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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

The Morning Rush and Night Ferry

6/6/2024

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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:

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now with the chart.
the ferry at the dock, lit
stern to prow, the next life like a footfall in my heart.
 
CR
6.6.24
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Catastrophic Equilibrium

17/11/2022

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I’m starting to write this before the Autumn Statement, as we may not be able to afford to type afterwards.

A month or so ago I berthed alongside one of the movers and shakers of the pre-Coalition education world. We lamented the present and made helpful suggestions for the future. Unfortunately, none of the recent Secretaries of State for Education were within earshot, but the retro-Scandi décor very much appreciated our wisdom, I felt. At one point he asked ‘Do your teachers call each other Sir and Miss’? I knew what he was driving at.
 
We weren’t talking about the semi-formal way a pair of teachers might refer to one another while talking to children – as in ‘Sir told you not to reproduce the Rokeby Venus on the corridor wall, didn’t he?’ to which Sir might respond, in serious tones, ‘Indeed I did, Miss, and I checked he understood that Spanish Golden Age is next term, not this.’ I’m talking about conversations without children, but where the child-facing persona seeps into ordinary professional conversations. ‘Did you bring the year 11 predictions, Ms, and what are you going to do about them?’ ‘I did, Sir, and have many innovative plans’.

It's quicker than names, of course. School life is brisk and I can see that Mr Fotherington-Thomas talking to Ms Potter-Pirbright might take up more time than anyone has left, but they could be Clive and Gert behind closed doors without frightening the horses. What my interlocutor sought was further evidence of the creeping infantilisation of teachers. He had a hunch that leaders insist on teachers calling each other Sir and Miss as part of a focus on ‘professionalism’ which is anything but.

I wrote a piece for the trade press last week in which I discussed this in a slightly less abstruse way. I won’t rehearse it here, but it was about government support for a particular brand of online learning, whether that meant that online learning was being proposed as a solution to the crippling national teacher shortage, and whether that meant that teachers as a species of skilled scholars with a deep intellectual hinterland is further endangered. Will cheap and easy solutions lead to cheapened education planning? Autumn statement notwithstanding, the answer mustn’t be yes.

Anyway, as the gods of Blackheath Hill decreed that my driving needed attention, I found myself on a Speed Awareness Course. I must say that it was excellent, especially when the facilitator led the ten of us to a point of action-planning our new lives as safer drivers. He didn’t quite call it that, but he forced (enabled) us to tackle our habits thuswise:
  1. This is the problem…..
  2. It might be caused by….
  3. I could fix it by…..
  4. Why might that not work?.....
  5. To help my plan I will…..
 
Isn’t that fabulously clear? Google offers me a 46-page guide to action planning that the NHS uses, even my own goes on a bit, but any decent plan covers the same ground. So, if we apply this to the matter in hand:

  1. The problem is that we don’t have enough teachers
  2. This might be caused by low salaries compared to other postgraduate professionals and an unreasonable expectation to solve all the nation’s ills all day every day
  3. We could fix it by funding education better so that we train teachers properly and give Clive and Gertie time to think and refresh their training, as professionals do
  4. Why might that not work? Because we hold children in little value in the UK. We refuse to fund the education system properly so everything we do, we do cheaply. This treats Sir and Miss like children or expendable units, so they leave.
  5. To help the plan we should fund the education system in a way that treats teachers as part of the solution rather than the problem, attracts and retains high-quality teachers, supports and develops our young people and builds up the nation’s life. My shaker and I don’t think this is unreasonable.
 
I note as I finish that, according to the BBC, J Hunt has pledged £2.3bn, for education. I’m not sure that’s a big number and I don’t know how much of it has already been announced or promised. More on this next time.
 
Hunt’s done whatever he’s done as part of a government running a country in what Gramsci called a state of catastrophic equilibrium, where everything is simultaneously failing and stable, where things can’t carry on but nevertheless must, year after year. That’s where we are in schools. He needs to have done enough to tip the balance back towards equilibrium from collapse, but it needs more than that to educate a people, to save the future.
 
CR
17.11.22
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An Epilogue with Goats

15/5/2022

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On the day when ninety-one thousand civil service jobs were declared superfluous and a Russian tank battalion sank in the Sivertsy Donets we had our leavers’ assemblies. Shirt-signing in the yard and a big group photo, then into the hall. Frankly, I’d expected better weather. Some have been wearing sunhats for weeks, entirely unnecessarily. Anyway, the vibe was happy and this year’s fashion included shirts with golden names stuck on the back and some seemingly bespoke for the purpose of signing.

It's not the first time we’ve ever done these assemblies, but the echoes of Covid ring loud and long. While I was listening to the end of Ms taking leave of her year group, I was transported back two years, to a hastily-cobbled-together assembly in March 2020 to say goodbye to year 11 because lockdown was beginning and school was closing, suddenly. I felt quite queasy. 

The day itself isn’t like leavers’ days of old. We don’t do lengthy study leave any more and this one was put in to mark the transition from the ordinary timetable to the exam prep sessions adjacent to the big days. The very do itself today abutted the first external exam just after lunchtime. Timing was key but the gods of Friday 13th will have their fun and we had a total AV and IT collapse at the very assembly when slideshows and photomontages with emotional soundtracks are de rigeur. Doughty Ms and her team had to busk while technicians of all kinds clustered around and eventually a trolley, like a mobile ICU, was rushed in. The careful dovetailing - getting Year 11 out so Year 13 can get in – all went to pot. I intervened and moved the boundaries. Everyone was supportive. Children of all ages and sizes had a lovely time. See you on Monday, exams are upon us.

Today, their tutors praised them and reminisced publicly. Some sang, some rapped, all gave awards – for character, and Goats. Goats were new to me as I don’t mix with sporting types, but it pleases me as an acronym and it worked for the tutors. Greatest Of All Time at….arguing, football, falling off chairs, organising, saying hello to everyone, looking after new people, keeping the peace, being tannoyed for, speaking the truth without fear or favour, looking good…. while Sir and Ms blinked back the tears.

These young people have had such a rocky time. We were interviewed by the BBC for a piece to go out on Monday about the return of exams, so I had seven in the Sports Hall yesterday pretending to sit at exam desks (‘Quick! No! Get tidier ones out!’). They all spoke urbanely and calmly about their preparation and how they’re feeling. Ready, but anxious. Who knew? The Beeb may have wanted something more hysterical, but we’re too cool for that. As the soundtrack to one of the slideshows today said:

Feeling my way through the darkness
Guided by a beating heart
I can't tell where the journey will end
But I know where to start
​

I think they do. I hope they do. But the world they navigate is more difficult than it used to be and harder than it needs to be. Our national discourse is polarised and unreasonable and no one cares about the example that sets young people. Measured argument is rare, and the things the adolescent brain likes – a laugh, a bold insight, a new fact, a bit of outrage – have run riot like knotweed. It takes real commitment and determination to want to see the full scope of an issue, to want to create a thoughtful, reasoned view without being ridiculed, to resist the superficial, the easy answers.  It’s so hard when you’re young and don’t know anything else.

Today would have been my grandmother’s 121st birthday, but, obviously, she isn’t around to blow out what would be an impressive range of candles. She was a clever girl from a modest background who became a teacher. She used to quote poetry and I think I first heard Masefield’s Epilogue with her Geordie accent. It's not a piece I recite to children because they might think I’m making personal remarks, which we’re stamping out at Tallis. But it’s what I thought of today when I watched six hundred young people emerge from the hall, rubbing their eyes in the sudden sunlight and wondering what will happen next.

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

CR
13.5.22
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On the need to dig deeper

12/6/2021

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Three small boys rushed me with a request. ‘Can we start our own club?’ I said it depended on the topic. ‘Japanese Culture’. ‘Manga?’, ‘No, Japanese Culture generally’. I declared in favour with the all-purpose answer ‘Talk to your Head of Year’. Their leader commanded ‘All eyes on Rawlings’ as they charged off. Arigato gozaimasou.

Boys are in the news with the ghastly OFSTED report (as in, a report on a ghastly matter rather than the other thing) into sexual harassment in schools. HMCI was pursued by the Today programme this week on the lines of ‘why haven’t you tackled this before?’ but to be fair to the clipboards, they are at the mercy of Sanctuary Buildings, whom we know to be a bit slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, my Westminster correspondent saw the Secretary of State in the street again at the end of May, customarily laden with bags, describing him as looking like a man about to take the last ferry out. As you would be if your catch-up plan lay in ridicule and tatters and your Tsar had abdicated.

The problem with tackling sexual harassment in schools isn’t having rules and issuing punishments but hearing about the problems to start with. Young women expect that the world will treat them shabbily and therefore put up with outrageous impositions on their persons and emotions. They look upon it as normal to be prodded and put upon, they think they should accept that physical and mental assaults are normal. The report talks about girls being sent dozens of requests for nude pictures and getting dozens of foul nude pictures from boys and men every day. Yet young women are more empowered, more up-front, more determined to stamp out inequity then ever before.  How did we arrive at a position where these irreconcilables co-exist?

Ofsted’s report has recommendations for schools, partners and government:

Schools should create a culture where sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are not tolerated, and where they identify issues and intervene early to better protect children and young people.  They should assume that sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are happening in their setting, even when there are no specific reports, and put in place a whole-school approach to address them.
This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

All of this is important and true and we’ll try to do all of it, but schools can’t turn the tide alone. Violent coercive behaviour towards women is not new, and I wrote last time about the tsunami of pornography that overwhelms our young. Whom does that serve?

And yet, I read in the news today about another school that’s banned skirts. I’m interested in this kind of thing, as long-term readers know to their cost. Banning skirts, on the face of it, could be a liberating act to remove oppressive gender norms from a community. Tell me more, I thought.

Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, the school has banned skirts because ‘members of the public’ have contacted them to complain. Staff are included in complaints, apparently. The usual sorts of words are used: the need for appropriate schoolwear, of appropriate length adding up to appropriate workplace attire. What?

I was reading Hilary Mantel’s essays in the Lake District sun last week. In one, she takes issue with a writer, saying,
"You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares."

I think that about ‘appropriate’. Appropriate schoolwear is clothes that don’t prevent children from learning and rushing about in the sun, that wash easily, dry quickly and don’t break the bank. Appropriate length, is a skirt that’s not going to trip you up on the stairs. Appropriate workplace attire is – well, who knows? It depends on the workplace: what’s appropriate in a blast furnace might be odd in a tea shop. But what business is what children wear to the man in the street?

We are obsessed with surface solutions. Do girls in schools feel sexually oppressed? Send OFSTED to inspect it. Some witchfinder general thinks that skirts are too short – ban skirts. Really? When will we start a discussion about freedom to co-exist peacefully, without prejudice, fear and oppression?

A young woman dropped by to read me a poem. It was about her struggles and triumph and about her determination to make a mark on the world and change it for the better. Perhaps she’ll start the serious global conversation about the mindset change needed to set girls free. I wouldn’t put it past her. I hope we’ve prepared her.
 
CR
11.6.21
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Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

29/6/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Part 1: Thursday 25 June
You were spotted in SW1 earlier this week and the fieldman’s report (I’m reading Le Carré) classified you as ‘preoccupied’. I’m not surprised. I feared for your state of mind before the current shenanigans began and I can’t imagine what it’s like navigating the corridors of power with your colleagues. Seeing them on the telly requires nerves of steel.

Unlike watching us! Tallis was on the box on Monday. BBC London came and filmed a newly-regathered half A-level Psychology class, interviewed Mr Smith, four thoughtful youths and me. They said that being back helped focus their minds: I said that having no children was scrambling mine but that the 2m rule would need to be gone – and all the bubble talk – before we could reassemble.

So we plugged the gogglebox in the dining room in on Tuesday lunchtime to watch the PM forecast the future. Social distancing meant those at the reception end needed binoculars, but never mind, I had a front seat. Good news: everyone back to school in September! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear and I tried to encourage moderate cheering. Some HTs are worried about the detail, but I’m sure you have it all under control. In fact, my pavement artist (Le Carré again) said it looked as though it was all in your bag.   
 
Perhaps one of those bright young things who nip around ministers fore and aft could sort it out a bit for you, though? Headteachers are fussy and we like things to be clear. It would be great to see which rules we have to follow in school, which are optional, which just occurred to a front-bencher while they were cleaning their teeth, which have been abandoned, which denied and which are ideas being road-tested before becoming policy which may never be heard of again. My primary colleagues, blessings on their tiny furniture, were certainly shocked this week to be told that 2m in school had never been a rule for them. Are you sure? 

And what about this rumour afloat that the exams might be pushed back a few weeks next year to maximise teaching time. That’s partially a good idea – but oh my, wouldn’t it have been better to test it out below decks before musing from the bridge? Now everyone’s asking about it and no one has the foggiest.

And without wishing to reopen a wound, since The Drive To Barnard Castle the whole cabinet’s seaworthiness is questionable, like a teacher who lost control of a class in October but has to survive until July. Was he worth it?    

Mr Williamson, I’ve been thinking about exams too, nursing a fond hope that the experience of this year might usher in a better future. Why have GCSEs at all?  Why not base the 16-year-olds’ passport on teacher assessment, moderated in the way this year’s will be, properly evaluated and monitored by nerdy subject-based inspectors who really know their stuff? That’s who Her Majesty’s Inspectors were before Ofsted was invented. Wouldn’t it be great to liberate learning by dispensing with GCSE? Wouldn’t it be great if year 11 marked their transition without the examination hall as the rite of passage? Remember, it only remotely works for two thirds of them.

Like the hapless October teacher we’re not very good at some kinds of learning so we end up having to keep promising the same changes time and again. I took two years out of teaching before I had my children and worked as a Community Relations Officer in the midlands. The 80s were a time of disturbance in Birmingham and London which resulted in a significant amount of Home Office funding for projects to tackle the racism and social exclusion. Most of the focus was on anti-racism training for individuals, but we understood about institutionalised racism and encouraged institutions to scrutinise their processes to combat it. Fifteen years later there was the McPherson Report. Now, twenty years after that, ten years after the Public Sector Equality Duty, where are we, exactly? And how can any government mired in the Windrush depatriations and the Hostile Environment be believed?

I saw a photo in the paper of a novel idea in a Chinese school to keep small-ish children apart. They had very serious expressions for persons in purple paper wings but it just goes to show that children will accept anything as normal if an adult tells them so. Children will believe a lie if someone they trust tells it. That’s why we have to tell them the truth and that’s why we can’t keep fobbing them off with change tomorrow.

Education, equality and justice are really hard to get right. Your Shadow has fallen today. You’re picking your way, Mr Williamson, through very difficult circumstances and you don’t look very steady on your own feet. Tell us the truth, talk to us and trust us and we can rebuild something righteous and grand, together.

Yours, at some distance.
 
Carolyn Roberts
26.6.20 
3 Comments

Sorry

18/10/2015

1 Comment

 
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My Apologies

​Cultural notes 1: we had Radio 3 and the BBC Concert Orchestra live from Tallis launching the 10 Pieces secondary project. 21 young people played with the orchestra and the jazz group did their cool stuff. Potential highlight of the year and it's only October? Notes 2: theatre lovers are too late to go see Rob Brydon in Future Conditional at the Old Vic, remarkable because it doesn't put a foot wrong about education. Admissions, snobbery, state v private, teacher workload, culture and learning all covered sensibly. There's a wonderful section where teacher Brydon is compelled to write an apology to a parent and muses aloud about what he's sorry for. Sorry about the mother's life and the failure of hopes and dreams, sorry about the state of the world and the injustices of society, sorry about what a child seems doomed to turn into. ​
We've been apologising at Tallis this week. Year 7 had local history walks  last week (not all at once, you understand, that would be lunacy) and a group was remarked upon. On investigation, it seemed they had overheated with the sheer excitement of being out together for the first time and had not matched behaviour to venue. This kind of thing brings the sky down on a class. Form tutor, head of year, assistant head and I expressed shock and outrage. The hapless eleven year olds were packed off to reform their characters and compose letters of apology, each according to the vocabulary, shame and imagination available. 

The letters were wonderful. Deep and specific. Guilt was confessed and forgiveness begged. All apologised unreservedly. Several wrote about letting the school down and one pleaded that our august institution wouldn't be judged by 'this tragedy'. We corrected the spelling and posted them. Sorry. 

Apology is one end of accountability. Sometimes things go wrong despite our best efforts. Sorry it didn't work, sorry we did one thing and not another, sorry we made a choice that turned out to be wrong. Sorry we couldn't make something happen, sorry we ran out of money. Sorry doesn't put it right, but it oils the wheels of forward progress. And it can unnerve. Passing through the lunch queue last week I bumped into (sorry) a year 11 character and asked how she was. "Oh, you know, tired cold hungry stressed out, all of the above." I apologised and she had to laugh. "You're not going to do anything about it, though, are you?" I told her she'd feel better after lunch and that she should keep me informed. She said she liked hearing northern people talking, so I laughed too. Tired cold hungry is sorted out by a school dinner, and the stress might be a good thing depending on the work rate of the youth under advisement. But I'm sorry if its bad stress and I'm sorry if the system doesn't allow you to make mistakes and ends up commodifying you by unpredictable exam results. I note that when we had 31 GCSE results in one subject upgraded by re-mark no one apologised to us or the children. 

Back on the history walk, we had a whale of a time. An ancient philanthropic foundation, First World War shelling, Second World War shrapnel, Saxon mounds, Henry 8th and a brief history of time at the meridian. I brought up the rear so kind souls dropped back to keep me company. One has an ingrowing toenail, another's brother is frightened of squirrels. One used the walk as a recruitment event for scouting "We sleep in tents! We make our own meals! We crawl through mud!" One's worried about his Nan and another's Dad's a window cleaner (a cold job). Some didn't have jumpers on, some were equipped to accompany Fiennes to the pole. We dawdled and rushed as required and were sheepdogged by an irrepressible Head of Department. We rather swamped a bus but gave up our seats and got in everyone's way. Sorry for being young and foolish, cheerful and mildly ridiculous. 

Back in class, I finish the lesson with The News. What's going on, people? Someone said: black people are 3 times as likely to be tasered as white. A parent's opinion was proffered but that didn't satisfy us. I won't quickly forget the anxious and bewildered looks on children's faces as we failed to resolve it. I'm sorry that's the news. 

​And I'm sorry that the other news is about grammar schools. Sorry that David Willets' magisterial 2007 speech on the "overwhelming evidence that academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it" is (in his own words) like light from a dead star.  Sorry that other schools will have to deal with the anxious and bewildered self-reproach of failed poor 11 year olds. Sorry we prefer prejudice to evidence. 

CR

​15.10.15
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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115    E: [email protected]
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