The rain having momentarily stopped, there are skipping ropes on the concourse to encourage year 7 and 8. Not just to leap about but to cooperate with one another. Staff gamely tried them before lunch earlier in the week with frankly disappointing results. Unsurprisingly, children are better at it: bouncier, freer, closer to remembering skipping in primary school. It’s a glimpse of play-based childhood, and I’m thinking about that as my transit listening is Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.  

I’m only halfway through, but the thrusts of the book ring bells with anyone who spends time around young people. He argues that smartphone use (I have my own two on my desk as I write) has rewired children’s brains since 2010 and that we have moved – globally, but especially in rich countries where children get smartphones young – from play-based to phone-based childhood. He believes that the parallel steep rise in anxiety and depression among young people, especially girls, is caused by all-pervasive social media to which girls devote 8-10 hours every day. For boys, the risks seem different: isolation caused by excessive gaming where a community of live friends has been replaced by online friends, and of course the ghastly risk of endless pornography and dangerous role models. All of which, for boys and girls, is exacerbated by the sleep deprivation caused by smartphones.

What to do? Haidt’s proposals begin with enforcing the laws we already have about children and social media, therefore not allowing profit-makers to rewire children’s brains. As I say, I’m only halfway through and this is a paraphrase. There are other views. What will we do at Tallis? We’ll think, and then act. 

One of the most troubling aspects of social media, to which Haidt may well turn in the rest of the book, is its bizarre effect on freedom of speech. You’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that unlimited access to all the knowledge and all the opinions in the world would spread openness and informed judgement – and yet we find ourselves at the other end, beset by tribalism and blinkered thinking.  So many children believe they have to plump for one side so schools have to work against this. Teachers have to plonk themselves on the threshold of freedom of expression to prevent the door from closing.

Why? Because good learning requires information of all kinds, open discourse, free expression and the willingness to discuss any problem that presents itself. Education is not designed for comfort but for thinking, to fortify courage and empower the learner to deal with complexity, to became an informed and active citizen. Free speech can be hard to hear so it’s tempting to call for some speakers to be silenced, or banned – cancelled, as we say.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for demagogues and rabble-rousers. Citizens have the right to be safe and treated fairly. But there must be a forum for reasoned debate even with people whose ideas are – to the liberal mind – intolerable. People with harmful opinions have to be refuted, word by word, put right and even pursued by the law. Its what civilisation requires. It’s certainly what universities are for.  It’s also what schools should do.   

Tallis expects young people to learn to be open-minded:  inquisitive, collaborative, fair and respectful. At the same time, they are young people who should want to change the world for the better and might be justifiably frustrated at the time that older generations take to sort stuff out. They are inclined to be revolutionary. That fervour needs to be focused on what will make the world better and more inclusive, not on what will make it worse and more bigoted.

We love an election at Tallis and will throw ourselves into the national frenzy. Education groups are already making their pitches: the social mobility charity The Sutton Trust emailed earlier today. Their General Election wants are:

• High quality early years education for all
• A national strategy to close the attainment gap
• A more progressive higher education funding system

My general election wants are:

• Education funding at a level that demonstrates children matter and which allows schools to give teachers time to think, collaborate, plan and develop
• Funding for health, social care, police and justice so that schools don’t have to try to do everything and that every citizen is protected
• A return to civility and truth in national discourse 

I’ve just been with the Sixth Form Thinking Aloud group. These good folk tussle with hearty questions and like to be made to think. I presented them with Archbishop Welby’s conundrum about Christianity and sexuality in global Anglicanism. Can he save the communion? What should he do? It’s a super-wicked problem if ever there was: every action taken to solve it seems to make it worse.

In the end, scripture, tradition, politics and national laws notwithstanding, the young people were optimistic that the positive inclusive messages they read and they post on social media would work this out. Old people will die, and their exclusive conservative views with them. Religions will survive or perish but young people will uphold inclusivity.
​
It’s a different argument to Haidt’s.  What did the old person in the room think?  I fear, but I hope.         
 
CR
23.5.24

Carrying parsnip soup through the canteen door I became tangled in historians seeking last-minute verification.  What was the Marshall Plan? When was the raid on Cadiz? Thankfully Ms History was at the ready with perfect short answers, which is how I know about the 96 facts. The human brain’s a mysterious thing so while most of the youths will have forgotten 90 of them by now, Ms knows ‘em all. ‘She’s like a machine’.  
 
Hmm. Remaining stoical and optimistic means I avoid thinking about some stuff, from US politics to an unnerving dream about a giant thistle in a car. I’ve tried to ignore Artificial Intelligence thus: too technical, potentially boring and located somewhere in the future. But on a train down France last week I read a leader in the FT and, crikey, I’m thinking of little else. In fact, I apologise for not bothering you about this before.  
 
While the Internet, mobile phones and social media bemused schools in their time, generative artificial intelligence knocks them into a cocked hat. Humanity’s response will shape the future and struth, schools should be steadily panicking about this without delay.  
 
Forgive me if you’re already expert on this generative AI growing like Japanese knotweed. Building on published data, information, books, journals, wikis and social media it literally predicts the next word on any subject. This has mega-implications not just for learning, but the development of thinking citizens. And while folks are happily speculating on the drudge-work it’ll take off us, I’m captivated by two serious problems.
 
AI can fabricate facts and make up links and references. These ‘hallucinations’ or ‘confabulations’ give plausible-sounding falsehoods which are then repeated and become part of what people think is true.
 
Second, AI builds on what we already know, so stuff we’re trying to eradicate – the colonial past, misogyny, whether Joe Biden won the election or not – repeat endlessly. It’s not a tool designed to change the world for the better.
 
A relief, then, that the doughty Department for Education has produced a position statement.  A bit bland, maybe, but usefully covering stuff about AI opportunities and challenges, exam malpractice, data protection, cyber security, protecting students from harmful content and potentially freeing up teacher time.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. I like a nicely-turned phrase in a formal document and the following gripped my by the throat. The DfE note that AI

• content they produce is not always accurate or appropriate as it has limited regard for truth and can output biased information.
• is not a substitute for having knowledge in long-term memory
• can make written tasks quicker and easier but cannot replace the judgement and deep subject knowledge of a human expert. It is more important than ever that our education system ensures pupils acquire knowledge, expertise and intellectual capability.
• can produce fluent and convincing responses to user prompts [but] the content produced can be factually inaccurate. Students need foundational knowledge and skills to discern and judge the accuracy and appropriateness of information, so a knowledge-rich curriculum, is therefore all the more important.
• can create believable content of all kinds
• content may seem more authoritative and believable

 
And there’s an Office for AI squirreling away within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.  You’ve got to ask – who’s feeding it? Do they know it’s there?
 
Thank you, Secretary of State. Here are what’s on my mind, though.

1. Schools have to be committed to the highest standards of knowledge, quality scholarship and truth as AI develops, to avoid misinformation taking root in teaching and learning.  
2. This is particularly important when a crippling teacher shortage leaves isolated, young or unsupported teachers creating lessons content alone (not at Tallis). Especially those misled by DfE trends such as the sponsoring of online lessons through Oak National Academy. If you get used to downloading off-the-peg lessons, you’ll need to check the facts.
3. Students of course need to learn about and work with AI, but they also need to understand its dangers and the debilitatingly skewing effect that sustained falsehood has on human society. We’re already seeing this.
4. The ridiculously named ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ (what other sort is there?) is insufficient protection. As long as schools are cheaply assessed by exam results and snapshot inspections, some schools still face a perverse incentive to cover large amounts of knowledge superficially. Combined with a serious teacher shortage, the temptations of AI pose a real risk to the integrity of what children are being taught.
5. Young people devote HUGE portions of their waking hours to AI-generated content. Adults, teachers and policy-makers need to understand and work very hard to bridge significant generational differences.
6. Exams may be OK while they remain as memory tests fulfilled in handwriting in an exam room.  Unconsidered absorption of AI information, though, is a risk to independent student learning. Coursework becomes a nightmare and mechanised marking – cheaper for the commercial exam boards - could install hallucinations at the heart of knowledge. However, our examination system’s glued to university entrance, so the academy needs to think about this. Which it is.

 
So, what to do? At Tallis we’re writing a developing policy and thinking about the big issues. As the leader in the Financial Times 27.5.23 said:

School should include memorable experiences so as a new Deputy Head in 1997 I got very excited about the chance to book one. For a brisk fee, a helicopter would land and take off on the school field a couple of times, children could be invited to look at it and have some talks about how it worked. I reckoned the PTA would shell out for this brilliant idea so I rushed to the Head for the rubber stamp. He looked like a man who regretted a brave appointment. ‘Are you mad? Of course not.  We’d get nothing done all day.’ But as his successor was wont to say, revenge is a dish best enjoyed cold, and it only took me 25 years to eat it.

Friday last, I’d been in in since crack of dawn catching up with myself and all was going nicely. At about 0825 the word went out that there’d been an incident in the street and would we mind clearing away the hundreds of nosey teenagers who were potentially impeding the emergency services? Colleagues helpfully rushed forth and sheepdogged the masses through the gates. So far so good, but the sound of helicopter rotors was growing, like one of those modern war films where everything’s falling apart and out of the sky. This does not calm: children were jumping up and down with excitement.

Concerned about a frankly poor start to the day, I gathered self and Acme Thunderer, instructed my long-suffering PA to ‘tell everyone to get their kids in’ and scuttled out. Block 5’s staircases go around the long way so all hell had actually broken loose by the time I gained the concourse. The children, happy to have been ushered off the public highway, entered Fortress Tallis only to find that the bright red Air Ambulance had obligingly landed just south of our memorial garden for their better inspection. The noise was deafening, whistles completely useless.  Miraculously, adults summoned by my peremptory instruction managed to get in front of the crowd thus preventing the foolish from getting in the way of the landing skids (a new technical term).

I was a seething ball of outrage by then and with a cry of ‘who said they could land a helicopter here?’ stomped towards the offending machine, which was turning itself off. The pilot, obviously experienced with het-up local despots, took the wind out of my sails by apologising so charmingly that within seconds I had offered him free landing rights for life from the football area to the basketball courts, an escort in and out of the gates and a cup of tea if he liked. Everyone went in and the machine had picked itself up and gone within 10 minutes.

By then, of course, it was all over social media that the air ambulance had had to be called because of something at school, so I spent a bit of time calming folks. Yes, it had landed. Yes, there was a life-changing injury. No, it was not at school. No, it didn’t involve any children. For us, it was over by lesson 2. For the family involved, not so. As I said in a swift email to parents: seeing the helicopter had been fascinating for the children but tragedy lay behind it. We were glad to be of service (once I’d got over myself, I didn’t add).  

I’d hoped for calm on Friday because we had enough excitement, which, as Mr Dunford knew needs to be doled out carefully in school lest things become inflamed. It was Earth Day, so we had visitors and gardening, including a chance for year 9 to mingle with leaf blowers and lawnmowers round in the other garden. 

It was also Stephen Lawrence Day so we had one of our moments of solidarity planned, with a gathering on the concourse, in memory and to hope for better.

We’ve done a few of these now, it’s becoming quite a feature of Tallis life. We’ve got better at the practicalities. The speaker had rehearsed well and I kept my nose out of the amplification – except to pull the plug on a nice little band playing as the community started to come out. You don’t have to be zero-tolerance to know that there’s a better chance of getting silence quickly without shouting if there’s no other noise. The heli had given us quite enough of that. They played to a rapt audience afterwards, when no one needed to be quiet.

Our speaker was Harry Marcus from 10RA, from his heart and his mum came to hear him. He talked about the Lawrence family first, and then his own:

Do you remember interference? It was a big feature of my childhood. You couldn’t hear the radio when the hoover was on because it went all crackly. The telly was sensitive to interference too and even the sharpest of slaps on the top or fiddling with the vertical hold knob didn’t always fix it. Happy days. The car I sometimes drive is ten years old with an FM radio. Reception is crackly between Deptford and Peckham. I’ve got used to it and – as if you couldn’t hear this analogy galloping towards you out of the squiggly mist of a 1960s television screen – I’ve got used to government interference too.

May I set out a few thoughts on the surprise announcement to finish this term a day early, and how irritable everyone has been about it?

First, the government needs to be pulling out all the stops to tackle Covid. Whether you think they have or not is up to you. Whether you think they can or not is more worrying. However, like the geography of Derbyshire, that is not the purpose of this piece. 

Second, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to have a view on the purpose of education, a national curriculum, an inspection process and a fair funding mechanism. Whether or not this can all be achieved smoothly when the focus for the last 20 years has been on a spurious ‘autonomy’ for Headteachers is more worrying. However, like the poetry of Thomas Hardy, that is not the purpose of this piece.

Third, it is reasonable that decisions about schools will have to be made quickly in a pandemic. Whether the Secretary of State’s pandemic-handling so far gives one confidence for future decision-making is worrying.  However, like the exams debacle, the laptop promise, the food vouchers, the BBC lessons, rotas and the October firebreak, that too is not the purpose of this piece.

What is, then? you cry, put us out of our misery, would you, please? No, the focus of this piece is how schools have once again been cast as shiftless villains only interested in a day off, in some parts of the media, this week. Given we’ve been working flat out, how did this happen? Might I try to shed light?

No one asked for a day off. Unions, professional associations and other groups made the point severally and singly with evidence and justification that it was no surprise that when schools reopened, infection rates among children rose. Therefore, once Christmas was declared open and restrictions lifted from the day before Christmas Eve to the day after Boxing Day, schools spotted an issue. Covid-infected or Covid-carrying children may be a risk to older people. As Christmas is invariably spent in multi-generational close proximity, young people may well endanger the health of older people. Gran and Max may have missed each other desperately since the start of lockdown, but it would be a pity if the visit had to be summarily cancelled, made her ill or worse. Therefore, schools’ tribunes said, since we are all capable of remote learning now, had you thought about making the week beginning 14th December a remote learning week and protecting everyone?

A further complication was schools’ responsibilities for contact tracing. If the end of term broke into the 6-day incubation period, schools would need to be making phone calls about infections on Christmas Eve, or later.  This required schools in some way to be open to do that – even if it was just the Head, or the Business Manager, or whoever has been in charge of the process.

And now we get to the bit that enrages the public. Heads said: everyone is exhausted and working over the actual Christmas Eve-Day-Boxing-Day stretch is hard to bear. Some of us (not me) haven’t had much of a break since March. Is there a way of avoiding being responsible for contact tracing all over Christmas?

The solution, declaring Friday 18 December to be an in-service training day must have seemed like a reasonable one to the government. We’re not giving a week of remote learning because everyone has had enough of that, Mr Williamson might have thought – though I suspect it's Gibb the Schools Minister who does the thinking at Sanctuary Buildings. Friday the 18th removes schools from contact tracing over the actual heart of the festivities.  Excellent plan! So why was this not met with general applause?

Well, the difficulty is in the nature of training days. These are not invented on the hoof and they are not meant to be a time when everyone catches up on their marking. They are for actual training to improve classroom practice, planned as part of the school’s improvement planning over the course of the year. They are to be taken seriously. If the training is not done that day, then it is acceptable for the equivalent number of hours to be made up at other points in the year, in planned after-school training time. What the DfE should have done is to declare that this Inset day is a one-off under extraordinary circumstances, unlike others, with other rules. What they have done is to tie everyone up in knotted red tape.

Worse, lots of schools – especially primaries, I suspect - had planned some appropriately-distanced festivities which couldn’t easily be reorganised. We don’t do a lot of that here. The tree’s up, Christmas Lunch is on Tuesday, I’ve recorded a verse of the song we’ll broadcast on Thursday and I’m writing this in a Christmas-y jumper wearing antlers, but that‘s as far as it goes. But now I’m embarrassed that the nation thinks we’re slackers. ‘Teachers say not enough time off’ shrieks the headline.

Everybody’s tired. Children of all ages and dispositions have found the last 15 weeks exhausting and so have the adults around them. The zoning separation of year groups eats away at the teaching day and at any semblance of freedom that the children had. This is hard for adolescents to bear who are wired for developing independence in these years: tempers are frayed. It is immeasurably worse for those who’ve had to isolate, some of them, by the cruel hand of fate, for weeks on end. We understand that many parents are struggling. Some heads and teachers have said regrettable things on social media – but that’s tired human nature broadcasting out loud in the modern world.

Which brings me back to the crackle of interference. Fourth (for those of you who haven’t fallen off the chair with boredom yet) it is shoddy for a government to conduct business by press briefing. Whether the current leaders of a parliament which used to be the model and envy of the world can get over this is debatable. However, like Paine’s Rights of Man, that is not the purpose of this piece.

I trust that these extraordinary circumstances will end some day. Until then, we need to look after each other and try to be kind. So, finally, fifth: it is a pity that so much of the media can’t abide teachers and attack schools at the drop of a hat. However, like the apparently perfectly acceptable decision of Eton to close early to protect families at Christmas, that is not the purpose of this piece. But perhaps it should be?     
 
CR
11.12.20

Well, Mr Williamson, I’m disappointed. Months of waiting and what do we get? Silent corridors and phone bans?  Really? When I wrote two weeks ago that I’d recognise what you were going to be like by the first things you said I didn’t expect them to be quite so, what shall I say, dog-whistly. Oh dear me no. When we think of the virus and the curriculum, the scrap with Ofsted, the funding, the reappearance of teaching-as-a-career adverts, the recruitment crisis and the sad state of our zero-sum, zero-tolerated young I had hoped for something a bit more hopeful.

Phones are still an open debate in my head but not the corridors. Let me dispense with this. Children talk. They have a range of volumes available to them and a plethora of topics. Some of the foregoing are more acceptable to the genteel adult ear than others. If they’re too loud this can easily be fixed by saying ‘shush’ while applying the finger to the lips. If their discussion lacks civility that can be dealt with by removing them into a corner to offer counsel and issue instruction. However, most of the time they’re talking at a reasonable volume about music, love, books, lessons, teachers, sport, gossip, animals, wars, food and Playstations. You might not tackle to their taste, but civil conversation is good for them and offsets all kinds of problems, from inarticulacy to isolation. Since I last ranted about this I’ve visited Roedean which I’m sure you’ll think is a model to us all. Their corridors sound like ours, full of children talking. What does silence bring? Control, is all. 

Enough of this. I heard the wonderful Will Gompertz talk last week and he told a great story about children describing their GCSE results to each other. One told of a string of A*s and As, another chirpily claimed to be able to beat that because ‘I can spell BEEF DUDE with mine’. How I know that child and how I can picture them falling about with laughter and tears, clutching each other for support. What a racket, what a memory, what a lesson. Both men are successful now, the dude richer than the A, if that’s what matters.

But he also talked about the twin pillars of teen life: social media and exams. Both are solitary, isolating and largely uncontrollable, especially under comparable outcomes and the requirement of a third to fail GCSE. What are we doing to our children?

Anyway, back at Tallis, I was summoned into action by Head of Year 7. ‘I need you to finish off assembly. I have to go and teach and it’ll overrun because of the bees.’ Happy to oblige and make myself unusually useful, I started it off too. Depositing year 7 neatly in rows on the Sports Hall floor we started with coronavirus and the handwashing-Happy Birthday thing. One of the great things about year 7 is that they are young enough to be openly curious and uninhibited enough to prefer an answer to anonymity. A hand shot up. ‘How long it lasts depends on the person’s name, doesn’t it?’ Yes indeed. Let’s call her Eglantyne and practise that.

However, the bee man was unpacking his affairs by then and attention was elsewhere. He had bees, he had hives, he had boxes and he had honey. At some point I ended up holding bees while the younger element asked questions. Some got to hold bees too and some were rewarded with honey. Loads of previously bee-indifferent city dwellers asked detailed and imaginative questions. We frequently had to pause while they discussed bee-related issues with one another and when I finally handed my green parcels back and shooed them off to class the bee-debate was stretching from block 5 to the furthest reach of period 1. (Oh, the green parcels were the bees.  Hibernating – do you think I’m mad?) As I remarked to the meeting I was 20 minutes late for and the phone call I forgot altogether until break – never work with children or bees. All your best lines are lost.

Mr Williamson, wouldn’t it have been a waste if the children had had to be quiet all the way to Art? They were so excited, astounded, bemused about what they’d seen they wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves talking. We’d have had to shush them and tell them off, some might have needed punishing, for talking, about an endangered wonder of creation. Who would have benefited? The bees lived again in the retelling as well as in the buzzing and flapping and the silly laughter as 270 11 and 12-year olds swarmed across the yard. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Well, I suppose that if you’re frightened of children, or if you’re not confident in your relationships with them, or if you think they have nothing to say or nothing to share, or if being in control is more important than teaching children a good way to live you might want it, but it still wouldn’t make sense.

And I suppose that when your corridors are silent you’ll never here the quiet admissions, friend to friend. I’m frightened to go home. I’m hungry again. I don’t want to stay alive. I know something dangerous. I don’t know who to tell. And you don’t get the friend’s advice: tell Miss, tell Sir, come with me and I’ll help. 

It’s not just bees who hold us together. Children’s voices frame the world for some of us, and we count ourselves lucky.
 
CR
12.3.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A teacher comes to visit and tells me she’s wearing her geek trousers. I think we should all put some on, take a breath and think calmly and professionally - preferably behind closed doors for a while. OFSTED evaluation frameworks usually take a while to bed in and there’s no need to panic. We’re way off getting this right, but the system is thinking better and about the things that matter. As we say in every room here: we know we are learning when we are thinking very hard.      
 
CR 17.10.19                       

Posh people do it a lot. They talk about people they know and then seem surprised if you don’t know them, though why you would is baffling. They follow with a disappointed ‘oh’, as in ‘Oh, I thought you were one of us, but obviously if you don’t know Hugh Collapsible and the Hyphenated-Deckchairs you can’t be, shame.’ The idea that everyone who’s anyone knows everyone you know is how elites perpetuate themselves, making you desperate to be in the know too.

I’ve been involved in a twitterstorm of late. When I say involved, I mean that someone tweeted dismissively about a group of people which included me. In order for me to be involved, someone had to email the tweet to me, but it eventually hit the spot and annoyed. Anyway, I was dismissed as one of ‘a bunch of officials who no-one’s ever heard of’ meaning, I assume, that our opinions were worthless because they hadn’t been pre-approved by celebrity despite being democratically elected to do a difficult deed. Harumph.

I recalled a conversation I had back in 2013 when I was preparing to come to Greenwich. A friendly colleague (outside Tallis) said ‘of course, no-one’s ever heard of you, but we looked you up and you seem to be doing a good job.’ I was mildly outraged as well as amused. Durham to London is another world but I wasn’t unknown among educators there. And what does it matter? Who said knowing you validated my existence? I only met you a month ago.

We struggle a bit in school with this. Social media for some of our young is like being trapped in a cocktail party where all the posh people know each other. If you’re peripheral, you need resilience. Loneliness and social exclusion are ever-present fears among teenagers and now there’s no escape from the yattering of the crowd that you’re not part of. Playgrounds have always had elites, but now they’re validated in cyberspace, in pictures and home movies, in conversation shouted across the ether. It’s hard for them all, hard when they fall out, hard to keep up the pretence of knowing everyone as a way of proving you exist, especially hard when adults are obsessed with it too.

That’s not to say that some teenagers aren’t almost magically contented away from the crowd. Yesterday, first lunch, after ejecting a large group of loud girls I wandered off to survey other diners. The readers with their novels, absently picking at their sandwiches, and the card-swappers leaning right over the tables. A group of small boys trying on each other’s glasses and chortling. The mixed bunch gathered round the motherly sixth former, and the ones who choose the pundit stools ready like meerkats to engage teachers in chat. An illicit homework catcher-upper lurking behind a pillar, and my current favourites, a tidy pair of year 8 boys, had their habitual quiet chat over lunch before zipping up their topcoats and taking a dignified turn around the yard before the whistle.

There’s strength in quiet industry and decent human endeavour and it doesn’t need to be demonstrated publicly. An old head chum of mine, Australian Barry, possums, had a quiet way with words. We’d been talked at by one of Tony Blair’s deliverers who had segued from the officious to the patronising. Barry’s opening remark was ‘Son, I’d taught on three continents before you were born’. Later, in a tetchy session reflecting on another colleague’s self-promoting BBC appearance he just said ‘For shame. You give us all a bad name.’ Barry’s career passed in obscure diligence leading a good school in a dull town. No-one had ever heard of him, except the generations of families he served. His slap of the young pup was only partly exasperation. He was saying, eloquently to my junior ears, that you may be in the papers and heading for a knighthood, matey, but I’ve done my best for 40 years, don’t assume I’m not worth listening to, give me a break.

Success in anything shouldn’t be determined by whether we’re known or unknown, but on the quality of our service. We should teach our children that it is quality friendship that matters, not quantity. We should celebrate the quiet life well lived and the hidden goodness of the everyday. We should all understand that human worth is utterly unquantifiable. We should think hard about the example we set as we grasp at fleeting notoriety, and the damage we do to the quiet people around us.

So I tip my fake-fur titfer to the great unknown, as MacNeice said: