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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Whatever Happened to the Self-Managing School?

20/6/2024

1 Comment

 
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I watch year 10 on their careers interview practice day, coping with the formal clothes they’ve opted to wear, unusual for us. Two boys have added a tie to their polo shirts and I mildly observe that this might seem eccentric to an interviewer. One is affronted: ‘it’s my rugby club tie’. Some girls are discussing others’ choices: ‘a school skirt with a white shirt is sensible. Smart and economical, you can’t go wrong’, although none of them are garbed thus.
Things we roll with at Tallis that bring other schools out in a rash include blue hair, nose rings, trainers, a very broad curriculum, student activism, noisy corridors, staff in shorts and skirt length. Things we grit our teeth about and smile through include Progress 8, SEND funding and financial terrors. Things we’re really fussy about include inclusion and respect for everyone. We look and feel different from a lot of other schools. We have our own vision and our own ways of working.

Readers from other schools will be foaming at the gills and shouting at their machinery. All schools are different.  We all make our own weather. The silly old bat’s making a fuss about nothing. Who’s rattled her cage?
At a lunch bidding farewell to a colleague more experienced than I, she put down her cuttles, looked me in the eye and bowled a poser.  ‘Whatever happened to the self-managing school?’ Struth, a distant echo. Gorn, I said. But when? and why?  

My co-eater’s to blame for this blog, about a memory of an idea that turned itself inside out and ended back where it started.

Everyone talked heartily about self-managing schools between the Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988 and the domination of deliverance from the early 2000s. I was prancing off to conferences at that time the better to claw my way up the greasy pole and heard a lot of chaps called David. Reynolds of Exeter, for example. He opined
Experience of past top-down change programmes or improvement schemes was one of dismal failure….it is also clear from the various school improvement programmes that commitment to personal and institutional change is greatest where the individual school is in charge of its own schemes. 

The belief was that schools’ capacity and vision had been let down by sclerotic structures, notably the Local Education Authorities (LEAs). The ERA had introduced Local Management of Schools, which largely and radically meant schools managing their own budgets. From then onwards, the push to manage more was obvious, inevitable and righteous. Why wouldn’t Heads, long experienced in curriculum design and management, free to spend their own budgets, want to shape the entire direction of their schools, including their core purpose, teaching and learning?

Initially, expertise developed and was shared across and between the LEAs who still ran (almost) all the schools. Self-managing schools became part of the ‘self-improving school’ system. Enterprising Heads joined forces in broader groups such as the Specialist Schools Trust, perhaps lured by the cash premiums attached to Specialist School Status and the quasi-business language of entrepreneurship which became common parlance. The National College for School Leadership was the flagship of the self-improving system and another David, Hargreaves of the SST, wrote for them on ‘Creating a self-improving school system’ in 2010.

It has long been known that the most powerful influences on teachers are other teachers, but policies have rarely built on the fact. The best way of exploiting this phenomenon is through regular, face-to-face encounters among professionals that focus on the improvement of teaching and learning…… In a self-improving school system, more control and responsibility passes to the local level in a spirit of mutual aid between school leaders and their colleagues, who are morally committed to imaginative and sustainable ways of achieving more ambitious and better outcomes. England is part way there. Will it now decide to travel the rest of the journey?

Well, yes. Vocal self-managers were highly influential with New Labour and the development of academies. That single policy snowplough cleared the path for the doctrinaire demolition of the Local Authorities from 2010 onwards under a government of an entirely different kind. The self-improvers became ‘system leaders’.  Collaboration laid the foundations for the MATs, whose self-managing blueprints became the orthodoxies of their schools and the drivers of the current system.

So do we now have self-managing schools? Was I wrong to say they had vanished like eight-track cartridges Hargreaves’ vision, of a system led by school leaders, by teachers for teachers, is where we, apparently, nearly, are.  Academies and MATs are run by the leaders and teachers who seized the day (along with some former civil servants and LEA folk, and some very rich people linked to governments). Has it worked? Yes and no, perhaps - but I speak from a particular vantage point and I may be wrong. 

The MATs committed themselves, as good public servants, to the deliverance of public sector targets for the good of all our children. They found particular ways that worked in particular contexts which were shared and copied.  Trends developed. None of this is new and none of it is wrong. But if funding collapses while accountability measures are keenly sought and assessed by high-stakes inspection, cost-effective models becomes accepted or recommended models. Many schools teach a more limited curriculum for exactly these reasons and a terrifying 60% MORE intend to reduce their curriculum.  

Perhaps this is a principled response to the prevailing circumstances? We can only do what we can afford, and we must fulfil expectations. The children need to pass exams in the subjects apparently valued by the nation, so this is what schools are for, and here’s how to do it. it’s a national scandal as well as a tragedy. But, returning to my question, I have to observe that some leaders in the dominant MATs appear to have significantly less freedom to self-manage than I’ve enjoyed as the servant of three Local Authorities. What self-management became seems to have led to greater control.

I don’t quote a lot of Eliot, but I can’t avoid Little Gidding.   
​
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.     ​
 
I’m not sure that self-managing or self-improving schools were ever the complete answer. There’s not enough service to the common good for me in such formularies, and the risk of becoming solely task-driven was likely, and has proved, to be overwhelming. Emerging with difficulty from this circular tunnel we should scrutinise the landscape closely. What about an education service that looks outward, rather than inward? What about a big and healthy curriculum, bringing national improvement for the common good, and future citizens with the knowledge and the nous to understand the world and change it for the better?

​CR 19.6.24
1 Comment

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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Children and war

17/11/2018

0 Comments

 
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Imagine the scene. Over 2000 people on the concourse, fluttering strings of red messages, life-size photographs of soldiers, nurses, civilians, children of the wars, representatives of five faiths and a very tall bugler in full dress uniform, including bearskin. Last post sounds, two minutes silence, then Reveille. The bugler snaps smartly to attention and salutes. A good number of children are so startled by this that they salute back, before we have our usual Tallis claps and disperse for break.

We planned this year’s Remembrance for a while to make sure that the 100th anniversary of the armistice wasn’t missed. We worked with filmmakers internally and externally and people shared family stories. We made poppies and even had a special lunch menu – heavy on the pie and root vegetables, with a rather toothsome fruit cake. And we goggled at each other in properly inquisitive manner. One colleague who joined us from the army had beret and medals and a girl rushed up to me. ‘I’ve just seen Sir, he’s wearing all his badges.’ A chum put her right. ‘Not badges, medals. He didn’t get them for being brave at the dentist’.

Yet the lasting memory for me took place out of sight of the crowds, out of earshot of the bugle. We gathered guests from mosque, church, gurdwara and synagogue in my room to welcome them before 11, sharing perspectives on Remembrance and seeing Muslim and Jew embrace, heartfelt, like brothers. 

So much time in school is spent trying to teach young people that love, friendship, kindness, cooperation, tolerance and peace is better than hate, suspicion, cruelty, threats, violence and war. The adult world sets a terrible example to adolescents who are quite capable of making entirely idiotic choices in social affairs. The great liberation educator Paulo Freire described this very aptly as them being ‘caught up in the drama of their own existence’.  Teenagers prefer to fan flames of outrage, rather than damp them. They enjoy gossip and rumour and they’re very poor at seeing the longer game. They’re prone to hyperbole, and they lack the experience to know that some things just don’t matter.

Some of these irritating characteristics are also strengths. Deep interest in other people, a strong sense of justice, faithfulness to friends and living in the moment are characteristics worth having. In their turn they’re better than indifference, isolation and living in the past. At its best, Remembrance focuses on the good, on the resilience of the human spirit.

But the personal wars our young people inhabit are terrifying when they go wrong. When intense self-regard or sensitivity to pressure turns inward to self-harm, when justice seems to demand violence, when sociability becomes persecution. Adults should live to protect young people, from those who’d do them harm and from themselves while the turbulence of adolescence rages.

This is why I’m so annoyed almost everything in social policy at the moment – if that term isn’t itself an echo from better days. When Universal Credit doesn’t work, its children who go hungry. When schools can’t afford support staff its children whose needs are unheard. When there aren’t any teachers its children whose hopes and dreams are scuppered. When there aren’t enough police its children, manipulated by adults fuelled by delusions of status, who kill one another.

The great Macneice poem I’ve quoted before (Prayer before Birth) has a verse that reads:

I am not yet born, forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
 
Our children need us, society, the state, to look after them because they are children and can’t look after themselves. They need us to protect them and help them to grow.  Just because we’re not sending them in their hundreds of thousands to die on the green fields of France doesn’t mean that we’re not sacrificing them. We need a safer, kinder world for them, now.
 
CR
15.11.18 
          
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What do we want?

17/11/2017

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I was heading for the big room outside at break but had to wait for a semi-feckless youth to tell me how hard he’s working. The fecklessness translated into not-turning-up-at-all but that was just as well as there wouldn’t have been room. In the end I had School Improvement partner dropping by mid-visit, Sir receiving feedback, Miss who was next, a maths man to be introduced, four year 11 ladies talking Prom and a phone call from the union. One of the office staff wanted to give me some papers but she couldn’t physically get through the door.

A shame, because today is coat exchange day. A duty colleague nearly as old as me, steeped in age and treachery, borrows a coat each week for duty and he doesn’t much care what it looks like. I twigged this the day he was wearing a pink sprigged affair which even in these gender-fluid days could only be described as a ladies’ mac.          
My year 10 political correspondent caught up when I managed to get out yesterday. Turning our attention temporarily away from the parlous state of the nation, I put her onto the Philippines and she’s not at all happy with what she’s found. ‘Peoples’ rights are being trodden on’.

Not just in the Philippines. I’m heartened by Emma Hardy, a Hull MP who in her maiden speech in the summer said,
We should not be making our schools into learning factories who churn out compliant, unquestioning units for work.  We want our children to be creative, to question, to inquire, to explore and think independently, especially during this era of fake news.  We are discussing the reform of drugs law without asking ourselves if we only ever teach our children to obey adults unquestioningly, how can they ever understand when they shouldn't?
This week she questioned the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, about the relationship between school behaviour policies and children’s rights, observing, praise be, that Article 28:2 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child says:
States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity and in conformity with the present Convention.
The commissioner agreed. She pointed out that some schools – the neo-trad uber-schools and their copies – have policies that violate those rights. I’ve been saying this for years. Zero tolerance and all that malarkey is superficially attractive, as are all easy answers, but children aren’t adults and the most difficult children to manage are usually the ones whom adults have messed up so much that they need subtlety in the protective boundaries that will help them. I fervently hope this line of argument goes somewhere. Perhaps I’ll prod it a bit.
 
Don’t misunderstand me. Behaviour in school needs to be good, systematised and consistently enforced. It’s not easy. Behaviour Policies are a very particular kind of document, statutorily on the website but really a document of last resort. Ours is immensely long and tries to cover almost any eventuality upon which the Policy might be brought to bear. Actual behaviour on the ground is simpler, modelled by teachers and supported by praise and sanctions where needed.   
 
Our problem as ever is that we mistake our proxies for our goals. Schools bear many of the nation’s proxies: examination results are a proxy for learning, super-strict behaviour policies a proxy for developing good character. Both try to measure something that’s very hard to measure. Exams help us tell if a person is able to remember and process information in such a way that will make us be able to trust him or her as an adult ; you wouldn’t want an innumerate accountant or a doctor who was clueless about chemistry. Behaviour tells us if people can regulate themselves and be kind to others because we don’t want selfish and vindictive adults. But what if our exam accountability measures actually don’t measure learning, and our behaviour management just generates compliance or anger?
 
Accountability is really important but really hard. Every change in the GCSEs is part of our national attempt to get the examinations to prove something and we’re still way adrift. There aren’t any easy metrics for character development because we don’t really know what virtues we value as a nation.  Is it quiet kindness and reserve, our bottomless creativity or the shouty skills of the marketplace?  If we could just take the time to set out what we value, what we hope our young people will be, then perhaps we could set about generating schools that actually produced them. Monitoring and accounting for that would be very expensive to generate, but what a difference they’d make to all of us.  
 
It’s not that our young can’t show us the way. When the Salvation Army food bank in Catford ran out of food and clothes two weeks ago, RE set sorting that out as year 8 homework. They staggered under the weight of generosity and kindness as our families gave them good measure, pressed down and running over. There’s no policy for that.   
 
CR
17.11.17
​
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The Voice of the Sluggard

24/3/2017

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

10/9/2016

12 Comments

 
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I don’t need to tell you the facts, you can read them anywhere. Grammar schools do not help social mobility, they restrict it. Grammar schools do not spread advantage, they entrench disadvantage. Progress for clever children is not better in grammar schools. Very few children from disadvantaged households go to grammar schools.

​Grammar school places are won by children whose upbringing predisposes them to pass the 11+ or whose parents have paid for tutoring. Grammar schools existed when we needed a blue-collar/white collar work force. Passing the 11+ and keeping that achievement level going is exceptionally stressful for children who know that their parents have their hearts set on it. 


I’m writing carefully for a particular audience. If you live in a selective area, you’ve got to make the best of it. I’m not getting at you, but the state should protect children from harm, and selection harms children. School places should be planned, not established on a whim. Free School sponsors should be able to demonstrate that any educational provision for which they clamour, to which a Free School is apparently the answer, serves the needs of the democracy, the common good. Greening’s bizarre assertion that selection can be casualty-free is from someone who hasn’t thought through what that means to the child who is not selected.Intelligence is not fixed at 11. The 11+ is a poor indicator of anything but family income. A child may be good at tests or too distracted for tests at 10 or 11 but that means precisely nothing about his or her chances in the future.  Intelligence isn’t about to run out and challenging academic education does not have to be rationed. It’s not a zero-sum game unless the structures make it so.

This school is in Greenwich. We are fabulously comprehensive, educators for the world city. Over our southern borders lies selection. Sometimes our year 11s go to look at the grammar schools when they’re deciding about whether to stay on with us. Sometimes a child likely to get a hatful of top grades at GCSE tells us that they have definitely decided to go to one of the grammars. We tell them the facts: that they’ll do as well as or better here and that others in their position have come back, sharpish. They look embarrassed and tell us that their parents have their hearts set on it or ‘My community think this is best’. What would you say?  

Grammar schools are a proxy for parental fear: so here’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about grammar schools.  ‘I don’t want my child’s education to be dragged down by slow, naughty or disrespectful children.  I don’t want her to learn bad habits or fall in with the wrong crowd. I want him to make his choices within a limited range of options so he can’t make a mistake and end up on drugs and die young.  I want him to get the kind of job that posh kids get. I want him to be happy.’  Of course you do, but hoping that your little one is a quick acquirer by the age of 10 and therefore insulated for life doesn’t make sense. It certainly doesn’t make for a stable, just and excellent education system for everyone’s little one. 

Parents’ fear is rooted in another zero-sum myth: comprehensive schools are all terrible so we need to replace them with grammar schools for 20% of children because there isn’t enough good education to go around. But comprehensive schools are not all terrible.  Very few of them are terrible. Some grammar schools are terrible. Most comprehensive schools are very good and loads of them are absolutely fantastic. The postcode selection trope  trotted out by the PM - that good comprehensives only exist in rich areas – is just not true.  London proves that, as HMCI (a man incapable of telling it other than it is) has trenchantly said. Tosh and nonsense indeed. 

This isn’t policy, but education as nostalgia, a dog-whistle to a bygone era of class distinction and limited mobility.  Even David Cameron called it ‘splashing around in the shallow end of educational debate’. It’s part of the anti-intellectualism of the Conservative government, where anyone on top of the facts, from sugar to Europe, is disregarded as an expert. It is the stuff of despair. 

When our sixth form leave us we tell them to be kind to people at university who haven’t had their advantages, whose parental choice of school for them has made them uncertain about people from different backgrounds. We tell our young people to share their ease and confidence so that the gifts of a comprehensive education are shared with those whom privilege has restricted.

We do this because comprehensive education is an honourable and visionary undertaking every bit as important as the NHS. It preserves the fabric of our democracy and gives us all the chance to lay the foundations for a model society. These great schools work brilliantly for all our children. Parents love them and communities thrive. We have everything to lose as a nation if they are destroyed. We should rise up as one against this shallow, cynical, divisive, wicked and ignorant project.
 
CR
7.9.16
 
 
 
Distant star:
We should never judge children by their qualifications.  We need to get out of this mess.

12 Comments

Where should you be?

15/5/2016

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John Baldessari - Goya Series, 1997
​I have nothing to say on the Secretary of State’s academy announcements, other than that the government must be worried about the EU referendum. I am, literally, speechless.

Readers may be interested to know that sarcasm’s largely died out in schools, along with ranting. We’ve moved on from the idea that reducing a child to tears is a sensible way of expressing authority, and shouting never really accomplished much. That being said, I don’t object to the occasional shout in the right place. Dangerous foolishness, for example, or egregious fannying-about-on-the-yard-when-there’s-a-teacher-waiting-for-you need a quick fix, and a volume shock can expedite perfection.

Rhetoric, however, is alive and well in school in its basest form, the Question Obvious. Teachers love rhetorical questions more than tea or stationery. We question like champs inside our classrooms but like chumps on yard duty or in a corridor. Why are you late?  Why are you talking?  Where is your homework? Where are the rest of the class? What do you mean by…..?  How am I supposed to…..?  Am I a mind reader? Do I look like a fool? The only answer a child can reasonably bank on is ‘sorry’, because truths would bring the world down.  Because I love my bed. Because I think I love this girl. I really don’t know. I really don’t care. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Search me. I hope not. What does a fool look like? ​

The best is the existential demand repeated a thousand times a day: where should you be? Let me set the scene. A child is found in an unauthorised place (in our world where authorisation and unauthorisation change according to time). ​

​
He may be at a watering hole or moseying along a corridor.  She may be lurking outside an office or emerging from the loo. Sensible forensics would require a thorough investigation: where he or she has been, why, how long and on whose say-so. It’s much quicker to invoke the future. Where should you be?

Again, a range of answers: maths, reception, the Library, my Head of Year, art. Those enable a youth to pass on, with just a quickly then, shooing motion or chop chop.  Actual dreams are discouraged:  somewhere warmer than this, in my bed, on holiday, at the chicken shop, with my luurrve would be rewarded with a personal escort to a destination of the escort’s choice and an unceremonious posting through a classroom door with another question: ‘This one of yours, Miss?’

But where should they be? Somewhere happy, somewhere safe. Somewhere people know them and love them. Somewhere the people are reliable and human.  Somewhere you can look out of the window when you’re 11 and watch the 16-year-old gods pass by. Somewhere where they listen, somewhere where they care.  Somewhere taxpayer’s money is spent wisely and effectively. Somewhere you can learn how to measure things in the sun with your LSA. Somewhere you can learn things, somewhere you can discover things. Somewhere your geography teacher will show you what’s under the drain cover. Somewhere where they’ll smile at you. Somewhere where they’ll teach you how to live, how to behave, how to create a somewhere that’s better for the next generation. Somewhere they don’t treat you like a fool, or a criminal. Somewhere they won’t judge by externals.
Questioning lasts all day. Sir appears in my room with a flourish and a bright idea about a marquee: what do they cost? He’s joined by another who claims to have solved two problems: is this ok? A third poses a conundrum: am I right? A fourth, however, issues a communique: news of a Pride Drive at OFSTED from a conference in town. Inspectors don’t like lippy children, untidy classrooms, scruffy (tie-less) uniforms.  Who does? Children should learn how to be friendly and confident. Classrooms should be physically and emotionally orderly. Uniforms, duh, should be worn as designed. But having a joke with a teacher isn’t lip, having a lot of stuff out at once in a lesson isn’t untidiness and wearing a polo shirt isn’t a personal affront to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector. I spoke at a Policy Exchange gig this week and there was barely a tie in the room. Where’s the research behind these time wasting-personal prejudices? 

Education policy is littered with these non sequiturs: a range of rhetorical questions present themselves. Who are they kidding? What are they on? Why don’t they understand? We’d do well to stick to ours: where should you be, child?  Somewhere better than this.
 
CR
11.5.16
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Will it vibrate?

17/4/2016

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Picture
Kazimir Malevich - Suprematist Composition (White on White) 1918
I sat at the back of DT watching a class tussle with fusion.  Not fission, which would be dangerous, but fusion, for a fused future. The teacher was interesting and year 8s were away with it. ‘Trainers you drive like shoes’  ‘stuff that hovers so you don’t have to bend down’ ‘contact lenses with your phone on it’, ‘moving blankets’. One prospective Dyson muttered into a sudden silence ‘Vibrates.  Yes.’  Obviously, anything’s better if it also vibrates.  This at least is a proposition that could be tested in a workshop and then declared to be true, workable or otherwise. 
​
The education White Paper does not submit itself to such tests though it does make similar assertions.  It’s in 8 parts and joins up all the loose knitting in Conservative education policy: chapter headings in bold. 

1. Our vision for Educational Excellence Everywhere: structural thinking in fancy warm language.  ‘you can mandate adequacy but you cannot mandate greatness: it has to be unleashed.’  This government will very rarely dictate how these outcomes should be achieved. Good schools will remain responsible for their own improvement, free from interference, except that you must become academies. ​

​2. Great teachers – everywhere they’re needed: teacher recruitment is becoming more difficult as the economy grows stronger (see what they did there?) but no mention of the confusion of deregulated routes into teaching. Teachers won’t qualify at the end of the NQT year, but be readied for assessment in their second year. Inspection reform giveth and taketh away in one sentence: OFSTED commit to not changing the handbook or schedule in-year, except when they do.

3. Great leaders running our schools and at the heart of the system: in an academised system where schools will be more locally accountable to academy trusts with whom parents have a direct relationship is followed by it is even more important that parents and governing boards should be able to challenge schools and hold them to account. Parent governors, however, are not necessary to achieve this.

4. A school-led system with every school an academy, empowered pupils, parents and communities and a clearly-defined role for local government: the biggest change for us is spreading excellent practice and ending the two-tier system where all schools will have to be academies by 2022 by which point local authorities will no longer maintain any schools. There it is.

5. Preventing underperformance and helping schools go from good to great: school-led improvement with scaffolding and support where it’s needed. Sounds OK.

6. High expectations and a world-leading curriculum for all: the EBacc is something the vast majority of pupils should study, the core academic curriculum for 90%.  The definition of mastery is helpful: designed to ensure that no pupil’s understanding is left to chance and each step of a lesson is deliberate, purposeful and precise.  

7. Fair, stretching accountability, ambitions for every child: accountability is still a little mealy-mouthed, but progress is the key. The scope of the statutory roles of Director of Children’s Services and Lead Member for Children will be reviewed. There is a description of the role of the Regional Schools Commissioners, appointed by central government.

8. The right resources in the right hands: investing every penny where it can do the most good. The Pupil Premium remains alongside a national funding formula for schools and on top of funding for disadvantaged schools and disadvantaged areas.  There’s a clearish explanation of the proposed system. LA funding methods stay as they are for two years, after that we will shift to a single national formula determining each school’s funding. 

Quick enough? Or this?

"We decided what to do and stripped away funding from any other structure.  We need the market to run the system so we can’t have democratic hindrances.  We don’t care enough about teaching to ensure regulated highly competitive entry to a well-paid profession. We’d like to tell you to teach what we got in our public schools, but Gove ended up an embarrassment so we backed off. We prefer tax cuts to investment, so we hope that you don’t realise that the same amount of money to educate loads more children is actually a reduction.  We’ll happily centralise everything that undermines local involvement, because we don’t trust the people to agree with us."
Centrepiece of the Easter holiday was 40 year 11s doing maths all day for a week. On the face of it, not very exciting, but the tutors we bought in thought them delightful; participative and engaged, pleasant and cheerful.  That what makes our daily lives vibrate, not endless messing about with structures.
 
CR 14.4.16 
 
 
 
There’s no apology for Gove’s Blob statement.
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A visit from the Three Kings

5/12/2015

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

CR
2.11.15
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Textbook Tallis

29/6/2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR 16.6.14

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