The canteen was busy this morning. A trip going out, and the last English GCSE, so the whole of year 11 were gathered to panic and make resigned huffing noises while being counted and sent upstairs. Simultaneously, four A-levels in the Hall - physics, business, drama and Russian. I’m interested in how the gods of Ofqual organise the timetable to minimise clashes. Do they sit back in their chairs, feet on the table and conjure up possible candidates? Do they ask each other ‘What kind of 18-year old is likely to take physics, drama and Russian? Hmmm.’  I read a lot of spy novels, so it seems a likely combination to me. The gods probably use an algorithm, which is less fun to picture.

In a big school every child is known by lots of adults, but no one is known by everyone. The same goes for adult-to-adult recognition, especially of valued colleagues amongst us temporarily. It makes for a different dynamic to smaller schools, and certainly to primary schools. People know their team: the department or tutors, the senior team and support staff they work alongside or call upon for specialist services. We can go weeks without meeting people outside our usual ambit, I really need staff briefing every week to scan the room and make sure I recognise all the faces. Like absolutely everything else this is difficult at exam time because briefing is squashed into the staffroom, which has an actual wall across the middle, and spills out onto the corridor.

Recognition has come up in discussions about site security of late. Apparently 2% of the population are super-recognisers who can recognise faces fleetingly seen, even in a crowd, years ago. I wonder if teachers are better at it? Perhaps the fact that the average age for a teacher in England is 39, the fifth-youngest in an international study – might help us. And as if you’re interested, Italy and Estonia have the oldest average teacher age, at about 50, Singapore the youngest at 36. The global average is 43: Finns, Czechs and Norwegians. These facts may be useful to you, though I don’t know how.  
             
If we’re serious about schools being microcosms of society, little communities in which children may learn, make mistakes and put them right, then its good if teachers look like the outside world. All ages and  backgrounds and – within reason – all kinds of personalities. It’s important for children to know that there’s not just one kind of person who’s learned, or who’ll care for them, and very important for them to know that all types of folks can be teachers. We need everyone we can get.

There’s an article on BBC News today asking ‘Would a 1.40pm Friday finish stop teachers quitting?’ alongside two stories about how impossible teaching is and another one about a bright young thing who loves it and will be deputy head of English in her second year of teaching. All these stories are depressing. The week doesn’t need changing, the job shouldn’t be impossible and someone in year two might not have the experience and understanding to help lead one of the two big departments  and guide other teachers. However, schools have to appoint the best they have, and when no one comes to interview, good souls in school are promoted early, which leads to a different set of problems and a different kind of burnout. But good for her.

I don’t think I’m a super-recogniser, though I did used to know 450 names by October half term when I was in the classroom, and it was only when age addled me that I had to forget the previous years’ in order to store new ones.
I wish I knew more. I wish I knew the name of the young person commanding an audience in the Block 1 airlock today, lecturing her friends on enzymes. She’d be a good teacher. Another sits and reads quietly. He might be good at it too.

Yesterday I was mildly concerned by whooping outside at first lunch. From my angle, it looked as though small children were hurling themselves against a wall at speed, though the adults seemed entirely unconcerned so I didn’t investigate further. This morning, I spotted a Head of Year with a stepladder, and noted at break that horizontal red lines had appeared on a wall for children to leap at, yelling with laughter as they fly through the air. It’s an alternative to skipping: I’d like to know more of their names.

Perhaps an elegiac tone in this, my last half term, where everything is normal but underpinned by oddness. How to cope? Poetry, obvs. The sad death of John Burnside sent me back this Scotsman who was ‘shamelessly in pursuit of the invisible’. When he wrote, he listened quietly to himself and waited for stillness: ‘the traditions of my reading and of my true kinfolk, the native urges of my blood, the sense I have of being anchored to gravity and light. All those frequencies’.

That’s what I feel about being in a great school: the traditions, kin, gravity and light and the particular frequency that’s the feel of the school, that blows you over when you walk through the door.  
 
So I give you the last verse of ‘The Night Ferry’, which speaks to my condition:

I was 16 in 1977, I said to year 11, which caused some of them to laugh out loud and others to look sceptically at one another, as if I was making it up. I’m not sure shirt-signing had been invented or, if it had, it hadn’t reached north Teesside. Nor had the level of care and entertainment that we think is usual on what is still euphemistically called Leaving Day, which doesn’t mark their leaving and isn’t a whole day.

As the small child who’s been wearing a hat which seems to be made of cloth bananas, the better to protect himself from the scorching heat of May in SE3, may have observed, we did shirt-signing proud this year. In recent years we’ve poured cold water on saucy drawings, salty language and minority mayhem as traditions reasserted themselves after Covid. We rethunked, and prepared. Rather than risking them grasping freedom to roam while they were meant to be in lesson two we ushered them to one end of the concourse to sign to their hearts’ content without disturbing the peace. I stood on the Block 1 outside stairs and surveyed the melee.    

It wasn’t just the adults who’d been thinking. This year, so many pre-signed shirts were sumptuously embellished works of art. I saw sequins, embroidery, paintings of Batman and other mythical creatures, iron-on names and feathers. One group were covered in pink bows. This had all taken preparation, and so traditions develops: no longer the felt pen and shirt scribbled spontaneity but an expression of a kind of identity, something to keep, and through which – one hopes – remember happy times.

I’m moving house soon, somewhere smaller, the ninth move in forty years and I can up-and down-size with the best. My children being in their thirties and the next hutch smaller, a decree has gone out – no family storage. This includes signed shirts from years 6, 11 and 13. One loved school and has loads of room so wants it all, the other, who found school irksome and lives in London so barely has room to arrange a thought, allows me to dispose. But memories persist, for good or ill and both had school friends at their weddings.
​
Subsequent to sunny shirt signing we herded year eleven into the canteen where they sat amiably in tutor groups and were even allowed chat and modified whooping as they went into the hall. After that, a few words from me, some emotional farewells from tutors and year team, a band, thank yous, and – most of all – the hysterical photos of their eleven-year-old selves. Goodbye is at lunchtime and off they go, wreathed in their own graffiti, to dip their toes into the world. Exams, Prom, Leaving Ceremony, long holiday, results, next steps. Then what? The signed shirts go into a drawer or under the bed ready for the day twenty years hence when a parent begs for its removal.
It was my last year 11 leaving day so I thanked them for making me a pleasant memory.

Perhaps it’s the atmospherics of the year that I’ll miss the most: the bustle of September, hassle-y behaviour in the November cold, darkness enveloping the week before Christmas, the leaving day before study leave, the last exam, sports days and summer on the grass, the euphoria at the end of the year. Year after year, every school the same. Every child prepared for adulthood through these local rites of passage.  

I’m thinking as usual about the part schools play in society, to unite or divide, and the comprehensive dream. I’m thinking of conversations with parents about the clash between the needs of the many and the individual. I’m thinking about fake news, gullibility and hatred. I’m thinking about the strain that meagre budgets put on everything we do to excite children, bind up their wounds and fit them for the future. I’m watching the way we make the weather and listening to the music we make together.

Marie Howe’s new poem The Hymn describes an ‘almost inaudible hum’ of humanity in the cosmos, getting louder and louder until humanity breaks into

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times, years begin in September in schools. But I hadn’t told you I was retiring then so you’ll have to bear with me. Starting back for the last time at the start of the year was odd, as was all the Christmassy stuff. But once you’re into January the school year’s nearly half over and now it all seems very real.

January always has an odd feeling. We usually start back suddenly with little fuss after the excitements of the season. This year the jolt of return was mitigated by the shape of the holiday, but its always cold and dark and prone to exams. Tension for some and confusion for others. I was overwhelmed this week this year, on my perch on the block 4 stairs, by the responsibility of getting the children back and settled, being stable and resourceful for them and – more practically - keeping them warm. Which, as I write, we are managing to do.

So – January - I thought to myself – these blogs will run out soon. What shall I write about in the time remaining?  (I pause to allow jubilation among patient readers who now see the light at the end of an eleven-year tunnel and allow themselves cautious pre-rejoicement at liberation to read more useful things from September. Got that out of your system?)

I chartered a course back to my berth at 1511a to write a list, but was temporarily diverted by a football. I’d heard it bouncing indoors contra to local byelaws and despite poor directional hearing pursued it. I read it, if not the Riot Act, certainly the Footballs in Languages Corridors, Prohibitions and Restrictions Thereto Ordinance, and it vanished into the recommended carrier bag. Further distracted by asking the local statisticians if it is true that only 5% of children nationally with under 90% attendance in years 10 and 11 get 5 GCSEs including English and Maths, I embarked on the note to self.

It's twenty-seven weeks until the end of term. Removing four weeks of hols, that’s twenty-three, so maybe a dozen blogs. Currently my list looks like this:

• Vision for the education system and the future
• Vision in schools
• Subjects, content and a broad and balanced curriculum
• Teachers
• Education and social mobility and social justice
• The genus and genius of school governors
• Behaviour and zero tolerance
• Uniform
• Safeguarding and mental health
• Progress, learning, exams and results
• Accountability and inspection
• Funding and government
• Ethics and what kind of people are we
• Comprehensive schools as models for a better world
• SEND
• Competition between schools

Does that cover it?

There was a game in the 90s we used to pass the time on long journeys. I think it started on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on Radio 4. Called ‘One More Ninja’, you had to add it to the front of a title of another film or play or book to general hilarity. One More Ninja On Golden Pond. One More Ninja Barbie (or Oppenheimer). One More Ninja Frozen. How we laughed. Looking at the list above, you could do something similar. Being kind, you could add ‘What the government has done about’ to all of the above. Being exasperated you could have ‘How the government has turned ………….. into [something unrecognisable]’. 

I’m making no promises about sticking to the list, mind. I’ve the attention span of a gnat and can be…Oh did I say? The football then reappeared, alone, outside my door, as if seeking refuge. It's currently resting under the table pending further developments.

Later, I was talking to someone just starting a first headship. They were pretty chipper about it all but seemed obsessively worried about parents. Will parents be angry? obstructive? how should I tackle them? all of which surprised me. It seemed to be expecting trouble where none is necessary. Parents, carers, children are human beings too. Try to treat them how you’d like to be treated.  Its not a guarantee of perfection because we all get cross or crass, but it should at least set the tone.  
        
Speaking of which, there was much left to be desired while some parts to be admired in the Shadow Secretary of State’s speech this week. Talking about that sometimes difficult relationship, Bridget Phillipson spoke of

Fifteen or twenty papers over a matter of weeks? Is this a sensible way to educate eleven-year-olds? Why have we got into such a state?

Third, a YouTube experience that’s an absolute joy. It’s the magnificent Phil Beadle talking to someone I don’t know, about SLANT. SLANT’s a zombie classroom management technique dressed up as good teaching, invented and abandoned in the US, that won’t die here. I’ve written about it before, but to recap, it stands for something like sit up straight, lean forward, ask and answer, nod for understanding and track the speaker. It’s in the news because an academy chain is making a big thing of it and some of their teachers and parents are revolting. Beadle destroyed it in his magnificent 2020 book The Fascist Painting but you can’t help some folks.

At the end of the film, having been laughed at more than once, Beadle departs himself abruptly, advising his interlocutor that he needs to up his intellectual game. He’s a genius and an English teacher so why would you want to film yourself arguing with him? Yet the enthusiasm for this kind of short cuts persist in English schools. Why have we got into such a state?

Allow me to posit some views. First, the government doesn’t really believe that people are actually hungry, and besides, it’s the economy, Tina. There is no alternative so everyone has to wait for things to pick up. This is fine if you’ve just unpacked your Waitrose order but its not so good if you have to live on expensive terrible non-food from the only shop you can get to, or the food bank.  
 
Second, as a result of target-setting and an obsession with cheap measurement we like to test our children. This is sort-of OK, but test-driven teaching only measures how well children have imbibed the test-related materials they’ve been taught. Its not real education, and it doesn’t last. Set a tricky paper, but all means – but don’t give child-level results. Use it to test teaching levels and keep the results at school- or national level to inform detailed, longitudinal school improvement work. Let the children learn widely and excitingly in primary school. 

Third, building on the above, put some effort into behaviour management by making relationships with the children. Don’t interfere with their bodies by telling them how to sit and don’t interfere with their thinking processes by telling them what to look at. Did the school leaders who love this stuff have to learn like this?

Last week we said good luck to year 11 as the GCSEs started. A highlight of the day was a youth who’s photocopied seemingly hundreds of A4 portraits of himself which he handed out to anyone who’d take one. It was a kind-of art installation in itself, a performance. He was encapsulating our mutual loss and his own happy confidence in the future, as all children should.

This stuff is hard to get right and we all make mistakes. We really need to find a new way of living that doesn’t pit flawed crass certainties against each other at the expense of our young. We dislike serious thought in this country but we need some new paradigms. I  hope that, despite the way we conduct schooling, our young people will still be able to change the world for the better.
 
CR
18.5.23

Monday I was talking to a group of arts educators at the Royal Opera House. I told them a few war stories and talked about the need for courage in school leadership, not to be blown about by conformity, government or exam board whims and exigencies, but to be principled and take the long view.

Actually, it was a wonder I spoke at all. While I was waiting to perform I took the radical step of checking my notes, a single page printout of nine slides. Upon reading, I was seized with panic that this was the day when I was finally exposed as having comprehensively lost it. Excellent individual points but joined up randomly, conveying no sense even to me. Struth, what to do? It was a 20-minute ‘provocation’ slot so I could potentially do it slide-less, but incoherent ramblings seemed unnecessarily provoking for an outfit paying Tallis for my services. Taking a last despairing breath I shook myself and looked again, just to discover that the printout was vertical but I’d been reading it horizontally like an idiot. It now made perfect sense. Revival of stout party.

I tell you this as it took me right back to being in exams at school, reading something that I thought I knew but actually didn’t recognise at all. It is absolutely terrifying, and I was filled with admiration for the fortitude of our young people walking calmly into so many exam rooms this last six long weeks rather than screaming in terror and fastening themselves to the banisters, which I very nearly did.

It was a joy, therefore, next morning at Tallis, to chance upon 5 questing chaps who introduced themselves as four astronomers and a Russian speaker in search of exams. I found the room, they thanked me gravely and unflappably and went to face their foe.

Back at the Opera House, I told them about visiting the RA Summer Exhibition last Saturday where himself and I engaged in pointless bickering in the shop afterwards. He concluded with a flourish, declaring ‘your trouble, Carolyn, is that you’re a conformist’. This stung, and despite many witty ripostes in the following week it repeats.

Thursday I found myself gladly introducing and welcoming five visiting academics to the inaugural Tallis Philosophy conference in partnership with the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I said that it was often frustrating to children to discover that what we teach them, especially in exam years, is partial and not the totality of human knowledge on a subject. What about all the other stuff they might be interested in? I found myself saying that schools are essentially conservative institutions and that’s why we need close links with the academy, to keep in touch with what’s new, to keep in touch with professional thinkers.

It's odd to be conservative, liberal and radical at the same time, but that’s what we try to be at Tallis. We fulfil the role of a school (a bit conservative) but we allow a lot of freedoms within that boundary (liberal) and we challenge outdated views as we try to change the world for the better (radical). You need your wits about you to manage all three. Getting your slides in order would be a start.

People are therefore kind enough to give me leadership books from time to time and I’ve been amusing myself by opening a volume on the transferable lessons of commanding a submarine, when I write the staff bulletin every week. This week was about ‘maintaining the tickler’. If you don’t mind me asking, how’s yours?

Returning to the arts, last year someone gave me a beautiful edition of Philip Larkin’s poems. Larkin has been quite in the news, having been excised from exam board OCR’s GCSE Eng Lit specification, so that the assigned poets might be more representative of global writing. The Secretary of State, among others, is furious about this, saying that Larkin was his gateway to poetry and that all children should read him, that to deny him was denying great art to students who might never get it otherwise.  
 
Hmmm. It is the gateway that’s the thing. Teachers always ask themselves: what do we want children to learn and to know? What do we want alongside them as they leave the room? All other arguments notwithstanding, what I want is for children to love poetry and to want to read it, to find within it an expression of their unspoken feelings, fears and worries, hopes and dreams. Therefore, it has to make sense to them at the time. It has to be readable and speak to their condition.

Larkin’s poetry will survive whether or not every sixteen-year-old is forced to read it and, crucially, more of them might seek him out as adults if they’ve been introduced to other poetry that seizes their souls when they’re in school. Teaching poetry at all might be seen as a conservative or radical act by some, but engaging with art in any form should never be about conformity.  We don’t all have to read the same verses, but the verses that open the doors to the child, at that time.  Enabling children to see something of themselves in the curriculum choices we make should help them, to make interesting choices for themselves as adults. We are laying the foundation to build a better world. Or, as the man says, in his first published poem, a different ship:

On the day when ninety-one thousand civil service jobs were declared superfluous and a Russian tank battalion sank in the Sivertsy Donets we had our leavers’ assemblies. Shirt-signing in the yard and a big group photo, then into the hall. Frankly, I’d expected better weather. Some have been wearing sunhats for weeks, entirely unnecessarily. Anyway, the vibe was happy and this year’s fashion included shirts with golden names stuck on the back and some seemingly bespoke for the purpose of signing.

It's not the first time we’ve ever done these assemblies, but the echoes of Covid ring loud and long. While I was listening to the end of Ms taking leave of her year group, I was transported back two years, to a hastily-cobbled-together assembly in March 2020 to say goodbye to year 11 because lockdown was beginning and school was closing, suddenly. I felt quite queasy. 

The day itself isn’t like leavers’ days of old. We don’t do lengthy study leave any more and this one was put in to mark the transition from the ordinary timetable to the exam prep sessions adjacent to the big days. The very do itself today abutted the first external exam just after lunchtime. Timing was key but the gods of Friday 13th will have their fun and we had a total AV and IT collapse at the very assembly when slideshows and photomontages with emotional soundtracks are de rigeur. Doughty Ms and her team had to busk while technicians of all kinds clustered around and eventually a trolley, like a mobile ICU, was rushed in. The careful dovetailing - getting Year 11 out so Year 13 can get in – all went to pot. I intervened and moved the boundaries. Everyone was supportive. Children of all ages and sizes had a lovely time. See you on Monday, exams are upon us.

Today, their tutors praised them and reminisced publicly. Some sang, some rapped, all gave awards – for character, and Goats. Goats were new to me as I don’t mix with sporting types, but it pleases me as an acronym and it worked for the tutors. Greatest Of All Time at….arguing, football, falling off chairs, organising, saying hello to everyone, looking after new people, keeping the peace, being tannoyed for, speaking the truth without fear or favour, looking good…. while Sir and Ms blinked back the tears.

These young people have had such a rocky time. We were interviewed by the BBC for a piece to go out on Monday about the return of exams, so I had seven in the Sports Hall yesterday pretending to sit at exam desks (‘Quick! No! Get tidier ones out!’). They all spoke urbanely and calmly about their preparation and how they’re feeling. Ready, but anxious. Who knew? The Beeb may have wanted something more hysterical, but we’re too cool for that. As the soundtrack to one of the slideshows today said:

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

Last month I was baggy at the seams to but this month, to use a trade term, it's all a bit raggy. What means this, you cry? Like a Rag Week? Clever teasing all over the place from Block 6 to the MUGA? Sadly, no. Just a feeling that things could be tighter, could be tidier, could be more neatly tied up.

I don’t usually fess up to such given that my reader is likely to be a parent so I avoid horse-frightening. However, desperate times and so on. Here’s what we’re dealing with.

The blindingly obvious and unbelievably tedious Covid experience is largely of absence now, rather than illness, and folks having to be off for the regulation 5 days knocks a hole in teaching. Teaching is the heart and root of our endeavour so once that starts to wobble, unhelpful waves are set up (I’m no physicist, I’ve said it before). It was worse, before Christmas, but last week we had eight supply teachers in as well as using every spare ounce of in-house capacity. That’s a lot of children without their familiar adult in front of them, a lot of learning from textbooks. It’s a lot of classroom doors without anyone scanning the corridors and a lot of teachers’ desks in disarray. It’s a lot of seating plans being not quite enforced and a lot of independent learning not being set in the usual way. I’m not saying things have fallen apart, I’m saying that there is more room for the unexpected.

Adventurous souls may love this, encountering the mystery in daily life and so on. We pride ourselves on our creativity and inquisitiveness, our exploration and openness at Tallis, but adolescents need and really value security and structures. They don’t tell you this, of course, because they’re programmed to be risk-takers and to kick against restrictions while they find their feet in the world. It just so happens that the conditions for safe curiosity and happy investigation are optimum when the enfolding arms of the school are absolutely reliable and almost tiresomely predictable. And punctuated by frequent reminders and helpful hassling by tutors and assemblies. I cannot overstate the importance of this undersung aspect of the English school system. I’ve written about tutors before, the family unit of any school, especially important in a big one. We try to double-staff tutor groups to safeguard daily continuity but there are limits. No one is staffed for a pandemic. Without every tutor being in place, messages don’t carry. Troubles are missed. Children bottle things up and then unbottle themselves unusually.

Piling Pelion upon Ossa, we’ve lost assemblies. Yes, we have them online and Heads of Year deliver their brisk and uplifting messages through cameras showing children in tutor rooms sitting neatly and listening quietly, but it’s just not the same. You can’t eyeball a fidgeter through a camera. You can’t calm 270 people into silence and quietly move them to a spotlit room where a communal experience reinforces the ethos and mores of the institution. You can’t laugh with them, and you certainly can’t give them a good old-fashioned piece of your mind when daily routines show signs of wear and tear. Schools miss assemblies when we can’t have them: that’s why we go through all sorts of shoe removal malarkey to do them in PE spaces in exam season, but for two years we’ve hardly been able to have them at all. Three year groups are frankly unfamiliar with the whole concept and the older ones have forgotten. That means that children don’t see the school in session formally, don’t experience the obvious manifestation of the secure boundaries, don’t understand themselves as a valued participant in a community endeavour. They’re left to make sense of their immediate, personal, experience which is harder to interpret when the faces at the front are unfamiliar, even a bit confused themselves, perhaps.

I took part in a survey this week. The new Secretary of State seems keen on finding stuff out, which is a welcome change from his predecessor who didn’t give two hoots. One of the (admittedly fatuous) questions was about the impact of the call for ex- or retired teachers to rally to the colours with their board markers akimbo. What? There has been absolutely no impact. Has anyone seen one, anywhere?*

It wouldn’t have made any difference, except in basic supervision. The thing we’re really up against in secondary can’t be helped by strangers, supply teachers or Sally Slapcabbage. The second problem is, already weighted down by absence. We’re drowning in exams. It's good that the specification reductions have been declared by the exam boards and reasonable that it was done at this point so that most children might have been taught most of the courses. It's unavoidable that people are irritated by the timing or the contents - we live on our wits and we argue with the furniture if there isn’t anyone else around. It’s just that the contingency arrangements for no-exams have to run alongside the arrangements for having exams. That means that we have to have three formally assessed piece of work ready in school, just in case, as well as finishing the courses and getting children who have never taken formal exams ready to do it. In a school with a big sixth form, that’s wall-to-wall examining since early December meaning more lesson disruption followed by endless, endless marking as well as preparation for teaching and now, reorganising schemes of learning to reflect the reduced content. No wonder everyone’s a bit twitchy.

But the mopping up of quotidian flotsam caused by staff absence has to take precedence, so time is concentrated even further and everyone gets a bit more frantic. You can’t lock yourself away to mark or plan if the exam class next door hasn’t got a specialist teacher or the little ones look as though they might behave foolishly. I’m not complaining, just explaining. I wonder, had the PM given any thought to lifting the contingency requirements when he was boldly announcing that we’d be free of all restrictions by the end of Feb so that he didn’t have to apologise to the former DPP? What? Hadn’t thought it through? Really? Hasn’t he got advisors? Oh wait….
 
CR
10.2.22
 
*SEND Green Paper, Mr Zahawi?       

One of our doors has been out of action for a few weeks. It’s the door I rely on to be able to poke my nose into everyone’s business in block 3, so it is irritating. The situation has its advantages, mind. I can watch colleagues breezing along the bridge only to find yellow tape in the way and enjoy the wild and furious gesturing that follows as they appeal to the high heavens to be spared another irritation. This bridge is really just an exposed corridor and people often behave on it as if they were invisible: dancing, drooping, scuttling about with kit that they’ve borrowed or liberated from another department as well as flinging their arms about. 

I was making myself a pot of coffee (two scoops) when I noted a largish youth had breached the barrier and was using a roadblock bollard to try to hitch a stranded football out of the veranda gutter. I needed to remonstrate, but the locked soundproof door blighted the experience. As I mouthed ‘What are you doing, stop, depart’ and so on, he may have replied ‘only being useful, rescued two footballs already, no one else does it, what’s a boy to do?’ Or something else. Unable to get to him, I made a shooing gesture and he shooed.

Later that day I was in a zoom about the future of assessment, this being much on schools’ minds. We were discussing the utility of exams and their usefulness in encouraging people to think on their feet, against the clock, satisfactorily answering unexpected or devious questions. An interlocutor suggested that maybe only doctors or police sergeants needed this particular skill but I was having none of it. Everyone should have the pleasure of being able to dredge and reclaim a nugget of learning and apply it to an unexpected problem. Parents do it every day. 
The problem is, of course, that that’s all we value now. Children’s 11-year education experience is validated by GCSE exams – or not, if exams don’t uncover your skills. Exams unlock the only door to the next stage of life. If you can’t open it, you’re trapped.  Exams are really useful for competitive entry where places are short – onto some university courses, for example. They’re not a universal key. We’ve made them such because of it is an easy and cheap way of measuring education and, tragically, of measuring children.

Schools should prepare young people to be good citizens in later life. They need a range of experiences at school to help them feel common cause with their peers and they need to be equipped with the knowledge and skills that will help. We can’t afford to close the door on some young people because we can’t afford to find out what they know, what they can do for the common good as they grow. 

May I make a diversion to Hartlepool, a windy spot on the north-east coast where I served some years? Many years ago the good burghers there elected a man dressed up as a monkey as Mayor. This is all to do with an incident during the Napoleonic Wars which you can look up somewhere if you’re so inclined and the chap in question – Stuart Drummond – did have a reason for the monkey outfit: he was Hartlepool FC’s mascot. At the same time, Peter Mandelson was MP, quite a contrast. The people of Hartlepool have been voting again this week. 
Stuart was an old boy of the school which turned into the school where I was Head. He was a lovely man; thoughtful, humble and determined to do his best. He didn’t expect to get the gig but when he did he took off the monkey suit and set about being a figurehead for an exceptionally deprived town. Despite the shock he behaved in an entirely principled and proper manner through three terms as Mayor, a model politician in many ways.  He didn’t bolt for the door, nor did he lock it behind him. 

Doors open and close to admit and exclude. As Herbert and I discovered this week, shouting through a locked door gets you nowhere. Ours was locked until it’s safe to use again, but some doors are locked to keep people out and some doors only open to allow people to escape their responsibilities. We’d all be better off with two-way opening doors, like ours at school are meant to be – in both senses.  

Today’s title is from a Louis MacNeice poem which caught my thoughts years ago

            I will build myself a copper tower
With four doors out and no way in
But mine the glory, mine the power.   

Whether he meant it like this or not, for me, the poem conjures an image of powerful people insulated from the lives of others, serving themselves, keeping people out while still protecting an escape route for themselves. It’s a depressing thought in an election season.

I hope that voters everywhere get politicians who’ll open doors wide enough to admit all of our citizens, present and future. I hope that folks who didn’t expect to win will be as good as Stuart Drummond. Most of all, I hope that they will prioritise education, schools, fairness and children.

Mr Williamson’s talking about phones again. Really, really, that’s not the most pressing issue in any school at the moment. My door’s open if you’d like to know what is.
 
CR
7.5.21

Mr Williamson, please listen to me.

I’ve been worried about your health for a year now and dear me, you’ve had a bad week. Allow me to help your reflections.

Let me deal with the elephant not so much in the room as in your face yesterday, Mr P Morgan of the telly. I wasn’t allowed to watch ITV as a child and old habits die hard, and the man represents the kind of newspapers I don’t allow in the house. Having properly established myself as a snob of the worst kind, I might add that Morgan, P. supported and sympathetically interviewed the former President of the USA several times, only at the very end referring to him in terms both appropriate and unrepeatable. Being interviewed by such a one must be an unpleasant experience. Shudder.

But what were you thinking? You can’t be oblivious to the furore surrounding your continuing as top dog at Sanctuary Buildings. You must know that there is general assent to the proposition that a dishwasher or astute turnip would be a better Secretary of State. You must have expected the question? You surely had an answer prepared?  ‘No, the PM has not asked for my resignation and loves me with all his generous heart’ or ‘Yes, the PM has asked for my resignation but I’ve barricaded Great Smith Street at both ends’ or ‘Yes, I’m keen to resign as soon as a I can find a pen’ or ‘No, as the Kingpin in a palace coup I expect to be PM by Candlemas and you’ll be first against the wall’. Surely any of the above would have been better than obliviously droning about what’s been allegedly achieved. At the very least, you could have said ‘I’ve been precious little use to child nor beast so far but look at the size of my consultation document’.

Piers Morgan, sadly, may not have read it. Had he done so he might have scoffed at the 64 questions. He might even have raised a sclerotic eyebrow at the sentence (p9) ‘That would put [teachers] in an impossible position, as they would be required to imagine a situation that had not happened’. If either of you had ever taught year 9 on a wet Wednesday in November you’d know that imagining things that hadn’t happened is a pre-requisite for good behaviour management.

He might even have suspected that you were about to implode after a sudden change of mindset to one which includes trusting teachers’ judgments. Upon which matter, do you take us for fools? 

‘Centre Assessed Grades’ worked pretty well eventually last year. It gave the correct impression that there was a standard centrally-directed process which schools followed. ‘Teacher Assessed Grades’ knowingly shifts the emphasis. It's reasonable to assume that you hope that all the doodah that descended on you last year when you ploughed on with an algorithm you’d been told wouldn’t work might this year be spread upon the teachers of the nation. 

Why do I think this? Because I’m ancient and recognise treachery when it bares its teeth at me. It is quite a theme of the document. Let’s look at the proposal for mini-exams. First, it is optimistic to assert that all young people are disappointed by not being able to take exams. Some of them will but many of them won’t. Me, I’d have loved not having to take exams.  Second, the proposal of exam-board-issued tests which teachers mark, have standardised by the board and include in the final grade by early July is boggling. Children in different places have missed different amounts of work taught in different orders, so how many papers will be available? How many exam board moderators are there? Are Ofsted inspectors going to be repurposed? What are you thinking?

Ah, but the penny drops, Mr Williamson, again and again. Here’s a fact not in the document: exam boards are not only going to charge for whatever they do this year but they’re going to put their prices up while reducing their service as we mark the things ourselves. For the big businesses that, shockingly, run our formerly independent examination system this is a scheme to print money. Reduce output and accountability while increasing profit. Kerching and thank you, Secretary of State.

However, some Headteachers whom I respect are convinced that exams are the only fair way to judge children, and that teacher assessment does a disservice to disadvantaged children because teachers are prejudiced in some way against them. I think they are wrong. Disadvantaged children are disadvantaged by poverty. If they had space to work at home, parents with secure jobs, good food on the table and a realistic hope of modest security in adult life they would do better.  It is fallacious to assert that exams can mitigate disadvantage. This, too, is not teachers’ fault. 

Mr Williamson, I was myself grilled on both sides at quite a temperature this week. I do try to sympathise.  Although, on reflection, perhaps I could spend my time better.

It's nearly Burns’ Night and I do love auld Rabbie. I’ve procured haggis and tartan napkins, other ingredients being part of daily rations chez Roberts. One of Burns’s biographers observed that he appeared to live his rackety life in the confident expectation of posterity’s attention. You could learn from that. You could certainly learn that the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley and perhaps decide to lay them in collaboration with people who know the terrain.      

I think you should think hard before appearing on any more telly.  Actually, I just think you should think hard. As Burns remarks

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
Yours, at the end of my tether,

CR
22.1.21
 
PS A correspondent has asked me to make good on my promise to comment on the National Tutoring Programme.  Next week, dear readers.

How are you?

Fine, thank you. What difference would it make if I wasn’t?

May I call you Caroline?

No.

How many children do you have in school?

Usually over 2000. Between 30 and 60 since Monday.

Weren’t you annoyed at the sudden closure? How could you get ready for remote learning overnight?

All schools had to be ready for lockdown from September. It’s been a long night.

What about the exams?

That’s a vg q. The PM cancelled the exams on Monday and Mr Williamson says they’ll be replaced with teacher-based assessments.

How do you feel about that?

Fine and dandy. It’s the only remotely fair possible solution. As a teacher it's good to see someone learning from their mistakes and trying to improve.

Won’t teachers inflate the grades so that they’re meaningless and no one has a proper qualification and the world ends?

No, calm down. As long as results are used wisely everyone will play their part honestly. Since you’ve asked, might I rant on about this for a bit?

The ring is yours. Knock yourself out.

Thank you. Problem A is how to grade the children. They’re not less clever than children in previous years, they just know less stuff.  Problem B is that our exam-based system uses memory as a proxy for intellect so we struggle to decouple exams from learning. Problem C is that this particular exam-based system rations grades so you can only get a grade 5 if someone else doesn’t. Problem D is that you’re much more likely to get a grade 5 if you’ve been really well taught and you’ve done all the homework, which depends on your school and home life. Problem E is that there is a teacher shortage and the schools serving the poorest have trouble recruiting teachers. Problem F is that if you are poor, you’re less likely to have the space to do the homework or parents with the time to help you or a good laptop and connection for the online stuff, so you might get a worse grade because you haven’t been able to keep up. Problem G is that government describes a third of grades as a fail. So, you might be trying really hard against the odds and end up with a fail.  

That’s why schools have to stay open! It’s all fair then!

Had I finished?

Sorry, carry on.

None of this is new. The achievement gap between poor children and richer children is hard-wired into our system.  The current GCSE model makes it worse. We’ve been campaigning about this for years, but the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said that proved that Heads were enemies of promise with the soft bigotry of low expectations, also enslaved to The Blob.

Harsh?

Shameful.

Hopeless?

Mr Gove? I’ve seen worse. The exam system? Hmmm. We need a different way of assessing learning. We could start by agreeing that exams are a measure, not the purpose, of education. Might we do that this year, as part of all this, d’you think?

Search me. Ahem. What about the Beetex?

They’re more flexible. The school or college can decide on the configuration of exams and coursework for each candidate, within reason, although since 2016 there are more exams in it. We don’t really understand why. 

Really?

No, sorry, that was a lie. We absolutely understand why. It’s because there’s a doctrinaire elitist view afoot at Sanctuary Buildings that all learning has to be validated by exams which a portion of the cohort have to fail, or else they look too easy.  Are you sure there isn’t another question you should ask about this?

Curses, you rumbled me. What are Beetex?

Well done, I thought you were struggling. It’s always best to ask when you don’t understand. First, snappier pronunciation please – Be-tek. No bees. Second, BTECs are the qualifications organised by the Business and Technology Education Council. They run alongside GCSEs and A levels, you can mix ‘em up, and they’re based on the world of work. They’re modular, and you can resit bits of them. They’re useful qualifications and most universities like them.

Why don’t I know this?

Same way that the PM and Mr Williamson didn’t appear to know or care that they existed. Because of our ridiculous system that prioritises academic qualifications over anything with a vocational slant.  Your editor probably thinks they fall into the category of ‘courses for other peoples’ children’ but then he may be a fool.     
I’m not allowed to think like that, but thanks. May I move on?

Knock yourself out.

Shall we have mock exams?

Yes. We need to find out how the children are doing so we know what to remedy.

Isn’t that too stressful?

Not for most. We can make arrangements for others.

Are you Covid-testing at school? Who?

Yes, we’re all ready. Tables, screens, swabs, people, the lot. Staff, at the moment. Children who are in school next.  The Local Authority is helping us.

What about the children who’ll be really frightened by this?

What do you take us for? 

What do you think of the PM?

I’ve seen better.

How stressed are you?

Not very. I’m pretty old.

How annoyed with the government are you?

On a scale of 1-10? 400.  

Can I ring you up?

Happy to oblige. Ask me about the National Tutoring Programme.
 
CR
6.1.21 

Dear Mr Williamson,
​
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    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changeable as the May weather, we waltz towards the exam room with year 11. Some are ready, some resentful, some panicky, all a bit nervous. Some show welcome signs of maturity, others not yet. Some do foolish things, but on Tuesday night we were treated to a wonderful evening of dance, and on Wednesday night, at Bromley FC and in a new strip, our boys WON! The final of the London U16 cup. Both evenings were characterise by elegance, patience, enthusiasm, dedication, collaboration and skill.

I didn’t play footy or dance at school but I did act and speak and I remember very clearly the excitement of participating and cooperating and the uncertainty of the unique performance on the night, of triumphing over the unknown. It’s completely different to the classroom experience.
 
A person who qualified in the same decade as me came calling and we reminisced. She said, rather tentatively, ‘you know, I don’t think it was all bad, in the old days’. Of course it wasn’t. Her comment transported me to a meeting room next to a canal in Sheffield four years ago where a Young Thing gave a group of us to understand that the past was such rubbish that it effectively needed to be erased from the history of education.

I had a few words in response. It wasn’t perfect, but then we’re not perfect now. Children went to school, teachers worked hard, stuff got learned, art was made, cups were won and exams were taken. What is this trope that schools are uniquely culpable for being the product of their times? Do we blame the Army for not having the right boots in the Falklands, and insist they’re sorry about it all the time? Do we say to the NHS ‘why did so many people die in the 90s, what were you thinking of?’ Not so much. So why do it to schools? Times change, things improve or get worse, we reflect the society in which we are situated, for good and ill. 

Oh, and we talked about chalk. There are fewer of us who remember that quintessential teaching skill and the challenge of looking after a beautiful diagram you’d drawn and coloured nicely (I was talking to a geographer). I told her about the old soul I worked with who hoovered up the school’s chalk stocks when the whiteboards first arrived, hoarding it against an upturn in the market. He may have been a mathematician but the gamble didn’t work and when he retired he was offered the chalk to take home. One of our own Young Things was in this conversation with us. She’d had a terrifying and entirely unexpected encounter with chalk in rural Yorkshire, this decade. Taught her a thing or two about thinking on her feet.

Which is what the young people in the exams have already started learning quickly. The language speaking tests are situated near me so I can see them sitting mouthing the phrases, going over everything they’ve learned and worrying about facing the unexpected. The value of examinations is arguable but one of the useful things they promote is the development of confident and lucid responses in uncertain circumstances. There’s value in that experience which our obsessive high-stakes culture has dissipated. 

Life is both untidy and unpredictable so schools have to prepare young people for that too. Learning to face things when you’re not ready is also a life skill. Even the young people who struggle against the exam hall tractor-beam know that. 

Mind, some embrace uncertainty early. I was emerging from a difficult conversation when two small boys accosted me politely. In a conspiratorial whisper, one with sticky-up hair asked ‘have you got the rugby ball?’ This I could answer definitively. ‘No.’ ‘Someone’s taken it off us’ ‘Who?’ ‘We don’t know’ they chorused. We looked at each other for a moment then parted company, none the wiser on either side. I await developments.

A larger boy stopped me abruptly, silently, later on the bridge. I laid some groundwork for the exchange. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m good’ (not strictly true). He investigated my habits. ‘Have you seen Endgame?’ ‘No, is it good?’ ‘I can’t tell you, it’ll spoil it’. Once again, none the wiser. He has some distance to travel before work as a film critic puts food on his table, I fear.

And a man from Australia who joined the school in 1971 wrote to us. He wants to contact his English teacher. With the benefit of many years, he recognised those whose creativity and relationships formed him and made him.  That’s what he remembered, and that’s what we try to do in every age. Knowing things and getting qualifications are important. Knowing that life takes unexpected turns is also important. Learning it in a positive community is priceless. 
 
CR
2.5.19   

It's year 11 picking-over-the-mocks time. Teachers have a strange relationship to mocks.  They set hard papers because that’s the point of a mock, to show the children what they’re up against. Then they worry that it will upset them or depress them, then they worry that it’s not really a good indicator of what happens in the next few months. For the number crunchers upstairs, results are one thing, but predictions are another.  We work on what we’ve got.

For some year 11s, however, mock results bring an outbreak of self-justification, soul-searching and sudden insights. They tell you how little or how much work they did for the mocks, the blinding flash of light it has shone on the last four-and-a-half years and exactly how different a person they are going to be hereon in. ‘Of course the thing about the mocks……’ they begin, having taken them once and never again, and as if their teachers could do with some contextual advice.

That’s fine. We learn from experience and mistakes and it is the crowning glory of adolescence to see everything newly minted and focused on the self. January is a good time for self-examination: I used to do that, but now I do this. I used to play on my phone but now I watch GCSE pod. I used to eat chips but now I’m all veg. I used to answer back but now I grit my teeth. As one said to me yesterday, demonstrating the teeth work and the sound effect. I reserve judgement on whether the recipient will find that any less annoying. 
 
Adults too. Those who arrived in September have now got the hang of the place and are starting to offer analyses and suggestions. Old lags watch the year turn once again. Otherwise undemonstrative folks are thrilled by November GCSE resit maths and English results: a perfect example of a mistake made in the past put right at second try, for many. New starters are both perky and chipper, and you can’t ask for more than that. Some make helpful suggestions about the car park, for which I am, of course, grateful. It is our Schleswig-Holstein question.  All are bemused by the plumbing problems which best us.

There was a nice piece about Tallis in Schools Week last week. SW is an influential on-line newspaper and they came to look at how we’ve reduced exclusions, in the national context of exclusions rising again. Excludable behaviour is obviously part of the mistake-making of adolescence and, by trial and error, we think we’ve found a better way.

One of the methods we use is restorative meetings. Combatants of all sorts have to meet together to resolve differences and agree a way forward, or just make a proper, personal apology. Ms in charge says ‘twenty minutes’ awkwardness is worth it for a year without awkwardness’. It is the human way.

I had another thought about the human experience on Monday. I set off late to assembly so dived into the viewing gallery at the back, watching proceedings from a bit higher than the back row of the seats. This made for a very different assembly from the ones I usually see from front or side. From there, I get 300 faces and the performer in the stage lights: all very real, and close. From the gallery it’s more like being at the pictures. The back row is a long way from the action and when the Head of Year, Deputy Heads and whoever else has fine words to impart doesn’t stand in the stage lights, you can barely see them. You can see a lot of backs of heads, but those aren’t nearly as friendly as the fronts.  I’m thinking about what this means for our messaging, while threatening assembly-givers with a gaffer-tape cross to stand on.

I’m thinking because distance makes for glibness and detachment. Mock exams are years, then months away. That’s like another lifetime to a young person whose revision can start sometime after the next ice age. Maturity is signalled by the sudden realisation that you can SEE May from here and the weeks need a bit of attention. If you’re at the back of assembly, does it make a difference to how much a part of the community you feel?

Which brings me to the inevitable. No, not Ofsted, still no report. Brexit. One of the million problems with Brexit is that it has been approached rather like mock exams. It was once all in the future, so there was plenty time for posturing.  Now it’s here, and the revision hasn’t been done, and everyone’s flailing about blaming everyone else and some won’t meet with others. Meanwhile, the world turns and the year moves on. The people get poorer, the public services are neglected and we’re stepping over the homeless in the streets while young people murder one another. And those who caused the mess are so far from the people that they might as well be actors on a distant stage. It’s all very well saying ‘We’ll still be breathing if there isn’t a deal’ but that’s a pretty low bar to set. The good life requires more.
​
Enough with the self-justification. We need the soul-searching and restorative action, now.
 
CR 17.1.19

​There’s a wonderful moment on a sunny June afternoon at about quarter past two. Lunchtimes are over, exams are settled and everyone is posted into their allotted slot. Overheard on the way up to an exam, four boys not previously noted for devotion to study ‘We’re doing all these exams but this place is full of little kids just running about in the sun. They don’t know our stresses, man.’ Anyway, teachers are teaching, students are learning, people are meeting, children are thinking, candidates are writing, technical staff are pottering about and pigeons are doing their pigeon thing.
 
My thing is Radio 4 so it was fun to open the day with a visit from a journalist from The Westminster Hour. He was interested in the way we’ve responded to the London knife crime issue and was recording a piece on our wanding of tutor groups after assembly to check for weapons. As parents know, we decided this was the better way of doing it. Rather than having a big set-piece with knife arches and lots of police outside school we have Mr Brown and Mr Sheedy with a wand each giving a randomly selected tutor group the once over, one at a time. He talked to some of the children and then to the three of us. It was intended to take 15 minutes, but he was with us for another hour once we got started.

We talked, as ever, about safety and keeping everyone calm and happy. We talked about security and the different ways we find out Stuff We Need to Know. We talked about the kind of public spending cuts that means that youth work is disappearing and the Police struggle to respond. We talked about the effect of highly academic curricula on students who need another route into lifelong learning. We talked about the pressures on schools and the cost of student support services and the other things that parents now expect us to do that we don’t get any money for. We talked about schools as model communities and our responsibilities to demonstrate the actions and calm responses of a good citizen.

We also talked about old fashioned teachering. The way that schools build up good relationships with students and families so that everything is do-able and nothing ends up as a big fuss or a stand-off between the fearful and anxious on both sides. He’d seen 300 students walk quietly into the Dojo, half of them with their shoes in their hands and sit listening to a range of announcements followed by a poem. He’d seen us chatting to the chosen form group about the wanding and the sensible discussion we had.

If he’d been in earlier in the week he’d also have seen Sir and Sir so absorbed in the experience that they then set off purposefully through school in just their socks. A third Sir suggested to them that they’d need shoes at some point in the day. Especially as they were wearing four different socks between them.

Cogitating on the days, I’m brooding not so much on all of the above, but another conversation with a visitor. She was with us from A Notable Teacher Training Organisation and had some questions for me. She was bright, keen, open and honest, excited and apprehensive about what she’s taking on. Good for her. But the questions annoyed me and we had to laugh about that: it wasn’t her fault.

For a start, teacher training is teacher training. It’s a worthy and honourable undertaking: why does it have to be called ‘leadership development?’ Doesn’t that undervalue the older folks who’ve been at it for a bit, learned the craft skills and are now actually doing leadership development, rather than the most difficult initial learning of all, how to survive the classroom?

Another question was ‘What are the barriers to raising aspiration’ which almost begs the answer‘My own mediocre leadership and determination to do a bad job’. Yes, we can all do better, but aspiration is a social issue. Poor children, unhappy children, stressed and sad children, hungry children and those whose parents have to work zero-contract, gig-economy jobs to make ends meet and can’t spend any time supporting their school work may find that aspiration comes second to surviving. Poverty and a massive teacher shortage don’t help. Can I reiterate that: a massive teacher shortage? 

Combined with no youth workers and fewer police, what picture does that paint of the way we care for our young in this so-called advanced society? Why are serious, aspirant young professionals being sent out with loaded questions before their bewilderingly quick training? They need an understanding of detailed, thoughtful, long-term solutions, not blame-laden soundbites.
 
I’m a third generation teacher and I’ve been at it for a bit. I’ve seen things change and develop. None of us in the past set out to do a bad job. It’s not just the bright and shiny new intake who’ll want to change children’s lives, it’s all of us. And it has to be government too.  

That’s an old-fashioned teacherly view. It doesn’t mean we’re wrong.   
 
CR 6.6.18

A practical lesson today as I thought you’d like to know what we do at GCSE time. We teach them, obviously, for years on end and practice exams, you know all that. We nag away at them and warn them about deadlines and tell them how to revise. But how is it actually done, in the Sports Hall, on the day, child v examiner?

A big school has a well-staffed Exams Office so they do the legwork with the boards: Pearson, AQA and OCR.  They’re huge businesses. We spend towards £200k a year on exams alone. If you were starting from scratch, is that how you’d do it? Private companies, who also write the textbooks? Isn’t examining compulsory education part of the state’s responsibilities so shouldn’t exams come down with the rations? If they did, would it be more flexible? Could we make educational choices that weren’t affected by business interests and competition? Do we actually need GCSEs now that everyone stays on? 
    
Sorry, anyway, exam boards have rules and we comply with all of them. The Exams team has an army of hourly-paid invigilators trained up and ready to be set loose in the exam rooms. Teachers used to do this, but workforce reforms of the early 2000s decided it wasn’t a very good use of their time. (Despite many of us fearing that unfamiliar faces would lead to mayhem in exam rooms, it didn’t. Mind, it’s an extra unfunded expense.)
​
Timetables are devised once we have national timings and rooms allocated. We have a lot of children who need extra time or special provision. Some need scribes to write down what they know, some need readers and writers.  Some need amanuenses to help them or nudge them to complete. The basic extra-time children are in the main exam hall with the others: the special provisions are spread out around the school.  We’re very full with a high room-use ratio so every room used for an exam displaces a class. Is Spanish in English? is an entirely sensible question in May. 
  
Every exam room needs equipping. The desks so far apart, wall displays covered or removed, exam warning notices put up, corridors outside festooned with QUIET PLEASE, shushers activated.

Immediately before the exam candidates gather in the dining room for counting, sorting, and calming. The subject leader reminds them of the dastardly tricks examiners play, and which questions they should answer. Odd but important - we don’t want a child to take a sudden notion to answer on Buddhism instead of Christianity, or Richard the Third instead of Romeo and Juliet. This morning Madam French said remember the van and while I was in a retro Citroen bucketing around the Peripherique in my head, the youth were nodding sagely and thinking verb, adjective, noun agreements.

We walk them up the stairs in silence and they dispose of phones, bags, watches, waterbottle labels, opaque pencil cases. There’s a photo on each, and berth-finding takes a while. We allow time for the checking of pens, calculators or not, extraneous items on the floor, right papers in the right places. Head of Year is despatched to find latecomers (30 minutes or no exam). Finally, final instructions: don’t sniff, don’t gaze about, don’t ask to go to the toilet, Good Luck and the big number for the finish goes on the board.

Even exam time passes, the standard-time finishers tiptoe out and all flop about a bit on the yard before going to class, a revision session or home. Phew. 
   
Teachers aren’t allowed in exam rooms anymore, so often the first they hear of what was on the paper is when children debrief each other. This can cause palpitations. Is it worse to hear that the paper was easy or hard? Is it helpful to spot a child banging his forehead with a cry of energy, not glucose, aargh?

Last week’s Guardian had a piece about GCSEs and the effect of the exams on the young. It included all sorts of worrying things about stress and the physical effects of exam terror. It cited schools where character education is all about resilience so that children cope with harder, linear exams, and I don’t like the sound of that at all. It talked about the pressures schools pile on and how ticking countdown clocks turn stout young souls to jelly.

I can be smug and say that we try not to be too, well, extra about it. We don’t have pictures up of children who do the best and we don’t spread terror stories about what happens if you don’t get a 4. Life doesn’t actually end at 16 and some of that stuff is just disrespectful to people who aren’t doctors or high court judges, which is most of us.
It’s a really hard circle to square. Post-16 life requires results so GCSEs are a gateway, for good or ill. Has the pressure got worse? Undoubtedly. Does it cause mental illness? Yes. Can we do anything about it?  I’m not sure, if we insist, as a nation, on judging children by educational achievement. For every school panicking about its results there are parents who also have their hearts set on particular grades. For every stressed child there’s an indolent one who needs to be coaxed and hassled to work.

When does raising aspirations turn into unreasonable pressure? When does a reminder of how long there is to go turn from a countdown to a time bomb? How do you deliver different messages in classes of 30 and assemblies of 300? How do we balance the cost of student support services against the price of maths teachers? One hour 45 to answer, use both sides of the paper, show your working.  
 
CR
18.5.18
 
 
 
 
Who’d put children through this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny how the world turns when you’re not looking. Distracted by turquoised youths and unable to use technological social megaphones I have a limited world-view. For example, I try not to think about academies but that doesn’t alter the fact that 70% of secondary schools are academies or Free Schools now, and that those of us who stood still are in a minority. 36% of schools are part of MATs (multi-academy trusts), many of them big ‘uns. This is interesting (really, bear with me) because the larger MATs are developing their management and their economies of scale. The most successful in terms of GCSE outcomes - because that’s the only way success is measured – have developed very safe ways of getting results. As you’d hope.

First among those methods is standardisation of processes across schools. So, a large MAT will employ a Director of Curriculum and subject specialists. They design and write the curriculum for, say, History, or Science, and how it is to be taught in the MATs schools.

In the old days, Local Education Authorities kept a stable of such folks, and schools used or adapted the materials according to need, inclination or diktat. When the funding went, the Advisors and Inspectors disappeared from County Hall. Once performance tables became the only measure of the system, curriculum design merged with the GCSE syllabus.
  
This didn’t do anyone any good because exams measure knowledge, they don’t define it. That’s a different rant, however, and my point is that we are now in interesting times If by interesting you mean ‘things that make me chew off my fingerends’. The big MATS (I said MATs, not Macs, do pay attention) don’t just appoint the expert and issue the curriculum, but they also give teachers scripts. Scripts, like in a play.

What kind of news is this? It might help the workload crisis that we face: teachers don’t have to prepare the teaching materials or write or adapt the curriculum. They just have a script and then can concentrate on making sure that children are progressing, intervening when they need to. Given that for the third successive year we’ve nationally failed to meet teacher training recruitment targets by a mile, we could perhaps do with some scripts. And someone to read them out.

Or it might be terrible. Pundits luurrve to say ‘we don’t want teachers reinventing the wheel’ which is head-bangingly obvious, but it doesn’t cover it. The best teachers burn with a love of their subject and take intense satisfaction in devising new and interesting ways to teach it. They create, experiment and refine. They recycle stuff that works and ditch stuff that doesn’t. They tinker and tune, and get the results. They use their learning and their own habits to lead and support the little learner in front of them. They share and steal, they revel in the stuff.  Some of them take over the department and write their own curricula and give it away to others. Some take over schools, and put knowledge and creative learning at their heart

All of that takes time, which, in a horrifically underfunded system, is beyond rubies. So the big MATs with their Curriculum Directors work one way, and we try to do it the old way: good schemes of work, good shared resources and planning, freedom in the classroom to adapt and adopt, as long as it works. Would workload be reduced if we handed everyone a script? I don’t know. What would that cost? What kind of people would we become?

Which takes me back to last Wednesday when I went to a gig for my dear chum Prof Michael Young, to celebrate his 50 years at the Institute of Education. He’s see a lot, and he’s worried about the future for schools when teachers don’t have to think it through for themselves from first principles. Worried about the scripts.      

Another Prof, our school chum Bill Lucas, has been namechecking us this month, thank you kindly. He’s worked with us for years on our habits and dispositions, on our creativity and love of learning. Now he’s working with PISA to get that into the international measures. I’m pretty sure there won’t be a script for it. 

Anyway, we had Community Day this week, thinking about our futures with lots of career-friendly activities: planning, debating, collaborating, thinking. Year 11 did yoga and spacehoppers as well as thinking about their Tallis legacy and revision timetables. Everyone branched out a bit, and thought expansively.

I walk out into a snow flurry at break and everyone was ridiculously squealing and shrieking. Teachers who get them into class afterwards need to use all their skills to dial down the excitement and turn their minds to thinking hard. Would you have a special script, for a snowy day in London?

I don’t know where this curriculum path will lead us all and I might be worrying about nothing. The MATs are dominant, though, and big enough to sit an elephant on. And you know what happens when they get into the room.
 
CR
31.11.17