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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

I like, I wish, I wonder

14/11/2021

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I note that the late Princess of Wales in the latest film imagines eating pearls at a tedious royal Christmas. I like a pearl myself, though not for supper, and am assured by fashion pages to which I am obviously a slave that you can wear them with anything. This includes PE kit, whereupon earrings and necklace were modelled by a young person going into year 7 assembly on Monday. Lest uniform or H&S geeks are panicking, PE kit is worn all day on post-pandemic PE days, and doubtless the pearls would be cast orf before any kind of throttling danger.  

Such Year 7 eccentricities prosper in a happy school. I intervened with a pair blissfully unconcerned about the pile-up of traffic on the bridge behind their experiment into picking up things while pretending they had no hands, as they explained as I towed them into a layby. Another keeps me daily informed on the progress of her new brace.  
Year 8 are developing the anxieties of adolescence. I scrutinised a science corridor this morning and advanced upon two pleasant citizens outside a lab.  Behaviour walkabout gives you familiarity with those few more likely to be without than within and these were strangers to truculence. ‘We can’t go in because of the lungs on my desk’ was the beguiling reason. And so it was: offal being inflated with a bicycle pump by a technician while the teacher (‘I’m not at my best with this sort of stuff’) kept a respectful distance. The transfixed class bickered mildly about vegetarianism while scrutinising the biology.   
    
I’ve spent a lot of weekends recently separated from the Roberts sofa, at conferences and meetings. It was at one such that a colleague used a new-to-me feedback mantra of ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’. Struth. I like Year 7, I wish they wouldn’t cause an embouteillage, I wonder why some people will happily poke at a pair of lungs while others turn green? She also talked about ‘lethal mutations’ of previously good ideas, an obvious but helpful description, like when a concern for teachers’ workload leads to a rigid, strangulating, pre-packaged lesson delivery.

There is a part of the forest specialising in lethal mutations. Current scuffling under the foliage from Sanctuary Buildings appears to be muffled mutterings about academisation, of interest to those 21% of us secondary schools still blessedly council-run. SoS Zahawi hasn’t really said anything and Herrington the Schools Commissioner says there isn’t a master plan yet. But soft! In a dull-sounding consultation entitled ‘Reforming how local authorities’ school improvement functions are funded’, launched inevitably during half-term, we find:
the government’s longer-term ambition for all schools to become academies within a strong MAT 
– an end point which a number of councils are already closing in on, where councils would no longer maintain schools.

​
The report uses the brain-scrambling terminology of de-delegation which, despite tussling for decades, I have to work out every time. De-delegation is when a Local Authority doesn’t pass part of the schools’ grant into schools’ delegated funding but keeps part of it for a particular purpose. I was once trapped in a consultation about de-de-delegation for which ‘delegation’ didn’t seem to be an acceptable contraction. As Ted Lasso says, I’m still looking forward to having it explained to me. I choose not to panic.

Next door the World Peace Game in is full flow with citizens of the Republic of Tallis alongside those from the hill tribes of Eltham and Parliament. They’ve just had the term ‘sitrep’ explained to them and are dealing with submarine menaces, I think. They understand that negotiation takes forever but is the only guarantee of lasting success. Some of the visitors are very inquisitive about what else is happening here and pass slowly by my door or glue their noses to the window.

They’d have had a treat yesterday for Remembrance, with everyone quiet on the yard under the spell of a magnificent trumpeter from the band of the Grenadier Guards. Someone wrote to me saying that we disrespect the remembering of the war dead by looking at the racism and colonialism inherent in our conflict history and I am sorry if it looks like that. We don’t, but our young people have to learn from the past so they can make the future better.

I like, I wish, I wonder. I like schools and their children. I wish we knew what we wanted from a national education system. I wonder why ideas mutate lethally and everyone shouts madly at each other. 

I hear through the door that global warming hasn’t been solved by the 12-year olds. It’s enough to make anyone eat their pearls.
 
CR
12.11.21
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Hello Possums

13/9/2021

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We nearly didn’t get away on 21st July. At about 0930 vans arrived to dig up the pavement and the zebra outside the Tallis moat. I have experience of this. I once couldn’t open a new school because the pavement needed re-laying so I had visions of us all trapped together for weeks, unable to open the gates, still attempting to tunnel out in early August. However, pickaxes were packed up by 1230 so everyone escaped as planned, as you may have noticed to the detriment of your hot water supply, fridge contents and remote controls.

Since then, exam results have been distributed, training undertaken, testing trudged through, timetables issued and now, a full week completed. All’s well.

Or is it? Holidays are meant to help you cope by forgetting the things you were worried about. At my age I genuinely forget what I was worried about and so write myself notes in July to remember them, which then, during results weeks, I transcribe from old diary to new. Some are diverting: ‘Pie chrts sort out’, some worrying ‘Ofsted?!!!!’, some deeply mysterious ‘Top slice 9th won’t you?’. Pie charts are the concern of the top floor of block 3, and the 9th passed without slicing required. As for Ofsted? Death and taxes, I say to you.

Worry was encouraged, though, last term. Apart from the virus itself, all messages were tinted with doom. Teacher grades can’t be trusted. Everyone will be unhappy with grades. Appeals will be unmanageable. Universities won’t offer enough places. There’s no money for recovery. The Department should know better. No child will know anything in September. And what about the National Tutoring Programme?

When the so-called Recovery Czar resigned because government wouldn’t stump up the cash they denied ever promising, some educators became transfixed with horror. Without money, how could the compulsory holiday provisions and the lengthening of the school day needed until the end of time to address the loss be financed?  What to do?

May I deal with these one by one? Exam grades were arrived at fairly and concerns could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Teachers are trusted – though some sectors have questions to answer. Universities offered places and what might have been a clearing-heavy year turned out to be nothing of the sort. Who expected money for recovery, really, or anything else? The department remains strangely led. Children know all sorts of things, perhaps not all of them useful. The National Tutor Programme? Pshaw.

Me, I always assume there’s no money for anything so trim my expectations accordingly. It seemed egregiously unfair to children and unreasonable to teachers to punish them for not being able to be at school last year by making them be there longer this year. That’s not how you develop a self-directed lifelong love of learning – though it is how you cram people for exams. It seemed to me that we would have to teach fewer things in greater depth and make sure that children understand the how as well as the what so they can pick up missed content as they grow.

Imagine my gratitude when Prof Oates of Cambridge threw himself into the debate. ‘Recovery’ is a ridiculous concept, he said. What we need is acceleration, in class, as usual. Find out how each child has been affected. Make sure reading, writing and number are solid. Reinforce core subject concepts and don’t panic. Use what you have wisely and don’t look for centralised support or guidance from soundbite politics. He might have added – especially from a man who can’t tell his blindside flanker from his attacking left-winger. Oh, what a message is there. More on this anon.

But on Planet Tallis we’ve been basking in the sun and getting used to one another again. That’s not always straightforward, especially for troubled children, so we try to make sure we remember the systems that protect everyone and have support at hand for the bewildered, agitated, confused, new and angry. Adolescence is tricky and, as Machiavelli said of the Romans, wisdom demands that difficult things aren’t made any harder if you want to get anything done. 

We’ve even kept a few of the odder Covid habits. We’re still lining up year 7 and 8 four times a day and I’ve noted a common addition to the repertoire of teachers’ silent instructions.  It’s a barely-perceptible twitch of the head, to left or right, that means ‘This line isn’t very straight and you, child, stick out messily. Align yourself with colleagues fore and aft so we may all depart in peace, if you’d be so good, pronto.’

We can be as cross as we like with government ministers and grade inflators but the day job returns like joy in the morning. I was trying to attach a mask without losing an ear while holding a cup of hot tea when year 13 Rose brisked past, clutching gladioli to gladden the heart of Dame Edna. She smiled pleasantly. ‘I want to give these to my tutor but she keeps changing rooms’ I’ll track her down, though’.  Its good to have you back, possums.

CR
10.9.21    
 
 
 
 
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Every Jumping Child

10/7/2021

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We’re alert to language at Tallis, not that the average bellow of a fourteen-year old needs alertness as you’ll generally hear it anyway. ‘Leave me alone, you irrelevant peasant’ besought one to her friend. Research tells me that this is a phrase used in a video I’m not allowed to watch so it may be terrible even to mention it. However, it took my fancy: no profanity or coarseness, magnificently dismissive. Nothing to resolve so I chuckled orf.

On a diametrically opposite staircase another youth badgered a friend. ‘Is your leg still broken?’ as if it were a personal affront to speedy conveyance. These young folks have places to go and don’t want to be delayed by other peoples’ limitations. Adolescence gets you like that: idealism and impatience, get out of my light, why wasn’t this fixed yesterday?

Which are reasonable concerns. Why are we still facing racism, misogyny, poverty and climate disaster? Have these disasters not been well-trailed?

We spent last Friday’s Community Day talking about gender and violence, following up on the righteous anger of the Everyone’s Invited movement, of which I heartily approve. Outrage is an interesting emotion to share with the young, especially as outrage is now funnelled through social media whereas when I was a lad you had to join a political party or stand in the street and shout.   

We planned an inclusive day, some sessions separated by gender, with options for those who identify differently. The sessions required thought and skilled direction of discussion. We tackled the whole range of the debate and why counter-groups set up with a ‘yes, but’ agenda once an injustice is uncovered. The way that we conducted debate was, necessarily, a compromise. All our children start from different places and have been exposed to different ranges of opinions and ways of living. Understanding the world and changing it for the better can’t just be done on the surface: you have to get under the skin, so there have been many, many further conversations about gender this week.

I may be too phlegmatic about human life. I try to tackle injustice where I can make a difference. I’m worried about the climate. I know a bit about misogyny but I’ve never experienced racism. I’m angry when young people are commodified or categorised and sloppy thinking makes me bang my head on the table. I think that shared humanity requires us to try to make the world a better place and I’m not sure that the echo chamber of peoples’ phones necessarily facilitates global improvement.

But I’m committed to the idea of young outrage and I won’t crush spirits. My grandfather used to say that there’s nothing sadder than a young conservative, meaning that the young should want revolution of some kind, change, and fast. I’ve found myself compromised at every turn this week by a world that’s in a bit of a state and young people who want to overturn every structure and declare a better world tomorrow. As they should.

I turned sixty this week (pause for the cries of ‘surely not?’) and realise that I am beyond decrepit to a seventeen-year-old who’s blood’s up. All I can do it to try to maintain the secure structure through which adolescent anger may be channelled so that when they leave us, to change the world, their views are tested, founded, informed and of material use to the service of the common good.

You remember Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the wonderful poem by Amanda Gorman? That was followed by controversy that a white writer had been commissioned to translate Gorman into Dutch. Rijneveld stepped away from that work with another poem, the end of which reads:

            ……you actively need to feel the hope that
you are doing something to improve the world, though you mustn’t
forget this: stand up again after kneeling and straighten together our backs.
 
All I can do is all I can do. In this context? Make sure that Tallis faces injustices and tries both to resolve them where we can and equip our young with the tools to make a bigger difference than any preceding generation.  To them, my efforts may be crass but, for me, I hope they’re not misguided.
 
The best view from the window this week has been skipping. Some genius procured a sack full of ropes and we’ve used them with all year groups at lunchtimes. They’re skipping singly and in doubles but most of all, in groups in long rainbow ropes. A visitor asked ‘Are these Pride skipping ropes?’ 

I don’t know. They may be part of the unicorn-rainbow vibe that appears to have taken over the world and which in former days I’d be itching to set as an A-level General Studies question ‘Do unicorns like rainbows? How might we know? Discuss.’

Let’s say that they are Pride symbols. Let’s say that all rainbows are thresholds to a better world. Let’s say that every jumping child and every outraged young person is a door to a better future. Let’s do something to improve the world.  
 
CR
9.7.21
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Pushmi-pullyu

8/11/2019

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Travelling from Liverpool Street to Ware (Where? How we laughed) was diverting due to tangled announcements.  The outward and inbound messages were delivered tidily together giving the impression of simultaneous forwards and backwards motion. This was moderately amusing for those of us who could identify where it began and familiar with the route. It was potentially catastrophic for the inexperienced and just plain disturbing for those joining part way through the journey. Several people stepped onto the train, then off, then on again in response to what they heard, like an annoying video meme.
 
That the whole zeitgeist of the time feels like a mad seesaw or Dr Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu is too obvious a point to make, making us all miss-step and doubt our capacity to plan or make any progress anywhere. People cope by not listening to the news, not talking about the news, ranting endlessly about the news, making up news or succumbing to despair. In this we have a lot to learn from the common or garden adolescent. Such a youth may be clueless, confused, misinformed, brilliant, tentative, furious, doom-laden, perspicacious, happy or sad within a day, or an hour, or a conversation. They’re like this because they’re detaching and rebooting synapses and suchlike all the time. It’s exhausting and maddening for the child and witnessing adult, but at least we know what it is. Politicians, largely over 25, have no such excuse.
 
I sit to write this in the green canteen, the home of the XFN Study Hall. Not a cheesy radio station, XFN stands for expectations, effort and engagement and is our latest way of tricking and training the reluctant of year 11 into working. Starting in September, we identified 50-odd who needed attention and kept them behind to work for an hour every day. We measured them and released those who’d responded to treatment after 6 weeks, adding others who’d lost the plot or showed no capacity to find it. That was where the fun started. Some of the originals were glad to be out of it, but some wanted to stay. Some didn’t want to stay but their parents wanted them to, some weren’t invited to join but volunteered to join the crew – lured by the custard creams? – and some have parents who want them to join no matter how well they work under their own steam. Some approach with the brisk step of enthusiasm, some have to be lassoed, some adopt a mournful drooping air to demonstrate that the effort required will not be easy to generate. Some come with a current love interest and hardly mind at all.
 
And they all do it in the developing knowledge that they are competing for every mark, for every grade with students everywhere, and that no matter how hard they work they might not get the 4 or 6 or 9. I tried to explain this to an interested non specialist representative of the intelligentsia last night. The logic eluded him. So you’re telling me that 90% might not necessarily be a grade 9? It might be 91% one year and 85% the next year? How does this help? How do you know what to tell them? ’. Good questions, sir. Come and watch us at work.
 
So the excitement and torture of adolescence is compounded by the swings and roundabouts of comparative outcomes: the excesses and exaggerations of press and the politics butt up against the despair and uncertainty of the way we live now. Last weekend another interlocutor, in the west, told me how posh Greenwich is, and Camberwell. And, in fact, Peckham. And everywhere else in south London, well-known fact, poverty’s over, children of austerity not in need. What are we all going on about? Good lord. Where to start? With the facts that the deprivation in London looks less because that in the north has got so much worse? As one might say to an opinionated but lazy A-level student: interesting view point. Come back when you’ve balanced the facts and we’ll talk then.
 
Scepticism and clarity are required skills of the day job. We have to hear the pronouncements of the young through the ears of age. You say you want to go to the toilet, but I think you’re just trying to avoid work. You may indeed have left your homework at home, but chances are that your bedroom is a stranger both to book and biro. You say you were prevented from getting to school on time by a tiger on the pavement, but it hasn’t been on the news so we’ll assume you weren’t. You promise to start revising for the mocks, but every indicator in the universe suggests that you won’t get started before you’re 25. It’s not that we don’t believe you, just that we’ve heard it all before and we know better than you do what you might possibly mean, and why. We trust and disbelieve at the same time, supporting and punishing, interpreting.
 
I hope that the election allows us to think. I hope it is conducted plainly and honestly. I hope that it is focused on the good of all and the best for a happy, safe and united society. Heads have been sent about three versions of the public sector advice about not being partisan in our professional capacity during this time of increased trial, so I hope our trustworthiness is repaid in kind. I hope we can go forward, safely towards some sort of peace together.
 
Two year 13s dressed in black were so obsessed with an argument about graphs that one walked into a wall and the other into me. I said, loving the graph-work, but have a care for the fixtures and the elderly. I know you didn’t mean it but there’s more to life than winning an argument. Is that bipartisan enough?
 
CR
8.11.19   
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Vain and vapid

21/6/2019

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One of Jane Austen’s nastier creations is the ghastly Sir Walter Elliott in Persuasion. Vain, vapid, disregarding, flimsy and partial, he wafts about in a cloud of debt preferring his horrible daughter to his good one. At one point early in the book he’s told by his agent that he must retrench and move to Bath because a gentlemen may live cheaply there. Off he goes and devotes his time to his rich relations. Long story. 

Retrenchment aptly describes schools and their budgets since 2010. Beginning with austerity (formerly known as public sector cuts) funding has plummeted. Governments since 2010 have tried doggedly to avoid solving the problem. 

First, they said there wasn‘t a problem and school leaders should stop going on about it and do their jobs properly.
Second, they said that there well may be a problem, but that because the money was hiding in clumps and not fairly distributed. The National Fair Funding Formula would sort this out so everyone would be happy. Then the NFFF lost it’s Fair and set about redistributing only the money that was already in the system. 

Third, they said that there was, actually, literally loads more money in the system so, like, what is the problem, really? The UK Statistics Agency took a dim view of this. In the interest of balance, they were critical of a union counter-narrative called School Cuts which gave crude and scary headline figures slightly detached from the context. They then issued four rebukes to the DfE along the lines of ‘I am sure you share my concerns that instances such as these do not help to promote trust and confidence in official data, and indeed risk undermining them’. Do the sums properly, would you? 

Fourth, Lord Agnew put some embarrassed civil servants on the road to go over our budgets with a bottle of champagne promised to any head where they couldn’t find savings. Churchill Pol Roger at £150 or Co-op Les Pionniers at £19.99? I don’t think anybody knows.

As a top-notch strategy for a major public service, guaranteed to bring about the world-class system which politicians apparently desire this is flaky. Schools have had to devote a disproportionate amount of time – and therefore cost – to dealing with the terrible effects of the 8% drop in funding and trying to gather counter-arguments. ASCL cost it at an extra £5.7 billion to deliver basic expectations: £40.2 billion compared to the allocation of £34.5 billion. The Worth Less? campaign has mobilised the reasonable, the parents and the Tory shires. 
 
It is perhaps hopeful therefore, that the next PM will allegedly make school funding a Thing? None of them have looked closely at what heads are saying but all of them are frightened that the ballot box will be impeded by the begging bowls of headteachers. None of them will say: ‘we didn’t care so much about schools, we don’t really care now but I’ll say anything if you PLEASE elect me. And by the way? We’ve spent the money on Brexit, on nothing.’
Notwithstanding, Gove has said he will spend an extra one billion on schools. Javid promises “billions more for education”. Johnson will spend at least £5,000 on every secondary pupil (which wouldn’t help us in London). Even the hapless May is reportedly setting a £27 billion education “spending trap” for whoever follows her. What should they spend it on?
 
As part of the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), teachers in England (and elsewhere) were asked precisely this: 'thinking about education as a whole, if the budget were to be increased by 5%, how would you rate the importance of the following spending priorities?’

The answers are clear.
  1. Recruit more support staff to reduce teachers’ administrative loads
  2. Recruit more teachers to reduce class sizes
Teachers in England want these more than they want a pay rise. Politicians, it seems, will say anything to get a clap. I’m not hopeful but always ready to unlock the coffers and await the coinage.

I’m surrounded by adolescents all of whose brains are being rewired as they go about.  It means that they take risks, push boundaries and – some of them – like the PM contenders, will say anything to get out of trouble. I was showing a Dignitary around this week when we chanced upon an altercation in which intemperate language was used by a youth. I was the net winner in this tussle, one phone the richer as I whisked off to a calmer spot.  The youth had to be confined to (our in-house) barracks and as part of the punishment, apologise honestly to me. This he did. It might not stick, but it was properly done.

Adults can do it too. A parent was agitated and spoke with asperity. Time elapsed and an apology appeared: time to think, heat of the moment, sorry.  Can we pick up where we were before I lost it?

A group of 18-year-olds, in sight of the final A levels, gather to chat on the yard.  Eight years of their education has been sacrificed to shallow, doctrinaire, fearful and punitive spending cuts. Above them a small child pelts along the empty bridge at full throttle, full of energy and on a mission. Perhaps he’ll be luckier.

Sir Walter was a foolish spendthrift and the capable Anne was rescued from his stupidity by the Austen’s best hero, Captain Wentworth. He’s described as having ‘spirit and brilliance but no fine friends to recommend him’ much like the state schools of the nation. We don’t need a hero to rescue us, but we need honesty, openness, truth, trust, justice, wisdom, service and an apology. How dare they use the children as a bargaining token in their vain and vapid competition?    
 
CR
19.6.19
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Crass or Class?

28/2/2016

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Sean Scully - Morocco, 1995
Wednesday I was at Emily’s piano recital but Thursday I gave the wind-up speech at a conference in in town. One of the previous speakers had an interestingly fancy day-shape, but another made me want to bang my head on the table: ‘Building ethos through teacher rewards’. Not as in hard cash or time off, elegant performance-related pay review or a glowing reference.  No, visiting classrooms and handing teachers postcards. Writing to them on Fridays ‘so they get a doormat thank you waking up a bit growly after a few cheeky beers’. ‘Corridor chats’ were recommended, and namedropping in briefings, because everyone loves that.

To my certain knowledge there’s only one person in a school who loves briefings. They’re catnip to the head but dentistry to everyone else. I’ve had leadership teams volunteer for bus duty in snow rather than sub for me at briefing.
Despite terminal nosiness, I didn’t enjoy them that much when I was a footsoldier and being publicly complimented made me want to tunnel out. I’ve served with people who gave out light-hearted awards in briefing and the ice still makes me shiver.  I’m here to tell you that no teacher likes chirpy public thanks amongst their grizzled and witty chums.

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Why so ungrateful? Why do I think this goodhearted Head so squirmingly wrong? First, teaching is a public service to be rewarded with decent pay and conditions and public respect. ‘A finger of fudge’ awarded in briefing (yes, really) is demeaning not amusing. Second, teachers choose the job and are paid for it: they don’t need corralling into a jolly gang but professional guidance and support to do well. Third, good teachers are tuned into the personalities in a room and are skilled at trying not to embarrass people. Fourth, teachers are not children. 

Treating adults in a way that’s too crass even for most adolescents is symptomatic of a gimmicky, shortcutting, undermining approach to educating the nation’s young.  Maybe I don’t thank teachers enough, but I know that their hard work and motivation aren’t reliant on clumsy presents from a corporate mother. Teachers are public intellectuals with advanced interpersonal skills and a liking for children. Being good at it can’t rely on superficial activities.  It takes time, years of it.

Some training routes for teachers underplay this and undermine young colleagues with false promises. They breed an expectation that the institution will always do all the heavy lifting in terms of adolescent formation through uniform and behaviour proxies, silence and compliance. It’s just not as easy as that: a school’s strength relies on individuals and their relationships in classrooms, labs, studios, fields, offices, corridors and yards. Young people make choices and it’s in the nature of youth to make the wrong ones. They have to be educated and turned to face the light so they can grow.
Chatting on the corridor (oh all right) we tell Thos to take his coat off. He does, slowly. Sir remarks: we could have yelled at him and destroyed him on the spot, then he’d yell back and we’d have to exclude him.  What would be the point?  We like simple rules that build up our common life, so Thos has to take his coat off because the sea of Tallis turquoise indoors shows that we all belong together.  As we explain again.

I collide with a class of year 7s rushing to watch a primary dance showcase that’s been practising on our lovely hall floor. They are beyond excited at a change to routine as we sheepdog and shush them into the hall, and the little ones gaze on these giants with awe. The dancing is blissful and the audience immaculate. Is that compliance, or happiness and human interest in a secure atmosphere? Year 13 assembly this morning was Caleb on gender construction: clear as a bell.  ‘He couldn’t have done that when he was younger’ his form tutor beams.

Earlier I’d been to admire the new whiteboards in maths. We’ve got ‘em on all four walls in the rooms now and the mathematicians love them for their squares. ‘Maths teachers love squared things’ I remarked to a class which amuses Peter the wonderful band singer. Small groups help each other with topics from the mock. ‘I’ve just not been comfortable with this decimal!’ shouts Ahmed.  ‘It made me panic in the exam and I lost 3 marks! I insist on doing it again tonight! ’ 

Some of them came to school for four days over half term and with skilled help are edging ever closer to success. How do you reward that public servant with a bar of chocolate?
 
CR
24.2.16
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How does the term begin?

13/9/2015

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Picture
Kenneth Noland, Beginning, 1958
September and teachers settle into the school halls of the land for HTs’ call to arms. I can’t speak for others, but mine was absolutely gripping. Then we remind each other of routines and expectations, spend time in departments and, whoosh, the hordes descend. Two hours bonding with the form tutor, assembly, timetables, routines and expectations then lessons start after break and we’re off. See you in 195 days.

If you’re in year 7 all this is a bit of a blur. Everything is new and, while exciting, very little makes sense. Where’s the next lesson? The nearest toilet? It’s a long time since breakfast: where’s lunch? And the next lesson? What do I need for PE? How does my planner work? What’s my log-in? Which door do I go through to get to music? Really? Do I know you? Are you in my tutor group? What, registration again? 

New year 12s have to seem a bit cooler. They can’t bucket about the place like turbocharged squirrels. They develop a mooch, a sort of quick saunter, and ask for advice judiciously where they can’t be overheard, all the while wondering if their chosen outfit really expresses what they intended.  Some can’t quite pluck up courage to spend time in the sixth form rooms at break and still occupy the yard. The weather usually forces them indoors. 
New teachers are the same. If you’re newly qualified then you expect to not know which way you’re up for a year and asking about everything is required.  If you have arrived with – ahem – a position of responsibility then you worry that people expect you to be abreast of the arcane. You may know the lot about all possible A level specifications, the latest Statutory Instrument or recite pi to 4000 places but what do you if your computer’s in a huff?  Where do you take a child who’s poked himself in the eye? Where exactly is the door to the library? We like to keep people on their toes at Tallis with a byzantine room numbering system. Now in my third year, I direct people with confidence. Floor, block, room number, unless you’re talking to premises staff who need you to convert your answer into algebra where x = 5.

The start of the year is curtain-up on the preceding 6 months’ planning and rehearsal: recruitment, staffing, exams, cleaning and tidying, bright ideas and missives from the government. This summer, precious little on the exam results in the press (hooray hooray) but lots about academies and free schools, again. A rallying-call from the Secretary of State arrives simultaneously with Ofsted’s report on KS3, neutrally entitled ‘KS3: The Wasted Years?’ Why, thank you, Sir.

I talk to a highly effective and perpetually cheerful colleague who reflects on the pace of activity as we start the year, how it takes a few days to get to peak speed, even for the best of us. Another says: we get it, we really get it, but the pace is daunting. I stop a year 8 youth who appears to have doubled in height over the summer. Perhaps his parents stand him in compost every night. He’s proud to be taller than me, but we agree that he could literally aim higher. His little mate is downcast, but it’ll come.

Like growing a teenager, some things take time and can’t be forced. Schools have focused on KS4 because that’s where the national focus is.  Loopholes allowed some to adapt procedures to influence outcomes without putting the leg work into learning. Now, the pressure is in a better place, but it’s still oddly expressed. If I was HMCI or the SoS – an outcome as likely as growing 6 inches over the summer, curses – this is what I’d say.
Over the last 20 years or so we were really worried that lots of young people left school without the qualifications they needed to prosper.  We devised systems so that school leaders had to focus on this. We combined that with macho rhetoric about school leadership, and a hero-head cult that, in retrospect, was unfortunate. It’s taken us a while to redevelop the qualifications and performance measures to our satisfaction, but we’re very nearly done.  Unfortunately, the KS4 focus of the past led pressured secondary schools to undervalue consolidating the excellent work of primary schools.  Our report demonstrates this, and we are sorry.  Now we intend to support schools to make KS3 the best it can be and we will inspect for this - not this year, but from September 2016.
How does term begin?  With optimism.   

CR

10.9.15
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You heard it here first

10/5/2015

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Picture
Peter Lanyon, Zennor Storm 1958
I’ve been furious for years, so shouting in the street is regrettable but not unusual. The election’s one thing, but the adverts on the backs of buses drive me mad. You’ve heard me on schools publicity before (gurning headteachers and flowering shrubs) but I’m currently amused by one that promises solutions to life’s problems. One particular church is the answer to money troubles, irritating neighbours, rebellious teenagers and other unforeseen difficulties. Excellent! Less amusing is the current one inviting any Tom, Dick or Harriet to become an examiner with OCR, illustrated by an oh-so-funny picture of a small child in large glasses. As if we didn’t know that was how exam papers are already marked. Or by assistance dogs, or washing machines or Charley’s aunt. Why not be really clear and have an advert that says: ‘We measure our entire school system by these exams, but we won’t pay to have them marked properly, so if you can read you could do it, perhaps actually on this bus. That’s cheap and we can always charge schools to have them remarked. Ker-ching! A licence to print money’. 
Our examinees at 16, 17 and 18 are showing signs of wear and tear. They’re both ready and in denial, working and feckless, stressed and oblivious. It’s hard to treat them all alike and we have a range of ways of getting them to the finishing line: carrots, sticks, hooks, crooks and the satisfaction of a job well done with a flounce out of the room. At the other end, year 7 parents evening, we explain the progress these little ones have made since being examined in year 6. Thinking on this has shifted dramatically recently. For many years almost every school was criticised for slow progress in key stage three and an achievement dip between years 7 and 9. Faster! they cried. Make a Flying Start! Speed replaced sense and young people were left breathless without actually knowing much while simultaneously making the huge transition to the big school and adolescence. Speedy progress crashes and burns in a new KS4 without modular exams.

So, what’s to do? We talk of depth, consolidation, foundation programmes of study that re-embed year 6 learning and check that every child understands the basic knowledge upon which higher learning is based. The unusable term for this is mastery, so we need a new word. That’s why our work for the next two years is on curriculum content and design for 5 and 7 years, making our young people into independent learners and long-term, confident thinkers. We would have done this in any case: great teachers going not too fast, not too slow. Continuous Goldilocks (as we say). 

Young persons rushing across the yard from PE to Music last week didn’t manage that.  An entire class skidded to a cartoon halt distracted by the tiniest of mice, under a birch tree in the yard. They shrieked and cooed as I sheepdogged them away: ‘A mouse! Can we have it as a school pet?’ and all the warmth and wonder of childhood flooded around us. One big family, one exceptionally small and unperturbed pet.  

Last week we had the US Ambassador in school (home and foreign policy, stars and stripes).  This week it’s Deaf Awareness (t-shirts, badges, cakes, videos, guess the sweets in the jar). We’re fundraising for our families in Nepal. The Rubik’s Cube man came to maths, but I missed it (he can do it in seconds). Our year 11 footie boys won the London Cup. Governors thought about the future shape of the curriculum. We had a mock election: a Labour landslide in our PE classroom Polling Station.   

My grandfather used to say that a young conservative was a sad-looking thing. Why would the young be conservative? Young people should be filled with hope and argument, ready and willing to chain themselves to anything in the hope of a better deal for all. They need to keep hold of that as adults and not have it flattened out of them by teachers or the press. They need to understand the world so that they can change it for the better. To do that we need properly-funded schools, planned teacher supply, sensible curriculum agreements, benefits that keep food in the stomachs of the poorest and the heating on in the winter. Schools and teacher have been spending millions feeding and clothing children: I don’t know where that’ll come from with 10% cuts. 

We’ve been interviewing English teachers here this morning so Gatsby comes to mind as we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. You heard it here first.

CR 8.5.15
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Boxers and Lawyers

15/3/2015

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Picture
Nigel Henderson, Photograph of children playing outside, 1949–1954

You’re never more than 6 feet from a lawyer in London. I had a great email last term from one who’d had the commuter’s nightmare of being at a bus stop with a load of schoolchildren. Despite this, she wrote to offer work experience to the sixth former whom she’d heard expostulating so eloquently and accurately on Donoghue v Stevenson (about negligence, I had to look it up). ‘She formulated a perfect argument and wouldn’t let it go’ she wrote. ‘She’ll be perfect in court’. 

Last week I stood in a queue for the Palace of Westminster, how I do gad about, earwigging on the conversations behind me. A brace of English lawyers were explaining life to a Polish third. They talked about the public school to which one had sent his children and the other was about to (no, I shan’t tell you which one). The Polish person asked if it was good: chuckling in a knowing way, one said ‘well, the sixth form’s pretty good for studying, playing poker and smoking’. I mused on this while ostensibly reading a report on teacher supply. First: I suppose if children are sent off to board then they have to do these things among strangers. Second: say that about Gasworks Comprehensive and it’ll bring the inspectors running across the fields in their long black coats. How the other half (7%) live. 
Finding out what parents think is a holy grail for secondary schools and we try to bridge the obstacles of adolescence, scale and distance in different ways. I’m terrifically grateful to the parents of Tallis PTA and I’m indebted to the 84% who turned out for year 8 Parents’ Evening. I do like seeing parents with their youths. Spotting family relationships is interesting for the nosey, and seeing resemblances is fascinating. Year 8 are particularly funny. They’re way too old to sit on Mum’s knee so they usually lean in a sort-of chummy manner, while things are going well.  When they’re not they can be as huffy and flouncy as a year 12, or resort to comically guilty despondent expressions, like a Boxer dog with a mouthful of Christmas cake.

We’re pretty pleased with our new reports this term so year 8 were experimented on. That happens a lot to year 8, just as well no-one’s stuck there permanently. Parents could see at a glance where offspring were doing well by the jolly shades of green: yellow and red not such happy news. Wily parents grasped this instantaneously and couldn’t be thrown off course by flimsy excuses. ‘Very useful’ one grimaced at me as she dragged the Boxer off to account for himself in Science.

He’ll recover. I stood on the bridge today and watched Break. Children swarm and mooch, muttering and shouting. I watched a new starter rush to hug her new friend (she’s got that Tallis habit quickly) and some older boys trying to eat crisps and chase each other at the same time. A laughing year 10 was having her hair re-done. Footballs were being simultaneously confiscated and encouraged depending on the zone. At the end we did our outrageous whistling, clapping, shooing and shouting routine to hassle the hordes back into class. I explained for the fiftieth time why we’ve put part of the bridge out of bounds and thought for the sixtieth time about whether there’s a better way of doing it.  

We’ve invited consultants amongst us recently to give a couple of areas the onceover. They’ve been worth every penny, encouraging us to think in a slightly different way about the future. How do you get the Boxer dog to a state where he can’t stop himself explaining tort law at the bus stop? How do you get the reluctant 12 year old scientist onto a space shuttle?

We start with the end in mind while seizing the present reality of a child. It’s quite a balancing act: we value the person she is now while we hope to help her become someone we won’t know and may not even recognise. We do it in partnership with parents and the people at the bus stop. We let them be children while we form then into adults that might make a better go of changing the world. And the richness of our community gives them something extra so they can hope to breach the fortresses of privileges. They have to smoke and play poker in their own time.

CR

10.3.15

 

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Where do you go to my lovely?

15/2/2015

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Picture
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, A Child's Face, 1944, Theresienstadt (Terezin)
Year 11 English last week considered loss and beauty in the poetry of the Great War. Diverted from a film still of la Redmayne (‘he really is beautiful, sir’) and recommending further reading (‘there’s a lovely sonnet of Milton’s’) we tussled over the number of horsepersons of the apocalypse. One amongst us had forgotten Death who, as you recall, brings hell in its wake. GCSE approaches so I investigated how close we are to peak poem. ‘I’m working for an A*’ said one no less beautiful specimen, skilfully tangling himself in a roller blind and nearly falling out of the window.  

War troubles me for all the usual reasons, though I don’t think I’m a pacifist. Holocaust Memorial Day in January troubled me more after I went to Auschwitz in 2006: not so much the camp as the bureaucracy. I think to myself – if you were a headteacher in such times, when would you know something was amiss? When would you worry? When would you act? Would you worry about having to submit the names of children of a particular group? How would you feel about the yellow stars? About an edict to segregate classrooms? If the attendance of particular children became something you weren’t accountable for? If they disappeared? If you ran a really successful school, followed all instructions properly and kept the system stable for the others? When is a headteacher culpable? When the men in uniforms appear in a truck for the children you’ve been told to line up in the yard, doing it as they’ve been taught and telling jokes to keep each other cheerful? If not then, when?
So much of what we believe now about human rights is rooted in the soil of Auschwitz. Children’s rights pre-date that. The plight of small blockaded children after the First War compelled Eglantine Jebb to start Save the Children, but nothing saved them from Hitler. French primary schools commemorate exactly this. Since 1997 plaques have appeared in Paris and beyond explaining exactly what happened. From this school, this arondissement, such-and-such number of pupils were deported as a result of Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the Vichy government.  Those headteachers of the little ecoles maternelle and splendid lycees: what did they think they were doing? Did they believe the rhetoric? Were they just following orders? Were they protecting their own income and fragile safety under the jackboot of tyranny? What would you do?        

Children are easy to miss. Many of them are small and all of them are powerless. They are either weak and easy to neglect or adolescently strong and easy to corrupt. They like certainty and are poor judges of what is good for them. They get hungry and tired quickly. They can’t vote and don’t pay taxes. They are easy to kill.     

Schools keep children alive because schools are where this society looks after its young. School attendance is a human good. If we see them every day we know they are fit and well while we try to push a bit of Spanish or algebra into them. School is about regularity, routine, walls of safety to batter against until you can look after yourself. Chasing persistent non-attenders is depressingly hard and helping children escape from that chaos unbelievably difficult. It can’t all be done by a workforce occupied in the parts of a volcano or the uses of copper sulphate. An old head once described the perfect Education Welfare Officer as having the personality of a Sergeant-Major and the speed of Linford Christie (it was a while ago), but they are disappearing with the fading of public services. How does a school, or a council, choose between keeping children warm or paying the people who’ll check that they’re still alive?    

Free schooling up to adulthood is a great achievement of civilisation and education makes people live longer. We have a duty in school to make sure that adults don’t mess up children’s lives by withholding or denigrating education. Here’s to the schools that know where all their children are, every day, and here’s to the workforce who make that possible. Here’s to the attendance officers, social workers, youth workers and police officers who support us and the parents who persevere. Here’s to the whining school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school and here’s to the teachers who make sure he knows that Shakespeare said it. 

It takes a village to raise a child and some of our villagers have council identity tags and unreasonable workloads. We are partners in protecting ourselves from error and our children from harm. Who’s campaigning on that manifesto?

CR 12.2.15
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Uniformity

8/11/2014

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Picture
Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, 1953
A parent stopped me in my tracks with a question. ‘What’s the main difference between secondary and primary?’ I found myself adapting the line about Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels. Secondaries do everything that primaries do, but with 1800 children in the throes of adolescence.    

It is in the nature of young people to question everything and argue about it loudly. They can get through more whys than a herd of toddlers and have an advanced facility for eye-rolling, teeth sucking and tutting. They can spot outrage from 1000 metres and injustice with their eyes closed. They are perpetually furious, excited, hot, cold, exhausted, overactive, simultaneously solipsistic while adopting the communitarian stance of a truculent shop steward of the 70s. And there are hundreds of them, quite a lot bigger than many of the adults commissioned by the public purse to guard and guide their development. They’d rather be asleep but are unbelievably awake and most people wouldn’t want to poke them with a stick.
So why do we have rules and regulations in school that seem calculated to annoy? No one would argue against basic safety and manners.  Not pushing on staircases, for example. Take turns answering questions, listen to instructions, work hard, respect others and try your hardest.  Keep your hair out of Bunsen burners and don’t use your bag as a weapon, speak respectfully and put the date on your work. But why do schools torture themselves with what children wear?  Or, as another parent asked me – what difference can it possibly make?

There was a story in the news this week about a school sending home 152 children on one day for uniform infringements. These stories hit the press occasionally and reportage is divided between admiration for enforcing standards and exasperation at petty Headteachers, the adolescent dichotomy of being simultaneously for and against something.

I used to be agnostic about uniform. I’ve worked in good and bad schools with and without uniforms: the correlation is weak. There’s no empirical evidence to prove that uniform makes the blindest difference to learning and schools who use a traditional uniform as a proxy for traditional excellence are just using a proxy. Non-uniform days are lovely to see, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as a year 10 who’s planned an outfit for charity for weeks. So why persist with this mother of all battles? 

So many reasons. The old one: uniform is a leveller, you can be rich or poor, but you all look the same in uniform.  It’s true enough, but exploitation of the young means that accoutrements are financial indicators, and we allow trainers at Tallis, the ultimate exploitation garb. The convenience one, popular among the young: uniform is easy, you don’t have to decide what to wear, mornings are hard enough without fashion choices. The financial one: uniform is cheaper than not-uniform. Ours is pretty cheap comparatively, but a supermarket black blazer might cost less than our designer jumpers. The depressing one: everyone needs to wear a uniform in later life so you might as well wear business dress now. That has the disadvantage of just not being true. The aesthetic-tidy argument: children look tidier en masse if they’re all dressed the same. The control one: demonstrate that you’re fussy about small things and the large things will look after themselves. Ho hum.

My year 7s and I are tussling with postmodernism in religious thought (a good job it’s Monday mornings) and I reckon I’m a uniform postmodernist.  We all have to make decisions about our schools. We have to have a look at our community and decide what’s right, for us, now. We look at the traditions and make a decision. For me, the egalitarian, convenient, financial, that’s-what-adults-wear, tidy and control arguments contain some but insufficient elements of truth. It is the uniform as a community builder that persuades me. 

No matter how annoying they find it, young people both like and need to belong. It is in the strength of that belonging-longing that great schools excel. A school uniform may be dull, purple or glorious Tallis turquoise but it marks us apart: we belong to this community with these values. We wear it in accordance with the rules as a mark of respect for each other and our community. Our uniform is a walking symbol of commitment to a collective reality. That daily reality, of flawed humans young and old, trying to build a model community is well worth dressing up for.

CR

6.11.14

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Champions

5/10/2014

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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

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Much hugging at Tallis

14/8/2014

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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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Spend a penny to save the world

30/3/2014

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Picture
Phyllis Galembo, Mami Wata Mask, Cross River, Nigeria, 2004

It’s Mothers’ Day so put the daffodils down and bear with me. 

I’m a third generation teacher. My grandmother was born in 1901in a shipbuilding settlement called Bill Quay on the south bank of the Tyne. Her father was a foreman in the shipyard and her mother a domestic servant. She was a clever child and passed the test for the Grammar School in Jarrow. She went by train for the interview to clinch the place and the headmaster asked her its number. She knew he wouldn’t know, so she made it up. Whether that got her the place, she never said. She became a pupil teacher and then a certified one, earning her own living up to the end of the 1920s.  Married women couldn’t teach so, despite her husband being in the Merchant Navy she had to stop, describing herself in later years as ‘vexed’. When the second war came, and teachers were in short supply, she was implored to return to the classroom. She refused. Not a woman to be toyed with. 

My own mother was well educated and her father hoped that she’d go to university in 1951. She chose to go south to the City of Leeds Training College and did a two-year teaching certificate.  
She qualified at about the same time that women teachers started to be paid the same as men. When I was born in 1961 my retired grandfather sent her back to work with the words ‘it doesn’t take three people to look after this baby’. He taught me the parts of a car engine and the church boiler and took me to meetings. My mother worked as a primary school teacher for 40-odd years in Teesside. She did everything: lots of plays, singing and dressing up as well as a furious insistence on the primacy of times tables by heart over all things. My friends’ mothers in the 70s didn’t work and I was proud of her career, which started when teachers were also Civil Defence Volunteers and ended with computers in the classroom. Married twice, she wasn’t told to stop until she was 65.

I did go to university, though my grandfather didn’t live to see it. I came to London and then did a PCGE at Birmingham. I’ve taught all over the place and picked up qualifications at two more universities. I chose not to work when my children were tiny and was a Head by 40. No-one has ever shown the slightest interest in whether I was married or not, though colleagues did buy me a nice set of pans when I did.

My own daughter shows no signs of going into the family business. Educated to within an inch of her life at an excellent comprehensive school, she took university in her stride. Like her grandmother and great-grandmother she knows a thing or two about life and is not a woman to tangle with. Prosperity or austerity – what could get in her way?

Having an educated mother is a pretty good start in life for any child. UNESCO knows that having a mother with secondary or higher education halves child mortality. The World Bank recognises that educating girls to secondary level is a clear indicator of prosperity and stability. Yet simple things prevent it. While Malala’s story is a crystal-clear shocker of bigotry and brutality education remains impossible for millions of girls for cruder reasons. Even in places where governments have strained every sinew to provide education, girls stop going to school once they start menstruating because there are no toilets, no privacy and no running water. Some girls don’t get educated because their world is against them, but some don’t get educated because there are no sanitary towels and no doors on the loos.  Half of the girls who drop out of school in Africa do so because there are no proper toilets.

So have a look at the Toilet Twinning website, and if you haven’t bought your Mum anything for Mothers’ Day, put a toilet in your basket.  My mother and grandmother had some things to overcome in their time, but nothing as outrageously basic as this.  Let’s spend a penny or two and give other women the chances our mothers fought for.

CR

26.3.14  

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Days are where we live

19/1/2014

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Picture
Artist Ed Fairburn creates portraits on vintage maps. You can find out more about his work here.
Monday we have visitors from the Singapore Ministry of Education, to talk with us about citizenship. We discuss the state of the world then hand over to the Year 7 Council. These young citizens, beautifully trained in formal meeting structures, talk to our visitors about everything from lockers and zebra crossings to collaboration and persistence. Everything is of importance to them and nothing escapes their scrutiny. They are at ease with abstract virtues, lavatory behaviour and everything in between. Our guests love them, and no one mentions PISA. I discover two interesting facts: Singapore schools don’t have assemblies and Ministry officials are seconded from the ranks of Headteachers: the latter an unsung factor in their success, I’ll wager.

Tuesday year 10 are thinking about work experience. It’s not the work that worries them but how to get there, what to wear, what to call the people in charge, how they’ll find food. Things we make look so easy in our idiosyncratic communal home. Year 7 are encouraged to eat more fruit, a second batch of non-swimmers are signed up for sessions and are excitable about goggles. Governors consider their Public Sector Equality Duty and worry again about who supports children in need when school’s out: representatives of the biggest group of citizen volunteers in the country, scrutinising our work.   
Wednesday is sixth form council. They reminisce about life lower down the school, how to encourage that happy absorption in interesting events in their younger colleagues.  ‘Fairtrade Week!’ one cries, others groan. I make peace with a young chap who acted foolishly and apologises graciously. Year 12 have mock results and a parents’ evening. It’s lovely to see personal traits we know well reflected in parents.  We see different faces of the child: one who’s painful at home may be all charm at school, and the opposite. Parents want to know what we’re doing and we are pleased to be accountable. Year 11 have mock exams but the weather gods are only partially kind to PE while the sports hall is full of anxious desks. All 21 staff who took level 1 BSL have passed. More ukeleles appear.

Thursday we review our new improved lunch queuing system, instigated by communal outrage from the small about pushing in from the large. We face the challenge of a dining room built without space to train The Great British Queue of the future. Young people simultaneously demand and resist change, and support and complain about decisions. They want to know why we decide as we do.  We’ve brought the queue indoors and it’s quick but loud.  A slow-loading computer poses problems for the year 9s presenting assembly: they react with aplomb. I read OFSTED’s latest guidance so to predict their scrutiny when it comes.     

Friday is observing in history. Year 8 students tussle with the ending of the slave trade in Britain. Despite complexity, they articulate honourable and economic reasons. They understand pragmatism and moral imperatives and contort themselves across chairs the better to make their points in group debate. I talk to a man about door-stops who thinks children are much bigger than when he was at school. Are they? Everyone over 12 looks tall to me. I give the Director of Education a Thomas Tallis umbrella.

So ends a week that began on Sunday with teacher licensing on the news.  I was irritated that politicians and press think this might annoy or challenge us. We are analysed and examined from every angle all the time and none of that as closely as we study ourselves.  At least it’ll expose the old lie that there are thousands of incompetent teachers skulking in the staffrooms of the nation.  I planned to mull it over in church, but the sermon was too interesting.

Monday of week 18 we start again.  Notwithstanding alarums and excursions, about 3,500 lessons will be planned and taught, 40,000 pieces of work created and 8,000 or more lunches cooked.  An inestimable number of pens will have run out and homework sheets been glued in upside down.  We’ll have theatre trips, job interviews, residential visits and visitors from 6 countries. 

Tallis spends another week fulfilling our responsibility to the community’s young under the public’s eye.  Changing the world, one day at a time. 

CR

16.1.14

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Magi in flowery shirts

5/1/2014

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Picture
Carlo Maratti 'Adoration by the Magi (in garland) Late 17th century. The flower garland was executed by Mario Nuzzi, nicknamed Mario dei Fiori.

I love the Epiphany, the story of the three kings. I love it all, from the gold hats in nativity plays to Eliot’s question about birth or death.  I especially like Evelyn Waugh’s Helena’s commendation of the Magi – she calls them her especial patrons, inspiration to all those who have a long and difficult journey to the truth. I think that’s why I like adolescents so much, with their hopeful and random gifts, and their determination to make the hard journey to adulthood even harder.

However, Christmas comes first and we had our celebrations and ritual events, from the Christmas hamper competition to the appearance of tinsel and antlers upon the corporate body.  (In my younger years I once found myself wearing antlers with bells on at a staff meeting where redundancies were being announced so  I’ve been personally cautious around them ever since, but no matter.)  We also had a whole-school end of term assembly which, in a school of nearly 2000, takes some planning. There’s probably a formula for working out how long it takes to load a large sports hall with adolescents and we would have been underway within 20 minutes if one form hadn’t taken a roundabout route to join us. However, we kept the hordes reasonably quiet and, distracting fidgety year sevens by getting them to introduce themselves to a sixth former each, generated a pleasant atmosphere. Children like to chat, so sitting on a clean floor chewing the fat in a Christmassy manner is perfectly acceptable as an end of term diversion.
Having inserted the lost form we started the music and singing. I hadn’t seen the massed Tallis before and the sea of well-behaved cheery turquoise and sophisticated sixth form lifted my spirits. I told them that they were a gift to the future, we congratulated the hamper winners and the bands played. We sang, we clapped, we wished each other Merry Christmas and went home. 

This week we regroup and continue our journey into the future from Twelfth Night. Christmas and New Year can distract even the most assiduous teacher from his or her planning and marking so people usually come back in cheery spirits, occasionally accompanied by a diverting garment to add to their school repertoire.

One of the odder things I was asked by Tallis men when I arrived was if I felt strongly about flowery shirts as if my own paisley trousers weren’t enough of a hint.  Brilliant teaching is a matter of hard work, determination, scholarship and communication. As long as a chap is pressed and freshly laundered I don’t need to choose his clothes. I’d baulk at tee shirts and jeans, but really, let a thousand flowers bloom.  What’s wrong with showing young people that you can be a learned public servant and trusted with your own eccentricities? Teachers need to be clever, well trained, decently paid and expert in developing hardworking relationships with young people. They need to be fully professional, that is, able to make the right decisions when faced with unavoidable ambiguity. Shirt design is neither here nor there. 

It’s not surprising, however. The kind of command structure common in schools that can make the proscribing of flowery shirts seem like a reasonable act has its roots in a fear of the human spirit and the difficult journey. Even allowing children to chat in corridors is banned in some lauded schools. Our combination of teachers in flowery shirts encouraging civilised small talk while one group made a longer journey to join the community is far from the prevailing orthodoxy about behaviour management.      

The finale at our Christmas assembly was a huge performance of One Day Like This by a hundred young musicians. If you don’t know the song, let me recommend it to you. As they sang about throwing the curtains wide and the samba drummers raised the temperature I hoped that 2014 might bring an outbreak of understanding of the human spirit and the human journey. That maybe one day the sheer joy and exuberance found in communities of growing human beings led by devoted adults might be trusted and valued as part of our national life.  That one day the comprehensive ideal which encapsulates all our hopes might be recognised as a vision every bit as great as the foundation of the NHS. As the song says: one day like this a year would see me right.

Happy 2014!      

CR 2.1.14

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Red Christmas

15/12/2013

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Picture
Decorating a Christmas tree collaboratively in a large comprehensive school takes imagination and military planning. Fortunately Head of Year 13 has the former, Head’s PA the latter and the premises staff stepladders and patience. Thomas Tallis now has a pair of large trees embellished with about 1800 matching red parcel tags with messages from the community small and large. (My own contribution was attaching a tag to myself for Monday morning’s staff briefing in what I felt was a suitably dignified manner pour encourager les autres.)

The red tag messages are a warm and cheerful combination of Merry Christmases, quotations from songs, generalised good wishes and hopeful if misdirected late requests to Santa. Lots of tags wish people happy times at home which gives one pause for thought. Some young people hate school holidays and dread their approach, missing the love and structure they find in school, and Christmas is especially hard for them. There are lots of tags for peace on earth, about which young people feel particularly strongly. Some of those are combined with thoughts about Nelson Mandela who we’ve talked about a lot this week. There are few world statesmen, and children should know the history that surrounded him and remember that his death was important enough to be marked at school.
Barack Obama said at Mandela’s memorial service that ‘nothing he achieved was inevitable’. I’m ridiculously irritated by cheesy school mottos, and would like to decree that this should replace every single one of which I disapprove. Nothing we achieve is inevitable, nothing that children become is inevitable. There is always a choice and a chance to set them on another path. 

We’ve worked very hard in schools for years now to know everything we possibly can about every child’s skills and achievements. We have data enough to submerge us and acronyms sufficient to launch a new language. But my second pause for thought of the week related to the dreaded PISA. There’s some evidence, apparently, that more successful countries know less about individual children than we do and therefore expect more of all of them. This is really interesting: do we serve our young people better by knowing their ability inside out or by not knowing them? Do we expect the inevitable or plan to avoid it? Our schools have always been built on care for the whole child but does detailed achievement data free us to help them more or less?  No doubt OFSTED will tell me what to think.  
However, we try not to be inevitable here at Tallis. Our young people incline to the quirky and we put a premium on creativity. As I write 20 students are working with a designer to try to perk up our reception area which will look even duller once the red tag tree departs.  While a suggested slide and ball pool may present a challenge too far for the reception staff I quite fancy the comfy seating and 2000 hellos of another option. That’s something to look forward to after Christmas.
One of the red tags on the smaller tree says ‘I want to be less bad next year’. A plangent human hope, perhaps from a child who experiences the trials of adolescence as inevitable? He wants to escape from badness’s consequences: failure at school, unhappy relationships, frustration and disillusionment. I hope those around him will be less bad too: more patient, more generous with their time, more structured.  Being less bad demands more than not making off with your colleagues’ whiteboard markers or making cutting remarks to the cat. It involves making changes that model the kind of world we want to live in. It involves taking hold of ourselves, deciding that what we are now doesn’t necessarily dictate what we become and what we think or know about children doesn’t become their inevitability.

So, here’s to the red tree, the less bad New Year and confounding the inevitable. May all your Christmas trees be covered with cheery messages and if a ball pool or a slide would improve your workplace, consider them. If you know any children, get them to write you a message for your Christmas tree.  You’ll see that nothing is inevitable to them until we make it so.      

CR 12.12.13
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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: headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
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