While I’m very glad for the NHS that extra funding has been agreed, you can imagine me waiting for the second shoe to fall in the public sector. I was at the annual school leaders’ association conference last week where a wise person described schools as being in gridlock. I think our problems are difficult to make simple, but it was an apposite image and I’m going to have a go at explaining it. Yawn if you’ve heard me before.

Schools’ biggest problems are funding and the teacher supply. Our funding problems are a result of national austerity measures, a much-postponed decision to move to a national funding formula, and the London issue.  
National austerity means that funding has been stagnant for some time, the increased spending that the government claims being because of more children in the system (schools are funded per child). The national funding formula combined with austerity means that the total existing money is to be shared out more fairly. 

That’s good, but there are as many losers as winners. We would be losers. This combines with the London issue.  London schools were funded more highly because of higher costs, of course, but also through the London Challenge, the initiative which improved the achievement of London schools so radically this century. On top of that, there were pension and NI changes which were unfunded, costing school budgets more.

The teacher supply issue is a real nightmare. Routes into teaching are very complicated and have been decentralised. This combined with static pay and publicity about unmanageable workloads to deter applications, so its many years since government teacher recruitment targets were met. In London, teachers leave to move to areas where they can afford housing.  

The link between funding and workload is harder to explain. Schools spend most of their money on teachers so when budgets have to be reduced, we employ fewer teachers. That means three things. Each teacher teaches more of the week, each class is bigger, and schools discontinue particular courses. Or all three. All those add to the work of remaining teachers. Recruitment does the same thing: an unfillable science post after Christmas led to existing teachers getting more classes and some classes welcoming more students. 

All those affect the service parents expect from teachers. More and larger classes mean less non-contact time and more marking. More marking leads to less frequency, and parents worry about that. I worry about everything.  Hence the gridlock. We sit in our schools hooting wildly, but no one opens the flow in any direction. The answer is more money, but will that ever be the message?

I look out of the window and espy a child, teacher and standard lamp combo. It looks like a nice DT product, so I can only speculate on why it’s been taken for a walk. An inveterate shorts-wearer skips past, obviously feeling the equinox to be satisfactory. Two sirs seek a child who left me in the regular manner but is now elsewhere from where he should be. Year 10 are doing mock exams and so we are still in shushing mode. In fact, next year I might instigate a rule where everyone may only say shush on the first floor of block 4 between December and June. Beat that with a stick, silent-corridor schools.

I tangle with some year 10s who let us down badly earlier in the week, and I’m reading a journal about all the things we ask of the adolescent brain while it’s still rewiring itself. However, it doesn’t excuse these malefactors. I’m daunted by the papers’ erudition but that may be faulty wiring affected by my own adolescence downwind of a chemical works. There’s a whole chapter on myths, and I know a bit about those. Especially the ones about running schools without teachers or money.

Unexpectedly, a second pair of shorts crosses my vision while I have a cordial and witty row with a trusted colleague. His parting shot is that it’s not worth carrying on a fight he’s not going to win. That’s just defeatism. Many human myths are about battles of endurance and he might yet win, unlike the children of austerity with no teachers. That’s a battle against the odds and it’s just not fair. 
  
A youth renowned for Irish dancing scissors across the bridge in the between-lunch quiet, thinking no one’s looking. He’s a fine sight. You’ve got to love it.
 
CR
22.3.18  
 
  

I could talk about Ofsted or the snow but I’d rather talk about year 9. If you’d rather think about the other things, please see last week’s or this week’s newsletter.

We’re looking at what happens in tutor group time this half-term. There’s a programme for each year group that involves reading, news, equipment, revision and so on, according to age and proximity of examination and we extended the time to make it better last year. I’ve been allocated year 9. Year 9, as I’ve said before, are always a bit odd. They lack the winsome charm of year 7, they’re more sluggish than year 8 but they can’t quite focus on the future in the way that year 10 nearly can and most of year 11 do. Year 9, against all the evidence, believe themselves to be quite the models of maturity.

Tutor groups are eccentric beasts too. They’re like a large family of up to 30 children with only one parent (perhaps a second if other adults hitch their caravans to this particular train). Tutors demonstrate a range of parenting skills in this rather challenging task. I scuttled round all nine groups one week to assess the weather and this is what I found.

Two groups were watching Newsround and there were the makings of intelligent discussion on current affairs. Two groups were reading the year group’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. What joy to start the day thus! One group was competing ferociously in an on-line book quiz and couldn’t spare the time to be interrupted by me. One group’s tutor had just returned from a residential trip so the family were going through notices that might have been missed. Another group’s tutor was on jury service so the atmosphere was a bit different. Groups like to see the same community parent’s face every day and don’t really like substitution.
One group was having an equipment inspection. This was being done in total silence and, the merest twitch of the tutor’s eyebrow cause the requisite items to be brandished. ‘Two sharpened pencils? Calculator? Two working pens?’ Tutor was just about satisfied by 99% compliance. The shirker didn’t even convince himself that he’d looked hard enough to find his planner.

Next door, however, there was much in hand. Tutor posed the question ‘Why are we so useless at Sports Day?’ and got many answers including the perfidy of other groups, lack of girls or boys of sufficient prowess in all the events, most of the form being too short, tall or weak or having the wrong kit, inclination or motivation. Dismissing all this as losers’ thinking, Tutor then showed a bit of Coach Carter and set out his plans for world domination.  Introducing novelty concepts entirely in line with our Habits ‘We are going to train’  he said ‘We are going to practice’, to a chorus of much groaning.

We assign tutors at the start of year 7 in the hope that most last until year 11. It’s a wonderful thing to be the school parent of a group of growing children, though it doesn’t necessarily feel like that every single morning and afternoon. Children make mistakes, and personalities change through hormones or circumstance, just like at home.  Friendships emerge and disband, some thrive and some don’t. Some like the relative informality of form time, some hate it.

We try very hard to make tutor groups balanced but aspects of adolescent character are unpredictable. Sometimes groups become collectively unhappy and hard to manage, so we move people around. Some groups stay the same for five years and their sense of family and nostalgia when they part at the end of year 11 is heartbreaking.

I had a tutor group for years in a different part of the forest in another century. Our tutor room was a demountable classroom (hut, terrapin, call it what you will) on the far periphery of a single story site housing a 10-form-entry 11-16 school. Tutorial lessons for PSE happened on Friday afternoons for year 9s but we had RE together after that. Including afternoon reg, that was two-and-a-half hours together to round off the week. We had our ups and downs, but we knew each other pretty well by the end of the year. I can’t say that I begged the timetabler for a repeat in year 10, but when we all  left I was touched by the group memories of long cosy afternoons in a warm room with the rain coming down outside. We planned some cracking events that year for team building and charity: car washing, kayak trips, abseiling. We celebrated birthdays and I visited the reluctant attenders. I saw shocking poverty in some of their homes and learned a lot from all of them.

Schools have different traditions and use different language for the same things. I range through form tutor, registration and tutor group to the bewilderment of children I’m interrogating. Tallisees call the group and the person by the same name: ‘Tutor’. As in, ‘I’m off to tutor to see my tutor’. I like that, the group and the person as one thing with one purpose.

So here’s to the form tutors of the land. May you be a good parent to your many children in your busy rooms. May you build up happy memories. May you know them as they want to be known and smile at them every day, even if they’re useless at the shot putt.

CR
8.3.18

If you can name that song you’re at least as old as me, so well done twice. Though it didn’t feature in Band Night this week, unlike Hendrix, Clapton and a bit of punk.

Its jolly nice to be back after half term. Holidays are funny things: we press pause for a few days, then start again exactly as before, knowing what we’re doing and when, pressing play on the second half of the year. Schools are always running. No matter where in the world you are, someone is teaching fractions, someone is asking a child a rhetorical question, someone is mopping a tearstained face and someone is irritably counting back scissors.

We’ve had a visitor this week to the show that never ends, another civil servant on the DfE Immersion Scheme. It’s good to be put on the spot by an intelligent stranger who’s come to learn. The first thing they say is ‘I thought it would be different’ meaning ‘inner-city, multi-ethnic, big, sweatshirted, I expected to be terrified’. The second thing is to try to make sense of what they’re seeing through the lens of their own experience at school. We all do that and it’s a besetting problem in education policy. Everyone’s been to school, so we carry our bags, heavy or light, from that experience for the rest of our lives. Adults either want schools to be better for children now, or as good as they used to be. Generally, it doesn’t make for clear analytical thought.

Despite that, we had lots of long and really interesting conversations. Our guest met with Head of year 11 and learned some pretty arresting facts about children who don’t have much English. He tangled with our budget and the flexibilities (ahem) of the PFI scheme that maintains our building. He spent time talking about teaching quality, and teacher workload, and reflecting on the pressures that social media bring to the nation’s young. He did a walkabout and couple of break and lunch duties, and some A level philosophy. He heard an options assembly and spent three hours in the same seat in a classroom watching a skilled teacher swap from A level, to mixed ability year 8, to a group of children for whom learning is more slowly acquired. And he asked a lot of questions about policy, and why we aren’t an academy. And while he watched and asked, the show went on.

The sharper readers will have spotted ’walkabout’ above and might have raised a quizzical eyebrow. We have a timetable of senior staff who use non-teaching time to keep an eye on the place and monitor behaviour and learning. We literally walk about, covering the whole building every hour, all by slightly different routes and methods. It takes me nearly an hour to get around, but I am shorter in the leg as well as longer in the tooth. Others nip around quicker, other stop to chat. Sometimes you can be waylaid by an incident that means you don’t get very far: a truculent child, a seagull in the building, a nasty smell. Usually everything is quiet, the show running smoothly.

In school there’s always something to do next and somewhere to go, something to discover and something to achieve and the show is multidimensional. But as you leave block one and go to block two, art and English don’t stop existing because you’re looking at science and tech, and the children you see in year 10 are still the same people you taught in year 8. ‘Walkabout’ isn’t a derogatory use of an ancient spiritual quest, but a vital experience for all of us who do it, convenient or not. As we walk we interpret the school as it develops and the children grow around us. The show is never-ending and always the same, but the children are all different from the others who have gone before and from who they were themselves a year ago, a week ago, a day ago. Our institution protects them because we’re unending and stable, always the same but always changing too. With all that going on, we walk it because we have to know it.

When I set out on Tuesday I saw a pair of year 8 girls whom I love to watch at play. Both had an awkward and difficult start to year 7. It took time and tears to settle, too much of it alone. Somehow, someone put them together and now, utterly inseparable, gloriously happy in each other’s company they laugh all the time and it make me smile just to see them. I hope their friendship is a show that never ends.
 
And I hope our guest remembers the never-ending show when he’s back in Sanctuary Buildings. When I waved him off I told him to come back any time. He’s been on walkabout too and he can come back to check out his thinking.  We’ll all be the better for it, now and into future. Come inside, come inside.
 
CR
23.2.18