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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Briefing: Can Schools Save Democracy?

25/4/2024

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

Sara Khan says:

Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy. Built on centuries of hard‑won rights, our democratic freedoms form the bedrock of our nation. However, it is a mistake to assume the endeavour towards building an inclusive and cohesive society is accomplished. Advancing and protecting our plural democracy requires constant vigilance.

-- The Khan Review, March 2024

Citizenship was introduced into the National Curriculum in England in September 2002.  It gave all pupils aged 11 to 16 an entitlement to education citizenship.  The 2013 curriculum specification for Citizenship defines the ‘purpose of study’ thus: 
A high-quality citizenship education helps to provide pupils with knowledge, skills  and understanding to prepare them to play a full and active part in society. In particular, citizenship education should foster pupils’ keen awareness and understanding of democracy, government and how laws are made and upheld. Teaching should equip pupils with the skills and knowledge to explore political and social issues critically, to weigh evidence, debate and make reasoned arguments. It should also prepare pupils to take their place in society as responsible citizens.
It aims to ensure that all pupils acquire a sound knowledge and understanding of how the UK is governed, its political system and how citizens participate actively in its democratic systems of government. It also covers the role of law, justice, volunteering, and political debate.

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

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

They are, in their entirety,
  • Mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and without faith
  • The Rule of Law
  • Democracy
  • Individual Liberty

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

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

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

The Khan Review observes:
In previous reports, there has understandably been a focus on identifying the ‘shared values’ that bind us together as a nation. This has often been a hotly contested topic and continues to generate debate and division. At the same time however, the teaching of such values have often been viewed positively within schools. The duty placed on schools to promote fundamental British values including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and belief have been widely embraced.
Whether bound by the National Curriculum or not, the OFSTED/FBV imperative means that most schools will have some work going on to promote democracy. These may be any or all of the following: 
​ 
  • In the classroom:
    • Work on classroom ground rules and processes
    • A focus on oracy and quality discussion
    • Properly done group work in which children learn how to express views, find agreement, disagree cordially, persuade and resist oppression, injustice  and prejudice (though this is very hard to do and has fallen out of favour in recent years).
    • Analysing and interpreting information including the veracity of statistics and news
    • Specific teaching on freedom of speech and what that means
    • Discussing current affairs – from A level Gov and Pol to watching Newsround in tutor time in year 7.
  • Whole-school:
    • Student voice in school or year group councils
    • The opportunity to become activists and allies on particular issues
    • Mock elections (with or without compulsory secret voting)
    • Debate training and competitions
    • Student leadership opportunities
    • Leadership training using political simulations such as World Peace Game
    • Compulsory representation such as Tallis’sJury Service

Most schools have a motto which might help such work: ours of Education to understand the world and change it for the better, for example, requires students to be educated in active democracy.

So that’s the background. 

The Khan Review made some recommendations for the Department for Education. They should:
  • Put forward legislation that requires protests to be at least 150m from school gates (with the exception of industrial action pickets).  This is a reaction to a very challenging series of incidents in Bradford.
  • Establish a Cohesion and Conflict Unit which:
Brings together existing advice to schools such as the teaching of fundamental British values, dealing with political impartiality and others, while also providing clearer guidance and resources on other areas of conflict including when protected characteristics conflict and other controversial issues. The unit should issue guidance, training materials and resources to support schools in teaching what it means to live in a diverse democracy, how to manage opposing and different opinions, how to debate well and the importance of critical thinking.
  • This unit should support schools and teachers when being threatened or harassed, including immediate support for ‘flashpoint incidents’.  Data on these should be collected.  It should also collect cohesion data to assess the progress of key indicators such as segregation – ethnic and other – and other relevant issues. A new Office for Social Coherence and Democratic Resilience (OSCDR) would ensure this.Hmmmm.
I must observe that the DfE’s forerunner, the Department of Children, Schools and Families required schools to undertake community cohesion work, which was inspected by Ofsted from 2007. I was on the national reference group in 2009-10 and have a photo of me talking to Gordon Brown on the very matter. The Coalition immediately disbanded both policy and group ‘to let schools focus on their core mission’.

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

1.  Democracy and voting

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

2. Democracy and character education

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

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

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

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

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

If I was asked for a Civics Manifesto (which, inexplicably, no one did,) I’d suggest:
  • making the Citizenship national curriculum programme compulsory in all schools in KS3 and expect that all students are offered it as an option as well as its content being embedded in KS4. 
  • enabling this by adjusting the accountability measures to force the issue by including Cz as an EBacc alternative to History or Geography. The content is academic and serious. (as long as the EBacc zombies on, of course)
These would need to be hand in hand with national developments: politicians should be mindful that their every act is an example to children and they should not bring democracy into disrepute. And while I’m at it, news media independence and balance should be strengthened and legislation introduced to protect it.
 
Daniel Chandler’s fabulous book Free and Equal covers this much better, if you fancy a long read.
 
So, if you’re ever stuck in a lift with someone who asks you what schools are doing about the state of the world, do tell them this. Of course, if we had a national understanding of what schools are for, these problems might be solved. Ask them to work on that, then send them to me.

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


CR

25.4.24
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Last New Year?

11/1/2024

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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
too many parents saying all they hear from schools are requests or warnings,  the relationship between schools, families and government has changed for the worse.  And the government has spent year after year sitting by-frankly, sitting back.
Hmm. I’m not sure that government can be entirely blamed for all schools v families strife, but the state of the nation doesn’t help any public service. I’m pretty sure good communication depends on the value of your intent and even then it’s easy to get it wrong.

Which doesn’t say much for me, if you look at the list. Where’s the bullet
  • Partnership with families?

So, as I peruse the list and the future, let me just say thank you to all the families who talk with us and help us, who share their worries, their lives, their children and their footballs with us. More on this to come. Happy New Year!
 
CR
11.1.24  
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Time and Present

21/12/2023

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The best gig I ever went to when I was young and didn’t need to go to bed at nine, was in ’84 or ’85 at Loughborough Student’s Union, near to where I lived at the time. Headline: Elvis Costello, supported by the unknown Pogues, whose percussion section was a chap who hit himself on the head with a tin tray. What a night.  So, while I was sorry that Shane McGowan had died I wasn’t necessarily surprised. He had, as the man said, warmed both hands before the fire of life. It did lead to a spirited discussion chez nous on Best Pogues Song. Rainy Night in Soho, Sickbed of Cuchulainn, Billy’s Bones or, obviously, Sally MacLennane. You decide.

But for the last dozen years or so MacGowan has only reminded me of a sad drive on a beautiful day to a memorial service for a Headteacher who’d taken his own life. I was listening to a collection of Irish songs and poems and the matchless little recording of MacGowan reciting Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ came on. It’s a short poem about futility and the future, magically done. Last week it made me think again about Ruth Perry again, but also about time and memory.

Today would have been my grandfather’s birthday. He was born in 1899, a very long time ago, but I remember him clearly and dearly and have a sort of link with the Victorian era because of him. My little grandchildren should live into the 2100s so that’s a whole other era into the future. I’m obviously thinking a lot about past and future at the moment. It’s my last Christmas here at Tallis and as a serving teacher: I won’t do all this stuff again. No Christmas assemblies or jumper days, no school Christmas lunch or staff get-togethers, no writing of hundreds of cards to say thank you at the time of year we think about gifts and human kindness. No need to nag about working right up to the end or bracing ourselves for a short half-term full of mock exams and budget worries to come back to. No more travelling through the dark into silent building with the smell of the Christmas tree scenting the foyer. No more Santa-ing about the place to drop off bits and pieces on the last morning of term.

But the traditions and the life of the school will carry on next year, because time and human life are like that. I’ll be doing something else, but Tallis will do its thing. That’s how great community schools work. The children will be doing their thing too, as they potter and lunge about the place.  

It’s this I’ll miss most of all and am trying to experience every day fully. Overheard this week alone: two boys, context impenetrable: ‘You understand it’s the same day in Australia, don’t you?’. A year thirteen, going into a languages classroom ‘I don’t know any French, not a word’ following two younger souls practising Latin verbs. In another block, another sixth former, entering cheerfully with ‘I hate this classroom with a rare passion’.   

Interestingly, the House of Lords report Requires improvement: urgent change for 11–16 education (parliament.uk) hates the EBacc with a rare passion. This zombie Gove dream is still a headline measure for schools. It’s all but wrecked the notion of a broad and balanced curriculum in many places where people are fearful of judgement or just love compliance. The Lords, bless ‘em, are fed up with it and have issued a cease and desist order in no uncertain terms:
The Government’s ambition that 90% of pupils in state-funded schools should enter for the EBacc sends a strong message as to which subjects should be prioritised, which is echoed by the references to the EBacc in Ofsted’s handbook and recent school inspection reports. Faced with the pressures of a high-stakes accountability system and stretched resources, schools have understandably organised their curricula in line with the EBacc’s requirements, often deprioritising creative, artistic and technical subjects as a result.
 
The Government must immediately abandon the national ambition for 90% of pupils in state-funded mainstream schools to be taking the EBacc subject combination. The EBacc subject categorisation, and the EBacc entry and EBacc average point score accountability measures, should also be withdrawn in their entirety, and all references to the EBacc in the Ofsted school inspection handbook removed.
​…. and the ground ploughed with salt. I know why Gove invented it, but its time is up. Anyone listening?
 
So as we call time on another calendar year may I wish you good memories and a happy future. I hope the bells ring out for you, too, for Christmas Day.
 
CR
21.12.23  
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Their Fate Will Be Our Fate Too

9/11/2023

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The block four stairs and I are not strangers. I monitor safe passage, preventing foolishness including jumping, running, scuffling, bickering and attempts at back-facing ascent and descent. Therefore, I was glad when Paul Muldoon’s poem about bannisters plonked itself out of the ether into my face.
 
Our ornamental gates and railings that were melted down
for rifle barrels have gained some sort of posthumous renown
by unambiguously drawing a line in the sand.
The gates and railings are finally taking a firm stand
and even more emphatically bringing things to a close.
The exit wound is their approximation of a rose
or a geranium under gauze on the windowsill.
Gangrene. The green and gold of the first full-blown daffodil.
Also rendered, so it would even more tellingly rend,
was lead stripped from the gutters and flashing. For lead will bend
along a spine as it did along a walnut ridge post.
What was once an outer sanctum is now the innermost.
Shouldered as rifle stocks, after a mere three weeks of drill,
the bannisters are gradually taking another hill.
 
We’ve been thinking about war at Tallis, ten years after my first blog. It’s Remembrance, of course, so we’re preparing for that. This year we planned to focus on the contribution of the Windrush generation and public servants. Discussing it in the staff briefing, one said ‘This will be Carolyn’s last’ as if I were being called to higher service forthwith. I’m only retiring. I trust I’ll see another Remembrance.

Our young people are rightly worried about Israel and Gaza, for the full range of reasons. This conflict is very hard to educate about. Sometimes I wonder if there are things in the world that are best left to adult life – but that’s a hard message to hear when you’re seventeen or eighteen and rightly determined to change the world for the better. Our discussions haven’t been much helped by a letter to schools from the SoS and two government ministers which tells me what I can’t do on this particular global issue. In the absence of better actions, I’ve waved it at a lot of people.  

At the same time, I’ve been talking to new staff about what brought them to our door and I’m delighted by their stories. Most of them are fuelled with a desire to transform, built from their own experience or sheer determination. Many are strikingly dressed. All of them seem to love their tutor groups, which can be tricky when you take over a little family from someone much loved who’s left: as one said ‘they’ve just about warmed to me’. I doff my cap: I once took over a year 11 who didn’t speak to me until Christmas. We had a lot of frosty sessions together until they stopped hating me for not being Mr Harrison.

I’m talking to new teachers on the PTI Saturday courses and the good graduates of the Chartered College this weekend. I’m thinking about vision and motivations, why they wanted to be teachers, and what keeps them doing a frankly quite tricky job. I’m keen to be part of the solution that keeps good people in the classroom for the long term, not part of the problem that makes them leave. So I’m thinking about the teacher’s place in society: public intellectual, role model, advocate for the young.  Not everyone can live up to that every day but as long as most of us do most of it all the time then our hopelessly fragmented system will survive this bumpy patch and the children will be served well.

Which we do: from my forty-year standpoint, children are better taught and better looked after than they’ve ever been. Their betrayal, however, is two-fold: the poverty that blights so many lives, and the shockingly poor funding of schools which blights the choices of all but the most compliant and quick-to-learn.

It was war and teachers combined therefore which led me to a list of unbelievably brave teachers in the Second World War. These are people who risked everything to shelter and hide children and to keep them from the concentration camps. I’d not met them before and I think their names are worth recording:

Elizabeth Abegg of Germany
Amato Billour of Italy
Benjamin Blankenstein and Joop Westerwiel of the Netherlands
Vladimir Chernovol of Ukraine
Andree Gulen of Belgium
Jelena Glavaski of Serbia
Nuro Hoxha of Albania
Aleksander Kramarovsky of Russia
Gertruda Stanislawa Marciniak of Poland
Joseph Migneret of France
Gerda Valentina of Denmark
 
It was Sister Gertruda who said ‘once a child has come to me, their fate will be my fate too’. Words that any nation would be wise to heed. 
 
CR
9.11.23
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​From Terrible to Plummeting

20/10/2023

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A round-up, I feel, of the half term’s voyage so far. Weather unseasonably warm until it was freezing for a day. HMS Tallis generally seaworthy, crew and passengers know the ropes. Purser struggling to make ends meet. All hands look relatively tidy and we haven’t been troubled by croc boots with mock spurs yet. Sea conditions could be better. Nautical imagery runs aground at this point.

Time to round up some thoughts on education ideas emerging from the party conference season. Labour policies are not very clear, which at least has the advantage over their being foolish. The Conservatives want to end A-levels. This is theoretically interesting and it may well be time for us to melt down the gold standard into a different gold standard. The dominance of academic A-levels over our whole system is worthy of close scrutiny and what it does to the many hundreds of thousands of young people for whom A-levels are absolutely the wrong answer. Time perhaps to consider whether a qualification designed for a tiny minority in a divided education system still recovering from the war is really the right way forward in perpetuity. Blimey, my mother did A-levels.   
But this is not that time. Education is in crisis and we can’t rearrange these particular deckchairs. Especially as the tenure of the Captain is under serious consideration and he might not be around to steer through these icebergs.  The system is flawed, but it has many strengths and it’s not entirely broken. It can wait until we reach a safer harbour, or at least some plain sailing.

Rishi Sunak is admirably obsessed with maths. It's obviously done him well and I’m entirely in favour of this general drift. We denigrate maths in this country to a ridiculous extent, just like we denigrate proper nutrition, early years teaching and the state of the railways. All of these are emergencies. All of them need well-qualified, valued experts to lead and run them. Maths, inescapably, needs maths teachers. We don’t HAVE maths teachers to meet the needs we have now. Where are all the others going to come from? You can’t outsource it offshore, Prime Minister. The education associations are right: this won’t happen, so best not to think about it. They’re not just being obstructive. We have other things to worry about. First, money. Second, teachers. A lively observer described that yesterday as having gone ‘from terrible to plummeting’.  The third, or first depending on your school or your child is what we do about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. 

The number of children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) in England has gone from 220,898 in 2010 to 473,300 in 2022 to 517,026 this year. 17.3% of children have SEND, 13% need SEN support in schools and 4.3% have an EHCP. The biggest growth areas in SEND are Autism (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Children with these needs in particular often find school life quite hard. Many other children with SEND might not do so well with the monolithic curriculum we have in schools now and their results might not redound well on a school. Therefore, they are unevenly distributed. Some schools welcome children with SEND, others – not so much.

You would have thought therefore that the government might consider this a bit of an issue, especially as the SEND funding which goes to LAs doesn’t match the number of children or the needs identified on their EHCPs.  Many LAs are in deficit on their SEND budget and have had to be given ‘safety valve’ bail-out money. Some LAs balance their own books but push the deficit down to schools – who are meant to do what, precisely? Getting an EHCP is inequitable and the pointier of elbow tend to win. Getting any help can be a desperate battle for parents. And these are the nation’s most vulnerable children.

Well, the government has thrown its brightest and best at the matter. Frequently.
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 …and as you can see, have really prioritised continuity and expertise in this area. Hmmm. I wonder why the situation has gone from bad to worse?

In other news, we had a wonderful African Caribbean Come Dine with Me and concert last night with staff as well as student turns and enough food to fell an ox. Three Year 7 boy dancers went down well with a happy crowd and a small follower demonstrated his own moves to me at break. I was hotfooting to meet with some serious Year 12 and 13s to try to work out what we could do as a school about the middle east horrors. Worry, express sadness and work for peace is our best guess. I was able to read them parts of the letter I’ve had on the matter from Gillian Keegan, Nick Gibb and Robert Halfon but, being good Tallis students, they felt that the Trappist option (silence, not brewing strong beer, you understand) was not a guarantee of better understanding for all. And yet this is a particularly difficult issue. We’ll reconvene after half-term.

Tallis life is endlessly fascinating. We need a week to recover from each other, but who’d want to be anywhere else?
 
CR
20.10.23
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What to worry about

19/5/2023

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A passing child said ‘my dad’s six foot but I’m really short’. I’m always intervening on this one. You are twelve, I said. How tall do you really expect to be? Give it time. Boys worry about growing. As the girls disappear upwards past them you can see them scanning the older versions and wondering if they were ever this tiny. Matthew 6:27, I say – but only in the King James. Fret not.

Older children are currently fretting about exams, which is to be expected, but there are three other worrying things floating about in the zeitgeist that they should be spared.

The first is hunger. One of our chaps (Timi Jibogu) is a member of the Greenwich Youth Parliament and campaigning for the council to provide free school meals for examinees.
Many students come to school hungry and are unable to concentrate on their studies and this has a direct impact on their academic performance. As a community, we have a responsibility to ensure that every student has access to basic necessities, especially during exams. Providing free school meals for students taking exams would ensure that every student has the opportunity to succeed, regardless of their background.
He's right – but why have we got into such a state?

The second is the furore about this week’s year 6 SAT reading paper. Exams are hard to set, so I don’t have a view about the hardness of the questions, but this comment from a father on the BBC made me bang my head on the desk. 
Of the 15 or 20 that he's done over the last couple of months, the only one he hasn't completed or been able to complete is the one that he did last week, which makes it feel like something went wrong with that paper.
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
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The Year’s Midnight

15/12/2022

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We had a visitor to Geography yesterday, entirely friendly. He’d heard of the interesting things our map-and-rock folks do so he came to give them the once-over and put them in the running for an award. We rolled out a reddish carpet and he saw some lessons, talked to staff and children and even to me. We went so far as to insert mince pies into the sandwich lunch to butter him up.

The students, of course, were the star turns. Our man put them through their paces on whether or not the opening of a new coalmine in Whitehaven is a good thing or a bad thing and was much impressed at the breadth of their considered replies. Three of the students want to study Geog at university and could reflect knowledgeably on the relative merits not only of the courses under advisement, but also interesting features of their localities. One is havering between Sussex and Newcastle and I am ready to advise on that.

I know three things about Whitehaven. First, a woman once pushed her partner’s van into the harbour because she was sick of him. He obviously hadn’t worked out it was best to stay on good terms with a person who can shove Transits about. Second, it used to have a really good second-hand bookshop from which I got a nice early copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Third, it has a Weather Museum where you can do your own forecast, blue screen and all, outside of which I was once prevented from parking by an angry goose. It is to the benefit of youth that they don’t have their heads clogged up with such, or they’d never get a single A level.

Sunday and Monday’s weather was so pretty it was worthy of a gallery rather than a museum. Despite hopeful emails from students asking if we would close, we didn’t, of course, and made the best of it. Snow is nobody’s friend up close and much better looked out at from a warm indoors if you’re over 18. We were 27 teachers down at the start of the day with not a supply teacher to be had, but people got in eventually and everyone mucked in. Managing snow excitement is demanding at this end of term, but we did that too. I thought, as I picked my way gingerly across the yard, people can’t afford to heat their flats and houses or feed their children. We have to stay open, no matter what, just for that.

So how are we feeling as we trudge or slip towards the end of term? I’ve got Ofsted’s Annual Report neatly printed out waiting for me on the settee in my office, observing that SEND structures and funding are very far from working. Next to it is the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Annual Report into Education Spending. They say:
  1. In 2021–22, total spending on education in the UK stood at £116 billion or 4.6% of national income (including the cost of issuing student loans). This is about the same share of national income as in the early 2000s, mid 1980s and late 1960s, but lower than the mid 1970s and late 2000s, when it was well over 5% of national income.
  2. Between 2010–11 and 2019–20, there was a real-terms cut of 8% or £10 billion in total education spending. A £7 billion increase over the next two years reversed much of this cut, such that education spending was only 2% lower by 2021–22 than in 2010–11. About two-thirds of the rise since 2019–20 (or £4.5 billion) reflects standard increases in education spending, whilst about £2.5 billion reflects a higher and more volatile cost of issuing student loans.
  3. In the late 1970s, education spending represented 12% of total government spending, making it the equal largest area of government spending. This has since fallen to 10% of total government spending in 2021–22, which equals a historical low point. At the same time, we estimate that 20% of the UK population was in full-time education in 2021–22, equal to the highest it has been in at least 60 years. In sharp contrast, as the share of the population over 65 has risen, the share of total spending on healthcare has more than doubled from just over 9% in the late 1970s to over 20% today.
St Lucy’s Day on Tuesday and in the time I’d put aside to start on one of them Ahmed buttonholed me to say that his Spanish classroom smelled of seaweed, and what was I going to do about it? Nothing. Seaweed has many nutritional properties so he shouldn’t worry. While responding to a request elsewhere, I overheard a much larger soul telling another he was ‘frankly, heartbroken’ but I couldn’t work out if it was the state of the nation, a lover’s spurning or a disappointing Chemistry test. Arrived at my destination (the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter) I put a cover class right on the mature way to deal with a room change (replacing hysteria with industry), observing that I was a sixty-one-year-old woman with a heavy cold and they wouldn’t want a return visit.

John Donne said ‘tis the year’s midnight’ in A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day. That's how it feels, perhaps this year more than most. We’ll talk about light, hope and love in Assembly tomorrow and then give each other a break until the New Year. No matter what the problems around us, we’ll try to make 2023 the best yet. 

​Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
 
CR
14.12.22  
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If You Think It’s Wrong, Act On It

10/11/2022

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A long-ish blog, second in a quadrennial series on Fury Resulting From Adverts On Trains.

Heading north for a family funeral I had stuffed my rather stylish new handbag with reports I hadn’t had time to read. The first, a cross-sector (heads’ associations, Chartered College and suchlike) legal advisory briefing on gender issues in schools was a fine piece, detailed and helpful. I shall keep it to hand.  

The second was the excellent and extremely depressing final report from former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield's Commission on Young Lives 'Hidden in Plain Sight: A national plan of action to support vulnerable teenagers to succeed and to protect them from adversity, exploitation and harm'. It's quite long but I think everyone ought to read it. This blog therefore is a bit of a precis, with the added bonus of Roberts’ General Asperity.
​
I quote:
Government statistics published last week reveal that in 2021/22 there were over 16,000 instances in England where child sexual exploitation was identified by local authorities as a factor at the end of an assessment by social workers. There were 11,600 instances where gangs were a factor and 10,140 instances where Child Criminal Exploitation was a factor. These numbers are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Those involved in gang activity and criminal exploitation are disproportionately young, vulnerable, and unknown to services. It has been estimated that there could be as many as 200,000 children in England aged 11 to 17 who are vulnerable to serious violence. The report says there are already huge stresses on over-stretched services and the public purse due to a lack of early intervention, and that a combination of Covid, a cost-of-living crisis, and any return to austerity would be a gift to those who exploit children. Over the last year, the Commission has heard from multiple professionals working with vulnerable children that many of these problems have become more extreme since the pandemic, including the ages of those running gangs becoming even younger. It has also heard countless examples of children from suburban, middle-class England being groomed by criminals who have spotted a vulnerability and moved in with clinical ruthlessness.
Imagine the outcry if 200,000 Conservative voters were vulnerable to serious violence? 

Notably, clearly and sensibly, Anne Longfield (with whom I have not always agreed) said:
There are parts of our country where the state is completely failing in its duty to protect vulnerable children from the ongoing epidemic of county lines, criminal exploitation, and serious violence. This is a problem hidden in plain sight, rocket-boosted by Covid, which is disproportionately affecting teenagers in deprived and minority ethnic communities and also some families living in leafy suburbs.
It is a national threat to our country's prosperity and security, a threat which is ruining lives and scarring communities, and which is costing the NHS, schools, the police and criminal justice system, and the children's social care system billions of pounds every year.
So, the report recommends:
  1. The Prime Minister recognises the national threat to prosperity and security by the scourge of serious violence, criminal exploitation, and harm and convenes regular COBRA meetings to tackle the root causes of these problems. The Children’s Minister of State should attend Cabinet.
  2. The Department of Education returns to its previous incarnation of Children, Schools, and Families, reflecting the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world class education system.
  3. The Government establishes a new Sure Start Plus Programme, a “Sure Start for Teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. ‘We have chosen to incorporate the name Sure Start as it is a well-recognised and well-respected programme, which we believe was a mistake to dismantle.’ [Not half, say I]
  4. The Government sets a target of 1,000 Sure Start Plus Hubs by 2027 to co-ordinate and deliver health and education support for vulnerable teenagers. Established in and around schools, the hubs will be run by charities, public bodies, business, and philanthropy organisations.
  5. A new drive across Government to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, including the re-establishment of a Child Poverty Unit in Whitehall.
  6. The Government leads a national mission to identify and remove racial bias in the systems that are currently failing many Black, Brown and Minority Ethnic children.
  7. The Government takes a new “Family First” approach that supports families with children at risk of becoming involved with gangs, serious violence, or criminal exploitation and which prevents crisis, financed through the implementation of Children’s Social Care reforms, and delivered by local authorities and family organisations.
  8. Reform of the children’s social care system to provide high quality care for all teenagers, taking an invest-to-save approach and delivered by a partnership of Government, local authorities and the third sector. Implementation of the Independent Review into Children’s Social Care recommendations delivered at pace.
  9. The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community, financed by funds from the proceeds of crime and administered by a collaboration of national charities.
  10. Opening all secondary school buildings before and after school, at weekends and during holidays, to provide safe and appealing places for teenagers, financed by funds from dormant bank accounts and National Lottery community funding.
  11. The Government to promote a new era of inclusive education, ending the culture of exclusion and helping all children to succeed in their education.
  12. One-off £1bn children and young people’s mental health recovery programme, part-financed by a levy on social media companies and mobile phone providers.
  13. Reform the youth justice system to accelerate moves towards a fully welfare based, trauma-informed Child First approach.
 
To my mind, these proposals are absolutely excellent and should be enacted at once. Youth work is always the first to go under revisionist government, and we’ve had 12 years without it now. The Cabinet’s not short of what we now coyly call ‘high net worth individuals’. Perhaps they could prime the philanthropy for 3 and 4?

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

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

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

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

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

28/5/2022

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Looking forward to half term? I’m not following my usual May path of getting onto a train somewhere hot straight after school, but going to West Wales and back for the Jubilee. Time’s running out for us older folks – not including the Queen, of course – and I may safely bank on not seeing another Platinum Jubilee. It seemed churlish not to return to London to potter about in the crowds.
 
I like to do a bit of shopping on my hols, between books. Even a different supermarket is interesting to me and I’m a sucker for everything from weaving in the wilds to the magnificent pharmacies of France. 
 
We’ve been having two different kinds of trouble with shopping here. The first is linked to two large shops of the modern type which opened opposite us but don’t really want children’s custom. I get that hordes of youths hell-bent on unhealthy snackage deters other shoppers who may have more cash. I know that handling teenagers isn’t to everyone’s taste and fear arouses anger which generates trouble, especially when highly caffeinated comestibles are in the case, but it's not as if the existence of the school was hidden to the planners. We are big enough to see.
 
Similar happened in my last school, with a magnet sixth form like Tallis, but gathering also from semi-rural areas. Young drivers couldn’t park in the car park but could in the local streets. This drove residents crazy. Yes, they needed practice parking tidily, but didn’t we all? Young citizens with full licences and insured cars also have parking rights. Responsible young shoppers, some picking up a few things for the family on the way home, could be allowed to go to the shops everyone else goes to, with a bit of planning. We’re working on it.
 
The second shopping trouble isn’t actually about the shopping. Our local parade, as local readers know, can be a troubled spot, so we operate a post-school curfew. From time to time, working with the police, we ban everyone for a day or two. This infuriates lots of people, but keeps our children safer for a while. Supervising the streets, however, is hard, and one of the things that would help is good CCTV. Some adults have strong feelings about being filmed: I have strong feelings about keeping children safe. We could work together on this.
 
Anyway, returning to the shopping, I am delighted to update you on Lord Agnew and his champagne. From Schools Week:
The government will not reveal its costcutting advisers’ recommendations to balance the books at two Hackney schools held up as success stories of the controversial scheme… [They] found savings totalling £303 million after visiting around 1,000 schools and trusts. Just £17 million of savings had been made six months after visits. But neither the DfE, the schools nor Hackney council – which commissioned the visits – would release the reports following a Freedom of Information request. Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “If you’re going to say that if you get these cost-cutters in you can all save money, then there absolutely is an obligation to say how it is done. An FOI previously revealed that the government’s own research indicated more than half of schools reported the advisers did not identify new ways of saving money.”
I expect the fridges full of Pol Roger are still humming along, if they weren’t raided for lockdown parties. Perhaps they were part of the Wine Time Friday fridge battery (WTF as the acronym apparently used, do they think we’re stupid?). Obviously they don’t have to worry about the electricity bill.
 
I look out of the window onto a sunny day and a sprinkling of cultural dress for the eponymous day. Does what I wear every day count for the cultural dress of an English Headteacher? An online assembly - we have to have them online at the moment because every space is taken up for exams, 22 room changes today - is about to start for year 10 on the Jubilee. 

Bradshaw’s been delivering these assemblies which explain everything about the monarchy in 15 minutes. We start with the meaning of Jubilee, a concept first used about 2700 years ago, meaning a shout for joy which started a time of rejoicing or a time of release. After 7 years a year of Jubilee required people to review their community relationships and debts, even more so after 49 years. We could do with that.
 
When the Queen was 21 she made the famous speech in which she said:
I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service. 
Which, monarchist or no, you have to admit has a better tone than either WTF, taxpayers or sorry we upset people, didn’t realise it was banned, didn’t know it was a party. Could we all perhaps try a little devotion to service?
 
There’s a Tallis English challenge for over the hols that invites age-appropriate use of 18 words. I’ve inaccurately divided them into two groups. For your Jubilee homework, which best fits the Queen and which best fits the government? Give reasons, 19 marks.
​

  1. Gumption, humungous, iconic, lucid, esoteric, Zeitgeist
  2. Kerfuffle, quaver, cantankerous, miffed, obsequious, discombobulate, defunct, collywobbles, capricious, ennui, idiosyncratic, ubiquitous, Zeitgeist
 
Jubilees in the ancient world started with a blast on the 
shofar. Find me a ram.
 
CR
27.5.22
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On the need to dig deeper

12/6/2021

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Three small boys rushed me with a request. ‘Can we start our own club?’ I said it depended on the topic. ‘Japanese Culture’. ‘Manga?’, ‘No, Japanese Culture generally’. I declared in favour with the all-purpose answer ‘Talk to your Head of Year’. Their leader commanded ‘All eyes on Rawlings’ as they charged off. Arigato gozaimasou.

Boys are in the news with the ghastly OFSTED report (as in, a report on a ghastly matter rather than the other thing) into sexual harassment in schools. HMCI was pursued by the Today programme this week on the lines of ‘why haven’t you tackled this before?’ but to be fair to the clipboards, they are at the mercy of Sanctuary Buildings, whom we know to be a bit slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, my Westminster correspondent saw the Secretary of State in the street again at the end of May, customarily laden with bags, describing him as looking like a man about to take the last ferry out. As you would be if your catch-up plan lay in ridicule and tatters and your Tsar had abdicated.

The problem with tackling sexual harassment in schools isn’t having rules and issuing punishments but hearing about the problems to start with. Young women expect that the world will treat them shabbily and therefore put up with outrageous impositions on their persons and emotions. They look upon it as normal to be prodded and put upon, they think they should accept that physical and mental assaults are normal. The report talks about girls being sent dozens of requests for nude pictures and getting dozens of foul nude pictures from boys and men every day. Yet young women are more empowered, more up-front, more determined to stamp out inequity then ever before.  How did we arrive at a position where these irreconcilables co-exist?

Ofsted’s report has recommendations for schools, partners and government:

Schools should create a culture where sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are not tolerated, and where they identify issues and intervene early to better protect children and young people.  They should assume that sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are happening in their setting, even when there are no specific reports, and put in place a whole-school approach to address them.
This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

All of this is important and true and we’ll try to do all of it, but schools can’t turn the tide alone. Violent coercive behaviour towards women is not new, and I wrote last time about the tsunami of pornography that overwhelms our young. Whom does that serve?

And yet, I read in the news today about another school that’s banned skirts. I’m interested in this kind of thing, as long-term readers know to their cost. Banning skirts, on the face of it, could be a liberating act to remove oppressive gender norms from a community. Tell me more, I thought.

Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, the school has banned skirts because ‘members of the public’ have contacted them to complain. Staff are included in complaints, apparently. The usual sorts of words are used: the need for appropriate schoolwear, of appropriate length adding up to appropriate workplace attire. What?

I was reading Hilary Mantel’s essays in the Lake District sun last week. In one, she takes issue with a writer, saying,
"You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares."

I think that about ‘appropriate’. Appropriate schoolwear is clothes that don’t prevent children from learning and rushing about in the sun, that wash easily, dry quickly and don’t break the bank. Appropriate length, is a skirt that’s not going to trip you up on the stairs. Appropriate workplace attire is – well, who knows? It depends on the workplace: what’s appropriate in a blast furnace might be odd in a tea shop. But what business is what children wear to the man in the street?

We are obsessed with surface solutions. Do girls in schools feel sexually oppressed? Send OFSTED to inspect it. Some witchfinder general thinks that skirts are too short – ban skirts. Really? When will we start a discussion about freedom to co-exist peacefully, without prejudice, fear and oppression?

A young woman dropped by to read me a poem. It was about her struggles and triumph and about her determination to make a mark on the world and change it for the better. Perhaps she’ll start the serious global conversation about the mindset change needed to set girls free. I wouldn’t put it past her. I hope we’ve prepared her.
 
CR
11.6.21
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Interference

12/12/2020

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Do you remember interference? It was a big feature of my childhood. You couldn’t hear the radio when the hoover was on because it went all crackly. The telly was sensitive to interference too and even the sharpest of slaps on the top or fiddling with the vertical hold knob didn’t always fix it. Happy days. The car I sometimes drive is ten years old with an FM radio. Reception is crackly between Deptford and Peckham. I’ve got used to it and – as if you couldn’t hear this analogy galloping towards you out of the squiggly mist of a 1960s television screen – I’ve got used to government interference too.

May I set out a few thoughts on the surprise announcement to finish this term a day early, and how irritable everyone has been about it?

First, the government needs to be pulling out all the stops to tackle Covid. Whether you think they have or not is up to you. Whether you think they can or not is more worrying. However, like the geography of Derbyshire, that is not the purpose of this piece. 

Second, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to have a view on the purpose of education, a national curriculum, an inspection process and a fair funding mechanism. Whether or not this can all be achieved smoothly when the focus for the last 20 years has been on a spurious ‘autonomy’ for Headteachers is more worrying. However, like the poetry of Thomas Hardy, that is not the purpose of this piece.

Third, it is reasonable that decisions about schools will have to be made quickly in a pandemic. Whether the Secretary of State’s pandemic-handling so far gives one confidence for future decision-making is worrying.  However, like the exams debacle, the laptop promise, the food vouchers, the BBC lessons, rotas and the October firebreak, that too is not the purpose of this piece.

What is, then? you cry, put us out of our misery, would you, please? No, the focus of this piece is how schools have once again been cast as shiftless villains only interested in a day off, in some parts of the media, this week. Given we’ve been working flat out, how did this happen? Might I try to shed light?

No one asked for a day off. Unions, professional associations and other groups made the point severally and singly with evidence and justification that it was no surprise that when schools reopened, infection rates among children rose. Therefore, once Christmas was declared open and restrictions lifted from the day before Christmas Eve to the day after Boxing Day, schools spotted an issue. Covid-infected or Covid-carrying children may be a risk to older people. As Christmas is invariably spent in multi-generational close proximity, young people may well endanger the health of older people. Gran and Max may have missed each other desperately since the start of lockdown, but it would be a pity if the visit had to be summarily cancelled, made her ill or worse. Therefore, schools’ tribunes said, since we are all capable of remote learning now, had you thought about making the week beginning 14th December a remote learning week and protecting everyone?

A further complication was schools’ responsibilities for contact tracing. If the end of term broke into the 6-day incubation period, schools would need to be making phone calls about infections on Christmas Eve, or later.  This required schools in some way to be open to do that – even if it was just the Head, or the Business Manager, or whoever has been in charge of the process.

And now we get to the bit that enrages the public. Heads said: everyone is exhausted and working over the actual Christmas Eve-Day-Boxing-Day stretch is hard to bear. Some of us (not me) haven’t had much of a break since March. Is there a way of avoiding being responsible for contact tracing all over Christmas?

The solution, declaring Friday 18 December to be an in-service training day must have seemed like a reasonable one to the government. We’re not giving a week of remote learning because everyone has had enough of that, Mr Williamson might have thought – though I suspect it's Gibb the Schools Minister who does the thinking at Sanctuary Buildings. Friday the 18th removes schools from contact tracing over the actual heart of the festivities.  Excellent plan! So why was this not met with general applause?

Well, the difficulty is in the nature of training days. These are not invented on the hoof and they are not meant to be a time when everyone catches up on their marking. They are for actual training to improve classroom practice, planned as part of the school’s improvement planning over the course of the year. They are to be taken seriously. If the training is not done that day, then it is acceptable for the equivalent number of hours to be made up at other points in the year, in planned after-school training time. What the DfE should have done is to declare that this Inset day is a one-off under extraordinary circumstances, unlike others, with other rules. What they have done is to tie everyone up in knotted red tape.

Worse, lots of schools – especially primaries, I suspect - had planned some appropriately-distanced festivities which couldn’t easily be reorganised. We don’t do a lot of that here. The tree’s up, Christmas Lunch is on Tuesday, I’ve recorded a verse of the song we’ll broadcast on Thursday and I’m writing this in a Christmas-y jumper wearing antlers, but that‘s as far as it goes. But now I’m embarrassed that the nation thinks we’re slackers. ‘Teachers say not enough time off’ shrieks the headline.

Everybody’s tired. Children of all ages and dispositions have found the last 15 weeks exhausting and so have the adults around them. The zoning separation of year groups eats away at the teaching day and at any semblance of freedom that the children had. This is hard for adolescents to bear who are wired for developing independence in these years: tempers are frayed. It is immeasurably worse for those who’ve had to isolate, some of them, by the cruel hand of fate, for weeks on end. We understand that many parents are struggling. Some heads and teachers have said regrettable things on social media – but that’s tired human nature broadcasting out loud in the modern world.

Which brings me back to the crackle of interference. Fourth (for those of you who haven’t fallen off the chair with boredom yet) it is shoddy for a government to conduct business by press briefing. Whether the current leaders of a parliament which used to be the model and envy of the world can get over this is debatable. However, like Paine’s Rights of Man, that is not the purpose of this piece.

I trust that these extraordinary circumstances will end some day. Until then, we need to look after each other and try to be kind. So, finally, fifth: it is a pity that so much of the media can’t abide teachers and attack schools at the drop of a hat. However, like the apparently perfectly acceptable decision of Eton to close early to protect families at Christmas, that is not the purpose of this piece. But perhaps it should be?     
 
CR
11.12.20
2 Comments

Are we alone?

21/11/2020

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I used to work in a central London school with a wonderful indoor concourse that served as a yard because we didn’t have much outdoor space. The senior Deputy Head there used to work in a corner of the staffroom, probably to keep abreast of the temperature therein as we tended to the excitable in the early 90s. Anyway, I needed counsel from this kindly geezer on managing a colleague. I may actually have used the words ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ ten years before Lionel Shriver made her fortune from them. My share, please, Madam.

He suggested we talk without flapping ears so we went onto the concourse and leaned on a banister. ‘We’re alone now’ he said, looking at the – perhaps 400 - children swirling fore and aft. I remember laughing out loud and thinking, yes, we are.  None of them are paying us the slightest attention and the noise covers everything. It’s part of my repertoire now, of course.  
 
I moved on after a bit and didn’t see him again until the day London got the Olympics. He was the Head by then and we were being briefed by the Specialist Schools Trust at a hotel in Chelsea to which I’d made the trek from Durham. It was nice to talk but he looked shattered. He resigned a couple of years later, the school was academised, knocked down, rebuilt. Story of our times.

When I read of Heads deciding stop, to leave, I often think of the man with the exhausted face I met among the happy car-horn hooting of that July day. As an inexperienced Head of Department he was my go-to guy and if I had any success, it was with his calm and constant support.

It's easy to feel alone as a Headteacher. No matter how friendly the staffroom or how long you’ve been there, decisions stop with you and if things are going wrong, its you that has to find a way to put it right. I work hard to gather good people around me, whose integrity and expertise can sort the trickiest problem. If you don’t have those people to hand, or if you’re in a really small school you can feel desperately isolated.

The man above’s movements coincided with the decline of the Local Authorities. I’d worked with a gifted RE advisor in that authority and moved to a city where there was still a full stable of advisors, and then again to another.But those were in the municipal socialist red wall authorities of the north east where the erosion of local capacity took longer. In my first headship, in a tiny authority, there was still good cover for a new head. When I encountered problems – with staffing, with violence, with an arson attack that wiped out a third of our classrooms overnight – there was someone on the end of the phone less than a mile away who would come and, as it were, talk about Kevin. Indeed, when I encountered my first budget deficit I actually sobbed over the phone and the help I needed was there within half an hour.  

I’m not a young or a new head (I say that in case you mistook me for thirty-five) and I don’t know how it feels now.  I’m not surprised that the current circumstances make people want to give up. We’re all reeling from the sheer quantity of previously undreamt-of actions that need to be taken. Not just trying to prevent children or staff getting the damn thing, but then what to do once there is a case. Sending children home en masse used to be something that happened once every ten years for a boiler or water failure, once every couple of years for snow if you were holding the north. We’ve done it twice this week.

It's November, so all schools will be looking at their finances, especially those whose budgets run with the calendar year. There is no money promised for Covid, so we are all looking at unsustainable levels of spending. Some Heads of tiny schools have already spent more than their whole budget on the Covid response.

So imagine how beleaguered, lonely and worried heads, new and old, read this on Tuesday 17 November:
The new UK Border Operating Model will apply to all goods entering the UK from 11pm on 31 December 2020.  It is important for all schools, FE colleges and local authorities to prepare for potential changes to food supplies so they can minimise the effect on pupils and young people in their care……You should contact any food suppliers before 1 January 2021, to check whether….changes are necessary. These might include:
  • • varying the timing and number of deliveries to allow for transport delays
  • • being as flexible as possible on delivery times during the day
  • • ordering longer shelf life products during this period, such as frozen foods or foods that can be safely stored at room temperature
Imagine yourself the new Head of a standalone academy – that is, a school which did exactly as the government of the day wanted and broke free of the LA – without a trust or an LA to help you. Imagine yourself the Head of a small school which manages its own catering. Imagine yourself the Acting Head of a school that can’t get a Head. Imagine yourself surrounded daily by children you know to be at risk of going hungry.  Imagine yourself with a Cook who is isolating. Imagine yourself already at your wits’ end. Is it any wonder that half the heads in the NAHT survey thought they might retire early, or just leave teaching? What kind of government is this?

On the same day a very large child loomed at the door of our office and asked my PA for a mask, please. She was all for packing him off, our office not being a general depot for the disorganised. But he was being pursued by a very determined teacher and when he looked soulfully at me I saw a pleasant and diligent 11-year old with whom I’d whiled away happy hours back in the day and provided the face gear. ‘Bless you, Miss’ he said. I wished God’s blessings on him too but told him to provide his own masks in future. He didn’t need to be alone to be savaged by the wrath who was gaining on him along the corridor.  I was glad to help.     

The great Irish poet Derek Mahon died in October and you’ll have been waiting for me to quote Everything is Going to be All Right, his best-known poem. Not this week, mateys. Here’s the last verse of his beautiful Day Trip to Donegal which I quote in sympathy with everyone despairing of doing the job right, this year, under these circumstances. 
​At dawn I was alone far out at sea
without skill or reassurance – nobody
to show me how, no promise of rescue –
cursing my constant failure to take due
forethought for this; contriving vain
overtures to the vindictive wind and rain 
May we all protect each other from being alone, for blaming ourselves, for calling out for help and hearing no answer. Time to change the world for the better.
​ 

CR 20.11.20
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Warning: Adult Language

22/5/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

It’s a while since I’ve bothered you with my thoughts, so I expect you’re pleased to hear from me. I thought you’d like to know a bit more about my childhood?

I may have mentioned that my mother was a teacher, and her mother before her, und so weiter. This, combined with very fixed views on child-rearing much less common in the early 60s than they are now, lent a particular tone to my upbringing. I never had a book that reinforced gender roles or a pink toy. Dolls were out, and she once gave a present back to Santa in Robinson’s department store because it was a girlie one and took one from the bin marked Boys. (A plastic Tommy gun, a story for another day). She particularly objected to the reinforcement of middle-class values and twee-ness in children’s literature. You can imagine that I never went to Narnia, but I did smuggle school stories in when I was old enough to buy them myself.

This has obviously set me up for life pretty well but with attendant scarring. One such is that I cannot abide childish language in adults: the word ‘yummy’, for example, brings me out in a rash. It was this phobia that made me so cross all last Saturday to the extent that one of my housemates took to the cocktail handbook to find a cure.  What am I blithering on about? This:
It is now up to the Government and the teaching unions to work together, along with the many teachers who are not in unions, to find solutions in the best interests of children and make this work – while doing all they can keep children and staff safe. We cannot afford to wait for a vaccine, which may never arrive, before children are back in school. It’s time to stop squabbling and agree a staggered, safe return that is accompanied by rigorous testing of teachers, children and families.
This was the final part of the Children’s Commissioner’s press release on the controversy about reopening schools. You can read it all here.

I could be annoyed by the inference that the teacher unions don’t represent the huge majority of teachers, or the outrageous suggestion that they – and schools – are not trying to keep children safe. I could be annoyed about the assumption that the government are foolishly relying on a vaccine: they can defend themselves. I’m absolutely incandescent about ‘squabbling’.

The Children’s Commissioner’s role is to advocate for the most vulnerable and she and her predecessors have done it admirably. It is an important and distinguished public office and a hallmark of a civilised society. So why denigrate, belittle, ridicule the efforts of the only universal service for children? Why use baby language, as if government and those who represent teachers were naughty toddlers, or just need their heads banging together, taking one to bray the other as we used to say in the peace-loving Republic of Teesside? I’d have tutted at the radio if she’d used ‘arguing’ but I wouldn’t have been grinding my teeth about it nearly a week later.

Why? There is an assumption perpetually lurking just under the surface in England that almost anyone could run schools better than teachers, that almost anyone has the best interests of children closer to their hearts than teachers and that teachers are only after long holidays and lounging around being retro-Communists. This assumption has popped its head above the grimy water in the last week, fished up by Gove, and added absolutely no nutritional value to the discussion. Primary Heads are being asked to do the impossible with such weak guidance that it is negligent. Secondaries haven’t had any guidance at all yet – and all this because the PM had to have a sound-bite a week gone Sunday rather than a plan. Were you warned, Mr Williamson?

I’m very willing to admit that this is misplaced annoyance. I warned you about my upbringing in the first paragraph. It's just a word. But to me it is a word that plays to the gallery, that treats teachers as if they were children and just need to stop being silly. That imagines that people who work with children do it because they’re immature in some way and need to be told what to do by people with proper jobs. 
           
The teacher unions have been around for a long time. They represent an educated workforce that is professionally incapable of being fobbed off. I’ve written endlessly that teachers are both public servants and role models in society: in neither of those roles can we take instruction or information on trust without questioning it. It’s just not in our DNA. At our best, we cannot stop questioning until we reach the truth – because that’s what you want us to instil in all our children. Yes, the conversations are, I believe, very difficult for all concerned, but as they concern the health of the national children, why shouldn’t they be, Mr Williamson?

We’re nearly done for half term and we’ll be closed on Monday for the first time in ages – before being open for the rest of the week. It’s the kind of weather that would make for a lively Friday afternoon before a holiday in normal time. Our young inmates finish the week cheerfully, rushing around the daily mile today circling and chasing each other like lion cubs in the wind. Our buildings stand clean and quiet. We’re waving at a distance until we welcome them back, safely. Are you waving or drowning, Mr Williamson?

As ever,

​CR
22.5.20
1 Comment

Tell us the truth

23/9/2019

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Week three and some small girls accost me with a legitimate grievance. They offer documentation in support. ‘Miss, it says in the uniform list in the planner that you can’t wear false eyelashes or nails, but we’ve seen loads of people wearing them.’ They’re right on all counts. I tell them I’ll do better in future. Revision required. Truth to power, bang to rights.

Truth matters. HM Government has been reprimanded in the past by the Office of National Statistics for telling untruths about school funding. Because of this track record of mendacity the recent funding undertakings have been met with moderate enthusiasm by Heads. So, today, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a second annual report on education spending in England, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. I only quote the bits that affect children in our age group, but it is worth a read.

Spending by local authorities on services for children and young people is increasingly focused on mandatory elements and responses to crises. Spending on children looked after by the state is up nearly 20% since 2010 and spending on children’s social care is up 9%. However, spending on preventative services has been cut significantly. Spending on Sure Start is down 62% and spending on services for young people is down 65%.

Extra funding announced in the spending round effectively reverses past cuts to school spending per pupil [but that’s all it does].
  • Total per-pupil spending on schools in England has fallen by about 8% in real terms since 2009–10. This is largely driven by a 57% cut in spending per pupil on services provided by local authorities and a cut of more than 20% in sixth-form funding per pupil.
  • Funding per pupil in primary and secondary schools fell by 5% in real terms between 2015–16 and 2019–20.
  • The government proposes teacher starting salaries of £30,000 for 2022, an increase of about £6,000 or 23% on current levels. Few details are available on how this will be delivered, but such details will be very important in determining likely pressures on school budgets.
  • Despite the increase announced for 2020, funding per student aged 16–18 has seen the biggest squeeze of all stages of education in recent years. School sixth forms have faced budget cuts of 23% per student since their peak in 2010–11. The 2019 Spending Round allocated a further £300 million for 2020–21. This represents a 4% real-terms increase in spending per student, but will still leave spending per student in further education over 7% down on 2010.
  • Student numbers are growing, so an additional £300 million on top of current plans would be required by 2022–23 just to avoid further cuts in per-student funding. Fully reversing cuts since 2010–11 would cost £1.1 billion on top of current plans by 2022–23.

It may be better than nothing. It may look really encouraging, but school funding isn’t index linked, it doesn’t go up with inflation. This proposed increase, however welcome, is less than the rate at which costs are rising. Will the promise mean additional teachers, resources or extra staff? Will it cut down Tallis sixth form class sizes or reduce our teacher workload? I shouldn’t think so.  

The little ones have got more confident and are picking up speed. Long shiny corridors are irresistible to an 11-year old in new trainers and our day is punctuated by cries of ‘Walk!’ I direct some to Drama every day: ‘Go through all the double doors until you hit the wall then look for your class on the left.’ One looks impatiently at me, as to an eccentric who’s gone too far. ‘I don’t really think we need to hit the wall, Miss.’

Year 11 are facing up to a misspent year 10. Some are being given extra support in Study Hall after school every day, not entirely voluntarily. Some have sought to elude this, outraged by the sheer persistence of adults in league against their frittering away the year. We bring them a motivational speaker of unashamed cheesiness: he’s captivating, and they love it. I sit in on a debate about sex and religion in RE which is loud and beautifully respectful, though distracted by gay penguins. ‘Really?’

I talk to the sixth form about the Supreme Court, and Fuller’s 17th Century dictum be ye never so high, the law is above you. I tell them we live in extraordinary times but they assume that all times are like this and can’t imagine a calmer way to regulate national life, can’t imagine a world in which truth is reliable, systematic, embedded, irrepressible.

We claim of ourselves at Tallis that we mean what we say. The small girls are asking me if it’s true, or if we’re just some more adults who promise one thing but mean something else. They’d really like an answer. I have high hopes for them. 
 
CR
19.1.19
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Walk a mile in their shoes

18/5/2019

1 Comment

 
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I’m a fan of Timpsons, the shoe-mending folks who sort you out with watch batteries and keys and all those other things you could easily plan for in advance but because you haven’t, become a sudden and urgent need. They’re a brilliant employer of ex-offenders, did you know?

Currently, there are approximately 10 million people in the UK with a criminal conviction. At Timpson we believe it is madness to throw such a large section of society on the employment scrapheap. By carefully selecting the right individuals to work in our business, we have enabled thousands of ex-offenders to have a second chance in life and go on to have rewarding careers. Often, other employers don’t realise they can be missing out on some very talented, hardworking individuals. Their loss is our gain. Currently, our retention rate for colleagues who we have recruited from prison or who have a criminal conviction is approximately 75%. This means that the vast majority of colleagues that we employ from prison do not re-offend.

They are a principled, effective and successful outfit as far as I am able to tell. Forgive me, but the same cannot be said for our current government or their political opponents. 

We’ve been reading the Timpson Report on Exclusions this week. I don’t think former Education Minister Edward Timpson is a scion of the cobbler Timpsons, but he grew up in a family which fostered almost 90 children. He was handed a difficult job which he fulfilled diligently. He made 100 visits and took 1000 submissions, completing the report at the turn of the year only for it to be sat on by the department for months while they wrangled about money and power (I’m told).
​
There are 30 recommendations, which said department has agreed ‘in principle’. I’ll spare you the detail but here are the key points:
  • Schools should be made responsible for the children they exclude, no matter when they exclude them by being accountable for their GCSE results. 
  • Headteachers must retain the power to exclude pupils where necessary  
  • A small number of schools are off-rolling (where children are made to leave a school without the proper process being followed) for their own interests.
  • Councils must be advocates for vulnerable children to make sure they are well-placed
  • Funding is a problem but good practice is still possible
  • Most schools take a balanced and measured approach to using exclusion but some don’t
  • Boys are substantially more likely to be excluded in primary school than girls.
  • Persistent disruptive behaviour accounts for around a third of all exclusions
  • Alternative Provision provides education to excluded pupils but it is often not very good
  • Schools face a particular challenge in recognising, understanding and meeting the needs of children in, or on the edge of, the care system.    
  • Ofsted should ‘consistently recognise’ inclusive schools
 
All of this is pretty obvious so I shall make obvious points in my turn. The biggest problems in our system are these:
  • It values autonomy above all things, which means that there are over 20000 individual decision-makers making decisions behind closed doors.
  • It values simple outcomes such as GCSE results because they are cheap to measure. This has driven the system mad. Troubled, vulnerable and needy children do not get good exam results so schools who are in trouble or who wish to seek pre-eminence by exam results are reluctant to admit them or keep them.
  • There are too few teachers in the system and all of them are working harder. This means that behaviour support is stretched.
  • Schools have no money. They have to prioritise teaching so all the pastoral support has withered away.
  • Political decisions have stripped the public sector to the bone. As well as too few police there are too few youth workers, psychologists, social workers. There is no one to turn to.
As the man said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We’ve spent billions of pounds on structural and management alterations in public services and Brexit. If we cared about children we’d have spent the money on them. Vulnerable children don’t care whether their school is community or academy and they certainly don’t care whether they might get blue or red passports. They can’t see the long-term, they’re very likely to end up in prison and they make terrible decisions because they’re trying desperately to protect themselves from further harm. 

Austerity has taken a terrible toll on its children.

Timpson described a system where the best hope for an excluded child might be Timpson’s. How do we live with that?
 
CR
17.5.19 
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Decolonisation

7/5/2017

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I like a bit of punctuation and envy the sticky apostrophe first aid kits carried by obsessives. Similarly (to use a recognised connective) I challenged the overeducated amongst whom I spent the Bank Hol to define a fronted adverbial. Year 5 can, and these guys were way older than that. All night long, we bickered. Grammar matters too.  A well-turned sentence is a creative act in itself and we need to keep our standards up as darkness falls: Churchillian in the blitz.

There’s anger about the approach to writing represented by the fronted adverbial thing, and you should tread warily near a primary school teacher as it really isn’t a joke. I’m part of the generation who weren’t taught any English grammar at primary in the late sixties and secondary in the seventies. We were taught to spell and to write with structure, clarity and creativity, but not how to take the stuff apart and analyse it. I took German O level and was properly bamboozled by the sheer tonnage of grammar required accurately to describe a Danube steamer. (I cannot tell you how useful that’s been). In the mother tongue we were expected to write well because we read widely. It was a bit of a devil-take-the-hindmost approach and those whose lives weren’t full of books by background or inclination fended for themselves. That’s not fair education.

This month we approach the new GCSEs in English and maths. They’ve been attractively described as big and fat, meaning that a huge amount of knowledge and understanding is required and young people have to be able to manipulate their learning to perform well. Government, Ofsted and the exam boards are putting on a show of being reasonable about expectations. Everyone hopes they’re working hard to create a system in which children’s learning can be sensibly structured and assessed and, so far, tarantara, no-one’s said that everyone has to be above average.

A visitor came to see me about knowledge and we chewed the fat for a bit. We talked about the journey of the last seven years and the importance of putting knowledge and learning, rather than assessment and school performance, front and centre of the curriculum. We walked around school and I felt a bit of a fraud because everyone was doing exams and testing, but it is May. The artists and dancers were actually being examined, but all exuded a zen-like calm.

We wondered what will the new government do about the Ebacc? I formulated a view. When the curriculum was being weakened by performance incentives there had to be a way of stopping it. That turned out to be a debate about what’s important to learn and how we should assess it. It’s still a work in progress but the structural impediments have been adjusted: therefore, does the Ebacc need to be pushed all the way? Can the nation not devise a way to work together with trusted school leaders to judge if a school has a solid and sensible curriculum without a binary judgement? Ebacc good, Nobacc bad?

I understand entirely the notion of entitlement. A child should get, at any school, a curriculum that enables him to compete with the unreasonably privileged. But the Ebacc raises so many insurmountables: no teachers, no money, skewed calibration of GCSE languages which make them exceptionally daunting to slower acquirers, brexitty populism, overloading of English and maths, preservation of the arts and not enough time. I worry that the big fat specifications will be unmanageable for human students of all abilities unless we can really learn some new language about what constitutes progress.

However, young people have their own imperatives. Two year seven girls wielded a clipboard of their own devising at me, action researching into that great mystery, the pronunciation of Primark. I supported the majority view. The Guitar Night ended with some blues and an arrangement of the Game of Thrones theme beautifully played by young peoples 11-18 of all shapes and sizes. Our own politics is marginally less blood-sodden, I suppose.
Thursday’s Evening Standard headline was a marvel of punctuation:
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Oh for an anti-colon sticker.
 
CR
5.5.17
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Little Red Roosters

22/4/2017

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How often do you think about red roosters? Twice a day? Then this column’s for you: read on.

A mixed pair of year 8s are gazing at something so I get between them. This new pound coin? What’s it worth? Ever the educator, I can help: ‘A pound’. ‘Yes, yes, but what’s it worth, I mean, how long’s it been around?’ This is, I suspect, precisely the existential question that standardised coinage is meant to prevent. Rather like you and I, dear child, worth does not depend on age. 

We’re obsessed with money this week as the future is grim. Successive governments have longed for a schools’ National Fair Funding Formula but shied away from the cost or the carnage until now. This lot are doing it within the funding envelope, as we say now. The same money, shared out fairly. It has a brutal logic as a cold fiscal fix. As a way to support a the nations’ young, it is utterly inexplicable. Why disinvest from children? 

Tallis’s total budget is about £12 million a year. For the financial year 2017- 18 we’ve been given about £326,000 less, a drop of -2.7%. We‘ll face further reductions next year, and then that lowest level of funding will be the new normal. Over the next two years we’ll try to plan to lose over half a million pounds.  Which may not be possible.   
Such brutality does interesting things to language. The ‘Fair’ was dropped a while ago so it’s just a formula, rage against the machine. Similarly the parroted ‘we are spending a record amount on schools’ makes my head swivel on its stalk before exploding. School funding is frozen, with inflation and other factors meaning schools have to make huge cuts on top of Coalition cuts.

So, pottering home after the A level dance showcase (brilliant, with a matchless first Little Red Rooster) I thought out loud (thankfully not on the bus), about the rationale for slashing expenditure on schools. Hana’s questions recurred: What’s it worth and how long’s it been around?

The best schools have a grand narrative: this is what we are, this our history, this our aim. Ancient schools know: educating the poor of the parish for 500 years, Honore et Labore, Sapere Aude, like we have Education to understand the world and change it for the better. But quality education for the masses is very recent, a post-war, comprehensive dream. Most of our schools, in historical terms, are modern. Does that make us less valuable?
From the standpoint of the privately educated, this must all look very clear. If schools were better they’d have nothing to fear. Most schools are not very old so they haven’t survived for a long time, and they’re not very attractive to rich people, they’re obviously not very good. Ergo, they’re not worth much, so they must be improved in whatever way seems economical at the time. Or starved of cash so the weak go to the wall. Or altered again and again and again by successive ranks of politicians who have no clue that stability and trust are crucial to public institutions.

So, Hana, perhaps the government sees it your way. We can tell what schools are worth by how long they last. In a future without enough money, subject to measurements that change every year, without enough teachers and with people rightly fearful of becoming headteachers, let’s see how they last. Like the rooster-less barnyard: everything in the farm yard upset in every way, the dogs begin to bark and hounds begin to howl.

Our friends from Taiwan came to visit to protect us from gloom, dancing and singing. 20 year 8s had a great day with them and there was much hugging and tears when they left, having given us a second rooster. It’s got a money-box slot, so we’ll perch it on reception and see if it can lay us a load of cash. The attributes of the year of the rooster, I discover, are fidelity and punctuality, and you can’t have too much of either of those in school.
So I turned to Confucius and the wisdom of the structured life. As he said:
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.
All the government have to do to get a really bad outcome from schools is to carry on as they are. Finding money to fund us all really fairly, with the money we need, would be difficult, and it would be good. Leaving us alone for a few years to generate stability and do our jobs would be even better. We value things that last on this damp island. Loving our schools and letting them flourish would be a public good.

CR

21.4.17 
1 Comment

What would you cut?

10/3/2017

1 Comment

 
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Not many jokes this week, apols. I thought I'd try to explain something about school funding cuts so that, as we go into the darkness, everyone understands just why an anodyne lie from government leads to heads having to switch the lights off.
 
There’s a great campaign called #whatwouldyoucut but because I don’t really know how to tweet I haven’t contributed much. Nonetheless, the question is the right one. And, because we’re like that at Tallis, we have a list. Hold that outrage, it's not a list of what we would cut, but the things that a conservative government with a functionalist view of education informed by nostalgia, class constructs, elitism, obsession with the markets and sheer not-knowing-what-we-do-all-day-ness think we should do without. The list is about the extra things about which we shouldn't forget to tell an inspector calling. Mr Tomlin and Mr Nicholls are list-keepers-general for this purpose, thank you Sirs. It includes (fanfare drumroll deep breath)
 
Workshops, visiting authors, dance and drama companies. Trips and visits (about 150 a year) near and far,  the mosque, the Wallace Collection, Norway. Performances and exhibitions. Competitions: debating, football, anything. Prince's Teaching Institute work (school of the week twice). Creative studying group workshops for year 10. Maths Day rock competition (and the concert tickets we won). GCSE Pod, the revision app (top 7% of users in country). Artsmark (hoping to get the platinum award). Thomas Tallis Centre for Contemporary Art, our Tate Exchange project (we're the only Associate school). The Shakespeare Schools Festival. The Wandering Bears photographic collective for year 9 & 10. Mentoring between years 12 and 11/7. A reduced curriculum in year 11 for those struggling (with additional maths and English support provided). PET Xi intensive specialist revision, weekend and holiday support sessions. Year 8 boys visiting primaries to read with their students. Primary school science workshops. 36 clubs (from ukulele & astronomy to ninja school). World Challenge To Ecuador. Charlton Athletic Academy. Tech Club and the go- bat-cart, Productions, (We Will Rock You in 2016). Year 7 and 8 outdoor events in June 2016, the jolly old Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, counselling, internal elections (mayoral, general elections, Brexit, school council). Teens and Toddlers Programme, attendance reward trips. International links with Taiwan. Free tea for staff at break time, Parent Coffee Mornings every week, a weekly newsletter with 1700+ subscribers. Psychologists, family support, on-call behaviour support. 
 
We’ve  got them on our list and they'd all of 'em be missed. Not that they're about to disappear at Tallis, I'm just showing the working needed to balance a budget.
 
I bet some readers are thinking 'some of those sound pretty cheap, so why the panic. Won't they carry on with less money, or are teachers doing that goodwill thing they did years ago?'. May I explain a bit about this?
 
Our money comes to us in age-weighted pupil units. We spend it on employing the teachers we need to teach the number of children we have, and ancillary services. Saying that money to schools is increasing doesn't prove anything other than that there are more children. More children need more teachers. (They're hard to find, so they're getting more expensive, but that's another story). If the amount of funding per pupil isn't enough to pay the teachers we need, then we have to cut.
 
Schools look at making other savings before they look at cutting teaching. That means less money for books, equipment and suchlike. Exams are expensive: up to £200k a year in a big school and we can't reduce that - though why the examination boards have to be profit-making and not free to schools is a mystery to me. If like us you have a  PFI building with an annual charge to the school budget you can't save money on building maintenance, costs or heating, which is what schools traditionally do in hard times. We can't let it out and make money, because it's not ours. 
 
So, heads finally look at how to take money from the teaching budget, by reducing the number of teachers or by having cheaper ones. If you reduce the number then you have to increase class sizes or increase the hours a week that a teacher teaches, or both.
 
Once either of the above happens, then, with the best will in the world, teachers have to reserve their energies for the day job. If you don't get a free period until Wednesday your capacity to run a club or a team, or a revision session is limited. If lunchtime's shortened so that supervision is safer with the same expenditure, then your day's more pressured. 
 
School trips take a bit of planning so the time for that might be hard to find. Trips require teachers to be covered, which costs either extra school staffing or supply teachers.
 
And don't get me started on schools that only employ young teachers because they're cheap. Young is buzzy but older is important and young people need to know that wise people dedicate their lives to their service. I was a young teacher once. 
 
Oh, and all those insights about how our children need pastoral care and help with the worries and anxieties that the twin pressures of cool and school bring? Forget them. Skilled support staff are expensive too, and there's no separate budget for them.
 
Does that help understand the debate? Does Philip Hammond understand why Band Night with 20 acts is important? Will Justine Greening calm an angry child? Can George Osborne give us a bit of his retainer to keep the visits going? Hands up at the back there, if the teacher can see that far. 
 
I'd found a hat on the floor and recognised it as one I'd confiscated and returned a while ago. After a week I sought its owner and there was an emotional reunion. The hat-wearer in question is new to the UK and thought it perfectly  reasonable to  hug me in thanks, so we had a chat about that. I should have said: here are some more UK traditions. Slashing public spending and blaming the public servants. Not caring about children unless they’re like you. Grammar schools, and all they stand for.
 
CR 10.3.17
1 Comment

A shooting foot

24/2/2017

1 Comment

 
Picture
Visiting a friendly primary yesterday I was so distracted arranging my hair for their fancy entry photo system that I typed myself in as Thomas Tallis. I am not actually tallis, nor shorts: I am the average height for a UK woman, no matter what my own giant offspring say as they stoop to reason with me as if I were a more than usually stupid dachshund.

Nonetheless, I’m recognisable among the Tallis horde. On the bridge yesterday we inquired civilly after each other’s half-terms. The bridge flows best with minimal supervision and the occasional left-right reminder, but all was nearly brought to confusion by a pair of small girls with pointy eared hairbands who rushed across the path of year 11 boys three times their size. Popular imagination would expect them to be unpleasant, but they just muttered (woah!) and tutted about The Youth of Today needing to learn how to cross traffic.

We keep things going like this most of the time. A pleasant word, a bit of oversight, some minor hassling and not much shouting. The adult-child ratio, not over-generous, enables this, as does the number of teachers who’ve been at it for years and who can sort out a queue with a raised eyebrow and a click of the fingers. Not quite an idyll, an inner-London comprehensive, but it works for us.

Imagine such a school however, with fewer adults, with less experience, with more children. Imagine that lots of the teachers are inexperienced, unqualified, on short-term contracts. Imagine that the classrooms are a mess because no-one’s there long enough to claim them and the children, whose attendance starts to slide, don’t know who they’ll have for maths, or French because they’re in year 8 and they’ve been re-timetabled four times this year so the permanent teachers get the exam classes. Imagine not having your own form tutor. Imagine that inner-city school with no pastoral staff, no one with time to comfort a desperate child, no one to go to the meeting with social services (who haven’t got any long-term staff either). Imagine thresholds so high for mental health support that only a child in hospital (if there’s a bed) gets an appointment with a medic. Imagine no bands and teams, trips and visits. Imagine no visitors because we can’t pay them and don’t have enough staff to manage behaviour in front of strangers. Imagine no time for International Day or Black History Month or the Big Draw, no Christmas tree, no rewards. Imagine day after day only of subjects that count for the latest version of the accountability measures, in big classes in cold rooms with broken computers and no text books. That’s what the funding future looks like.

The two biggest problems facing schools aren’t anything to do with structures or super-selective grammar schools – though they’re stupid enough diversions – but funding and the teacher shortage. Funding is too low, but now the comparatively better-funded are being reduced to the level of the poorest-funded in the name of fairness.  It takes a special skill to generate a teacher shortage in a recession when there are more graduates then ever, but that’s what’s happened. And so we face the ghastly consequences of political ideology versus the public sector (‘safe in our hands’). The facts are denied: no, there are not more children, and no, more of them don’t have special needs. Dogmatic posturing interfering with professional leadership means no-one wants the jobs: accountability pressures make it foolish to stake your mortgage or your children’s futures on an unstable career ladder. No central planning of teacher supply mean there’s no one to help anyone’s children’s future, but still the government says it’ll be alright in the end. Does anyone in government actually care about children?

No funding and no teachers means that the teachers who are left can’t cope and can’t afford to do it: as the Education Select Committee’s report said on Tuesday:
a key driver for teachers considering leaving the profession is unmanageable workload. It is important for people to understand that the current education funding crisis is contributing significantly to these workload pressures. Schools are having to cut the number of teaching and support staff, and this inevitably means more work for those who remain. We would also point out that successive caps on teachers’ pay over several years have greatly devalued salaries in real terms and this issue also needs to be addressed. More investment in education should be a national priority.
The future looks pretty grim, but my spirits rise as I meet a helpful and realistic officer from a neighbouring borough, talk sense with good governors and bang my head on the desk when Harry, late again, describes what he thinks is a revision schedule. I see sixth formers shaking hands pleasantly as they regroup and then try to get Ahmed out of trouble when he loses his rag after stubbing his toe. ‘At least it wasn’t my shooting foot’. I know what I’d like to use a shooting foot for.
 
CR
21.2.17
1 Comment

Happy New Year

13/1/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
You can start a year where you like, but it has to end at some point and another one begins. Years actually start in September, but I understand that others may believe it to be January. Seems odd to me: it’s very dark, and cold even here in the south, and by January we’re actually nearly halfway through the real year which starts mellowly in September and chugs on until the examiners have had their pound of flesh. January with its much-hyped resolutions is just a reboot to keep us going until the sun comes back.

Year 11 had a nasty shock in December with mock exams based on what the new GCSEs will look like. You understand that I’m talking about maths and English here, where A*-G is being replaced by 9-1 and no one really knows what's going to happen. Well, year 11 do. They had a look at a maths paper produced by the exam board and it had given them pause for thought. Revision sessions were popular this week. Perhaps we’ll even offer biscuits. We hand out the mock results in a mock-August manner early next week, in the hope of focusing the mind of those who lack imagination about how they might feel on the actual day. It works for some, but for others 8 months is an eternal sort of time, even 5 months to the exams is unfathomable, like the age of the earth or the distance to Jupiter. One pleasant sort of chap told me he’d not done much revision because he wanted to find out how well he’d do without it. He knows now. Resolutions all round.

Just as well the young ones aren’t in charge of the institution (for all sorts of reasons, really). They’re easily distracted and very much concerned with the interior of others’ heads and phones, rather than devoting themselves to defeating the examiners. As I heard one remark to another ‘Yes, but you’re just trying to impress Ellen’. Has she noticed?

I go upstairs to take issue with year 9, the awkward squad of any school. This particular bunch of comedians was inhospitable to a visiting teacher and will be mending their ways. Some get to spend extra time reflecting on their manners. At lunchtime the dining room’s overcrowded because of the rain and there’s some huffing. I see some of them later, the huffers and ill-mannered, in punctuality detention. Every term the same, we re-embed the rules with those whose lives mean they forget them over unstructured holidays. Every term’s a new year.

And I make a hash of having a new idea and in fine cart-before-horsing put out a proposal without any time to discuss it or refine it. It’s not Machiavellian, just inept, so I press pause and give us all time to think. There’s a lot going on and just because the government change everything every year until our heads are spinning doesn’t mean that we should do it in school. There’s always time to think. Well, nearly always, and when there isn’t, you’d better be pretty experienced at making snap decisions.  I am pretty experienced, but still spooked this week by a combination of budget reduction, accountability measures, assessment and curriculum change.

But I enjoyed a few minutes this morning watching a new teacher talking to an old stager across the yard. I couldn’t hear them but the hand gestures were magnificent. If they were devising an entirely new language, its one I want to learn. We can add it to the gestures we already use in school such as  ‘take your coat off’ (plucking your own shoulder), ‘get in a line’ (a sort of repeated flapping motion) and ‘Really? Would you like to reconsider that action?’ (hands thrust outwards combined with a Gallic shrug, outraged  eyebrows and goggly eyes, try it at home). All those being ones teachers have to avoid using when out and about among the populace in the holidays and at weekends, for fear of being incarcerated.

I think the latter gesture would work well for the West Sussex Heads, the unlikely shock troops of the Reasonable and Exasperated Tendency, as they take on the Department over the money issue. How are we to make the books balance? Employ fewer teachers for more students? Close for half a day? Turn the heating off? Stop doing all the things that have made such a difference to vulnerable  children’s lives over the last 15 years? Altogether now: shall we reconsider?

I gesture at the weather as the sun suddenly goes in as we approach break. Snow. Really? 
 
CR
13.1.17
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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115    E: [email protected]
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