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

Sara Khan says:

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

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

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

They are, in their entirety,

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

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

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

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

The Khan Review observes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR
25.4.24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ouch. Given the Gavin Williamson tweetgate (‘heads really really hate work’) you’d have thought she might come to soothe. Or perhaps that’s why not? She should calm herself: it’s not as if we’re unruly. Mr Barton manages the thousand or so delegates like a big assembly and gives us a look if there’s even any rustling. Heckling would be unthinkable.

Back at freezing Tallis, much afoot. We’re talking with good folks who fancy governing. They express an interest to the Chair for which they’re rewarded with a visit and, special gift, a conducted tour with year 9. These youth fling themselves into the task, devising long routes and answering questions freestyle and at length. Today’s visitor got the full service, including being taken to places with which the guides were unfamiliar. ‘What happens in these rooms?’ ‘We don’t know’. I’m hoping this was, perhaps, the sixth form silent study area rather than the boiler house.  

And on Wednesday, year 13 parents’ evening, the final countdown. We made some innovative changes to the distribution of teachers which confused everyone, especially the most experienced. Someone still complimented me on our efficiency, which was perhaps an aggregated kindness. I’m thinking now about something to mark this passage, the end of some 2-year but many 7-year relationships. The commitment of your beloved child to a neighbourhood school that you support and value – with eyes open to our limitations and alarums -  is a social action that builds up the common good.  We can’t afford to have medals struck, but we might run to a card.
Which brings me to Community Day today, where the whole school thinks about a theme.

Using and strengthening local and community links is one of the aspects of our School Plan so today we’re all thinking about A Sense of Place, about being formed by, and our relationship with a particular area. This we merge with aspects of the history of Greenwich and our immediate locality to give us all a better understanding. So many young people without cash or confidence to spare rarely stray from their immediate locality. It’s the same in London as on the estates of the north and the bus-deprived rural villages. We try our best to help them live on a larger map, but seeking richness and understanding on your doorstep is also valuable and validating.

​This is one of the quotations we’re using:

So, the report recommends:

1. The Prime Minister recognises the national threat to prosperity and security by the scourge of serious violence, criminal exploitation, and harm and convenes regular COBRA meetings to tackle the root causes of these problems. The Children’s Minister of State should attend Cabinet.
2. The Department of Education returns to its previous incarnation of Children, Schools, and Families, reflecting the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world class education system.
3. The Government establishes a new Sure Start Plus Programme, a “Sure Start for Teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. ‘We have chosen to incorporate the name Sure Start as it is a well-recognised and well-respected programme, which we believe was a mistake to dismantle.’ [Not half, say I]
4. The Government sets a target of 1,000 Sure Start Plus Hubs by 2027 to co-ordinate and deliver health and education support for vulnerable teenagers. Established in and around schools, the hubs will be run by charities, public bodies, business, and philanthropy organisations.
5. A new drive across Government to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, including the re-establishment of a Child Poverty Unit in Whitehall.
6. The Government leads a national mission to identify and remove racial bias in the systems that are currently failing many Black, Brown and Minority Ethnic children.
7. The Government takes a new “Family First” approach that supports families with children at risk of becoming involved with gangs, serious violence, or criminal exploitation and which prevents crisis, financed through the implementation of Children’s Social Care reforms, and delivered by local authorities and family organisations.
8. Reform of the children’s social care system to provide high quality care for all teenagers, taking an invest-to-save approach and delivered by a partnership of Government, local authorities and the third sector. Implementation of the Independent Review into Children’s Social Care recommendations delivered at pace.
9. The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community, financed by funds from the proceeds of crime and administered by a collaboration of national charities.
10. Opening all secondary school buildings before and after school, at weekends and during holidays, to provide safe and appealing places for teenagers, financed by funds from dormant bank accounts and National Lottery community funding.
11. The Government to promote a new era of inclusive education, ending the culture of exclusion and helping all children to succeed in their education.
12. One-off £1bn children and young people’s mental health recovery programme, part-financed by a levy on social media companies and mobile phone providers.
13. Reform the youth justice system to accelerate moves towards a fully welfare based, trauma-informed Child First approach.

 
To my mind, these proposals are absolutely excellent and should be enacted at once. Youth work is always the first to go under revisionist government, and we’ve had 12 years without it now. The Cabinet’s not short of what we now coyly call ‘high net worth individuals’. Perhaps they could prime the philanthropy for 3 and 4?

Back on the train, I was heading for Cambridgeshire and reading fast. I thought of another vision for education, that of Henry Morris and the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges from the 1920s onwards. He determined that everyone, no matter how poor, should have access to good education in an inspiring setting. The village colleges were secondary schools and community facilities at the same time, focal points in villages where people of all ages came to learn, mix, be entertained and even get babies weighed. Henry Morris didn’t just create village colleges that were big schools – he created community education. Community education where everyone was in it together, where the whole village raised the children and support each other throughout their lives. When I was offering my skills in Leics in the eighties, their Community Colleges had the same vision.

So what have we now? Narrow education behind locked gates, for safety. Education at which many must fail to keep allegedly elite standards high while the country is run by the 7% who went to fee-paying schools and where a mere millionaire just isn’t trying hard enough. Where a known bully and incompetent can be promoted again and again, knighted for his services to the destruction of trust and integrity in public life: obviously a perfect person to be Secretary of State for Education at the time of the biggest increase in child poverty in modern times. I apologise for writing light-heartedly about such a one in blogs passim.

But finally, the advert. As I arranged my affairs, discovered I had only one contact lens and no charging plug for the Great Northern Electrostar making irregular terrifying banging noises upon which I travelled, I read the wall. There was a government poster about sexual harassment in the workplace, showing some concerned citizens saying what they would do to stop it. Good stuff, though not nearly as good as the Scottish That Guy campaign. But it was the sign-off that got me.

HM Government say ‘If you think it's wrong, act on it’. 

Tell that to Anne Longfield and the 200,000 terrified children, Rishi.
 
CR
10.11.22

Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon reported from a North Sea trawler to which he was poorly suited, being too tall and argumentative, and sick all the time. He described ‘six degrees of freedom’ at sea as pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I found that helpful when I was a young Head in stormy waters but I think we’re all feeling it nationally at the moment. Yaw now?

Heavy weather requires something to cling to so I’m returning to my moutons in the woolly shape of some principles I wrote 11 years ago. These have developed a edu-zeitgeist half-life as well as being inflicted on every group of people I’ve ever met. They are a sort-of answer to the perennial question of ‘what are schools for?’ and I wrote them at the time of the coalition government and to help make sense of Gove’s curriculum reforms. Here they are:

1. Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
2. Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society.We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
3. Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities.We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
4. Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world.Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
5. Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
6. Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
7. Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
8. It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
9. Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission.The teacher’s authority to transmit or broker knowledge is given and valued by society
10. Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

 
At the time I was collaborating with Prof Michael Young of the Institute on a book that was published in 2014 and is still being read, called Knowledge and the Future School. He’s concerned that schools leap from one two-dimensional solution to another without sufficient mental scrutiny, without thought and without reflection.

In 2011 it was important to conceptualise and reassert the primacy of knowledge in learning – but now we’re in danger again. Post-Covid, people are lurching towards off-the-peg curricula, like the Oak National Academy that sprang up to assist in desperate times but is now set to take over the thinking of a generation of teachers, a Japanese Knotweed of curriculum development. And perhaps schools can’t find space to see that or worry about it in the context of the unfunded pay award, the energy crisis, the fact that families can’t afford to eat and the missing of teacher recruitment targets in eight of the last nine years. By a mile. (Not that we’ll be able to measure anything in a future without maths or geography teachers.)

So what principles might we cling to in this particularly prolonged storm, with buckets of hail being thrown from each side and the siren call of off-the-peg answers sounding through the surge? Here’s my thinking so far:   

1. Knowledge is powerful: it can change the world, person by person.
2. Children need knowledge to interpret the world and broaden their possibilities.
3. Knowledge and understanding bring freedom and requires us to choose how to live
4. Knowledge is real but provisional: it endures and changes.
5. Knowledge gives people the power to think and act in new and better ways
6. Knowledge is social, produced in history: good communities are built on shared knowledge
7. Inequitable distribution of shared and powerful knowledge undermines democracy
8. Schools give unique access to knowledge, skilfully tailored to the growing human
9. Learners volunteer to acquire knowledge when enabled by skilled teachers
10. Good education is not inevitable.  It must not be withheld, misused or devalued.

​Comments welcome, of course.

I was watching a staircase last week and found a youth walking up it backwards, with one hand for the ship, the better to lecture his comrades. This caused significant embouteillage upstream so I issued a cease and desist. He apologised nicely, but I couldn’t tell if it was incipient demagoguery or a concern for safety that inspired him. 

When I visited the Capitol in 1999 the guides walked backward in front of us to prevent anyone slipping off to install Communism. It does feel as though we’re being led backwards at the moment, without reason or rationale.
Pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw are only good to look back on if you didn’t go under. Here’s hoping, for us all.
 
CR
31.9.22    

Looking forward to half term? I’m not following my usual May path of getting onto a train somewhere hot straight after school, but going to West Wales and back for the Jubilee. Time’s running out for us older folks – not including the Queen, of course – and I may safely bank on not seeing another Platinum Jubilee. It seemed churlish not to return to London to potter about in the crowds.
 
I like to do a bit of shopping on my hols, between books. Even a different supermarket is interesting to me and I’m a sucker for everything from weaving in the wilds to the magnificent pharmacies of France. 
 
We’ve been having two different kinds of trouble with shopping here. The first is linked to two large shops of the modern type which opened opposite us but don’t really want children’s custom. I get that hordes of youths hell-bent on unhealthy snackage deters other shoppers who may have more cash. I know that handling teenagers isn’t to everyone’s taste and fear arouses anger which generates trouble, especially when highly caffeinated comestibles are in the case, but it's not as if the existence of the school was hidden to the planners. We are big enough to see.
 
Similar happened in my last school, with a magnet sixth form like Tallis, but gathering also from semi-rural areas. Young drivers couldn’t park in the car park but could in the local streets. This drove residents crazy. Yes, they needed practice parking tidily, but didn’t we all? Young citizens with full licences and insured cars also have parking rights. Responsible young shoppers, some picking up a few things for the family on the way home, could be allowed to go to the shops everyone else goes to, with a bit of planning. We’re working on it.
 
The second shopping trouble isn’t actually about the shopping. Our local parade, as local readers know, can be a troubled spot, so we operate a post-school curfew. From time to time, working with the police, we ban everyone for a day or two. This infuriates lots of people, but keeps our children safer for a while. Supervising the streets, however, is hard, and one of the things that would help is good CCTV. Some adults have strong feelings about being filmed: I have strong feelings about keeping children safe. We could work together on this.
 
Anyway, returning to the shopping, I am delighted to update you on Lord Agnew and his champagne. From Schools Week:

Which, monarchist or no, you have to admit has a better tone than either WTF, taxpayers or sorry we upset people, didn’t realise it was banned, didn’t know it was a party. Could we all perhaps try a little devotion to service?
 
There’s a Tallis English challenge for over the hols that invites age-appropriate use of 18 words. I’ve inaccurately divided them into two groups. For your Jubilee homework, which best fits the Queen and which best fits the government? Give reasons, 19 marks.
​

1. Gumption, humungous, iconic, lucid, esoteric, Zeitgeist
2. Kerfuffle, quaver, cantankerous, miffed, obsequious, discombobulate, defunct, collywobbles, capricious, ennui, idiosyncratic, ubiquitous, Zeitgeist

 
Jubilees in the ancient world started with a blast on the shofar. Find me a ram.
 
CR
27.5.22

The calendar gods decree that I write a blog on Community Days. This week is the big autumn event with all year groups doing slightly different things – sustainability, identity, oppression, relationships, careers, debating, revising, wellbeing, planning and budgeting.  Something for everyone, for every eventuality on adult life’s thorniest pathways. From our experience and scholarship to the brains of the young, engagingly delivered. That’s what the recipients of the cry ‘HB to the sports hall’ are off to, in their usual shambling, bickering and tripping manner.
I was Performance Managed yesterday which focuses the mind. I’ve been a Head for 20 years in three different places, and I reckon I’ve got rules of thumb or mental lists to deal with most eventualities. These were, of course, expanded by new stuff we absorbed under lockdown about how to run a school when the children aren’t allowed to come to it, but there’s a new dimension to educating at the moment with which I’m tussling. Remember that as you read, breathlessly, on.

I don’t know how they do things in the independent sector, but I assume they have time to organise a thought, hence the heads’ hutches being called studies, which would explain the number of books old Seldon wrote while he was high heid-yin at Wellington, for example. But I digress. Anyone been to Peppa Pig world? Anyway, the president of the Girls’ Schools Association made a whole load of very good points yesterday, summarised on the Beeb.   

She said: parents and teachers should keep up with young people who are genuinely worried about racism, sexism and climate change and want to address them with support from adults. Adults who complain that today's teenagers are judgemental and speak a different language so adults ‘can't say anything without being called out by PC children’ should get with it. Times have changed, and we need to keep up. This nastily-dismissed 'woke' generation are actually young people who are worried about things. We teach them to be kind but when they grow up to be impressively so with an understanding and appreciation for the world around them, we mock them, or dismiss them as unrealistic do-gooders. Nicely put, Ma’am.

Contrast this with the Social Mobility Chair’s end of the forest. She thinks that children need to be very strictly controlled, so they’re habituated into choosing good over evil because they’re all wicked underneath. We can train good behaviour into them, but left their own devices, keep clear, they’re pretty unsavoury. Original Sin.

Ah me. Which side of the fence whereon to plummet? Obviously with young people trying to change the world for the better, but what about the echo of reality hiding in the misogynist retro-theology? Children can be horrible to each other as they explore, or are fearful about, the boundaries of their world. Why is that?

Well, part of the problem is the example adults set, hypocrisy in particular. Why can’t I speak in the corridor at school, no one talks to me at home? Why should I worry about getting a job when the world’s about to end?  What’s the point of learning to be fair if I’m judged by the colour of my skin, or kind, if I’m not safe walking home? What exactly have you done, Sir, to make the world a better place?

Some years ago I wrote ten precepts underpinning the curriculum which still have an interesting half-life in the edu-ether. I started from the importance of knowledge and ended with adult authority and the teacher’s skill. But the problem I’m wrestling with now is this: how to be educators at a time when adults are demonstrably the problem?  I’m reading about wicked problems, again, and worrying about the shallow simplistic solutions that schools have been forced into for so long that now we’re hooked on the superficial, the tick-boxable, the headline-grabbing, the Emperor’s new clothes.

One of the chaps I wrote that book with has just died. He was a great comprehensive school Head for yonks, twenty years older than me. One of the best things about the writing process was talking to him about leading a school yesterday, as it were, the past being a different country. Now I think I need to revise myself, to include the mortal dangers and injustices we knew were around the corner all along, but that young people won’t ignore any more.

My Year 13 class and I keep company with some very old white male theologians as we head toward liberation theology at the end of the syllabus. We drop in on Karl Barth, whose magnum opus was Church Dogmatics in fourteen volumes over thirty-five years. If I had the headspace I’d start on some School Pragmatics, on the lessons of the sum of all my days since 1983. Guilt will probably feature, but not sin. Look out for the next list.
 
CR
23.11.21

We’re alert to language at Tallis, not that the average bellow of a fourteen-year old needs alertness as you’ll generally hear it anyway. ‘Leave me alone, you irrelevant peasant’ besought one to her friend. Research tells me that this is a phrase used in a video I’m not allowed to watch so it may be terrible even to mention it. However, it took my fancy: no profanity or coarseness, magnificently dismissive. Nothing to resolve so I chuckled orf.

On a diametrically opposite staircase another youth badgered a friend. ‘Is your leg still broken?’ as if it were a personal affront to speedy conveyance. These young folks have places to go and don’t want to be delayed by other peoples’ limitations. Adolescence gets you like that: idealism and impatience, get out of my light, why wasn’t this fixed yesterday?

Which are reasonable concerns. Why are we still facing racism, misogyny, poverty and climate disaster? Have these disasters not been well-trailed?

We spent last Friday’s Community Day talking about gender and violence, following up on the righteous anger of the Everyone’s Invited movement, of which I heartily approve. Outrage is an interesting emotion to share with the young, especially as outrage is now funnelled through social media whereas when I was a lad you had to join a political party or stand in the street and shout.   

We planned an inclusive day, some sessions separated by gender, with options for those who identify differently. The sessions required thought and skilled direction of discussion. We tackled the whole range of the debate and why counter-groups set up with a ‘yes, but’ agenda once an injustice is uncovered. The way that we conducted debate was, necessarily, a compromise. All our children start from different places and have been exposed to different ranges of opinions and ways of living. Understanding the world and changing it for the better can’t just be done on the surface: you have to get under the skin, so there have been many, many further conversations about gender this week.

I may be too phlegmatic about human life. I try to tackle injustice where I can make a difference. I’m worried about the climate. I know a bit about misogyny but I’ve never experienced racism. I’m angry when young people are commodified or categorised and sloppy thinking makes me bang my head on the table. I think that shared humanity requires us to try to make the world a better place and I’m not sure that the echo chamber of peoples’ phones necessarily facilitates global improvement.

But I’m committed to the idea of young outrage and I won’t crush spirits. My grandfather used to say that there’s nothing sadder than a young conservative, meaning that the young should want revolution of some kind, change, and fast. I’ve found myself compromised at every turn this week by a world that’s in a bit of a state and young people who want to overturn every structure and declare a better world tomorrow. As they should.

I turned sixty this week (pause for the cries of ‘surely not?’) and realise that I am beyond decrepit to a seventeen-year-old who’s blood’s up. All I can do it to try to maintain the secure structure through which adolescent anger may be channelled so that when they leave us, to change the world, their views are tested, founded, informed and of material use to the service of the common good.

You remember Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the wonderful poem by Amanda Gorman? That was followed by controversy that a white writer had been commissioned to translate Gorman into Dutch. Rijneveld stepped away from that work with another poem, the end of which reads:

            ……you actively need to feel the hope that
you are doing something to improve the world, though you mustn’t
forget this: stand up again after kneeling and straighten together our backs.
 
All I can do is all I can do. In this context? Make sure that Tallis faces injustices and tries both to resolve them where we can and equip our young with the tools to make a bigger difference than any preceding generation.  To them, my efforts may be crass but, for me, I hope they’re not misguided.
 
The best view from the window this week has been skipping. Some genius procured a sack full of ropes and we’ve used them with all year groups at lunchtimes. They’re skipping singly and in doubles but most of all, in groups in long rainbow ropes. A visitor asked ‘Are these Pride skipping ropes?’ 

I don’t know. They may be part of the unicorn-rainbow vibe that appears to have taken over the world and which in former days I’d be itching to set as an A-level General Studies question ‘Do unicorns like rainbows? How might we know? Discuss.’

Let’s say that they are Pride symbols. Let’s say that all rainbows are thresholds to a better world. Let’s say that every jumping child and every outraged young person is a door to a better future. Let’s do something to improve the world.  
 
CR
9.7.21

This is about several of my failings, one of which is a predilection for business as usual no matter what. I’ll come to that later, but let me focus on my onscreen shortcomings first by walking you through my week in meetings. I claim no special sympathy for this experience. The children and classroom teachers have it much worse and manage it much better, but I’m the one writing the blog.

Here we go: three lessons with my year 13 class. Two meetings with the PTI. One with the school union representatives. Three hours in a review with governors and the local authority. Two leadership group meetings, a meeting with the departed Mr Tomlin, two with the deputy heads. One with an achievement advisor who freezes. Several brisk ones with my Head of Department, eight slots at year 13 parents evening. An hour with some local heads, a Saturday morning meeting online with the full Board of Governors. A podcast panel discussion and a 30-minute keynote. In the middle, a bit of time out to have a call with my sister and a solicitor about our mother’s will.
I’ve seen into people’s kitchens, been shown decoration in progress and I’ve marvelled at their pictures and lighting. I’ve asked nosy questions about now-familiar spaces: why is that coffee pot always on the piano? I see family members I’d never otherwise meet and the Clerk to the Governors’ cat. I’ve made remarks that would have been better unsaid, telling Mr Bradshaw that he appeared to be turning into Russell Crowe or at best, Michael Sheen. I admired the Chief Executive of the Chartered College’s matching jumper and crockery. I enjoy it when Mr Malik’s blurred background looks as though it’s consuming him and I’m working my way through Mr Williams’ bookcase.   Tomlin showed me around his new office, beset with cricketing memorabilia.

I’m not great on the phone. I actually prefer online meetings now and I think that it’ll make a big difference to the way we do stuff in the future, less time out of school, but good grief, I’m going to have to improve my game. They truly bring out the worst in me.

A caveat: I can concentrate with the best of them while I’m teaching, but that’s because I’m so worried about looking like a dim-witted oldster with the tech that I’m in a fever of anxiety in case I press a button that loses everyone. Also, like all Heads, I like the sound of my own voice and I have a captive audience to go with my unadventurous slides.  

Teams, Zoom or GoToMeeting, I’m the same in them all. I fidget. I tidy my desktop in the literal sense. I pick at my face, fiddle with my hair, chew my fingers. I pour tea out of a teapot noisily and then slurp it. I rearrange pencils and sharpen them with a retro device clipped to the edge of the desk just like the one in my mother’s classroom in the 60s. I mess about with hand cream and occasionally file my nails. I stare at my hair and wonder what can be done, then I shake it like a dusty dog all over my keyboard so then I have to use the toothbrush in my desk drawer to clear it out. I poke further in the desk drawers to see if anything new has incarnated therein since the last look, then I eat a Fisherman’s Friend. I look out of the window or stand up and walk about.  I think about other things and ignore the proceedings. I interrupt, I roll my eyes, I swivel my chair. I slump, so now I’ve a pain in my lower back. I take my glasses off and on, which in a live meeting signals I’ve run out of patience.

I’m more than usually irritable. I forget to mute and unmute myself but I show little patience with others who do exactly the same. When I’m chairing meetings I can’t read the body language accurately and sometimes get people in the wrong order, adding to annoyance and tension. Because I’m a gazer-about (in real life too) I miss people gesticulating wildly at me to be allowed to speak. And I’ve done something to Teams that means that I’m literally hands-free in that I can’t see the little yellow hands when they go up and I can’t put mine up because it tells me that I don’t have permission. How can that be true?    

Oh get over yourself, you cry. We all have this and some of us spend eight solid hours a day on screen with barely a break. Worse, we expect our children to learn this way, so that they can complete an education that is, in some mystical way, meant to be comparable with the usual sort.

I write in the twilight zone between the exams consultation and its findings. Somehow we’re going to have to make the best of this for our year 11s and 13s and safeguard their futures. Some of them struggle in this world designed for adults with offices, desks, swivel chairs and teapots. Some of them have managed, many fall between, most of them miss each other. We miss all of them and Tallis has to be ready to welcome them back. That’s why we have all these benighted and tortuous meetings, why we try to make sure we’re not letting anything slip that we can help.

We hold trust for our young people whether they are with us or not. We try our best while we’re chartering these deadly waters, but we need to be ready to take them back calmly, warmly, readily when we reach the shore. I’m not going to any meetings that don’t tend to that welcoming.
 
CR
4.2.21

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 

Dear Mr Williamson,

You’ve got a lot on and it looks as though it’s getting on top of you. If you need some peace and quiet to think, Tallis-the-building has got that. Tallis-the-school, however, is trying to keep itself going.  
 
Let me tell you about the building first. There are so few people here that any movement catches my eye. I looked up yesterday to see a colleague going into one of the blocks. She turned and looked wistfully at the empty concourse before heading into the dark to lead a live A-level lesson. She’s lost family in the virus and may have been thinking about that, but she looked like she was hearing what I hear, the hollow sound of a building holding its breath. 
 
Teachers laugh about school without children being peaceful and tidy, but it’s not new. Anyone who comes in to work in the holidays hears a silence, but it’s different to this silence. Holiday silence is about taking a breath, settling and regrouping ready for the next foray. This silence is different, an absence, not a breather. It’s as if the bricks, the glass and the mighty steel frames are asking what’s happened? Where are they?

We know where they are, but it isn’t here. So I’m wondering about what it’ll sound like when they’re back, and trying to analyse what I’m missing. Noise and busy-ness obviously. The particular sound of the little crossroads outside my office at lesson change contrasting with the purring motor of the main office next door; the racket of 11RA seizing and gathering for afternoon tutor and the Deaf children talking and signing as they go for support.  The personal leitmotif of a colleague’s keys and whistle, of another’s heels and the clatter of the fire door against my wall because the doorstop’s in the wrong place. 

The work we’re doing at the moment is all about maintaining the bones of a school: checking children are OK, sending work, teaching lessons where we can and sorting out work to keep people going. Governance, budgets, teacher recruitment for September. We’re just about holding it together under the circumstances and we’re waiting to hear what happens next. We’ll hear it from you, Mr Williamson, but we’ll hear it from the children too.

And there’s the problem. Schools are designed to be full of bustle, even a bit squashed in parts. They’re designed to be community crucibles in which children learn how to deal with themselves and others. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to look after themselves, and we do it in batches. Social distancing is the opposite of what we do and the infrastructure is all against it. 

Practically speaking, we could keep children 2m apart in class if we had 10 (out of 30) to a standard classroom.  We’d be hard pressed to do it in the corridors and we could probably only feed 60 at once. Children would have to be kept indoors all day to enforce it, being taken out for walks occasionally. We could do this – we could do whatever it takes - but we could only do it for a small number. Even on a giant site like ours that would perhaps be 500 at most – 25%. Which 25%?

Lockdown’s five weeks old now and it's hard, very hard for some. We need to remember why we’re doing it and take care that our next actions are measured and rational. Life will never be the same again and we can’t make up the time we’re losing to Covid-19. We mustn’t unpick the good that’s been done by our unusual national self-discipline and we must especially guard against controversy-as-an-antidote-to-boredom that panics shaky politicians into making bad decisions. This disease kills people who are unprepared, and both our national health and National Health remain at the mercy of national unreadiness.
 
Whatever happens to bring us out of this will have a cost, which we’ll pay for a long time. Some children will learn less than they expected over the course of their school careers, but if we get it right they’ll have the rest of their lives to learn in. If we get it wrong, some of them, and their teachers, won’t.

There are 53 Thankful Villages in England and Wales who lost no one in the Great War. There are tens of thousands of villages and towns who lost people, singly or in big numbers, whole street-fulls in the Blitz, of course. Whatever happens next, we need our schools to come through this Thankful. We need our young people for a better future.  We need to keep them safe now. 

Take care, Mr Williamson.

Yours in hope

CR
24.4.19

Dear Mr Williamson,
 
I hope you’re bearing up under the workload I suggested a fortnight ago. I imagine your action plan is coming along beautifully. And me? Inspired by a Norwegian visitor, I’ve been thinking about free school meals. How the Vikings have changed over the centuries.
 
A long time ago in a school far away I was in charge of the free meals queue. This was a Friday lunch duty where children eligible for free meals queued up to get dinner tickets for the following week. In that school, in the 90s, children who paid for meals paid with cash, but free meals children had tickets. (In another school everyone had tickets but free meals were a different colour). Anyway, the free tickets queue seems a brutal way of doing it, to modern eyes. We might as well have put a sign up saying ‘Poor kids, line up here’. I used to try to make it The Line to Be In with song-and-dance routines and jokes as well as top-notch training in the conventions of queuing.  
 
Technology freed us from this and changed the world for the better. Cashless catering preloads free meals money.  Everyone pays the same, rich and poor fingers alike, no one needs to know who’s free. 
 
Free school meals are of course our major proxy for deprivation, for the children who have the biggest struggle in life and who, nationally speaking, tend to do less well at school. Some of your predecessors in Sanctuary Buildings haven’t liked to speak of such things. Your dear old predecessor Gove was prone to call any reference to differences in achievement mapped against poverty as ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, blaming teachers for self-fulfilling unequal expectations. I haven’t heard you on the matter but doubtless you concur.
 
The self-fulfilling thing is insidious the other way though. A report by the redoubtable Sutton Trust into why normal people can’t afford to live in London makes some interesting comments about how rich people picture themselves in contradistinction to the poor.
 
Top earners do not see themselves as "especially fortunate" because they are "surrounded by numerous other people like themselves", says the study. The report warns of a social and geographical separation, with very affluent people in London having infrequent contact with those facing much tougher circumstances. They are likely to espouse values of meritocracy, while being part of a process that has seen social mobility becoming less likely.
 
In plain English, sir, if you will, that means that rich people never mix with poor people. They don’t understand that security of wealth also secures educational advantage. They assume they do well because of their own efforts, because they were naturally born cleverer, harder-working, more insightful, go-getting, resilient, plucky rather than lucky. That chap who plays Lewis’s cross oppo thinks along these lines.
 
However, policies made exclusively by those who have never had a moment’s anxiety about paying the rent or putting food on the table have a tendency to blame the vulnerable for their lack of gumption and devise direr punishments for poverty. It leads to universal credit inflexibility, drains schools and hospitals of money, closes libraries, sports centres and youth clubs, derides the public service and blames the poor for not being richer. It makes it unacceptable to draw a line between poverty and the experiences that lead to educational success, despite the education system being designed to reflect, support and reproduce the experiences of the rich, in the wake of cultural capital. Why would you want to face a terrible human problem when you can just tell people its unseemly to mention it?
 
We’ve had a community day at Tallis today on celebrating diversity, though we tend not to include divisions between rich and poor in such events. At first lunch I struck out with my warmed-up stew and berthed alongside a shipmate who was about to launch a sonnet with year 8, namely, Robert Hayden’s beautiful tribute to the remarkable slave and liberator Frederick Douglass:  
 
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,  
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,  
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,  
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:  
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro  
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world  
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,  
this man, superb in love and logic, this man  
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,  
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives  
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
 
Mr Williamson, your people of the comprehensive schools have a dream like this of education as a beautiful and terrible thing, necessary as air, and useful as earth. We want a world where none is ignorant, none excluded or alienated. Yes, we aim to teach the rhetoric, legends, poems and wreaths of bronze.  But we do it focusing on the flesh-and-blood lives that we try to grow. We do it despite struggle, injustice, poverty and the wilful misunderstandings of those who have everything to lose by flinging open the gates of opportunity, of London and saying – take your place, you’re welcome.
 
Mr Williamson, seize the day. Abolishing child poverty is the beautiful, needful thing that would garland you with sonnets. Wouldn’t that be worth trying?
 
As ever,
 
Carolyn Roberts

CR
​24.1.20

I often tell you that I’m looking out of the window. I wouldn’t want you to think that’s all I did, but my window – as is befitting – is a particularly interesting one with much to see. It’s sometimes so interesting that I have to intervene. On Wednesday I looked up and saw a small person sitting on a bench at A Time Not Authorised for Sitting Outside. Fortunately a teacher much more experienced with the older sort skidded to a halt and parked himself. I watched their deep conversation during which it transpired that she’d taken being ‘sent out’ literally.  Children in the northeast used always to describe being sent out as being ‘flung out’, conjuring an image of centrifugal force, but even that didn’t extend to leaving the building. 

You never know what they don’t know. We discovered some 16-year-olds yesterday who’d never played a board game, had no idea of the conventions, didn’t know any card games. They were offered this chance as part of the Tallis Choices Community Day. Younger year groups had time on sustainability, relationships, violence, drugs and careers, but year 11 get a bit of support in how to make the right choices in a year full of exams. This included what to do to relax, on the grounds that many of them are a bit anxious, and mocks start in a fortnight. Yoga, team games, board games, relaxation, meditation and a bit of optional crochet. 

But you never know how they see themselves. One chap who’d opted for the crochet fetched up in XFN Study Hall (expectations, effort, engagement) with it later and calmly sat down to while away an hour with the wool. XFN isn’t optional and it’s only for those who’re strangers to the flashcard. You don’t have time to crochet quotations from An Inspector Calls even in 1 hour 45 exam, so that little bit of creativity had to be suppressed.  Kindly. There are places to relax and there are places to work.

And places where sitting zipped into your puffa with your bag on your back ready to spring is a little unnerving.  Year 12 were debating all day and I muscled in to judge the final. The chair was inexperienced and keen to learn, but didn’t look very relaxed and also had to be warned about applauding one side more than the other. Be more Bercow, I advised. On the way in I followed some people so tall I couldn’t see their heads, boys whom the gutter press would characterise as arrogant yobboes, clinging to one another in case they have to articulate an unprepared thought. ‘I’m going to sit next to you. I can’t speak out loud even if I’m asked’. Mind, off-the cuff may make more sense than another who confidently told me ‘you can catch death from meningitis’.

Either of which were preferable to year 11 on healthy eating. How was it? ‘It’s all about the poo, Miss. You’ve got to get it just right.’  Thank you, indeed it is. Oh look, there’s someone I can talk to about the weather.

Or politics! Which brings me neatly to heads’ priorities for school funding which I’d like to share with you in the necessary purdah-imperative spirit of impartiality, having taken my puffa off.

• An adequately-funded National Funding Formula for all schools
• Proper funding for SEND and High Needs provision which is in crisis
• Adequate post-16 per pupil funding rising from £4000 to £4760, not £4188 as planned
• Funding for social care, policing, counselling, behaviour support and all the other unfunded extras now expected and required of schools

• A published 10 Year funding plan as recommended by the Education Select Committee
• Clarity about future costs and future revenue streams
• Salary increases fully funded by new money.
• An independently verified benchmarking tool for school funding
• Independent statistical analysis so the system doesn’t have to rely on the IFS and EPI for accurate and unvarnished funding analysis. (On this last, government have referred to a headline investment of £14 billion into schools and the UK Statistics Agency riposted  “There is, however, a risk that the figures could mislead: for example, people who read no further might expect that the headline figure of £14 billion refers to an annual increase.  We therefore encourage the Department and Ministers to continue to provide appropriate context when making statements on school funding.” 

 
Does this sound unreasonable? I don’t think so. If we really cared about children we’d have 10-year funding plans which couldn’t be unpicked by governments. Children’s futures are too important to leave to politicians.
 
I discovered a brilliant poem two weeks ago, Anne Carson on Troy.  It ends

‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’

Available in more than 360 languages, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is the most translated document in the world. It provides a foundation for a just and decent future for everyone, and gives people everywhere a powerful tool in the fight against oppression and affronts to human dignity.

The declaration is 70 years old this year and Ai Weiwei has designed a flag to celebrate it, which we’ve got three of.  Some of our children went to meet him and all of our children have looked closely at the declaration on our very successful community day on 19 June. We had a wonderful display of pennants of rights all around the concourse, but weather intervened and they had to go.
 
You could stop reading at this point and watch the film, but just in case I’m invited to become PM in the absence of any other reasonable candidate, I thought you should be reassured about our stance on Human Rights at Tallis. 
It is very important that we all know and support these hard-won rights which protect and support us all. Here they are, very briefly paraphrased by me:
​

1. Human beings are born free and equal
2. Everyone in the world is entitled to these rights and freedoms
3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person
4. Slavery must be outlawed
5. Torture or inhuman punishment is outlawed
6. Everyone must be recognised before the law
7. Everyone has an equal right to the law
8. Every country should uphold these rights
9. No one should be arbitrarily arrested, detained or exiled
10. Rights should be upheld fairly and publicly
11. People are innocent until proved guilty
12. Private and family life, honour and reputation must be protected
13. People may freely move around the world
14. Asylum from persecution should be provided internationally
15. Everyone has the right to a nationality
16. Marriage should be freely and equally entered into and dissolved
17. Everyone has the right to own property and not have it taken off them arbitrarily
18. People must have freedom of thought, conscience and religion
19. People must have freedom of opinion and expression
20. People must be free to assemble and associate peacefully
21. People need free elections, democracy and public services
22. Social security and cultural rights are needed to safeguard the dignity of the person
23. Everyone has a right to work, equal pay, trade unions and protection against unemployment
24. Everyone has a right to leisure, limited working hours and holidays with pay
25. Everyone has a right to basic healthcare, especially children and mothers
26. Education must be free, accessible and allow for full personal development
27. Everyone has a right to culture, arts, science and the fruits of their own production
28. Everyone has a right to a social order which protects all of these
29. Everyone has duties to the community
30. No one may try to destroy any of these rights and freedoms.

Here, in this advanced democracy, now, I’m worried about 17 of these. I’m worried about the Hostile Environment policy, internet trolling that destroys lives, vanishing public services, removal of legal aid for the poorest, zero-hours contracts and the functionalism of education. I could go on.

One of those rights, of course, is to an education. Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre includes a wonderful sculptured layout of 90 tonnes of straightened steel reinforcing bars from substandard regional government buildings that didn’t survive the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. So many of them were schools which collapsed on top of the children and teachers. When I saw it in the Royal Academy a couple of years ago it was like seeing the timbers of Aberfan laid out before you, and hearing the cries of crushed children.

But young people are defined by optimism and they love to learn something new. Our film explains their ‘favourite’ human rights and gives a flavour of the deep learning that happened on that day. And one of the groups came up with this. The future’s in safe hands.

Today I take my texts from the great poet Tomlin. We’ve adjusted our mobile phone rules, on which I have pontificated at length in the past and even in the press. 
 
This was tannoy 1 on Tuesday, day 2 of the new jurisdiction. It caused groans. 
 
The corridors, the walkway and the blocks are no phone zones
Don’t forget this simple rule also includes headphones
 
Things, as Mr Blair didn’t say, could only get worse. Changeover 2 cause people to bang their heads on desks, though I thought it a great improvement.
  
Help us keep a great big smile on all your teachers’ faces
By only using phones at social times in social spaces
 
This was followed by a specific warning at changeover 3. I think the scansion needs attention and there’s too much dangle in the second line. 
 
Help us keep your phones and keep them firmly in your pocket
You don’t want to get to lunch when it’s allowed, but you have lost it.
 
He busked the next one but the final exhortation was perhaps the worst of all.
 
Thanks to all those students who can now go straight on home
For the rest, attend the green canteen for some harsh words and your phone
 
See how we model creativity to the children? I shall enter him for the Forward Prize for Poetry next year.
 
Changing a rule in school is an interesting process. It takes us a long time to decide and we have to argue amongst ourselves for weeks until we come up with an agreement. Children then have to be warned and the infrastructure put into place. In this case, consistent instructions, seven assemblies, tutor group scripts, padded reusable envelopes with labels, lists of names, boxes to put them in, safe places to store them, return mechanisms, FAQs with staff and, after a pilot week, tweaks to the system and a clear message for parents in the newsletter. That’s the easy part.

The harder part is actually changing our daily actions. In this case, moving the ‘no phones’ rule back from the classroom door to the outside door, and developing a consistent and safe way of removing offending items and retraining their owners. After that we work through the ones who just forgot, the ones who thought it wouldn’t happen to them, the ones who thought they’d test a new system until we’re left with the dogged recidivists who can’t let it go. That’ll take a while.

It’s been interesting to see how annoyed some older students have been by this. Unusually, we made the new rule fit post-16 students too, except for subjects where teachers need them to use their phones, or where it has long been allowed in a very thoughtful and controlled manner. We thought long and hard about this, worrying that years 12 and 13 would feel affronted by being treated the same as the younger ones – but then decided that the new rule was whole school.

Why? Because we try to model a way of living in community that will help young people understand the world and change it for the better. While we don’t demonise phones as such, we were losing too much lesson time arguing over them and that was in the sixth form too. We decided collectively that we weren’t helping our young people learn a more sensible way to be, and we’ve changed our minds.

And we’ve changed the way the adults act too. We’re not checking our phones all the time or walking along looking at them, except for the safeguarding team. We’re all in this together, because phones are addictive to adults as well as children and we can all demonstrate a bit of self-control.

The poet Nick Drake wrote about the ancient Aztec rubber ball game, in the voice of a young missionary priest who becomes captivated by it. He describes the ball:

I have it now
In the palm of my hand.
It is a small, dark ball, warm
As an egg, or a fallen star,
And decorated with skulls;
It is heavy as a stone, and yet
What spirit moves it? Whose god
Created such a wonder 
That leaps for joy? And why 
Does my body tremble with delight
To play the game again? 
Pray for me, now –
For I find I cannot let it go.

Isn’t that like a phone? There’s a fear in the last line of being overtaken by something that you chose to do but can’t stop. That’s always terrified me. I think our new rule is both moderate and humane and I hope it helps young people to put their phones down from time to time outside school too. Perhaps to play football or write poetry, who knows?

Changing your mind after reflection and investigation is a sign of good learning and a hallmark of adult life. Our legislators could learn from this.
 
CR
7.3.19

I am now in a position to report back to you on these little ones who are now 15 and 16. That position is lying flat, running on the spot, saluting the sun or exhaling carefully from each nostril, because I found myself eyeballing yoga in the Dojo with one of the above classes this week. Let me tell you, they’re looking pretty chipper and they’re very bendy.

You might be tempted to ask why a woman of my stature – and I mean that literally – is doing yoga with children, but you’d be better off asking how. It’s not easy with my arthritic knees, and I could only do some of it and yes, yes, I know that if I did more of it I could do more of it. I didn’t even close my eyes, for example, which seems important in yoga and remains within my physical capacity.

As a general rule, parents expect those charged with the care of their young to keep their eyes open, if not peeled. I can’t imagine a teacher anywhere who would close her eyes with 50 year 11s in the room. Anyway, if I’d closed my eyes I wouldn’t have seen them and the seeing was the joy: my physical flexibility is nothing to do with the case.   
These fidgety and energetic young people were model yogis. They were entranced by it. Artfully arranged by Sir so that they weren’t burdened by peer pressure they were free to listen, watch, try and relax. They breathed, lay, stretched, and ran like good ‘uns. Not one of them let embarrassment stop them participating.  Each of them, after a full hour of pretty silent concentration, was wreathed in smiles. One asked for the name of the music. One said she didn’t like her leggings, but got over it.

Good grief, why? Why weren’t they in maths? I hear you ask. This was one of our Community Days in which we try to give young people a bit of exposure to aspects of adult life. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship, and there’s quite a lot to that. Keeping control of yourself and not getting overwhelmed is the message we give to year 11 on this particular annual day. We do team games, revision planning and, yes, yoga. All year groups do something a bit different. Year 10 worked with external partners about avoiding gangs and violence, for example. Year 12 debated. We usually take year 7 for a walk, but the weather was against us.  

One of the other year 11 sessions was mindfulness with crochet. I didn’t get to that, but you’d probably like to know that though my knitting is serviceable, I’ve never crocheted but I can at least pronounce the word, which sets me apart from the crowd, it seems. A senior person confused governors almost beyond endurance with talk of crotchet training, and year 11 themselves made only garbled sounds. 

Having something to do with your hands is important if you’re a fidgeter. HMCI Spielman has been seen to crochet, and I once went to a lecture by the late Heinz Wolff where he gave us bits of Meccano to fiddle with while he spoke. This amused the nuns siting behind me, one of whom poked me in the back and said it was the first time I’d sat still all day. 

But today I sat tidily with the Director in the Woolwich Centre while we talked about our plans for this year 11 and two weeks ago I sat still into the night chairing a meeting about the usefulness of arts research and measurement to school decision-making. A Tallis friend, Tate’s Anna Cutler, talked about measurement, about space, time, content and method. She said two very arresting things. The first was obvious: art and schools have endured and will be around for a long time, despite current measurement trends. The second was chilling. She talked about South Korea’s reviewing of their school curriculum in the light of an unacceptable level of child suicide. What, she posed, would be an acceptable level?

We know that the way we measure children has got out of kilter with the things we value in life. We try to mitigate a little of that in a small way at Tallis while still doing what we’re expected to do to equip them with the qualifications for the adult world. Don’t begrudge them a couple of hours in the year focusing on deep breathing: it’s the least we can do.   
 
CR
29.11.18        
 
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I 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

The White House book sounds gripping. I picture the Wolff man sitting quietly in a corridor smiling pleasantly so that people stop for a chat. Perhaps he had cakes. Who can resist someone listening sympathetically when you’re tired and irritated?

If OFSTED had any sense, that’s what they’d do. A day spent in reception with an open smile and some fancy biscuits and you’d learn a lot. Who’s late, who’s angry, who’s ill, who’s in tears, who’s got time to talk, how many supply teachers are signing in, why are the Police there, who is that bedraggled old soul who never remembers she needs her keys to get back? Ah, that’s the Head. 

Daily sights are available to any watcher. Monday Mr Springall had trousers on. (Not that he’s usually overexposed, you understand, just that he lives in shorts and generally only wears trousers for awards ceremonies. I didn’t think he’d been issued with tracksuit bottoms.) Tuesday I admired a matching pair of hair ribbons and the wearers gave me the biggest smiles. Wednesday I took issue with a camouflaged hat. Thursday the police came to tell us something we’d told them. Friday I returned to the classroom as a rusty supply teacher.

So that means that Monday everybody was cold, Tuesday year 7 are still perky and charming 16 weeks in.  Wednesday ‘It’s been a week now. No hats indoors no matter how new.’ Thursday nearly working in partnership with external agencies. Friday another nasty case of bronchitis so Roberts had to dust off her Religious Attitudes to Crime and Punishment.

This at least demonstrates I’ve put in a whole week. We came back on Wednesday last week but I spent Thursday to Saturday at a conference in Oxford, talking with philosophers and ethicists from around the world on Civic Friendship. It was the intellectual equivalent of a Christmas Dinner and I’m still digesting it. In particular, from Berkowitz of St Louis-Missouri University’s nugget ‘Children are the only known raw material from which adults can be made.’   
 
So Tuesday wasn’t just hair ribbons. Tuesday was early close for training, on trauma, on understanding the causes and damage of early childhood trauma and looking at how this might affect young people’s approach to adults, to school, to experiences, to life. Once you’ve grasped that, some inexplicables start to make sense. Why might some children be fearful and angry all the time? Why does the slightest change to routine throw some completely off kilter? Why is it important for teachers to be predictable, consistent, reliable, calm and – to return to the White House – stable?
 
It’s important because kindness and empathy can repair some of the damage already done, and even if it couldn’t it would still be the right way to live. When I looked round Tallis one of the things that made me want to come and serve out my twilight years here was the sight and sound of teachers talking calmly, firmly and kindly to struggling souls, about a better way to be. It permeates the place. Civic friendship indeed. 

I try to show this to visitors so I make them look out of my window at lesson change. It’s a bit of a risky strategy as you never know what might emerge in human community, but as a spectacle it’s never let me down (though Toby Young didn’t quite know what to make of it when he watched in May). New governors yesterday had been on a guided tour with some exceptionally loquacious year 8s who’d even commissioned a dance performance en route, so could be forgiven for wondering why it took 55 minutes to get around the building when 1900 people could emerge and disappear in 4.

But the best uncapturable moment of the week was Thursday in the quiet of the after-school gloaming, hearing George whistling Auld Lang Syne as he crossed the yard. 
                 
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne. 
 
Don’t be anxious about willie waught. Loosely translated it means ‘take my hand in friendship and make a toast to the times we’ve known’. That’s as good for a new start as for an ending, for a reunion as for a parting. Here we are, the raw materials of civic life, holding out a hand to each other as we reboot Tallis for 2018.    
 
CR
12.1.18

We know it’s Christmas at Tallis when the red tags are issued to decorate the trees with messages of hope and happiness. Thursday was Christmas Show day with lots of excitable Tallisees running about in dancing gear and suchlike, feeling important by being on the wrong lunch and performing while their compatriots are slogging through the curriculum. 

Yea, even unto week 14 and in these last two weeks, mock GCSEs. The new exams have a lot of stuff in them and year 11 looked distinctly queasy by Wednesday. We teach them the right behaviour for the task so lining up in the canteen, ushering upstairs in silence to the be-desked Sports Hall, shushed by Sir on the landing, Miss on the stairs, Sir at the door. And me, hassling thoughtlessly raucous small inmates: ‘Stand aside! These people are going to an exam!’ as if they were slightly bemused gods progressing to a test on Mount Olympus. Anyway, its back to basketball in the big space now, until we gather as a whole village on Wednesday for the Christmas Assembly.
Likewise the Gallery, a much-used space. Exams this week, governors’ meetings, anti-Gangs work and a visit from a team of researchers at the British Museum interspersed by tetchiness ‘who left the tables like this?’. And the hall: exams, staff briefing, assembly, and tonight the Christmas show Tallis in the Woods. Spaces have specific meaning in schools but flexible spaces are where we train our young for the unpredictability of the outside world. This is what’s expected, these are the conventions, don’t worry about how to behave, we’ll teach you to be secure so we can teach you to be confident. That being said, in the last staff briefing of 2017 I amused myself gathering views through the medium of head shaking and nodding. Funnier for me than them, I said. Sorry.

‘Something Christmassy?’ requested Heads of Year 7 and 8 so I was away. Having watched Cressida Dick on the news, I was impressed by the quantity and inventiveness of her hand gestures even when sitting with a select committee. So we gathered in the Sports Hall, I waved my arms about a lot and got 540 11-13 year olds to think about the shape of the school year, festivals of light, nativity plays in their past and how all the characters in the ancient story behave unexpectedly. I asked them which parts they’d played and then had to stretch my interpretation to cover ‘trees’ and ‘bales of hay’, let alone donkeys. Bales of hay? That’s a primary school with more actors than useful parts.

Something Christmassy in maths too this week. Venn diagrams: what’s warm, what’s festive, what’s made of fruit? Lee was away with dreams of a warm mince pie: Tommy trying to persuade Sir that turkey is fruit-based. What falls outside the circles? Shoes! Dogs!  Another maths lesson, another set of sets (vets’ clients) and Mario’s howl ‘I’m having trouble with the dogs’. We teach children to categorise and analyse so they can contain the world in their heads, but sometimes stuff doesn’t fit and we need to find a way through uncertainty.

Which is why herself had to forage in the archives for a new box of hankies. My room has multiple uses too: meetings, interviews, book looks, arguments, crises, exasperations and the imponderables of human life. Hankies provided, if we can find a new box. I’m writing our Christmas cards today. No winsome drawings of robins and Santa by a perky year 7 for us. Christmas is about a baby, the only character who behaves as expected in the nativity play, the eternal symbol of hope. Our card this year is another lovely sixth form portrait of a young person, and a line from Eglantyne Jebb whose work founded Save the Children: all wars are wars against children.

So as their government forget to count the Rohingya refugee children we look on the clear-eyed face of a girl and try to think about a better future. Tallis in the Woods combined all sorts of music, dance, film and drama with Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and a mystery demon caretaker in an anarchic feast of harmony and wit. As the song says, how do you measure a year? 525 600 minutes? We measure it by hours, lessons, breaks, queues, jokes, plays, trips, events, detentions, quiet, nudging, scuffling and forests of hands up. It’s a training for life until they’re old enough to put it behind them and change the world for the better. Who says that won’t require dancing?  
 
CR
15.12.17