Category: Conference

Less Likely than a Unicorn

22/3/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need a school system that works for everyone, in schools that hold communities together and make them better places to live. As Harold Dent, Editor of the TES until 1950, said of the wartime plans:

A true democracy must be a community, united by a common purpose, bound by a common interest, and inspired by a common ethos. These ideals cannot be realised if from an early age children are segregated into mutually exclusive categories. All should be members of the one school, which should provide adequately for diversity of individual aptitudes and interests, yet unite all as members of a single community

Dent feared that a country without common schools might end up in discord and revolution. It was in everyone’s interest to make the fairest solution work. We didn’t, and we’ve got the discord. Might the time be now? I saw something that looked very like a unicorn here, last week. Surely we can summon up a better world if not for these children, then for the next ones along.

CR
22.3.24

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Trouble with leopards

4/10/2023

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tToday’s staircase was loud with red-faced and exhausted Year 7s after cross-country training. About forty of them told me they’d had to go round TWICE and could not therefore rush to French or Spanish. A second staircase for some was like the great north face of the Eiger as I chivvied and hassled. How could we be so unreasonable? I know how they felt: I’d just come from a Heads’ meeting on a third floor. But I have often been to a small pensione in Vienna with a sign affixed to the tiny ancient lift which says ‘Taking the stairs is also exercise’ so I was able to make helpful remarks.

So, forty-fifth in a series of things I never expected to write is a shout-out to (Sir) Dan Moynihan, high heidyin of the Harris academy chain. He’s said to be a bit of a recluse which only means that he doesn’t appear endlessly on social media. And when he does its usually other people talking about his salary, but that’s not on today’s agenda. No, Moynihan was on a panel at the Tory conference.

Trade paper Schools Week had it all:

On Peckham: "Staff spent no end of time trying to get people into accommodation, night-by-night, and provide them food from a food bank because they don’t have cooking facilities".

On mental health: "Somebody needs to do something about the structure and resourcing of provision for mental health in local authorities and also for special needs. They’re stretched to hell, they can’t deliver. It’s not just about money, it’s about money and reform."

On outcomes: “For me, any government worth the title – whichever colour it is – would be addressing that head on and having a national debate about what we’re going to do with the underachievement of some key groups [he was particularly talking about disadvantaged white children] that do really, really badly". This is a “perennial problem that clearly is a criminal waste of talent. If we’re going to be a country that competes with the best in the world, we can’t be writing off a large section of our population.”

On knife crime: "Endemic" in some London boroughs but “we don’t hear much about it other than we see the faces on the television of the latest kid who’s been stabbed. If this was in Surrey we’d be seeing it and hearing about it. We’re not seeing and hearing about it when it’s in Southwark or Croydon. What’s the strategy to tackle knife crime?”

On the whole boiling: “We now need more than education. We need the other services as well, and somebody needs to find a solution to that in policy terms rather than ignore it.”

Well, that covers the ground. I bet they’re sorry they invited him. I wonder what will happen next? Oh, sorry, we know: an announcement abut mobile phones that is years out of date, and something about reforming A levels, as if this government had time to eat that particular elephant. The whole will-he won’t-he HS2 debacle is calculated to obscure these concerns. As long as people are talking about trains, they’re not talking about any of the above. Hats orf to you, Sir.

Someone sent me a favourite quote from Kafka last week, from the Zurau Aphorisms of 1917-18:

Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening ; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.

Public service shouldn’t be Kafkaesque, but it is. Manchester delegates would have heard Moynihan while panicking at the desperate electorate but relying on the bread and circuses of culture wars. There may be an Elastoplast solution proffered to hunger, homelessness, violence, alienation and the squandering of human potential, but there won’t be a policy change and there won’t be money. Like the difficult leopards, the status quo will be accepted as inevitable and schools will be tasked to sort it or mask it, or vilified for failing. It's like the small boy I wrote about last year who told me there should be better foodbanks: no, there should be no need for foodbanks, no homeless children, no knife deaths and everyone should have a hand to help them flourishing. Schools and other services should be funded properly. Factoring despair and abandonment into the system is not leadership and it’s no way to run a country.

Mind, I’d better be careful. The Guardian’s found out that the DfE are keeping tabs on educators criticising government policy on social media and leaning on organisers to cancel conferences with potentially critical speakers. Have a look at this. Kafka? Orwell? Stalin? Mao? What do they think they’re doing? And who for? How will they cancel Sir Dan?

Head of PE leapt up the stairs behind the puffing Year 7s and I asked what on earth he’d done to them. He opined that some will need to work hard on their fitness, but that’s what PE’s for. It’ll take time and patience, good people and encouragement, thought and determination to help, but that’s his stock-in-trade.

It’s time to redefine what we want from education and what we hope for all our children. It's time to spend the nation’s money correctly, for the future. It's time to stop factoring in despair as an unavoidable part of British life.

We can get leopards out of the temple.

CR
4.10.23

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Not Penguins but Pilgrims

11/3/2023

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Rain and wind, snow, even. I greeted a colleague at the door in a coat he’d brought from his years in Ukraine, which gave me something to think about, but that’s not what the title’s about. Read on.

It’s conference season so I’ve already been to Eastbourne for the Greenwich Heads and tomorrow it’s the Association of School and College Leaders in Birmingham. At Eastbourne we focused on the link between reading and educational disadvantage and what we can do about it. Also staff wellbeing – for reasons I’ve ranted about before - in the hope of keeping our staff, our hair and our sanity.

The ASCL conference has been rocked by the Secretary of State giving backword and pulling out of the programme. This is newsworthy. It will be my 26th time at the great gathering and I can’t remember the last time the SoS didn’t come.

Our illustrious leader, former Headteacher and reading expert Geoff Barton expressed himself more in sorrow than anger:

We are disappointed that Gillian Keegan has decided not to come to our conference. We very much hoped she would use this opportunity to thank school and college leaders for everything they are doing in what is proving to be yet another extremely challenging year. It would also have been a good opportunity for her to set out her vision for education, to talk about how we can work together to shape a better future for all young people, and say something about how the government intends to address the teacher recruitment and retention crisis which is at the heart of the current industrial dispute and which our members have to deal with every day. But nevertheless we will continue to engage with the Secretary of State positively and constructively and look forward to a time when she will feel more able to talk directly to our members.

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:

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.

― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Perhaps this is especially poignant for year 13s, within six months of adult life? They may lack the head-space for this kind of thinking, this side of the exams.

There is significant power for change when a community discovers what it cares about. We try constantly to give the best service we can to this place. We know what we stand for and our young citizens tell us what they care about. We listen and we try together.

Which is why I can’t fathom Gillian Keegan’s decision. I don’t know why she won’t go to ACAS. I don’t know why she wants to look as though she doesn’t care. Do we not travel together through this currently rather barren land?

Which brings me back to the title. It’s from a reported conversation with a young person searching for ‘pilgrim’ as the correct term but stuck on, y’know, those small animals, what are they called, penguins? And which are we? Journeying together or frozen out? Stolidly waiting and guarding our young until the storm passes? We need our community around us for that. Thank you.

CR
9.3.23

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‘Hush, hush, nobody cares’

5/4/2019

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I arrived late for a workshop session at a conference – not one I was leading, you understand – and was handed a piece of Winnie-the-Pooh to read out. I love this stuff and the Bear has been my companion these 57 years.

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.”

The quotation introduces the interim report of ASCL’s new Commission called The Forgotten Third. It is apposite.
Each year in England over half a million 16-year-olds take their GCSEs. A third of these students do not achieve at least a standard pass (grade 4) in English and mathematics.

The commission is asking some pointed questions, common to all subjects:

Why is it that a third of 16-year-olds, after twelve years of compulsory schooling, cannot reach what the Department for Education (DfE) describes as ‘standard pass’ level?
Why is there not proper recognition of the progress these young people have made as they move on to further education and employment?
At age 11, as they leave primary school, a similar third of children fail to reach expected national standards in reading, writing and mathematics. What is happening in homes and schools that means too many children and young people are judged not to be competent at a basic level?
Does the answer lie with: a. the students; b. their parents; c. teachers; d. the content of the GCSEs e. the design of the examination system; f. the national accountability measures?
As one 17-year-old student, with a grade 3 in English Language, asked the Commission: “Do a third of us always have to fail so that two-thirds pass?”

A thinking nation should be asking all of these questions. Might I suggest some answers?

A very small number of children will underachieve because they haven’t worked hard enough. Adolescence is distracting. I’m leaving them on one side.

Some children may appear to be underachieving, but actually they’re doing pretty well, because their KS2 grade may not reflect their true ability in year 6. This is for two reasons. First, published performance tables do terrible things to education: watch Monday 25 March 2019’s Panorama for more on this. Second, national progression data works well in big datasets but is hopeless at individual progress level.

The very concept of a GCSE ‘pass’ at grade 4 standard or grade 5 higher is troubling. We have a single examination to assess every child at all levels of aptitude for testing. So why do some grades have more intrinsic worth than others? Again, two reasons. There are levels of skill that are obviously important for adult life. If you’re secure at that level, you may find adult life easier. Employers expect a level of competence, fair enough. Not all jobs, however, require this level and not all children progress at the same speed.

The real reason for the ‘pass’ nomenclature is a combination of elitism and international comparison. Singapore or Ontario or Finland or Shanghai have a certain proportion of children able to do certain things by the age of 16, so the UK will only be globally competitive if we do too. That’s a superficially attractive argument, but it wobbles in the slightest breeze, like Winnie-the-Pooh’s spelling. Other jurisdictions aren’t committed to inclusive schooling where every child is included in the common school system and its measured outcomes. Other jurisdictions are not beset by a zombie obsession with selection at 11 which serves no educational purpose and depresses the achievement of children in selective areas. Other jurisdictions are not beset by class obsession with private education which undermines national pride in our common schools.

And finally, the very slightly improved accountability measure of P8 itself remains shamefully dismissive of children’s endeavour. ‘Comparable outcomes’ require some children to fail so that others may succeed. It has to produces a failed bottom third if it has willed that the top two-thirds pass.

We value what we measure. In England we appear to value ranking and blame, and their brothers elitism and failure. It’s no way to model human value. We could make a very small step in the right direction by refusing to use the word ‘pass’ altogether. We could make a bigger step by finally, permanently rejecting any threshold measure in school performance. We could change the world by valuing perseverance and effort over accidents of birth and social standing.

I’m happy that people should have to pass a driving test. I’m happy that children should learn how to work hard and stick at it. I’m furious that only the two-thirds who are good at tests are allowed to value their effort and experience after 12 years of compulsory schooling. This can’t be what we intended. As Winnie says:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little brain, and you Think Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

This is one of them.

My title is the incomparable Beachcomber’s parody of one of A A Milne’s more sugary poems, but it captures the DfE’s view of 170 000 of our young people, every year. Look again, Secretary of State.

CR
5.4.19

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Auld Lang Syne

12/1/2018

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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

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Crass or Class?

28/2/2016

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Sean Scully - Morocco, 1995

Wednesday I was at Emily’s piano recital but Thursday I gave the wind-up speech at a conference in in town. One of the previous speakers had an interestingly fancy day-shape, but another made me want to bang my head on the table: ‘Building ethos through teacher rewards’. Not as in hard cash or time off, elegant performance-related pay review or a glowing reference. No, visiting classrooms and handing teachers postcards. Writing to them on Fridays ‘so they get a doormat thank you waking up a bit growly after a few cheeky beers’. ‘Corridor chats’ were recommended, and namedropping in briefings, because everyone loves that.

To my certain knowledge there’s only one person in a school who loves briefings. They’re catnip to the head but dentistry to everyone else. I’ve had leadership teams volunteer for bus duty in snow rather than sub for me at briefing.

Despite terminal nosiness, I didn’t enjoy them that much when I was a footsoldier and being publicly complimented made me want to tunnel out. I’ve served with people who gave out light-hearted awards in briefing and the ice still makes me shiver. I’m here to tell you that no teacher likes chirpy public thanks amongst their grizzled and witty chums.

Why so ungrateful? Why do I think this goodhearted Head so squirmingly wrong? First, teaching is a public service to be rewarded with decent pay and conditions and public respect. ‘A finger of fudge’ awarded in briefing (yes, really) is demeaning not amusing. Second, teachers choose the job and are paid for it: they don’t need corralling into a jolly gang but professional guidance and support to do well. Third, good teachers are tuned into the personalities in a room and are skilled at trying not to embarrass people. Fourth, teachers are not children.

Treating adults in a way that’s too crass even for most adolescents is symptomatic of a gimmicky, shortcutting, undermining approach to educating the nation’s young. Maybe I don’t thank teachers enough, but I know that their hard work and motivation aren’t reliant on clumsy presents from a corporate mother. Teachers are public intellectuals with advanced interpersonal skills and a liking for children. Being good at it can’t rely on superficial activities. It takes time, years of it.

Some training routes for teachers underplay this and undermine young colleagues with false promises. They breed an expectation that the institution will always do all the heavy lifting in terms of adolescent formation through uniform and behaviour proxies, silence and compliance. It’s just not as easy as that: a school’s strength relies on individuals and their relationships in classrooms, labs, studios, fields, offices, corridors and yards. Young people make choices and it’s in the nature of youth to make the wrong ones. They have to be educated and turned to face the light so they can grow.
Chatting on the corridor (oh all right) we tell Thos to take his coat off. He does, slowly. Sir remarks: we could have yelled at him and destroyed him on the spot, then he’d yell back and we’d have to exclude him. What would be the point? We like simple rules that build up our common life, so Thos has to take his coat off because the sea of Tallis turquoise indoors shows that we all belong together. As we explain again.

I collide with a class of year 7s rushing to watch a primary dance showcase that’s been practising on our lovely hall floor. They are beyond excited at a change to routine as we sheepdog and shush them into the hall, and the little ones gaze on these giants with awe. The dancing is blissful and the audience immaculate. Is that compliance, or happiness and human interest in a secure atmosphere? Year 13 assembly this morning was Caleb on gender construction: clear as a bell. ‘He couldn’t have done that when he was younger’ his form tutor beams.

Earlier I’d been to admire the new whiteboards in maths. We’ve got ‘em on all four walls in the rooms now and the mathematicians love them for their squares. ‘Maths teachers love squared things’ I remarked to a class which amuses Peter the wonderful band singer. Small groups help each other with topics from the mock. ‘I’ve just not been comfortable with this decimal!’ shouts Ahmed. ‘It made me panic in the exam and I lost 3 marks! I insist on doing it again tonight! ’

Some of them came to school for four days over half term and with skilled help are edging ever closer to success. How do you reward that public servant with a bar of chocolate?

CR
24.2.16

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Better in Madrid

29/3/2015

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Warren de la Rue, Total solar eclipse of 1860 in Spain

We didn’t see the eclipse, but Tallis youth described it on Sky News and the radio. Science large and small went and stood on the MUGA and were careful with their eyes, but as the whole of SE3 was shrouded in dense cloud, all we got was a sense of teatime in the morning. A year 11 said ‘It looks better in Madrid’, but that would be so for any March day in an English yard.

The spring conference season brings light and fog to educators. First there was the Greenwich Heads’ Annual get together, then the ASCL conference last weekend (the Association of School and College Leaders, since you ask). This latter outfit’s gig is the stadium rock of our world: 1200 delegates, big name speakers, all the politicians. 9 till 6 then dinner and dancing. Your correspondent hasn’t actually done the dancing since 1998, but I believe that the younger generation still manage it: dancing deputies, a sight to be seen.

ASCL made a proposal this year alongside our usual calm campaigning on funding. In order to protect our children’s interests, what about an Independent Commission on the Curriculum made up of teachers, governors, employers, parents and politicians to review the core curriculum once every five years. That way, we put up a shield between children’s learning and the need for Secretaries of State to make their mark (not literally, though the help would be welcome) on children’s exercise books.

Mrs Morgan is underwhelmed: ‘what our children learn in school should be determined by our democratically elected representatives’.

I used to agree with this because I’m all for democracy, but I’m done with it now. Politicians have an eye on the electorate, the press and their legacies (3 eyes in total). They know precious little about children and less of pedagogy or epistemology. Few of the current cabinet went to state schools and the current enthusiasm for the excellent Greycoat Hospital does not make them curriculum thinkers. Even the CBI despairs, begging for schools to be allowed to offer the rounded and grounded curriculum that their members crave. I strive to be apolitical but here’s what Roberts thinks: stack the commission if you will, fill every position from Chair to tea-boy with political placemen but give us a break. One mega idea (diplomas, EBacc, grit, phonics, Mockingbird) every five years will still get you into the history books but it might mean that a child has only two major upheavals in his school life, three if she’s unlucky. Leave us alone, to think, to plan, to teach. Struth. Commission the thing, would you?

A smaller national conference happened in terrific Tallis last week. We shared a love of expansive education, helping young people think and make links with the world. Two delegates nearly didn’t make it at all because their train went the wrong way out of London Bridge and, in the manner of a Secretary of State, without planning, warning, apology or support, deposited them in Hither Green. Isn’t it the whole point of trains that they don’t get lost? However, our people are teachers and despite all provocation got back on track and arrived on time.

As did the hundreds of young people from other schools we interviewed for our sixth form, the parents who came to find out about revision and the friends who joined the PTA’s Wine and Chocolate evening. We did it wearing lurid socks for Down Syndrome, eating cakes for Ecuador, setting off to Zaragoza or Santander or the history trip or Snowdon or the Maths Feast. We did it winning the year 8 London Sportshall Athletics finals or at the Fashion Show Abstract Couture. We did it because you can trust us to teach our hearts out, if you just let us.

I told them all this in a recent speaking tour of Germany. I describe it thus because saying ‘some nice German English teachers were kind to me in Leipzig and Duisburg’ doesn’t sound quite so grand. I talked to teachers brought together by Klett publishers who use Tallis and Greenwich as a way to learn English. They were interested in our pastoral work and outraged by interference in the guise of accountability. The teachers wanted to know about the triumphs of multiculturalism and goggled at photos of our building and laughed with our Good Morning video. 100 German 12 year olds shared their excitement with us this week: we love this link.

The Germans know a thing or two about politics and the curriculum. Perhaps that Commission isn’t such a bad idea.

CR

23.3.15

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Less Likely than a Unicorn

Trouble with leopards

Not Penguins but Pilgrims

‘Hush, hush, nobody cares’

Auld Lang Syne

Crass or Class?

Better in Madrid

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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