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! Lord Agnew! My dear!

Regular readers may recall this Agnew’s previous appearances in this column in his former guise as Academies Minister. The eminence grise behind the Inspiration Trust, from where we also got our Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza, he once made an offer we could almost all refuse. Putting accountants on the road, he promised a bottle of champagne to any school where his people couldn’t find savings, though whether Chateau Co-op or Pol Roger remained mysterious. ‘Use curriculum driven budgeting’ he cried, as if there was any other sensible way of desperately trying to make four bob educate two thousand people for thirty-eight weeks.
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I can forgive him all for this, however, for his magnificent appearance in the Lords last week, resigning furiously over the amount of money wasted by government through ‘schoolboy errors, arrogance, indolence and ignorance’. As minister in charge of counter-fraud he had no alternative but to resign, what with the mountains of fraud hemming him in on every side. 

Such behaviour has a touch of retro-novelty in these troubled times. A man is given a job to do, finds he can’t and so resigns. Gosh. From Richard Cromwell to John Major this was once taken as read as principled behaviour, but standards have slipped this last decade and now it seems perfectly reasonable for the power-mad to cling to power no matter what. I write, of course, before the publication of that report, so by the time you read this I may be embarrassingly out of date.

We’re quite big on schoolboy errors here, as we have a lot of actual schoolboys. Picture the scene. A class of twelve-year olds is released form bondage at 12:20 to go to lunch. Queues form in a big community so it’s in their interest to stave off starvation by pegging it down the corridor the faster to bucket across the yard. A man of some experience plonks himself sturdily in their way and after cartoon screeching-to-halts the matter is put up for discussion. He sympathises, but makes them walk. I know what you’re doing because I used to do it. It’s obvious, but still a bit dangerous, you have to walk in the same way that I had to walk. Sorry, lunchers. Committing traditional mistakes anew is a schoolboy error. Getting caught is a schoolboy error.

But there’s a reason for the nomenclature. Schoolboys have infuriating, reckless and bizarre in their job description. While their synapses are forming they’re meant to make errors because they don’t know any better. From footballs to eating to hoods indoors and missing homework, schoolboys through the ages have tended to the random and boisterous, to the flying-by-the-seat-of-the pants, to justifying actions in risible ways, citing necessity, dogs, love or hunger. They don’t always take instruction and they can make you seize your own head in despair.

Much is forgivable in the young but mind-boggling in the old. I wouldn’t expect much sympathy if all of my countless and tedious parent emails since March 2020 had begun with ‘I don’t know what’s right or wrong’ or ‘no-one’s told me what to do’. We’ve lived through a time when everyone was telling us what to do and we, the people, largely embraced it with stoicism and good sense. Birthdays were unmarked, family celebrations postponed, spontaneity disappeared. We thought everyone was doing it – but it seems not. 

There’s nothing wrong with childlike-ness. Being relatively innocent and inquisitive, seeking to enjoy life in the moment and to its fullest has a lot to be said for it. We rate optimism and inquisitiveness on planet Tallis.  Childishness is another matter. Seeking to excuse oneself, refusing to learn from mistakes, wiggling around the facts and expecting others to love your whim and caprice so much that you can do what you like is not adult, moral behaviour. Bleak House may be Dickens’ finest novel but the creepiest, flesh-crawling-est character is the venial Harold Skimpole, masking greed and irresponsibility in tedious foibles while fleecing his friends and abandoning his dependents.

It's not for me to say what must be done on the national stage (though you might guess what I think), but I refer you to previous messages. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship. All adults are role models to the young, and the higher they’re exalted, the more important the modelling. We have standards for public life, of selflessness, integrity, openness, honesty, objectivity, accountability and leadership. They’re not hard, but they need attention. It’s not always fun to be good, but it is always right.

Agnew’s an unlikely hero. He couldn’t abide being made a fool of and nor, I think, can the rest of us. For me, the example being set to the young is irretrievable. It undermines the democracy and the rule of law that we’re meant to teach as a Fundamental British Values for Pete’s sake. All our lives have been made materially harder by sloppy national leadership.

I’m enjoying Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House. I like a bit of good chairing and he’s a delight. Last week he was trying to calm everyone down, little knowing that he’d still have to be doing it a week later. ‘You may not like this day’ he advised, ‘but this is the day we’ve got’. May it pass briskly, for all of our children’s sakes.  
 
CR
27.1.22

I was wandering in science, and dropped into a cover lesson, all going well. I berthed near a pair of girls, one with green hair. They were doing something that required sheep drawing but were dissatisfied with their efforts. In this, I could help. Sheep figure frequently in RE what with the parables and so an occupational by-product means I can draw them pretty sharply, in the manner of clouds with legs.  I demonstrated as much on the walkabout rota sheet. The ladies were not only delighted but could also remember the sheep-and-goats routine, so that’s a job done. Who needs performance management?  

January requires new thinking even though it's halfway through the school year. I’m thinking about three unmanageable topics at once, just to keep me fresh. 

First, as per, ethics. I talked to some young staff yesterday and we chewed over the values and virtues of the Framework for Ethical Leadership. The biggest ethical problems they identified – unsurprisingly – were the way we measure the value of a young person based on their academic scores, and the kinds of curricula we push them through. Wouldn’t it be better, several mused, for young people who struggle on our fearsomely overloaded GCSE courses, to be allowed to take very practical courses about looking after themselves and saving money?

Well, yes, perhaps all children need that, but the argument is multi-faceted. Why shouldn’t a child who cannot score at GCSE History be exposed to some of the stories and lessons from history? They need to be able to tell the difference between truth and revisionist lies as much as anyone else. The problem is in the qualification, which has to be the same for everyone and apparently, inexplicably, shamefully, has to have a third of below-pass grades (‘fails’ in normal person’s language). The problem isn’t with history, but the way we measure children using a qualification designed to prove some old lie about teacher slacking.

They’re not worried – and why should they be, learning to be a teacher is hard enough – about admissions. Mike Ion wrote about it in Schools Week last week and I couldn’t have put it better. He railed at the use of parental interviews, school fund requests, birth and marriage questions and the use of tests, all for y7 entry, and how the sharp-elbowed negotiate it all. The fact remains, he says, that secondary school admissions are ‘the secret scandal of our system, fostering delusions about consumer choice and reinforcing outdated perceptions of quality in education. 

My second issue is linked, about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). I’ve just seen a great article in the TES about SEND ‘magnet schools’. This is also to do with performance and admissions of course, but also with the limited understanding some educators have of their role in building up a good, national, comprehensive system.
It goes like this:

Bagpuss Comp has good provision for SEND, so increasing numbers of parents of SEND children choose Bagpuss over Rupert High. The Ruperts then say to any inquiries - we don’t have much provision for SEND, have you thought of Bagpuss? Neatly circular. Further, the money that Bagpuss gets isn’t equal to the provision specified in the Education, Health and Care Plan, and the likelihood of their meeting performance measurements is constrained. All the Bagpuss children get a worse deal, resources-wise and the clipboard brigade descend, with the usual range of results.

Some schools are really committed to inclusion. Some avoid it. How is that allowed?

You’ll recall my tedious attempts to communicate with G Williamson, late of Sanctuary Buildings, SW1. Nothing daunted, I may try afresh with Mr Zahawi who seems pretty efficient. He’s about to publish a consultation on SEND of which we Bagpie have rightly high hopes. I will report further on this.

I regret I don’t think even the SoS can help the third issue, to which all the above are stuck like glue. That’s of the retracted, restricted thinking of educators who take measurable achievement at 16 for their lodestone, inexorably drawn to it such that they don’t recognise the responsibility to map their own path so that their school makes sense as part of our national provision for all of our young. Does it increase results? No? Don’t do it, appears to be the mantra.

A colleague told me she was going to treat herself to a trolley now that the financial year is nearly up: a small pleasure. She needs a bit of help to get herself and her baggage from A to B. So do we all, but the hallmark of a good society is how fairly it distributes its goods, in both senses. I’ve told everyone who gets an email from me that I’m reading Sandel, and I often quote Rawls. There’s no better way to start a new year that with two philosophers. They say:

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

Dear Mr Williamson,
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It was the staircase that did for me on Thursday the 12th, the morning after the announcement that schools would close and the exams were cancelled. We had a mock GCSE Physics exam and proceeded as usual, corralled the youth into the dining room, instructed them about examiners’ wheezes and checked them for pens. Then we send them up to the sports hall in batches, a trip involving four sets of double doors, six sharp turns and two flights of stairs. Old folks position themselves on the stairs encouraging the youth to approach the exam hall in the zone, silently, thinking about physics or whatever tasty dish is on the menu.  

I was on the half landing and frankly, unimpressed. I said to myself ‘This’ll have to improve before the real exams start’ until, as they say in the six counties, I caught myself on. This was it. There weren’t going to be any real exams. It was a miracle of muscle memory and instilled habits that they were walking quietly up the stairs at all. They’d never take Physics GCSE again. Or any other. What? How could that be? What vacuum were we about to enter (as the physicists say)?

For the record, I think the closing of schools and the necessary cancelling of exams was done well and briskly. It gave us just enough time to organise and to talk to year 11 and 13 in particular about their futures. It gave them the chance to see how adults have to mobilise rapidly and change quickly when crisis headbutts the door. At least, I hope that’s what they saw. We’d been doing Virus Q&A in assemblies and had y11 on Wednesday afternoon, two hours before the announcement. The first Q to Roberts was ‘What will happen about the exams?’. ‘Keep working!’ quoth I – ‘Exams will happen no matter what’. When I climbed onto a bench to address y11 the next day had to begin with ‘so you remember the question about the exams?’. They were kind enough to laugh.

Trusting in your skills, sir, to make sure the solution this year is fair and good, this break in the cycle could be a great opportunity to improve education. You’d probably welcome my advice. Are you sitting comfortably?

There are many things wrong with GCSE but the biggest is that it’s completely unnecessary. Until 1951 children who stayed at school past 14 got a School Certificate. That was replaced by GCEs in 1951 for those who stayed on until they were 16. The GCE pointed towards ‘matriculation’ or university entry. Indeed, the exam board AQA was, in my time, the Joint Matriculation Board of the northern redbrick universities. OCR was Oxford and Cambridge, Pearson the London Board. The blessed GCSE was born in 1988 of GCE O-levels and the CSE. They were both qualifications for further study or the job market at 16. A-levels remaining unchanged for nearly 70 years were designed to assess whether a tiny minority of young people were university-ready. We scaled them up but didn’t change their purpose.   
May I pose three questions? The first is: why does everyone have to take an exam that is essentially a filter for university entry two years later, for a minority of students? The second is: If no one can leave school until they’re 18 why does everyone have to take an exam at 16? The third is about the forgotten third. What possible justification is there for an examination that a third of students have to fail?    

You’ll be desperate to hear my solutions so here they are. First, we need to rethink what we want for young people and the nation. University is only one pathway and many, many (most?) jobs are better served by apprenticeships or on-the-job learning at 18. Not everything is examinable by examination. If we finally, formally decoupled most of our assessment system from its elitist past we might also put ourselves in a better position to seek the holy grail for English education, proper parity between academic and vocational strands. Second, we’d still need some kind of assessment because we swap a lot of students around at 16. This remains sensible because they’re old enough to make choices about their aims in life. They need a passport to the next stage. That should be a reliable, trustworthy and standardised set of grades with a particular focus on proficiency in English and maths. Third, that passport needs to be fair and to assess endeavour, not advantage. A child who works very hard but achieves proficiency slowly needs a qualification which tells the receiver what she can do, not what she can’t do. 

The current system which officially uses the word ‘fail’ to describe the school careers of a third of children is not only wrong, but wicked. But my solution is rooted in something much, much bigger.

My passport at 16 would be assessed by teachers, the same teachers that taught the children. Why? Because they’re already there, thousands of skilled education assessors. How? Through assessment based on our current expertise, standardised through the National Reference Tests. These are maths and English tests that a selected sample of children take each year – Tallis did them in 2019. Teachers don’t see those tests or find out the results, but they’re designed to estimate the range of abilities present in a national year group. We have the data we need to do something completely different and much better.

It will require a leap of faith from some earthbound factions. Politicians and policy-makers will have to trust teachers. School leaders will have to trust teachers. Parents and students will have to trust teachers. All of them will have to understand that teachers have a particular skill in assessment that only fails when too much weight is put on it. That skill can easily bear the weight of a single child and it can stand firm under scrutiny, but it can’t be used to measure the success of a school. That needs to be done another way, by a properly funded expert inspectorate using serious longitudinal studies into what helps children learn and what doesn’t. 

Teachers will be honest about assessment if school leaders let them, and if we all agree to lay down the petty rivalries that brought our system to its knees. We can hold each other to account using a nifty little tool that’s live in the system already, the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education. That requires school leaders to show selflessness, integrity, optimism, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. It demands that we do it showing trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We could build a better system on a new level of professional trust.

Out of this terrible experience a better world might be born for our children. Future years might not equate education with exams and exams with failure. They might enjoy school a bit more and love learning for its own sake.  We might train and keep more teachers. Keep an eye on this year, Mr Williamson and have the courage to think big. Sure, we’ll still need some exams at 18, but they’re big enough to walk up the stairs on their own then.

Yours ever, CR   

27.3.20    

For the greater good, I stay at arm’s length from social media. Other Heads are all over it, dispensing wisdoms and being useful but, like chip shops, I stay away from temptation. I’m way too fond of a smart remark and a brisk retort to resist putting people right about stuff that’s none of my business. I’d have to spend my life apologising.  Also, my phone is fully occupied with answering emails, reading novels and looking at pictures of my granddaughter so I don’t really have time for other hobbies.

If I did follow the twitts, I’d apparently be in a proper state about OFSTED and the application of their spiffy new framework. After not being interested in it for years, the clipboard brigade are very keen to uncover the intent, implementation and impact of a school’s curriculum and the first reports are piling up now. Schools have prepared, even retooled, to demonstrate their knowledge-rich curricula and their plans for a future liberated from the short-termism and exam fixes which OFSTED used to like under its previous pugilistic proprietor.  Good news.  What could possibly go wrong?

Thirty-odd years ago I used occasionally betake myself to Sheffield to hear a radical Methodist theologian of advanced years. He once said, woundingly, that there was nothing good that the CofE couldn’t get wrong and I sometimes, sorrowfully, feel this about OFSTED. These tweeted early reports have commented not so much on the curriculum, but on whether schools have a 2- or 3- year key stage 3 and what % are doing the EBacc. Hmmm. Key stage length is a school choice and the EBacc is the Department’s political ambition, not OFSTED’s. Righteous indignation enters stage right, to be met by obfuscation from the left. What exactly are OFSTED looking at? On whose behalf? Curriculum, or cheap-to-measure markers? Children’s learning or White Paper lunacy?  

Our own visiting clipboards, you will recall, popped a similar question. Observing that we talked a good game about a broad curriculum entitlement but that we let too many drop arts, DT or languages at the end of year 8, they suggested that we might consider the impact of the 2-year KS3 on our claim of a broad curriculum until year 11.   Fair point, but our lead inspector was a subtle and thoughtful man who took time over his words. Other reports have been rather more direct: change your key stages.

Ofsted are right to be worried about curriculum breadth and integrity and to look at it closely. They are responding to the madness caused by over-simplified high-stakes inspection measures which drove Heads mad and made some narrow the curriculum and dilute knowledge in order to meet performance metrics. Originally, lengthening KS4 to three years was a way of doing this.  Hothouse the GCSEs for longer, get better results. About half of secondary schools did it. 

Undoing it will be troublesome because GCSEs are now much heavier in content and harder in assessment. Doing them in two years rather than three is fine for those who are fully attuned to education and assimilate book-learning easily.  It’ll require wall-to-wall didacticism, and I’m not sure that the research on how children learn values that so highly. Doing them over three years gives a bit of space for unpacking the context of particular learning and for imagination and discovery – and other things that the current captains and the kings particularly don’t like. We’ve been thinking about this here since January. We’re not stupid: if there was a simple answer, we’d have found it.

But is this thoughtful uncertainty a luxury? It’s not as if our GCSE results couldn’t be improved. Shouldn’t we just do as we’re told and follow the instructions of the regulator and the DfE?    

The confusion in the system, from which OFSTED suffer, is deeply rooted. We have a system that bizarrely prizes autonomy above almost everything else. Making the right curriculum decision is a matter therefore for the school, not the state.  Only LA schools are actually still bound by the National Curriculum (wrongly, mistakenly). School curriculum decisions are a matter for schools, except when there’s a political panic. Then the independent regulator – OFSTED – is put to the service of the manifesto promises and the whole structure is revealed, shaky as a weak jelly.

If we knew what schools were for, then we’d make better decisions. If we could agree about what children should learn, then we could have a real, proper, broad National Curriculum that schools could adapt to their circumstances. If we trained and supported Heads properly rather than measuring them cheaply we’d have a system second to none. But that takes time and money, cool longitudinal research and a realisation that twitter-feeding isn’t the same as educational leadership.

We are the advocates for the nation’s young. Ethical leadership demands that we hold trust on their behalf and should use our wisdom, knowledge and insight wisely and kindly.  We should seek to serve justly, courageously and optimistically and continue to argue calmly and in detail for the best curriculum for our schools.

I looked out of the window and couldn’t work out why flags-of-the-nations bunting was being put up inexpertly by some sixth form, helped by every passing advisor. Then I remembered today was our Black History Month festival at lunchtime, the nearly-end of three weeks of activity.  First lunch was sunny and dancy, second lunch wet and huddly, but never mind, we’ve had a lovely time; informative, challenging and interesting. Just like a good curriculum...

A teacher comes to visit and tells me she’s wearing her geek trousers. I think we should all put some on, take a breath and think calmly and professionally - preferably behind closed doors for a while. OFSTED evaluation frameworks usually take a while to bed in and there’s no need to panic. We’re way off getting this right, but the system is thinking better and about the things that matter. As we say in every room here: we know we are learning when we are thinking very hard.      
 
CR 17.10.19                       

Crossing the yard I encounter a group of year 11 boys, usually of the laid-back sort, hopping about in an agitated manner emitting squaws. ‘It’s the bees, Miss’. I can’t see any bees, so I issue a sympathetic tut and counsel them to have a care for easily crushable smaller children. 

These smaller members are more confident now and generally navigating themselves accurately. Just as well, as the only bottleneck I’ve seen this term was caused by a kind year 10 stopping to explain and direct. At lesson change.  On the bridge. He hadn’t done the mental risk assessment: the child could have fended for himself until he got inside a building rather than bringing a third of the school to a standstill.  Still, everyone was patient and it’s the thought that counts. The same small scholar was being towed about by a teacher next I saw him.  Perhaps he’s not good with maps, timetables, diagrams: it takes all sorts.

I met with the new teachers – those just starting out on their careers - and we talked about ethics and the values behind their work. We tried to root the language of ethics in daily experience. Selflessness in helping a child at break or taking a job off a burdened colleague. Integrity in the rock-like consistency of the everyday. Objectivity in marking and assessment and how hard it is, in dealing with facts and not opinions. Accountability in handing over the test scores to your head of department no matter how ropey they are.  Openness in asking for help. Leadership in being a tutor, a role model, always the adult in the room.

And the personal virtues: trust that fairness will prevail. Wisdom in planning for student misunderstandings and knowing what to worry about. Kindness in every interaction. Justice in handling disputes. Service in seeing the task through. Courage in apologising when you’ve made a mistake, or being brave enough to speak out in a meeting, or dealing with angry parents. Optimism after watching an expert at work in the classroom and believing that you’ll get there, believing things will go well even on an overwhelming day.

I’ve devoted years to making sure that that first list – the Principles of Public Life – are better known in schools.  They bind us all and we should use the language as we go about the formation of children in loco parentis. The second list are the personal virtues that make us worthy to be in charge of the nation’s young, that means parents can trust us. What we do is important, but so is how we do it.  Remembering that every day is a true mark of our profession.

Someone sends me a poem he thinks I’ll like for Poetry Day, St Kilda’s Parliament by Douglas Dunn. I do. I’m trying very hard not to think about parliaments at the moment but this moving piece is based on a photograph taken in 1879 by Washington Wilson, fifty years before the islands were abandoned and the people chose to move to the mainland. 

The parliament of the island’s adult males met daily every weekday morning in the village street. Women had their own meeting.  Without rules or a single leader it considered the work to be done that day according to each family's abilities and divided up the resources according to their needs. Everything was done for the common good. Wilson wrote ‘by a majority the order of the day is fixed, and no single individual takes it upon himself to arrange his own business until after they unitedly decide what is best’.

In the picture the men stand in two rows looking at the camera and the poet, in the photographer’s voice, talks of the community’s life on the poor land, and how he imagines they see themselves. The final lines are calming and unnerving all at once.

Outside a parliament, looking at them,
As they, too, must always look at me
Looking through my apparatus at them
Looking. Benevolent, or malign? But who,
At this late stage, could tell, or think it worth it?
For I was there, and am, and I forget.

Perhaps the best we can hope at the end of this particularly agitated and unpleasant phase of our national life, outside a parliament, looking at them, is that we forget and look back with equanimity and wonder if it was worth it. But benevolent or malign? Who will make that judgement?

I’m saddened that the Principles of Public Life haven’t been invoked in parliament this autumn. The standard of national debate would have been improved by them and our community spirit less coarsened. I’m saddened that we are so divided. I’m saddened so many of our leaders are cynical rather than principled, insulated when they should be embedded, reckless where they should be careful, flippant where they should be serious and sloppy where they should be diligent.

I discover that the people of St Kilda had never seen a bee, unlike my jumpy boys. I wish that was the biggest trouble that lay in store for them as they grow up. Most of all, I wish for a recommitment to the common good.
 
CR
4.10.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ethical Leadership Commission now has a Framework set of words, a pathfinder programme which 200 schools have already signed up to, some developing work in teacher and leader training and a new Ethics Committee and open forum at the Chartered College of Teaching. Tallis’s governors are pathfinders. It's slightly terrifying work: there’s a real risk in sticking your dishevelled head above the parapet and saying ‘we should behave as good role models for children’. Everyone’s made mistakes, but the real human skill is reflection and change, in a spirit of humility. I’ve written a book concurrently too, but that’s me ranting, not the measured tones of the great and good commissioners.     
 
Reflecting on our own behaviour doesn’t mean introversion or compliance with injustice. So much school policy in the last 20 years has danced around the elephant of privilege guarding the powerful. Ring-fencing money to support disadvantaged children is good, but it’s an Elastoplast on inequality. Our responsibility as good adults isn’t just as models of good character. Society should be fair and children’s lives not blighted by poverty and struggle. Those who have never needed any funding to give them a leg-up, or who have never known want, or who exist only within a bubble of other privileged people undermine the fair chances of the many by passing power around among themselves. Good people should be outraged abut this.  

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

A year 9 said to me exasperatedly on Wednesday: what exactly are schools for? It nudged me to presume upon your good will to ask a question about some work I’ve been doing. Would you mind?
 
I’ve spent a bit of time this year chairing a national group called the Ethical Leadership Commission. It’s a set of people from all sorts of groupings in education, including Ofsted. We’ve ben thinking about the fundamentals of school leadership, to see if we could help hard pressed folks to see beyond the daily things-to-do, things-to-worry-about and things-to-try-to-forget-about-for-now lists. We wanted school leaders to think about what schools are for and how they should act. Governors, as well as Heads.   
 
This seemed important not just because I like to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s important because the world has changed quickly in education. Now that different people and different organisations run schools, who is keeping an eye on the purpose of schooling, as well as its outcomes? Tallis is a straightforward case, still a community school run by the local authority. Other schools run themselves, are a part of an academy trust or a larger chain, some are church schools, some ‘Free’. I wonder if this confuses taxpaying citizens?
 
Despite differences in the system, we all have a one crucial thing in common: children. Tiny children, large children, noisy children, silent children, children who love school, aren’t so fussed, like big crowds, prefer to be alone, arty, music-y, scienc-y, mathematic-y, sporty, happy, thoughtful, angry and sanguine children. Parents send children to our schools – all sorts of schools – and trust teachers to do a good job with them. Largely we do. Sometimes there are blips.
 
Parents and society therefore trust us to do two things. First, to be diligent and trustworthy public servants.  Second, to model the behaviour of a good society to children: to show them how to be good citizens. Both of those are huge responsibilities. The first is carried out at work: doing a good job with teaching and results, for example. The second is harder to pin down. We teach character and values, but do parents see that in the way our schools run?   
 
The Ethical Leadership Commission has been working on three things. First, agreeing some key language that school leaders and teachers might use to talk about this. Second, to provide some training materials so that we can all think about this responsibility together. Third, to set up a structure so that there is a space to think about ethics and the pressures that sometimes constrain our decision-making. It’s interesting work, as you can imagine.
 
I’d be interested to know what you think of the draft words. The first seven are based very closely on the Seven Principles for Public Life. If you work in the public sector, you may know them.
 
The Framework for Ethical Educational Leadership
Ethical educational leadership is based upon the Seven Principles for Public Life.

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

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

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

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

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

6. Honesty
Leaders should be truthful.

7. Leadership
Leaders should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs. Leaders include both those who are paid to lead schools and those who volunteer to govern them.
 
The second set of words try to explain what we think makes up good leadership.
 
Schools and colleges serve children and young people and help them grow into fulfilled and valued citizens. As role models for the young, how we behave as leaders is as important as what we do. Leaders should show leadership through the following personal characteristics or virtues.
 
a. Trust:
Leaders should be trustworthy and reliable. They hold trust on behalf of children and should be beyond reproach. They are honest about their motivations.

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

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

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

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

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

g. Optimism:
Leaders should be positive and encouraging. Despite difficulties and pressures they are developing excellent education to change the world for the better.
 
None of us is claiming that we are perfect. All of us know that the responsibility is huge.
 
Are these the right principles? What do you think?
 
[email protected]
 
CR
22.6.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My session is on Ethical Leadership, wittily entitled The Real Teacher Standards.  I encourage these dedicated youngish folk to consider the principles that inform their every action. I pose them a few questions. 

​Do you know the Principles for Public Life? What matters to you? Can you recognise malpractice and irregularity? Has anyone tried to make you do something professionally you know to be wrong? On what grounds do you make decisions?
 
We look at the Aristotelean virtues of courage, temperance, greatness of soul, magnificence, friendliness, justice, wit, friendship, generosity, even temper and truthfulness. We think about what kind of role models we are to the young. We consider old Kant who said that our duty to make children's lives bearable is a consequence of the act of procreation. We reflect on justice and I tell them that equal opportunities lip-service just gets you meritocracy, a cabinet full of old Etonians and a list of top 20 universities with shameful numbers of undergraduates educated at state schools. 
 
We move on to the great American jurist Rawls and his Veil of Ignorance : if you knew nothing at all about this child, would this education you offer be right, be just? We consider the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the failure of schools under murderous regimes to protect their young. I suggest (tediously, year after endless year) that we need a code of ethics, like the medical Royal Colleges. After that, good old English case law can do its stuff and build up our understanding and our practice. I make them think about how their teams and their future schools should run on ethical principles. About how to translate all of this into talking to actual teachers about their actual behaviour and practice and making children's lives better.
 
So aren't I Mrs Perfect with all this theory? Never an error, never a duff decision, philosophical purity perpetually oiling the Tallis wheels? One of the exercises in the sessions is to plan a meeting to set out the way a staff team should behave. I'm not talking about inspirational visionary speeches to launch a new role: any old fool can use fine words with people you don't know. I get them to think about what they'll say to people with whom they have some history, where emotion and embarrassment might blister fine words a bit. About trying to make the right decisions in circumstances of unavoidable ambiguity, about marrying fundamental principles and democratic demands, about the pitch and roll of school life. About doing the best you can.
 
Madam can be manipulative and witty, furious and foul, but this week she made a split-second decision that required getting over herself. She came up against someone else’s pain and put herself second. She had faith she'd find help because she trusted her teachers to be unyielding walls of security against which to batter herself in safety. In an optimistic moment, before she drives me barmy again I dream that one day she'll remember that kindness, integrity and learning go hand in hand, and that might help her into the future. It heartens me, when times are out of joint.
 
Unlike the Irritating Pronouncement From An Academy Chain Leader #400 this month. Say it in an outrageous Yorkshire accent: 'You can turn a school round in 7 weeks' [whatever that means]. No you can't. You can make self-satisfyingly macho decisions in 7 weeks, and change some stuff that's egregiously wrong. Building a community on right principles takes years, and it involves, maddeningly, keeping faith with Madam.
 
I finally read Harper Lee on the train last week and her magnificent musing on morality, principle and relationships. Bringing up Madam takes time. Don’t cut corners. Look to your ethics. Go set a watchman.
 
CR 8.2.16