I love a bit of advice. Following it is an entirely different matter but hearing it is interesting. Even annoying advice can be diverting, and the kind that makes you put on a cross-eyed face and bang your head on the table often makes a good story once you’ve had a cup of tea.

Its Open Day season, so the BBC – whose mission is to inform, educate and entertain – have combined all three kinds of advice in their Family and Education news page item School open days: eight things to look for. They ask ‘How can parents get behind the glossy prospectuses and slick presentations and decide whether this is the school for their child?’ Advice is given by three notables: former Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw; General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders Geoff Barton; and acting Chief of the organisation Parentkind, the umbrella group for PTAs and similar, Michelle Doyle Wildman. They don’t always agree. 

I thought I’d put a Tallis take on the tips in the hope of being helpful. We have Open Evening next week and then a weekly opportunity to come and see us at work on Tuesday mornings. For the record, our prospectus is matt not glossy, and slick would be accidental. We aim for honest and hope you also get engaging!
 
BBC Tip 1: Quiz those handpicked pupils who show you around
‘Handpicked’ suggests we send you round school with only the cleanest and shiniest students who’ve been trained up to say particular and positive things. On Open Evening we ask for volunteers, from children whose attendance and behaviour deserve recognition. On Open Mornings, however, we’ll dragoon a whole class or more to take people round. The only children we don’t use are those who are too shy to talk to strangers – and even then sometimes we pair them up so you might get a silent and loquacious duo. No one has a script. They say what they think is important and answer your questions honestly. If they make stuff up, we have no way of knowing. Adults wait at the return point, and you can ask for interpretation then if your guide has befuzzled you.  

Sir M says ‘ask them about progress since primary schools and if they’re in sets or mixed-ability classes.’ It sounds as though he has a view on the superiority of the former over the latter, for which there is no evidence. We’ll tell you about class organisation in our talk. Asking children how they think they’re doing is a sensible idea, though some year 7s will be going over previous learning – especially in maths – to check it hasn’t fallen out of their heads since the SATs. 
 
BBC Tip 2: Ask to go to the toilet
You’re very welcome to go to the loo at Tallis. Geoff Barton says that ‘the toilets pupils use say a lot about a school’s values’ and that is also true. Be our guest.   
 
BBC Tip 3: Bring your child
Of course. Michelle Doyle Wildman says ‘Gauge their reaction, let the visit sink in’ rather than asking what they think straight away. Can I be honest? Choosing a school is a parent’s job. Children know too little about anything to make an informed choice. Of course, if a child declares he won’t eat or sleep if he has to go to Gasworks High and you think Bog Standard Comp is just as good, that’s a reasonable discussion. Don’t let your child make what you think is a bad choice. It’s not fair on them, and it will lead to endless unhappy conflict between school, parents and child.   
 
BBC Tip 4: Listen to the HT speech
Well hello there. What a rare treat that will be. Naturally the Head will educate, inform and entertain with matchless erudition, learning and good sense. I’m unscripted, but we always talk about children’s experience and our hope to fulfil our aim of education to understand the world and change it for the better.

Sir M says ‘leadership is everything in a school…... make sure he or she talks about progress and outcomes and is the sort of person and personality that will drive the school forward’. I’m not sure that leadership is everything. Leaders have to provide the conditions for success, but a good school is a good school because everyone there believes in it and works to make it better.

We will talk about progress and achievement at our Open Evening but the structure of the new system means that we might not have our GCSE Progress 8 result before the day. That result shows how well we’ve done compared to all other schools. I’ll tell you the scores, but they are a bit meaningless without comparison. I’ll also tell you what we’re working on and what we’re proud of, and what our priorities for the year are. I may mention in passing that we got 7 young people into Oxford and Cambridge this year, 2 into Central St Martin’s and 180 into university. I well may.

It’s rare that results are the biggest issue for prospective year 7 parents, to be honest. We’re more likely to be asked about the curriculum, happiness and the prevalence or absence of bullying. That’ll be why Michelle Doyle Wildman says ‘is the school taking a whole-child approach or is it more focused on the academic achievement? That’s a nuance you want to get in this process of looking at schools’.

Two different bits of advice there, folks. At Tallis, we’re whole-child-focused. We don’t look on children as output or yield for the good of the school, and we believe that school is where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizens. We want to help them become rounded, self-regulating, kind and useful people. We want them to be well qualified, but we don’t judge the worth of a child by her potential exam results.   
 
BBC Tip 5: Ask tough questions
We like that. Ask away. Sir M says they should be about progress, strategies, interventions, provision for underachievers and destinations. Ask us anything.  
 
BBC Tip 6: Take a good look at the teachers
Geoff Barton says that the teachers ‘should look like a corporate body, welcoming and keen to talk about the school’. I’m wary of corporate looks, so you won’t find us in matching outfits, but we will be welcoming and talk about Tallis until you beg us to stop.

Sir M says ‘Do they look professional? Do they look like teachers? Are they well turned-out?’ What does a teacher look like? My mother and grandmother were both teachers – is that what they look like? Tweed jackets? M&S Suits? Knee-length skirt and sensible shoes? Heels and a silk scarf? A good teacher has a glittering eye and can’t stop talking about the wonders of the subject. He or she may be slightly unkempt from running fingers through hair for a large part of the day. Or damp round the edges from yard duty. Or covered in paint, sawdust, or whiteboard grime. Or carrying piles of books. Or in a tracksuit. It’s whether they seize and hold your attention that’s important. Look out for that.

Sir M says – ask about ‘unfilled teaching vacancies and the number of temporary or supply teachers’? That’s a good question in an obvious way. We have hardly any: 3 temporary teachers out of a force of 120. One of those is covering a maternity leave. Does that count? Another is a bit of extra staffing we put in just in case. Another is in a subject area of serious national shortage. 

There are 40,000 fewer teachers than we need in our school system. If a school has loads of temporary or supply teachers it might be because it isn’t a good place to work, but it’s more likely to be because there simply aren’t enough teachers. That’s a national scandal, not one school’s fault.    
 
BBC Tip 7: Visit again at home-time
If you like being surrounded by hundreds, even thousands of teenagers then home-time is just the place for you. If you are of a more timid disposition, you might want to watch from a distance. Sir M says is ‘uniform still worn properly, whether they’re congregating outside fast-food outlets misbehaving..…are there staff outside the school?’ All those are good to see, but schools are not police and the amount of time we can spend outside school supervising the streets is limited. At Tallis we enforce a curfew point at the Dover Patrol shops at 1600, but after that it is reasonable to expect parents to take responsibility for their offspring’s whereabouts.
 
BBC Tip 8: Write the date on your calendar
This may fall into the category of cross-eyed face and banging head on table. Of course you would.
 
We hope you come to see us next week and at other points if you would like to. We hope you find us engaging and interesting. We hope you’d entrust your child to us. Most of all, we hope you find us honest and humane partners in the crucial business of raising our children together. Welcome to Tallis!
 
CR
20.9.18

I return to the Tallis Hug. For new readers, this quite a feature. Students here hug each other desperately as if waving goodbye to an émigré, when they part for a lesson. They hug when they reconvene in sheer relief that the loved one is safely returned to whichever draughty part of concourse or canteen is home. This is inexplicable to the northerner for whom a raised eyebrow is an embarrassingly gushing show of affection. And they come pre-programmed. 

Directing canteen traffic in the early hours of the term small child rushed up to me with a story of lost bag, shoes and bus before leaving home, followed by confusion and excitement in school. ‘Now I’m FINE!’ she squeaked. ‘Can I get a hug?’ ‘No!’ I squawked, rearranging her outstretched arms and backing into a dinner lady. ’We don’t do that here!’  Which, as explained above, is patently untrue. What I meant was - you’ll find plenty people to hug here, but not adults and certainly not me. The exuberance of youth. 

In telling this rocket-propelled putative hugger something about the Tallis way I was – rather magnificently – following my own instructions. My theme for the year is Tallis as usual. We don’t want to invent any new ways of doing things this year, just to do everything we already do better, and more consistently. That’s not to say that we won’t have some creatively eccentric new ways of teaching, but we want our running procedures to be reliable, predictable and better.

Which subtle segue leads me into the general state of our education system. Not enough money, 40 000 fewer teachers that we need, exam system that can’t bear the weight put on it, financial scandals etc etc. My solution to most worries is reading so I’ve just finished Melissa Benn’s Life Lessons. Benn is a tireless campaigner for community comprehensive schools but in this little piece she also turns her attention to the state of adult education and the universities, as well as schools, proposing a National Education Service. (Before you reach for the pen to report me to the Secretary of State for contravention of Staffing and Advice for Schools September 2018 para 5:33 (expressing political views) this is not quite the same as the one that Labour talked about a bit at some point.)  It’s well worth reading, not least for this.

One of the things we often say at Tallis is that the comprehensive dream is a vision every bit as precious as the NHS, and every bit as complicated. Model communities of local young people taught with expertise and equity is a blueprint for a better society. There are other barriers, mind, and I’ll talk about my next reading book, Robert Verkiak’s Posh Boys next time. 

Reading was on the agenda in year 7 assembly too. ‘Reading makes you kinder’ said Ms R. ‘You all need to read more’.  Perhaps the year 11 boy who bizarrely told Sir in English that he wouldn’t need English after leaving school could be persuaded that he might need kindness? Not that the conversation I had with Sir didn’t have its odd turns.  It was in discussing the choice of poetry for GCSE that he gave me the title of this piece. Which poems would you rather read?

We are committed to love at Tallis in that we are committed to kindness and service. Part of that is to be reliable, predictable and better. War and love, love and service, expertise and equity, creativity and eccentricity: Tallis as usual, hold us to our promises.
 
CR
13.9.18

Ahoy there from the good ship Tallis. The crew are aboard and ready to sail tomorrow: I thought you’d be interested to know which flags we’re hoisting for the 2018-19 voyage?

I can’t actually go any further with this image. I like a nautical vision, but lack the knowledge to back it up. I know there’s a flag combination that says ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instructions immediately’ which is just the kind of thing that Headteachers like. I might have it made into a hat.

How were the results? Sixth form first. We’re pleased with them, and have got a bumper crop into university, art college and onto apprenticeships. Seven into Oxford and Cambridge and 2 into Central St Martins, lots of others on really competitive courses, into sought-after universities and where they wanted to go. We enrolled nearly 280-ish into year 12, which is jolly nice.

GCSE is hard to tell until we get our nationally-determined progress score in September. We hope to improve on last year’s. Some areas did super-well, some improved, some still need to improve, some were hit by misfortune.    We have a plan for all of it. Jane Austen wisely warns that Pride and Prejudice doesn’t give a description of the geography of Derbyshire and similarly this blog doesn’t go into detail about results. Look on our website for more. 

We have 18 new teachers (our total teaching force is about 120) and 22 new support staff and we all know each other now. Some works needed doing over the holidays which were done and some which weren’t done. We hit a PFI-related contractual problem with getting some ICT upgrades to classrooms and we’re sorry about that. I’ll keep you informed. There’s lots of shiny new paint about, some of it on me.

Yesterday we met as a staff and looked at the things we stand for, what we believe and how we try to do them.  Our Leadership Group is one smaller so we explained how the roles are shared out. We remembered that we want our young people to use our habits and be inquisitive, collaborative, persistent, disciplined and imaginative.  We committed ourselves again to our characteristics of being kind, fair, honest, respectful and optimistic. I talked about the work I’ve been doing on ethical leadership and the public service values of selflessness, honesty, openness, objectivity, integrity, accountability and leadership. I committed us to the ethical leadership virtues of trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. And we remembered how to use the data-collection system and met some of the PTFA. Curriculum teams spent time together planning and sorting.

Today we’ve done nuts-and-bolts stuff on classroom practice and expectations and systems, met as year teams, renewed our safeguarding training and looked again at GPDR. We are martyrs to excitement. New staff have tried to work out our frankly peculiar room numbering system and who everyone is. Planner, postcards, posters and lots of other things beginning with other letters have been gathered and squirreled away. Timetables have been printed and reprinted and all the lunchtime staff had first aid training.

Outside, education storms still buffet us all. We don’t have enough money. I did a phone interview for the Jeremy Vine show about mobile phones. Again. There’s a panic in the press about high rates of exclusion and schools’ internal exclusion methods. There’s panic about off-rolling year 11s, high rates of self-harm and London knife crime. Couldn’t we link those things? Schools without money can’t afford support services to help young people cope with themselves. That’s harder for them because all anyone talks about is results, as if that’s all childhood is for.  Shrinking police numbers and disappearing youth and outreach services leave struggling young people to chance and the market forces of the streets. As a nation we don’t care enough about them to spend enough money on them. But we care enough about Brexit, it seems, to spend our all on it.

And meanwhile the biggest injustice goes unaddressed. What do 22% of shadow cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs and Russell Group university Vice-Chancellors, 43% of newspaper columnists, 44% of the Rich List, 50% of the cabinet and the House of Lords, 55% of Whitehall Permanent Secretaries, 67% of Oscar winners, 71% of senior officers in the armed forces and 74% of senior judges have in common? All privately educated. The 7% keeping its stranglehold on the 93%. How do we fix this?

Storm cones hoisted. Time to understand the world, and change it for the better.
 
CR
4.9.18