Category: Politics

Christmas Dinner

14/12/2014

James Gillray, Substitutes for Bread, 1795

Year 9 are a good distraction from education policy announcements. They lack the charm of children or the sense of adults and fall into disarray at the drop of a hat. Assembly presented some obstacles this week ; not huge, but they added up. 270 of them had to line up at the same time as 240 y11s doing a mock exam. A door to the hall was mysteriously locked. A step at the bottom of the raked seating was misplaced and much tripping begat some unseemly giggling, which had to be suppressed. Mind your step, we said. Don't be unkind. We are not toddlers.

Assembly started with a trailer for jolly jumper day, £1 for Young Epilepsy. We marvelled at year 12 Gina's jumper-I-made-earlier-out-of-one-of-my-gran's visual aid. Head of Year and I, doing our novelty double act, may have given the impression that we too would wear jolly jumpers of our own devising on Friday. Then we moved on to collections for Christmas hampers, as is our wont. The tone changed a bit then, to be honest.

What do we believe in, I asked year 9. Education to understand the world and change it for the better, we agreed. I am ashamed, I said, to be a 50-something in a wealthy democracy where hunger seems commonplace, accepted. How has this happened? If my generation has created - or failed to prevent - this, what can I say to you? Please make it stop in yours?

Here are some things I didn't say : put your hand up if you didn't have breakfast because there wasn't any. Put your hand up if you had a meal last night. Put your hand up if you're hungry now at ten to nine. Put your hand up if you know there'll be food at home when you get in. Put your hand up if you're dreading Christmas because it makes you feel poor or if being away from your free school meal leaves you hungry for a fortnight. Head of year finished off: wear a Christmas jumper and bring in some thing for the hamper. You can do both - and most of our young people can, and will.

But I read that soldiers are needed to demonstrate character and grit to our children? I've seen skinny reprobates turned into respectable men by the army and, for some young people, it works a treat. Almost all the cases I remember were where young men were given some pretty basic support when they joined up: regular meals, reliable laundry, exercise, less access to drink and drugs, and a couple of years to grow up in. It's a rare serving soldier who's cold and hungry at home. What'll they say to a hungry and angry teenager? Join the army for a square meal? Show grit and determination in the food bank queue? Has anyone factored the high levels of ex-servicemen ending up in prison into this cosy picture?

I'm fed up with trivial and risible advice. We teach our young people character every day because its part of helping them grow up and we don't need a national award scheme to make us do it. True grit is doing your best under any circumstances without any hope of reward. Doing it when you're tired, upset, confused, cold, hungry. When no one's watching and it seems as if no one cares.

And fiddling about with private schools' charitable status is even more irrelevant. Are we meant to be grateful? Show me the public school with children who know how a food bank makes you feel. Show me the ancient foundation built for the poor that now serves only the unbelievably wealthy and the historically privileged and I'll show you a better way. And don't mistake privilege with learning: I'll match you top graduate for top graduate on my teaching staff and we'll see who can teach the hungry and the dispossessed and who only knows how to teach the wealthy.

The Tallis Christmas card says 'we remember the gift of children and our responsibilities to them'. To their development of character and learning, and to the things that'll help them grow up well and prosper, to succeed from a position of love and comfort or from a position where the bare necessities are sometimes out of reach.

Our Christmas concert was called Apricity - the warmth of the sun in winter. We'll have that warmth at our end of term celebrations as we enjoy each others' talents and idiosyncrasies. A bit of warmth and the light of understanding from government would be a welcome gift. Merry Christmas!

CR

11.12.14

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To be fair to the mayor

30/11/2014

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Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664

To be fair to the mayor, he’d just done his London-is-great spiel at his Education Conference when he was ambushed by a question that caught his attention. What did he think, asked the Press Association, about expanding grammar schools?

To be fair to the mayor, he didn’t answer that, but he did think out loud. What do you think of academic selection, he asked the room? What’s wrong with it? It never did any harm to the chap who was always at the bottom of the Mayor’s year group at Eton. He asked for a show of hands: did we use academic selection? He was interested that we did. The crowd started to rustle a bit and someone shouted ‘we do it all the time’.

To be fair to the Mayor, he spotted that the temperature had dropped. ‘I’ve lost my audience!’ he wailed. People got a bit cross, in a teacherly way, with muttering and tutting. We’re always irritated at suggestions that we don’t measure achievement or progress, or arrange our schools in order to support them.

To be fair to the Mayor (and I may only be saying this because it rhymes) he didn’t say he was proposing grammar schools or the 11+. He was concerned that we should support those who would lose out but he believed academic competition is key to success. Why does it work in the public and independent schools, he asked? I have several answers to this and muttered some of them to myself in a huffy sort of way. I may have said ‘follow the money’ out loud at one point in a noisier part of the discussion.

In purely practical terms, selection is based on assessment which is troublesome to use in ways that are simultaneously humane and useful. Our current use, both to measure students and judge schools, has muddied the water so much that National Curriculum levels have been removed. From dirigiste to deregulation in one move, with what mayhem in its wake.

Like other schools we are discussing life after levels now that the extraordinary decision has been taken that every school will invent its own system. What do we want to measure? What do we need? What do parents want to know? What will scrutineers want to see? What will partner schools do? What is the relationship between attitudes and work habits and subject knowledge? How can you judge progress in a subject that’s new at year 7, or at GCSE ? Can we measure progress in the arts and PE in the same way as in maths or history? What will work with the well-motivated, the reluctant, the struggler, the lazy, the misunderstood?

Politicians love to talk about their own schooling. Some – like Johnson and Tristram Hunt – admit that it was private and privileged. There is a gap in their understanding of other types of schools, which is then compounded by media storms designed to sell news and dominated by those of a similarly narrow background. We are trapped in misunderstandings which have their roots in the deep inequalities of British society, some of which were helpfully uncovered last week by the 1970 British Cohort Survey comprehensively exploding some grammar school myths.

May I offer some facts? Most schools use some form of academic selection in their setting processes. Setting is not streaming, but is done by assessing ability in a particular subject (this seems impossibly hard for politicians to grasp; they may be in the wrong set). However, there is no outcomes evidence to distinguish setting from mixed ability teaching: teacher quality is the key. Assessment measures progress and helps design subsequent teaching to accelerate it, which is standard good practice. Attending a grammar school does not confer lasting benefits in terms of university entrance or success as children from comprehensive schools achieve more highly at university than those from other types of schools. However, private schooling is powerfully predictive of gaining a university degree and especially a degree from an elite institution. This is probably because of the double advantage of close links with Oxbridge colleges and a prevalence of graduate parents, the strongest predictor for university success.

In 2007 David Willetts – supported by David Cameron - courted lasting unpopularity from the Conservative party by saying:

We must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright poor kids. This is a widespread belief but we just have to recognise that there is overwhelming evidence that such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.

The comprehensive dream can transform lives for all its children. That’s where we’ll get a return on our belief.

Christmas approaches and we’ve bought the red tags and the trees. Perhaps the hope I’ll write on my tag is that education debate might be embellished with facts and evidence in the General Election. Perhaps I’ll tie one to the door of Sanctuary Buildings, SW1.

CR 27.11.14

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Much hugging at Tallis

14/8/2014

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A Song Dynasty painting of candidates participating in the imperial examination

I like hoo-ha and am a great user of malarkey. I’m fond of kerfuffle, but was shocked when I first saw its spelling. These come to mind in the results season when the tone and atmosphere of the national discourse about A levels has traditionally reached febrile heights. There’s the generation of outrage, the deliberate obfuscation and the scuffling in the undergrowth to see whose figures can match which rigid opinion. Today’s story of a 0.6 per cent increase in the number of A* grades and a decrease of 0.1 per cent in the overall pass rate isn’t really news in any recognisable sense. ‘Exam Results Stable Again’ won’t really generate queues round the block to buy papers. No hoo-ha over exams being easier? No things-ain’t-what-they-used-to-be malarkey? No kerfuffle over too few places for too many students? I may be tempting fate in this early afternoon of results day, but the news seems pretty quiet out there.

Therefore, allow me to fill the space. We’re pretty pleased with our results here at Tallis, our best ever. We’re pleased for our young people who’ve got what they need to go to university and we’re confident that we can support those who’ll rethink their plans. The internet makes the whole UCAS process much simpler and quicker now most young people know if they’ve got into university by the time they come to school to get the results. It’s a bit more humane than it used to be, I think. Is it as good as it could be? Here are a few questions.

Wouldn’t post-qualification university application take some more uncertainty out of the system? Universities argue that it would disadvantage academically able applicants from poorer backgrounds, but would it have to? We’d have to change the shape of our year, both in school and university, but isn’t that overdue? Wouldn’t it be more transparent? Isn’t that a good in public life?

How well are we served by having competing commercial examination boards? Why are our young people’s futures left up to an (admittedly regulated) market?

Is the government going to make a quiet u-turn on the Goveite AS fiasco? When schools and universities agree that AS grades aid transparency in university admission and career planning does it really need to be a political issue? When the Secretary of State for Education Secretary says the government is "lifting the cap on aspiration" what on earth does that mean? Does the quiet news today suggest that education is becoming less of a political football?

I’m grateful for an A level results day that hasn’t seen our hard work disparaged by defenders of a system designed to generate an elite rather than educate the nation. I may raise a glass (tonight) to the teachers and parents who have worked, worried and loved our students through to adulthood. I’ll certainly raise one to year 13 themselves who, despite the trials and indignities of adolescence, the incessant fiddling about with education throughout their entire school careers and the ambivalent attitude this society has towards its young, have come through.

So here’s to the elated and the tearful, to your futures close to home or in a new city, to the difference you’ll make and the citizens you’ll be. Let’s hope that Tallis really has given you an education to understand the world and change it for the better. Good luck, don’t forget us, and thank you for sharing your lives with us.

CR 14.8.14

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Entering harbour

23/7/2014

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Alfred Wallis, The Schooner the Beata, Penzance, Mount’s Bay, and Newlyn Harbour

We bought a grand piano in the early spring and last week we launched it. We had a recital with pianists of many ages, guitarists, singers, films and so forth. It was quite wonderful, Chopin to Hendrix, Beethoven to Glass played by young people, staff, friends and a remarkable old boy. It was, in the best sense, a bit of a do - drinks on the concourse, posh nibbles. That was Thursday. Friday was a languages extravaganza for year 7, France v Spain in cooking, dance, sport, everything. Tallis beribboned, bedecked, singing and dancing on the concourse, Spanish-quality sunshine.

What else has happened as we sail for harbour? Year 8 have been to the Tate Modern. PE won a quality mark. Year 10 had a Directions Day to help them think about the future. We’ve interviewed young people about our three-year KS4. There’s been a Tour de Greenwich for year 7 cyclists and apprenticeships for Business students. We had year 12 taster week and geography field trips. The foyer designs starts to happen. Some staff are leaving, some changing roles, all are thanked, clapped and smiled on their way. We’ve had celebration assemblies – year 7 so enthusiastic they nearly missed lunch. The timetable is roomed, we ready ourselves for exam results and wonder how this term got to be quite so long.

And as the outside world turns, Mr Gove falls off. A remarkably long-lived post holder, did we lose him because he picked too many fights, or because 1 in 10 women work in education and there’s a women issue? Have we got Ms Morgan because she’s calmer or because she’s female? When will we next have a Secretary of State of any party who went to a state school? Where are the 93% in politics? Why are the 7% in charge even in Sanctuary Buildings? Is there no one who understands how we live, to direct what we become?

In the week when the Trojan Horse inquiry reports, perhaps we should muse on our sun-loungers on where the manipulation of schooling structures has brought us. Autonomy is not an educational good of itself and neither is freedom. What joins us together is worth more than what sets us apart. We need the Nolan values of selflessness, honesty, objectivity, leadership, openness, integrity and accountability. We need the principles of public education to be publicly understood and agreed.

However, it is week 39 and I won’t solve that this term. I’m a fan of the Cornish poet Charles Causley, a former primary school teacher. He wrote a wonderful poem about the end of a school day whose opening words fit the end of term too:

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

The good ship Tallis has reached safe harbour for 2013-4 and now we’ll take a little shore leave. We’ll see what August brings and chart our next course from September. Wherever your dinghy takes you over the summer, I hope the weather is set fair for you and yours.

CR 22.7.14

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British Values

15/6/2014

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The Mykonos Vase, c. 670 BC.

Such a long time since we talked. Keeping well? Good. I promised to tell you more about OFSTED, but compared to the Birmingham excitement, I don’t have much to say. Inspectors came, got us straight away and despite not being able to stop themselves asking finicky questions, delivered a clear and helpful report. In the through-the-looking-glass language of school accountability we got a good good. Fair play to them: a British value?

More excitingly, the week before half term was Deaf Awareness Week which we threw ourselves into with typical gusto. Huge prizes (small badges, wrist bands, useful leaflets) were offered to those who had another go at signing during sunny days in the yard. It seems as though everyone learned how to say good morning and good afternoon, and some could even say who they were – a benefit in any language. We made a little film in which we chuckle at ourselves a lot. Is not taking ourselves too seriously another British value?

After that it was half term. I had a wet week in Germany and visited the Nuremburg courtroom, where genuine British values played a part ‘the tribute of power to reason’ that picked up the stitches of civilisation again. US Judge Jackson’s speech for the prosecution is an astonishing feat of rhetoric, but it was Maxwell-Fyfe’s calm and methodical cross-examination which broke Goering. Unflashy but effective is a British value too.

The memories of wars are heavy this year. Before half term we’d met with our vicar to plan our part in the redevelopment of the war memorial in St James’ Kidbrooke. We think it’ll be interesting to find out who we’re related to and what happened to them. We need to think about the D Day anniversary too, once we can have some assemblies again after exams. Remembering (and getting round to it in the end) are British values too.

And so is going to Tyn y Berth for a week with year 8 to be outdoorsy or walking down to Sports Day in Sutcliffe Park or selling doughnuts for charity or other ordinary things. It’s being so astonished by the sun that you get half-dressed outside after PE just for the feel of it, or getting really cross with an inanimate object and having to climb down afterwards. But it’s also putting other people first and creating the circumstances for everyone to get along together, and taking care of the hard-won victories of democracy and equality. Trying to make things better for everyone is surely a British Value?

There are so many irritating factors in the Trojan Horse furore, so many ways in which conspiracy may be alleged on all sides that paranoia and suspicion may well have become British values as well as Corporal Jones-y panic. Useless to speculate on Wilshaw, Gove or May’s motives but I wouldn’t be British if I didn’t add my two-penn’orth. We HAD a statement of British Values for schools – it was in the preamble to the 2008 version of the National Curriculum and it was wonderful. It said

Education should reflect the enduring values that contribute to personal development and equality of opportunity for all, a healthy and just democracy, a productive economy, and sustainable development. These include values relating to the self, recognising that we are unique human beings capable of spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical growth and development, relationships as fundamental to the development and fulfilment of ourselves and others, and to the good of the community. We value others for themselves, not only for what they have or what they can do for us, the diversity in our society, where truth, freedom, justice, human rights, the rule of law and collective effort are valued for the common good.

We have them in the Teachers’ Standards 2012, telling us that teachers must not

undermine fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs;

We had all this and a great Citizenship Curriculum. We’ve standing orders for RE which ensure children learn about and from religion. We’ve a distinguished tradition of assemblies and community activities and an inspection system that, until two weeks ago, was in grave danger of working sensibly. Struth, we know what to do. But now we’ve got academies and free schools that don’t have to build up the common good, a moral panic just before an election, knee-jerk reactions, and wanton ignorance of the honourable purposes that direct daily life in school. Such a shame that hypocrisy is a British value too.

CR

11.6.14

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Cicero's Gift

2/3/2014

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Cicero said: ‘What greater and better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and to instruct our young?’

Vincenzo Foppa, The Young Cicero Reading, c.1464

The September teacher recruitment season is underway and Heads are competing in the trade papers for the prize of Most Risible Claim Made for the Greater Good. Schools are not merely outstanding but exceptional, innovative or (suddenly) traditional; scrubbed and comely children grin to order from photographs artily taken in gorgeous new buildings and tidy sixth-formers pose with dapper Head Teachers under the loveliest of trees. Inspection reports are filleted and dramatic assertions made about career progression. Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

I know about recruitment. I’ve been interviewed in schools where I’ve been stuffed with rich foods and allowed to wander freely, or where we got a jug of water and couldn’t go to the loo without a minder; in town halls or over the phone miles away from the school; after journeys of hundreds of miles or 50 yards from my own classroom; with panels clued up and challenging or sleepy and tetchy.

I kid myself that we make recruitment reasonably humane. If candidates can only persuade us that they have a glittering eye and a brilliant mind, combine the gutsiness of Julie Walters and the steel of Daniel Craig, that they won’t vanish without trace in the first term or deflate under pressure in the first year, the job’s theirs. Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

If you’ve got a good degree and you want to be a maths or science teacher there are bursaries up to £25k. Our schools are good and the work rewarding - but there were 81 September science posts advertised in a single week for schools in London alone. The people I work with are a pleasant and urbane bunch, educated, effective and Oscar-quality actors every one. They can hold a crowd in the palm of the hand and make it look effortless. Our science department are particularly chirpy. So why are science teachers hard to find? Is it that scientists (unlike historians or artists?) all get better paid work elsewhere? Or that no-one short of a hedge fund can live in London? Or does a combination of Educating Essex, Yorkshire or Waterloo Road by Tough Young Teachers just make the job look too damn scary? Who’d want to be that teacher?

It’s not too much to say that we have a national crisis of understanding about teaching. Teachers are too diffident about why we do what we do, and politicians use us shamelessly. Nationally, we don’t care enough about young people to be idealistic and articulate about the formation of our young. The best education systems in the world really value education and teaching. Training posts are extremely competitive and involve postgraduate theoretical pedagogy as an essential adjunct to excellent subject knowledge. PISA winners don’t scorn education’s thinkers as The Enemy Within and they keep politics out of our children’s futures. Most of all, they don’t denigrate teachers in public discourse with fatuous misquotings: ‘those who can, do…’

So this recruitment season let’s talk up Cicero’s gift, starting with these 10 things.

Children and young people deserve the best a nation can give them
Knowledge is worthwhile in itself and teachers share it on behalf of society
Children need teachers so they may understand and change the world
Powerful knowledge liberates children from their daily experience
Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens
Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy
It is fair and just that all children should have access to transforming education
The teacher’s authority to do this is given and valued by society
Society trusts teachers to model our shared values
We need the best possible teachers to achieve all this for all our children.

If you’re not already a teacher, why not think about becoming one? Look at the Department for Education’s website and the range of routes you can take, not all of which involve penury. Ask if you can shadow a teacher in a school you know, or come to us. Come and talk to some young people. They’ll blow your socks off.

If you like the sound of any of this you know where to find me. We’ll have very few vacancies this year, but we can help you look. Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

CR

26.2.14

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Life as a leaf

26/11/2013

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'Ejiri in Suruga Province' also known as "A Sudden Gist of Wind' by Katsushika Hokusai

Teachers say that young people are excited by wind. Undoubtedly true, but they are also excited by chips, rain, wasps, blinds falling down and pheasants tapping the window in geography. You have to get your excitement where you can in school and being buffeted by elemental forces and shrieking as you bucket across to Art is more fun than walking with due care and attention to other yard users.

There is a cosiness to the warm and hardworking indoors while a storm rages outside. I love the Rolls Royce purr of an expert’s classroom and the happy immersion of young people tussling with something they’re just working out how to do, that’s just beyond their grasp. I love hearing teachers and children confident in technical language. I love seeing them seize really powerful knowledge, to understand the world and change it for the better. I especially love going to Maths and seeing young people chewing their pens and clutching their hair while they try to repeat something Sir made look pretty straighforward.

I am ashamed to say I have been skittish with maths teachers – I once described a conversation between a timetabler and the Head of Maths as dinosaurs calling across the swamp – but because I’m the Head they have to be patient with me. While I chuckle at a former colleague describing A level Further Maths as The Sum of all their Fears, they treat me kindly, hoping I’ll find my way back to the yard soon and leave them to get on with the numbers that keep the building standing and make the earth turn.

It was maths in the wind last week that stopped me chuckling. Looking up from upper and lower bounds through a lot of hair Child, 14, grasped her neighbour’s arm with ‘but what would it be like to be a LEAF?’ We looked through the window at the storm and the poplar trees swaying and the leaves swirling, then got back to work. I thought – but the world would make you a leaf caught in the wind. Unless we are very careful with you it would exploit you and measure you and design you with a template and scissors and hurl you from one expectation to another. I thought - we know a bit in schools about being leaves in the wind, about being at the whim of changing external forces so that we are blown hither and yon, castigated for raising a thoughtful protest as we try to protect you from the storms of change.

How different our lives would be without that wind beyond the window. If education was de-politicised. If there was a check on change that meant that no child could have his examination course changed mid-track. If the role and value of teachers and schools, of knowledge and scholarship and the needs of a good society could be decoupled from the election cycle. If a College – like the medics have – could be a gatekeeper for our training and development, and speak for us in a calm and scholarly manner. A check and a College – now that would be a change in the weather.

Poetry, like maths, usually has an answer. I never see a windy tree without hearing great Larkin challenging me to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Our great good fortune in school is that we can do that with every young person who shares part of a life with us, and while they’re young they can experiment and make mistakes secure in the knowledge that we’ll help them to begin afresh. Yet young life is so complicated and unforgiving now. Mistakes are preserved in cyberspace in perpetuity making a fresh start harder. Poverty and debt makes it hard to feel free as a leaf on the wind. And the education system, which should give them a reliable and secure start is recalibrated annually, trapping young people in caprice and uncertainty.

What would it be like to be a leaf? I’d love it if she never knew.

CR 26.11.13

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Forward>>

EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Christmas Dinner

To be fair to the mayor

Much hugging at Tallis

Entering harbour

British Values

Cicero's Gift

Life as a leaf

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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