A brief history. After school in Stockton-on-Tees I read theology at KCL and then did a PGCE at Birmingham, including the chalk, though we did have a session learning how to write in straight lines using whiteboard markers in case we ever went to a school where they could afford them. I taught in Birmingham and Leicestershire, and then gave up. I spent two years in race relations and then had two children. By the time I went back into the classroom as a ‘woman returner’ the National Curriculum and ICT had been invented. I taught in Peterlee, the only town named after a miners’ leader, on the former East Durham coalfield them moved back to London to Pimlico, moving back to another part of the coalfield two years later. After that, Deputy Head in Durham City, Head in Hartlepool, back to Durham to be a Head again and to Tallis in 2013.  

I was lucky to become a Head after relatively little experience, at 40, in the Labour building-boom years and rebuilt first one school and then another. When that was done, we’d got the outstanding badge and I’d decided not to be a National Leader of Education, for which you got an embossed notebook and went about advising poor souls deemed in need of it - my potential referee said ‘Don’t do it. You’d hate it.’ - I wondered what to do next. A friend once asked me what my ambitions were and I said I’d like a go at one of those big London schools.

So I applied for a job in the centre of town I didn’t get. The Chair and I had a long longlist interview after which they decided that my last school wasn’t impressive enough and I decided they didn’t know a damn thing about life outside London. Tallis had been advertised for the second time and I pushed in an application just ahead of the deadline. I manufactured an excuse to come to London and came for a poke about one Friday afternoon. I fell in love with the place as I walked through the door, just the feel of it. This is interesting, I thought. This is different.
Which is just as well because the paperwork was deranged. Half of it was the technical language of raising achievement – ‘relentless’, ‘laser-sharp’ - and half of it a paeon to creativity. The documents told one story, the website another. On holiday in Orkney I wrote a 20-point development plan, then came for two days of interviews. I was offered the job on the train between Doncaster and York on the way home. Everyone in Durham thought I was the deranged one – why leave Durham Johnston and a house with a view of the World Heritage Site? Why? Because somewhere in that paperwork was the phrase ‘to understand the world and change it for the better’. Who wouldn’t want to work with people who thought that?

So thank you to all those of you who were here at the time who made me so welcome.

Thank you to the LG survivors from then and for the great people who joined it subsequently. I’m very proud of the former members who are now Heads themselves, of course, as well as the one who’ve stayed. The current team are the strongest I’ve ever known; expert, clever, efficient and humane. An especial thanks to my redoubtable PA, whose organisational standards are unequalled. As she once said to a hapless colleague ‘only German standards in this office’. Quite so. We’ve had a great time together.  

Thank you to the LA team under whom I’ve been glad to serve and whom I respect enormously for their openness, honesty and collaboration – but I remember when support came in a different form. It was probably 2015 when the former Chair and I were summoned to account. At one point he passed me a note saying ‘I’m going to jump out of the window’. It was the only sensible response.

Thank you to governors old and new, especially the Chairs. I’ve never met such a strong board: seriously impressive public servants themselves. The (national) Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education wouldn’t exist without you.

Thank you to the Greenwich Community Schools Partnership, originally formed when it looked like we’d all have to become academies. Lifeboats need maintaining.   

When I arrived I wanted to make this school the best it could be, not to change it into someone else’s idea of a good school. We do that individuality pretty well and we are successful. Staff stay, parents fight to get in and post-16 is so big you can see it from space. The building is beautiful, the children are happy and the staff interesting, committed and scholarly. The curriculum is broad and balanced in the best old-fashioned sense, based on powerful knowledge, strong teaching skills, signature pedagogy, threshold concepts and proper cultural capital (which, like powerful knowledge is much misunderstood. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s teaching to the test.) Our systems are good: the place runs itself with time for staff to deal with the serious, rather than the trivial. Most of all, there’s a place for the awkward or unwieldy child and the one who’s - within reason - trying it on during adolescence. We weren’t all perfect at school ourselves, remember.

So thank you to the teachers and support staff. Thank you to everyone who makes it possible to hear the Rolls Royce purr of an experts’ classroom every lesson in our mighty buildings. Thank you to those of you who hold the Tallis flame and bear it high.   

However, there is much still to do. Although it’s hard to meet a narrow metric squarely when you’re trying to change the world, we all have a duty to try and, at the very least, we want all of our children to have valid individual passports to adult life.  Tallis remains a work in progress.

Someone asked me this week how I kept going, and finding new things to do. I usually says it’s because of my tragically short attention span, but there is a serious answer. If you believe, as I do, that comprehensive schools are a vision every bit as vital as the NHS, central to this country’s future and a model for a better world you have to keep going when the principle is being nibbled at – if not attacked. We cannot take anything we believe in for granted, not the broad and balanced curriculum that enables every young person to make sense of their lives, not the inclusivity which educates every child from the local community, not the adult behaviour that gives a strong role model to the young. We need to guard it all. We might have finally got a government that’s not likely to repeal the Human Rights Act on a whim, but we cannot relax.  We are children’s advocates and representatives. We speak on their behalf and we have a duty to them from which we will never be relieved.

My thinking was formed by liberal Christianity, which has its advantages. It gives you a broader frame of reference and an entirely sceptical view of all kinds of narrow and simple answers. It forces you to consider love and hope. It enables you to look coolly at panic and demand and think about the long-term potential for good. All of us must sustain our own reasoning and resist becoming drones in a clone-y education future. Take nothing on trust without thinking it through. If something’s right, do it anyway. If it’s not, don’t. For me, in the end, it was never been between me and the LA, or me and Ofsted, or me and the Department for Education. What I’ve done I’ve done anyway, because I thought it was right.

That’s not to say I might be wrong, or I couldn’t have done better in so many ways. I’ve often described myself as inadequate with outstanding features but I found in Tallis a school that needed me, and I’ve had the time of my life.  Haven’t we had fun?

So thank you to everyone involved in Tallis here now and over the eleven years. And in particular, to my dear husband whose own organisational skills have kept me going for 23 years of headship.

I’m sorry to leave but its time to go. Keep on modelling that better world and, for the love of God, change it for the better.
 
As ever
 
CR
18.7.24

This may be sort-of my last blog, though the election may be irresistible and there’ll be no escaping my leaving speech. I started writing them to order for a newspaperman who happened to be a parent, and I just kept going, yea up to about two hundred, way more than any reader should be expected to endure. Thank you.

Two columns of children crossed the concourse while I was seeking an old buffer to polish a trophy for assembly. I followed them to their briefing on Voting in a General Election. Year 12 Poll Clerks waited for them in the back of Reception, directing them to the booths, shushing discussion or other undemocratic behaviour and turning away sixth former students without lanyards (just or unjust, they have to learn). Not that there hadn‘t been canvassing in a rather odd way according to a conversation that passed me in Block 5. ‘If I vote Reform, you have to vote Green to give them a fair chance’. Ah me, Tallis Character misplaced, in so many ways. 

A small boy was confused: ‘I thought we weren’t old enough to vote?’ so we explained that this was a mock, training them for adult life. An older girl wondered ‘Do they vote the same in America?’. No, I said, forbearing to wail that their poll seems certain to bring catastrophe for all.

Perhaps by the time you read this the result will be abroad. The canny trainer-clad folks of Newcastle or Houghton and Sunderland South will have won the fastest count race and we’ll be set for another five years. I taught in Houghton-le-Spring for 3 years so I have a pride in their speedy tellers. You know my politics. I won’t belabour you with them.

Someone was so kind as to ask me about my career yesterday and what I thought was important for the future of English schools after the election. Inevitably I said that while money is the big problem, recruitment and retention of teachers is bigger. Something can be done about the latter while the former is recovering from our own catastrophes.

How? Simple. Teachers need an even break. They need to be valued, talked up, recognised. Teaching as a career needs to be rebranded and readvertised. Its fundamental motivations – to do good, to change the world, to make a difference, to share knowledge, to build an educated citizenry, to set a good example of adult life – need to take front and centre stage. Teachers need to step out from the shadow of the NHS and fill the space. These people preserve and save lives too: they turn your children into adults.

The Festival of Education is happening today and tomorrow at Wellington College and loads of teachers will be there. It’s a big gig that I spoke at about 5 years ago. I got off a packed train from London and walked in a huge crocodile of bright young things, all keen and excited to hear the latest. They’d been lauding it loudly since Paddington. 

This year I note that ‘Artificial Intelligence, Ofsted, Cognitive Science, Great Teaching, Coaching, SEND and sustainability’ are themes. Nothing wrong with any of them but – unless they’re part of a bigger vision for education they’re just so much glitter and gloss. 

If I may gloom? AI could completely undermine teaching and the nature of knowledge, Ofsted is just a regulator with a snapshot camera, cog sci is interesting but not sufficient, great teaching is an art that can’t always be mandated or taught, coaching is part of any sensible leadership system, duh, SEND needs a week to itself and the climate emergency can’t be solved by schools. None of these solve our problem because none of them get to the bottom of what hooks and keeps teachers. No-one’s asking what schools are for, what childhood is for and how they might best be provided and served. Where’s the learning? Where’s the love? 

I’ve just rediscovered Arlo Guthrie’s 1969 song Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. Do listen to it if you have a spare 19 minutes. When he finally gets around to talking about the draft he describes the office as a place where they’re ‘injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected’. It’s a bit too close to an accurate description of client, compliant English schools for my liking. 

If the people who look like they’ll win tomorrow win tomorrow they’ve got a mission. While nodding to the regulation surface dressing, they look like they’ll dig to the bedrock of the problem: ending child poverty, solving chronic social insecurity and ‘supporting a profession of excellent teachers, encouraged to develop as experts in their field, and valued for the work they do’. Only words yet, I know, but some words are worth more than others.
We know about the worth of words at Tallis. We talk about values and virtues, powerful knowledge, habits of learning and character traits, about signature pedagogy and threshold concepts, inclusion and creativity, a broad and balanced curriculum and about making sure every child is seen, known and loved.  We try to be a model community and a blueprint for a better world.  We want to understand the world and change it for the better. We resist the gloss and embrace the risks required to serve our children well.

Educators everywhere are in a desperate state, clinging on by our fingernails for a glimmer of hope. Everywhere democracy is under threat from people peddling dangerous glittery answers to serious human problems. As I look out of the window there are still columns of children going to the poll. At this moment, they think they’ll always vote and that no adult cynicism will make them reluctant to leave the sofa and demand a better life for themselves and their children. 

My teacher grandmother didn’t get the vote until she was 27, so she took it very seriously. I hope that these children will too. That better world is in our hands and theirs. I hope we all have the courage to make the most of it.
 
CR
3.7.24

I watch year 10 on their careers interview practice day, coping with the formal clothes they’ve opted to wear, unusual for us. Two boys have added a tie to their polo shirts and I mildly observe that this might seem eccentric to an interviewer. One is affronted: ‘it’s my rugby club tie’. Some girls are discussing others’ choices: ‘a school skirt with a white shirt is sensible. Smart and economical, you can’t go wrong’, although none of them are garbed thus.
Things we roll with at Tallis that bring other schools out in a rash include blue hair, nose rings, trainers, a very broad curriculum, student activism, noisy corridors, staff in shorts and skirt length. Things we grit our teeth about and smile through include Progress 8, SEND funding and financial terrors. Things we’re really fussy about include inclusion and respect for everyone. We look and feel different from a lot of other schools. We have our own vision and our own ways of working.

Readers from other schools will be foaming at the gills and shouting at their machinery. All schools are different.  We all make our own weather. The silly old bat’s making a fuss about nothing. Who’s rattled her cage?
At a lunch bidding farewell to a colleague more experienced than I, she put down her cuttles, looked me in the eye and bowled a poser.  ‘Whatever happened to the self-managing school?’ Struth, a distant echo. Gorn, I said. But when? and why?  

My co-eater’s to blame for this blog, about a memory of an idea that turned itself inside out and ended back where it started.

Everyone talked heartily about self-managing schools between the Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988 and the domination of deliverance from the early 2000s. I was prancing off to conferences at that time the better to claw my way up the greasy pole and heard a lot of chaps called David. Reynolds of Exeter, for example. He opined
Experience of past top-down change programmes or improvement schemes was one of dismal failure….it is also clear from the various school improvement programmes that commitment to personal and institutional change is greatest where the individual school is in charge of its own schemes. 

The belief was that schools’ capacity and vision had been let down by sclerotic structures, notably the Local Education Authorities (LEAs). The ERA had introduced Local Management of Schools, which largely and radically meant schools managing their own budgets. From then onwards, the push to manage more was obvious, inevitable and righteous. Why wouldn’t Heads, long experienced in curriculum design and management, free to spend their own budgets, want to shape the entire direction of their schools, including their core purpose, teaching and learning?

Initially, expertise developed and was shared across and between the LEAs who still ran (almost) all the schools. Self-managing schools became part of the ‘self-improving school’ system. Enterprising Heads joined forces in broader groups such as the Specialist Schools Trust, perhaps lured by the cash premiums attached to Specialist School Status and the quasi-business language of entrepreneurship which became common parlance. The National College for School Leadership was the flagship of the self-improving system and another David, Hargreaves of the SST, wrote for them on ‘Creating a self-improving school system’ in 2010.

It has long been known that the most powerful influences on teachers are other teachers, but policies have rarely built on the fact. The best way of exploiting this phenomenon is through regular, face-to-face encounters among professionals that focus on the improvement of teaching and learning…… In a self-improving school system, more control and responsibility passes to the local level in a spirit of mutual aid between school leaders and their colleagues, who are morally committed to imaginative and sustainable ways of achieving more ambitious and better outcomes. England is part way there. Will it now decide to travel the rest of the journey?

Well, yes. Vocal self-managers were highly influential with New Labour and the development of academies. That single policy snowplough cleared the path for the doctrinaire demolition of the Local Authorities from 2010 onwards under a government of an entirely different kind. The self-improvers became ‘system leaders’.  Collaboration laid the foundations for the MATs, whose self-managing blueprints became the orthodoxies of their schools and the drivers of the current system.

So do we now have self-managing schools? Was I wrong to say they had vanished like eight-track cartridges Hargreaves’ vision, of a system led by school leaders, by teachers for teachers, is where we, apparently, nearly, are.  Academies and MATs are run by the leaders and teachers who seized the day (along with some former civil servants and LEA folk, and some very rich people linked to governments). Has it worked? Yes and no, perhaps - but I speak from a particular vantage point and I may be wrong. 

The MATs committed themselves, as good public servants, to the deliverance of public sector targets for the good of all our children. They found particular ways that worked in particular contexts which were shared and copied.  Trends developed. None of this is new and none of it is wrong. But if funding collapses while accountability measures are keenly sought and assessed by high-stakes inspection, cost-effective models becomes accepted or recommended models. Many schools teach a more limited curriculum for exactly these reasons and a terrifying 60% MORE intend to reduce their curriculum.  

Perhaps this is a principled response to the prevailing circumstances? We can only do what we can afford, and we must fulfil expectations. The children need to pass exams in the subjects apparently valued by the nation, so this is what schools are for, and here’s how to do it. it’s a national scandal as well as a tragedy. But, returning to my question, I have to observe that some leaders in the dominant MATs appear to have significantly less freedom to self-manage than I’ve enjoyed as the servant of three Local Authorities. What self-management became seems to have led to greater control.

I don’t quote a lot of Eliot, but I can’t avoid Little Gidding.   
​

The rain having momentarily stopped, there are skipping ropes on the concourse to encourage year 7 and 8. Not just to leap about but to cooperate with one another. Staff gamely tried them before lunch earlier in the week with frankly disappointing results. Unsurprisingly, children are better at it: bouncier, freer, closer to remembering skipping in primary school. It’s a glimpse of play-based childhood, and I’m thinking about that as my transit listening is Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.  

I’m only halfway through, but the thrusts of the book ring bells with anyone who spends time around young people. He argues that smartphone use (I have my own two on my desk as I write) has rewired children’s brains since 2010 and that we have moved – globally, but especially in rich countries where children get smartphones young – from play-based to phone-based childhood. He believes that the parallel steep rise in anxiety and depression among young people, especially girls, is caused by all-pervasive social media to which girls devote 8-10 hours every day. For boys, the risks seem different: isolation caused by excessive gaming where a community of live friends has been replaced by online friends, and of course the ghastly risk of endless pornography and dangerous role models. All of which, for boys and girls, is exacerbated by the sleep deprivation caused by smartphones.

What to do? Haidt’s proposals begin with enforcing the laws we already have about children and social media, therefore not allowing profit-makers to rewire children’s brains. As I say, I’m only halfway through and this is a paraphrase. There are other views. What will we do at Tallis? We’ll think, and then act. 

One of the most troubling aspects of social media, to which Haidt may well turn in the rest of the book, is its bizarre effect on freedom of speech. You’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that unlimited access to all the knowledge and all the opinions in the world would spread openness and informed judgement – and yet we find ourselves at the other end, beset by tribalism and blinkered thinking.  So many children believe they have to plump for one side so schools have to work against this. Teachers have to plonk themselves on the threshold of freedom of expression to prevent the door from closing.

Why? Because good learning requires information of all kinds, open discourse, free expression and the willingness to discuss any problem that presents itself. Education is not designed for comfort but for thinking, to fortify courage and empower the learner to deal with complexity, to became an informed and active citizen. Free speech can be hard to hear so it’s tempting to call for some speakers to be silenced, or banned – cancelled, as we say.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for demagogues and rabble-rousers. Citizens have the right to be safe and treated fairly. But there must be a forum for reasoned debate even with people whose ideas are – to the liberal mind – intolerable. People with harmful opinions have to be refuted, word by word, put right and even pursued by the law. Its what civilisation requires. It’s certainly what universities are for.  It’s also what schools should do.   

Tallis expects young people to learn to be open-minded:  inquisitive, collaborative, fair and respectful. At the same time, they are young people who should want to change the world for the better and might be justifiably frustrated at the time that older generations take to sort stuff out. They are inclined to be revolutionary. That fervour needs to be focused on what will make the world better and more inclusive, not on what will make it worse and more bigoted.

We love an election at Tallis and will throw ourselves into the national frenzy. Education groups are already making their pitches: the social mobility charity The Sutton Trust emailed earlier today. Their General Election wants are:

• High quality early years education for all
• A national strategy to close the attainment gap
• A more progressive higher education funding system

My general election wants are:

• Education funding at a level that demonstrates children matter and which allows schools to give teachers time to think, collaborate, plan and develop
• Funding for health, social care, police and justice so that schools don’t have to try to do everything and that every citizen is protected
• A return to civility and truth in national discourse 

I’ve just been with the Sixth Form Thinking Aloud group. These good folk tussle with hearty questions and like to be made to think. I presented them with Archbishop Welby’s conundrum about Christianity and sexuality in global Anglicanism. Can he save the communion? What should he do? It’s a super-wicked problem if ever there was: every action taken to solve it seems to make it worse.

In the end, scripture, tradition, politics and national laws notwithstanding, the young people were optimistic that the positive inclusive messages they read and they post on social media would work this out. Old people will die, and their exclusive conservative views with them. Religions will survive or perish but young people will uphold inclusivity.
​
It’s a different argument to Haidt’s.  What did the old person in the room think?  I fear, but I hope.         
 
CR
23.5.24

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 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.
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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:   

Working through the list: teacher this time.

I’m incapable of seeing teachers objectively. Given that I’m the third of four generations of teachers and I’ve been embedded most of my life, I have little idea what they look like to the outside world.

Within sight of me at the moment is one such wondering over an art display and another standing on a concrete bench supervising mass coat removal. I’ve met them today unblocking doorways and temporarily impeding access to a toilet. All the while, of course, a hundred-and-ten or so of their colleagues are sharing knowledge imaginatively, going through mock exam papers or giving someone the cease and desist look. All are inhabiting the slightly too-obvious persona required of teaching, with exaggerated facial expressions and bizarre semi-dramatic hand gestures.    

Many Ofsteds ago, I watched a young PE teacher, slightly anxiously, with an inspector. I had hopes of the lad and didn’t want him battered to death with a clipboard in his first year. No fear, the wielder made a just and useful assessment: ‘A lot to learn, but a nice old-fashioned teacherly manner’. He was right. Adam was serious, kind, very organised and with high expectations. He made the children feel comfortable and ready to participate because he exuded security. Nothing was going to go wrong in the lesson, and he knew what he was talking about.

Teachers are bound by all kinds of expectations. There are Standards (OK but a bit weak) and all sorts of national professional qualifications, but nothing now that really gets under the skin. It’s all a bit functional. Why so dull? My Grannie’s 1916 copy of the Board of Education’s Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Schools has a lovely ‘general direction to teachers’. Advising that PT should be ‘enjoyable and interesting’ they say this will depend
        

My own training was influenced by a great headteacher of the past, Michael Marland. He wrote a little book in 1972 called The Craft of the Classroom. I bought it ten years after at Hudson’s bookshop on the Birmingham University campus, for £1.75. It's 100 pages long, starting with four unarguables: teachers need to care about the job, care for the students, explain their knowledge clearly and be very, very organised. You can’t say fairer than that.

Obviously, every offering is of its time. The 1916 PT book is in the context of the public health crisis uncovered by conscription for war. Marland’s genius includes the jaw-dropping lines ‘….we are all human and tempers can be lost.  There are very few teachers who have not struck a pupil at some time or other in their career’ followed by useful advice on what to do next. 

We improve. We’re educators, so we should be able to learn from the past, unless you’re Michael Gove whose shameful disrespect of university teacher training departments tried to turn the clock to a strange year zero where the only quality assurance was his journo rhetoric.  

Where are we now? I bowdlerised the best of Marland into ‘The Craft of the Tallis Classroom’ some years ago to make it more accessible, and we have our fabulous Tallis Praxis handbook. The overall tone of teacher education, however, is functional and delivery-based. It talks about the how and the what but not the why or the who-ness of teaching. Nationally, classroom practice is prescribed minute by minute in many schools with ready-made teaching materials and a pre-agreed curriculum decided way over the heads of practicing professionals. And so we are where we are, with a recruitment crisis for this, the best of jobs, and oddly scratchy relationships with parents, nationally.  

We work hard to avoid either at Tallis, but we may be odd.

Why? Teaching has very nearly become a public service delivery force rather than a profession or even vocation. Every conversation in some schools has to be measurable and is therefore likely to be scripted to increase efficiency and reduce variability. Bright young graduates don’t want that cardboard life: who’d want to be a teacher if you can’t bring your personality and judgements into your practice? Parents at schools where all the contact is about uniform infringements and detentions might understandably withdraw a bit of goodwill, partially generating the terrible attendance crisis. In sixties terminology the transactional relationship has lurched from ‘we’re OK, you’re OK, let’s work together for the good of your child’ to ‘we’re not OK because you’re not OK. Follow our instructions at once and don’t answer back’.

You know I’m reminiscing in these last blogs, so bear with.

The application forms I filled in as a new teacher in 1983 invited me to include war service, national service and full-time parenting, for each of which experience there was the chance to start higher on the pay scale. Someone mused with me recently about what teaching must have been like for those returning from war service, or training straight afterwards and it made me wish I’d talked to some of them about it. They’d had an atrocious experience and lived through the aftermath, perhaps teaching up to or even leading the social and educational revolution of the sixties and seventies. Their careers saw the beginning and the end of the 11+ system in most places, the end of deference and the slow struggle for equalities. Nothing about that could be scripted or minutely directed.
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It's good to run an education system with strong quality assurance. Taxpayers and parents alike should expect schools to be good. I think they probably expect teachers to be clever, interesting, highly motivated and effective. If one of my grandchildren chooses to follow the family business, it would be great if they could bring their whole selves into a respected and valued profession.    
  
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28.2.24

I was part of a panel at a leadership gig this week, offering punditry on teacher recruitment and retention and its link to school culture. Obviously, I speak from experience and hunch, not with any research behind me. I can tell people how we set about it here and whether that appears to be successful or not. If we only knew what success is.

There was a chap from one of the thinktanks beside me. He must have known a bit about the research but would only commit himself to saying that we’ll get and keep teachers if we pay them more. Duh. The Pundit’s Code required me to say ‘yes, obvs [but we’re here for 45 minutes] so here’s a few other thoughts’. On reflection, perhaps we should have, hall and all, sat in silence for the duration in protest. Maybe we should all refuse to join in any further discussion until the tenners start rolling back in? I’m not sure the government care enough about our opinion to make that a stance worth taking. 

So I held forth on subject-based CPD, attempting honest and open leadership, communication, humane relationships, reliable systems and a bit of give and take. Most of all, on treating teachers like the adults they are and allowing the respect due to their scholarship. Which leads me inexorably back to the time and money trope you’ve had before. Cash-strapped institutions who spend most of their (public) money on people are exhorted to sweat their assets, as another pundit coarsely put it. If you increase productivity, you need fewer people so you save money.

The problem with learning, from teaching reception number bonds to ten, through algebra and poetry to finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, is that real productivity depends on the immeasurable and imponderable. Educators of all kinds need time to think, research and experiment. It's hard to know how many of the things we do in school actually improve children’s learning, as opposed to their examinable knowledge. We don’t test them in their mid-twenties or forties to see how much of it has stuck and what practical use it’s been, to prosperity or happiness of the individual or society.

On my way to the tube I was mildly inconvenienced by two school parties. One was a primary school, charmingly arranging themselves up an escalator with great pleasure. The other was a group of – I reckon – year nines in the middle of town. They were enjoying a reasonably orderly saunter despite the clipboard chap at the back shepherding them exasperatedly, like a six foot border collie in a mountain jacket. ‘Get a move on, will you? We haven’t got all day, we’ll be late.’ I picture the politicians in the Department a bit like that, obsessed with their legacy, hassling schools into frenetic, misguided priorities. Or perhaps that shows my age: nine Secretaries of State in nine years doesn’t suggest they’re remotely bothered.

Which take me back to number one on the list of blogs I imposed on you last time. It’s the vision for an education system that we lack. We have mechanisms and expectations. We even have processes and evaluations, but they’re all feeble because we don’t know what we want. Coughing loudly and shouting ‘look over there instead’ we devise cheap ways of measuring the blindingly obvious without managing to turn our heads towards the bigger, difficult and expensive questions. 

American philosopher Michael Sandel has been kindly reading me his book Justice. He develops an argument about the difference between what’s right and what’s good, the impossibility of neutrality in deciding big issues and the importance of narrative in the choices people make. I thought about it all the way home and much of the night.  Outcomes-focused judgements about schools are based on what’s right for children inside this funding envelope, and, perhaps, their right to an education that sets them on the path to adult life in this society. But it's not about what constitutes a good education. That would be a vast and difficult discussion leading to education costs of a different dimension to the current provision. If we really wanted schools to be models for a better society and centres of learning and human development we’d never run them like we do. Schools would be palaces, and expert teachers, trained for years, paid hugely more than we do now.

You’d expect me to have been fascinated by the Michaela prayer controversy which is really interesting for precisely the reasons above. Banning religion in school is superficially very attractive. Schools that are not faith-based, like society, are expected to be neutral about religion. In order to give religions equal status, its way easier to ban ‘em all than to actually tussle with them. But religion is part of the human experience and children go through phases of faith development. A religious teenager may cling to the identity that religion offers as part of adolescent self-understanding. Schools need to be aware of that and try to help them think through their beliefs, in the context of what it takes to build a better world.

Prayer needs to be facilitated and supervised so that thinking and developing process can happen in the safe space that is school, not driven underground, or out in the yard, or forced into oppositional demonstration. Doing prayer properly in a secular school takes time, money and sustained thought. It can go wrong in many different ways, but so can maths. Enabling young people to think about their deepest motivations is part of school. We can’t get away with banning whatever is inconvenient and skating furiously over thin ice, like the Austerlitz scene in the new Napoleon film. It doesn’t end well.    
     
We need to work hard, collectively, on what constitutes a good education. Without vision the people perish and children are particularly badly served. How can we describe what we value and hope for in the swirling joy of schools? How can we tell the story so that it is impossible for a civilised nation not to fund it properly? How can we actually understand the world, and change it for the better?

I’m not done with this. So much for the tidy list!
 
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26.1.24

I don’t listen to talk radio.  Not that I doubt the wisdom of my fellow citizens, but I’m not short of advice. Year 7 tell me how to save the planet, year 9 tell me I’m unjust, y11 that GCSEs should be abolished, y12 that I am personally complicit in all wars. Teachers have a view on everything. The local authority tell me what matters in Greenwich and the Department has views on whatever matters to The Party at the time. (Who’d have thought that the rather obscure matter of whether schools are using PSHE materials whose copyright means they can’t share them with parents would be such a cause celebre. What about other textbooks?). Him indoors has had an opinion on literally everything for the last 44 years.

So enough. I don’t listen to Any Questions or Answers and I don’t watch Question Time. Anything that requires viewer voting – off it goes. I’ll leave a room to avoid listening to any media discussion of schooling (that doesn’t involve me). I don’t even watch or listen to myself when I’m on.

However, I was sitting in a cab yesterday and couldn’t avoid LBC. James O’Brien, who I’m happy to read in print, was interviewing Jim Knight about the NEU’s Beyond Ofsted report. I like this Knight, Schools Minister a lifetime ago. I even took out my airpods (Barack Obama reading A Promised Land, if you must know) to follow the chat.  Headlines:  

Because Ofsted is no longer trusted and significant, change is needed. In a better future, every school will conduct its own nationally-set self-evaluation to report to stakeholders, working with an external school improvement partner (SIP) on an action plan. The SIP would also validate the school’s exam performance reviews. (This isn’t new, but we could do it better).

Inspectors would focus on this process, intervening where it goes wrong. They would not routinely inspect teaching or pupil outcomes but they would be sufficiently skilled to build capacity in school leadership teams. They’d be fully independent and hold government, policies and the effects of policies to account through system-wide thematic inspections. This would include teacher supply. (Bonza scheme).

Safeguarding audits would be conducted annually under the oversight of a different national body. (Ditto)  
So, routine inspections should be immediately paused to reset and regain the trust of the profession. A national duty of care is due to teachers so they may develop collaborative learning cultures which generate excellent professional skills and competencies. This should be at the heart of any reform. (Nicely put, Sir)

At the same time, another v interesting report landed from IPPR: Improvement through Empowerment. They start with:

Enthusiastic in July, I made a note in my new diary about how I should entertain you in September. Sadly, teachers’ mental hard drives are semi-wiped clean over the six weeks and the clearest reminder might as well be in Sanskrit.  I think it was something about cricket, of which I know almost nothing despite living within earshot of the Surrey ground. What to do?

Step forward the Secretary of State and the concrete issue. Our concrete, being of a relatively up-to-date kind, is fine, but I’ve done my time in crumbling buildings and I sympathise most energetically with Heads who suddenly had to close. I taught in a room with a hole in a broken window for the whole of my first year, and in a school which had outside toilets until 1998 and sixteen rotting demountables until 2009.  I once lost 13 classrooms to an arson attack. This stuff happens, but its wearing.

One might ask why? Surely we should educate our young in buildings suited to the value we place upon them as our jewels, the holders of our dreams, our single hope for a better future? Schools should be palaces – or at least as nice as Tallis’s lovely building. The problem is that our school buildings are indeed matched to the value we place upon children, nationally. Children are messy and a bit unpredictable. They’re not much economic use until they’re grown and though they complain with every breath they also take everything in their stride so everyone can ignore them. Schooling is compulsory, so its not as if we have to lure them there.

I don’t know of a nation that spends the right amount on schools, but the Children Village in Brazil was declared the world’s best building in 2018. The three Building Schools for the Future-era buildings I’ve been lucky enough to head are each lovely in their way, built when much more money was spent on design as well as building (though I did have to skill myself up on post-torsioned concrete and nickel sulphide inclusion very temporarily). It's been sad to hear lazy glib talk of ‘wacky warehouses’, as if we’ve never known what we’re doing. I wonder how many fee-paying schools were built with holey concrete?

The Secretary of State gives the impression of being a practical woman. It is annoying to find yourself at the top of a heap that appears to have let something (literally) fall. It's embarrassing to be caught out venting on a matter that would best be kept between you and the dog. It happened to me – ahem – recently. But honestly? Getting a 95% return on a questionnaire should give you enough to go on. The other 5% might have been places like us, Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schools where you have to escalate any inquiry through Dante’s nine circles of hell before you can fill a form in. Cursing won’t alter the fact that everything in education needs more money and every chicken comes home to roost in the end. They’d better be careful which roof they land on.

Filling further inches with the lucky appearance of the new Chief Inspector of Schools designate, Martyn Oliver: I met him at a dinner last year and he seems a nice chap. He’s going to try to keep his own roost in the north, which is good too. I hope he values the considerable work Ofsted have done on curriculum and doesn’t revert to the easy but damaging single focus on outcomes. Despite considerable experience, I hope he isn’t dogmatic about the way to run a school, a real problem with the last ex-head who held the golden clipboard. No, my problem with Sir Martyn is purely linguistic. It is his claim, at the Select Committee, that he would ‘walk the walk’.

This stuff has been getting on my nerves for a bit.  Leaders are prone to say they ‘walk the talk’, demonstrating that they practice what they preach. Fair enough, but now its amped up to ‘walking the walk’ which doesn’t shed any light. What walk? How far? To where? Why? Does it mean that people have actually done the job that they’re supervising? But leadership isn’t just about solving practical problems. It needs vision, and articulacy.  If you spend your life with your sleeves rolled up, when do you think?

Am I worried or just irascible? Time will tell.

No more time for that as the cricket thing’s re-emerged as a tea-stained press cutting under last year’s School Plan. It seems I was gripped by an article about Bazball which told me about playing test cricket as though losing doesn’t matter much. Cricketers have apparently been encouraged to play as if they enjoyed it, without the fear of failure, remembering that it’s a game and that it ought to be fun. Instigators Stokes and McCullum (whom I wouldn’t know if they presented me with The Ashes) asked players ‘what if you don’t mind about losing, so long as you are playing your own style’. 

I’m not going to make an obvious and worthless point about Ofsted here. Children are too important to allow every school and teacher to do as they please, cheerfully failing them but having a great time.  We have to have a shared and clear vision and some assessment of success against it. But we need to get out from under the fear of failure, and allow everyone in schools to think and to enjoy it a bit more. Is Mazball at Ofsted Towers too much to hope?  

Happily seaworthy, we’ve launched the good ship Tallis cheerily this week. I hope we’ll enjoy the voyage for the next 38. I’ll keep you informed.
 
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8.9.23

Life on the block four stairs: two girls walked past and I heard ‘I said alopecia, but I meant arthritis’. Both are difficult enough, though naturally-balding knees would undercut the depilation industry, but I need more on the matter. Shortly afterwards a man told me that he loved stairs. Me, I love escalators but we don’t have any here. You?

I love John Rawls, the great American jurist and philosopher who died in 2002. Oh do keep up. Destined for the episcopal priesthood he lost his faith in the war and devoted his life to setting out the framework of a fair society. His books are – ahem – a little dense – but a sprightly young chap at the LSE called Daniel Chandler has set his thinking out afresh. Allow me. despite it being the end of the year we can’t let our brains go to mush. At least not before Thursday afternoon.

Rawls’ original position is that society should be fair, that we should design social goods such as law, education, employment and health care as if from behind a veil of ignorance where we didn’t know how we ourselves might benefit. Further, there should be intergenerational justice and sustainability. All of this is his basic liberties principle where a fair chance for everyone should be designed into every system.

However, equality is hard to get, so we have to work on it really hard. Equal opps just give the already advantaged an easier swim to the top so we need fair opportunities with some rightly getting more help than others. This is Rawls’ difference principle  which governs the distribution of income, wealth, responsibility, power and the social basis of self-respect.  Inequalities in the distribution of these goods should be allowed only if they benefit the least well-off in society. That’s very different from a dried-up stream of trickle-down economics. What rising tide?
Finally, the just savings principle spends public money on environmental stewardship in place to protect the material and natural environment.

For Rawls, education teaches subjects, of course, but it’s not just about future economic value. Schools should generate and uphold the political virtues of reasonableness and mutual respect. They should teach rights and freedoms, politics, the diversity of beliefs, social skills and expectations, analytical skills to tell right from wrong, communication to help all the above, basic liberal values and attitudes, good character, the encouragement of respectful debate, critical thinking, respect and tolerance, shared identity and a liberal patriotism that everyone can believe in. A pretty good manifesto for a diverse comprehensive school, eh? 

Young Chandler updates this with some priorities of his own, based on the original position. More focus on early years, the abolition of fee-paying and grammar schools, more targeted funding (like pupil premium), admissions decided by lottery and investment in teacher quality.  

He’d go further. He’d enshrine freedom in a written constitution, strengthen the judiciary, nurture an inclusive British patriotic identity, introduce proportional representation, remove money from politics, use direct citizen participation methods, impose climate protection laws, make much more effort on respecting protected characteristics, treat the lowest paid with respect, develop opportunities for fulfilling work that builds communities, and mandating good modern workplace democracy. A ‘realistic utopia’ that ‘avoids despondency’. Yes!

I was at a meeting with civilians where the teachers’ strikes announcement generated tutting and eye-rolling. Intervening would have prolonged an event form which I needed to scuttle at the end, so I kept my peace. Or I think I did. Who knows what the body language or the studious avoidance of eye contact may have conveyed? It did make me think, however, about how to explain the action, so I thought I’d experiment on you, dear readers.

Today brought another meeting where we chewed it over, a professionals’ gathering where the image of the Front Door is often conjured, so I thought I’d press this rather exhausted metaphor into service.

Schools, like other services, are sometimes called the Front Door because that’s the place you go, the one-stop-shop, if you’re lucky, to get the support and the entitlement the state has decreed, devised and funded. The GP surgery is the front door of the NHS, the desk sergeant is literally at the front door of policing and the school is the front door to education. Our Tallis front door is rather nice, approached under a canopy with brightly decorated pillars and sometime festooned with flags for whatever we’re celebrating. We hope this is a welcoming place, where our warm friends behind the desk will try to meet your every need. 

The school is the front door to the belief in and investment of the state in the future of our young. It is the place where accepted and verified knowledge is taught and the community where acceptable social norms are transmitted. With luck, it’s also a place where a good experience of growing-up may be gathered and from where a happy adult life may be approached. That’s quite a lot for one building, let alone one door, to represent.

It is reasonable, therefore, for the tax-payer to expect that, once the door is broached, the service behind it will be top-notch. In the case of a school, that should be everything that the good parent would want for the child, in loco parentis. It’s a contract made between education, the state and the population. We will take your money and your dreams and use them wisely and well. We will look after your children as well as you could possibly want, and do our very best for them. This compact is the foundation stone of our system. We fail in our duty if, once the shiny front door is opened, the education and the experience behind it is patched together, fragile and unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. It's no way to run a health service and its no way to run a school.

So teachers are striking because they have run out of other options to bring the parlous state of our service to the nation’s young to government’s attention. They are not just striking about pay, though that is a huge part of the problem. Poor pay for a highly trained and skilled graduate profession working in high-pressure settings means that fewer and fewer people want to do the job. Even a recession, historically the teacher workforce’s friend, hasn’t worked this time. The workload and remuneration are so out of kilter with other career options that no one wants to be a teacher. Under 60% of secondary recruitment targets have been met this year in most subjects, again, in a ninth out of ten years of missed targets. Only the first lockdown brought an upsurge in interest in teaching as a career, and that quickly failed.

And last year’s pay rise, announced in the last week of term without funding to pay it? It nearly broke us all.

Workload and burnout are significant pressures of the job. Each is inextricably linked to funding, and this is the root of the strike action. Because there aren’t enough teachers, the teachers we do have have to shoulder more of the burden. If, for example, and this is not the case at Tallis, a school can’t get maths teachers and so must rely on graduates in other disciplines to teach maths, that’s a triangle of problems (maths teachers love triangles). The French or PE or whatever teacher will find the teaching stressful, the Head of Maths will find the constant setting-of-work for a potentially floundering colleague exhausting and the children will inhabit the teacher’s anxiety, every single lesson. Behaviour will be scratchy, outcomes poor and enjoyment absent. The teachers’ strikes aren’t just about pay, they’re about recruitment and retention, SEND promises made that can’t be kept, unpalatable choices made to keep or scrap curriculum areas or behaviour support, no educational psychologists or speech therapists and six-month waiting lists for mental health services for desperate teenagers. 

They’re also about better funding and a way out of crisis management and the constant attrition of the things the reasonable citizen believes we have promised and expects us to do well. It’s a crisis a dozen years in the making.

But last night was Year 7 parents’ evening, the contract in motion. I perched as ever near the front door (in many jumpers and then my coat), ready to chat helpfully and absorb complaints. I heard about a child who’s lost four jumpers so far (we’ll provide a stock of pre-loved garb) and another who’s only lost his Spanish book (we have spares). But most of all, I heard compliments and thanks from parents who trusted us with their beloved, who decided that we meant what we said about a broad curriculum and an inclusive vibe and are grateful and happy for what we’re doing. They were glad they’d found our door.

Given the prevailing gloom of the foregoing, it was a lovely experience. I just hope that we can find the funding to keep it all going, and to keep our promises. Our door is always open.
 
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19.1.23

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

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

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

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

Anyway, as the gods of Blackheath Hill decreed that my driving needed attention, I found myself on a Speed Awareness Course. I must say that it was excellent, especially when the facilitator led the ten of us to a point of action-planning our new lives as safer drivers. He didn’t quite call it that, but he forced (enabled) us to tackle our habits thuswise:

1. This is the problem…..
2. It might be caused by….
3. I could fix it by…..
4. Why might that not work?.....
5. To help my plan I will…..

 
Isn’t that fabulously clear? Google offers me a 46-page guide to action planning that the NHS uses, even my own goes on a bit, but any decent plan covers the same ground. So, if we apply this to the matter in hand:

1. The problem is that we don’t have enough teachers
2. This might be caused by low salaries compared to other postgraduate professionals and an unreasonable expectation to solve all the nation’s ills all day every day
3. We could fix it by funding education better so that we train teachers properly and give Clive and Gertie time to think and refresh their training, as professionals do
4. Why might that not work? Because we hold children in little value in the UK. We refuse to fund the education system properly so everything we do, we do cheaply. This treats Sir and Miss like children or expendable units, so they leave.
5. To help the plan we should fund the education system in a way that treats teachers as part of the solution rather than the problem, attracts and retains high-quality teachers, supports and develops our young people and builds up the nation’s life. My shaker and I don’t think this is unreasonable.

 
I note as I finish that, according to the BBC, J Hunt has pledged £2.3bn, for education. I’m not sure that’s a big number and I don’t know how much of it has already been announced or promised. More on this next time.
 
Hunt’s done whatever he’s done as part of a government running a country in what Gramsci called a state of catastrophic equilibrium, where everything is simultaneously failing and stable, where things can’t carry on but nevertheless must, year after year. That’s where we are in schools. He needs to have done enough to tip the balance back towards equilibrium from collapse, but it needs more than that to educate a people, to save the future.
 
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17.11.22

Well, Lord Geidt, quite the stir. Despite a mini-obsession with ethics, I hadn’t really clocked him until this week. I was still stuck on the resignation of the last one, Alexander Allen over Priti Patel’s bullying and didn’t realise the PM had got on with recruiting and destroying another one. He is a busy bee. This Geidt looks pretty tough on Google.  Perhaps he decided that life in Downing Street compared badly with Bosnia and other war zones of his military and diplomatic service, or with his years at The Palace, though I expect it can get pretty excitable there.

Tim Harford was writing about ethics, or more particularly about metacognition versus virtue in the FT last Saturday (don’t worry, this’ll get scrappier soon). Metacognition, teaching people how to think is next to impossible to define, so what about looking at what kind of people emerge from education? How have their temperaments and virtues benefitted from years of investment? Harford suggests love of truth, honesty about one’s failings, fair-mindedness, humility and a willingness to seek help, perseverance, courage, good listening, perspective-taking, empathy and wisdom make for better learners. Others added the ability to see connections and a sense of humour, humanity and getting-stuff-done-ness. Persuasiveness (hmmm). Curiosity. 

One of Harford’s correspondents objected, saying it wasn’t her place to teach students how to be good people. But if not, who?  He ends the piece, having admirably made not one reference to the PM, with ‘And if we don’t know who will teach those virtues or how to teach them, that explains a lot about the world in which we now live’.
You heard it here first. We‘re queasy about the language of virtue, and the churches don’t fill the space any more, so who teaches young people how to live a good life? Obviously: we do. Teachers and parents, schools. Unfortunately, the cheaply functionalist, any-means-necessary, measure-by-results, structure-not-quality mechanisms of our system drown the virtuous route: sustained endeavour, curiosity, substance, breadth, depth, kindness and selflessness.

Did the Times Education Commission report, published this week to deafening fanfares, dive into this, I hear you cry? Not so much. Their twelve-point, forty-five recommendation plan is interesting. There is much collusion with government policy hidden in the very small print, such as the outrageous ‘elite sixth forms’ cuckooed into disadvantaged areas, for example. Some of the narrative smacks of poverty tourism and paternalism such as ‘private schools understand all too well that there must be more to education than knowledge’. The ‘teachers are heroes’ damaging trope is given another run out – heroes don’t need paying properly, of course – as is the inevitable Birbalsingh. While any document using ‘superhead’ should be flung across the room, the commitment to broad, deep and memorable educational experiences appears to be real.  It would be churlish not to quote the first two recommendations, a 15-year strategy for education run by an independent body, and an end to three-year funding cycles. Oh yes.

The other report this week is from the Rethinking Assessment group, a coalition of educators trying to reframe the way we assess schooling and what children know. There’s much to be said for this. Perhaps the combination of the two might dislodge something?
 
What’s not included, in either, is a broad, deep or even memorable critique of our divided society, and the effects of cynicism, slovenliness and playing it for laughs in public life on our children. Both reports have a serious tone, but the Department is congenitally obsessed with structural reform, and the PM doesn’t seem to have time to care about anything other than continuing to be PM against the odds. I’m not holding my breath. 
 
But I write this at lunchtime on the hottest day of the year and, despite some rather coarse inter-student shouting I can hear through my open window, all are cheerful. We got through year 9 Sports Day with a gentle breeze before someone turned the gas up, and when I held the block 4 bridge door open for the hordes almost every single one of them said ‘thank you’ or asked me how I was.  One even blessed me from under a straw hat as she scuttled past determinedly. Three teacher trainees called in to say goodbye at the end of their placements, the GCSE Art moderator has been and gone and, fabulously, among the exams of the day have been Persian and Astronomy.  Wouldn’t it be great if Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar were among the candidates?

We had Tim Oates in school this week, talking about the long-term educational effects of the pandemic and the things we should focus on.  It was good to have him in in the flesh: we started the year thinking about his insights, in September.  And we’ll return to it this September, because in the end, these children in this place haven’t time to wait for the tanker to turn round, even if the order is sent down from the bridge. We have to look to our own skills in teaching and questioning, reading and really thinking hard about the concepts that unlock doors in children’s brains and make them yearn to find out more. We need to put our learning virtues to work. 

Good people, good learning, good classrooms, good schools. If the PM can’t find a replacement for Lord Geidt he doesn’t need to scrap the post. Lots of us could do it. At your service, matey.
 
CR
17.5.22 

Oh give me a break. Buffeted by Cornish winds, I’m warned to be politically impartial and then there’s a war. Given that all sides of the House agree that this is a result of unprecedented aggression etc, am I allowed to talk about peace? What is balance, this week? Do I just teach one side? Please don’t answer. I’m sure it’ll get us into trouble somehow.

When the western political situation took a turn for the worse with the previous inhabitant of the White House and depressing shenanigans this side of the pond, I decamped from Radio 4 to 3 avoid it all. This time, I’m taking refuge in the Thinking with Pinker podcasts, a short course in cogitational improvement. One episode is called ‘You Can’t Say That’ and it’s on ‘taboos, heresies and counterfactuals’. I’m swum in the seas of religion all my life so I know a bit about these. I like to think that makes me reasonably sharp at spotting myth, sentiment, falsehood and claims of destiny. Before you get cross, Pinker isn’t talking about the language of racism and misogyny: rudeness and oppression are always wrong. He’s talking about the ruts of acceptable thought in which we stick ourselves.

We love this in education. We’re counterintuitively keen on confining thought and easily attached to totems. Exams, for instance. Rather than looking at the current circumstance as a chance radically to reform the whole outlandish structure, we’re swimming frantically back through the shark-infested waters of memory testing and cheap proxies to replant our flag in the Land of the Forgotten Third. And we delude ourselves and yes, I have an example, a sub-heading on the BBC Family and Education page asking ‘How will my exams be different this year?’.
This makes no sense. For a start, a child wouldn’t ask it. Barely a one sitting public examination this year will have ever taken one before. Year 13 didn’t do GCSEs. They have no idea what’s different, or similar. The question actually being asked, by anxious adults, is ‘are exams children take this year worth anything to the elitist calibration mindset we’re trapped in?’. If it was a child asking, the question would be ‘What’s happening and what do I need to do? Will I need a pen?’

I’m not opposed to exams. It's reasonable to measure learning, not least to assess current aptitude for choices at 18. It’s also perfectly legitimate for the state to want to measure its system. But we could do so much better. My counterfactual would run: ‘If we already knew that exams were a flawed way of measuring children’s learning, we would have seized the opportunity of the pandemic to ……’ Why can’t we think about that? If not now, when?

Children, however, can turn their minds to other things. Wandering about to spy on the choices Deputy Head candidates made at break I chanced upon the conversion of a bench seat to a table tennis table, requiring the game to be played inelegantly at the stoop, then the peer-review of an engineering prototype. This latter was a small boy whose friend claimed he’d made a device to extract apple juice from apples. I thought it needed further development, myself. Squeezing the air out of one of those tiny soy sauce bottles and trying to jam it into the side of a Gala didn’t appear to be extracting a marketable product, and at least one of the potential investors thought it was disgusting, but a refined model may have legs? Or show signs of being remotely able to work.
 
Year 8 have been thinking about what they can do to help children in Ukraine. They settled on a sort-of sponsored walk (steps in tutor time) for War Child. This seems like a sensible way of expressing concern and fits with one of our repeated sayings, on every Christmas Card since 2014, Eglantyne Jebb’s ‘all wars are wars against children.'

Good for them. Meanwhile, in peace time, we were trying desperately to track down some Food Bank vouchers.   
But by the time you read this we’ll have appointed a new Deputy Head and that’s always exciting. Deputies forecast, control and make the weather in school and good ones are beyond rubies. Lots of people have been involved: students, teachers, classes, year groups, support staff and governors over a two-day grilling process. I did this twenty-five years ago. I didn’t get the first one I applied for, largely because I couldn’t express a thought about the curriculum. I got the second one and it changed my family’s life. It’s a great job in the right school.

I have put some time into thinking about the curriculum since then, despite national lurching from one set of ossified prescriptions to another ever since. We think a lot at Tallis, and we try to teach the children that an unexamined life is perhaps less rewarding than one where you create informed choices. As a colleague said at the end of term, we try to link our epistemology to our ethos here, which is great if you can remember what epistemology means. As we say to the children – we know we’re learning when we’re thinking very hard – but within the bounds of kindness and respect, the blessed exam specifications and the impartiality rules, we can think what we like. Impartiality is the child of considered thought
 
CR
2.3.22

It was foggy when I set off this morning but the streetlights were pretty and the great illuminated buses big enough to see. By the time me and my bicycle got onto to Blackheath it was pitch black. I said ooh-er out loud a few times and hoped that the cross guy who mutters wouldn’t appear for me to run over.
 
Fog and early darkness always remind me of a conversation in a Head’s office on the edge of Sunderland at the end of a day, when the dark sky was all-enveloping. We talked about what it must have been like in mediaeval times, with the same sky, no lights, just the cold and the hills, and eventually, to the west, Durham Cathedral appearing looming above the city as if it had descended directly from heaven.
 
Safely indoors, the clock ticked round to year 11 assembly: Instructions for Mock Exams. These will be important but we don’t know how important. I noted with interest that the Queen of the Mocks referred to the pre-exam gathering place as the Green Canteen. This is catching on, though I call it the Dining Room and one of the chaps on the top floor calls it the Bistro. It doesn’t matter.
 
The curriculum we offer does matter, which may lie behind the continually condescending tone of this week’s post-lockdown briefing from the DfE. While announcing a pay freeze for teachers and public spending cuts that will make learning re-stabilisation harder, they remind us of the blindingly obvious: I condense

• the curriculum must remain broad and ambitious
• remote education must be high-quality and safe,
• schools should plan on the basis of the educational needs of pupils.

Duh. They wrote this in July and trot it out every time. It was annoying then and gets more annoying the harder it is to keep schools going and offer a curriculum that is the same for everyone, the necessary condition for an exam-based system. The tone lacks respect, treating us as idiots.

Which appears to be the Home Secretary’s preferred register, manifesting itself ‘in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing.  This may not be done intentionally to cause upset, but that has been the effect on some individuals’.

And later in Alex Allen’s belatedly published independent advice ‘Her approach on occasions has amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals.’

And then! ‘There is no evidence that she was aware of the impact of her behaviour and no feedback was given to her at the time………I note the finding of different and more positive behaviour since these issues were raised with her.’

Yet she remains, as the PM has insisted that the wagons circle around ‘the Pritster’.

I am in a Blackheath cycling fog about this and mediaeval darkness has descended on my comprehension. How can someone of such eminence, the Home Secretary, have to have bullying pointed out to her? How can it ever be right to shout and swear at colleagues, especially those whom one is expected to lead? How can she command any respect?

I have long clung to the existence of the Committee for Standards in Public Life as a guarantor of standards of conduct for public officials, from the PM down to lowly ole me. The ‘Nolan Principles’ of accountability, selflessness, honesty, objectivity, openness, integrity and leadership have bound us all since 1994. The current Chair spoke on 12 November and said:

‘The bullying allegations made against the Home Secretary were investigated by the Cabinet Office but the outcome of that investigation has not been published though completed some months ago…..this does not build confidence in the accountability of government.’

He goes on, further, to talk about cronyism in appointments and the awarding of public contracts, the firing of civil servants when the resignation of a minister would have been correct, the avoiding of parliamentary scrutiny by media announcements and the use of ‘just vote us out if you don’t like us’ as a way of brass-necking wrong behaviour.

The system depends on everyone choosing to do right, Evans says. High public standards rely on the individual. ‘It remains that case that in politics, public service and business, that ethical standards are first and foremost a matter of personal responsibility.’ because 'few systems are sufficiently robust to constrain those who would deliberately undermine them’. 

This is a dense area and the argument is nuanced. We are not living in a post-Nolan world nor should any of us wish to. We want high standards of conduct in our politicians because we want them to be good people determined to do the best for their constituents. We don’t want to be saddled with people who, as educated adults, have to be told how to behave. We want government to be built on a foundation of goodness and altruism, not self-interest and showing-off. We expect it of children and ourselves and we have a civic right to expect it of our government.

When we devised the national Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2016-18 we realised that Nolan wasn’t enough, but we needed clear personal virtues to underpin all of our actions. We therefore also committed ourselves to trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We check our own behaviour to make sure it sets the right example to children, and to other adults. This enlightenment didn’t descend from a mediaeval heave, we worked at it.

The PM is lost in a fog of his own obfuscation. He has made too many personal mistakes to want to shine the Nolan spotlight on colleagues. He looks as though he can’t tell right from wrong and worse, that he doesn’t care. Our children deserve better than this.

CR 27.11.20

Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Protection of Invictus. Someone has to act: things have got out of hand.

My mother didn’t care for poetry, but she furnished my habit from youth and provided the Oxford Book of English Verse from the Literary Guild Book Club. I liked gung-ho stuff and learned a lot of it. Invictus was a favourite as I was all for self-realisation – though she had another term for it. It drives me MAD when I see it misused.

When I read of a school where everyone has to ‘follow Invictus’ and the children are encouraged to learn it by heart I nearly had to self-isolate with rage. I may be misinformed but apparently they suggest that children choose their friends by whether or not they’ve committed this Henley to memory. You can picture the windswept coastal playground chat:

What kind of person wouldn’t take up this challenge? asks the school. Well, one who had read the poem. 

Invictus is a great piece of Victorian rhetoric written by someone who had a terrible early life (and incidentally may have been the model for Long John Silver). It speaks of the undefeated human spirit and is where we get the phrase ‘bloodied but unbowed’. Allow me to quote the last verse:

Schools are pretty hot on charging scrolls with punishments. We call them detention lists, or sanctions or corrections. Children who do their own thing no matter what are prone to end up on these scrolls. If they persist in being master of their own fate they will, sooner or later, be shown the door and invited to take their unconquerable souls elsewhere. Invictus is not about conformity, uniformity or obedience. It is about taking a long view of the difficulties of life and deciding to win through endurance. 

Don’t misunderstand me. Telling children that they can escape the grinding poverty and hopelessness of their birth is an entirely good thing. I’ve led a school in those circumstances and I sympathise with the aim – but it can’t be at the expense of truth. Captaining your soul to a good berth requires a following wind and predictable seas. 

The photographer Chris Killip died this week and his collection In Flagrante has followed me from house to house.   They’re photos taken in the north-east between 1973 and 1985 and illuminate my memories of the same time in the same place. ‘Youth on a wall, Jarrow, 1976’ was for many the definitive image of the time, but as a work of art it is itself timeless.

The school that the boy on the wall went to wouldn’t have bothered much about Invictus. The education he got might not have been up to much and he was probably selected for it, luckily or unluckily. In Jarrow in the seventies his prospects would have looked pretty bleak at 16, but he’d have been used to bleakness. Would it have helped him to go to a school where he had to learn Invictus by heart? Hard to say. If the school was well-run and kindly, energetic in finding jobs and filled with skilled teachers then the poetry could have been an added bonus, a consolation in troubled times to come. If not? Would he have turned the blame in on himself for being insufficiently unbowed? What does the picture say to you?

And now? He sits on the wall rather than going to school. He missed 6 months of education last year and ran wild in that time, with criminals. He might get a grade 3 in English if he works hard with a gifted teacher, but its still a fail.  He can enrol at a college with next-to-nothing, but he’ll have to carry on fighting GCSE maths until he’s 19 while youth unemployment heads for 20%. With what does he captain the small ship of his fate through these menaced waters?

Children deserve to be told the truth. They are free to read poetry and they are the master of their souls but neither puts food on the table. Learning Invictus and repeating it in a community of Invictus-chanters will not prevent you from failure in a system that requires 30% to fail. We can choose as a nation not to provide for the most vulnerable but we cannot escape our responsibility. 

It is shameful to download the failure of the state into the hearts of our children and mask it with the 19th century equivalent of ‘just follow your dreams’. They deserve the truth – and they deserve an education system that cares about them all.
 
CR
16.10.20      

An old hand dropped by to muse ‘It’s always useful to throw our processes in the air and see what we can do better’. Good grief, matey, I said. We’ve done nothing else since March. I distantly ran into another of similar vintage on the stairs later the same day. His view was that ‘It’s best to keep things as normal as possible’. Scowling at myself for inconsistency, I agreed warmly as he rushed upstairs to barter with the timetabler. Stap me, but both of them are right.

The things that really matter in school are very simple. Safety, good teachers and good relationships cover it all. Safety is foremost now and our response is rooted in my love of a queue. Lots of lovely lines in zones that keep year groups apart as best we can and every class has to be fetched and returned, like a very unwieldy library book.  The lines are a nice way to start the day in nice weather, The solution to not-so-nice weather is best described as a work in progress involving umbrellas. Students being towed from place to place by teachers means they don’t all get jammed in doorways with other year groups.

Its 0905 and from my eyrie there’s a beautiful sight of different aged-lines fanning out like a sunburst from the entrance to block 2, waiting patiently and chatting happily.  Some schools do this all the time. It's popular in the newer schools where young peoples’ unquestioning compliance is highly valued. There’s never one solution in schools, though, which is why governments find them so infuriating to run. Safety and compliance are central, but so are questioning and individuality. You can prevent harm, but you can’t prescribe brilliance. Speaking of which.
One of the most irritating training sessions I ever sat through was from a person who billed himself as an iconoclast. He’d written a book that had its moment in the sun so we shelled out for a session. He began with a line-related expansive flinging of the arms. ‘If you imagine a continuum with Ken Robinson at one end, Michael Gove is at the other’. Oh dear. We were partial to Sir Ken, may he rest in peace, at Tallis, not just because of his TED talk (‘Do schools kill creativity?’) that everyone in the world watched, but because he talked sense that reached deeply into our history at Tallis. He wasn’t at one end of anyone’s line.

Robinson was a former teacher and distinguished education academic who finally ended up working for the Getty Foundation. He argued that children do not grow into artistic creativity but are educated out of it by school systems that focus on academic achievement and conformity instead of liberating imagination and initiative. He feared that ‘our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity.’  He wanted a system that didn’t treat children as the same or try to ‘over-programme them’. He wanted all children to be able to to find their talents by being able to try things out at school. 

Robinson wasn’t opposed to academic learning or a national curriculum and those who say he was are just wrong. He wanted a curriculum judged by different priorities with parity of esteem between core subjects and the arts.  Tony Blair asked him to chair a National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education and the 1998 report ‘All Our Futures’ argues:

Michael Gove trashed him in his puerile ‘blob’ rhetoric, rather than saying: this is best but fiendishly hard to get right. Let’s look at it seriously and build up a wonderful education system, rather than a cheap one that easier to measure.

Ken Robinson used Mick Fleetwood as an example in one of his books. Our Fleetwood Mac man was written off at school, distracted, unfocused, always thinking about something else – but what a legacy. Is there anyone over 40 who wouldn’t recognise Albatross, or whistle along to Rumours, if whistling were permitted?

Which reminded me of the Norman Rockwell picture of the Soviet schoolroom. Look at it carefully. The children are tidily uniformed. There’s an exhortation on the wall about ‘study and learn’ and everyone is focused except for the child looking out of the window. Is Rockwell just making an obvious cold war point about the crushing of individuality and the yearning of the human soul? Or is he saying something about a universal experience of children? About the child who’ll still think his own thoughts no matter what the classroom climate – and the teacher who recognises it?

Yet this picture illustrates much of what’s currently praised in secondary education: absolute conformity, even down to the level of all eyes ‘tracking the teacher’. That distracted thinker would be sanctioned in many schools, and his teacher would certainly be criticised by inspectors. But what is he thinking of? What memory, what experience of school does the picture bring back to you? (Ignore the bust of Lenin, though I did serve in a County Durham school with a bas-relief of Peter Lee on the hall wall who could easily have doubled for Lenin. I thought it was him until I got up close.)

We are constantly distracted by easy ways to fix education or loud ways to argue about it. Robinson wasn’t at one end of anyone’s continuum but wanted a way of combining the best in a good and lively system. Responding to the virus doesn’t meant that we start from scratch nationally, but it doesn’t mean that we pretend nothing’s happened. Learning lines at Tallis doesn’t mean that we’ll always do it – but we might learn something new that helps us. Both of my chaps are undoubtedly right.

I followed a matching pair of year 10s along an orderly and well-spaced-out corridor. As they went outside I’m certain that one said to the other ‘my mask smells of roman numerals’. If he did, what wonderful poetry and maths awaits us in the future?
 
CR 10.9.20

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

Readers will be dismayed to know that I plan more blogs for 2020, but potentially delighted that I will address the Secretary of State for Education directly. I think he needs help, and I intend to offer it.
 
Dear Mr Williamson
I hope you’re familiar with Eddie and the Hot Rods’ magnificent 1977 hit ‘Do anything you wanna do’. I heard it again last week and thought of you. Though you were only one when it bounced up the charts I expect your parents took the trouble to introduce you to its lively beat and compelling chorus. I know Scarborough a bit and I can well imagine that later, you’d be keen to leave it all behind and search for adventure, that you must then have got tired of doing day jobs with no thanks for what you do and other sentiments so briskly expressed by Mr Rods. 
Now you’re grown up and in your quest to become someone I note (from your twitting) that you’re looking forward to working hard, so I investigated your areas of responsibility to find out what on. You’re in charge of early years, children’s social care, teachers’ pay, the school curriculum, school improvement, academies and free schools, further education, apprenticeships and skills and higher education. Dearie me, what an exhausting list.

Even on first glance this landscape is littered with potholes: troubled families, the death of nursery schools, austerity’s child poverty, catastrophic teacher recruitment failures, Ofsted’s key stage saga, improving a zero-sum performance system where half of schools and a third of children have to fail, sorting out school place planning without any place planning, unconditional university offers and that’s just the stuff I know about.  It’s a good job you’re an up-beat, can-do sort.

However, I bring tidings of great joy. All of these areas of work are overrun with highly trained people who are obsessed with making them better. They’ve committed their lives to this, regardless of pay, working conditions, public recognition etc. They like children and are brim full of resilience, optimism, pluck, determination and all the other attributes that people like you like. They can easily help you with the challenges you face.

Exempli gratia, a few thoughts from me. Reinstate Sure Start, reinforce nursery schools and the fabulous pedagogical skills of early years teachers. Work with colleagues to sort out low wages and benefits so that families can eat without relying on foodbanks. Build social housing so that families can set up home with stability and dignity. Make good on the jolly recruitment advert with the science teacher and sort out entry into teaching, pay and working conditions (#everylessonshapesalife). Make the National Curriculum binding on all schools and decide openly on what you want, without using Ofsted as underground shock troops. Fund inspection properly so they can do a thorough professional job. Remove the language of pass and fail at GCCSE: the grades speak for themselves. Give school place planning back to the local authorities so we don’t waste money and trap children in schools that are failing or will never get off the ground. Tackle university entrance with a proper, lengthy, serious commission of inquiry. That should get you started.   
  
I expect you think of yourself as an alpha male and having been a Chief Whip, I’m sure you know how to get the best out of people. Anyway, you might like this exchange overheard at the end of the day:

Year 11 tutor: In you come chaps, coats off.
Year 11 boy: But I’m an alpha male, sir.
Year 11 tutor: Then you won’t need any help with the buttons.  
 
Sometimes even the best of us needs help and it would be a wonderful novelty to work together. So as the man says, why don't you ask them what they expect from you? Why don't you tell them what you are gonna do? And, a radical thought for a new decade, why don’t you do it in that order?

Yours,
CR

​8.1.20