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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Hello Possums

13/9/2021

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We nearly didn’t get away on 21st July. At about 0930 vans arrived to dig up the pavement and the zebra outside the Tallis moat. I have experience of this. I once couldn’t open a new school because the pavement needed re-laying so I had visions of us all trapped together for weeks, unable to open the gates, still attempting to tunnel out in early August. However, pickaxes were packed up by 1230 so everyone escaped as planned, as you may have noticed to the detriment of your hot water supply, fridge contents and remote controls.

Since then, exam results have been distributed, training undertaken, testing trudged through, timetables issued and now, a full week completed. All’s well.

Or is it? Holidays are meant to help you cope by forgetting the things you were worried about. At my age I genuinely forget what I was worried about and so write myself notes in July to remember them, which then, during results weeks, I transcribe from old diary to new. Some are diverting: ‘Pie chrts sort out’, some worrying ‘Ofsted?!!!!’, some deeply mysterious ‘Top slice 9th won’t you?’. Pie charts are the concern of the top floor of block 3, and the 9th passed without slicing required. As for Ofsted? Death and taxes, I say to you.

Worry was encouraged, though, last term. Apart from the virus itself, all messages were tinted with doom. Teacher grades can’t be trusted. Everyone will be unhappy with grades. Appeals will be unmanageable. Universities won’t offer enough places. There’s no money for recovery. The Department should know better. No child will know anything in September. And what about the National Tutoring Programme?

When the so-called Recovery Czar resigned because government wouldn’t stump up the cash they denied ever promising, some educators became transfixed with horror. Without money, how could the compulsory holiday provisions and the lengthening of the school day needed until the end of time to address the loss be financed?  What to do?

May I deal with these one by one? Exam grades were arrived at fairly and concerns could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Teachers are trusted – though some sectors have questions to answer. Universities offered places and what might have been a clearing-heavy year turned out to be nothing of the sort. Who expected money for recovery, really, or anything else? The department remains strangely led. Children know all sorts of things, perhaps not all of them useful. The National Tutor Programme? Pshaw.

Me, I always assume there’s no money for anything so trim my expectations accordingly. It seemed egregiously unfair to children and unreasonable to teachers to punish them for not being able to be at school last year by making them be there longer this year. That’s not how you develop a self-directed lifelong love of learning – though it is how you cram people for exams. It seemed to me that we would have to teach fewer things in greater depth and make sure that children understand the how as well as the what so they can pick up missed content as they grow.

Imagine my gratitude when Prof Oates of Cambridge threw himself into the debate. ‘Recovery’ is a ridiculous concept, he said. What we need is acceleration, in class, as usual. Find out how each child has been affected. Make sure reading, writing and number are solid. Reinforce core subject concepts and don’t panic. Use what you have wisely and don’t look for centralised support or guidance from soundbite politics. He might have added – especially from a man who can’t tell his blindside flanker from his attacking left-winger. Oh, what a message is there. More on this anon.

But on Planet Tallis we’ve been basking in the sun and getting used to one another again. That’s not always straightforward, especially for troubled children, so we try to make sure we remember the systems that protect everyone and have support at hand for the bewildered, agitated, confused, new and angry. Adolescence is tricky and, as Machiavelli said of the Romans, wisdom demands that difficult things aren’t made any harder if you want to get anything done. 

We’ve even kept a few of the odder Covid habits. We’re still lining up year 7 and 8 four times a day and I’ve noted a common addition to the repertoire of teachers’ silent instructions.  It’s a barely-perceptible twitch of the head, to left or right, that means ‘This line isn’t very straight and you, child, stick out messily. Align yourself with colleagues fore and aft so we may all depart in peace, if you’d be so good, pronto.’

We can be as cross as we like with government ministers and grade inflators but the day job returns like joy in the morning. I was trying to attach a mask without losing an ear while holding a cup of hot tea when year 13 Rose brisked past, clutching gladioli to gladden the heart of Dame Edna. She smiled pleasantly. ‘I want to give these to my tutor but she keeps changing rooms’ I’ll track her down, though’.  Its good to have you back, possums.

CR
10.9.21    
 
 
 
 
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Listening and travelling

19/12/2019

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A creature of habit, I have a view about how long terms should be. 15 weeks is fine for Autumn, but it should be 8 followed by 7, not what we’ve just had. I’ll complain to someone about it. Anyway, we’ve got there. T.S. Eliot’s Magi knew a bit about endurance, as they reflect in old age on the journey to follow the star.
 
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
 
And how deep the winter has been so far.  All that shouting, all that messy politics, all that dislike and distrust as darkness deepens in just the worst time of year.
 
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
 
The end of the autumn term does feel like we’ve been travelling all night, coming to school in the dark and leaving in the dark. And folly is easy to find this December. Folly in the mad consumption of Christmas, folly in austerity’s punishment of children, folly in the state of the climate, folly in leadership of all kinds.  
 
However, we take our pleasures where we may. We’ve been having a great time in assemblies this week rockin’ around the (dancing) Christmas tree, Heads of Year in Santa hats, Pastoral Welfare Team in tinsel, Parris on drums and Tomlin on the old joanna. Hearing’s only part of the experience, and it takes time before it turns into listening. We heard an enthusiastic rendering of an old hit: we listened to a slightly raucous gift of love from people whose working life is devoted to the children’s welfare. 
 
The penny doesn’t always drop quickly. I was directing traffic indoors at the crossroads of block 5 and 6 when two girls waltzed past, one saying ‘but I hate my name, I’d rather be called Val or Tina’. No disrespect to any so-called readers but I thought these were old-fashioned sort of names. It was a day before I realised she’d said ‘Valentina’. 
 
Governors visited a couple of weeks ago to give us the once-over. They talked to some BTEC students in the sixth form about their work, their endeavours and their plans. Students said ‘we love it, but there is a stigma attached to BTECs that is completely unfair’. We can’t do anything about the ridiculous way qualifications are turned into a snobbish calibration of worth but we can do something about hearing their anger, listening to their complaint and advocating for them.
 
We should understand this at Tallis. Our lives are enhanced by our deaf students and their skilled signers, teachers and advocates. It adds a dimension to our experience that some communities never know. Likewise our students for whom language itself poses a problem and for whom the world is full of discordances and jarringly inexplicable noise. People who can’t hear can still listen: people who hate noise can teach us to long for calm.
 
Not that adolescence lends itself to quietude. I joined a science class who chunter on so much they can’t hear themselves think, the concept of an unexpressed thought alien to them. They were all wittering about work but there’s only so much ‘I need a pen, have you got one, does the stapler work, why not, where’s the pencil sharpener, what did you get for number 4, why is number 10 wrong I thought it was right, what’s wrong with my formula, what’s the pass mark, I’ve stapled the wrong bits together, Miss! what does this say, what did you ask us to do?’ one can take. After a bit I called a halt and blessed silence engulfed us so we had the chance to organise a thought, to listen to our learning.
 
The advantage of the election being over, and it being nearly Christmas is that we all might get a similar break from each other in national life. Having been a Radio 4 addict since I first encountered it at 19 I’ve found news so difficult in the Trump-Brexit era that I’ve avoided it. I know a whole lot more about Radio 3 than I used to, which really does require listening. However, this ostrichy approach must end with the old year. I must return to the fray in 2020.  
 
The three kings in the poem reach their destination and don’t quite know where they’ve arrived they’ve got to
 
Finding the place it was, you may say, satisfactory.
 
But that’s not how it ends. Children are a gift and a life, exuberant, reflective or both at once is never satisfactory but wonderful, terrifying, joyful or desperate. We can’t be indifferent to children, and we can’t ignore them. We have to hear them, listen to them, travel with them and resist folly as we serve them with integrity, courage and kindness. Here’s to Christmas, and a better New Year.
 
CR
19.12.9   
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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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Pushing out from the shore

4/9/2018

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Ahoy there from the good ship Tallis. The crew are aboard and ready to sail tomorrow: I thought you’d be interested to know which flags we’re hoisting for the 2018-19 voyage?

I can’t actually go any further with this image. I like a nautical vision, but lack the knowledge to back it up. I know there’s a flag combination that says ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instructions immediately’ which is just the kind of thing that Headteachers like. I might have it made into a hat.

How were the results? Sixth form first. We’re pleased with them, and have got a bumper crop into university, art college and onto apprenticeships. Seven into Oxford and Cambridge and 2 into Central St Martins, lots of others on really competitive courses, into sought-after universities and where they wanted to go. We enrolled nearly 280-ish into year 12, which is jolly nice.

GCSE is hard to tell until we get our nationally-determined progress score in September. We hope to improve on last year’s. Some areas did super-well, some improved, some still need to improve, some were hit by misfortune.    We have a plan for all of it. Jane Austen wisely warns that Pride and Prejudice doesn’t give a description of the geography of Derbyshire and similarly this blog doesn’t go into detail about results. Look on our website for more. 

We have 18 new teachers (our total teaching force is about 120) and 22 new support staff and we all know each other now. Some works needed doing over the holidays which were done and some which weren’t done. We hit a PFI-related contractual problem with getting some ICT upgrades to classrooms and we’re sorry about that. I’ll keep you informed. There’s lots of shiny new paint about, some of it on me.

Yesterday we met as a staff and looked at the things we stand for, what we believe and how we try to do them.  Our Leadership Group is one smaller so we explained how the roles are shared out. We remembered that we want our young people to use our habits and be inquisitive, collaborative, persistent, disciplined and imaginative.  We committed ourselves again to our characteristics of being kind, fair, honest, respectful and optimistic. I talked about the work I’ve been doing on ethical leadership and the public service values of selflessness, honesty, openness, objectivity, integrity, accountability and leadership. I committed us to the ethical leadership virtues of trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. And we remembered how to use the data-collection system and met some of the PTFA. Curriculum teams spent time together planning and sorting.

Today we’ve done nuts-and-bolts stuff on classroom practice and expectations and systems, met as year teams, renewed our safeguarding training and looked again at GPDR. We are martyrs to excitement. New staff have tried to work out our frankly peculiar room numbering system and who everyone is. Planner, postcards, posters and lots of other things beginning with other letters have been gathered and squirreled away. Timetables have been printed and reprinted and all the lunchtime staff had first aid training.

Outside, education storms still buffet us all. We don’t have enough money. I did a phone interview for the Jeremy Vine show about mobile phones. Again. There’s a panic in the press about high rates of exclusion and schools’ internal exclusion methods. There’s panic about off-rolling year 11s, high rates of self-harm and London knife crime. Couldn’t we link those things? Schools without money can’t afford support services to help young people cope with themselves. That’s harder for them because all anyone talks about is results, as if that’s all childhood is for.  Shrinking police numbers and disappearing youth and outreach services leave struggling young people to chance and the market forces of the streets. As a nation we don’t care enough about them to spend enough money on them. But we care enough about Brexit, it seems, to spend our all on it.

And meanwhile the biggest injustice goes unaddressed. What do 22% of shadow cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs and Russell Group university Vice-Chancellors, 43% of newspaper columnists, 44% of the Rich List, 50% of the cabinet and the House of Lords, 55% of Whitehall Permanent Secretaries, 67% of Oscar winners, 71% of senior officers in the armed forces and 74% of senior judges have in common? All privately educated. The 7% keeping its stranglehold on the 93%. How do we fix this?

Storm cones hoisted. Time to understand the world, and change it for the better.
 
CR
4.9.18  
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Time to press pause

20/7/2018

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It is the end of the year.  Let me tell you we have had the best end of year. The greatest. So good, the top end of special.

I apologise if this sounds Trumpery but fear not. When I say we’ve had the best end of term that’s what I actually mean. I don’t misspeak and say that we have had the worst end of term, depending on the audience. What are we meant to do with this stuff?

We have surely crammed a lot into the last weeks. Bugsy Malone was huge, over a hundred in the cast and running for four nights. Some parents came every night. Primary schools come to watch the show’s dress rehearsal and we got them settled. Then we offered a toilet opportunity, 100 of them take it up and we have to start all over again.  Then the microphones don’t work – but it’s alright on the nights. The set is all-conquering. We certificate the sixth form leavers from Fat Sam’s Speakeasy, above the bar.

Our routines are a little affected. Year 10 line up for assembly tidily but I decide that occupying the hall on the morning of the first show might be best avoided. We walk year 10 in silence to the Dojo just to find the outdoor and adventurous activity briefing underway. We perform and about turn and walk up to the sports hall where muscle memory triggers crossed legs on the hard floor. It’s a surreal experience: 270 children and a dozen staff in search of an assembly. We could have kept walking until we’d done our daily mile: the yard was my last resort. 
A colleague warns me she’s annoyed, but goes for a run and cheers up. A musician works with a dancer on Motion Sickness, cello and Bach as part of our practice-based appraisal option. A leaver sells his paintings for charity. New teachers visit. Newly-qualified teachers breathe a sigh of relief at another hurdle jumped. I follow a small child rushing over the bridge in pursuit of a youth too cool to listen to her frankly impertinent cry of ‘Alice’s brother! Alice’s brother! Come to me’.

Parents contact me: some to complain that early holiday isn’t authorised, some to congratulate on specific things we’ve done or the general way of things, some to ask questions, some to advise, some helpful ideas, some impossible, but all welcome. 

There’s only one taker for Waistcoat Wednesday, though we like young Southgate who appears to value character.  Others say allez le bleus, insouciant.

We celebrate too, assemblies with certificates for attendance, endeavour, habits and character with advice on how to be a good audience thrown in gratis. Some prizes come with a pre-installed learning experience. I encounter Ms S on the yard with her form: a prize box of chocs caused 12 wrappers on the floor so now everyone’s tidying the yard.
 
And a final visit from Mr Brown’s dog. She enjoys the sleep of the just in a leadership group meeting but wakes to snuffle around a bit, startling a member who suspects one of the blameless brethren of unprecedented inappropriateness. Mr Brown himself departs. I’ll miss his comprehensive range of opinions and barely-concealed righteous fury on behalf of the nation’s young.

Which is justifiable if for no other reason than we head into the hols with no word from the School Teachers’ Review Body. This affects everyone’s budgets: discovering in September that a proposed teacher pay deal might or might not happen, or be funded will make for an excitable start of term. Perhaps they’ll put out the news on the same day as the results in the hols, in the hopes Heads won’t see it. Or next week, when we’re all having a lie down. As the unions have said to the Secretary of State:
…it is surely not unreasonable to expect that a fundamental role of government is to govern in an orderly and timely manner and not precipitate uncertainty and a sense of crisis.  The current delay fails this basic test and is entirely unacceptable.
It’ll affect school next year, and you’d expect me to be able to tell you how.

But our last assembly together was as lovely as ever. We change our world for the better year by year. Our children will have to do it for all of us when they take on the mantle of adult citizenry, but do you know something? I think we’re in good hands.
 
CR
​20.7.18
6 Comments

Unscripted

1/12/2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/9/2017

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Welcome to new readers. I write a blog at least once a fortnight and more often if I feel particularly opinionated about something. Some blogs contain useful information, but there’s a lot of that elsewhere on the website, so these pieces are reflections on the state of education as seen, 39 weeks a yea,r on Kidbrooke Park Road.
This week’s piece is in two parts. Part 1 is before our children come back to us, part 2 after. I’ll tell you how the day went!
 
September 6th 2017 part 1

We’ve talked and tidied and ourselves for two days since the holidays ended and now we’re ready to welcome our young people back. We think we’re ready now, so we’ll fling wide the gates and get the show on the road for another year. Term begins with welcomes to new starters – largely year 7 and year 12 – lots of assemblies, raucous and refined reunions, some tears (from anxious parents) and a lot of hugging. Day 1 is peak hug, which is saying something.

Saying goodbye in the summer term is a really strange experience. We have a lovely last morning, a bit of a celebration and then everyone walks away and disappears back into the undergrowth. People joke about schools being very peaceful without children but actually, they’re not schools at all without children, just big public buildings filled with emptiness and unanswered questions. Two odd ones today. What’s the difference between a noticeboard and a sound baffle? and Have we enough desks?  I’ve never given the former a moment’s thought or thought to worry about the latter. I expect it’ll all be fine. What if I’m wrong?  No-one’ll be able to hear anything and everyone’ll have to squash up for a day or so. Of all the things I lost sleep over in August, they didn’t remotely feature. Cripes.

September is simultaneously the best and worst time to do new things in school. It’s the obvious time because it’s good to make improvements with a fresh start, and the worst because the holidays wipe your memory and you can’t remember the motivation for arcane changes. How did we say we’d avoid that bottleneck? No, really? Cor blimey. A new rota, please, pronto.

I’m not so cavalier about the other questions we think about before the year begins. Why are we teachers? What are we doing it for? What do we really want for our nations’ young people? Do we have any way at all of measuring it? I’ve not written yet about this year’s exam results, apart from the information on the website here. In a nutshell? Sixth form results were jolly good again, with lots of young people getting a great boost into next thing. Year 11 results are a bit impenetrable this year, as Mr Tomlin’s Q and A document explains here: everything’s changed again and will change again again next year. In both sets of results some amazing achievements at all levels, some triumphs against adversity, some just deserts, some inexplicables, some wild inaccuracy, some re-marks. Is it too soon to hope for a new emphasis on our children as children, not examination yields?

If only other education stories in the news had been so equivocal. In what seemed like three ghastly days we had scandals about pay, exams and sixth form admissions. I expect that parents are at a loss as to what Heads think they’re doing?  May I offer a thought?  If, nationally, we can’t agree whether it’s important to hitch up our international PISA scores or worry about children’s mental health, in a system so deregulated that no one can speak for anyone else, we shouldn’t be surprised if people make odd decisions. Confused? Who isn’t? Let me get back to my sound baffles.

We’ve committed ourselves at Tallis this week to keeping our eyes firmly on our children as children, on what they need to fulfil themselves today and this year. We’re thinking about our broad curriculum, our commitment to inclusion and our diverse community. We’re thinking about persistence, discipline, imagination, collaboration and inquisitiveness. We’re concentrating on kindness, fairness, respect, honesty and cheerfulness. We’ll do that all year, every year, and we’ll teach our young people everything we know. At a time of nuclear threat and wickedness the world over, we’ll strengthen their hands through education so they understand the world and can change it for the better. 

CR 5.9.17
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Commentary

20/5/2017

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A dog came to visit me last week before helping on a Duke of Edinburgh trip. We’re pretty comatose at 0730 but as she set off for a lie-down in block one, children appeared from all over running to inspect such a novelty item.  How we enjoy diversion. Then we had two great events in a week, which helped. The first was the dance showcase on Friday, cast of thousands, exuberantly bursting and a real demonstration of a broad curriculum.  The second was a London Schools footie final at Crystal Palace, Tallis U15 v London Nautical (2-2, shared the trophy). Our boys were tenacious and determined, Tallis habits throughout. 

It was a while since I’d been to a football stadium. 39 years. Let me tell you Selhurst Park was considerably more fragrant than Ayresome Park in 1978 and I’d forgotten how diverting others’ commentaries are. A Dad in front of us didn’t let up with focused, specific, very loud tips for the team, each repeated 3 times, throughout the match.  I especially liked ‘get organised early’ and, when he’d yelled himself into a frenzy, ‘settle down’.

I’m much the same now its OFSTED season. Three years is up so the clipboarders could parachute in at any point.  This is how it goes: we wait in quivering panic by the phone every Monday-Thursday lesson 3.  (Anyone else ringing at that point risks castigation as an unfeeling oaf)  When I say quivering, I mean that we remind ourselves to quiver while doing something else. If they ring, they’d tell us they’d be there in the morning at 0800, for a day. In that time they’d check that senior staff know what they’re doing and everyone is competent and able to answer questions intelligently. Entry level, but we do practice. They watch lessons and behaviour and give our safeguarding processes a good going-over, then check that we took them seriously when last they visited. If that goes well, we stay ‘good’. If not, or if we’re better, they invite themselves for a second day. Some of you may have relations a bit like this. Or as Father Dougal said of bishops ‘They come in, they strip the wallpaper, they fumigate the place and then they’re gone’.

Why do Heads moan on about it so much, I hear you cry? There’s nothing wrong with being accountable. There’s nothing Ofsted do that isn’t a reasonable public service, but the conclusions drawn from it have, in recent years, been a bit outré. People lose their jobs after critical comments in reports. Sometimes that may be right, but really?  Inspection, like Radio 2, shouldn’t really be telling you anything you don’t know already. So my zen-like calm, which may just be old age, suffers a ruffle in the middle of the day. Truly, when the call comes, you’ll be among the first to know.  We’ve got the text ready.      

A chum stops me as we enter the building at crack of dawn this morning. ‘Are they coming, or should we stand down?’ Wish I knew. The talk is that they’re behind schedule, but then sometimes they’re bang on. This is literally 50% of what heads talk about when we meet, and I can’t do anything other than issue contradictory instructions: ‘Get organised early! Settle down!’ 

And year 11 had their final full day in school and assembly, shirt-signing etc. All very pleasant and cordial, a song from the Head of Year and a Purple Rain pianist who thanked his 270 peers for ‘accepting me as who I am, so I don’t have to feel ashamed’. 

We had a non-Ofsted visitor a bit ago who was very pleasant. We talked buildings and went for a wander around to see the hordes at work. I’ve picked up a bit of knowledge on this over the years and can have a superficial discussion on BB99, nickel sulphide inclusion and post-torsioned concrete with anyone. I showed him the hall and it was a sight to behold, GCSE Dance warming up with stretches, chairs, bowler hats etc. He hadn’t realised that dance was offered at GCSE or A level and had to assimilate this into his worldview.  I wondered, as I watched the cogs turning, how many others are oblivious to the arts, which may be why they’re not bothered about the cuts. If you don’t know what can be done, how can you regret its passing? The parents at the Dance Showcase knew, and some volunteered to help campaign to protect the arts.

Dance, like PE, reaches the parts other subjects can’t, and it’s physically good for you. Children need exercise and confidence: dance and football both provide it. At a time of obesity, worrying mental health problems among the young and shifting accountability through Ofsted and others, schools will have to balance their budgets by looking closely at anything that falls out of the Ebacc, but none of those involve physical exercise or self-expression. It just doesn’t make any sense. ‘Look where you’re running’ Dad shouted last night. Too right.
          
CR
16.5.17
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The Voice of the Sluggard

24/3/2017

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When Alice has her day in court in front of the King of Hearts in the matter of the tarts, a guinea-pig becomes overexcited and is suppressed by playing-card soldiers putting him in a bag and sitting on it. I had assumed Michael Gove had undergone something genteelly similar at the hands of the Conservatives but too soon. With muffled roar, the self-styled ‘slavish backbencher’ addresses the world (a conference in Dubai – how much?) from within the bag. ‘London schools’ success is due to aspirational immigrants’ he trumpets. They have raised standards because of their high expectations! Simultaneously, they have prevented ‘some people’ from getting places at good schools! In other parts of the sceptred isle it hasn’t gone so well! With a message for those who like to criticise immigrants and teachers equally he’s back in our ears. Good and bad at once! Tricky, eh?
 
My head still rotating on its stalk I stepped out into the corridor for un-Goved air. I exchanged cordial greetings with the young people and advised on matters from precise location of the Exams Office to the correct carriage of a basketball in an enclosed space. They smiled and grumped their way to class in this corner of world city where ‘immigrant’ really only means that you might speak more languages than the next person tripping over his feet.
 
It’s a stupid smokescreen from one of the great communicators of modern politics, part of a revisionist plot to remove the impact of funding from the legacy of the London Challenge. Simultaneously saying that non-immigrant parents aren’t involved in schools or want great things for their children while saying that immigration works in London but not in the north he only manages to illuminate the thing he tries to mask. It’s the economy, stupid.
 
People from all over the world make London a wonderful place to be no matter what, but schools don’t run on ambition and aspiration. If that was so, Oxford and Cambridge would be full of the children of the poor. Schooling for social mobility works when aspiration is generated, harnessed, transformed into a successful education by gifted and valued teachers in stable and respected schools. One of the things the London Challenge tackled from 2003 was the unhelpful distribution of those schools. Expensively, government set about four controversial policies to improve London’s education: the challenge itself, which involved school-to-school support and big data; Teach First; the academisation programme and higher expectations of challenge and support from local authorities. London children were funded well in schools who were given the cash to release teachers to share and learn across the city. It worked, demonstrated by the well-worn but nonetheless remarkable statistic that London thereby became the only capital in the world where achievement is higher than the national average.
 
What Gove doesn’t say is that before he got involved in 2010 there was investment in teaching, training and release time, for thinking and learning, and that there was money to go with the aspiration, and a plan. He doesn’t want to say that because he took the money away and, as a slavish backbencher, he has to support a range of harmful and destructive policies. There will be no release time in the future. There will be no training in the future.  There will be no sharing of good practice and no learning from the best. There will be fewer teachers, not more – 6% fewer applications this year at a time of shortage - and there will be little support from the local authorities now almost starved to death.
 
Oh, and those ‘refugees from Somalia or Kosovo’ who arrived new in our schools? They were welcomed with language programmes, counselling when they needed it, tailored curricula and intensive intervention to get them up to speed. Their parents looked for help from an education system for which they’d travelled halfway round the world, and they got it. Where the journey had nearly killed them, we helped put them back together. Now we’re taking it apart. 
 
And why hasn’t that happened for refugees from the same places who fetched up in Sunderland or Scunthorpe? Follow the money: it was underfunded schools that will stay underfunded while London schools become underfunded. It was grinding poverty with no shiny city on the doorstep. So when Gove says that success in London was solely because of the aspiration of children and their parents he says it because that comes free, in the free air of the world city – so we can do it without the visionary public investment we once had. Shame on him.   
 
In better news, the Year 13 BTEC farewell music performance by Streamlined was sublime. The Danes who visited us and built recycled models were charming. The Tallis Centre for Contemporary Arts is beautiful. The pi competition was sheer entertainment. And in my close surveillance of year 8s some of whose habits are not yet Tallis Habits, I’ve chanced upon a tiny diverting commentator whose favourite adjective is ‘tedious’. Gove is tedious. Back in the bag with him. As the King said ‘If that’s all you know about it, you may stand down’.
 
CR
23.3.17
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What are the values and principles that underpin great leadership? Could expressing those make a better education system? In this article for the ASCL's Leader magazine I share my thoughts and ask for yours on proposals for a new Commission on Ethical Leadership in Education.
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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.
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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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Open Night

26/9/2015

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​I put on the velvet jacket because it smartens up the shirt and trousers and not because I can fill the pockets with pencils, keys, phone, notes to self until I look like a walking barrel. Adding only crippling shoes and a new Director of Key Stage Three, I took to the stage at 1700 for this week’s biggest hit: Come to Tallis!  It's Open Night!  Embellished by 5 shiny year 7s, a cool year 10 pianist, subtle lighting and a flower arrangement half as big as me we talked to about 1200 people in five sittings. Then we gave them a map (KS3 is a geographer) set them free to wander and admire the lovely spaces and the friendly people and collect stickers, bits of clay, photos, pencils and what not. It all went very well.
I like to think that my innovative intervention early in last year’s open evening, which deftly reduced weeks of careful planning to chaos, was a useful learning experience for everyone. It certainly meant that this year’s planning was done secretly by the crack KS3 logistics team and I was kept locked in a cupboard until it was time to brush me down and stand me up. Hats off to them, though: it was a cracking evening, as far as I could see from my position chained to the piano.

I’d thought about what I was going to say and even went so far as to prepare a few slides. I talked about our 4 values (creativity, community, engagement and excellence), our Habits ( inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline, imagination), our character (fairness, kindness, honesty, optimism and respect), our beliefs (education to understand the world and change it for the better) and the great mantra of Coe of Durham (whom I didn’t acknowledge) that children learn when they have to think really hard. I described us as a ‘blue-plaque comprehensive school’, faithful to those visionary values.

I trumpeted our sixth form results. Top 10% of all sixth forms for progress, 160 into top universities, 40 to art college, 3 into Cambridge, our 7 year education and our three year plan. And I agonised over our GCSE results, below national average last year and this, particularly in maths (a well-staffed and stable department who do well at A level). Should I talk about GCSE or flannel? Should I go into the whole thing about tiers of entry and the inflationary legacy of the past? Should I talk about what happens when you recalibrate behaviour and set a school on a long-term journey to reconsider the whole curriculum? Or should we go smartly into KS3’s pictures of children on mountain tops and teachers in fields?

We chose our character traits together last year, and honesty is one of them. I talked about GCSE as a changing picture and was clear that we need to improve. I didn’t compare us with other schools, but with our own aspirations and hoped that parents would respect our determination and optimism. I tried to be fair. A few parents wanted to talk more, afterwards, and I was frank and open. (I could hardly be anything else, handcuffed to the flower stand.) 

Afterwards, I reflected on 3 comments. One was ‘you glossed over GCSE’. I didn’t, and I’ll talk to anyone about it at any length, but it’s not really what year 6 come to Open Night for. Parent Forum is the grilling arena. One was ‘do you ban mobile phones?’ No, but we confiscate them if they get annoying. A third was: ‘you’re very liberal here, aren’t you’, caused mainly by our relaxed uniform and chatty manner.  In that regard, we are. Do liberal values preclude quality education? When five sittings were done and I was freed into the foyer to talk to departing folks (logistics determining that there was nothing left for me to damage) only one person wanted to talk about GCSE. 

So what is the truth?  Should our GCSE results (50% 5+A*-CEM) have been better? Yes. Do we know what went wrong? Yes. Can we fix it? Yes. And there is another truth, which I found myself saying, unplanned, in sittings 3, 4 and 5.  It was that I’ve seen too many young people over the years with exam results driven by the perverse and shallow incentives of the performance tables, and that I want our Tallis future to be of deep learning and lifelong understanding. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, but it happens to be true.  

Education to understand the world and change it for the better: there are no easy options. 


CR

25.9.15 

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What do we stand for?

19/7/2015

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Headward Headington-Hail, the headmaster of Bash Street School, who loves his tea and biscuits.
It’s tweaking the community week at Tallis as we get ready for September’s reboot. We’ve gone pipless to see if removing squawking 10 times a day makes for calm, or just discombobulation and reduces the jamming of hordes in doorways. We quite like it so far, but it’s only day 4 and we’re spacious with 2 year groups down. As we might say about everything concerning adolescents – it’s too early to tell.

Fire drill has a new muster station on the basketball courts but retains the comedy implement useless megaphone. Quickest ever evacuation but a bit noisy in the early stages. What else is new? Picnic benches which we spread around experimentally. Enterprising young souls carried them to inconvenient parts of the landscape so we’ve removed them again and will accompany their reappearance with a short lecture on the uses of public furniture. And concrete them in. 

An email arrives about a young chap who helped an elderly person who’d collapsed in the street. ‘He saved her life’. I look out of the window after a pipless changeover and spot a year 10 peacock practising a new strut. Above him, furtiveness defined, an art teacher rushes out of Science with a body. Admittedly it’s a skeleton, but it has a bag over its head to disguise it. The Festival (Summer Fair) of art, dance, music, face paints and assorted stalls ends with excitable free sausages. Time for a lie down before we start again, I remark to a seagull. 

Speaking of which, earlier this year I conveyed a Personage along the byzantine route from the front door to my room. It was break and we chanced upon some small girls sitting on the floor in a corner of a wide stairwell. ‘Wouldn’t you be comfortable somewhere else?’ she inquired. ‘Not really, thank you’. They explained that they were ‘practising French before the lesson’. They’d chosen a spot where there was a bon chance of regarding a sixth former of the très jolie variety, but French is French and it needs practising, and it was cold outside. 
Imagine my concern, then, when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools started in about the crisps. Apparently an inspector was out inspecting and was going about with the Head. Students were eating crisps on the floor blocking the corridor and they didn’t move, so the pair of them had to step over ‘prone’ bodies. Ofsted are going to inspect for that kind of thing from September and woe betide any school with supine crisp-eating barbarians. 

I’m a bit of a behaviour nerd and I like things to be orderly and pleasant with only as many rules as are needed to discourage foolishness. Calm is generally good, but young people need memorable experiences so we sometimes generate a bit of noise and excitement. (Street dance flashmob last week, Tallis Festival today). Children should be polite and well-mannered and the crisps incident sounds pretty shabby. But this was all rolled up with children having to stand when teachers enter a room and a quarter of headteachers not knowing what day it was. I’ve been thinking about this on my bicycle and unpicking my disquiet. For what it’s worth, here’s where I am.

Schools are where society looks after its young. We educate them to understand the world and change it for the better, and develop the lifelong skills of inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline and imagination. We enable them to make a relationship with the ideas that define and unite us. That’s brokered by strong relationships between teachers and students, the heart and root of education. It happens in school communities which are safe and happy and where progress is good.

Beyond that, what? If I go into a classroom I expect everyone to be engaged in learning. If I go into an assembly I expect silence. If I go into the yard I expect rushing about. If I go along a corridor I expect pointless chat. We don’t call students ‘mate’ but I call everyone ‘dear’. We also don’t have HMCI’s favourite standing-up rule, silent corridor rule, tie-up-to-the-neck rule (we don’t have ties). We do have stringent rules about oppressive language and violence, and we’ve decided, all 1800 of us, that we value honesty, respect, fairness, optimism and kindness. We work damn hard to create a place where young people learn to live well in community. We enjoy ourselves together.

Sir Michael, I think I saw you on London Bridge station a couple of weeks ago and you looked pretty tired. I’m pretty tired myself. If we make all the above work, will that do? Do we have to stand up as well?         

CR 16.7.15

   

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Boxers and Lawyers

15/3/2015

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Nigel Henderson, Photograph of children playing outside, 1949–1954

You’re never more than 6 feet from a lawyer in London. I had a great email last term from one who’d had the commuter’s nightmare of being at a bus stop with a load of schoolchildren. Despite this, she wrote to offer work experience to the sixth former whom she’d heard expostulating so eloquently and accurately on Donoghue v Stevenson (about negligence, I had to look it up). ‘She formulated a perfect argument and wouldn’t let it go’ she wrote. ‘She’ll be perfect in court’. 

Last week I stood in a queue for the Palace of Westminster, how I do gad about, earwigging on the conversations behind me. A brace of English lawyers were explaining life to a Polish third. They talked about the public school to which one had sent his children and the other was about to (no, I shan’t tell you which one). The Polish person asked if it was good: chuckling in a knowing way, one said ‘well, the sixth form’s pretty good for studying, playing poker and smoking’. I mused on this while ostensibly reading a report on teacher supply. First: I suppose if children are sent off to board then they have to do these things among strangers. Second: say that about Gasworks Comprehensive and it’ll bring the inspectors running across the fields in their long black coats. How the other half (7%) live. 
Finding out what parents think is a holy grail for secondary schools and we try to bridge the obstacles of adolescence, scale and distance in different ways. I’m terrifically grateful to the parents of Tallis PTA and I’m indebted to the 84% who turned out for year 8 Parents’ Evening. I do like seeing parents with their youths. Spotting family relationships is interesting for the nosey, and seeing resemblances is fascinating. Year 8 are particularly funny. They’re way too old to sit on Mum’s knee so they usually lean in a sort-of chummy manner, while things are going well.  When they’re not they can be as huffy and flouncy as a year 12, or resort to comically guilty despondent expressions, like a Boxer dog with a mouthful of Christmas cake.

We’re pretty pleased with our new reports this term so year 8 were experimented on. That happens a lot to year 8, just as well no-one’s stuck there permanently. Parents could see at a glance where offspring were doing well by the jolly shades of green: yellow and red not such happy news. Wily parents grasped this instantaneously and couldn’t be thrown off course by flimsy excuses. ‘Very useful’ one grimaced at me as she dragged the Boxer off to account for himself in Science.

He’ll recover. I stood on the bridge today and watched Break. Children swarm and mooch, muttering and shouting. I watched a new starter rush to hug her new friend (she’s got that Tallis habit quickly) and some older boys trying to eat crisps and chase each other at the same time. A laughing year 10 was having her hair re-done. Footballs were being simultaneously confiscated and encouraged depending on the zone. At the end we did our outrageous whistling, clapping, shooing and shouting routine to hassle the hordes back into class. I explained for the fiftieth time why we’ve put part of the bridge out of bounds and thought for the sixtieth time about whether there’s a better way of doing it.  

We’ve invited consultants amongst us recently to give a couple of areas the onceover. They’ve been worth every penny, encouraging us to think in a slightly different way about the future. How do you get the Boxer dog to a state where he can’t stop himself explaining tort law at the bus stop? How do you get the reluctant 12 year old scientist onto a space shuttle?

We start with the end in mind while seizing the present reality of a child. It’s quite a balancing act: we value the person she is now while we hope to help her become someone we won’t know and may not even recognise. We do it in partnership with parents and the people at the bus stop. We let them be children while we form then into adults that might make a better go of changing the world. And the richness of our community gives them something extra so they can hope to breach the fortresses of privileges. They have to smoke and play poker in their own time.

CR

10.3.15

 

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Navigating Events

16/11/2014

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Joseph Mallord William Turner Ship in a Storm c.1823–6
Events, dear things, events.  What to make of them? Last Friday we had a day in which three of our governors talked for five hours with some young people who find school behaviour norms unbearably irksome, counselling them to do better. Monday we had the Smoothie Bike chefs creating nutritious snacks by the sheer power of the bicycle. They’re back next Monday.   

Tuesday was Remembrance. Regular readers remember the digger man who joined our silence last year. Emboldened by success and in the name of preparing young Tallis for adult life, we decided this year’s silence should be in the heart of our community on the concourse, more usually a venue for hugging, arguing and standing about. An energetic colleague hatched a plan involving miles of red ribbon. Several plans later taking mud, bins, benches, trees and the weather forecast (he’s a geographer) into consideration we decided trust and freedom were the answer.  So we stopped organising, hired a trumpeter, talked about it in assemblies and blew a whistle just before 11. Silence fell on a busy yard and canteen, everything stopped. The Last Post played for a sublime and serious silence in the heart of SE3. 
When Reveille sounded we were so pleased with ourselves we had a good old clap as the pips went for lesson 3. The red ribbon, which we eventually wound round the bridge over the yard looked a bit bedraggled later so some younger members were detailed to remove it. They were so beset with helpful advice that time ran out and small girl tidied it up alone as dusk fell.
Immediately after the Armistice Lindsey Hilsum from Channel 4 News talked to the sixth form about reportage and foreign affairs.  Her experiences were terrifyingly impressive: our questioning deeply incisive. Maybe we do learn from wars? 

That night we had Tallis Strings with Michael Bochmann of Trinity Laban. He’s been with us courtesy of Clifford Chance to give some of year 7s a taste of the violin so that, playing alongside teachers and world-class Michael they experienced the joys of music and the ensemble. At a wonderful concert for family and friends one new player said to me "It is quite hard. The strings are really close together." 

Wednesday we had workshops with a Danish colleague from the Kaospilots organisation. Their aim is to equip people to navigate through life’s chaos, and who wouldn’t want help with that? We’re using them to help think about Tallis Character to complement our Habits so that our young people may navigate whatever choppy waters are ahead for them.

We met in the evening to set up a new PTA-type organisation. 20 parent volunteers and a plate of school cakes, high hopes for partnership and a bit of fun.  I heard the call of the first mince pie of the season. Thursday was post-16 Open Evening with hundreds coming to find out about how to get a hot ticket to adult life. Much praise for our vibrancy but also the precision of our advice. Young people are rightly much more demanding and together about what they want from the future. Those of us who lurched from one thing to another in the 70s are from another era altogether.    

I’m reminded of a chance overhearing at the final celebrations of Black History Month in October. We had a lovely day and replaced the lesson change signal with startling music, generating a little dancing in the corridors. I heard a chap ask his chum ‘Is that coming through the pips machine?’ as if we have an Orwellian squirting device to move us in Pavlovian fashion or direct our every thought.      

Would it help them steer through events if we did? It’s easy to write rules but hard to keep them, as the young people in front of the governors admit. It’s easy to watch a foreign correspondent but hard to contemplate being one. It’s lovely to hear a virtuoso but hard to be one, what with the strings being so close together and all. It’s good to drink a smoothie but hard to produce one by cycling. 

Our daily life is a mixture of planned and unplanned events, challenges and opportunities. It is really hard to measure what schools do in any but the most obvious ways. We aim for education to change the world, but the world can be unpredictable, hostile and dangerous as well as exciting and interesting. That’s why we take character and habits so seriously. We want to know what best will help our young people navigate through the choppy waters of freedom and trust so they know when to be still for remembrance and when to dance to the pips.

CR 15.11.14          

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Champions

5/10/2014

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Picture
Second Lieutenant Walter Tull, seen here in his Tottenham Hotspur kit, killed in action in 1918.
Wednesday night was open night so we brushed our hair and gussied ourselves up a bit. We enjoy showing off to prospective parents and children, excited and worried about the choices they’ll have to make. About 1400 people of all ages came to look at us, which was itself rather exciting.  For those who prefer heightened reality we have open house every Tuesday, all year, warts and all. Reality, however, can be subjective:  if parents come at break-time do they see a crowd of anxiety-inducing adolescents or do they see what we see – children playing, young people chatting, racing about, occasional fecklessness, refuelling, good humour? How can we paint an accurate picture of what we can do for a person who joins us as a child of 11 and leaves as an adult of 18?  What can we offer except confidence that we teach well and take good care of them? 

Visitors this week also included a shoal of colleague headteachers and a champion. Sir John Dunford, DfE’s Pupil Premium Champion (that’s champion, as we say in the north-east, but whatever happened to Tsars?). John came to tell us about best practice in spending this money to raise the achievement of children who are likelier to struggle.  This is a public good: we would all want to be given a hand if the odds were stacked against us and it would be shocking if we didn’t do that for children. You’ll guess what I think about the money: very welcome, but it replaces money we used to get under another heading. The freedom is also welcome, but freedom in school is a relative thing: spend it how you like, but Ofsted will be all over it like a rash. The champ‘s message, however, was typically sensible and measured. How do we raise achievement for the most vulnerable? By improving teaching.  How do we raise achievement for everyone?  By improving teaching.     
How do we improve teaching? That needs time, which is money, calm and stability. It needs reliable measurements and long-term thinking.  It needs sustained hard work by people of good will and common sense.  It needs not to be skewed by ego or the prospects of fame or fortune.  It means recruiting the best, training them thoroughly, giving them time to flourish and trusting their judgment. It needs wisdom and courage in making difficult or ambiguous decisions about those for whom teaching is a poor match to their skills. It takes thinking, planning, imagination, endurance and not a little cunning. Teacher training needs to be highly competitive, based on exacting standards of pedagogical research and practice and top-notch subject knowledge. It cannot be done on the cheap and must not be downgraded. Incidentally, it shouldn’t be used as a freakshow for cheap television viewing, but just call me an old misery.   

Learners have needs too: an orderly, kind and supporting home:  being fed and watered, washed, talked to and well-slept. They need routine and shared laughter, predictability and the occasional excitement. They need direction and increasing freedom, rules to batter themselves against and shared ‘let’s-see-what-happens‘. They need structure and love in the teeth of adolescence. None of this is easy.

Listening to an assembly about Black History Month I thought about Mandela quoting Nehru’s no easy walk to freedom anywhere and the importance of our Tallis habit of persistence. Our best teachers put in the graft to make themselves inspirational and utterly, completely reliable.  They work ridiculously long hours and focus on the details that they know will make a difference to learners. Was I pleased with Nicola Morgan’s promise on workload this week? Yes, if it comes true – but we are our own worst enemies.  It’ll require schools too to wean themselves off easy answers and flashy solutions to lifelong human issues, or impossible documentation demands. Teachers need to think, to plan and to assess.  None of these are easy, and they need to be allowed to get on with it.

Our own community of endurance jogs along. We’ve finished picking over the exam results and adjusted this year’s plans. Year 12 Graphics go to look at street art, the World Marathon runners come second and we’ve made some progress on the art rooms’ floors. Our homework monitoring software is treacherously good. I think about funding. Y8 physics run up and down a lot to think about energy. A young man learns to apologise nicely. It’s World Poetry Day on the theme of the Great War: Dulci et Decorum Est to be in a big comprehensive school.               

CR

2.10.14

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Textbook Tallis

29/6/2014

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Picture
Sol Lewitt All ifs or buts connected by green lines, 1973
We are a textbook school. By that I mean that we appear in textbooks, German ones, published by Klett of Berlin. Our young people help to make the content so that it is vaguely similar to real life, and we appear in the accompanying DVD. We even did a model assembly so that German children experience the full eccentricity of English school life. The book describes life in a range of London housing, school days, even has a diary entry from a dog called Sherlock. There was a dog in the German textbook I used at school in the last century (Lumpi ist mein hund) but we were not privy to its thoughts. It’s interesting to see our lives in text book form, simple but believable.  

Tallis is therefore so well known that German tourists flock to us to check that we weren’t just made up by their English teachers. This week we had a visit from a consulting engineer taking time out from a university symposium to have his picture taken with me, and a visit from 30 12 year olds who spent the day with year 7. They sang us the song with which they start all their English lessons: ‘Let’s go to Greenwich, jump on the bus’. It’s wonderful that they think of us, fellow humans who’ve never met, every time they have an English lesson, and all the more remarkable as sadly we don’t actually teach German. Verzeihung!
The Bishop of Woolwich spent some time with us on Tuesday:  we’re not a religious school in any way, but it was nice to welcome someone who has a heart for South London. Maybe he’ll jump on a bus to Greenwich in his head when he thinks about schools. We had alumni too, talking to our year 12s as they enjoy progression week and start to learn about universities. These adult friends who’ve just left us, finishing their degrees, give great advice and love to reminisce. They remember the particular and the general about school as a launch pad for the world and the many advantages conferred by comprehensive education. They also remember food and trips and tell the young people of today that they don’t know how lucky they are.

On Wednesday I went to the Civic Centre to talk about teachers’ pay policies, an summer fixture. We talked about the challenges of the job and how we use and interpret government policy. Should we try to codify everything we do so it’s used as a checklist? How far does professional judgement and interpretation free or restrict schools? How detailed do policies have to be? Studies consistently show that performance related pay for teachers has very little effect on standards but that doesn't stop us spending a huge amount of time on it year after blessed year. We’re warned to plan for more pay appeals this autumn. Is that really a good use of education time?

The gods of public service provide the 178 from Woolwich to Tallis so I literally jumped on a bus to Greenwich at the end. Halfway along a young man who’s recently left us joined me for a brief symposium of our own on comparative education. We chatted about his new start and he offered a few tips he'd picked up. It was a general picture from a chap with particular outlook, but he remembered Tallis with pleasure, knowing the inside track on the textbook school.

We’re rewriting our own textbook at Tallis. National changes give us the chance to make a sensible unity of teaching, planning and assessment based on what we value. It might turn into an actual textbook one day – Tallis habits for Tallis praxis.  It is in textbook clarity that the real strength of a school lies:  what do we stand for, what do we value, how do we get there, annually judged against how are we doing? I’m not sure we need the dog, but perhaps we might: until recently I didn’t know they wrote diaries. 

Arriving back at school I jumped off my bus while a small gaggle of Tallis got on the front, in acceptably orderly manner. Even before we write it each one of those young people should be able to tell us what’s in the Tallis textbook and whether what we represent, illustrate and illuminate is clear enough to them. If it’s a good text, they’ll always have a bus to Tallis in their heads that they can jump on to help them to the next stop.   

CR 16.6.14

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Welcome to our world

16/2/2014

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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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    MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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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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