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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

The end of time

20/7/2019

1 Comment

 
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The timetabler is wandering the corridors and waves a piece of paper at me that I’ve seen before, several times that day, to be honest. ‘I can timetable 5000 lessons but this tutor group has defeated me’. What he means is that the very last piece of the jigsaw won’t quite go in, but he lost me at 5000, wondering. Is that rhetorical?  Is it 5000? It seems an interestingly tidy number from one not prone to hyperbole. And being defeated by a year 9 tutor group conjures up another image: armed only with maths books my money would still be on the man.   

Last day of term and we are now one working day away from the start of the next school year. This is the point at which DfE announce an unfunded pay rise, of course. 2.75% from existing budgets, as if we have it just hanging around unallocated. Disgracefully cynical timing. Now the budget needs rewriting before September.

Of course, being one working day away from September 2nd only works for children – and not all of them. A level results day in August followed by GCSE and post-16 admissions. There’s a huge amount gets done over the holidays, but the non-existent time between now and then is also important as a gap, a space for assimilation and reflection, for resolution and just forgetting. 
  
But before that, how does term end? With an Art Exhibition that’s simply perfect. Images in paint, photography, textiles, sculpture, digital media of a breathtaking quality. As I go around the Biennale in Venice in August I’ll inevitably harrumph at my partner as to the superiority of the Tallis product. 
 
With a piano recital where The Instrument is celebrated among superb performers of all kinds and the new Tallis Orchestra. Top quality, and I’m moved to remark, seeing Tallis’ name high on the hall walls, how pleased he would have been that some of our young folk will go on make a living out of music as he did so successfully, in times more turbulent than even our own.

With Governors discussing strategy on Saturday morning, recommitting themselves to the school’s story of education to understand the world and change it for the better, and opposing all that would dehumanise us.
With Moon Day celebrating the anniversary of the landing – rockets, poetry, music and the much-trailed Spudnik finally managing to fire potatoes, moon songs on the tannoy at lesson change and live moon music on the concourse as the children leave us, a new song performed by Science and Music. 
    
With a Climate Change Crisis demonstration on the grass, organised by sixth form so that the younger ones have a chance to protest safely in school. The wisely noted the hypocrisy: a barbecue for year 9 rewards, and another for the staff leavers, at the same time. ‘That’s hypocrisy Miss’. ‘Yes but if you were demonstrating in town there’d still be buses and tubes running’ ‘Yes but can we riot?’ ‘No’.

With a leaver playing himself out on the guitar, surrounded by staff art.

With year group celebration assemblies, four in a row, awarding excellence, character, habits, sports, and the most library books borrowed. An outbreak of rhyming couplets from staff.

With a final whole-school assembly for everyone, words about spending time, about the right way to live and, most of all, about staying safe and coming back. With luck, time will allow us all to become better than we are, to understand and change the world for the better.
 
I signed off the year with this in 2014, teacher Charles Causley’s words:

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

​Causley talks about ‘a squabble of children’ wandering off, a lovely image. I’ve just watched ours go, from under the shelter of my Tallis umbrella, some with a bounce and a spring in their step, some filled with dread for the long weeks without the safety of school. Safe home, safe return.
 
And after that? The place will be clean, ready and open for the training days in September and on Wednesday 4th our children return to us. We will be utterly changed but absolutely the same. It’s a glorious privilege. 
 
CR
19.7.19
1 Comment

Walk a mile in their shoes

18/5/2019

1 Comment

 
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I’m a fan of Timpsons, the shoe-mending folks who sort you out with watch batteries and keys and all those other things you could easily plan for in advance but because you haven’t, become a sudden and urgent need. They’re a brilliant employer of ex-offenders, did you know?

Currently, there are approximately 10 million people in the UK with a criminal conviction. At Timpson we believe it is madness to throw such a large section of society on the employment scrapheap. By carefully selecting the right individuals to work in our business, we have enabled thousands of ex-offenders to have a second chance in life and go on to have rewarding careers. Often, other employers don’t realise they can be missing out on some very talented, hardworking individuals. Their loss is our gain. Currently, our retention rate for colleagues who we have recruited from prison or who have a criminal conviction is approximately 75%. This means that the vast majority of colleagues that we employ from prison do not re-offend.

They are a principled, effective and successful outfit as far as I am able to tell. Forgive me, but the same cannot be said for our current government or their political opponents. 

We’ve been reading the Timpson Report on Exclusions this week. I don’t think former Education Minister Edward Timpson is a scion of the cobbler Timpsons, but he grew up in a family which fostered almost 90 children. He was handed a difficult job which he fulfilled diligently. He made 100 visits and took 1000 submissions, completing the report at the turn of the year only for it to be sat on by the department for months while they wrangled about money and power (I’m told).
​
There are 30 recommendations, which said department has agreed ‘in principle’. I’ll spare you the detail but here are the key points:
  • Schools should be made responsible for the children they exclude, no matter when they exclude them by being accountable for their GCSE results. 
  • Headteachers must retain the power to exclude pupils where necessary  
  • A small number of schools are off-rolling (where children are made to leave a school without the proper process being followed) for their own interests.
  • Councils must be advocates for vulnerable children to make sure they are well-placed
  • Funding is a problem but good practice is still possible
  • Most schools take a balanced and measured approach to using exclusion but some don’t
  • Boys are substantially more likely to be excluded in primary school than girls.
  • Persistent disruptive behaviour accounts for around a third of all exclusions
  • Alternative Provision provides education to excluded pupils but it is often not very good
  • Schools face a particular challenge in recognising, understanding and meeting the needs of children in, or on the edge of, the care system.    
  • Ofsted should ‘consistently recognise’ inclusive schools
 
All of this is pretty obvious so I shall make obvious points in my turn. The biggest problems in our system are these:
  • It values autonomy above all things, which means that there are over 20000 individual decision-makers making decisions behind closed doors.
  • It values simple outcomes such as GCSE results because they are cheap to measure. This has driven the system mad. Troubled, vulnerable and needy children do not get good exam results so schools who are in trouble or who wish to seek pre-eminence by exam results are reluctant to admit them or keep them.
  • There are too few teachers in the system and all of them are working harder. This means that behaviour support is stretched.
  • Schools have no money. They have to prioritise teaching so all the pastoral support has withered away.
  • Political decisions have stripped the public sector to the bone. As well as too few police there are too few youth workers, psychologists, social workers. There is no one to turn to.
As the man said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We’ve spent billions of pounds on structural and management alterations in public services and Brexit. If we cared about children we’d have spent the money on them. Vulnerable children don’t care whether their school is community or academy and they certainly don’t care whether they might get blue or red passports. They can’t see the long-term, they’re very likely to end up in prison and they make terrible decisions because they’re trying desperately to protect themselves from further harm. 

Austerity has taken a terrible toll on its children.

Timpson described a system where the best hope for an excluded child might be Timpson’s. How do we live with that?
 
CR
17.5.19 
1 Comment

Choices

22/3/2019

3 Comments

 
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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
3 Comments

Pushing out from the shore

4/9/2018

0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Night Again

30/9/2017

1 Comment

 
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I'd been in town pestering the great and the good and pottered back from the station at break time. Children often imagine that the road elevation of the grassy knoll to the east of the site is invisible, despite the see-through fence, and can be startled by a known person apparating in front of them.  

Not so the cheery year 7 boys I chanced upon, sitting in a row, phones in hand, chortling and shoving each other hilariously. I asked if they were spying on the road and they leapt up and gestured through the bars at me, explaining enthusiastically that they were 'playing a very intense game'. Parents fear that phones mean the loss of all social skills but not with these chaps. While it did involve phones, the intense game also seemed to require raucous laughter, throwing themselves about on the grass in the way of 11-year-olds, and much rolling around. The old and the new. 
 
Last night was Open Night and we had upwards of 1500 visitors through the doors. Head of Year 7 and I did 6 hall-fulls (with extra chairs). We also combine the old and the new as she's a lot younger than me. Our hall is pretty nice, being newish, and with a film of year 7 at work running on the back wall, flowers on the Tallis turquoise cloths, the stage lights and Freddie on the old Joanna, it's a stylish venue. We don't do the PowerPoint thing, so we talk about what parents worry about: transition to a big school, pastoral care, curriculum choice, break and lunch, form groups. Of course we cover the other things, but we talk about the whole child before we break him into constituent parts.  We'll take care of your little one and try to give her a memorable, happy education.  

This neatly leads me to tell the people about our new school plan's 3 parts: curriculum, inclusion and community. Curriculum: we want to preserve the broadest offer, it's a struggle predicting the future, this is what we do at KS3. Teaching's good, staff are stable (no reflection on their mental state, I mean that we don't have a high turnover). A level and BTEC results are very good, young people come from miles around to study with us in the sixth form. GCSEs need to improve but who knows what this year's results actually mean. So many re-marks, so much alteration. Inclusion's nex, in four parts: provision for learning for everyone and the wonderful work of our Deaf Support and Speech and Language centres. Wellbeing and our concern for mental health. Safeguarding and the time we put into it, and behaviour. We're relaxed but not sloppy. We're fussy about relationships and their development and maintenance. Finally, Community: we want to serve. Join in with us, please.  

I don't know if that's what parents expect to hear but it seemed to go down well. Behind the scenes, we're tussling this week with the progress accountability score. Context is everything here: we have room to improve but we took a principled stand with the year group when the new measures came in and didn't force them to change options so the school would score better. Oh for a national accountability system that's risk-assessed for its impact on children's experience of school. 

(The adults' experience can be mixed, mind you. There was huge excitement - everything's relative - about the Tidy Staff Room competition. You may be interested to know that Visual and Media Arts won the silver Desk Tidy for Most Improved, but Design Technology took gold for Best in Show.  

But reflecting on the week, it's the tensions that stick. We'd been waiting for the progress information so that we could get stuck into the metrics. We're committed to our support services but there's no money to fund them. We'd like to represent our community better.  

When parents come to see us, what do they want to see? How much information helps them choose? We talk a good game, but we're not complacent. We don't stop picking over results in good years or bad until October. We plan for the short and the long term. Do they want to look under the bonnet?  

A young inmate with an eccentric gait came to see me because his trousers had split 'picking up a pen in Geography'. Keeping him at a distance I said it wasn't obvious and he should carry on regardless. He thanked me kindly and rushed off. I think parents expect much the same: they need to trust us to make sensible judgements and carry on. The old and the new combine here too I suppose: we worry about our service to children not less than all of the time, and we deal with each new challenge as it comes along. It's an intense game, and we laugh when we can, but only the young ones roll on the grass. 
 
CR 28.9.17 
 ​
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The calm before...

6/9/2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR 5.9.17
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Life on Mars

17/1/2016

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David Bowie in 1973.
January often has a surreal feel, and on the day of Bowie’s death we were thinking about the drains. Head of History turned up apologetically in spotted wellies after forgetting to put shoes in her bag: the best dressed amongst us, as it happened. To mark the man we played a few hits over the tannoy at lesson changes on Monday. Fair to say that more staff sang along than students but lots of parents got to talk about their youth under the guise of explaining the man’s artistry, creativity, independence.
 
I was never an obsessive, but you can’t avoid memories. Standing at the bus stop in 1973 we talked to an older girl who someone else knew, with a painting of Ziggy Stardust on her rucksack lid. 
I borrowed the album: it wasn’t so much the songs but the friendly act that remains, the realisation at 12 that I could listen to the stuff that the cool kids liked, that Ziggy could tell a story that chimed enough with the little I knew of life to know that it was true like poetry was true. Life on Mars made perfect sense. ​

​The distance between my school days and how schools think now is like infinite space. In the 70s most of us looked on exams and assessment as a god-awful small affair, hoping that a bit of work at the end, aptitude, native wit and a winning smile would see us into adult life. I was pretty vague about revision. ​​
We got our O level results by post and I can still see the envelope as it wetly arrived on a campsite in Wales containing what could be charitably described as mixed news.   
 
We had an envelope day this week. Year 11 mock results given out a bit like the real thing, in the hall. Tears for fears, praise and blame, now let’s go and talk about what it means. Some want teachers to open the envelope for them. I overheard a friend offering advice ‘You’ll have done more work than that in the summer, though, won’t you?’ The cheesy staging of the event has an effect.
 
Yet the exams that we practice are more like the 70s now than people realize. We use the supporting structures that we’ve developed over recent years when we were clear about assessment and grade boundaries, and what examiners are looking for, when we make predictions and divide up our young people according to the help they need. The trouble is that the goalposts have moved and are set to move every year until 2019 when proposed national benchmark tests bear fruit. GCSE results are a zero-sum game now where a school can only improve if another declines. The old numbers mean nothing. Grades are changing, the papers are harder and schools must plot in the new territory.  Nothing wrong with that in theory, but we never have a year when we don’t have young people taking the things so we can’t experiment in the lab before it really matters to someone.
 
Talking with Professor Michael Young of the Institute this week we chewed this over. Having booted the knowledge debate into the centre of the park in 2009 he argues that instruments of accountability (results) don’t define the educational goals of a school and that ‘satisfying efficiency criteria’ is not an end in itself. 
At its worst, this leads a school to focus on being efficient in terms of outcome criteria but neglecting the educational purposes that such outcomes should assume. 

​It’s hard to argue but hard to agree: if I say that the results are not the whole story I’m accused of low aspirations. If I say that results define the school I’m accused of neglecting the whole child. If I enforce the EBacc do I rob children of valuable creative experiences? If I don’t, do I leave them ill equipped to compete in an unfair and poorly-defined future?
 
The EBacc ‘consultation’ ends this month. The GCSE reforms will take another three years. Nearly a thousand young people will have passed through our year 11 alone in that time and we’ll be advising them on the hoof. None of them is remotely interested in the sailors fighting on the dance floor of the House of Commons: every single one of them wants only to be an adult and make his or her own contribution to the world.
 
And these children that you spit on 
As they try to change their world
Are immune to your consultations 
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.
 
Changes, eh?
 
CR
14.1.16
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Sorry

18/10/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
My Apologies

​Cultural notes 1: we had Radio 3 and the BBC Concert Orchestra live from Tallis launching the 10 Pieces secondary project. 21 young people played with the orchestra and the jazz group did their cool stuff. Potential highlight of the year and it's only October? Notes 2: theatre lovers are too late to go see Rob Brydon in Future Conditional at the Old Vic, remarkable because it doesn't put a foot wrong about education. Admissions, snobbery, state v private, teacher workload, culture and learning all covered sensibly. There's a wonderful section where teacher Brydon is compelled to write an apology to a parent and muses aloud about what he's sorry for. Sorry about the mother's life and the failure of hopes and dreams, sorry about the state of the world and the injustices of society, sorry about what a child seems doomed to turn into. ​
We've been apologising at Tallis this week. Year 7 had local history walks  last week (not all at once, you understand, that would be lunacy) and a group was remarked upon. On investigation, it seemed they had overheated with the sheer excitement of being out together for the first time and had not matched behaviour to venue. This kind of thing brings the sky down on a class. Form tutor, head of year, assistant head and I expressed shock and outrage. The hapless eleven year olds were packed off to reform their characters and compose letters of apology, each according to the vocabulary, shame and imagination available. 

The letters were wonderful. Deep and specific. Guilt was confessed and forgiveness begged. All apologised unreservedly. Several wrote about letting the school down and one pleaded that our august institution wouldn't be judged by 'this tragedy'. We corrected the spelling and posted them. Sorry. 

Apology is one end of accountability. Sometimes things go wrong despite our best efforts. Sorry it didn't work, sorry we did one thing and not another, sorry we made a choice that turned out to be wrong. Sorry we couldn't make something happen, sorry we ran out of money. Sorry doesn't put it right, but it oils the wheels of forward progress. And it can unnerve. Passing through the lunch queue last week I bumped into (sorry) a year 11 character and asked how she was. "Oh, you know, tired cold hungry stressed out, all of the above." I apologised and she had to laugh. "You're not going to do anything about it, though, are you?" I told her she'd feel better after lunch and that she should keep me informed. She said she liked hearing northern people talking, so I laughed too. Tired cold hungry is sorted out by a school dinner, and the stress might be a good thing depending on the work rate of the youth under advisement. But I'm sorry if its bad stress and I'm sorry if the system doesn't allow you to make mistakes and ends up commodifying you by unpredictable exam results. I note that when we had 31 GCSE results in one subject upgraded by re-mark no one apologised to us or the children. 

Back on the history walk, we had a whale of a time. An ancient philanthropic foundation, First World War shelling, Second World War shrapnel, Saxon mounds, Henry 8th and a brief history of time at the meridian. I brought up the rear so kind souls dropped back to keep me company. One has an ingrowing toenail, another's brother is frightened of squirrels. One used the walk as a recruitment event for scouting "We sleep in tents! We make our own meals! We crawl through mud!" One's worried about his Nan and another's Dad's a window cleaner (a cold job). Some didn't have jumpers on, some were equipped to accompany Fiennes to the pole. We dawdled and rushed as required and were sheepdogged by an irrepressible Head of Department. We rather swamped a bus but gave up our seats and got in everyone's way. Sorry for being young and foolish, cheerful and mildly ridiculous. 

Back in class, I finish the lesson with The News. What's going on, people? Someone said: black people are 3 times as likely to be tasered as white. A parent's opinion was proffered but that didn't satisfy us. I won't quickly forget the anxious and bewildered looks on children's faces as we failed to resolve it. I'm sorry that's the news. 

​And I'm sorry that the other news is about grammar schools. Sorry that David Willets' magisterial 2007 speech on the "overwhelming evidence that academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it" is (in his own words) like light from a dead star.  Sorry that other schools will have to deal with the anxious and bewildered self-reproach of failed poor 11 year olds. Sorry we prefer prejudice to evidence. 

CR

​15.10.15
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Open Night

26/9/2015

2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


CR

25.9.15 

2 Comments

Champions

5/10/2014

2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

CR

2.10.14

2 Comments

Ahoy there!

24/8/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Sir John Everett Millais The Boyhood of Raleigh, 1870
Perhaps the stripy tops and nautical imagery have overwhelmed me this week. If we were a ship entering harbour at the end of term then what are we doing now? In dock being - what's the term? - fitted out? What happens in school in the hols? 

Infrastructure, enabling works, drainage on the west field, painting and decorating. Refurbishing the foyer, tidying classrooms, clearing emails, moving offices, not being ruled by the bells but working at another pace. Wandering about without any shoes on, archiving stuff, battening down the hatches for when we put to sea again. 

And much more. Thinking, preparing for new roles, writing schemes of work, hosting the summer school, sixth form enrolment. Quiet reflection on what we know, about our subjects and how to teach them. Reading new books, and research, reflecting on our pedagogy: what went well, what needs changing, what could be better, what’s new. Dragging our families to bizarrely fascinating subject-related destinations. And we think about the assessments we have and the progress that our young people have made. National attention is focused on the 16 and 18 year olds, but we are on a longer voyage.    
Is the weather set fair? I observed a lack of national excitement after the A level results last week, and posed some questions about the way we do A levels and whether the structure of the examination system serves us well. This week, approaching GCSE results, a different kind of commentator joined in when the Head of Eton described the whole examination system as ‘archaic’. The wonderful Professor Michael Young wrote a response on the Institute of Education’s blog,  part of which I reproduce here: 
What really would be news would be if Eton decided to stop entering pupils for any public examinations until the system was reformed. Then, especially if a number of other such schools followed suit, we might get a Royal Commission with the remit to examine both why such an anti-educational system of examinations had emerged and what might be the alternatives.

No complex modern education system could exist without some form of examination system….. The problem is that the relationships between public examinations, the curriculum …and the professional work of teachers, have become grossly distorted. Instead of examinations guiding teachers and students and providing feedback on the curriculum, they have come to replace the curriculum in deciding what is taught and how, and to be a major control force over teachers’ pedagogy and student learning. Taken to its limits, this turns teachers into technicians and all but the very highest achieving students into exam fodder, those that do not give up.

This is a constant struggle, but we still find time sensibly to assimilate and use the subject knowledge we believe to be important despite the constant churn of national curriculum and examination specifications which require different changes for different reasons almost every year.   

Ten years or so ago I read Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler in which this greatest of travel writers is quietly but comprehensively terrified by everything about an Orkney trawler in the North Atlantic. At one point he clutches the arms of his chair in a force 8 gale and remembers the 'six degrees of freedom' he'd read about somewhere: pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I’ve had this in my diary ever since.  It serves as a useful, if unfortunate metaphor for the education policies that create our weather.  

This year’s GCSEs nationally are characterised either by recalibration or volatility, depending on your commentator. Either way, they call for sturdy sea legs, but this is nothing new. It is always the case that results are simultaneously wonderful and disappointing, and young people euphoric and upset. 

The change in the weather that would make the most difference to schools is for us to enter a period of calm so that we may concentrate on our scholarly curriculum and expert teaching. That’s something else we do in the holidays: think about knowledge that is powerful and important for our young people and how to make it irresistible to them. Let’s hope the exam debate attracts a following wind so we get a better chance to do it.

It only remains for me to cry ahoy there to our new staff, new year 7, our biggest ever year 12 and all their parents. And ahoy there to all those who've sailed with us before. We're glad you've chosen us and we're ready, whatever the weather. 

CR

23.8.14
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Much hugging at Tallis

14/8/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
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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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115   F: +44 (0)208 331 3004   E: [email protected]
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