pay scale. Someone mused with me recently about what teaching must have been like for those returning from war service, or training straight afterwards and it made me wish I’d talked to some of them about it. They’d had an atrocious experience and lived through the aftermath, perhaps teaching up to or even leading the social and educational revolution of the sixties and seventies. Their careers saw the beginning and the end of the 11+ system in most places, the end of deference and the slow struggle for equalities. Nothing about that could be scripted or minutely directed.
​
It's good to run an education system with strong quality assurance. Taxpayers and parents alike should expect schools to be good. I think they probably expect teachers to be clever, interesting, highly motivated and effective. If one of my grandchildren chooses to follow the family business, it would be great if they could bring their whole selves into a respected and valued profession.    
  
CR
28.2.24

I reminded year 8 pointlessly that I was retiring this year. One stopped me later on the stairs, looked deeply into my eyes and shook my hand. ‘Congratulations on your retirement, Miss.’ I thanked him kindly, though his tone was, I felt, unnecessarily sepulchral. ‘Could you remind me where Spanish is?’ I put it to him that now, past the midpoint of the year, he could reasonably be expected to know. ‘Things do slip your mind, though’ he said, mournfully dropping my hand. I felt I’d severally blighted his day. Two year 10s at the block five interchange, however, were ranging globally: ‘But the American economy is a different matter. It affects us all so you can’t say you don’t care.’ That was better. Too right.

Last week a witty and erudite speaker said that the curriculum was the sturdy chassis on which every school journey travels, which I thought was rather good. All right, it was me, but a good image, no? Spanish and business studies, history and PE, maths and drama, the whole boiling gives form to our days and directs our thoughts, young and old, diligent and dilettante. We are rightly obsessed with the curriculum at Tallis.

When I was clawing my way up the greasy pole I spotted that the Curriculum Deputy was the Big Beast. The person who wrote the timetable seemed to have command of time and space and no bright idea from a Head of Department in a hurry could get anywhere without his gracious assent (the ones I knew were all men). In the old days they organised cover as well, so when one of your team fell off the twig you hoped you were in his good books and wouldn’t have to do it all yourself or be sent someone notoriously useless.

I was, of course, mistaking the timetable for the curriculum, despite being obsessed with the curriculum of my own department which I enjoyed writing and explaining to anyone who’d listen. Planning interesting, coherent learning which would be engaging at school and useful to build on in later life is wonderful work. Getting children to think like theologians and philosophers – the stories I could tell. 

I thought I’d never get a Deputy Head post without being able to timetable, however, so badgered the man. He gloomily showed me an runic A3 sheet, so I decided I’d better go on a course. This was a three-day residential in the Lakes, led by a retired DH who also ran air traffic control for Carlisle Airport. It became clear to me within minutes that my mental wiring was unsuited to this particular task and I despaired quietly in a corner.  It didn’t stop me getting a DH post in a school that managed things differently, though. That you don’t need to be able to do everything yourself is useful learning in itself. Trust the experts, keep them close.

Why burden you with this? My first headship was in a school that was in a bit of a state. I decided that rebuilding the curriculum in all areas from first principles, employing quality thinkers and setting the school on the right rails would be all for the good. This wasn’t universally accepted by those who wanted quicker wins: common at the time and remaining so for a long time. The more prescriptive the curriculum and pedagogy from the DfE and the more focused Ofsted became on outcomes, the more likely it was that curriculum = timetable + assessment + results. Content was secondary, assumed.

This partially changed after 2010 and again in 2019. Gove’s curriculum reforms, no matter how crassly conceptualised, did at least put subject learning back in the discussion. Ofsted’s move to inspecting the quality of the curriculum from 2019 forced everyone to think about content, planning, sequencing and real learning, as well as exams. It's turned formulaic, but it’s better than not thinking at all.

Tallis has a great curriculum built on skilled and imaginative teaching, challenging content, engagement and, for many children, good results. We focus on the idea that teachers broker the big ideas of subject learning to young people. Our threshold concepts encourage them to tackle a subject’s infrastructure and to learn to think like scientists, mathematicians, artists, designers and philosophers. Nonetheless, we never really know whether anything stays with learners, to inform their thought processes for the rest of their lives or whether it’s all temporary; like the location of Spanish, things that slip your mind.

But what about the exams? Is good learning more important or good results? What is the priority? Obviously, a combination of both. But embedding a concept, even a fact in a child’s brain is a complex procedure that has to begin with them really understanding it. I scraped through my university final paper in New Testament Greek by learning the passages off by heart so I could recognise them, but I didn’t understand the language. It wasn’t learning in any real sense.

Our education system still hasn’t found the right balance between learning and exams. Partly, yawn, how many times have you had to endure me saying this, it’s because we don’t know what education is for. But I think it’s also because we don’t have any real longitudinal studies that measure the effectiveness of different approaches.  Perhaps the Education Endowment Foundation, upon which much policy depends, will generate that in years to come, but research depends on the measuring of different approaches and it is very risky for a school to try another way. It may not even be legitimate.   
                            
Two better speakers than me last week debated this in front of a rapt audience. Is it ever right to take risks with children’s learning, to try untested methods? One said yes, how else would we learn and develop for the better?  The other said absolutely not – children only get one shot at exams and they need teaching that’s proved to work.  Perhaps the answer depends on your view of education: is it an academic discipline or a public sector target delivery mechanism? What happens if experiments go wrong? What happens if the system goes wrong? Given that children are always the winners or losers in the long or short term, shouldn’t we know more?

Whatever the answer, we need thinkers and quality teachers to build onto the sturdy chassis, not just for a trundle through the inevitable, but a smooth, high quality journey to the best destination. Our young people need us to get this right, not just for school but for their lives as reflective human beings. It takes thinking to help people to want to understand the world and change it for the better.    

​CR
9.2.24

I was part of a panel at a leadership gig this week, offering punditry on teacher recruitment and retention and its link to school culture. Obviously, I speak from experience and hunch, not with any research behind me. I can tell people how we set about it here and whether that appears to be successful or not. If we only knew what success is.

There was a chap from one of the thinktanks beside me. He must have known a bit about the research but would only commit himself to saying that we’ll get and keep teachers if we pay them more. Duh. The Pundit’s Code required me to say ‘yes, obvs [but we’re here for 45 minutes] so here’s a few other thoughts’. On reflection, perhaps we should have, hall and all, sat in silence for the duration in protest. Maybe we should all refuse to join in any further discussion until the tenners start rolling back in? I’m not sure the government care enough about our opinion to make that a stance worth taking. 

So I held forth on subject-based CPD, attempting honest and open leadership, communication, humane relationships, reliable systems and a bit of give and take. Most of all, on treating teachers like the adults they are and allowing the respect due to their scholarship. Which leads me inexorably back to the time and money trope you’ve had before. Cash-strapped institutions who spend most of their (public) money on people are exhorted to sweat their assets, as another pundit coarsely put it. If you increase productivity, you need fewer people so you save money.

The problem with learning, from teaching reception number bonds to ten, through algebra and poetry to finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, is that real productivity depends on the immeasurable and imponderable. Educators of all kinds need time to think, research and experiment. It's hard to know how many of the things we do in school actually improve children’s learning, as opposed to their examinable knowledge. We don’t test them in their mid-twenties or forties to see how much of it has stuck and what practical use it’s been, to prosperity or happiness of the individual or society.

On my way to the tube I was mildly inconvenienced by two school parties. One was a primary school, charmingly arranging themselves up an escalator with great pleasure. The other was a group of – I reckon – year nines in the middle of town. They were enjoying a reasonably orderly saunter despite the clipboard chap at the back shepherding them exasperatedly, like a six foot border collie in a mountain jacket. ‘Get a move on, will you? We haven’t got all day, we’ll be late.’ I picture the politicians in the Department a bit like that, obsessed with their legacy, hassling schools into frenetic, misguided priorities. Or perhaps that shows my age: nine Secretaries of State in nine years doesn’t suggest they’re remotely bothered.

Which take me back to number one on the list of blogs I imposed on you last time. It’s the vision for an education system that we lack. We have mechanisms and expectations. We even have processes and evaluations, but they’re all feeble because we don’t know what we want. Coughing loudly and shouting ‘look over there instead’ we devise cheap ways of measuring the blindingly obvious without managing to turn our heads towards the bigger, difficult and expensive questions. 

American philosopher Michael Sandel has been kindly reading me his book Justice. He develops an argument about the difference between what’s right and what’s good, the impossibility of neutrality in deciding big issues and the importance of narrative in the choices people make. I thought about it all the way home and much of the night.  Outcomes-focused judgements about schools are based on what’s right for children inside this funding envelope, and, perhaps, their right to an education that sets them on the path to adult life in this society. But it's not about what constitutes a good education. That would be a vast and difficult discussion leading to education costs of a different dimension to the current provision. If we really wanted schools to be models for a better society and centres of learning and human development we’d never run them like we do. Schools would be palaces, and expert teachers, trained for years, paid hugely more than we do now.

You’d expect me to have been fascinated by the Michaela prayer controversy which is really interesting for precisely the reasons above. Banning religion in school is superficially very attractive. Schools that are not faith-based, like society, are expected to be neutral about religion. In order to give religions equal status, its way easier to ban ‘em all than to actually tussle with them. But religion is part of the human experience and children go through phases of faith development. A religious teenager may cling to the identity that religion offers as part of adolescent self-understanding. Schools need to be aware of that and try to help them think through their beliefs, in the context of what it takes to build a better world.

Prayer needs to be facilitated and supervised so that thinking and developing process can happen in the safe space that is school, not driven underground, or out in the yard, or forced into oppositional demonstration. Doing prayer properly in a secular school takes time, money and sustained thought. It can go wrong in many different ways, but so can maths. Enabling young people to think about their deepest motivations is part of school. We can’t get away with banning whatever is inconvenient and skating furiously over thin ice, like the Austerlitz scene in the new Napoleon film. It doesn’t end well.    
     
We need to work hard, collectively, on what constitutes a good education. Without vision the people perish and children are particularly badly served. How can we describe what we value and hope for in the swirling joy of schools? How can we tell the story so that it is impossible for a civilised nation not to fund it properly? How can we actually understand the world, and change it for the better?

I’m not done with this. So much for the tidy list!
 
CR
26.1.24

If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times, years begin in September in schools. But I hadn’t told you I was retiring then so you’ll have to bear with me. Starting back for the last time at the start of the year was odd, as was all the Christmassy stuff. But once you’re into January the school year’s nearly half over and now it all seems very real.

January always has an odd feeling. We usually start back suddenly with little fuss after the excitements of the season. This year the jolt of return was mitigated by the shape of the holiday, but its always cold and dark and prone to exams. Tension for some and confusion for others. I was overwhelmed this week this year, on my perch on the block 4 stairs, by the responsibility of getting the children back and settled, being stable and resourceful for them and – more practically - keeping them warm. Which, as I write, we are managing to do.

So – January - I thought to myself – these blogs will run out soon. What shall I write about in the time remaining?  (I pause to allow jubilation among patient readers who now see the light at the end of an eleven-year tunnel and allow themselves cautious pre-rejoicement at liberation to read more useful things from September. Got that out of your system?)

I chartered a course back to my berth at 1511a to write a list, but was temporarily diverted by a football. I’d heard it bouncing indoors contra to local byelaws and despite poor directional hearing pursued it. I read it, if not the Riot Act, certainly the Footballs in Languages Corridors, Prohibitions and Restrictions Thereto Ordinance, and it vanished into the recommended carrier bag. Further distracted by asking the local statisticians if it is true that only 5% of children nationally with under 90% attendance in years 10 and 11 get 5 GCSEs including English and Maths, I embarked on the note to self.

It's twenty-seven weeks until the end of term. Removing four weeks of hols, that’s twenty-three, so maybe a dozen blogs. Currently my list looks like this:

• Vision for the education system and the future
• Vision in schools
• Subjects, content and a broad and balanced curriculum
• Teachers
• Education and social mobility and social justice
• The genus and genius of school governors
• Behaviour and zero tolerance
• Uniform
• Safeguarding and mental health
• Progress, learning, exams and results
• Accountability and inspection
• Funding and government
• Ethics and what kind of people are we
• Comprehensive schools as models for a better world
• SEND
• Competition between schools

Does that cover it?

There was a game in the 90s we used to pass the time on long journeys. I think it started on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on Radio 4. Called ‘One More Ninja’, you had to add it to the front of a title of another film or play or book to general hilarity. One More Ninja On Golden Pond. One More Ninja Barbie (or Oppenheimer). One More Ninja Frozen. How we laughed. Looking at the list above, you could do something similar. Being kind, you could add ‘What the government has done about’ to all of the above. Being exasperated you could have ‘How the government has turned ………….. into [something unrecognisable]’. 

I’m making no promises about sticking to the list, mind. I’ve the attention span of a gnat and can be…Oh did I say? The football then reappeared, alone, outside my door, as if seeking refuge. It's currently resting under the table pending further developments.

Later, I was talking to someone just starting a first headship. They were pretty chipper about it all but seemed obsessively worried about parents. Will parents be angry? obstructive? how should I tackle them? all of which surprised me. It seemed to be expecting trouble where none is necessary. Parents, carers, children are human beings too. Try to treat them how you’d like to be treated.  Its not a guarantee of perfection because we all get cross or crass, but it should at least set the tone.  
        
Speaking of which, there was much left to be desired while some parts to be admired in the Shadow Secretary of State’s speech this week. Talking about that sometimes difficult relationship, Bridget Phillipson spoke of

The best gig I ever went to when I was young and didn’t need to go to bed at nine, was in ’84 or ’85 at Loughborough Student’s Union, near to where I lived at the time. Headline: Elvis Costello, supported by the unknown Pogues, whose percussion section was a chap who hit himself on the head with a tin tray. What a night.  So, while I was sorry that Shane McGowan had died I wasn’t necessarily surprised. He had, as the man said, warmed both hands before the fire of life. It did lead to a spirited discussion chez nous on Best Pogues Song. Rainy Night in Soho, Sickbed of Cuchulainn, Billy’s Bones or, obviously, Sally MacLennane. You decide.

But for the last dozen years or so MacGowan has only reminded me of a sad drive on a beautiful day to a memorial service for a Headteacher who’d taken his own life. I was listening to a collection of Irish songs and poems and the matchless little recording of MacGowan reciting Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ came on. It’s a short poem about futility and the future, magically done. Last week it made me think again about Ruth Perry again, but also about time and memory.

Today would have been my grandfather’s birthday. He was born in 1899, a very long time ago, but I remember him clearly and dearly and have a sort of link with the Victorian era because of him. My little grandchildren should live into the 2100s so that’s a whole other era into the future. I’m obviously thinking a lot about past and future at the moment. It’s my last Christmas here at Tallis and as a serving teacher: I won’t do all this stuff again. No Christmas assemblies or jumper days, no school Christmas lunch or staff get-togethers, no writing of hundreds of cards to say thank you at the time of year we think about gifts and human kindness. No need to nag about working right up to the end or bracing ourselves for a short half-term full of mock exams and budget worries to come back to. No more travelling through the dark into silent building with the smell of the Christmas tree scenting the foyer. No more Santa-ing about the place to drop off bits and pieces on the last morning of term.

But the traditions and the life of the school will carry on next year, because time and human life are like that. I’ll be doing something else, but Tallis will do its thing. That’s how great community schools work. The children will be doing their thing too, as they potter and lunge about the place.  

It’s this I’ll miss most of all and am trying to experience every day fully. Overheard this week alone: two boys, context impenetrable: ‘You understand it’s the same day in Australia, don’t you?’. A year thirteen, going into a languages classroom ‘I don’t know any French, not a word’ following two younger souls practising Latin verbs. In another block, another sixth former, entering cheerfully with ‘I hate this classroom with a rare passion’.   

Interestingly, the House of Lords report Requires improvement: urgent change for 11–16 education (parliament.uk) hates the EBacc with a rare passion. This zombie Gove dream is still a headline measure for schools. It’s all but wrecked the notion of a broad and balanced curriculum in many places where people are fearful of judgement or just love compliance. The Lords, bless ‘em, are fed up with it and have issued a cease and desist order in no uncertain terms:

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
 
  
 
 

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:

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

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.

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: