Category: Send

Rise Like Lions After Slumber

6/7/2024

This may be sort-of my last blog, though the election may be irresistible and there’ll be no escaping my leaving speech. I started writing them to order for a newspaperman who happened to be a parent, and I just kept going, yea up to about two hundred, way more than any reader should be expected to endure. Thank you.

Two columns of children crossed the concourse while I was seeking an old buffer to polish a trophy for assembly. I followed them to their briefing on Voting in a General Election. Year 12 Poll Clerks waited for them in the back of Reception, directing them to the booths, shushing discussion or other undemocratic behaviour and turning away sixth former students without lanyards (just or unjust, they have to learn). Not that there hadn‘t been canvassing in a rather odd way according to a conversation that passed me in Block 5. ‘If I vote Reform, you have to vote Green to give them a fair chance’. Ah me, Tallis Character misplaced, in so many ways.

A small boy was confused: ‘I thought we weren’t old enough to vote?’ so we explained that this was a mock, training them for adult life. An older girl wondered ‘Do they vote the same in America?’. No, I said, forbearing to wail that their poll seems certain to bring catastrophe for all.

Perhaps by the time you read this the result will be abroad. The canny trainer-clad folks of Newcastle or Houghton and Sunderland South will have won the fastest count race and we’ll be set for another five years. I taught in Houghton-le-Spring for 3 years so I have a pride in their speedy tellers. You know my politics. I won’t belabour you with them.

Someone was so kind as to ask me about my career yesterday and what I thought was important for the future of English schools after the election. Inevitably I said that while money is the big problem, recruitment and retention of teachers is bigger. Something can be done about the latter while the former is recovering from our own catastrophes.

How? Simple. Teachers need an even break. They need to be valued, talked up, recognised. Teaching as a career needs to be rebranded and readvertised. Its fundamental motivations – to do good, to change the world, to make a difference, to share knowledge, to build an educated citizenry, to set a good example of adult life – need to take front and centre stage. Teachers need to step out from the shadow of the NHS and fill the space. These people preserve and save lives too: they turn your children into adults.

The Festival of Education is happening today and tomorrow at Wellington College and loads of teachers will be there. It’s a big gig that I spoke at about 5 years ago. I got off a packed train from London and walked in a huge crocodile of bright young things, all keen and excited to hear the latest. They’d been lauding it loudly since Paddington.

This year I note that ‘Artificial Intelligence, Ofsted, Cognitive Science, Great Teaching, Coaching, SEND and sustainability’ are themes. Nothing wrong with any of them but – unless they’re part of a bigger vision for education they’re just so much glitter and gloss.

If I may gloom? AI could completely undermine teaching and the nature of knowledge, Ofsted is just a regulator with a snapshot camera, cog sci is interesting but not sufficient, great teaching is an art that can’t always be mandated or taught, coaching is part of any sensible leadership system, duh, SEND needs a week to itself and the climate emergency can’t be solved by schools. None of these solve our problem because none of them get to the bottom of what hooks and keeps teachers. No-one’s asking what schools are for, what childhood is for and how they might best be provided and served. Where’s the learning? Where’s the love?

I’ve just rediscovered Arlo Guthrie’s 1969 song Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. Do listen to it if you have a spare 19 minutes. When he finally gets around to talking about the draft he describes the office as a place where they’re ‘injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected’. It’s a bit too close to an accurate description of client, compliant English schools for my liking.

If the people who look like they’ll win tomorrow win tomorrow they’ve got a mission. While nodding to the regulation surface dressing, they look like they’ll dig to the bedrock of the problem: ending child poverty, solving chronic social insecurity and ‘supporting a profession of excellent teachers, encouraged to develop as experts in their field, and valued for the work they do’. Only words yet, I know, but some words are worth more than others.
We know about the worth of words at Tallis. We talk about values and virtues, powerful knowledge, habits of learning and character traits, about signature pedagogy and threshold concepts, inclusion and creativity, a broad and balanced curriculum and about making sure every child is seen, known and loved. We try to be a model community and a blueprint for a better world. We want to understand the world and change it for the better. We resist the gloss and embrace the risks required to serve our children well.

Educators everywhere are in a desperate state, clinging on by our fingernails for a glimmer of hope. Everywhere democracy is under threat from people peddling dangerous glittery answers to serious human problems. As I look out of the window there are still columns of children going to the poll. At this moment, they think they’ll always vote and that no adult cynicism will make them reluctant to leave the sofa and demand a better life for themselves and their children.

My teacher grandmother didn’t get the vote until she was 27, so she took it very seriously. I hope that these children will too. That better world is in our hands and theirs. I hope we all have the courage to make the most of it.

CR
3.7.24

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Whatever Happened to the Self-Managing School?

20/6/2024

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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

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Becoming Jane

9/12/2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR
7.12.23

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From Terrible to Plummeting

20/10/2023

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A round-up, I feel, of the half term’s voyage so far. Weather unseasonably warm until it was freezing for a day. HMS Tallis generally seaworthy, crew and passengers know the ropes. Purser struggling to make ends meet. All hands look relatively tidy and we haven’t been troubled by croc boots with mock spurs yet. Sea conditions could be better. Nautical imagery runs aground at this point.

Time to round up some thoughts on education ideas emerging from the party conference season. Labour policies are not very clear, which at least has the advantage over their being foolish. The Conservatives want to end A-levels. This is theoretically interesting and it may well be time for us to melt down the gold standard into a different gold standard. The dominance of academic A-levels over our whole system is worthy of close scrutiny and what it does to the many hundreds of thousands of young people for whom A-levels are absolutely the wrong answer. Time perhaps to consider whether a qualification designed for a tiny minority in a divided education system still recovering from the war is really the right way forward in perpetuity. Blimey, my mother did A-levels.
But this is not that time. Education is in crisis and we can’t rearrange these particular deckchairs. Especially as the tenure of the Captain is under serious consideration and he might not be around to steer through these icebergs. The system is flawed, but it has many strengths and it’s not entirely broken. It can wait until we reach a safer harbour, or at least some plain sailing.

Rishi Sunak is admirably obsessed with maths. It's obviously done him well and I’m entirely in favour of this general drift. We denigrate maths in this country to a ridiculous extent, just like we denigrate proper nutrition, early years teaching and the state of the railways. All of these are emergencies. All of them need well-qualified, valued experts to lead and run them. Maths, inescapably, needs maths teachers. We don’t HAVE maths teachers to meet the needs we have now. Where are all the others going to come from? You can’t outsource it offshore, Prime Minister. The education associations are right: this won’t happen, so best not to think about it. They’re not just being obstructive. We have other things to worry about. First, money. Second, teachers. A lively observer described that yesterday as having gone ‘from terrible to plummeting’. The third, or first depending on your school or your child is what we do about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

The number of children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) in England has gone from 220,898 in 2010 to 473,300 in 2022 to 517,026 this year. 17.3% of children have SEND, 13% need SEN support in schools and 4.3% have an EHCP. The biggest growth areas in SEND are Autism (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Children with these needs in particular often find school life quite hard. Many other children with SEND might not do so well with the monolithic curriculum we have in schools now and their results might not redound well on a school. Therefore, they are unevenly distributed. Some schools welcome children with SEND, others – not so much.

You would have thought therefore that the government might consider this a bit of an issue, especially as the SEND funding which goes to LAs doesn’t match the number of children or the needs identified on their EHCPs. Many LAs are in deficit on their SEND budget and have had to be given ‘safety valve’ bail-out money. Some LAs balance their own books but push the deficit down to schools – who are meant to do what, precisely? Getting an EHCP is inequitable and the pointier of elbow tend to win. Getting any help can be a desperate battle for parents. And these are the nation’s most vulnerable children.

Well, the government has thrown its brightest and best at the matter. Frequently.

…and as you can see, have really prioritised continuity and expertise in this area. Hmmm. I wonder why the situation has gone from bad to worse?

In other news, we had a wonderful African Caribbean Come Dine with Me and concert last night with staff as well as student turns and enough food to fell an ox. Three Year 7 boy dancers went down well with a happy crowd and a small follower demonstrated his own moves to me at break. I was hotfooting to meet with some serious Year 12 and 13s to try to work out what we could do as a school about the middle east horrors. Worry, express sadness and work for peace is our best guess. I was able to read them parts of the letter I’ve had on the matter from Gillian Keegan, Nick Gibb and Robert Halfon but, being good Tallis students, they felt that the Trappist option (silence, not brewing strong beer, you understand) was not a guarantee of better understanding for all. And yet this is a particularly difficult issue. We’ll reconvene after half-term.

Tallis life is endlessly fascinating. We need a week to recover from each other, but who’d want to be anywhere else?

CR
20.10.23

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Baggy at the Seams

15/1/2022

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I was wandering in science, and dropped into a cover lesson, all going well. I berthed near a pair of girls, one with green hair. They were doing something that required sheep drawing but were dissatisfied with their efforts. In this, I could help. Sheep figure frequently in RE what with the parables and so an occupational by-product means I can draw them pretty sharply, in the manner of clouds with legs. I demonstrated as much on the walkabout rota sheet. The ladies were not only delighted but could also remember the sheep-and-goats routine, so that’s a job done. Who needs performance management?

January requires new thinking even though it's halfway through the school year. I’m thinking about three unmanageable topics at once, just to keep me fresh.

First, as per, ethics. I talked to some young staff yesterday and we chewed over the values and virtues of the Framework for Ethical Leadership. The biggest ethical problems they identified – unsurprisingly – were the way we measure the value of a young person based on their academic scores, and the kinds of curricula we push them through. Wouldn’t it be better, several mused, for young people who struggle on our fearsomely overloaded GCSE courses, to be allowed to take very practical courses about looking after themselves and saving money?

Well, yes, perhaps all children need that, but the argument is multi-faceted. Why shouldn’t a child who cannot score at GCSE History be exposed to some of the stories and lessons from history? They need to be able to tell the difference between truth and revisionist lies as much as anyone else. The problem is in the qualification, which has to be the same for everyone and apparently, inexplicably, shamefully, has to have a third of below-pass grades (‘fails’ in normal person’s language). The problem isn’t with history, but the way we measure children using a qualification designed to prove some old lie about teacher slacking.

They’re not worried – and why should they be, learning to be a teacher is hard enough – about admissions. Mike Ion wrote about it in Schools Week last week and I couldn’t have put it better. He railed at the use of parental interviews, school fund requests, birth and marriage questions and the use of tests, all for y7 entry, and how the sharp-elbowed negotiate it all. The fact remains, he says, that secondary school admissions are ‘the secret scandal of our system, fostering delusions about consumer choice and reinforcing outdated perceptions of quality in education.

The outcome of covert selection practice is to produce an educational apartheid that creates vast areas of underachievement which then suck in vast amounts of public money to compensate for structural inequality.

My second issue is linked, about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). I’ve just seen a great article in the TES about SEND ‘magnet schools’. This is also to do with performance and admissions of course, but also with the limited understanding some educators have of their role in building up a good, national, comprehensive system.
It goes like this:

Bagpuss Comp has good provision for SEND, so increasing numbers of parents of SEND children choose Bagpuss over Rupert High. The Ruperts then say to any inquiries - we don’t have much provision for SEND, have you thought of Bagpuss? Neatly circular. Further, the money that Bagpuss gets isn’t equal to the provision specified in the Education, Health and Care Plan, and the likelihood of their meeting performance measurements is constrained. All the Bagpuss children get a worse deal, resources-wise and the clipboard brigade descend, with the usual range of results.

Some schools are really committed to inclusion. Some avoid it. How is that allowed?

You’ll recall my tedious attempts to communicate with G Williamson, late of Sanctuary Buildings, SW1. Nothing daunted, I may try afresh with Mr Zahawi who seems pretty efficient. He’s about to publish a consultation on SEND of which we Bagpie have rightly high hopes. I will report further on this.

I regret I don’t think even the SoS can help the third issue, to which all the above are stuck like glue. That’s of the retracted, restricted thinking of educators who take measurable achievement at 16 for their lodestone, inexorably drawn to it such that they don’t recognise the responsibility to map their own path so that their school makes sense as part of our national provision for all of our young. Does it increase results? No? Don’t do it, appears to be the mantra.

A colleague told me she was going to treat herself to a trolley now that the financial year is nearly up: a small pleasure. She needs a bit of help to get herself and her baggage from A to B. So do we all, but the hallmark of a good society is how fairly it distributes its goods, in both senses. I’ve told everyone who gets an email from me that I’m reading Sandel, and I often quote Rawls. There’s no better way to start a new year that with two philosophers. They say:

Those who have been favoured by nature, however and whoever, should gain for their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out. Societies should be arranged so that such contingencies work for the good of the least fortunate.

Or, as Anthony Crosland, another Secretary of State, said in the seventies:

The system will increasingly be built around the comprehensive school…..all schools will more and more be socially mixed; all will provide routes to the universities and to every type of occupation from the highest to the lowest….then very slowly Britain will cease to be the most class-ridden country in the world.

Everything needs tightening up. Over to you, Mr Zahawi.

CR
14.1.22

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On Golden Threads and Lemons

11/12/2021

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If I were a better physicist, I’d understand how time simultaneously contracts and expands. Why is it that watching the end of the year 7 Languages Spelling Bee – which took about 5 minutes – felt like such a blessed episode of calm in the week, while the five hours spent writing a zillion school Christmas cards seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye? Why is it that standing on the yard for 15 minutes in the cold feels like a lifetime but discussing feminism with year 13 for an hour was over in seconds with only a tenth of the arguments covered? Why is it that anyone wants me to give any more minutes of my remaining years to hearing about the reformed NPQs?

Once upon a time we had coherent way of entering teaching but a wide range of incoherent and usually meaningless ways to perk up your skills once you’d become a professional custodian of a dry-wipe marker. This wouldn’t do, obviously, because other countries do it much better and manage to keep hold of their teachers for longer. So, we invented the National Professional Qualifications and spent a few years oscillating like loons between making them compulsory or totally irrelevant. Now, everyone’s had to work for what feels like aeons on How to Do It Better. Result? Utterly incoherent ways of becoming a teacher, numberless as the stars in the sky, but a spiffy new set of free NPQs with, I kid you not, a ‘golden thread’ running through them.

Some of us have an incoherent hinterland in our own heads and can’t just accept a metaphor like that. Golden thread? Is it Ariadne’s? Is it close-binding all mankind? Does it twitch like Father Brown’s? Does it weave a magic spell of rainbow design? Why does it have to be dressed up so? If we had a system fit for grown-ups we could just say that we finally have a set of National Professional Qualifications that build on the same principles, from early career teachers to Heads, soup to nuts. We could say, as has one of its architects, that it has a clear structure, more coherence, a better evidence base, can be done alongside the day job rather than requiring Einsteinian time-bending and includes the SEND skills we all need. Why do we need jollying along like three-year olds?

Some of what we do in school is really quite hard. We have to think a lot, at the same time as preventing children from getting jammed in doors or falling downstairs. We have to consider the purpose of education while handing out glue sticks and marking A-level pieces. We have to explain what acid can do to people who might want to taste it to find out for themselves. We have to have a rationale for teaching Spanish grammar and Venn diagrams at a time of plague; volcanoes and poetry while racism, misogyny and climate disaster mess with the future. We have enough threads going on in our heads to knit a Fair Isle jumper. All we require of policy-makers is that they speak plainly and respect our intelligence.

I’ll get over the confounded golden thread, but it won’t solve the teacher crisis. We need more money in the system so that there can be more teachers so that the teachers we have can have some time to think. That’s how they keep them in other countries, as well as coherent training. We need both.

I worry about the future, of course, for all sorts of reasons. As well as all the above, there’s a nagging fear that people don’t expect enough of one another, enough seriousness or enough concentration. I’m sure that the golden thread is a lovely way of describing some worthy training courses but to me it doubles as a tightening noose of over-simplification in our education system caused by cheapness. What do I want in my metaphorical stocking? A system where more funding buys more time, where academic research is respected and teachers’ intellects taken seriously, for the long term.

I’m one to talk, though. I’ve been pointing at children and saying ‘no noses’ all week like a mad thing which has kept me amused as I hand out masks we can’t afford to children who forget where they’ve put them. I delayed the start of a meeting on the content of the visual arts curriculum by telling the trapped assembled about the plastic lemons my mother hung on her Christmas tree, which I’ve inherited. ‘Was it a recycling thing?’ one asked carefully. In the sixties? No, she thought they looked nice and she didn’t have much spare cash. I think a Christmas tree looks unfinished without them, but that just shows what you can do with a child’s brain if you start early enough. One year she experimented with a special total-lemon tree and we were all surprised by how dull it looked.

Perhaps the other thing I want for schools’ stockings is a bit of imagination in the system as well as coherence. There’s a lot of content in the NPQs but not much room for imagination or flair. That’s another consequence of parsimony: thinking deep and free takes time, which costs. When all your lemons look the same, even golden threads don’t make your system sparkle with the reflected light of the sheer joy of learning in communities of children.

CR
10.12.21

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Rise Like Lions After Slumber

Whatever Happened to the Self-Managing School?

Becoming Jane

From Terrible to Plummeting

Baggy at the Seams

On Golden Threads and Lemons

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Rise Like Lions After Slumber

Whatever Happened to the Self-Managing School?

Becoming Jane

​From Terrible to Plummeting

Baggy at the Seams

On Golden Threads and Lemons

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

Archive

Categories

From Terrible to Plummeting