Category: Knowledge

Briefing: Can Schools Save Democracy?

25/4/2024

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

Sara Khan says:

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

-- The Khan Review, March 2024

Citizenship was introduced into the National Curriculum in England in September 2002. It gave all pupils aged 11 to 16 an entitlement to education citizenship. The 2013 curriculum specification for Citizenship defines the ‘purpose of study’ thus:

A high-quality citizenship education helps to provide pupils with knowledge, skills and understanding to prepare them to play a full and active part in society. In particular, citizenship education should foster pupils’ keen awareness and understanding of democracy, government and how laws are made and upheld. Teaching should equip pupils with the skills and knowledge to explore political and social issues critically, to weigh evidence, debate and make reasoned arguments. It should also prepare pupils to take their place in society as responsible citizens.

It aims to ensure that all pupils acquire a sound knowledge and understanding of how the UK is governed, its political system and how citizens participate actively in its democratic systems of government. It also covers the role of law, justice, volunteering, and political debate.

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

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

They are, in their entirety,

Mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and without faith
The Rule of Law
Democracy
Individual Liberty

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

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

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

The Khan Review observes:

In previous reports, there has understandably been a focus on identifying the ‘shared values’ that bind us together as a nation. This has often been a hotly contested topic and continues to generate debate and division. At the same time however, the teaching of such values have often been viewed positively within schools. The duty placed on schools to promote fundamental British values including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and belief have been widely embraced.

Whether bound by the National Curriculum or not, the OFSTED/FBV imperative means that most schools will have some work going on to promote democracy. These may be any or all of the following:

In the classroom:
- Work on classroom ground rules and processes
- A focus on oracy and quality discussion
- Properly done group work in which children learn how to express views, find agreement, disagree cordially, persuade and resist oppression, injustice and prejudice (though this is very hard to do and has fallen out of favour in recent years).
- Analysing and interpreting information including the veracity of statistics and news
- Specific teaching on freedom of speech and what that means
- Discussing current affairs – from A level Gov and Pol to watching Newsround in tutor time in year 7.
Whole-school:
- Student voice in school or year group councils
- The opportunity to become activists and allies on particular issues
- Mock elections (with or without compulsory secret voting)
- Debate training and competitions
- Student leadership opportunities
- Leadership training using political simulations such as World Peace Game
- Compulsory representation such as Tallis’sJury Service

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

So that’s the background.

The Khan Review made some recommendations for the Department for Education. They should:

Put forward legislation that requires protests to be at least 150m from school gates (with the exception of industrial action pickets). This is a reaction to a very challenging series of incidents in Bradford.
Establish a Cohesion and Conflict Unit which:

Brings together existing advice to schools such as the teaching of fundamental British values, dealing with political impartiality and others, while also providing clearer guidance and resources on other areas of conflict including when protected characteristics conflict and other controversial issues. The unit should issue guidance, training materials and resources to support schools in teaching what it means to live in a diverse democracy, how to manage opposing and different opinions, how to debate well and the importance of critical thinking.

This unit should support schools and teachers when being threatened or harassed, including immediate support for ‘flashpoint incidents’. Data on these should be collected. It should also collect cohesion data to assess the progress of key indicators such as segregation – ethnic and other – and other relevant issues. A new Office for Social Coherence and Democratic Resilience (OSCDR) would ensure this.Hmmmm.

I must observe that the DfE’s forerunner, the Department of Children, Schools and Families required schools to undertake community cohesion work, which was inspected by Ofsted from 2007. I was on the national reference group in 2009-10 and have a photo of me talking to Gordon Brown on the very matter. The Coalition immediately disbanded both policy and group ‘to let schools focus on their core mission’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I was asked for a Civics Manifesto (which, inexplicably, no one did,) I’d suggest:

making the Citizenship national curriculum programme compulsory in all schools in KS3 and expect that all students are offered it as an option as well as its content being embedded in KS4.
enabling this by adjusting the accountability measures to force the issue by including Cz as an EBacc alternative to History or Geography. The content is academic and serious. (as long as the EBacc zombies on, of course)

These would need to be hand in hand with national developments: politicians should be mindful that their every act is an example to children and they should not bring democracy into disrepute. And while I’m at it, news media independence and balance should be strengthened and legislation introduced to protect it.

Daniel Chandler’s fabulous book Free and Equal covers this much better, if you fancy a long read.

So, if you’re ever stuck in a lift with someone who asks you what schools are doing about the state of the world, do tell them this. Of course, if we had a national understanding of what schools are for, these problems might be solved. Ask them to work on that, then send them to me.

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

CR
25.4.24

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What’s a Good Education?

27/1/2024

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I was part of a panel at a leadership gig this week, offering punditry on teacher recruitment and retention and its link to school culture. Obviously, I speak from experience and hunch, not with any research behind me. I can tell people how we set about it here and whether that appears to be successful or not. If we only knew what success is.

There was a chap from one of the thinktanks beside me. He must have known a bit about the research but would only commit himself to saying that we’ll get and keep teachers if we pay them more. Duh. The Pundit’s Code required me to say ‘yes, obvs [but we’re here for 45 minutes] so here’s a few other thoughts’. On reflection, perhaps we should have, hall and all, sat in silence for the duration in protest. Maybe we should all refuse to join in any further discussion until the tenners start rolling back in? I’m not sure the government care enough about our opinion to make that a stance worth taking.

So I held forth on subject-based CPD, attempting honest and open leadership, communication, humane relationships, reliable systems and a bit of give and take. Most of all, on treating teachers like the adults they are and allowing the respect due to their scholarship. Which leads me inexorably back to the time and money trope you’ve had before. Cash-strapped institutions who spend most of their (public) money on people are exhorted to sweat their assets, as another pundit coarsely put it. If you increase productivity, you need fewer people so you save money.

The problem with learning, from teaching reception number bonds to ten, through algebra and poetry to finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, is that real productivity depends on the immeasurable and imponderable. Educators of all kinds need time to think, research and experiment. It's hard to know how many of the things we do in school actually improve children’s learning, as opposed to their examinable knowledge. We don’t test them in their mid-twenties or forties to see how much of it has stuck and what practical use it’s been, to prosperity or happiness of the individual or society.

On my way to the tube I was mildly inconvenienced by two school parties. One was a primary school, charmingly arranging themselves up an escalator with great pleasure. The other was a group of – I reckon – year nines in the middle of town. They were enjoying a reasonably orderly saunter despite the clipboard chap at the back shepherding them exasperatedly, like a six foot border collie in a mountain jacket. ‘Get a move on, will you? We haven’t got all day, we’ll be late.’ I picture the politicians in the Department a bit like that, obsessed with their legacy, hassling schools into frenetic, misguided priorities. Or perhaps that shows my age: nine Secretaries of State in nine years doesn’t suggest they’re remotely bothered.

Which take me back to number one on the list of blogs I imposed on you last time. It’s the vision for an education system that we lack. We have mechanisms and expectations. We even have processes and evaluations, but they’re all feeble because we don’t know what we want. Coughing loudly and shouting ‘look over there instead’ we devise cheap ways of measuring the blindingly obvious without managing to turn our heads towards the bigger, difficult and expensive questions.

American philosopher Michael Sandel has been kindly reading me his book Justice. He develops an argument about the difference between what’s right and what’s good, the impossibility of neutrality in deciding big issues and the importance of narrative in the choices people make. I thought about it all the way home and much of the night. Outcomes-focused judgements about schools are based on what’s right for children inside this funding envelope, and, perhaps, their right to an education that sets them on the path to adult life in this society. But it's not about what constitutes a good education. That would be a vast and difficult discussion leading to education costs of a different dimension to the current provision. If we really wanted schools to be models for a better society and centres of learning and human development we’d never run them like we do. Schools would be palaces, and expert teachers, trained for years, paid hugely more than we do now.

You’d expect me to have been fascinated by the Michaela prayer controversy which is really interesting for precisely the reasons above. Banning religion in school is superficially very attractive. Schools that are not faith-based, like society, are expected to be neutral about religion. In order to give religions equal status, its way easier to ban ‘em all than to actually tussle with them. But religion is part of the human experience and children go through phases of faith development. A religious teenager may cling to the identity that religion offers as part of adolescent self-understanding. Schools need to be aware of that and try to help them think through their beliefs, in the context of what it takes to build a better world.

Prayer needs to be facilitated and supervised so that thinking and developing process can happen in the safe space that is school, not driven underground, or out in the yard, or forced into oppositional demonstration. Doing prayer properly in a secular school takes time, money and sustained thought. It can go wrong in many different ways, but so can maths. Enabling young people to think about their deepest motivations is part of school. We can’t get away with banning whatever is inconvenient and skating furiously over thin ice, like the Austerlitz scene in the new Napoleon film. It doesn’t end well.

We need to work hard, collectively, on what constitutes a good education. Without vision the people perish and children are particularly badly served. How can we describe what we value and hope for in the swirling joy of schools? How can we tell the story so that it is impossible for a civilised nation not to fund it properly? How can we actually understand the world, and change it for the better?

I’m not done with this. So much for the tidy list!

CR
26.1.24

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96 Facts in History Paper 2

8/6/2023

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Carrying parsnip soup through the canteen door I became tangled in historians seeking last-minute verification. What was the Marshall Plan? When was the raid on Cadiz? Thankfully Ms History was at the ready with perfect short answers, which is how I know about the 96 facts. The human brain’s a mysterious thing so while most of the youths will have forgotten 90 of them by now, Ms knows ‘em all. ‘She’s like a machine’.

Hmm. Remaining stoical and optimistic means I avoid thinking about some stuff, from US politics to an unnerving dream about a giant thistle in a car. I’ve tried to ignore Artificial Intelligence thus: too technical, potentially boring and located somewhere in the future. But on a train down France last week I read a leader in the FT and, crikey, I’m thinking of little else. In fact, I apologise for not bothering you about this before.

While the Internet, mobile phones and social media bemused schools in their time, generative artificial intelligence knocks them into a cocked hat. Humanity’s response will shape the future and struth, schools should be steadily panicking about this without delay.

Forgive me if you’re already expert on this generative AI growing like Japanese knotweed. Building on published data, information, books, journals, wikis and social media it literally predicts the next word on any subject. This has mega-implications not just for learning, but the development of thinking citizens. And while folks are happily speculating on the drudge-work it’ll take off us, I’m captivated by two serious problems.

AI can fabricate facts and make up links and references. These ‘hallucinations’ or ‘confabulations’ give plausible-sounding falsehoods which are then repeated and become part of what people think is true.

Second, AI builds on what we already know, so stuff we’re trying to eradicate – the colonial past, misogyny, whether Joe Biden won the election or not – repeat endlessly. It’s not a tool designed to change the world for the better.

A relief, then, that the doughty Department for Education has produced a position statement. A bit bland, maybe, but usefully covering stuff about AI opportunities and challenges, exam malpractice, data protection, cyber security, protecting students from harmful content and potentially freeing up teacher time.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. I like a nicely-turned phrase in a formal document and the following gripped my by the throat. The DfE note that AI

content they produce is not always accurate or appropriate as it has limited regard for truth and can output biased information.
is not a substitute for having knowledge in long-term memory
can make written tasks quicker and easier but cannot replace the judgement and deep subject knowledge of a human expert. It is more important than ever that our education system ensures pupils acquire knowledge, expertise and intellectual capability.
can produce fluent and convincing responses to user prompts [but] the content produced can be factually inaccurate. Students need foundational knowledge and skills to discern and judge the accuracy and appropriateness of information, so a knowledge-rich curriculum, is therefore all the more important.
can create believable content of all kinds
content may seem more authoritative and believable

And there’s an Office for AI squirreling away within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. You’ve got to ask – who’s feeding it? Do they know it’s there?

Thank you, Secretary of State. Here are what’s on my mind, though.

Schools have to be committed to the highest standards of knowledge, quality scholarship and truth as AI develops, to avoid misinformation taking root in teaching and learning.
This is particularly important when a crippling teacher shortage leaves isolated, young or unsupported teachers creating lessons content alone (not at Tallis). Especially those misled by DfE trends such as the sponsoring of online lessons through Oak National Academy. If you get used to downloading off-the-peg lessons, you’ll need to check the facts.
Students of course need to learn about and work with AI, but they also need to understand its dangers and the debilitatingly skewing effect that sustained falsehood has on human society. We’re already seeing this.
The ridiculously named ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ (what other sort is there?) is insufficient protection. As long as schools are cheaply assessed by exam results and snapshot inspections, some schools still face a perverse incentive to cover large amounts of knowledge superficially. Combined with a serious teacher shortage, the temptations of AI pose a real risk to the integrity of what children are being taught.
Young people devote HUGE portions of their waking hours to AI-generated content. Adults, teachers and policy-makers need to understand and work very hard to bridge significant generational differences.
Exams may be OK while they remain as memory tests fulfilled in handwriting in an exam room. Unconsidered absorption of AI information, though, is a risk to independent student learning. Coursework becomes a nightmare and mechanised marking – cheaper for the commercial exam boards - could install hallucinations at the heart of knowledge. However, our examination system’s glued to university entrance, so the academy needs to think about this. Which it is.

So, what to do? At Tallis we’re writing a developing policy and thinking about the big issues. As the leader in the Financial Times 27.5.23 said:

Every technology opens exciting new frontiers that must be responsibly explored. But as recent history has shown, the excitement must be accompanied by caution over the risk of misinformation and the corruption of the truth.

Blimey. Anything but dull, then. Do tell me what you think.

CR
7.6.23

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Step Inside

20/1/2023

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I was at a meeting with civilians where the teachers’ strikes announcement generated tutting and eye-rolling. Intervening would have prolonged an event form which I needed to scuttle at the end, so I kept my peace. Or I think I did. Who knows what the body language or the studious avoidance of eye contact may have conveyed? It did make me think, however, about how to explain the action, so I thought I’d experiment on you, dear readers.

Today brought another meeting where we chewed it over, a professionals’ gathering where the image of the Front Door is often conjured, so I thought I’d press this rather exhausted metaphor into service.

Schools, like other services, are sometimes called the Front Door because that’s the place you go, the one-stop-shop, if you’re lucky, to get the support and the entitlement the state has decreed, devised and funded. The GP surgery is the front door of the NHS, the desk sergeant is literally at the front door of policing and the school is the front door to education. Our Tallis front door is rather nice, approached under a canopy with brightly decorated pillars and sometime festooned with flags for whatever we’re celebrating. We hope this is a welcoming place, where our warm friends behind the desk will try to meet your every need.

The school is the front door to the belief in and investment of the state in the future of our young. It is the place where accepted and verified knowledge is taught and the community where acceptable social norms are transmitted. With luck, it’s also a place where a good experience of growing-up may be gathered and from where a happy adult life may be approached. That’s quite a lot for one building, let alone one door, to represent.

It is reasonable, therefore, for the tax-payer to expect that, once the door is broached, the service behind it will be top-notch. In the case of a school, that should be everything that the good parent would want for the child, in loco parentis. It’s a contract made between education, the state and the population. We will take your money and your dreams and use them wisely and well. We will look after your children as well as you could possibly want, and do our very best for them. This compact is the foundation stone of our system. We fail in our duty if, once the shiny front door is opened, the education and the experience behind it is patched together, fragile and unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. It's no way to run a health service and its no way to run a school.

So teachers are striking because they have run out of other options to bring the parlous state of our service to the nation’s young to government’s attention. They are not just striking about pay, though that is a huge part of the problem. Poor pay for a highly trained and skilled graduate profession working in high-pressure settings means that fewer and fewer people want to do the job. Even a recession, historically the teacher workforce’s friend, hasn’t worked this time. The workload and remuneration are so out of kilter with other career options that no one wants to be a teacher. Under 60% of secondary recruitment targets have been met this year in most subjects, again, in a ninth out of ten years of missed targets. Only the first lockdown brought an upsurge in interest in teaching as a career, and that quickly failed.

And last year’s pay rise, announced in the last week of term without funding to pay it? It nearly broke us all.

Workload and burnout are significant pressures of the job. Each is inextricably linked to funding, and this is the root of the strike action. Because there aren’t enough teachers, the teachers we do have have to shoulder more of the burden. If, for example, and this is not the case at Tallis, a school can’t get maths teachers and so must rely on graduates in other disciplines to teach maths, that’s a triangle of problems (maths teachers love triangles). The French or PE or whatever teacher will find the teaching stressful, the Head of Maths will find the constant setting-of-work for a potentially floundering colleague exhausting and the children will inhabit the teacher’s anxiety, every single lesson. Behaviour will be scratchy, outcomes poor and enjoyment absent. The teachers’ strikes aren’t just about pay, they’re about recruitment and retention, SEND promises made that can’t be kept, unpalatable choices made to keep or scrap curriculum areas or behaviour support, no educational psychologists or speech therapists and six-month waiting lists for mental health services for desperate teenagers.

They’re also about better funding and a way out of crisis management and the constant attrition of the things the reasonable citizen believes we have promised and expects us to do well. It’s a crisis a dozen years in the making.

But last night was Year 7 parents’ evening, the contract in motion. I perched as ever near the front door (in many jumpers and then my coat), ready to chat helpfully and absorb complaints. I heard about a child who’s lost four jumpers so far (we’ll provide a stock of pre-loved garb) and another who’s only lost his Spanish book (we have spares). But most of all, I heard compliments and thanks from parents who trusted us with their beloved, who decided that we meant what we said about a broad curriculum and an inclusive vibe and are grateful and happy for what we’re doing. They were glad they’d found our door.

Given the prevailing gloom of the foregoing, it was a lovely experience. I just hope that we can find the funding to keep it all going, and to keep our promises. Our door is always open.

CR
19.1.23

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One Hand for the Ship

8/10/2022

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Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon reported from a North Sea trawler to which he was poorly suited, being too tall and argumentative, and sick all the time. He described ‘six degrees of freedom’ at sea as pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I found that helpful when I was a young Head in stormy waters but I think we’re all feeling it nationally at the moment. Yaw now?

Heavy weather requires something to cling to so I’m returning to my moutons in the woolly shape of some principles I wrote 11 years ago. These have developed a edu-zeitgeist half-life as well as being inflicted on every group of people I’ve ever met. They are a sort-of answer to the perennial question of ‘what are schools for?’ and I wrote them at the time of the coalition government and to help make sense of Gove’s curriculum reforms. Here they are:

Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society.We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities.We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world.Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission.The teacher’s authority to transmit or broker knowledge is given and valued by society
Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

At the time I was collaborating with Prof Michael Young of the Institute on a book that was published in 2014 and is still being read, called Knowledge and the Future School. He’s concerned that schools leap from one two-dimensional solution to another without sufficient mental scrutiny, without thought and without reflection.

In 2011 it was important to conceptualise and reassert the primacy of knowledge in learning – but now we’re in danger again. Post-Covid, people are lurching towards off-the-peg curricula, like the Oak National Academy that sprang up to assist in desperate times but is now set to take over the thinking of a generation of teachers, a Japanese Knotweed of curriculum development. And perhaps schools can’t find space to see that or worry about it in the context of the unfunded pay award, the energy crisis, the fact that families can’t afford to eat and the missing of teacher recruitment targets in eight of the last nine years. By a mile. (Not that we’ll be able to measure anything in a future without maths or geography teachers.)

So what principles might we cling to in this particularly prolonged storm, with buckets of hail being thrown from each side and the siren call of off-the-peg answers sounding through the surge? Here’s my thinking so far:

Knowledge is powerful: it can change the world, person by person.
Children need knowledge to interpret the world and broaden their possibilities.
Knowledge and understanding bring freedom and requires us to choose how to live
Knowledge is real but provisional: it endures and changes.
Knowledge gives people the power to think and act in new and better ways
Knowledge is social, produced in history: good communities are built on shared knowledge
Inequitable distribution of shared and powerful knowledge undermines democracy
Schools give unique access to knowledge, skilfully tailored to the growing human
Learners volunteer to acquire knowledge when enabled by skilled teachers
Good education is not inevitable. It must not be withheld, misused or devalued.

Comments welcome, of course.

I was watching a staircase last week and found a youth walking up it backwards, with one hand for the ship, the better to lecture his comrades. This caused significant embouteillage upstream so I issued a cease and desist. He apologised nicely, but I couldn’t tell if it was incipient demagoguery or a concern for safety that inspired him.

When I visited the Capitol in 1999 the guides walked backward in front of us to prevent anyone slipping off to install Communism. It does feel as though we’re being led backwards at the moment, without reason or rationale.
Pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw are only good to look back on if you didn’t go under. Here’s hoping, for us all.

CR
31.9.22

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Teaching to the test

22/10/2018

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You may know that Ofsted have been thinking, which is good. It’s even better that they’ve been thinking about ‘What is the real substance of education?’ or as a normal person might put it ‘what are schools for?’

HMCI commentary: curriculum and the new education inspection framework

The clipboard brigade make several points, all of which deserve a big tick. I thought you might like a digest, shamelessly condensed and filtered through my own prejudices. They say:

Education is the vast, accumulated wealth of human knowledge, and what we choose to pass on to the next generation. A ‘curriculum gives a school purpose’. Hurrah!
That curriculum is the heart of education. It requires the pursuit of real, deep knowledge and understanding of subjects.
In too many schools, the curriculum is just a combination of the exam board specification, the timetable and the exam results. Not enough schools really think about what they want children to learn. This leads to a narrow range of subjects being taught and too much ‘teaching to the test’.
Inspections have placed too much weight on exam results.
The 2019 inspection framework will emphasise ‘the curriculum as the substance of education’. Inspectors will look at a school’s ‘curriculum intent’.
They’d like to see schools focusing on subjects and subject vocabulary.
They’d like to be sure that ‘disadvantaged pupils are not put onto a stripped-back curriculum’.
They observed that expert teachers in the schools they visited ‘lived and breathed their curriculum’ and that good subject teachers are likely to stay in schools where subjects are valued.
A well-constructed, well-taught curriculum will lead to good results because those results will be a reflection of what pupils have learned.
Parents need to know the substance of what their children are learning throughout their time spent in school.

So far so good. Tallis approves Ofsted’s new thoughts, which will doubtless be a relief to them. But hold on! What’s this? They don’t like three-year key stage fours, like we have. Why?

Three-year key stage fours originated at a time of intense exam pressure. Lots of schools did it to give more time to GCSEs and therefore improve results. This is part of the reason for the current panic about schools just focusing on English, maths, science, history, geography and languages, because that’s what’s been valued in national education talk in recent years. Therefore, lots of schools just do a quick rotation of arts subjects in year 7 and 8 and then don’t offer them much at KS4 so they can tick the ‘EBacc’ box of the subjects above.

Tallis doesn’t do that. We have a very broad curriculum at key stage three with six hours a week of dance, drama, music, art and DT and a very large range of options in KS4. Choosing options early means that our children – who do one more option than many other schools, in any case – have the chance over three years to get into deep subject content, absorb it and make it their own. When I arrived at Tallis six years ago, I was very sceptical about choosing options in year 8 but was quickly converted. That’s not to say that we couldn’t improve the way we do it, of course. So, when the moment comes and we have to defend ourselves, we’ll have a few thoughts to offer inspectors about the what and the why, and how our choices enable us to keep a broad curriculum for everyone. Hurrah again!

It’s good news for everyone that Ofsted have made this commitment to the curriculum. I’m not just saying that because it’s Ofsted, but because it’s right. Schools are where society looks after its young, and the curriculum is what society thinks they should know. A broad, common curriculum which enables young people to think and reflect also means that the democracy speaks a common language. It builds up our communal life. That’s why good comprehensive schools with a wide curriculum are every bit as important to the health of the nation as the NHS. A nation educated together across the whole range of human experience should be well-equipped to understand and change the world for the better. Hold on a minute, that sounds familiar…..

Speaking of which: Black History Month. We’ve had dancing, eating, talking, films and workshops. We’ve had two mini carnivals with mass dancing and Caribbean Come Dine with Me. It’s been a joy. During the lower school carnival I was having our performance review with our Local Authority School Improvement Partner. I had to keep making excuses to sneak looks out of the window to see the children dancing to Sir’s music. They sent me up a plateful of outrageously good food but it didn’t make up for not being outside in the sun. A new colleague said ‘some schools would worry about losing control’ but we don’t. Our systems are good, our community strong and we love to dance, sing, cook and make things. We’re confident to do it because we value it, we do it all the time, and when we go back to class we know each other well enough to settle back down.

What are schools for? Being able to celebrate diversity and inclusivity with laughter and exuberance. That’s not a test you can teach to.

CR
18.10.18

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Decolonisation

7/5/2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh for an anti-colon sticker.

CR
5.5.17

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What's progress

11/2/2017

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A year 11 solicits my opinion on his burgundy fleece gloves, ridiculed as effeminate by his chums. I agreed this was unjust. Another inquires politely after my health and asks for advice on cough remedies. I’m available for comment on most things, but I generally try to specialise in two areas. For the record, those are knowledge and the curriculum, and ethical leadership. However, if you’d like my opinion on any other aspect of education, literature, life, politics, fashion or domestic poultry I’ll happily give it. I may not be well-informed, but I’m articulate.

I’d been asked for a piece on knowledge for an outfit of whom I was suspicious. I arranged to get up close to the commissioner one dark afternoon before agreeing. I went easy on him as he was so baby-faced he could have passed unnoticed among year 10 without the tweed jacket. He reassured me he was old enough to be out buying coffee for women so we agreed on the article and then he asked me about centralised detention.

My hearing isn’t great in a crowded room. What? I said: do you mean where an Assistant Head gathers all the sluggards who’ve been late for lessons into the canteen at the end of the day and annoys them? Like when a Deputy, steeped in treachery and low cunning, sits with egregious offenders until 16:30 on a Friday? Or a Head of Department gathers homework defaulters on a Tuesday? Or a Head of Year gets irritants together on Thursday and badgers them for an hour? Yes. It was a bit like being asked how I feel about GCSEs, or assemblies, or lining up for a fire practice. As kindly as I could, I said: I don’t think it’s new. He said, everyone’s talking about it on the blogosphere. I made a cross-eyed face: is that a fact?

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later the uber-school of the new rigidity advertised for a Director of Detention. Is that all they’re going to do? Someone described it as recruiting an official school bully, but that’s unfair. We all do detentions. Our own good Sheedy could be called Director of Detention, but its only part of his work on engagement and good behaviour. I’m amused by this oldest and unsubtlest of sanctions being gussied up by new schools who are very keen on saying what they DON’T do: they don’t mark books, they don’t do wall displays, they don’t let children talk, but they’re very keen on detention. Surprised they need it. Funny old world.

New schools in a deregulated landscape are on my mind. We’ve been talking to anyone who’ll listen about an aspect of the Progress 8 measure. P8 is a good measure in that it doesn’t present perverse incentives at the C/D borderline which skews schools’ approach to teaching. All grades count equally and the school is judged on its average deviation from the national norm, each year a different dataset. (Actually, all grades don’t count equally until next year, therefore favouring the grammar schools, but that’s a rant for another day). The problem is the disproportionate effect a non-achieving child has on the whole outcome. So, our final grade for 2016 is -0.05 against a national average of -0.03. That includes 8 young people (of a year group of 270) who, for a range of sad reasons, weren’t with us daily by the end of year 11. Without them, it would have been 0.1, quite a different outcome. But we weren’t without them.

So, this year there’ll be consequences of compassion again. We have young people not in school. Some did things that mean that they can’t be in the Tallis community, some are ill, others the victims of atrocious circumstance. All are being educated otherwise, but they remain on our roll until the end because we chose to find them a positive alternative to the oblivion-risk of a permanent exclusion in KS4, or keep trying. Local Authorities do the same. However, the protocols that bind all schools together where we share the most challenging young people appropriately and fairly are stretched by the proliferation of schools sailing under different flags. Some partner with us closely, others are more distant. They can’t be compelled to take children who’ll endanger their results.
Harbingers of doom said that the academy programme would lead to the abandonment of the vulnerable. As always, the regulator steps in to prevent sharp practice, so the last school the child went to gets his results. We’re proud to be one of those schools, proud to be inclusive and give everyone another chance and we’ve a lot of colleagues whose expertise makes that possible.

The future is troubling. The planned funding formula endangers support services and therefore further endangers children to whom life has already dealt a duff hand. Who’ll care for the children who are harder to love? Who’ll go the extra mile for children who can’t offer much in return? I’ve an opinion on that too.

CR
9.2.17

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Crass or Class?

28/2/2016

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Sean Scully - Morocco, 1995

Wednesday I was at Emily’s piano recital but Thursday I gave the wind-up speech at a conference in in town. One of the previous speakers had an interestingly fancy day-shape, but another made me want to bang my head on the table: ‘Building ethos through teacher rewards’. Not as in hard cash or time off, elegant performance-related pay review or a glowing reference. No, visiting classrooms and handing teachers postcards. Writing to them on Fridays ‘so they get a doormat thank you waking up a bit growly after a few cheeky beers’. ‘Corridor chats’ were recommended, and namedropping in briefings, because everyone loves that.

To my certain knowledge there’s only one person in a school who loves briefings. They’re catnip to the head but dentistry to everyone else. I’ve had leadership teams volunteer for bus duty in snow rather than sub for me at briefing.

Despite terminal nosiness, I didn’t enjoy them that much when I was a footsoldier and being publicly complimented made me want to tunnel out. I’ve served with people who gave out light-hearted awards in briefing and the ice still makes me shiver. I’m here to tell you that no teacher likes chirpy public thanks amongst their grizzled and witty chums.

Why so ungrateful? Why do I think this goodhearted Head so squirmingly wrong? First, teaching is a public service to be rewarded with decent pay and conditions and public respect. ‘A finger of fudge’ awarded in briefing (yes, really) is demeaning not amusing. Second, teachers choose the job and are paid for it: they don’t need corralling into a jolly gang but professional guidance and support to do well. Third, good teachers are tuned into the personalities in a room and are skilled at trying not to embarrass people. Fourth, teachers are not children.

Treating adults in a way that’s too crass even for most adolescents is symptomatic of a gimmicky, shortcutting, undermining approach to educating the nation’s young. Maybe I don’t thank teachers enough, but I know that their hard work and motivation aren’t reliant on clumsy presents from a corporate mother. Teachers are public intellectuals with advanced interpersonal skills and a liking for children. Being good at it can’t rely on superficial activities. It takes time, years of it.

Some training routes for teachers underplay this and undermine young colleagues with false promises. They breed an expectation that the institution will always do all the heavy lifting in terms of adolescent formation through uniform and behaviour proxies, silence and compliance. It’s just not as easy as that: a school’s strength relies on individuals and their relationships in classrooms, labs, studios, fields, offices, corridors and yards. Young people make choices and it’s in the nature of youth to make the wrong ones. They have to be educated and turned to face the light so they can grow.
Chatting on the corridor (oh all right) we tell Thos to take his coat off. He does, slowly. Sir remarks: we could have yelled at him and destroyed him on the spot, then he’d yell back and we’d have to exclude him. What would be the point? We like simple rules that build up our common life, so Thos has to take his coat off because the sea of Tallis turquoise indoors shows that we all belong together. As we explain again.

I collide with a class of year 7s rushing to watch a primary dance showcase that’s been practising on our lovely hall floor. They are beyond excited at a change to routine as we sheepdog and shush them into the hall, and the little ones gaze on these giants with awe. The dancing is blissful and the audience immaculate. Is that compliance, or happiness and human interest in a secure atmosphere? Year 13 assembly this morning was Caleb on gender construction: clear as a bell. ‘He couldn’t have done that when he was younger’ his form tutor beams.

Earlier I’d been to admire the new whiteboards in maths. We’ve got ‘em on all four walls in the rooms now and the mathematicians love them for their squares. ‘Maths teachers love squared things’ I remarked to a class which amuses Peter the wonderful band singer. Small groups help each other with topics from the mock. ‘I’ve just not been comfortable with this decimal!’ shouts Ahmed. ‘It made me panic in the exam and I lost 3 marks! I insist on doing it again tonight! ’

Some of them came to school for four days over half term and with skilled help are edging ever closer to success. How do you reward that public servant with a bar of chocolate?

CR
24.2.16

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Briefing: Can Schools Save Democracy?

What’s a Good Education?

96 Facts in History Paper 2

Step Inside

One Hand for the Ship

Teaching to the test

Decolonisation

What's progress

Crass or Class?

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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