Category: Character

Feeling it

21/7/2022

At the beginning of this auspicious Tallis 50 year I undertook to write a daily diary as a record. I expected to generate a pithy epigram or even a lasting aphorism that, taken collectively would sum up what a good big school is like, how the year goes and the seasons change. It would be a magnificent tone poem, a hymn of praise to the comprehensive school in all its glory. I would capture that ineffable ‘feel’ of a school, that thing that happens when you walk in and know what it’s like, within seconds, and want to run a mile or stay forever.

Anyone looking at the diary on the Tallis 50 site will know that I have signally failed in this task. It started off longer and vaguely elegantly worded but has now descended into a sort of gruff telegraphese which those in charge have had to hassle me to finish as I’d lost heart. The best I can hope is that it works in the future as a sort of record of what a school year’s like. The diary – as opposed to the year - is actually not very interesting at all, while being absolutely fascinating in another dimension.

It’s a bit like asking a teenager ‘what did you do at school today?’ and being met with a grunt that means – this stretch of time was important to me. It’s been interesting in a way I’m still processing. You wouldn’t understand, and I’m not sure I do, yet.

The diary was another attempt to encapsulate what good schools do. They breath, they sing, they hum over a sort of heartbeat of their own. They are reliable, solid, steady but also surprising, flexible and a bit unpredictable in the right way. The way other people measure schools is wrong, but the way we measure them is impossibly unpindownable, about character and ethos, yes, but about the feel.

Anyway. Final weeks of term are always showcases for character or characters. Teachers are hauling themselves to that finish line, other staff looking ahead to a tidier new year which, in real terms is minutes away. Children are irritable but vaguely excited.

The added gift this year has been the heatwave, a sure sign of the climate disaster to come, but also similar to the great three-week heat of ’76 when I was in the fourth year (year 10 in old money). I actually don’t remember much about it except a vague disappointment that it didn’t happen the following year when I had more time for it. This week’s heat was extraordinary, and we only had about half the children in school, due to what was, I think, inevitably poor quality government messaging. Our blessed building is large and mostly well ventilated, cool in some parts but too hot in others. For for the children there was enough shade and the chance to sit under a veranda, a tree, or indoors in the cool of the hall and talk.

I insisted on staying open for two reasons. First, because schools should be open. We must be completely reliable organisations, at the heart of society, calm and consistent especially for children who yearn to find that in adults. Second because our big space, no matter how hot block 1 got, is cooler and airier than a crowded flat with no garden. Children deserve us when the going gets tough. And besides, end of year awards assemblies gotta happen.

So my thanks to the teachers who saw their colleagues in other schools sent home early, but struggled with our inconsistent air-handling and PFI response systems. My thanks to the premises staff on the ground who worked so hard to help us, and my thanks to the community who made a new memory together. No thanks to the Tory leadership candidates who’ll dump the green levy and sacrifice us all in their mendacious pursuits. My thanks to the architects of Tallis 50: we’ve had a great year. If you’d like a copy of our souvenir booklet do call into reception or email me. It’s an easy read.

My thanks to everyone aboard HMS Tallis As the year ends and we enter harbour, especially to those who disembark for good this year. They’ve made their mark and we are better for their company on the voyage.
And my thanks to this remarkable school. Together, we have our imperfections. We’re necessarily fluid, experimental and messy, but our journey together is into the heart of education for the big world, that we need first to understand, and then change.

Auf wiedersehen. September will soon be upon us.

CR
21.7.22

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The end of time

20/7/2019

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The timetabler is wandering the corridors and waves a piece of paper at me that I’ve seen before, several times that day, to be honest. ‘I can timetable 5000 lessons but this tutor group has defeated me’. What he means is that the very last piece of the jigsaw won’t quite go in, but he lost me at 5000, wondering. Is that rhetorical? Is it 5000? It seems an interestingly tidy number from one not prone to hyperbole. And being defeated by a year 9 tutor group conjures up another image: armed only with maths books my money would still be on the man.

Last day of term and we are now one working day away from the start of the next school year. This is the point at which DfE announce an unfunded pay rise, of course. 2.75% from existing budgets, as if we have it just hanging around unallocated. Disgracefully cynical timing. Now the budget needs rewriting before September.

Of course, being one working day away from September 2nd only works for children – and not all of them. A level results day in August followed by GCSE and post-16 admissions. There’s a huge amount gets done over the holidays, but the non-existent time between now and then is also important as a gap, a space for assimilation and reflection, for resolution and just forgetting.

But before that, how does term end? With an Art Exhibition that’s simply perfect. Images in paint, photography, textiles, sculpture, digital media of a breathtaking quality. As I go around the Biennale in Venice in August I’ll inevitably harrumph at my partner as to the superiority of the Tallis product.

With a piano recital where The Instrument is celebrated among superb performers of all kinds and the new Tallis Orchestra. Top quality, and I’m moved to remark, seeing Tallis’ name high on the hall walls, how pleased he would have been that some of our young folk will go on make a living out of music as he did so successfully, in times more turbulent than even our own.

With Governors discussing strategy on Saturday morning, recommitting themselves to the school’s story of education to understand the world and change it for the better, and opposing all that would dehumanise us.
With Moon Day celebrating the anniversary of the landing – rockets, poetry, music and the much-trailed Spudnik finally managing to fire potatoes, moon songs on the tannoy at lesson change and live moon music on the concourse as the children leave us, a new song performed by Science and Music.

With a Climate Change Crisis demonstration on the grass, organised by sixth form so that the younger ones have a chance to protest safely in school. The wisely noted the hypocrisy: a barbecue for year 9 rewards, and another for the staff leavers, at the same time. ‘That’s hypocrisy Miss’. ‘Yes but if you were demonstrating in town there’d still be buses and tubes running’ ‘Yes but can we riot?’ ‘No’.

With a leaver playing himself out on the guitar, surrounded by staff art.

With year group celebration assemblies, four in a row, awarding excellence, character, habits, sports, and the most library books borrowed. An outbreak of rhyming couplets from staff.

With a final whole-school assembly for everyone, words about spending time, about the right way to live and, most of all, about staying safe and coming back. With luck, time will allow us all to become better than we are, to understand and change the world for the better.

I signed off the year with this in 2014, teacher Charles Causley’s words:

At 4 o’clock the building enters harbour
All day it seems that we have been at sea
Now having lurched through the last of the water
We lie stone-safe beside the jumping quay.

Causley talks about ‘a squabble of children’ wandering off, a lovely image. I’ve just watched ours go, from under the shelter of my Tallis umbrella, some with a bounce and a spring in their step, some filled with dread for the long weeks without the safety of school. Safe home, safe return.

And after that? The place will be clean, ready and open for the training days in September and on Wednesday 4th our children return to us. We will be utterly changed but absolutely the same. It’s a glorious privilege.

CR
19.7.19

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One Yorkshireman

16/2/2019

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Our dining room’s a funny shape. I said this to a visiting Head and he got a bit shirty, giving me the full Four Yorkshiremen (he was from Harrogate). At least you’ve got a dining room, at least it’s a decent size, at least it’s joined on to the school, at least it’s on planet earth, not full of dung and so on, luxury. All true, but it’s still longways on with no thought given to the need to queue.

In cold weather this glorious green space – which only one person ever calls the Tallis Bistro – is quite the place to be. As someone who turned never-going-outside-in-cold-weather into an art form in my own schooldays way north of Harrogate I have every sympathy with the inmates. That doesn’t extend to sympathy with shoving and other uncivilised behaviour when there are a hundred or so more souls than usual indoors who may not be entirely occupied with nutritious eating. In order to prevent annoying clumping we’ve therefore removed most of the pundit chairs at the high benches. This caused a wave of concern among little chaps who like to keep an eye on the scraps for Sir’s dog and the ganneting teachers around the plates trolley, so we saved a couple for them.

Children are creatures of habit, and those habits, good or bad, are largely formed by the adults around them. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to assume the mantle of adult citizenship and everything the adults in schools do is scrutinised by young people, both the what and the how. Those teachers aren’t just modelling eating standing up while using a knife and fork properly, but food choices, friendly conversation and eyes in the back of their heads.

And so much more. We had a governor visit to scrutinise how we spend our Pupil Premium funding and whether it is having any impact. PP money is meant to improve the educational experience and therefore outcomes of children who meet one of a series of disadvantage indicators. We get about £400k a year, so it’s important to our (£13m pa) budget. We have to account for what we spend it on and the statutory document is available on the website here. (Just before you get too excited about it, PP was a Coalition hat put on money already in the system, so the idea that schools had the leisure to spend it on anything new and innovative was always a bit of a stretch.)

We spend a lot of our PP money on our ‘first class’ Pastoral Welfare Team, who wear out their sturdy shoes supporting behaviour management. Governors asked some PP-attracting children about this: did they think this was a good thing? Oh yes, yes indeed.

This is interesting, money spent on adults who spend all their time talking to children about how to behave is seen as an obvious good by the children. They’re not just modelling Tallis Character but the values and virtues of the good life, how to be honest, fair, respectful, kind and optimistic. The children see that in adults other than teachers (who are a breed apart and tend to go on about this kind of stuff) personal virtue, taking responsibility for your actions, is important.

I’m thinking about this on a national scale. The Ethical Leadership Commission I wrote about in June launched its report in January and since them we’ve had quite a bit of publicity. Our thoughts aren’t revolutionary, but fundamental. Children will only learn how to behave well if adults behave well. Adults running schools have to put this above all other structural considerations. Fancy outcomes or badges can’t be got at the price of poor behaviour. We have to do right, or do another job.

The Ethical Leadership Commission now has a Framework set of words, a pathfinder programme which 200 schools have already signed up to, some developing work in teacher and leader training and a new Ethics Committee and open forum at the Chartered College of Teaching. Tallis’s governors are pathfinders. It's slightly terrifying work: there’s a real risk in sticking your dishevelled head above the parapet and saying ‘we should behave as good role models for children’. Everyone’s made mistakes, but the real human skill is reflection and change, in a spirit of humility. I’ve written a book concurrently too, but that’s me ranting, not the measured tones of the great and good commissioners.

Reflecting on our own behaviour doesn’t mean introversion or compliance with injustice. So much school policy in the last 20 years has danced around the elephant of privilege guarding the powerful. Ring-fencing money to support disadvantaged children is good, but it’s an Elastoplast on inequality. Our responsibility as good adults isn’t just as models of good character. Society should be fair and children’s lives not blighted by poverty and struggle. Those who have never needed any funding to give them a leg-up, or who have never known want, or who exist only within a bubble of other privileged people undermine the fair chances of the many by passing power around among themselves. Good people should be outraged abut this.

I’m reading (myself obvs, matchless prose, but also) Friedman and Laurison’s The Class Ceiling. They observe:

...when the following wind of privilege is misread as merit, the inequalities that result are legitimised. This leads those who have been fortunate to believe that they earned it on their own, and those who have been less fortunate to blame themselves.

Dr King dreamed that one day all children would be judged not on the colour of their skin but the content of their character. While we use our disadvantage funding to give love and lasting life-lessons, we mustn’t forget three of the virtues of ethical leadership. Our children need justice so they all may lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives. Adults need courage to speak out in the interests of all children. We all need optimism, to understand the injustices we face and to change the world for the better.

CR
St Valentine’s Day 2019

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Children and war

17/11/2018

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Imagine the scene. Over 2000 people on the concourse, fluttering strings of red messages, life-size photographs of soldiers, nurses, civilians, children of the wars, representatives of five faiths and a very tall bugler in full dress uniform, including bearskin. Last post sounds, two minutes silence, then Reveille. The bugler snaps smartly to attention and salutes. A good number of children are so startled by this that they salute back, before we have our usual Tallis claps and disperse for break.

We planned this year’s Remembrance for a while to make sure that the 100th anniversary of the armistice wasn’t missed. We worked with filmmakers internally and externally and people shared family stories. We made poppies and even had a special lunch menu – heavy on the pie and root vegetables, with a rather toothsome fruit cake. And we goggled at each other in properly inquisitive manner. One colleague who joined us from the army had beret and medals and a girl rushed up to me. ‘I’ve just seen Sir, he’s wearing all his badges.’ A chum put her right. ‘Not badges, medals. He didn’t get them for being brave at the dentist’.

Yet the lasting memory for me took place out of sight of the crowds, out of earshot of the bugle. We gathered guests from mosque, church, gurdwara and synagogue in my room to welcome them before 11, sharing perspectives on Remembrance and seeing Muslim and Jew embrace, heartfelt, like brothers.

So much time in school is spent trying to teach young people that love, friendship, kindness, cooperation, tolerance and peace is better than hate, suspicion, cruelty, threats, violence and war. The adult world sets a terrible example to adolescents who are quite capable of making entirely idiotic choices in social affairs. The great liberation educator Paulo Freire described this very aptly as them being ‘caught up in the drama of their own existence’. Teenagers prefer to fan flames of outrage, rather than damp them. They enjoy gossip and rumour and they’re very poor at seeing the longer game. They’re prone to hyperbole, and they lack the experience to know that some things just don’t matter.

Some of these irritating characteristics are also strengths. Deep interest in other people, a strong sense of justice, faithfulness to friends and living in the moment are characteristics worth having. In their turn they’re better than indifference, isolation and living in the past. At its best, Remembrance focuses on the good, on the resilience of the human spirit.

But the personal wars our young people inhabit are terrifying when they go wrong. When intense self-regard or sensitivity to pressure turns inward to self-harm, when justice seems to demand violence, when sociability becomes persecution. Adults should live to protect young people, from those who’d do them harm and from themselves while the turbulence of adolescence rages.

This is why I’m so annoyed almost everything in social policy at the moment – if that term isn’t itself an echo from better days. When Universal Credit doesn’t work, its children who go hungry. When schools can’t afford support staff its children whose needs are unheard. When there aren’t any teachers its children whose hopes and dreams are scuppered. When there aren’t enough police its children, manipulated by adults fuelled by delusions of status, who kill one another.

The great Macneice poem I’ve quoted before (Prayer before Birth) has a verse that reads:

I am not yet born, forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

Our children need us, society, the state, to look after them because they are children and can’t look after themselves. They need us to protect them and help them to grow. Just because we’re not sending them in their hundreds of thousands to die on the green fields of France doesn’t mean that we’re not sacrificing them. We need a safer, kinder world for them, now.

CR
15.11.18

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‘I’m not committed to love, I’d be fine with war’

16/9/2018

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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.

Why do we still know so little and celebrate even less the successes of comprehensive education? That a new generation of educational activists and administrators, including anti-grammar [conservative MPs] and many in the academy and free school movement now adhere to its principles so hard fought for half a century ago but rarely give it credit is not merely a form of disguised tribalistic discourtesy: it is also the result of a long-standing distortion of the historical record

She goes on to say:

It should not be forgotten that today’s widespread commitment across the political spectrum….to the idea of all children getting a shot at an ‘academic education is the direct result of comprehensive reform. It changed our attitudes for the better and should be built on, not dismantled.

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

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Pushing out from the shore

4/9/2018

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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

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Time to press pause

20/7/2018

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It is the end of the year. Let me tell you we have had the best end of year. The greatest. So good, the top end of special.

I apologise if this sounds Trumpery but fear not. When I say we’ve had the best end of term that’s what I actually mean. I don’t misspeak and say that we have had the worst end of term, depending on the audience. What are we meant to do with this stuff?

We have surely crammed a lot into the last weeks. Bugsy Malone was huge, over a hundred in the cast and running for four nights. Some parents came every night. Primary schools come to watch the show’s dress rehearsal and we got them settled. Then we offered a toilet opportunity, 100 of them take it up and we have to start all over again. Then the microphones don’t work – but it’s alright on the nights. The set is all-conquering. We certificate the sixth form leavers from Fat Sam’s Speakeasy, above the bar.

Our routines are a little affected. Year 10 line up for assembly tidily but I decide that occupying the hall on the morning of the first show might be best avoided. We walk year 10 in silence to the Dojo just to find the outdoor and adventurous activity briefing underway. We perform and about turn and walk up to the sports hall where muscle memory triggers crossed legs on the hard floor. It’s a surreal experience: 270 children and a dozen staff in search of an assembly. We could have kept walking until we’d done our daily mile: the yard was my last resort.
A colleague warns me she’s annoyed, but goes for a run and cheers up. A musician works with a dancer on Motion Sickness, cello and Bach as part of our practice-based appraisal option. A leaver sells his paintings for charity. New teachers visit. Newly-qualified teachers breathe a sigh of relief at another hurdle jumped. I follow a small child rushing over the bridge in pursuit of a youth too cool to listen to her frankly impertinent cry of ‘Alice’s brother! Alice’s brother! Come to me’.

Parents contact me: some to complain that early holiday isn’t authorised, some to congratulate on specific things we’ve done or the general way of things, some to ask questions, some to advise, some helpful ideas, some impossible, but all welcome.

There’s only one taker for Waistcoat Wednesday, though we like young Southgate who appears to value character. Others say allez le bleus, insouciant.

We celebrate too, assemblies with certificates for attendance, endeavour, habits and character with advice on how to be a good audience thrown in gratis. Some prizes come with a pre-installed learning experience. I encounter Ms S on the yard with her form: a prize box of chocs caused 12 wrappers on the floor so now everyone’s tidying the yard.

And a final visit from Mr Brown’s dog. She enjoys the sleep of the just in a leadership group meeting but wakes to snuffle around a bit, startling a member who suspects one of the blameless brethren of unprecedented inappropriateness. Mr Brown himself departs. I’ll miss his comprehensive range of opinions and barely-concealed righteous fury on behalf of the nation’s young.

Which is justifiable if for no other reason than we head into the hols with no word from the School Teachers’ Review Body. This affects everyone’s budgets: discovering in September that a proposed teacher pay deal might or might not happen, or be funded will make for an excitable start of term. Perhaps they’ll put out the news on the same day as the results in the hols, in the hopes Heads won’t see it. Or next week, when we’re all having a lie down. As the unions have said to the Secretary of State:

…it is surely not unreasonable to expect that a fundamental role of government is to govern in an orderly and timely manner and not precipitate uncertainty and a sense of crisis. The current delay fails this basic test and is entirely unacceptable.

It’ll affect school next year, and you’d expect me to be able to tell you how.

But our last assembly together was as lovely as ever. We change our world for the better year by year. Our children will have to do it for all of us when they take on the mantle of adult citizenry, but do you know something? I think we’re in good hands.

CR
20.7.18

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A Question of Ethics

23/6/2018

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A year 9 said to me exasperatedly on Wednesday: what exactly are schools for? It nudged me to presume upon your good will to ask a question about some work I’ve been doing. Would you mind?

I’ve spent a bit of time this year chairing a national group called the Ethical Leadership Commission. It’s a set of people from all sorts of groupings in education, including Ofsted. We’ve ben thinking about the fundamentals of school leadership, to see if we could help hard pressed folks to see beyond the daily things-to-do, things-to-worry-about and things-to-try-to-forget-about-for-now lists. We wanted school leaders to think about what schools are for and how they should act. Governors, as well as Heads.

This seemed important not just because I like to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s important because the world has changed quickly in education. Now that different people and different organisations run schools, who is keeping an eye on the purpose of schooling, as well as its outcomes? Tallis is a straightforward case, still a community school run by the local authority. Other schools run themselves, are a part of an academy trust or a larger chain, some are church schools, some ‘Free’. I wonder if this confuses taxpaying citizens?

Despite differences in the system, we all have a one crucial thing in common: children. Tiny children, large children, noisy children, silent children, children who love school, aren’t so fussed, like big crowds, prefer to be alone, arty, music-y, scienc-y, mathematic-y, sporty, happy, thoughtful, angry and sanguine children. Parents send children to our schools – all sorts of schools – and trust teachers to do a good job with them. Largely we do. Sometimes there are blips.

Parents and society therefore trust us to do two things. First, to be diligent and trustworthy public servants. Second, to model the behaviour of a good society to children: to show them how to be good citizens. Both of those are huge responsibilities. The first is carried out at work: doing a good job with teaching and results, for example. The second is harder to pin down. We teach character and values, but do parents see that in the way our schools run?

The Ethical Leadership Commission has been working on three things. First, agreeing some key language that school leaders and teachers might use to talk about this. Second, to provide some training materials so that we can all think about this responsibility together. Third, to set up a structure so that there is a space to think about ethics and the pressures that sometimes constrain our decision-making. It’s interesting work, as you can imagine.

I’d be interested to know what you think of the draft words. The first seven are based very closely on the Seven Principles for Public Life. If you work in the public sector, you may know them.

The Framework for Ethical Educational Leadership
Ethical educational leadership is based upon the Seven Principles for Public Life.

1. Selflessness
Leaders should act solely in the interest of children and young people.

2. Integrity
Leaders must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. Before acting or taking decisions they must declare and resolve openly any perceived conflict of interest and relationships.

3. Objectivity
Leaders must act and take decisions impartially and fairly, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias. Leaders should be dispassionate, exercising judgement and analysis for the good of children and young people.

4. Accountability
Leaders are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.

5. Openness
Leaders should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from scrutiny unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.

6. Honesty
Leaders should be truthful.

7. Leadership
Leaders should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs. Leaders include both those who are paid to lead schools and those who volunteer to govern them.

The second set of words try to explain what we think makes up good leadership.

Schools and colleges serve children and young people and help them grow into fulfilled and valued citizens. As role models for the young, how we behave as leaders is as important as what we do. Leaders should show leadership through the following personal characteristics or virtues.

a. Trust:
Leaders should be trustworthy and reliable. They hold trust on behalf of children and should be beyond reproach. They are honest about their motivations.

b. Wisdom:
Leaders should use experience, knowledge, insight understanding and good sense to make sound judgements. They should demonstrate restraint and self-awareness, act calmly and rationally, exercising moderation and propriety as they serve their schools wisely.

c. Kindness:
Leaders should demonstrate respect generosity of spirit and good temper. Where unavoidable conflict occurs, difficult messages should be given humanely.

d. Justice:
Leaders should be fair and work for the good of all children from all backgrounds. They should seek to enable all young people to lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives.

e. Service:
Leaders should be conscientious and dutiful. They should demonstrate humility and self-control, supporting the structures and rules which safeguard quality. Their actions should protect high-quality education.

f. Courage:
Leaders should work courageously in the best interests of children and young people. They protect their safety and their right to a broad, effective and creative education. They hold one another to account courageously.

g. Optimism:
Leaders should be positive and encouraging. Despite difficulties and pressures they are developing excellent education to change the world for the better.

None of us is claiming that we are perfect. All of us know that the responsibility is huge.

Are these the right principles? What do you think?

[email protected]

CR
22.6.18

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Home Room

9/3/2018

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I could talk about Ofsted or the snow but I’d rather talk about year 9. If you’d rather think about the other things, please see last week’s or this week’s newsletter.

We’re looking at what happens in tutor group time this half-term. There’s a programme for each year group that involves reading, news, equipment, revision and so on, according to age and proximity of examination and we extended the time to make it better last year. I’ve been allocated year 9. Year 9, as I’ve said before, are always a bit odd. They lack the winsome charm of year 7, they’re more sluggish than year 8 but they can’t quite focus on the future in the way that year 10 nearly can and most of year 11 do. Year 9, against all the evidence, believe themselves to be quite the models of maturity.

Tutor groups are eccentric beasts too. They’re like a large family of up to 30 children with only one parent (perhaps a second if other adults hitch their caravans to this particular train). Tutors demonstrate a range of parenting skills in this rather challenging task. I scuttled round all nine groups one week to assess the weather and this is what I found.

Two groups were watching Newsround and there were the makings of intelligent discussion on current affairs. Two groups were reading the year group’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. What joy to start the day thus! One group was competing ferociously in an on-line book quiz and couldn’t spare the time to be interrupted by me. One group’s tutor had just returned from a residential trip so the family were going through notices that might have been missed. Another group’s tutor was on jury service so the atmosphere was a bit different. Groups like to see the same community parent’s face every day and don’t really like substitution.
One group was having an equipment inspection. This was being done in total silence and, the merest twitch of the tutor’s eyebrow cause the requisite items to be brandished. ‘Two sharpened pencils? Calculator? Two working pens?’ Tutor was just about satisfied by 99% compliance. The shirker didn’t even convince himself that he’d looked hard enough to find his planner.

Next door, however, there was much in hand. Tutor posed the question ‘Why are we so useless at Sports Day?’ and got many answers including the perfidy of other groups, lack of girls or boys of sufficient prowess in all the events, most of the form being too short, tall or weak or having the wrong kit, inclination or motivation. Dismissing all this as losers’ thinking, Tutor then showed a bit of Coach Carter and set out his plans for world domination. Introducing novelty concepts entirely in line with our Habits ‘We are going to train’ he said ‘We are going to practice’, to a chorus of much groaning.

We assign tutors at the start of year 7 in the hope that most last until year 11. It’s a wonderful thing to be the school parent of a group of growing children, though it doesn’t necessarily feel like that every single morning and afternoon. Children make mistakes, and personalities change through hormones or circumstance, just like at home. Friendships emerge and disband, some thrive and some don’t. Some like the relative informality of form time, some hate it.

We try very hard to make tutor groups balanced but aspects of adolescent character are unpredictable. Sometimes groups become collectively unhappy and hard to manage, so we move people around. Some groups stay the same for five years and their sense of family and nostalgia when they part at the end of year 11 is heartbreaking.

I had a tutor group for years in a different part of the forest in another century. Our tutor room was a demountable classroom (hut, terrapin, call it what you will) on the far periphery of a single story site housing a 10-form-entry 11-16 school. Tutorial lessons for PSE happened on Friday afternoons for year 9s but we had RE together after that. Including afternoon reg, that was two-and-a-half hours together to round off the week. We had our ups and downs, but we knew each other pretty well by the end of the year. I can’t say that I begged the timetabler for a repeat in year 10, but when we all left I was touched by the group memories of long cosy afternoons in a warm room with the rain coming down outside. We planned some cracking events that year for team building and charity: car washing, kayak trips, abseiling. We celebrated birthdays and I visited the reluctant attenders. I saw shocking poverty in some of their homes and learned a lot from all of them.

Schools have different traditions and use different language for the same things. I range through form tutor, registration and tutor group to the bewilderment of children I’m interrogating. Tallisees call the group and the person by the same name: ‘Tutor’. As in, ‘I’m off to tutor to see my tutor’. I like that, the group and the person as one thing with one purpose.

So here’s to the form tutors of the land. May you be a good parent to your many children in your busy rooms. May you build up happy memories. May you know them as they want to be known and smile at them every day, even if they’re useless at the shot putt.

CR
8.3.18

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The calm before...

6/9/2017

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Welcome to new readers. I write a blog at least once a fortnight and more often if I feel particularly opinionated about something. Some blogs contain useful information, but there’s a lot of that elsewhere on the website, so these pieces are reflections on the state of education as seen, 39 weeks a yea,r on Kidbrooke Park Road.
This week’s piece is in two parts. Part 1 is before our children come back to us, part 2 after. I’ll tell you how the day went!

September 6th 2017 part 1

We’ve talked and tidied and ourselves for two days since the holidays ended and now we’re ready to welcome our young people back. We think we’re ready now, so we’ll fling wide the gates and get the show on the road for another year. Term begins with welcomes to new starters – largely year 7 and year 12 – lots of assemblies, raucous and refined reunions, some tears (from anxious parents) and a lot of hugging. Day 1 is peak hug, which is saying something.

Saying goodbye in the summer term is a really strange experience. We have a lovely last morning, a bit of a celebration and then everyone walks away and disappears back into the undergrowth. People joke about schools being very peaceful without children but actually, they’re not schools at all without children, just big public buildings filled with emptiness and unanswered questions. Two odd ones today. What’s the difference between a noticeboard and a sound baffle? and Have we enough desks? I’ve never given the former a moment’s thought or thought to worry about the latter. I expect it’ll all be fine. What if I’m wrong? No-one’ll be able to hear anything and everyone’ll have to squash up for a day or so. Of all the things I lost sleep over in August, they didn’t remotely feature. Cripes.

September is simultaneously the best and worst time to do new things in school. It’s the obvious time because it’s good to make improvements with a fresh start, and the worst because the holidays wipe your memory and you can’t remember the motivation for arcane changes. How did we say we’d avoid that bottleneck? No, really? Cor blimey. A new rota, please, pronto.

I’m not so cavalier about the other questions we think about before the year begins. Why are we teachers? What are we doing it for? What do we really want for our nations’ young people? Do we have any way at all of measuring it? I’ve not written yet about this year’s exam results, apart from the information on the website here. In a nutshell? Sixth form results were jolly good again, with lots of young people getting a great boost into next thing. Year 11 results are a bit impenetrable this year, as Mr Tomlin’s Q and A document explains here: everything’s changed again and will change again again next year. In both sets of results some amazing achievements at all levels, some triumphs against adversity, some just deserts, some inexplicables, some wild inaccuracy, some re-marks. Is it too soon to hope for a new emphasis on our children as children, not examination yields?

If only other education stories in the news had been so equivocal. In what seemed like three ghastly days we had scandals about pay, exams and sixth form admissions. I expect that parents are at a loss as to what Heads think they’re doing? May I offer a thought? If, nationally, we can’t agree whether it’s important to hitch up our international PISA scores or worry about children’s mental health, in a system so deregulated that no one can speak for anyone else, we shouldn’t be surprised if people make odd decisions. Confused? Who isn’t? Let me get back to my sound baffles.

We’ve committed ourselves at Tallis this week to keeping our eyes firmly on our children as children, on what they need to fulfil themselves today and this year. We’re thinking about our broad curriculum, our commitment to inclusion and our diverse community. We’re thinking about persistence, discipline, imagination, collaboration and inquisitiveness. We’re concentrating on kindness, fairness, respect, honesty and cheerfulness. We’ll do that all year, every year, and we’ll teach our young people everything we know. At a time of nuclear threat and wickedness the world over, we’ll strengthen their hands through education so they understand the world and can change it for the better.

CR 5.9.17

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Post Truth

20/11/2016

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When Gove declared that the nation was sick of experts during the Brexit (brexpert?) malarkey he sounded the death knell for civilisation as we know it. I could rant rhetorically about how it is possible that a man so fixated on subject learning and top-class degrees could simultaneously hold such a view, but then I remembered. Far from the zealot and idealogue he presented as himself during his occupation of Sanctuary Buildings, he is a cynical and deluded opportunist. Good schools for the poor? Yes, until it costs money. Safer prisons? Yes, until they cost money.

When Boris declared himself in favour of Brexit, he threw oil on troubled flames. I could rant rhetorically about how an educated global polyglot could simultaneously hold the view that we take no responsibility for shared endeavour with our neighbours, but then I remembered. Far from the lovable buffoon, he is a cynical and easily bored opportunist. London as the global melting pot? Yes, unless it loses party votes. The UK as a model of integration? Yes, until it loses party votes. Who cares, therefore, that they stabbed each other in the back? (We all should, see below)

Civilisation took another knock in another part of the forest, where Trump’s victory was utterly impossible right up until the moment that it seemed altogether likely. What’s the most worrying thing? Not the reprehensible views and the ghastly boasty claims but his capacity to invent stuff then passed off as facts. How many Mexicans, exactly? Who’ll pay for the wall? Which parts of Europe are controlled by Isis? Is Hillary Clinton actually a criminal?

And so "post-truth" is the O xford English Dictionary word of the year. They define it as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

We’ve got a bit in our Behaviour Policy at school which talks about truth and lies. It says:

Our investigations may lead us to a judgement that a child is lying. Lying is not unusual while growing up, and testing boundaries is normal. Some children lie habitually or occasionally. We would ask parents to remember that when a child asserts that he or she is telling the truth, that may also be a lie. We teach children that they are more likely to be believed if they usually tell the truth.

When we worked together (2000 of us) to decide on the five traits to define Tallis Character we agreed on fairness, respect, kindness, optimism and honesty. None of us realised that it would be like adopting an endangered species: quick, kids, have a try of these before the big game hunters wipe them from the earth. At least they’ll be able to tell their children about them. Do you know, Donaldina, once upon a time people were kind to people they didn’t know and never spread lies to frighten others?

I was talking to a governor in an advanced state of despair about this earlier in the week. He asked: how can we possibly tell children to live good lives when it is patently obvious that the way to get on in life is to be foul, and to lie with every breath? Well, we do it because it is right. We do it because children want to be respected, happy people. We do it because we model a better world inside our little communities and if that involves pulling up the drawbridge to protect our values then up it comes. Church schools have been at it for years: these are our beliefs, which the world doesn’t value. We can learn from them.

Which brings me on to the most famous ex-church school head of them all, the rapidly receding Sir Michael. All hail, once again, his principled opposition to grammar schools, the debate about which is a perfect example of post-truth policy. Academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it. Grammar schools are attractive to some because they are an appeal to the emotions and to an idea of life as it might once have been designed, not as it is or as it should be. The man says, grammar schools are wrong, but comprehensives can celebrate tradition ritual and formality. (Yes, good). Comprehensives have been remarkable escalators of opportunity and great forces for social cohesion (Yea, verily). There is no reason why headteachers shouldn’t insist that children stand up when the Head enters the classroom or sing the school song or learn whole tracts of Shakespeare by heart. Pardon?

In aping the hideous proxies of the rich and harping back to a bygone era, Wilshaw undermines himself. Our schools have ritual, tradition and formality of their own. They should be deeply rooted in the school’s DNA, respected and upheld. They should be for the right reasons, to build up community and model a better world, and for no other reason. Traditions cannot be mandated externally. They cannot be imposed: they grow.

Gove, Johnson and Trump have done civilisation a great disservice and materially endangered the future of our young for personal gain. In protecting that future, schools will have to be very clear about their character and resist lies, bigotry, reaction, flummery and false logic. From sea to shining sea.

CR
18.11.16

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Roberts on tour. Honore et Labore

29/5/2016

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I’ve been spending a bit of time in another school, lending a hand as best I can. To a teacher another school is a simultaneously fascinating and terrifying place. We’re all pretty nosy, hence the fascination, but there’s a terror in the almost-familiar like meeting your doppelgänger in the Co-op. It’s a bit like going to the States where we understand the language but not what they’re talking about.

Their motto’s lovely and Latin but schools are similar. There are yards, classrooms and lavatories, tidy and untidy, fragrant and smelly. There are teachers scooping up stragglers with threats and jokes. There are local rules: don’t ask for cups, don’t knock on this door. There are queues being supervised simultaneously by the highest and lowest paid. There are traps for the adult unwary at every stage. How do you get in if the door’s locked? Where exactly is the loo? Is there a sink anywhere or shall I do that teacher thing and only wash my cup every half term in the dishwasher at home?

In the old days you found out through the staffroom. After waiting some weeks to be invited to sit, a new teacher would worm his way into a sub-group. You’d soon know where new exercise books slept unattended or another department’s photocopying code. Segregated by age, you could moan about your elders or recent graduates. You could unite in dismissal of the senior team and lay traps for the uppity, useless or ambitious. You could argue, play cards, mark books in a hassled sort of way, knit or, in the old days, smoke yourself to death.My first job was a huge school in south Birmingham. There wasn’t a smoking room but a smoking end, which you couldn’t see through the fumes: we were all smokers there, passive or active. My second staffroom was dominated by Marxist vegetarians and the third by a scots ex-PE teacher who’d had to come in from the cold when his knees went and learn how to teach poetry. (Which he did through Phil Collins lyrics: I taught in the room next door). That school was half-empty in a post-pit town. We huddled together at one end of a giant room like shipwrecked mariners, appositely sharing a dramatic sea view.

My first London staffroom was angry and overcrowded. It had a tea lady and a bar after hours on Fridays. There was a staffroom committee and the Head was only allowed in by invitation. The next one had staffrooms and smoking rooms on two sites, one in a barely-converted lavvy. It had a whiff of the grammar school with large tables and traditional seating arrangements. Colleagues would trick you into sitting in Miss’s armchair then watch her take your ears off. My final oldschool staffroom had the remnants of a school flat from secondary modern Domestic Science. One inhabitant rearranged the furniture whenever he fell out with someone so it was hard to know where to sit and impossible to know where not to.

Once we started rebuilding schools staffrooms died. Teachers got space to work in their departments, a huge improvement to working conditions but a genuine loss to school life. People don’t mix up so well any more and you have to make a real effort to meet. Worst of all, for the Head, you can’t just wander in and take the school’s temperature anymore. Everything’s a bit more formal, and we need to guard against too much of that. ‘Reply all’ emails, the scourge of modern life, don’t really do the trick.

But anyway, it’s on the concourses, corridors and yards of these beautiful new buildings that you really get the temperature. I’ve hardly had a moment to meet a child at the other school, but three year nines dropped by to bring me an ulterior motive. ‘Hello Miss’ they greeted me, politely. ‘Are you from Tallis? Does that mean we can wear trainers?’. So much for our marketing as the place for creativity and A level excellence, it’s the footwear options they’re interested in. I gave it to ‘em straight: ‘No’. An omnicompetent Scotsman appeared through the carpet. ’You taking a chance, boys? Away with you!’ They laughed, he shooed, learning was resumed.

The much-misquoted ED Hirsch described state schools as common schools not because we’re lowly but because we all do the same thing. Our character isn’t in besieged staffrooms but the characters of our young people. We should serve and support one another as we serve and support our young. It’s good to see that reflected in a another place, and to be welcomed. Honore et labore.

CR
26.5.16

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Preventing what exactly?

4/10/2015

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David Shrigley, Those who get it

I trailed this piece as ‘Do young people smell like they used to’ but then we had our Prevent Training so you’ll just have to wait.

I’ve spent a lifetime thinking and talking about religion so I love it when young people engage in a search for meaning. Those of a religious background adopt or discard the faith of the family. Those not previously exposed to (inoculated against?) religion look for a narrative to hang their hat on. Others just search for an answer. Why is the world a mess? Why are adults so unsatisfactory? Why don’t I matter more? What’s going to happen to me?

Faith develops in religious humans. There is a journey from simple acceptance to understanding and universalising a faith position. Part of that journey - the end of it for some - involves experimenting with fundamentalism. I use the word fundamentalism here in the broad sense, the embracing of the literal truth of a holy book, the subsuming of free will and critical judgement in the tradition and practice of a faith. Choosing fundamentalism is part of our freedom, but irretrievably influenced by religions’ ancient foundations.

It takes time to argue modern inclusive and life-affirming principles from the writings of people struggling to stay alive. For all we know, they were the best thinkers of their time. The much-criticised Prevent training materials covers this journey quite nicely with case studies. A young person is distressed by an aspect of his life, searches for a simple answer, adopts an immaturely rigid religious or quasi-political position, finds affirmation within that group, starts to be a danger to himself and others and needs to be rescued. Schools should keep an eye out for distress, sudden change or unexpected behaviour. Use the safeguarding systems, don’t be afraid to report things, follow up, support the child. We know how to do this and the best of us have strong and sophisticated systems to protect children from themselves and others. Some of the training is a bit crass and patronising, but we got used to that with the National Strategies, didn’t we just?

I described Prevent to a cleric who became terrifically aeriated about supervising Friday prayer. An outrage! So I told him a about a school with a Christian Union annually staffed by posh and shiny gap year volunteers with full DBS clearance from a local church. Sensible sixth formers kept an eye on things in the room, right up to the day they planned a prayer walk in the yard to hand out sweets with texts against homosexuality. After that, always a teacher in the room. Of course we supervise prayer, in the same way that we supervise play or crossing the road on a school trip. Some things can be dangerous and children don’t always see it. Adults can be misleading, harmful or just plain wrong. Schools are designed for supervision. It’s what we do for society, looking after the young.

Good liberal folk, secular or religious, are queasy about Prevent because discussing religion is embarrassing. Most Brits aren’t religious and find it rather inexplicable. Church schools, however, are quite popular and we’ve happily let them chug along since 1944 because their religion is pretty mild. Imagine our horror when deregulated schooling and unreconstructed religion met and brought us Trojan Horse, whatever that turns out to be. OMG, literally. What were we thinking?

Like a child who’s forgotten her Spanish homework, we don’t have the vocabulary for the lesson. We once had checks and balances to prevent religion harming civil society but we didn’t look after them and now we’re confused. So now we’re using the law and the strange concept of fundamental British values (we could just call them human rights) to give us a language to distinguish between good and bad religion. We have to do this because, nationally, we don’t trust ourselves to articulate an argument that falls between ‘all religion is wicked’ and ‘believe what you like’.

However, optimism is part of Tallis character. In the new RE GCSE from 2016 every child should study the two largest religions and every one of them could leave school equipped to make a judgment about faith. That might lay the foundation for better national conversation about the role of religion in a secular democracy and help children experiment more safely, a bit like teaching them to swim.

The training isn’t perfect but it might help people who haven’t known how to think about tricky issues before. Preventing what, exactly? At the very least theological illiteracy, bad religion and the abuse of young people’s search for meaning.

CR
1.10.15

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Open Night

26/9/2015

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I put on the velvet jacket because it smartens up the shirt and trousers and not because I can fill the pockets with pencils, keys, phone, notes to self until I look like a walking barrel. Adding only crippling shoes and a new Director of Key Stage Three, I took to the stage at 1700 for this week’s biggest hit: Come to Tallis! It's Open Night! Embellished by 5 shiny year 7s, a cool year 10 pianist, subtle lighting and a flower arrangement half as big as me we talked to about 1200 people in five sittings. Then we gave them a map (KS3 is a geographer) set them free to wander and admire the lovely spaces and the friendly people and collect stickers, bits of clay, photos, pencils and what not. It all went very well.

I like to think that my innovative intervention early in last year’s open evening, which deftly reduced weeks of careful planning to chaos, was a useful learning experience for everyone. It certainly meant that this year’s planning was done secretly by the crack KS3 logistics team and I was kept locked in a cupboard until it was time to brush me down and stand me up. Hats off to them, though: it was a cracking evening, as far as I could see from my position chained to the piano.

I’d thought about what I was going to say and even went so far as to prepare a few slides. I talked about our 4 values (creativity, community, engagement and excellence), our Habits ( inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline, imagination), our character (fairness, kindness, honesty, optimism and respect), our beliefs (education to understand the world and change it for the better) and the great mantra of Coe of Durham (whom I didn’t acknowledge) that children learn when they have to think really hard. I described us as a ‘blue-plaque comprehensive school’, faithful to those visionary values.

I trumpeted our sixth form results. Top 10% of all sixth forms for progress, 160 into top universities, 40 to art college, 3 into Cambridge, our 7 year education and our three year plan. And I agonised over our GCSE results, below national average last year and this, particularly in maths (a well-staffed and stable department who do well at A level). Should I talk about GCSE or flannel? Should I go into the whole thing about tiers of entry and the inflationary legacy of the past? Should I talk about what happens when you recalibrate behaviour and set a school on a long-term journey to reconsider the whole curriculum? Or should we go smartly into KS3’s pictures of children on mountain tops and teachers in fields?

We chose our character traits together last year, and honesty is one of them. I talked about GCSE as a changing picture and was clear that we need to improve. I didn’t compare us with other schools, but with our own aspirations and hoped that parents would respect our determination and optimism. I tried to be fair. A few parents wanted to talk more, afterwards, and I was frank and open. (I could hardly be anything else, handcuffed to the flower stand.)

Afterwards, I reflected on 3 comments. One was ‘you glossed over GCSE’. I didn’t, and I’ll talk to anyone about it at any length, but it’s not really what year 6 come to Open Night for. Parent Forum is the grilling arena. One was ‘do you ban mobile phones?’ No, but we confiscate them if they get annoying. A third was: ‘you’re very liberal here, aren’t you’, caused mainly by our relaxed uniform and chatty manner. In that regard, we are. Do liberal values preclude quality education? When five sittings were done and I was freed into the foyer to talk to departing folks (logistics determining that there was nothing left for me to damage) only one person wanted to talk about GCSE.

So what is the truth? Should our GCSE results (50% 5+A*-CEM) have been better? Yes. Do we know what went wrong? Yes. Can we fix it? Yes. And there is another truth, which I found myself saying, unplanned, in sittings 3, 4 and 5. It was that I’ve seen too many young people over the years with exam results driven by the perverse and shallow incentives of the performance tables, and that I want our Tallis future to be of deep learning and lifelong understanding. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, but it happens to be true.

Education to understand the world and change it for the better: there are no easy options.

CR

25.9.15

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What do we stand for?

19/7/2015

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Headward Headington-Hail, the headmaster of Bash Street School, who loves his tea and biscuits.

It’s tweaking the community week at Tallis as we get ready for September’s reboot. We’ve gone pipless to see if removing squawking 10 times a day makes for calm, or just discombobulation and reduces the jamming of hordes in doorways. We quite like it so far, but it’s only day 4 and we’re spacious with 2 year groups down. As we might say about everything concerning adolescents – it’s too early to tell.

Fire drill has a new muster station on the basketball courts but retains the comedy implement useless megaphone. Quickest ever evacuation but a bit noisy in the early stages. What else is new? Picnic benches which we spread around experimentally. Enterprising young souls carried them to inconvenient parts of the landscape so we’ve removed them again and will accompany their reappearance with a short lecture on the uses of public furniture. And concrete them in.

An email arrives about a young chap who helped an elderly person who’d collapsed in the street. ‘He saved her life’. I look out of the window after a pipless changeover and spot a year 10 peacock practising a new strut. Above him, furtiveness defined, an art teacher rushes out of Science with a body. Admittedly it’s a skeleton, but it has a bag over its head to disguise it. The Festival (Summer Fair) of art, dance, music, face paints and assorted stalls ends with excitable free sausages. Time for a lie down before we start again, I remark to a seagull.

Speaking of which, earlier this year I conveyed a Personage along the byzantine route from the front door to my room. It was break and we chanced upon some small girls sitting on the floor in a corner of a wide stairwell. ‘Wouldn’t you be comfortable somewhere else?’ she inquired. ‘Not really, thank you’. They explained that they were ‘practising French before the lesson’. They’d chosen a spot where there was a bon chance of regarding a sixth former of the très jolie variety, but French is French and it needs practising, and it was cold outside.

Imagine my concern, then, when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools started in about the crisps. Apparently an inspector was out inspecting and was going about with the Head. Students were eating crisps on the floor blocking the corridor and they didn’t move, so the pair of them had to step over ‘prone’ bodies. Ofsted are going to inspect for that kind of thing from September and woe betide any school with supine crisp-eating barbarians.

I’m a bit of a behaviour nerd and I like things to be orderly and pleasant with only as many rules as are needed to discourage foolishness. Calm is generally good, but young people need memorable experiences so we sometimes generate a bit of noise and excitement. (Street dance flashmob last week, Tallis Festival today). Children should be polite and well-mannered and the crisps incident sounds pretty shabby. But this was all rolled up with children having to stand when teachers enter a room and a quarter of headteachers not knowing what day it was. I’ve been thinking about this on my bicycle and unpicking my disquiet. For what it’s worth, here’s where I am.

Schools are where society looks after its young. We educate them to understand the world and change it for the better, and develop the lifelong skills of inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline and imagination. We enable them to make a relationship with the ideas that define and unite us. That’s brokered by strong relationships between teachers and students, the heart and root of education. It happens in school communities which are safe and happy and where progress is good.

Beyond that, what? If I go into a classroom I expect everyone to be engaged in learning. If I go into an assembly I expect silence. If I go into the yard I expect rushing about. If I go along a corridor I expect pointless chat. We don’t call students ‘mate’ but I call everyone ‘dear’. We also don’t have HMCI’s favourite standing-up rule, silent corridor rule, tie-up-to-the-neck rule (we don’t have ties). We do have stringent rules about oppressive language and violence, and we’ve decided, all 1800 of us, that we value honesty, respect, fairness, optimism and kindness. We work damn hard to create a place where young people learn to live well in community. We enjoy ourselves together.

Sir Michael, I think I saw you on London Bridge station a couple of weeks ago and you looked pretty tired. I’m pretty tired myself. If we make all the above work, will that do? Do we have to stand up as well?

CR 16.7.15

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Boxers and Lawyers

15/3/2015

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Nigel Henderson, Photograph of children playing outside, 1949–1954

You’re never more than 6 feet from a lawyer in London. I had a great email last term from one who’d had the commuter’s nightmare of being at a bus stop with a load of schoolchildren. Despite this, she wrote to offer work experience to the sixth former whom she’d heard expostulating so eloquently and accurately on Donoghue v Stevenson (about negligence, I had to look it up). ‘She formulated a perfect argument and wouldn’t let it go’ she wrote. ‘She’ll be perfect in court’.

Last week I stood in a queue for the Palace of Westminster, how I do gad about, earwigging on the conversations behind me. A brace of English lawyers were explaining life to a Polish third. They talked about the public school to which one had sent his children and the other was about to (no, I shan’t tell you which one). The Polish person asked if it was good: chuckling in a knowing way, one said ‘well, the sixth form’s pretty good for studying, playing poker and smoking’. I mused on this while ostensibly reading a report on teacher supply. First: I suppose if children are sent off to board then they have to do these things among strangers. Second: say that about Gasworks Comprehensive and it’ll bring the inspectors running across the fields in their long black coats. How the other half (7%) live.

Finding out what parents think is a holy grail for secondary schools and we try to bridge the obstacles of adolescence, scale and distance in different ways. I’m terrifically grateful to the parents of Tallis PTA and I’m indebted to the 84% who turned out for year 8 Parents’ Evening. I do like seeing parents with their youths. Spotting family relationships is interesting for the nosey, and seeing resemblances is fascinating. Year 8 are particularly funny. They’re way too old to sit on Mum’s knee so they usually lean in a sort-of chummy manner, while things are going well. When they’re not they can be as huffy and flouncy as a year 12, or resort to comically guilty despondent expressions, like a Boxer dog with a mouthful of Christmas cake.

We’re pretty pleased with our new reports this term so year 8 were experimented on. That happens a lot to year 8, just as well no-one’s stuck there permanently. Parents could see at a glance where offspring were doing well by the jolly shades of green: yellow and red not such happy news. Wily parents grasped this instantaneously and couldn’t be thrown off course by flimsy excuses. ‘Very useful’ one grimaced at me as she dragged the Boxer off to account for himself in Science.

He’ll recover. I stood on the bridge today and watched Break. Children swarm and mooch, muttering and shouting. I watched a new starter rush to hug her new friend (she’s got that Tallis habit quickly) and some older boys trying to eat crisps and chase each other at the same time. A laughing year 10 was having her hair re-done. Footballs were being simultaneously confiscated and encouraged depending on the zone. At the end we did our outrageous whistling, clapping, shooing and shouting routine to hassle the hordes back into class. I explained for the fiftieth time why we’ve put part of the bridge out of bounds and thought for the sixtieth time about whether there’s a better way of doing it.

We’ve invited consultants amongst us recently to give a couple of areas the onceover. They’ve been worth every penny, encouraging us to think in a slightly different way about the future. How do you get the Boxer dog to a state where he can’t stop himself explaining tort law at the bus stop? How do you get the reluctant 12 year old scientist onto a space shuttle?

We start with the end in mind while seizing the present reality of a child. It’s quite a balancing act: we value the person she is now while we hope to help her become someone we won’t know and may not even recognise. We do it in partnership with parents and the people at the bus stop. We let them be children while we form then into adults that might make a better go of changing the world. And the richness of our community gives them something extra so they can hope to breach the fortresses of privileges. They have to smoke and play poker in their own time.

CR

10.3.15

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Navigating Events

16/11/2014

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Joseph Mallord William Turner Ship in a Storm c.1823–6

Events, dear things, events. What to make of them? Last Friday we had a day in which three of our governors talked for five hours with some young people who find school behaviour norms unbearably irksome, counselling them to do better. Monday we had the Smoothie Bike chefs creating nutritious snacks by the sheer power of the bicycle. They’re back next Monday.

Tuesday was Remembrance. Regular readers remember the digger man who joined our silence last year. Emboldened by success and in the name of preparing young Tallis for adult life, we decided this year’s silence should be in the heart of our community on the concourse, more usually a venue for hugging, arguing and standing about. An energetic colleague hatched a plan involving miles of red ribbon. Several plans later taking mud, bins, benches, trees and the weather forecast (he’s a geographer) into consideration we decided trust and freedom were the answer. So we stopped organising, hired a trumpeter, talked about it in assemblies and blew a whistle just before 11. Silence fell on a busy yard and canteen, everything stopped. The Last Post played for a sublime and serious silence in the heart of SE3.

When Reveille sounded we were so pleased with ourselves we had a good old clap as the pips went for lesson 3. The red ribbon, which we eventually wound round the bridge over the yard looked a bit bedraggled later so some younger members were detailed to remove it. They were so beset with helpful advice that time ran out and small girl tidied it up alone as dusk fell.

Immediately after the Armistice Lindsey Hilsum from Channel 4 News talked to the sixth form about reportage and foreign affairs. Her experiences were terrifyingly impressive: our questioning deeply incisive. Maybe we do learn from wars?

That night we had Tallis Strings with Michael Bochmann of Trinity Laban. He’s been with us courtesy of Clifford Chance to give some of year 7s a taste of the violin so that, playing alongside teachers and world-class Michael they experienced the joys of music and the ensemble. At a wonderful concert for family and friends one new player said to me "It is quite hard. The strings are really close together."

Wednesday we had workshops with a Danish colleague from the Kaospilots organisation. Their aim is to equip people to navigate through life’s chaos, and who wouldn’t want help with that? We’re using them to help think about Tallis Character to complement our Habits so that our young people may navigate whatever choppy waters are ahead for them.

We met in the evening to set up a new PTA-type organisation. 20 parent volunteers and a plate of school cakes, high hopes for partnership and a bit of fun. I heard the call of the first mince pie of the season. Thursday was post-16 Open Evening with hundreds coming to find out about how to get a hot ticket to adult life. Much praise for our vibrancy but also the precision of our advice. Young people are rightly much more demanding and together about what they want from the future. Those of us who lurched from one thing to another in the 70s are from another era altogether.

I’m reminded of a chance overhearing at the final celebrations of Black History Month in October. We had a lovely day and replaced the lesson change signal with startling music, generating a little dancing in the corridors. I heard a chap ask his chum ‘Is that coming through the pips machine?’ as if we have an Orwellian squirting device to move us in Pavlovian fashion or direct our every thought.

Would it help them steer through events if we did? It’s easy to write rules but hard to keep them, as the young people in front of the governors admit. It’s easy to watch a foreign correspondent but hard to contemplate being one. It’s lovely to hear a virtuoso but hard to be one, what with the strings being so close together and all. It’s good to drink a smoothie but hard to produce one by cycling.

Our daily life is a mixture of planned and unplanned events, challenges and opportunities. It is really hard to measure what schools do in any but the most obvious ways. We aim for education to change the world, but the world can be unpredictable, hostile and dangerous as well as exciting and interesting. That’s why we take character and habits so seriously. We want to know what best will help our young people navigate through the choppy waters of freedom and trust so they know when to be still for remembrance and when to dance to the pips.

CR 15.11.14

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Feeling it

The end of time

One Yorkshireman

Children and war

‘I’m not committed to love, I’d be fine with war’

Pushing out from the shore

Time to press pause

A Question of Ethics

Home Room

The calm before...

Post Truth

Roberts on tour. Honore et Labore

Preventing what exactly?

Open Night

What do we stand for?

Boxers and Lawyers

Navigating Events

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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