Category: Ofsted

One woman, two guvnors

23/4/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the superb National Governance Association says:

An extraordinary quarter of a million people volunteer their time and skills to oversee state schools in England in the interests of pupils….those who volunteer as school governors and academy trustees are motivated by making a difference for children and serving their community. It is a good and important thing which they do on behalf of the rest of us, ensuring the country’s schools are as good as they can be.…..They come together in governing boards that set the vision and ethos for schools and trusts: what children should leave the school knowing, having done, and being. They make important decisions about staffing structures, what limited funding is spent on, as well as recruiting, supporting and challenging headteachers and executive leaders.

Like many voluntary organisations, the overall percentage of Black, Asian and minority ethnic participants and those under forty are too few. If you fit the bill, do consider offering yourself. You don’t have to be attached to the school you govern: while parent governors are elected, others can represent the Local Authority or be co-opted to get a good spread of good folks. Have a look here, or talk to Greenwich here if you fancy it.

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

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

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

CR
17.4.24

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Less Likely than a Unicorn

22/3/2024

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I saw a unicorn on the bridge last week. There was no need of it, and it hadn’t been summoned up by World Book Day or Red Horn Day or whatever. It was just a child, older than you’d think, calmly and happily wearing a home-made unicorn headband, making their way to Block One. Not a hallucination. They avoided being knocked over by a small child yelling FRENCH TEST, but he was at least rushing towards it, like a trooper.

No rushing for me. Bit tired, since you ask. Lots of weekend work in March and I am getting on a bit. Yes, I was in the room when G Keegan said that she’d have punched an Ofsted inspector who was rude. She’d got overexcited talking to 1000+ school leaders in a great big auditorium and mistook polite attentiveness for approval. The atmosphere sank to frosty after the remark, in a roomful of people who’ve devoted their lives to teaching young people the norms of civilised behaviour. We all have signs up in our reception areas asking people to be pleasant. All public servants are at the mercy of national anger at the moment so her offering to punch the regulator is – I can’t dress this up – a really bad thing to say. They report to her, for the love of God. Words fail me (apart from the preceding 150, that is).

Another conference’s post-match discussions were beset by people starting their remarks with ‘I’m going to be a bit provocative’. Let the hearer be the judge of that. You don’t know how wide might be the range of listener’s views on the matter. Your provocative may be tediously predictable to people who’ve put in the hard yards. I roll my eyes quietly.

The actual speaker had been brilliant, posing a simple question: shouldn’t all schools be the same? What does it do to children and our system that we have local authority, comprehensive, grammars, faith, free, matted and so on. At the least, it means that central control is missing and admissions are a cat’s breakfast. Schools are enabled to do their own thing, or what they believe to be best, and children miss out. It’s a rare school that seeks out the least attractive children (by outcomes measures) and everyone misses out on the social vision of education as a model for a better world. Yes, sorting it out would be painful in one generation, but would be of immeasurable benefit for the rest. And yes, he’d manipulate admissions so that every school was genuinely comprehensive.

This glimmer of hope for a better society flickers in and out. Just when you think no one cares, or no one is willing to be bold, someone with all the facts, the research and the economics pops up and calmly revolutionises the future. Wouldn’t that be a great leap forwards?

The previous day I’d heard another good speaker who talked about bad leadership based on compliance, socialisation and internalisation. Stop me, I thought, that’s where we’re at. The Deliverance revolution of the Blair years brought easy-to-measure national targets. Teaching trimmed itself to meet those targets, so the purpose of schooling changed into compliance. A child at school taught that way could easily be a school leader now. Post 2010, the EBacc and other controversies have been constants and that young leader might well ask – ‘but hasn’t the Department always controlled the curriculum choices schools make?’ ‘Why bother with the arts, no-one’s measuring their uptake?’ Thus, compliant schools socialised the next generations and now that compliance is internalised to this narrow focus. Don’t say we don’t know what schools are for: we know very precisely.

My biggest fear for the future of education is that poor-quality, short-term, politically-motivated thinking becomes ossified into structures that no one sees any more. So to return to the question: Why do we have so many different kinds of schools? Because we started mass education early and then had to fit the existing small and experimental systems into bigger ones. Church schools were absorbed in 1870 and again in 1944. Grammar schools carried on locally after the 1965 push to full comprehensives. City Technology Colleges and academies took control of schools away from local democracy deemed to be insufficiently responsive to children’s needs. Free schools came out of an ideology that parents would run schools better. All of these were – at best – sticking plasters on a system that needs recentring, like a navigation system that’s lost its satellite.

We need a school system that works for everyone, in schools that hold communities together and make them better places to live. As Harold Dent, Editor of the TES until 1950, said of the wartime plans:

A true democracy must be a community, united by a common purpose, bound by a common interest, and inspired by a common ethos. These ideals cannot be realised if from an early age children are segregated into mutually exclusive categories. All should be members of the one school, which should provide adequately for diversity of individual aptitudes and interests, yet unite all as members of a single community

Dent feared that a country without common schools might end up in discord and revolution. It was in everyone’s interest to make the fairest solution work. We didn’t, and we’ve got the discord. Might the time be now? I saw something that looked very like a unicorn here, last week. Surely we can summon up a better world if not for these children, then for the next ones along.

CR
22.3.24

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Cheerful and Lively

29/2/2024

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Working through the list: teacher this time.

I’m incapable of seeing teachers objectively. Given that I’m the third of four generations of teachers and I’ve been embedded most of my life, I have little idea what they look like to the outside world.

Within sight of me at the moment is one such wondering over an art display and another standing on a concrete bench supervising mass coat removal. I’ve met them today unblocking doorways and temporarily impeding access to a toilet. All the while, of course, a hundred-and-ten or so of their colleagues are sharing knowledge imaginatively, going through mock exam papers or giving someone the cease and desist look. All are inhabiting the slightly too-obvious persona required of teaching, with exaggerated facial expressions and bizarre semi-dramatic hand gestures.

Many Ofsteds ago, I watched a young PE teacher, slightly anxiously, with an inspector. I had hopes of the lad and didn’t want him battered to death with a clipboard in his first year. No fear, the wielder made a just and useful assessment: ‘A lot to learn, but a nice old-fashioned teacherly manner’. He was right. Adam was serious, kind, very organised and with high expectations. He made the children feel comfortable and ready to participate because he exuded security. Nothing was going to go wrong in the lesson, and he knew what he was talking about.

Teachers are bound by all kinds of expectations. There are Standards (OK but a bit weak) and all sorts of national professional qualifications, but nothing now that really gets under the skin. It’s all a bit functional. Why so dull? My Grannie’s 1916 copy of the Board of Education’s Syllabus of Physical Exercises for Schools has a lovely ‘general direction to teachers’. Advising that PT should be ‘enjoyable and interesting’ they say this will depend

to a very great extent on the personality of the teacher. Impatience on the one hand, and hesitation on the other, should be avoided, and, while cheerfulness is greatly to be desired, the manner should be firm and decided in order that discipline may be maintained

‘A game should be introduced into every lesson,’ say the writers and good teachers will have

that quiet confidence and decision of manner which do so much to keep awake interest and attention and to gain a cheerful and willing response from the children [...] Commands should always be given in a cheerful, lively manner, as this has a great effect in making a class work happily and with interest.

Brilliantly, the writers emphasise again that

it is important that the teacher should get the children to take a keen and lively interest in the lesson and to share in the esprit de corps of the class. This will best be accomplished by sympathy, cheerfulness and the cultivation of a sense of partnership between teacher and pupil.

My own training was influenced by a great headteacher of the past, Michael Marland. He wrote a little book in 1972 called The Craft of the Classroom. I bought it ten years after at Hudson’s bookshop on the Birmingham University campus, for £1.75. It's 100 pages long, starting with four unarguables: teachers need to care about the job, care for the students, explain their knowledge clearly and be very, very organised. You can’t say fairer than that.

Obviously, every offering is of its time. The 1916 PT book is in the context of the public health crisis uncovered by conscription for war. Marland’s genius includes the jaw-dropping lines ‘….we are all human and tempers can be lost. There are very few teachers who have not struck a pupil at some time or other in their career’ followed by useful advice on what to do next.

We improve. We’re educators, so we should be able to learn from the past, unless you’re Michael Gove whose shameful disrespect of university teacher training departments tried to turn the clock to a strange year zero where the only quality assurance was his journo rhetoric.

Where are we now? I bowdlerised the best of Marland into ‘The Craft of the Tallis Classroom’ some years ago to make it more accessible, and we have our fabulous Tallis Praxis handbook. The overall tone of teacher education, however, is functional and delivery-based. It talks about the how and the what but not the why or the who-ness of teaching. Nationally, classroom practice is prescribed minute by minute in many schools with ready-made teaching materials and a pre-agreed curriculum decided way over the heads of practicing professionals. And so we are where we are, with a recruitment crisis for this, the best of jobs, and oddly scratchy relationships with parents, nationally.

We work hard to avoid either at Tallis, but we may be odd.

Why? Teaching has very nearly become a public service delivery force rather than a profession or even vocation. Every conversation in some schools has to be measurable and is therefore likely to be scripted to increase efficiency and reduce variability. Bright young graduates don’t want that cardboard life: who’d want to be a teacher if you can’t bring your personality and judgements into your practice? Parents at schools where all the contact is about uniform infringements and detentions might understandably withdraw a bit of goodwill, partially generating the terrible attendance crisis. In sixties terminology the transactional relationship has lurched from ‘we’re OK, you’re OK, let’s work together for the good of your child’ to ‘we’re not OK because you’re not OK. Follow our instructions at once and don’t answer back’.

You know I’m reminiscing in these last blogs, so bear with.

The application forms I filled in as a new teacher in 1983 invited me to include war service, national service and full-time parenting, for each of which experience there was the chance to start higher on the pay scale. Someone mused with me recently about what teaching must have been like for those returning from war service, or training straight afterwards and it made me wish I’d talked to some of them about it. They’d had an atrocious experience and lived through the aftermath, perhaps teaching up to or even leading the social and educational revolution of the sixties and seventies. Their careers saw the beginning and the end of the 11+ system in most places, the end of deference and the slow struggle for equalities. Nothing about that could be scripted or minutely directed.

It's good to run an education system with strong quality assurance. Taxpayers and parents alike should expect schools to be good. I think they probably expect teachers to be clever, interesting, highly motivated and effective. If one of my grandchildren chooses to follow the family business, it would be great if they could bring their whole selves into a respected and valued profession.

CR
28.2.24

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The Sturdy Chassis

9/2/2024

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I reminded year 8 pointlessly that I was retiring this year. One stopped me later on the stairs, looked deeply into my eyes and shook my hand. ‘Congratulations on your retirement, Miss.’ I thanked him kindly, though his tone was, I felt, unnecessarily sepulchral. ‘Could you remind me where Spanish is?’ I put it to him that now, past the midpoint of the year, he could reasonably be expected to know. ‘Things do slip your mind, though’ he said, mournfully dropping my hand. I felt I’d severally blighted his day. Two year 10s at the block five interchange, however, were ranging globally: ‘But the American economy is a different matter. It affects us all so you can’t say you don’t care.’ That was better. Too right.

Last week a witty and erudite speaker said that the curriculum was the sturdy chassis on which every school journey travels, which I thought was rather good. All right, it was me, but a good image, no? Spanish and business studies, history and PE, maths and drama, the whole boiling gives form to our days and directs our thoughts, young and old, diligent and dilettante. We are rightly obsessed with the curriculum at Tallis.

When I was clawing my way up the greasy pole I spotted that the Curriculum Deputy was the Big Beast. The person who wrote the timetable seemed to have command of time and space and no bright idea from a Head of Department in a hurry could get anywhere without his gracious assent (the ones I knew were all men). In the old days they organised cover as well, so when one of your team fell off the twig you hoped you were in his good books and wouldn’t have to do it all yourself or be sent someone notoriously useless.

I was, of course, mistaking the timetable for the curriculum, despite being obsessed with the curriculum of my own department which I enjoyed writing and explaining to anyone who’d listen. Planning interesting, coherent learning which would be engaging at school and useful to build on in later life is wonderful work. Getting children to think like theologians and philosophers – the stories I could tell.

I thought I’d never get a Deputy Head post without being able to timetable, however, so badgered the man. He gloomily showed me an runic A3 sheet, so I decided I’d better go on a course. This was a three-day residential in the Lakes, led by a retired DH who also ran air traffic control for Carlisle Airport. It became clear to me within minutes that my mental wiring was unsuited to this particular task and I despaired quietly in a corner. It didn’t stop me getting a DH post in a school that managed things differently, though. That you don’t need to be able to do everything yourself is useful learning in itself. Trust the experts, keep them close.

Why burden you with this? My first headship was in a school that was in a bit of a state. I decided that rebuilding the curriculum in all areas from first principles, employing quality thinkers and setting the school on the right rails would be all for the good. This wasn’t universally accepted by those who wanted quicker wins: common at the time and remaining so for a long time. The more prescriptive the curriculum and pedagogy from the DfE and the more focused Ofsted became on outcomes, the more likely it was that curriculum = timetable + assessment + results. Content was secondary, assumed.

This partially changed after 2010 and again in 2019. Gove’s curriculum reforms, no matter how crassly conceptualised, did at least put subject learning back in the discussion. Ofsted’s move to inspecting the quality of the curriculum from 2019 forced everyone to think about content, planning, sequencing and real learning, as well as exams. It's turned formulaic, but it’s better than not thinking at all.

Tallis has a great curriculum built on skilled and imaginative teaching, challenging content, engagement and, for many children, good results. We focus on the idea that teachers broker the big ideas of subject learning to young people. Our threshold concepts encourage them to tackle a subject’s infrastructure and to learn to think like scientists, mathematicians, artists, designers and philosophers. Nonetheless, we never really know whether anything stays with learners, to inform their thought processes for the rest of their lives or whether it’s all temporary; like the location of Spanish, things that slip your mind.

But what about the exams? Is good learning more important or good results? What is the priority? Obviously, a combination of both. But embedding a concept, even a fact in a child’s brain is a complex procedure that has to begin with them really understanding it. I scraped through my university final paper in New Testament Greek by learning the passages off by heart so I could recognise them, but I didn’t understand the language. It wasn’t learning in any real sense.

Our education system still hasn’t found the right balance between learning and exams. Partly, yawn, how many times have you had to endure me saying this, it’s because we don’t know what education is for. But I think it’s also because we don’t have any real longitudinal studies that measure the effectiveness of different approaches. Perhaps the Education Endowment Foundation, upon which much policy depends, will generate that in years to come, but research depends on the measuring of different approaches and it is very risky for a school to try another way. It may not even be legitimate.

Two better speakers than me last week debated this in front of a rapt audience. Is it ever right to take risks with children’s learning, to try untested methods? One said yes, how else would we learn and develop for the better? The other said absolutely not – children only get one shot at exams and they need teaching that’s proved to work. Perhaps the answer depends on your view of education: is it an academic discipline or a public sector target delivery mechanism? What happens if experiments go wrong? What happens if the system goes wrong? Given that children are always the winners or losers in the long or short term, shouldn’t we know more?

Whatever the answer, we need thinkers and quality teachers to build onto the sturdy chassis, not just for a trundle through the inevitable, but a smooth, high quality journey to the best destination. Our young people need us to get this right, not just for school but for their lives as reflective human beings. It takes thinking to help people to want to understand the world and change it for the better.

CR
9.2.24

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Becoming Jane

9/12/2023

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Did you ever see the brilliant anti-racist video from the 60s called ‘The Eye of the Storm’? if not, rectify that omission at once, if not sooner. It is imperfect, of its time, and the teacher, Jane Elliott, is very like my mother, but don’t be deterred. I’ve seen it so often that some of its wordage is trapped in my lexicon. Good days I am Jane.

The film begins with a snowbound reporter in Riceville, Iowa, describing the small town as being a long way from the noise of the city, protected from protests elsewhere. Then Jane Elliott unleashes a storm and a white community can’t avoid confronting racism. I’d like to think there were many Janes still in those towns.

Have I told you I’m listening to Barack Obama reading A Promised Land? Its 29 hours long so this fact will be current for some time. He talks about such small towns and how well-disposed they were towards him at the start, but how the right-learning news media turned on him and made it impossible for those folks to hear him. Especially on health care, so mind-boggling to the UK listener. Most of all, he talks about leadership, and about steering his way through events and trying to carve out time to think about decision-making.

I know how he feels. Planet Tallis is busy. What with talking to the Local Authority and governors about money, agitating on behalf of children with SEND, taking advice from our improvement partner about achievement, listening to other Heads’ woes (because I’m the oldest), making a video for Christmas, reinvigorating the national debate on ethical leadership in education, planning a conference, plotting next year’s staffing, talking to a visitor about Tallis Habits and a local journalist about adolescent crime and interviewing year 11s to check on their plans, I’m running to keep up. That’s not to mention perusing the Roman Villas in breakfast Latin (ok, that was a couple of weeks ago but I like mentioning it) or not managing to judge year 8 Dragons’ Den because the Secretary of State dropped by.

What? Calm down. It was the SoS for Science, Innovation and Technology not the other one, though she was SoS for Education for 36 hours earlier in the year. She came to visit our Cyber Explorers, part of a scheme ‘to support and inspire pupils towards a future career in tech and give them the foundational knowledge to pursue crucial subjects such as computer science for those striving to work in a range of tech roles, across social media content creation, sports technology and AI innovation.’ It was all very cordial.

But today I’m reading the reports on the inquest into Ruth Perry’s death. Which headteacher wouldn’t? I was particularly struck by some of the coroner’s remarks. She issued a ‘prevention of future death’ notice which, I learn from the BBC, ‘is a report that aims to stop similar situations arising again. It will be sent to people and groups in a position to reduce the risk of other deaths occurring in similar circumstances. Anyone getting such a notice has 56 days to say what they plan to do to mitigate the chances of deaths happening.’

I wonder what Ofsted will say? For a start, they’ll have to defend their claim that school inspections can be paused if the distress of a headteacher is a concern. Coroner Connor arrestingly described this as "a mythical creature created and expanded upon at this inquest". I wonder how they think that would work? At what point would distress become a concern? And what would they say publicly: ‘Sorry, this inspection’s been stopped because the Head can’t stop shaking?’ Where would that leave the Head? And truly, they’d hardly complete any. Their schedule would collapse.

OFSTED is, frankly, terrifying, even to old warhorses like me. The framework makes perfect sense to inspectors who use it every day and, I suppose, in schools where they speak of little else. It doesn’t make that much sense to those of us who prefer plain English and approach it in the way I assume was intended, as a way of calibrating a snapshot of a school. Like a dipstick (in the engineering, rather than abusive sense). The biggest problem is that words can mean one thing in ordinary parlance and another to inspectors. And that Ofsted inspectors like that kind of thing so they don’t think it’s a problem at all. And that the hype around inspection - which, to be fair, the current HMCI has tried to remove – makes it such an incredibly high-stakes event. That’s three biggest problems so I’ll stop there.

I’ve been Ofsteded loads of time and have many a witty anecdote but actually? It’s the fear that stays with you: of being misunderstood, of saying something that’ll sink the inspection, of not being able to prove something you know to be true, of being holed beneath the waterline by a chance event.

To cheer up, I wander around a bit at break and lunchtime. I like to see the board-game players energetically competing in the dining room, and the complicated cards that some of them bring. I’ve been keeping an eye on a little one who found it hard to make friends to start with – but now she has one and they rush to greet each other at break. Younger children still jump up and down when they see each other, they’re so happy. You’ve got to smile.
I don’t know if Jane Elliott would have done well in an inspection: it would depend on the team. One of her concluding remarks used in our household is ‘Do you know a little bit more than you did before? Do you know a little bit more than you wanted to?’ I think Ofsted could start there.

CR
7.12.23

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A Promised Land

5/12/2023

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I don’t listen to talk radio. Not that I doubt the wisdom of my fellow citizens, but I’m not short of advice. Year 7 tell me how to save the planet, year 9 tell me I’m unjust, y11 that GCSEs should be abolished, y12 that I am personally complicit in all wars. Teachers have a view on everything. The local authority tell me what matters in Greenwich and the Department has views on whatever matters to The Party at the time. (Who’d have thought that the rather obscure matter of whether schools are using PSHE materials whose copyright means they can’t share them with parents would be such a cause celebre. What about other textbooks?). Him indoors has had an opinion on literally everything for the last 44 years.

So enough. I don’t listen to Any Questions or Answers and I don’t watch Question Time. Anything that requires viewer voting – off it goes. I’ll leave a room to avoid listening to any media discussion of schooling (that doesn’t involve me). I don’t even watch or listen to myself when I’m on.

However, I was sitting in a cab yesterday and couldn’t avoid LBC. James O’Brien, who I’m happy to read in print, was interviewing Jim Knight about the NEU’s Beyond Ofsted report. I like this Knight, Schools Minister a lifetime ago. I even took out my airpods (Barack Obama reading A Promised Land, if you must know) to follow the chat. Headlines:

Because Ofsted is no longer trusted and significant, change is needed. In a better future, every school will conduct its own nationally-set self-evaluation to report to stakeholders, working with an external school improvement partner (SIP) on an action plan. The SIP would also validate the school’s exam performance reviews. (This isn’t new, but we could do it better).

Inspectors would focus on this process, intervening where it goes wrong. They would not routinely inspect teaching or pupil outcomes but they would be sufficiently skilled to build capacity in school leadership teams. They’d be fully independent and hold government, policies and the effects of policies to account through system-wide thematic inspections. This would include teacher supply. (Bonza scheme).

Safeguarding audits would be conducted annually under the oversight of a different national body. (Ditto)
So, routine inspections should be immediately paused to reset and regain the trust of the profession. A national duty of care is due to teachers so they may develop collaborative learning cultures which generate excellent professional skills and competencies. This should be at the heart of any reform. (Nicely put, Sir)

At the same time, another v interesting report landed from IPPR: Improvement through Empowerment. They start with:

Policymakers in recent decades have pursued a top-down approach to improving public services. inspired by new public management (NPM), which argued that the absence of market forces in public services meant they suffered from weak or misaligned incentives.

These seem to be able to change public services from poor to good enough, but not good enough to great. For example, teachers in OECD countries with excellent education systems get 100 hours of professional development a year. Us? 30 hours, left up to schools, so it tends to the idiosyncratic.

This makes it harder for them to do their job properly and undermines retention – damaging pupils in the process and resulting in unsustainable costs to taxpayer.

They go on to make other, less radical remarks about Ofsted.

Both of the above reports offer simple solutions that cost a bit of money, but if they stem the tide of people leaving teaching or refusing to be Heads, it would be well spent.

I’m musing on ‘weak and misaligned incentives’. I can see that strong and aligned incentives are crucial to production lines but strong alignment to outcomes or Ofsted has skewed education over thirty-odd years. Besides, what are the incentives? Better pay’s only part of the story. Teachers leave because they don’t have time to think and they’re treated like fools. The incentive to being a teacher is deep in the heart. They want to serve children and change the world that way. They want to model a good life and give their charges the chance of reflection, self-motivation and – with luck – prosperity. It’s hard to systematise incentives around that.

I’d hope that Ofsted review and teacher CPD might be on the parties’ agenda as the election trots toward us. They could certainly do it in the time they’d save by decommissioning the banned lists of people who criticise government policy.

I looked out of the window as a visiting football team crosses the yard, looking slightly bemused. All schools are the same but so different. I hope these little chaps had a good experience while being kindly trounced. Later, I’m stopped on the corridor for a minor interrogation as to why I’m retiring. Age mystifies the young. I told them I was 62 but they’d have believed me if I’d said I was 50 or 104. They wanted the name of the new head, and were frankly shocked when I said the job hadn’t been advertised yet. How could such things be left in the air?

Bigger things are left in the air, my dears. Education policy is only one of them.

CR
21.11.23

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This way or that?

23/9/2023

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I’ve just finished Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy, written in 1958. I don’t know why I haven’t read it before. I apologise. But before we start, this Michael Young is not the same as the other Michael Young, of UCL, whom we know and love, mind. This Young was a sociologist, the father of Toby Young, the Free Schools obsessive who came a cropper at the Office for Students after having decided that a small school was too difficult to run.

Anyway.

The Rise of the Meritocracy is a fable, a satire on the tripartite education system of the time which packed off the most schoolwork-adept children to grammar schools. If there were places – better not to be a clever girl in those times. It's written as if from the standpoint of 2024, describing a social revolution started in 1870 which led to completely different life experiences based on IQ. In this imagined future Britain is a ‘true meritocracy of talent’ where status is distributed according to a formula: ‘I.Q + Effort = Merit’. All this before algorithms had taken over.
The winners, the meritocrats, the lucky ones enjoyed high status and better salaries enhanced by free holidays, drink, servants, culture, restaurants and so on. Children were tested and chosen for this path younger and younger, and the unlucky were trained to be sportspeople or technicians or domestic servants. By the end of Young’s tale the meritocrats have become a distant, heartless and largely hereditary ruling caste. Like all satires, it was a warning. Hmm, I wonder.

We think we’re great at irony in Britain, but as someone else said, it’s a heavy freight to carry. Politicians of all sorts barnacled themselves to the idea of meritocracy as if it was a universal good, as positive cover for socially legitimate inequalities and not an invented word to describe a grave social mistake. David Cameron and Theresa May particularly loved it.

Young invents commissions and reports as part of his imagined history. The ‘Clauson Committee 1988’, for example ‘took the view that by that date about a third of all adults were unemployable in the ordinary economy’. Any social comment includes the words ‘a third’ seizes me, not because I’m triskaphobic but because of our current situation. Grade boundaries at GCSE are set so that a third of all children have to score below grade four, the so-called pass level. Ergo, a third of them have to fail every year no matter what mark they get. Hmm again.

The book imagines a crisis in this meritocracy, led by women, in the 21st century. These protesters resurrect a previously-discarded vision of ‘common schools’ which:

should have enough good teachers so that all children should have individual care and stimulus. They could then develop at their own pace to their own particular fulfilment. The schools would not segregate the like but mingle the unlike; by promoting diversity within unity, they would teach respect for the infinite human differences which are not the least of mankind’s virtues.

I like the name ‘Common School’. Young’s bit above isn’t far from my favourite part of the Department for Education’s Circular 10/65 which promoted the development of comprehensives:

A comprehensive school aims to establish a school community in which pupils over the whole ability range and with different interests and backgrounds can be encouraged to mix with each other, gaining stimulus from the contacts and learning tolerance and understanding in the process.

Devoted readers will remember that I worried last time about the new Chief Inspector and whether he might take us back to a system based on exam outcomes. Which are of course important, but the way we measure them potentially gives schools a perverse incentive to favour children who will learn and progress easily towards a pass grade, and resist taking those who may struggle. Like meritocracy, any system that declares winners also identifies loser. You can’t have one without the other. And who wants to be a loser? How does it feel?

Meritocracy is a dog-whistle to the already-privileged. Last year I read philosopher Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. He says:

Those who celebrate the meritocratic ideal… ignore…the morally unattractive attitudes the meritocratic ethic promotes among the winners and also among the losers. Among the winners it generates hubris, among the losers, humiliation and resentment.

Why? Because those who benefit from a so-called meritocracy forget the good fortune that helped them. They believe they come out on top by their own efforts, and those who struggle deserve it.

It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes

Education is going through a tricky patch at the moment. The system can’t meet the needs of children with SEND and there is a catastrophic shortage of teachers. The grading system we have is unjust to some children every year, while the successful are lauded as being of particular value to society. Schools are encouraged to have a narrow, cost-effective curriculum while a significant number of families aren’t that bothered by attendance any more. They don’t believe what we say about the link between GCSE grades and future prosperity.

But what would happen if we really looked at the link between poverty and school success, between poverty and school attendance? What would happen if we, nationally, decided to put enough money into the system to resource it. What would happen if we had enough teachers, and an examination system that recognised endeavour and progress without fixing the grade boundaries so a third have to fail? What would happen if we never used the words ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ at school, ever?

A Year Seven put me on the spot in exasperation at the end of the second week. Standing at the busy crossroads on the block four stairs he’d lost his bearings and demanded "Miss, is it this way or that way?" I needed furthers and betters in order to assist, but I liked his approach. Politicians and the nation have to make choices. Both directions are not acceptable. Keep an eye on this meritocracy word: it was never designed to help change the world for the better.

CR
22.9.23

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Mazball

8/9/2023

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Enthusiastic in July, I made a note in my new diary about how I should entertain you in September. Sadly, teachers’ mental hard drives are semi-wiped clean over the six weeks and the clearest reminder might as well be in Sanskrit. I think it was something about cricket, of which I know almost nothing despite living within earshot of the Surrey ground. What to do?

Step forward the Secretary of State and the concrete issue. Our concrete, being of a relatively up-to-date kind, is fine, but I’ve done my time in crumbling buildings and I sympathise most energetically with Heads who suddenly had to close. I taught in a room with a hole in a broken window for the whole of my first year, and in a school which had outside toilets until 1998 and sixteen rotting demountables until 2009. I once lost 13 classrooms to an arson attack. This stuff happens, but its wearing.

One might ask why? Surely we should educate our young in buildings suited to the value we place upon them as our jewels, the holders of our dreams, our single hope for a better future? Schools should be palaces – or at least as nice as Tallis’s lovely building. The problem is that our school buildings are indeed matched to the value we place upon children, nationally. Children are messy and a bit unpredictable. They’re not much economic use until they’re grown and though they complain with every breath they also take everything in their stride so everyone can ignore them. Schooling is compulsory, so its not as if we have to lure them there.

I don’t know of a nation that spends the right amount on schools, but the Children Village in Brazil was declared the world’s best building in 2018. The three Building Schools for the Future-era buildings I’ve been lucky enough to head are each lovely in their way, built when much more money was spent on design as well as building (though I did have to skill myself up on post-torsioned concrete and nickel sulphide inclusion very temporarily). It's been sad to hear lazy glib talk of ‘wacky warehouses’, as if we’ve never known what we’re doing. I wonder how many fee-paying schools were built with holey concrete?

The Secretary of State gives the impression of being a practical woman. It is annoying to find yourself at the top of a heap that appears to have let something (literally) fall. It's embarrassing to be caught out venting on a matter that would best be kept between you and the dog. It happened to me – ahem – recently. But honestly? Getting a 95% return on a questionnaire should give you enough to go on. The other 5% might have been places like us, Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schools where you have to escalate any inquiry through Dante’s nine circles of hell before you can fill a form in. Cursing won’t alter the fact that everything in education needs more money and every chicken comes home to roost in the end. They’d better be careful which roof they land on.

Filling further inches with the lucky appearance of the new Chief Inspector of Schools designate, Martyn Oliver: I met him at a dinner last year and he seems a nice chap. He’s going to try to keep his own roost in the north, which is good too. I hope he values the considerable work Ofsted have done on curriculum and doesn’t revert to the easy but damaging single focus on outcomes. Despite considerable experience, I hope he isn’t dogmatic about the way to run a school, a real problem with the last ex-head who held the golden clipboard. No, my problem with Sir Martyn is purely linguistic. It is his claim, at the Select Committee, that he would ‘walk the walk’.

This stuff has been getting on my nerves for a bit. Leaders are prone to say they ‘walk the talk’, demonstrating that they practice what they preach. Fair enough, but now its amped up to ‘walking the walk’ which doesn’t shed any light. What walk? How far? To where? Why? Does it mean that people have actually done the job that they’re supervising? But leadership isn’t just about solving practical problems. It needs vision, and articulacy. If you spend your life with your sleeves rolled up, when do you think?

Am I worried or just irascible? Time will tell.

No more time for that as the cricket thing’s re-emerged as a tea-stained press cutting under last year’s School Plan. It seems I was gripped by an article about Bazball which told me about playing test cricket as though losing doesn’t matter much. Cricketers have apparently been encouraged to play as if they enjoyed it, without the fear of failure, remembering that it’s a game and that it ought to be fun. Instigators Stokes and McCullum (whom I wouldn’t know if they presented me with The Ashes) asked players ‘what if you don’t mind about losing, so long as you are playing your own style’.

I’m not going to make an obvious and worthless point about Ofsted here. Children are too important to allow every school and teacher to do as they please, cheerfully failing them but having a great time. We have to have a shared and clear vision and some assessment of success against it. But we need to get out from under the fear of failure, and allow everyone in schools to think and to enjoy it a bit more. Is Mazball at Ofsted Towers too much to hope?

Happily seaworthy, we’ve launched the good ship Tallis cheerily this week. I hope we’ll enjoy the voyage for the next 38. I’ll keep you informed.

CR
8.9.23

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Shaping the World

6/5/2023

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It is impossible to know what young people are thinking. While popular convention imagines they think only subversion and mayhem, the evidence is different. What with food, love, football, hair and a bit of learning, teenage brain space is disputed territory. I’ve just overheard one talking to three captive mates about gravitational fields. Another passed me on the stairs deep in a conversation about betrayal. One asked me what day it was. Best of all, I was sitting at the bus stop two weeks ago, seeking Penge, when three chaps in year 10 or 11 walked past. Their topic was unexpected for 1710: ‘the Irish economy’s a different matter. You have to understand what’s going on there, regarding growth.’

I’m thinking about this because as well as anger over Ofsted and despair about funding there’s a worry about behaviour in schools. Hold onto your hats: that’s not to say that there’s general mayhem in the corridors and classrooms of Tallis or the nation: 95-odd percent of children still behave well at school and largely enjoy it, whether they admit it or not. But all institutions are feeling the pressure post-lockdown. Some are anxious, many are absent and a minority have got the idea that aspects of school are negotiable. Its happening everywhere: we’re all having to dig in extra-deep and re-establish boundaries. One of the Heads’ unions has gathered information nationally about behaviour this week, and the picture is – unnerving.

So I find myself asking: was it right to close schools during the plague? It seemed unavoidable at the time. But looking back? How can we balance the damage done to individuals’ learning and institutional integrity with the risk as it turned out? This isn’t a rhetorical question. There’s a 15 year research programme needed to assess the impact on learning, life-chances and social cohesion. If 5-10% of young people and their families have decided that schooling is optional, how will that play out in the next generation?

The context is further complicated by two boggy factors. One inevitably is funding, more below. The other is the way we see things now. Hard to express, here goes, sorry if I get it wrong.

The nation expects schools to be stable, bulwarks against the exigencies of life. The fundamental truth of safeguarding practice is that children are safest in school. So we have to get them all there, not 91% of them.
Schools are bulk institutions with baked-in economies of scale. We have classrooms of a standard 30-seat size, teachers trained and skilled in working with large groups, standard operating procedures that rely on consent and compliance, backed up by parents and society. A liberal outfit like Tallis is like all other schools in these respects.

We all need children to follow instructions: the difference between schools is how the instructions are given.
That means, necessarily, that the amount of individual negotiation any school can manage with a child is limited. A child with a severe, diagnosed need might be excused Spanish. A child who just doesn’t fancy it and would prefer to wander about …. hard luck, in you go. However, as a society we are much more likely now to take account of individuals’ needs and choices, and we are more likely to give some of those needs or desires a name. That means that some children and families wish for special treatment that schools will not and cannot give. It's not that we don’t care, and it's not that we see children as cogs in a machine. We’re literally built to function in a particular way, in communities where everyone has to play their part and children’s singular wishes usually have to be subsumed to the common good. we don’t just do it because of economics, conservatism or cussedness. We do it because that’s how the world works.

This is particularly difficult in secondary schools because between 10 and 19, those parts of the brain involved in planning and social interactions are still maturing. As the scientists say, this lengthy period of our lives is unusually challenging. Challenging for the adolescent, and challenging for everyone who cares for them.

You know that I believe that schools should be model communities of learning and social good, and that comprehensive schools in particular should demonstrate the best kind of equal and equitable society. It only works if everyone’s there, and we all work together. Some of our young people have suffered from the disruption of the plague in a particular way and perhaps do have a time-constrained special need that needs a particular kind of response. There was much money spent on the architecture of disease – testing, vaccinating and the economic support that sort-of followed – but now we need similar spending for the follow-on. We need attendance officers, behaviour staff, welfare teams, family liaison workers, counsellors, mental health specialists and educational psychologists. And we need teachers who have time to think, and plan. Currently – well, you’ve heard me on this before. We don’t have them and soon we won’t be able to afford anyone. And there’s hardly anyone to appoint even if we had the money.

I have a mixed relationship with The Guardian these days, but Zoe Williams wrote an interesting piece a couple of weeks ago about how the public schools reshape themselves every generation to produce what society wants from them: colonists, soldiers, politicians of a particular kind. I don’t think our public-school-dominated government is deliberately running state education into the ground, but I know plenty people who do think that. I just think they don’t know what we do, or what will happen when we can’t.

Many young people are still reeling from the brutal withdrawal of the major structure in their lives during the massive brain re-ordering of adolescence. They need enough good adults to support and manage them. Government, for the love of God, turn your thoughts to us, the universal service for children. If you destroy us, you destroy the future.

CR
5.5.23

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They May Cast the Lot Against You

24/3/2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s perfectly reasonable for the state to inspect its schools, but they need to do it properly. Inspection can’t be done properly on the cheap. It should take time and combine critical analysis with expertise and support. Large expert teams should visit for longer. Areas that need improving should be explained and the school given a chance to work with inspectors on the headlines of a plan. The final report should assess all aspects of the school and be expressed clearly in a balanced, detailed and rational manner. Parents are perfectly capable of reading.
Inspectors perform a public service and they should be valued. I understand the argument that values school leaders as inspectors, but I’m no longer convinced. Inspection is a profession, with its own expertise and body of knowledge. The consistency required to inspect a whole system cannot be achieved with an army of contracted folks temporarily out of their schools, no matter how brilliant they are. The costs – standardised language and template judgments - are too high and the quality control of rogue inspectors too weak. I’d perhaps put one serving leader on a team, to give practical advice to inspectors and support to the inspected head.

Obviously, urgent and dangerous issues in a school need swift restorative action. No one would argue with that. Some schools will get bad reports for good reasons and no one would want to prevent that. The problem with the current system is that, in the name of public accountability and easy reading, a complex and critical universal service is reduced to terminology that cannot possibly convey its fullness. As the writer of the Book of Sirach (fka Ecclesiasticus) said of judges in the second century BCE:

They may cast the lot against you…..and then stand aside to see what happens to you.

Our current system was designed before social media took over and the quality of public discourse downgraded. It doesn’t serve schools, families or children well. It fuels twitter trolls, public shamers and the sensationalist newspapers who habitually hate teachers, and perhaps that’s where Ruth Perry found herself, overwhelmed with guilt, or bewilderment, with nowhere to turn. Actually, much of our accountability system looks as though it is designed precisely for this; accountability dreams of the 90s have become fuel for the frenzy. It’s no way to improve public education.

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

CR
24.3.23

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How are we?

24/2/2023

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I’m unreasonably irritated by people asking me how I am. I don’t mean people I know, but people with whom I have no relationship but want a piece of my day to tell me how to do my job better. My mother, concerned that I was brisk to the point of rudeness even as a child trained me to answer ‘how do you do?’ with ‘how do you do?’ which I can cope with. It’s the expected disclosure (‘fine’, ‘mustn’t grumble’, ‘chugging along’) that annoys. I’m pretty stoical in temperament, so how I am is pretty much the same all the time. That means that the answer I long to give is ‘I’m here, so assume I’m able to do a professional job. Declare your business.’ I realise this reflects badly on me.

Which leads me into wellbeing and workload, about which I was interviewed by a think tank earlier in the week. I’m a veteran of the teacher workload reforms of the early 2000s and the development of support staffing which genuinely changed our lives for the better. However, every secretary of state since 2010 has paid lip service to teacher workload while every budget since 2010 has made it materially worse. Professional wellbeing is dependent upon having a manageable workload. Workload is dependent on time. Time is money. Teachers’ hours are squeezed and class sizes inflated when schools don’t have money. Workload goes up and wellbeing takes a hit. People are exhausted and overwhelmed. Tackling teacher workload is expensive. Talking about teacher wellbeing is cheap. Forgive me, it’s not the first time I’ve ranted about this.

Anyway, the Department has it in hand. The DfE Education Staff Wellbeing Charter was interpolated between the pandemic and the current financial and political collapse. Supported by unions and schools, it claims that:

Signing up to the charter is a public commitment to actively promote mental health and wellbeing through policy and practice. It is a way to show current and prospective staff that your school or college is dedicated to improving and protecting their wellbeing.

In the spirit of asperity I’ve adopted so far, I object to showing people something that can only be demonstrated by doing. Our sixth form would call that performatism.

Protecting the wellbeing and mental health of staff is:

essential for improving morale and productivity
critical to recruiting and retaining good staff
a legal duty: employers are required by law to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees
taken account of as part of Ofsted inspection

How’s that going? Is morale improving? What, precisely, in education is productivity? Student progress? Attendance? None of these are improving, and recruitment and retention is catastrophic. Of course we have to do what the law requires to look after our people, but OFSTED? Here I skid to a halt. That’s why people have signed up to it. It’s certainly why we have.

Here’s the wording from OFSTED’s ‘evaluation of leadership and management’. Inspectors will look at the extent to which leaders take into account the workload and well-being of their staff, while also developing and strengthening the quality of the workforce. (para 313)

Which might get you the ‘outstanding’ grade descriptor where leaders ensure that highly effective and meaningful engagement takes place with staff at all levels and that issues are identified. When issues are identified, in particular about workload, they are consistently dealt with appropriately and quickly. Staff consistently report high levels of support for well-being issues. (para 416)

I’m not decrying schools’ attempts to make the difficult bearable or even enjoyable. Lord knows we try. But what does it mean? Proper HR, of course, a bit of flexibility when family life bangs on the door, respect in the workplace, evidence that discussion is welcomed, free tea, umbrellas and a decent behaviour policy, a dress code that doesn’t require you to look like an idiot, plans, policies and leadership that explain themselves. Email curfews. Kindness. Wisdom.

But all of these should be normal. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if a school was being run madly and badly, by people hooked on robust leadership tropes. It would be good if Ofsted could uncover some of that, as opposed to lauding it, which they used to.

What teachers really need, as well as decent pay that respects their training and professionalism, and their value to society, is time. Time to think, collaborate, learn, plan, keep up with their subject. Time to care. Time to have fun in the classroom. All of that costs money. What I need is funding that allows me to put at least an extra hour of professional thinking time back into teachers’ weeks. And, if there are really going to be no other services available to children and their families, another hour on top of that to listen and talk to children about their lives.

I need that money now, and I need it on top of the budget I already have. An uplift of about 5% would do it. The last budget settlement just postponed disaster: it didn’t allow any of this.

What really drives teachers, social workers and medics out is moral injury. That’s when the workplace doesn’t match the vocation and good people have to make bad decisions either because they’re told to or because there isn’t the money to do better. When learning is secondary to outcomes, when compliance is substituted for character, when recruitment and training is bungled and cheapened again and again and again: it’s no wonder people leave.

Don’t ask us how we are. Don’t lodge the system’s failures in the hearts of teachers. Don’t pretend there are cheap alternatives. As far as I’m concerned, teacher wellbeing is all about the money.

CR
23.2.22

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The Year’s Midnight

15/12/2022

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

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

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

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

So how are we feeling as we trudge or slip towards the end of term? I’ve got Ofsted’s Annual Report neatly printed out waiting for me on the settee in my office, observing that SEND structures and funding are very far from working. Next to it is the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Annual Report into Education Spending. They say:

In 2021–22, total spending on education in the UK stood at £116 billion or 4.6% of national income (including the cost of issuing student loans). This is about the same share of national income as in the early 2000s, mid 1980s and late 1960s, but lower than the mid 1970s and late 2000s, when it was well over 5% of national income.
Between 2010–11 and 2019–20, there was a real-terms cut of 8% or £10 billion in total education spending. A £7 billion increase over the next two years reversed much of this cut, such that education spending was only 2% lower by 2021–22 than in 2010–11. About two-thirds of the rise since 2019–20 (or £4.5 billion) reflects standard increases in education spending, whilst about £2.5 billion reflects a higher and more volatile cost of issuing student loans.
In the late 1970s, education spending represented 12% of total government spending, making it the equal largest area of government spending. This has since fallen to 10% of total government spending in 2021–22, which equals a historical low point. At the same time, we estimate that 20% of the UK population was in full-time education in 2021–22, equal to the highest it has been in at least 60 years. In sharp contrast, as the share of the population over 65 has risen, the share of total spending on healthcare has more than doubled from just over 9% in the late 1970s to over 20% today.

St Lucy’s Day on Tuesday and in the time I’d put aside to start on one of them Ahmed buttonholed me to say that his Spanish classroom smelled of seaweed, and what was I going to do about it? Nothing. Seaweed has many nutritional properties so he shouldn’t worry. While responding to a request elsewhere, I overheard a much larger soul telling another he was ‘frankly, heartbroken’ but I couldn’t work out if it was the state of the nation, a lover’s spurning or a disappointing Chemistry test. Arrived at my destination (the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter) I put a cover class right on the mature way to deal with a room change (replacing hysteria with industry), observing that I was a sixty-one-year-old woman with a heavy cold and they wouldn’t want a return visit.

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

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

CR
14.12.22

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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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On the need to dig deeper

12/6/2021

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

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

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

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

Schools should create a culture where sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are not tolerated, and where they identify issues and intervene early to better protect children and young people. They should assume that sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are happening in their setting, even when there are no specific reports, and put in place a whole-school approach to address them.

This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR
11.6.21

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On checklists and their use

12/7/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

Thank you for the guidance which arrived last week and then, oh joy, more today. The 35 pages on full reopening is pitched well to annoy heads who want more guidance and heads who want less, so it is probably about right. Apart from asking us to do the impossible, it is a reasonable effort. Separating year groups is a great idea – if you have a 1970s building with year bases, like the old Tallis or the old Pimlico. That was a lesson from the past that no one wanted to revisit during Building Schools for the Future, where we all had to cut down on communal space and no one has anywhere to put children when it rains at lunchtime.

So dining is on my mind. I get up early so there’s a long gap after breakfast. That means I go to first lunch with y7 and 8, the bonus being that I can see over the littlest ones’ heads. First lunch is a melee of 500-odd 11-13s, organising themselves pretty well, grasping food and cackling happily as they review the morning, perfectly safe and orderly while making an ear-piercing racket quite different to the rumbling of older children. Second lunch is more crowded with over 800 bigger and hungrier diners reading, tutting, strutting and preening.

Let me tell you, we can solve ordinary lunch with no year group mingling but wet lunch? Oh my. Several people have suggested, helpfully, that we could roof over the spaces between the blocks. Well thank you. What? How? And have you seen the cost of a PFI building adjustment? OK, they say, saddened by my mindset: what about a big gazebo? It’d have to be semi-permanent: we’re built on a swamp like Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs and an hour’s rain gives us trench foot and quacking. Umbrellas?

An email enticingly titled ‘toilet amendments’ has just hopped into view. Anyone for latrine detail?

The School Council have been reflecting on weightier matters, reviewing our performance since March. They liked the work set and the support, they like Teams. They didn’t like timetable clashes or other students being late for lessons. They’re doing but missing learning. They want to see their teachers and their friends. Most of all, they want to be together to do something about Black Lives Matter, to talk about it, to demonstrate, to learn about institutional racism and to hold us to account. Other things can wait: ‘all of the focus at the moment needs to be on Black Lives Matter.’ We expected no less and we’re on it. See what happens when a school focuses on understanding the world and changing it for the better?

Returning to the matter under advisement, Mr Williamson, I cannot tell a lie. Your other guidance has annoyed me. Today we got 4 pages: a Checklist for school leaders to support full opening: behaviour and attendance. First, a quibble. A checklist needs boxes to tick. Scattering it with bullet-point ticks makes it instructions. Second, its really annoying.

Simon Hoggart, may he rest in peace, invented his Law of Inverse Absurdity one Saturday morning in the Guardian for just such a document. Let me entertain you.

(*This is new. Is it the tradecraft of Smiley’s people and picking up rumours on the street or me ringing the Head next door and asking how attendance is in their castle?)

So at the end of a long struggle since March, you decide to issue a statement of the blindingly obvious? Is that time well spent? Some heads are really agitated about Ofsted kindly offering to do some checking visits to see how its all going next term. I’m not that bothered, they have to earn their keep. But I’ve said it before, Mr Williamson, you’re putty in the hands of your leader. The PM’s flinging blame about. He’s started on the care homes and it’ll be social workers next. He daren’t blame the NHS but no one in any government has ever batted an eyelid at blaming schools for anything and everything.

Austerity, poverty, elitism, the Hostile Environment, racism, Brexit and an education-as-exams policy which sacrifices a third of children are the problems that lead to disengagement, poor behaviour and truancy. Our systems work pretty well, but they cost a lot and I’m worried about what Rishi Sunak will do when he’s finished carrying plates about for the cameras. You’re all limbering up to blame schools and then you’ll turn the screw. What will it be? Further reduced budgets or super-strict behaviour policies? Both?

Me, I’ve got to reopen a school that keeps children safe and helps them think about the state of the world. I have to be ready for rain and shine, for anger as well as relief. I’ve got to keep everyone with me while we steer this supertanker around the rocks. If you’re going to advise me, make it useful. If you can’t do that, leave me alone. The children expect a better world, and I must look to them.

CR
10.7.20

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Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

29/6/2020

3 Comments

Dear Mr Williamson,

Part 1: Thursday 25 June
You were spotted in SW1 earlier this week and the fieldman’s report (I’m reading Le Carré) classified you as ‘preoccupied’. I’m not surprised. I feared for your state of mind before the current shenanigans began and I can’t imagine what it’s like navigating the corridors of power with your colleagues. Seeing them on the telly requires nerves of steel.

Unlike watching us! Tallis was on the box on Monday. BBC London came and filmed a newly-regathered half A-level Psychology class, interviewed Mr Smith, four thoughtful youths and me. They said that being back helped focus their minds: I said that having no children was scrambling mine but that the 2m rule would need to be gone – and all the bubble talk – before we could reassemble.

So we plugged the gogglebox in the dining room in on Tuesday lunchtime to watch the PM forecast the future. Social distancing meant those at the reception end needed binoculars, but never mind, I had a front seat. Good news: everyone back to school in September! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear and I tried to encourage moderate cheering. Some HTs are worried about the detail, but I’m sure you have it all under control. In fact, my pavement artist (Le Carré again) said it looked as though it was all in your bag.

Perhaps one of those bright young things who nip around ministers fore and aft could sort it out a bit for you, though? Headteachers are fussy and we like things to be clear. It would be great to see which rules we have to follow in school, which are optional, which just occurred to a front-bencher while they were cleaning their teeth, which have been abandoned, which denied and which are ideas being road-tested before becoming policy which may never be heard of again. My primary colleagues, blessings on their tiny furniture, were certainly shocked this week to be told that 2m in school had never been a rule for them. Are you sure?

And what about this rumour afloat that the exams might be pushed back a few weeks next year to maximise teaching time. That’s partially a good idea – but oh my, wouldn’t it have been better to test it out below decks before musing from the bridge? Now everyone’s asking about it and no one has the foggiest.

And without wishing to reopen a wound, since The Drive To Barnard Castle the whole cabinet’s seaworthiness is questionable, like a teacher who lost control of a class in October but has to survive until July. Was he worth it?

Mr Williamson, I’ve been thinking about exams too, nursing a fond hope that the experience of this year might usher in a better future. Why have GCSEs at all? Why not base the 16-year-olds’ passport on teacher assessment, moderated in the way this year’s will be, properly evaluated and monitored by nerdy subject-based inspectors who really know their stuff? That’s who Her Majesty’s Inspectors were before Ofsted was invented. Wouldn’t it be great to liberate learning by dispensing with GCSE? Wouldn’t it be great if year 11 marked their transition without the examination hall as the rite of passage? Remember, it only remotely works for two thirds of them.

Like the hapless October teacher we’re not very good at some kinds of learning so we end up having to keep promising the same changes time and again. I took two years out of teaching before I had my children and worked as a Community Relations Officer in the midlands. The 80s were a time of disturbance in Birmingham and London which resulted in a significant amount of Home Office funding for projects to tackle the racism and social exclusion. Most of the focus was on anti-racism training for individuals, but we understood about institutionalised racism and encouraged institutions to scrutinise their processes to combat it. Fifteen years later there was the McPherson Report. Now, twenty years after that, ten years after the Public Sector Equality Duty, where are we, exactly? And how can any government mired in the Windrush depatriations and the Hostile Environment be believed?

I saw a photo in the paper of a novel idea in a Chinese school to keep small-ish children apart. They had very serious expressions for persons in purple paper wings but it just goes to show that children will accept anything as normal if an adult tells them so. Children will believe a lie if someone they trust tells it. That’s why we have to tell them the truth and that’s why we can’t keep fobbing them off with change tomorrow.

Education, equality and justice are really hard to get right. Your Shadow has fallen today. You’re picking your way, Mr Williamson, through very difficult circumstances and you don’t look very steady on your own feet. Tell us the truth, talk to us and trust us and we can rebuild something righteous and grand, together.

Yours, at some distance.

Carolyn Roberts
26.6.20

3 Comments

Sticky Labels

11/2/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

I’ve been watching ‘The Young Pope’ on the telly because I share a sofa so I don’t always get to choose what’s on. I’ve observed the scheming top Cardinal hassling the Pope to address the people. We’re still looking forward to hearing from you so may I beg you to do the same? In case you’ve forgotten, my helpful suggestions included school funding, teachers’ pay, school improvement and renationalising the National Curriculum.

Of course, you may be doing nothing at all and waiting for the shuffle, but as you promised to work hard, that can’t be true. I expect you’re locked in a dark room with the good accountants of the Treasury working out a long-term sustainable stable funding package to transform children’s lives. All power to your manly elbow!

However, the schools of the nation continue to assemble every day and do our bit for the common good so you’ll probably appreciate being kept abreast of same. Items on the agenda at Tallis since we last corresponded include:

Getting external support to sort out the behaviour of troubled young folks
Dealing with troubled young folks without any support.
Telling some year 11s that closing their eyes and hoping they land somewhere in September does not constitute a careers strategy
Telling other year 11s that they might want to take a break from revision from time to time.
Talking to a DfE official about curriculum breadth and creativity
Preparing for a Saturday governor meeting to decide the shape of key stage three and four.
Drawing a line under sixth formers who haven’t done any work yet.
Thinking about next year’s staffing.
Hosting a visitor to look at behaviour and inclusion systems as we all struggle with the effects austerity has had on the stability of home life for the poorest families.
Going to the funeral of a much-loved colleague who died at New Year
Trying to foresee all eventualities in our transgender policy
Dealing with criminality out of school seeping into school

On the agenda of young people at Tallis this week may have been some of the above plus

Wearing hoods indoors in contravention of local byelaws.
Learning the difference between the mournful, boisterous, friendly and annoying hug
Assessing the distinction between a large woolly hairband and a hat
Anticipating conversation at home after parents’ evening (year 8)

Youth ought to be generally carefree and I’m glad they don’t worry about everything we worry about. Mind, sometimes they are causes of worry. I encountered a youth helpfully carrying books from hither to yon, but inexpertly, as if he’d had them tipped into his arms from a laundry basket. We have a lot of stairs at Tallis but he assured me he’d get there safely. As for the books?

I write this with a local copper sitting in my office. He’s not arresting me for offences against the language but clearing up some issues in the locality. Simultaneously I note a campaign to Pause Ofsted in a ‘quiet revolution’ in order to bring about ‘fundamental reform’ in what it does. Have you seen this, Mr Williamson?

These campaigning colleagues believe that Ofsted increases problems for the most vulnerable schools. They make several unarguable points, specifically that the current inspection system

Destroys the reputation of schools in deprived areas, which are doing the best work in the most difficult circumstances. These are not ‘stuck’, they have been let down by inadequate funding and support. Ofsted has consistently failed to call this out.
Imposes inspection frameworks which are untried and untested on schools, leading to poor inspection judgements.
Makes schools the scapegoat for rising child poverty which is the real enemy of learning and progress.

This has been brewing since Ofsted’s unfortunate description of schools whose inspection grades haven’t reached good for many years, or ever, as ‘stuck’. A crude and needlessly disparaging epithet, ‘stuck’ sounds as though no one’s really trying. When I led one of them, they were described as ‘schools facing challenging circumstances’ which is both accurate and respectful of the professionals and children therein. Did I mention offences against the language?

Instructed by one of my sofa-sharers I’ve been reading Machiavelli this week. He observed:

……wise Romans did not wish to add difficulties and dangers to a thing in itself difficult and dangerous, since they thought that if they added them, no one would ever work virtuously.

Do the current performance and regulatory systems add difficulties and dangers to schools already struggling against fearful odds? That’s another question for you to get stuck into, Mr Williamson.

So, before I sign off, let me encourage your doubtless tireless work behind the scenes to repair ten years of austerity and child poverty. Accountability is legitimate, but openness, wisdom, justice, service and courage are what children and their communities need. And much, much more money.

Remaining your servant and trusting in your good intentions,
Yours
CR
7.2.20

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Too early to tell

21/10/2019

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For the greater good, I stay at arm’s length from social media. Other Heads are all over it, dispensing wisdoms and being useful but, like chip shops, I stay away from temptation. I’m way too fond of a smart remark and a brisk retort to resist putting people right about stuff that’s none of my business. I’d have to spend my life apologising. Also, my phone is fully occupied with answering emails, reading novels and looking at pictures of my granddaughter so I don’t really have time for other hobbies.

If I did follow the twitts, I’d apparently be in a proper state about OFSTED and the application of their spiffy new framework. After not being interested in it for years, the clipboard brigade are very keen to uncover the intent, implementation and impact of a school’s curriculum and the first reports are piling up now. Schools have prepared, even retooled, to demonstrate their knowledge-rich curricula and their plans for a future liberated from the short-termism and exam fixes which OFSTED used to like under its previous pugilistic proprietor. Good news. What could possibly go wrong?

Thirty-odd years ago I used occasionally betake myself to Sheffield to hear a radical Methodist theologian of advanced years. He once said, woundingly, that there was nothing good that the CofE couldn’t get wrong and I sometimes, sorrowfully, feel this about OFSTED. These tweeted early reports have commented not so much on the curriculum, but on whether schools have a 2- or 3- year key stage 3 and what % are doing the EBacc. Hmmm. Key stage length is a school choice and the EBacc is the Department’s political ambition, not OFSTED’s. Righteous indignation enters stage right, to be met by obfuscation from the left. What exactly are OFSTED looking at? On whose behalf? Curriculum, or cheap-to-measure markers? Children’s learning or White Paper lunacy?

Our own visiting clipboards, you will recall, popped a similar question. Observing that we talked a good game about a broad curriculum entitlement but that we let too many drop arts, DT or languages at the end of year 8, they suggested that we might consider the impact of the 2-year KS3 on our claim of a broad curriculum until year 11.   Fair point, but our lead inspector was a subtle and thoughtful man who took time over his words. Other reports have been rather more direct: change your key stages.

Ofsted are right to be worried about curriculum breadth and integrity and to look at it closely. They are responding to the madness caused by over-simplified high-stakes inspection measures which drove Heads mad and made some narrow the curriculum and dilute knowledge in order to meet performance metrics. Originally, lengthening KS4 to three years was a way of doing this. Hothouse the GCSEs for longer, get better results. About half of secondary schools did it.

Undoing it will be troublesome because GCSEs are now much heavier in content and harder in assessment. Doing them in two years rather than three is fine for those who are fully attuned to education and assimilate book-learning easily. It’ll require wall-to-wall didacticism, and I’m not sure that the research on how children learn values that so highly. Doing them over three years gives a bit of space for unpacking the context of particular learning and for imagination and discovery – and other things that the current captains and the kings particularly don’t like. We’ve been thinking about this here since January. We’re not stupid: if there was a simple answer, we’d have found it.

But is this thoughtful uncertainty a luxury? It’s not as if our GCSE results couldn’t be improved. Shouldn’t we just do as we’re told and follow the instructions of the regulator and the DfE?

The confusion in the system, from which OFSTED suffer, is deeply rooted. We have a system that bizarrely prizes autonomy above almost everything else. Making the right curriculum decision is a matter therefore for the school, not the state. Only LA schools are actually still bound by the National Curriculum (wrongly, mistakenly). School curriculum decisions are a matter for schools, except when there’s a political panic. Then the independent regulator – OFSTED – is put to the service of the manifesto promises and the whole structure is revealed, shaky as a weak jelly.

If we knew what schools were for, then we’d make better decisions. If we could agree about what children should learn, then we could have a real, proper, broad National Curriculum that schools could adapt to their circumstances. If we trained and supported Heads properly rather than measuring them cheaply we’d have a system second to none. But that takes time and money, cool longitudinal research and a realisation that twitter-feeding isn’t the same as educational leadership.

We are the advocates for the nation’s young. Ethical leadership demands that we hold trust on their behalf and should use our wisdom, knowledge and insight wisely and kindly. We should seek to serve justly, courageously and optimistically and continue to argue calmly and in detail for the best curriculum for our schools.

I looked out of the window and couldn’t work out why flags-of-the-nations bunting was being put up inexpertly by some sixth form, helped by every passing advisor. Then I remembered today was our Black History Month festival at lunchtime, the nearly-end of three weeks of activity. First lunch was sunny and dancy, second lunch wet and huddly, but never mind, we’ve had a lovely time; informative, challenging and interesting. Just like a good curriculum...

A teacher comes to visit and tells me she’s wearing her geek trousers. I think we should all put some on, take a breath and think calmly and professionally - preferably behind closed doors for a while. OFSTED evaluation frameworks usually take a while to bed in and there’s no need to panic. We’re way off getting this right, but the system is thinking better and about the things that matter. As we say in every room here: we know we are learning when we are thinking very hard.

CR 17.10.19

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Ofsted and the movies

8/6/2019

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I wandered onto the concourse in a sort of drizzle and was approached for pleasantries by a young person with her sweatshirt tied over her head and under her chin, like the Queen’s headscarf. We’ve been talking about uniform this week, but I hadn’t thought to explain which parts of the body each bit goes on. My son used to do this when he was being a centurion and my daughter put tomato ketchup on her hair to keep it blonde so I was open to a range of explanations. However, after agreeing that we were both well, I discovered she was just keeping her do dry in case it shrank.

Which reminded me of a conversation with a Head of Year a long time ago, watching some boys playing padder tennis without bats and in the oddest PE kit they could exhume from the spare kit box. ‘Children are mad’ I offered. ‘Yes’ she said ‘and they make no attempt to hide it’. And of another experience in a coastal school where a year 9 history group appeared with stiff PE shorts on their heads with cries of ‘we’re chefs, Miss’. Ah, the charm of the fourteen-year-old.

Speaking of charm, I turn now to Sean Harford, National Director for Education at Ofsted. This Harford is an avuncular chap whom I’ve heard pronounce on this and that, here and there. He’s reasonable and usually makes sense and I’ve always assumed he was behind the clarifications and mythbusters that Ofsted put out from time to time. He was in the trade press last week allegedly saying three things that made me long for something to put over my head.

While Ofsted’s reports show behaviour as good or better in 90% of schools, he doesn’t believe it. There are ‘real issues’ with inspecting behaviour and Ofsted can do ‘a whole bunch of things’ better, like talking to new or lunchtime staff who might see the worst of it. Yes indeedy.
The curriculum ‘started to suffer’ when schools became academies. Ofsted ‘missed a trick’ because it was slow to respond to schools having ‘freedoms to do different stuff’. They assumed that everyone would preserve the well-established national curriculum and not narrow choices unreasonably. This took how long to spot?
Ofsted don’t have enough cash to inspect properly and were therefore over-dependent on performance data, so that made everything worse. Mighty thinking, Maestro.

I itinerate around the building to calm myself and potter past an intense exchange in block 1 on the films of Quentin Tarantino. On this, I have wisdom to share. Inglourious Basterds is a work of art, the rest, not so much. The year 12 critics may or may not have been interested, but it has relevance in my junkyard brain.

At the end of the film quite a lot of things have gone badly, so much so that someone tells the sort-of hero, Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine he’ll be shot. ‘Nah’ he says sanguinely. ‘More like chewed out. I been chewed out before’.
Mr Director’s been on the electronic loudhailer to say he’s been misquoted. I hope that’s true because the alternative is that he’s just twigged onto something so blindingly obvious that I assumed we took it for granted. Obviously a day in school doesn’t show you what behaviour is like. Obviously autonomy combined with punitive accountability leads to fearful decision-making. Obviously inspection on the cheap is faulty.

Being honest is good. Thinking out loud is refreshing, but Harford isn’t Brad Pitt and breezy won’t do. Children’s education suffered, good people lost their jobs and teacher recruitment has fallen through the floor during this madness. As the damage is huge, so repentance has to be proportionate and lead to real change.

Forgive me, there’s more. Aldo Raine helpfully points out during the film that fighting in a basement offers a lot of difficulties, number one being that you’re fighting in a basement. I wonder if Sean Harford meant to say something like that: lack of money offers a lot of difficulties, number one being we didn’t have any money - so we had to do a cheap job. That raises more questions: if the money isn’t going to be put back, what kind of inspection can we expect? What scheme will overcome the difficulties?

Many head teachers might bring other Tarantinos to mind when contemplating Ofsted, but I prefer his smart remarks to the bloodbath movies and I don’t want to annihilate other public servants. Inspecting schools is a democratic duty, but we do it with at least one hand tied behind our backs. It’s not just the money, it’s the vision. Because we don’t know what our schools are for we don’t know what to inspect them for. We don’t care enough about children or state education to fund any of it properly so we make blindingly obvious mistakes. After decades of inspection, our data is corrupted, its use is shallow and we’re no wiser about trends or effectiveness because the goalposts move so often they must be on castors.

As Aldo Raine says ‘it behooves oneself to keep his wits’. The Director and HMCI are smart and honest folks: I hope something better comes out of this garbled messaging.

CR
6.6.19

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Choices

22/3/2019

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Last night was options evening, a reasonably jolly occasion. It’s the first time that children really get a choice about what they study and it’s always interesting to see how they respond. Options had an added soupçon of excitement for us this year as our advent visitors from Ofsted Towers gave us a Paddington stare on the matter. Pray tell us why, they said, you have a three-year key stage four when you know we disapprove? Enlighten us, would you, as to its purpose? And what, for the love of Mike, are you doing with year 9? As I’ve said before, we had ready answers. As I’ve said before, they raised their eyebrows and narrowed their eyes a little. Then it appeared in the Things To Do list they kindly left us.

After Ms Dedman, Tyla and Engen had spoken (admirably plainly and passionately) I addressed the assembled families in the hall. Reporting on the Lead Inspector’s thousand-yard stare I asked parents to tell me what they thought. Half a dozen sought me out, all of who approved of what we did and liked the early choice. They talked about motivation and freedom and taking on adult responsibility. Their children nodded sagely – but they don’t know anything else.

Some parents rested their weary elbows on the canteen pundit benches and probed gently. Why did we introduce a three-year key stage four, then? Well, it was before my time, but in an era when it was not only common practice in schools, but admired good practice. It gave children the chance to study for (sometimes modular) GCSEs in a flexible way, perhaps resitting where necessary, or even passing something in year 10 and doing new courses in year 11. It helped maximise results.

Most of those conditions have gone now. GCSEs have much more content, the modules are gone, and the chance of assimilating enough content and knowledge before the end of year 11 is frankly unlikely. Schools don’t do so many GCSEs and it’s not possible to hoist up results that way in any case anymore. Not that that was ever a justification.

Tallis has found itself in an interesting position. When I arrived in 2013, the first year of year 8 options, many staff begged me to return to options in year 9. I prefer to take a long view and had no experience of a three year key stage four, so I didn’t act precipitously. By the time we got to a second year, and certainly by the time the revised specifications for GCSE appeared, Tallis teachers had grown fond of the new division and much preferred it. Three years at key stage four gives you time to take the higher levels of content more slowly. It means that year 9 can be a foundation year, where children are spared exam questions and can really immerse themselves in the subject and what it means.

However, the visitors didn’t quite experience it like that. They were left with the impression that too many children are doing exam practice for too long. We shouldn’t be doing that. Fair point.

There’s another matter too. Three years is a long time to study one thing. It’s as long as a degree, but with much less lounging about. A thirteen-year-old is a different beast to a sixteen-year-old and there’s a risk of them forgetting by year 11 everything that they knew in year 9 (as well as their name, address, PE kit, timetable, friends, enemies and sandwiches). The year 9 introduction year works really well if it’s a foundation year, but the exam prep really should be left to year 11.

Why don’t we just stop it and go back to three-year key stage three? Well, three years is as long as a degree and they’re too young for all that coffee. Year 9 in a subject you can’t wait to drop is a long year, at just the wrong developmental age, when you find it really hard to concentrate on anything except yourself and are just getting into your stride as Outraged of Greenwich. Perhaps we should do something else with year 9 altogether?
So we’ve got a working group together and we’re thinking of both obvious and creative solutions. Everything is on the table and we’ll decide what to do by October, ready for next year. We’ll invite parents’ views too: watch this space.

But the really nice thing about options evening, like any parents’ evening is seeing our inmates with their elders, the way they talk to one another, lean on each other, tut and roll their eyes at each other, gasp in blank incomprehension at each other then leave arm-in-arm. Love takes so many forms, some of which are also confusion and worry. We need families to have patience, and keep talking , and make their good choices together, no matter how old they are.

I’m glad to be part of the same human family as New Zealand. When their PM’s ready, would she like to come and sort us out?

CR
21.3.19

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

One woman, two guvnors

Less Likely than a Unicorn

Cheerful and Lively

The Sturdy Chassis

Becoming Jane

A Promised Land

This way or that?

Mazball

Shaping the World

They May Cast the Lot Against You

How are we?

The Year’s Midnight

Hello Possums

On the need to dig deeper

On checklists and their use

Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

Sticky Labels

Too early to tell

Ofsted and the movies

Choices

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