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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

One woman, two guvnors

23/4/2024

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OFSTED always catch me on the hop. Believing that education is about more than jumping through hoops, I usually carry on as if they don’t exist. There’s nothing wrong with inspection in principle, but it’s a snapshot of what a school habitually does. If that’s OK, the inspection should be OK. No need to panic.

Which is easier said than done. They always ring in the mornings so when your turn gurns over the horizon, you do tend to jump when the phone rings before noon on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Thursday and Friday it can ring itself silly while you giddily ignore it (they need two days). Unless, of course, you’ve fallen foul of something and they ring you from the car park to announce their immediate apparition.

When Ofsted last berthed alongside in December 2018 I was temporarily hard of hearing and had to have a deputy (Mr Tomlin, remember him?) with me in the meetings to shout their comments down an ear-trumpet. This year I went one better and was 150 miles away, visiting a school in Poole. Ms Shaldas had the pleasure of picking up the phone and asking them to bear with while I bucketed back on the train.

Inspections these days start with a 90 minute phone call, which is a very good idea. You can say what you want to say without having to gabble as you pick them up from reception. Other improvements include the abandonment of that naff implement, the clipboard. Given recent events, they were very keen to check that everyone was happy, which is a bit like a dentist asking if you’re comfortable, but it’s the thought that counts. Me, I respond badly to being asked how I am. If I’m here, you can assume I’m bushytailed with the shiny coat of a Crufts Supreme Champion, but that’s just my antisocial old-gittery, not their fault.

Anyway, it went well. They charged about inspecting maths, English, art and geography, met curriculum leaders, teachers and students, heard children read, checked attendance, behaviour, mental health support, careers, PSHE and safeguarding. They got what we’re about and took pains to report accurately using our language. You can read the report. It's heartening.  

They also talked to governors, of whom we fielded a five-a-side team. This is a crucial, unsung part of inspection. Schooling is a national communal activity, a public service. Governors represent that public interest and their job is to make sure that schools are as good as they can be. They don’t get involved in the day-to-day, but are responsible, with the Head, for setting strategy and checking progress. Ours are great: committed, intelligent, hardworking and insightful. They’re both a support and a challenge, top-notch.

​As the superb National Governance Association says:
An extraordinary quarter of a million people volunteer their time and skills to oversee state schools in England in the interests of pupils….those who volunteer as school governors and academy trustees are motivated by making a difference for children and serving their community. It is a good and important thing which they do on behalf of the rest of us, ensuring the country’s schools are as good as they can be.…..They come together in governing boards that set the vision and ethos for schools and trusts: what children should leave the school knowing, having done, and being. They make important decisions about staffing structures, what limited funding is spent on, as well as recruiting, supporting and challenging headteachers and executive leaders.
Like many voluntary organisations, the overall percentage of Black, Asian and minority ethnic participants and those under forty are too few. If you fit the bill, do consider offering yourself. You don’t have to be attached to the school you govern: while parent governors are elected, others can represent the Local Authority or be co-opted to get a good spread of good folks. Have a look here, or talk to Greenwich here if you fancy it.

I went into year twelve assembly today and gave them a piece of my mind. It was bread-and-butter stuff: largely about being polite and following our (few and reasonable) rules. Everyone needs a reminder from time to time and it was a challenging rather than upbeat message. Accountability roles are all a bit like that. Inspectors and Governors take a look, talk to people, make a judgement, tell you and expect improvement.  

A regular dose of friendly fire is helpful, welcome or not. Some heads are outraged by Ofsted and irritated by governors. Me, I love the latter, but welcome the former as best I can. I was so polite I even told them how I was, every time they asked. Year twelve, that’s how it’s done.   
​  

Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship.  If we want good citizens for the future, who’ll change the world for the better, we should all take care of our schools. 
 
CR
17.4.24
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They May Cast the Lot Against You

24/3/2023

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I want to write about the terribly sad story of Ruth Perry, the Headteacher who killed herself after an Ofsted inspection, but I don’t know how. I’ll start with Tallis life this week and see where it takes me.

Well. Last week’s top news was the Geography Department winning a national award from the PTI, the curriculum training charity from where we get the bulk of our external training. The judges were blown away by the vision, the enthusiasm of teachers and students and the vast range of extra-curricular activities. Top sausage!

We had a wonderful music concert on Monday last with superb performances. I wrote my report to Governors for the spring term and had a phone call from the Chair. We had a grilling from the people who look over our results. I talked to a former colleague who’s now a Head. I went to a few meetings and advertised some posts for September. We’ve dealt with staff absences and crises. We had a visit from the Leader of the Council, to find out about the pressures in schools and how we’re doing. There was a Governors’ Achievement Committee meeting and a touring dance performance form our friends at Trinity Laban. Year 8 have been weighed and measured. I’ve had countless cheerful conversations with staff and a couple of trickier ones. We had a virtual meeting with a school who can help us improve our TOFFS project. We’ve absorbed the fallout from some nasty incidents in the streets after school and tried to balance next year’s budget. We’ve put a few children right on some misapprehensions.  We’ve taught, marked, planned, monitored, worried and celebrated. We’ve sorted out scuffles and rumours and home lives breaking up. I’ve responded formally to a long complaint.

On one of the teachers strike days I looked out of the window on the glorious sight of a year 11s progressing coolly from one thing to another whirling his jumper around his head like a toddler pretending to be a helicopter. He may have mastered the vertical take-off by the time the examiners call.

And  throughout all this, every time the blessed phone rings in the morning I leap from my moorings. Why? Because mornings, Monday to Wednesday are when Ofsted ring telling us they’ll be in tomorrow, and we’re sort-of due. That’s worrying in itself but nothing compared to sitting in the daily meeting with the assembled clipboarders while they attend to their idiosyncratic knitting and assemble a judgement in one word or two.

And so to Ruth Perry, a victim of the system: not the only one. What are we to make of this? No-one knows what’s in the mind of a person who makes this decision, but there’s context that’s now becoming more widely known and, unsurprisingly, I’d like to offer my two penn’orth.

It’s perfectly reasonable for the state to inspect its schools, but they need to do it properly. Inspection can’t be done properly on the cheap. It should take time and combine critical analysis with expertise and support. Large expert teams should visit for longer. Areas that need improving should be explained and the school given a chance to work with inspectors on the headlines of a plan. The final report should assess all aspects of the school and be expressed clearly in a balanced, detailed and rational manner. Parents are perfectly capable of reading.         
Inspectors perform a public service and they should be valued. I understand the argument that values school leaders as inspectors, but I’m no longer convinced. Inspection is a profession, with its own expertise and body of knowledge. The consistency required to inspect a whole system cannot be achieved with an army of contracted folks temporarily out of their schools, no matter how brilliant they are. The costs – standardised language and template judgments - are too high and the quality control of rogue inspectors too weak. I’d perhaps put one serving leader on a team, to give practical advice to inspectors and support to the inspected head.  
     
Obviously, urgent and dangerous issues in a school need swift restorative action. No one would argue with that.  Some schools will get bad reports for good reasons and no one would want to prevent that. The problem with the current system is that, in the name of public accountability and easy reading, a complex and critical universal service is reduced to terminology that cannot possibly convey its fullness. As the writer of the Book of Sirach (fka Ecclesiasticus) said of judges in the second century BCE:
They may cast the lot against you…..and then stand aside to see what happens to you.
Our current system was designed before social media took over and the quality of public discourse downgraded. It doesn’t serve schools, families or children well. It fuels twitter trolls, public shamers and the sensationalist newspapers who habitually hate teachers, and perhaps that’s where Ruth Perry found herself, overwhelmed with guilt, or bewilderment, with nowhere to turn. Actually, much of our accountability system looks as though it is designed precisely for this; accountability dreams of the 90s have become fuel for the frenzy. It’s no way to improve public education.  

When we wrote the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2019 we couldn’t express the ‘wisdom’ briefly. We said that leaders needed to use experience, knowledge and insight, moderation and self-awareness, and act calmly and rationally serving schools with propriety and good sense. That’s what we need from our inspectors.  It costs, but the price of the alternative is too high.

CR
24.3.23
 
 
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Finding my mojo in Block 3

19/9/2020

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I apologise for the quality of last week’s blog. I was suffering from a surfeit of exercise and the old bones were struggling. Yesterday I rallied miraculously, which I will explain in tedious detail below. Oh yes, worth reading all the way.

The lines are going well, thank you, on Planet Tallis and must be visible from space. Youthful exuberance in the line-ups is being suppressed and the crocodiles meander across the swamp largely elegantly and without snapping at the legs of others. Some old folks are relatively enthusiastic about them and the sheer number of steps being taken has generated mild competition.

One way to get the steps up is to teach year 9 who are banished to the MUGA, a 3-minute walk away. I got down there on Tuesday to encourage the lines when a youth called me into a goalmouth. ‘Look miss, spider’s eggs’. These were undoubtedly large seeds from a nearby shrub so I asked him to think about the size of the spider who laid them. Unconvinced, he threw me a challenge: ‘You stand on them then, I wouldn’t’. 
 
Tuesday had sadly started with a terrible accident close by, the aftermath of which several hundred children saw. I was at the front gate, interrogating. A Year 8 assured me that it was all right because ‘there are literally millions of police cars and all the helicopters’. A word to both maths and English required, perhaps.

Conkers also hove into view, in some cases at a considerable velocity. We have a couple of what I refuse to call conker trees as the Horse and its Chestnut are worthy of the name. Piling children up in very particular corners of the site have focused our minds. Children have probably always behaved foolishly with conkers, but now it’s in plain sight and annoying everyone. This too will pass.

Wednesday brought a furniture tussle in the outer office here. Removers counselled us to be sure we really wanted their services. ‘There’s a shortage of cupboards. They’re like gold dust’. Cupboards? The day declined further with a reasonable complaint from a local resident about children fly tipping in her bins. Good that they were looking for a bin, actually, but annoying nonetheless when the resident was fined for poor bin habits. We grovelled. Our own training session crowned a perfect day with muffling and blurrs as we enthusiastically but imperfectly broadcast building to building.

Thursday Governors came to look at the lines (and other procedures, obviously). They declared themselves satisfied. Spilt sanitiser was categorised as a hazard – very slippy, don’t try it at home.

By this time I felt as though I was about to breathe my last. What with the cycling and the zooms, the lines and the walks, reading the matchless prose of the daily DfE, agonising over what the government like to call ‘systems of controls’ and remembering my face mask I’d seriously lost my mojo. I’m experimenting with personal decaffeination at precisely the moment I need it most and I was aged mutton rather than spring lamb as I trudged down to pick up my Year 7 class from a year group disgracing themselves with an insufficiently serious approach to lining.

When I was a deckhand in the schools of the 80s and 90s I scoffed and chortled when ranking officers said that they found teaching a tonic, a break from the other business. Not 9F3 on a Tuesday afternoon, mateys, I thought. But I got just that tonic on Thursday from two groups of sweaty and dishevelled eleven-year olds. There’s just something about the Q and A, the back and forth, the uncovering of knowledge that reduced my age by about 200 years in the course of an afternoon. Having spent six months not really being able to answer any question with any certainty I was surfing a wave at the black of Block 3: ask me another – I know this stuff.

And so I look out of the window and see a retro sweet cart and perhaps the skeleton of a pigeon cree being ferried across the yard by fine specimens of Block 2. I’ve no idea what that’s about but I don’t mind. Board marker in one hand and seating plan in the other, I’ve remembered what kept me going with 9F3, and its wonderful.
 
CR
18 9 20
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The end of time

20/7/2019

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The timetabler is wandering the corridors and waves a piece of paper at me that I’ve seen before, several times that day, to be honest. ‘I can timetable 5000 lessons but this tutor group has defeated me’. What he means is that the very last piece of the jigsaw won’t quite go in, but he lost me at 5000, wondering. Is that rhetorical?  Is it 5000? It seems an interestingly tidy number from one not prone to hyperbole. And being defeated by a year 9 tutor group conjures up another image: armed only with maths books my money would still be on the man.   

Last day of term and we are now one working day away from the start of the next school year. This is the point at which DfE announce an unfunded pay rise, of course. 2.75% from existing budgets, as if we have it just hanging around unallocated. Disgracefully cynical timing. Now the budget needs rewriting before September.

Of course, being one working day away from September 2nd only works for children – and not all of them. A level results day in August followed by GCSE and post-16 admissions. There’s a huge amount gets done over the holidays, but the non-existent time between now and then is also important as a gap, a space for assimilation and reflection, for resolution and just forgetting. 
  
But before that, how does term end? With an Art Exhibition that’s simply perfect. Images in paint, photography, textiles, sculpture, digital media of a breathtaking quality. As I go around the Biennale in Venice in August I’ll inevitably harrumph at my partner as to the superiority of the Tallis product. 
 
With a piano recital where The Instrument is celebrated among superb performers of all kinds and the new Tallis Orchestra. Top quality, and I’m moved to remark, seeing Tallis’ name high on the hall walls, how pleased he would have been that some of our young folk will go on make a living out of music as he did so successfully, in times more turbulent than even our own.

With Governors discussing strategy on Saturday morning, recommitting themselves to the school’s story of education to understand the world and change it for the better, and opposing all that would dehumanise us.
With Moon Day celebrating the anniversary of the landing – rockets, poetry, music and the much-trailed Spudnik finally managing to fire potatoes, moon songs on the tannoy at lesson change and live moon music on the concourse as the children leave us, a new song performed by Science and Music. 
    
With a Climate Change Crisis demonstration on the grass, organised by sixth form so that the younger ones have a chance to protest safely in school. The wisely noted the hypocrisy: a barbecue for year 9 rewards, and another for the staff leavers, at the same time. ‘That’s hypocrisy Miss’. ‘Yes but if you were demonstrating in town there’d still be buses and tubes running’ ‘Yes but can we riot?’ ‘No’.

With a leaver playing himself out on the guitar, surrounded by staff art.

With year group celebration assemblies, four in a row, awarding excellence, character, habits, sports, and the most library books borrowed. An outbreak of rhyming couplets from staff.

With a final whole-school assembly for everyone, words about spending time, about the right way to live and, most of all, about staying safe and coming back. With luck, time will allow us all to become better than we are, to understand and change the world for the better.
 
I signed off the year with this in 2014, teacher Charles Causley’s words:

​At 4 o’clock the building enters harbour
​
All day it seems that we have been at sea
Now having lurched through the last of the water
We lie stone-safe beside the jumping quay.   ​

​Causley talks about ‘a squabble of children’ wandering off, a lovely image. I’ve just watched ours go, from under the shelter of my Tallis umbrella, some with a bounce and a spring in their step, some filled with dread for the long weeks without the safety of school. Safe home, safe return.
 
And after that? The place will be clean, ready and open for the training days in September and on Wednesday 4th our children return to us. We will be utterly changed but absolutely the same. It’s a glorious privilege. 
 
CR
19.7.19
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Auld Lang Syne

12/1/2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21/10/2016

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October blows towards half term and I take a turn outside to check the elephants and the miasmas and the general views (as Stevie Smith once said). The view from the bridge is diverting, watching the Brownian motion of folks as they rush about carrying news or just chasing each other. Heading back to another meeting I’m surrounded by a group at scuttling height, half a dozen shepherded by a smiley adult. I investigate their purpose. ‘We’re in transition’ they tell me and I have to laugh. ‘What?’ ‘We’re going to Transition, it’s our last Transition Group’. I suggest that they’re in transit to Transition which amuses at least one of them as they rush past. Transition’s what we do for the little ones who might need a hand settling into our big community: looks like it’s worked with this bunch.

I muse about this as we do our second big set-piece of the season, Sixth Form Open Night. We’re a huge sixth form and a big importer, so it’s important to give local and distant sixteen-year-olds a gander at what we offer. Head of Sixth (by his own admission dressed like an accountant for the gig) and I (dressed to match the tablecloths) give it our rhetorical best.  He’s inclined to the expansive but assures me he’s timed himself and so he has, 20 minutes delivered four times faultlessly, graphs, charts, the lot. The stars, however, are the extant sixth formers who charm the crowd. Ellen’s been with us since she was a rusher and chaser, subtle and stylish in black and applying to Oxford, couldn’t do it without Ms McG and the History department. Grace is newer, in a sort of transition too, been here seven weeks and already running the show. She’s got a lab coat over her Tallis Habits tee shirt and dashes off between speeches to check up on science.  

As we manage this year 11 to 12 transition we try make sure that young people don’t make the wrong choices for the wrong reasons. We don’t keep everyone here: our sixth form is largely A levels and solely level 3 courses, so some of our own go elsewhere to get the courses they need. Some want to spread their wings. A few, however, are persuaded by parents to move on when they’d rather stay and this worries us. One or two leave us every year to go to grammar school sixths over the border, which really doesn’t make sense. Our results are excellent and our value-added is outstanding – top 15% of sixth forms anywhere. Stay with us and you get a grade higher than you might expect, including in the grammar schools. Do well in a comprehensive school sixth form and admissions tutors at competitive universities love you. Our people make better undergraduates than those from independent and selective schools because they have their work habits embedded for themselves, in their own habits and minds. However, it’s hard for some parents to see beyond the brand hype of grammar schools and they worry that their beloveds might lose the chance to get ahead of the game. We find new ways of explaining it, so we’ve two enormous banners showing where last year’s year 13s went to university. It’s pretty impressive but a pity that the architecture of the foyer gives you a crick in your neck if you try to read them. 

Chair of Governors wanders around talking to staff between presentations and demos. He wants to hear their thoughts on workload and how the new day feels. We’ve changed the transitional parts of the day; added time to registration and separated the rushers from the moochers in two shorter lunchtimes. Governors worry when staff say it feels exhausting: I worry too. It works for the children but it’s harder on the adults, so we’ll need to keep an eye on it.

Friday is Black History Month Own Clothes Day. The year 10 girls who’ve organised it are clear, committed and very organised and their doughnuts sell out in minutes. A group of boys come to talk about some work they’re doing with Barclays and ask if they can hold a talent show. They all impress me: confident, articulate, brave. But I’ve stuff to worry about: money largely, and the pressures of cyberspace, body image and street life. How we sustain what we do and ease transitions for all our children. How we offer education for the hand and the heart as well as the head. How we change the world for the better.
​
Good job its half term, a transitional point to clear the mind. And new drains to come back to!
CR
21.10.16
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A visit from the Three Kings

5/12/2015

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Tai-Shan Schierenberg The Adoration of the Magi, 2012
Quite a bit, actually since we last corresponded. Community Day last week where all bets are off: events, dear boy, rather than the usual curriculum. Trips out (we are not afraid) theatre companies, Gangs Against Violence, debating, life at work, revision, yoga, spacehoppers, legacies and UCAS. Then a training day: curriculum, standardisation, Prevent, attendance. Business Manager goes to the y10 council and they collectively despair about the shape of the canteen again. A Public Intellectual comes into grill Oxbridge candidates who emerge a little charred round the edges. Undeterred, one offers the lower school a lecture on The Meaning of Life. Governors’ Learning and Achievement Committee hear six teachers talk about their areas of expertise. Parents' Evening is year 10, the crucible of adolescence. Three official visitors this week introduced at the staff briefing. One we know, one we're getting to know, one we didn't know at all before now. They point out things to us helpfully, usefully, sometimes irritatingly. 'Such and such is great, better than I thought it would be!' delivered cheerfully. Say what? Did you think us barbarians? 
The third category visitor is from Sanctuary Buildings, on an immersion visit. This great scheme puts civil servants into schools for three days to see what kinds of legs policies have and what schools are actually like. I’ve had a few over the years largely, in the north east, from the Finance and Pensions department in Darlington. Useful, but…. This week’s was from Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism which was apposite as we’ve been considering our Prevent duty. We were glad to talk and learned from each other. A contribution to the system!
 
We lay on the full Monty for visitors – trips round the building, meetings, shadowing students, party bags to take home – including this time a vuist to my own classroom where the civil servant enjoyed cutting and sticking on comparative religion. (I still see Pritt as a classroom luxury : Gloy used to ruin exercise books.)  ‘How studious the children are, how confident.’
 
More policy legs in discussion up in town next day, explaining how progress measures feel on the ground, how accountability bites. I’m working up a snake-in-the-grass image. How we prefer the predictable to the unfathomable, the stable to the whimsical. The legislators listened so were also issued with an open invitation to the good ship Tallis.
 
Both Deputies were out training, one on mental health and one on assessment, though a combined session might be very useful. Returning to the mothership, I received the command back from the unflappable F. He’d navigated smoothly through the morning, but the afternoon was all excitement. A lunchtime delegation to complain about a peer who’s become deranged with power since joining the Police Cadets. He’s been threatened with the removal of his hi-vis jacket. A welcome return of a colleague from illness. A training session on dyslexia. Preparation for a hearing. A brainstorming session, teachers and students, on branding Tallis character: we’ve no time to do it in and no money to do it with, but it’ll be great. 
 
Downstairs, fever pitch. Hundreds auditioning for We Will Rock You prepare for stardom at the south end of the dining room. At the north end The Big Book Sale could take over Hay on Wye. The year 9s in charge have baked a sorting hat and made notices. One lurches towards me despairingly and takes his coat out of his mouth (we have rules about that sort of thing) to complain. ‘ I’ve been REALLY ill for THREE days but I’ve got 100% attendance for three YEARS so my mum won’t let me stay at home.’ I congratulate him on his persistence and advise him to drink more tea. He droops even further: ‘my Mum MADE me some tea in one of those hot coffee cups but I FORGOT it so I’ll have to drink it when I get home. ‘
 
At the end of the week, some hard decisions. Comes with the territory. 
 
Best of all it’s red tags week now the trees are up. Everyone writes a message and the lunch time ladies kindly hang them on the trees. For the last two years some of them have had to be censored but this time there’s only one unsuitable joke. I read some as I pass. One is ‘I hope for good enough GCSEs to get into the sixth form and peace in Syria.’ Perfect, the personal and the global from a young person who values his own future in a safer world.  Education to understand the world and change it for the better.

CR
2.11.15
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Welcome to our world

16/2/2014

2 Comments

 
Picture
Ed Ruscha, The Act of Letting a Person into Your Home, 1983
We have open mornings on Tuesdays and sometimes prospective parents come several times to have a look. They are taken round by enthusiastic year 8s who can extend a conducted tour to epic length, despite many classrooms being really quite similar. They tow the unsuspecting around this enormous public investment and wave an airy arm at landmarks of purely personal significance: ‘this is where I have English’, or ‘if you stand on the bridge here you can see how long the sandwich queue is’ or ‘I saw some people doing parkour here but I don’t know how you get picked for that’. These 12 year olds take us for granted and suppose that all schools are as new, beautiful and spacious as this, our second home. The parents and their 10 year-olds get to see us at work, warts and all, nothing to hide. This is common practice in comprehensive schools. 
We are looked at a lot, and we take that for granted too. The Director of Education visited us last month.  We had a walk around and found the Head of Maths keeping an eye on his kingdom at lesson change. Unrehearsed, we had a detailed conversation about our habits of mind project and the enthusiasm our students show for inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline, and imagination. On the way back we talked about OFSTED  – but that particular entrail-reading is unsuitable for a newspaper column. I presented her with a Tallis umbrella for the current deluges. 

Last night was Governors and we powered through our agenda in 95 minutes, because of the amount of sub-committee and visiting work our team do. We talked about how best to represent our community and thought of some more ways to encourage a wider range of people to take part. Three members of the sixth form came to talk, and presented a better scheme for student representation. Another friendly professional from the local authority came to train governors in inspection skills.    

Parent and student surveys, commercially commissioned, tell us that we are doing a fine job.  The performance tables paint a healthy picture. Detailed national achievement analysis is covered in good green boxes with hardly any bad blue boxes. This half term I have drafted a new Behaviour Policy which staff and governors are currently looking over: we’ll meet with parents to talk about it after half term and include their views too. Yet the papers are full of advice for us. The secretary of state tells us that children should be punished by being made to run round a field (we don’t punish them with fitness) or write out lines (there’s proper work to be done in detention) or pick up litter (obviously). The former Behaviour Tsar’s advice is re-peddled: teachers should know children’s names (you don’t say), prepare their resources in advance (strewth) and use praise as well as reprimand (give me strength). Another politician describes public servants as having unaccountable power and tells us (reminds us, actually) that parents can trigger an inspection. There’s not a Head to whom this is news. 

We are correctly, accountable, every hour of every day. To OFSTED, the Local Authority, governors, our communities, parents and one another. Teachers support and challenge one another in equal measure and a staffroom can be unforgiving to someone not pulling their weight. I’ve never met a representative of a teacher union who wants to keep the wrong people in classrooms or a lecturer in education who wanted to train teachers badly. We live like the man in Amos who ran from a lion but was met by a bear, who escaped to the house, rested a hand on the wall and was bitten by a snake.  We observe, scrutinise and plan for improvement every breathing day and yet we’re castigated as if we were unprincipled oligarchs. How did this happen?

It is the children to whom we account and mustn’t let down. While we make account of ourselves the daily work goes on. Geography lessons are taught, basketball teams play, year 9 astronomers see Jupiter’s moons, next year’s timetable is written, drama, dance and music perform at the Cutty Sark (and appear on Woman’s Hour), ICT is tussled over, money is worried about and angry, distraught or confused young people are helped to make sense of the world.

We don’t need telling to be accountable.  We don’t know any other way to live.

CR

13.2.14       

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Days are where we live

19/1/2014

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Picture
Artist Ed Fairburn creates portraits on vintage maps. You can find out more about his work here.
Monday we have visitors from the Singapore Ministry of Education, to talk with us about citizenship. We discuss the state of the world then hand over to the Year 7 Council. These young citizens, beautifully trained in formal meeting structures, talk to our visitors about everything from lockers and zebra crossings to collaboration and persistence. Everything is of importance to them and nothing escapes their scrutiny. They are at ease with abstract virtues, lavatory behaviour and everything in between. Our guests love them, and no one mentions PISA. I discover two interesting facts: Singapore schools don’t have assemblies and Ministry officials are seconded from the ranks of Headteachers: the latter an unsung factor in their success, I’ll wager.

Tuesday year 10 are thinking about work experience. It’s not the work that worries them but how to get there, what to wear, what to call the people in charge, how they’ll find food. Things we make look so easy in our idiosyncratic communal home. Year 7 are encouraged to eat more fruit, a second batch of non-swimmers are signed up for sessions and are excitable about goggles. Governors consider their Public Sector Equality Duty and worry again about who supports children in need when school’s out: representatives of the biggest group of citizen volunteers in the country, scrutinising our work.   
Wednesday is sixth form council. They reminisce about life lower down the school, how to encourage that happy absorption in interesting events in their younger colleagues.  ‘Fairtrade Week!’ one cries, others groan. I make peace with a young chap who acted foolishly and apologises graciously. Year 12 have mock results and a parents’ evening. It’s lovely to see personal traits we know well reflected in parents.  We see different faces of the child: one who’s painful at home may be all charm at school, and the opposite. Parents want to know what we’re doing and we are pleased to be accountable. Year 11 have mock exams but the weather gods are only partially kind to PE while the sports hall is full of anxious desks. All 21 staff who took level 1 BSL have passed. More ukeleles appear.

Thursday we review our new improved lunch queuing system, instigated by communal outrage from the small about pushing in from the large. We face the challenge of a dining room built without space to train The Great British Queue of the future. Young people simultaneously demand and resist change, and support and complain about decisions. They want to know why we decide as we do.  We’ve brought the queue indoors and it’s quick but loud.  A slow-loading computer poses problems for the year 9s presenting assembly: they react with aplomb. I read OFSTED’s latest guidance so to predict their scrutiny when it comes.     

Friday is observing in history. Year 8 students tussle with the ending of the slave trade in Britain. Despite complexity, they articulate honourable and economic reasons. They understand pragmatism and moral imperatives and contort themselves across chairs the better to make their points in group debate. I talk to a man about door-stops who thinks children are much bigger than when he was at school. Are they? Everyone over 12 looks tall to me. I give the Director of Education a Thomas Tallis umbrella.

So ends a week that began on Sunday with teacher licensing on the news.  I was irritated that politicians and press think this might annoy or challenge us. We are analysed and examined from every angle all the time and none of that as closely as we study ourselves.  At least it’ll expose the old lie that there are thousands of incompetent teachers skulking in the staffrooms of the nation.  I planned to mull it over in church, but the sermon was too interesting.

Monday of week 18 we start again.  Notwithstanding alarums and excursions, about 3,500 lessons will be planned and taught, 40,000 pieces of work created and 8,000 or more lunches cooked.  An inestimable number of pens will have run out and homework sheets been glued in upside down.  We’ll have theatre trips, job interviews, residential visits and visitors from 6 countries. 

Tallis spends another week fulfilling our responsibility to the community’s young under the public’s eye.  Changing the world, one day at a time. 

CR

16.1.14

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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115   F: +44 (0)208 331 3004   E: [email protected]
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