Dear Mr Williamson,
 
I hope you’re bearing up under the workload I suggested a fortnight ago. I imagine your action plan is coming along beautifully. And me? Inspired by a Norwegian visitor, I’ve been thinking about free school meals. How the Vikings have changed over the centuries.
 
A long time ago in a school far away I was in charge of the free meals queue. This was a Friday lunch duty where children eligible for free meals queued up to get dinner tickets for the following week. In that school, in the 90s, children who paid for meals paid with cash, but free meals children had tickets. (In another school everyone had tickets but free meals were a different colour). Anyway, the free tickets queue seems a brutal way of doing it, to modern eyes. We might as well have put a sign up saying ‘Poor kids, line up here’. I used to try to make it The Line to Be In with song-and-dance routines and jokes as well as top-notch training in the conventions of queuing.  
 
Technology freed us from this and changed the world for the better. Cashless catering preloads free meals money.  Everyone pays the same, rich and poor fingers alike, no one needs to know who’s free. 
 
Free school meals are of course our major proxy for deprivation, for the children who have the biggest struggle in life and who, nationally speaking, tend to do less well at school. Some of your predecessors in Sanctuary Buildings haven’t liked to speak of such things. Your dear old predecessor Gove was prone to call any reference to differences in achievement mapped against poverty as ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, blaming teachers for self-fulfilling unequal expectations. I haven’t heard you on the matter but doubtless you concur.
 
The self-fulfilling thing is insidious the other way though. A report by the redoubtable Sutton Trust into why normal people can’t afford to live in London makes some interesting comments about how rich people picture themselves in contradistinction to the poor.
 
Top earners do not see themselves as "especially fortunate" because they are "surrounded by numerous other people like themselves", says the study. The report warns of a social and geographical separation, with very affluent people in London having infrequent contact with those facing much tougher circumstances. They are likely to espouse values of meritocracy, while being part of a process that has seen social mobility becoming less likely.
 
In plain English, sir, if you will, that means that rich people never mix with poor people. They don’t understand that security of wealth also secures educational advantage. They assume they do well because of their own efforts, because they were naturally born cleverer, harder-working, more insightful, go-getting, resilient, plucky rather than lucky. That chap who plays Lewis’s cross oppo thinks along these lines.
 
However, policies made exclusively by those who have never had a moment’s anxiety about paying the rent or putting food on the table have a tendency to blame the vulnerable for their lack of gumption and devise direr punishments for poverty. It leads to universal credit inflexibility, drains schools and hospitals of money, closes libraries, sports centres and youth clubs, derides the public service and blames the poor for not being richer. It makes it unacceptable to draw a line between poverty and the experiences that lead to educational success, despite the education system being designed to reflect, support and reproduce the experiences of the rich, in the wake of cultural capital. Why would you want to face a terrible human problem when you can just tell people its unseemly to mention it?
 
We’ve had a community day at Tallis today on celebrating diversity, though we tend not to include divisions between rich and poor in such events. At first lunch I struck out with my warmed-up stew and berthed alongside a shipmate who was about to launch a sonnet with year 8, namely, Robert Hayden’s beautiful tribute to the remarkable slave and liberator Frederick Douglass:  
 
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,  
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,  
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,  
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:  
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro  
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world  
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,  
this man, superb in love and logic, this man  
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,  
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives  
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
 
Mr Williamson, your people of the comprehensive schools have a dream like this of education as a beautiful and terrible thing, necessary as air, and useful as earth. We want a world where none is ignorant, none excluded or alienated. Yes, we aim to teach the rhetoric, legends, poems and wreaths of bronze.  But we do it focusing on the flesh-and-blood lives that we try to grow. We do it despite struggle, injustice, poverty and the wilful misunderstandings of those who have everything to lose by flinging open the gates of opportunity, of London and saying – take your place, you’re welcome.
 
Mr Williamson, seize the day. Abolishing child poverty is the beautiful, needful thing that would garland you with sonnets. Wouldn’t that be worth trying?
 
As ever,
 
Carolyn Roberts

CR
​24.1.20

Readers will be dismayed to know that I plan more blogs for 2020, but potentially delighted that I will address the Secretary of State for Education directly. I think he needs help, and I intend to offer it.
 
Dear Mr Williamson
I hope you’re familiar with Eddie and the Hot Rods’ magnificent 1977 hit ‘Do anything you wanna do’. I heard it again last week and thought of you. Though you were only one when it bounced up the charts I expect your parents took the trouble to introduce you to its lively beat and compelling chorus. I know Scarborough a bit and I can well imagine that later, you’d be keen to leave it all behind and search for adventure, that you must then have got tired of doing day jobs with no thanks for what you do and other sentiments so briskly expressed by Mr Rods. 
Now you’re grown up and in your quest to become someone I note (from your twitting) that you’re looking forward to working hard, so I investigated your areas of responsibility to find out what on. You’re in charge of early years, children’s social care, teachers’ pay, the school curriculum, school improvement, academies and free schools, further education, apprenticeships and skills and higher education. Dearie me, what an exhausting list.

Even on first glance this landscape is littered with potholes: troubled families, the death of nursery schools, austerity’s child poverty, catastrophic teacher recruitment failures, Ofsted’s key stage saga, improving a zero-sum performance system where half of schools and a third of children have to fail, sorting out school place planning without any place planning, unconditional university offers and that’s just the stuff I know about.  It’s a good job you’re an up-beat, can-do sort.

However, I bring tidings of great joy. All of these areas of work are overrun with highly trained people who are obsessed with making them better. They’ve committed their lives to this, regardless of pay, working conditions, public recognition etc. They like children and are brim full of resilience, optimism, pluck, determination and all the other attributes that people like you like. They can easily help you with the challenges you face.

Exempli gratia, a few thoughts from me. Reinstate Sure Start, reinforce nursery schools and the fabulous pedagogical skills of early years teachers. Work with colleagues to sort out low wages and benefits so that families can eat without relying on foodbanks. Build social housing so that families can set up home with stability and dignity. Make good on the jolly recruitment advert with the science teacher and sort out entry into teaching, pay and working conditions (#everylessonshapesalife). Make the National Curriculum binding on all schools and decide openly on what you want, without using Ofsted as underground shock troops. Fund inspection properly so they can do a thorough professional job. Remove the language of pass and fail at GCCSE: the grades speak for themselves. Give school place planning back to the local authorities so we don’t waste money and trap children in schools that are failing or will never get off the ground. Tackle university entrance with a proper, lengthy, serious commission of inquiry. That should get you started.   
  
I expect you think of yourself as an alpha male and having been a Chief Whip, I’m sure you know how to get the best out of people. Anyway, you might like this exchange overheard at the end of the day:

Year 11 tutor: In you come chaps, coats off.
Year 11 boy: But I’m an alpha male, sir.
Year 11 tutor: Then you won’t need any help with the buttons.  
 
Sometimes even the best of us needs help and it would be a wonderful novelty to work together. So as the man says, why don't you ask them what they expect from you? Why don't you tell them what you are gonna do? And, a radical thought for a new decade, why don’t you do it in that order?

Yours,
CR

​8.1.20

A creature of habit, I have a view about how long terms should be. 15 weeks is fine for Autumn, but it should be 8 followed by 7, not what we’ve just had. I’ll complain to someone about it. Anyway, we’ve got there. T.S. Eliot’s Magi knew a bit about endurance, as they reflect in old age on the journey to follow the star.
 
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
 
And how deep the winter has been so far.  All that shouting, all that messy politics, all that dislike and distrust as darkness deepens in just the worst time of year.
 
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
 
The end of the autumn term does feel like we’ve been travelling all night, coming to school in the dark and leaving in the dark. And folly is easy to find this December. Folly in the mad consumption of Christmas, folly in austerity’s punishment of children, folly in the state of the climate, folly in leadership of all kinds.  
 
However, we take our pleasures where we may. We’ve been having a great time in assemblies this week rockin’ around the (dancing) Christmas tree, Heads of Year in Santa hats, Pastoral Welfare Team in tinsel, Parris on drums and Tomlin on the old joanna. Hearing’s only part of the experience, and it takes time before it turns into listening. We heard an enthusiastic rendering of an old hit: we listened to a slightly raucous gift of love from people whose working life is devoted to the children’s welfare. 
 
The penny doesn’t always drop quickly. I was directing traffic indoors at the crossroads of block 5 and 6 when two girls waltzed past, one saying ‘but I hate my name, I’d rather be called Val or Tina’. No disrespect to any so-called readers but I thought these were old-fashioned sort of names. It was a day before I realised she’d said ‘Valentina’. 
 
Governors visited a couple of weeks ago to give us the once-over. They talked to some BTEC students in the sixth form about their work, their endeavours and their plans. Students said ‘we love it, but there is a stigma attached to BTECs that is completely unfair’. We can’t do anything about the ridiculous way qualifications are turned into a snobbish calibration of worth but we can do something about hearing their anger, listening to their complaint and advocating for them.
 
We should understand this at Tallis. Our lives are enhanced by our deaf students and their skilled signers, teachers and advocates. It adds a dimension to our experience that some communities never know. Likewise our students for whom language itself poses a problem and for whom the world is full of discordances and jarringly inexplicable noise. People who can’t hear can still listen: people who hate noise can teach us to long for calm.
 
Not that adolescence lends itself to quietude. I joined a science class who chunter on so much they can’t hear themselves think, the concept of an unexpressed thought alien to them. They were all wittering about work but there’s only so much ‘I need a pen, have you got one, does the stapler work, why not, where’s the pencil sharpener, what did you get for number 4, why is number 10 wrong I thought it was right, what’s wrong with my formula, what’s the pass mark, I’ve stapled the wrong bits together, Miss! what does this say, what did you ask us to do?’ one can take. After a bit I called a halt and blessed silence engulfed us so we had the chance to organise a thought, to listen to our learning.
 
The advantage of the election being over, and it being nearly Christmas is that we all might get a similar break from each other in national life. Having been a Radio 4 addict since I first encountered it at 19 I’ve found news so difficult in the Trump-Brexit era that I’ve avoided it. I know a whole lot more about Radio 3 than I used to, which really does require listening. However, this ostrichy approach must end with the old year. I must return to the fray in 2020.  
 
The three kings in the poem reach their destination and don’t quite know where they’ve arrived they’ve got to
 
Finding the place it was, you may say, satisfactory.
 
But that’s not how it ends. Children are a gift and a life, exuberant, reflective or both at once is never satisfactory but wonderful, terrifying, joyful or desperate. We can’t be indifferent to children, and we can’t ignore them. We have to hear them, listen to them, travel with them and resist folly as we serve them with integrity, courage and kindness. Here’s to Christmas, and a better New Year.
 
CR
19.12.9   

May I recommend some musical chaps? There’s a folky outfit called The Young ‘Uns who have a great line in singing the zeitgeist. I first encountered their song ‘Benefits Street’ and am pretty au fait with the whole catalogue now.  As I write this in the aftermath of Fishmongers’ Hall I’m particularly thinking about ‘Carriage 12’ about the 2015 attack on the Thalys Train 9364 to Paris. One of the main reasons I like them, though, is that they are Teessiders so they sing with my accent. A bit like Steph McGovern crossed with Reeves and Mortimer.

I’m not blessed with the clearest of speech. I stutter when I’m not speaking at volume and it seems that people (by which I mean southerners) find the accent initially hard to assimilate. It’s like flat Geordie or Yorkshire spoken by a Liverpudlian. My grandmother, late of Tyneside, moved to Teesside in 1930 and would accept none of it. She suppressed her native Geordie and sent my mother to elocution lessons to inflate her vowels. Cash which could, frankly, have been put to better use.

My childhood didn’t require me to learn Received Pronunciation and I met few who spoke it. I didn’t have to reflect much on the matter until I went to London and mixed with some posh types. One of those, ironically set to welcome new undergraduates, looked over my head at another second-year and said ‘You know, I can’t understand a word this girl says’. I’d won trophies for debating and reading aloud and have never been backward in coming forward but I didn’t say what was clearly required: ‘I beg your pardon? How rude.’ Still today, I see blank incomprehension wash across the faces of people who expect that someone like me will speak something like them and have to resign themselves to actually listening.

I can place a northeastern accent pretty accurately, for what it’s worth, from beautifully-moderated Northumbrian and exuberant Geordie through light Wearside to the guttural tones of the Boro. Educated, grammatical, precise, accented: clearly comprehensible, music to my ears. I overheard some experienced gents in the staff briefing discussing a common heritage in the dialects of Staffordshire, placing different tones in different towns. 

These both are of limited utility in south-east London, which is probably a good thing. While adult accents here are rich and varied, the melting-pot tones of the young when talking to each other are joyously similar. Far from decrying the common estuarine-isation of future generations it rather fills me with hope. Perhaps if we all spoke alike we’d find common cause more easily, another barrier broken down. We couldn’t make crass judgments about class, wealth or character, as if they’re linked, as soon as someone opens their mouth.

Why is this on my mind? The tragedy of Fishmongers’ Hall has been painful in so many ways. People killed while serving others. Political capital being made against the explicit will of a family. Shallow reactions in ludicrous lurid headlines blaming impossible causes. Such events are reported in the way these things are, but I’m also troubled by what might seem an insignificant detail. Both of the principled young people killed have been endlessly described as ‘Cambridge graduates’. So they were, both having done an excellent further degree which helped them in their dream of saving the lost. They were, however, also a Manchester graduate and an Anglia Ruskin graduate - so why the emphasis on Cambridge? Outrage that even people from ancient universities aren’t safe from wickedness? Surprise that such people might find themselves in danger? An attempt unhelpfully to tribalise? Is a Cambridge graduate assumed to be worth more in memory than another? I’m pretty sure Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt didn’t think that.

The new PISA report tells us that ‘life satisfaction’ of 15-year-olds across the UK has fallen faster than in any other country with comparable data over the last three years. Students in the UK were also much less likely to report a ‘sense of meaning in life’ than their peers. The report notes a correlation between life satisfaction and 15-year-olds’ fear of failing is stronger for the UK than the OECD average. In fact, its stronger than almost every other country.  One proffered explanation is that UK young people take PISA tests in the build-up to high-stakes GCSE exams.  When else could they take them? Almost any point in schooling is now part of a run-up to high-stakes exams.
And so our commodification of the young obliterates their innate value. They worry, they lose hope, they feel their life has little meaning and even in tragic death are described by the educational brand still stamped on them. Jack and Saskia had a vision for a better society, in which a person’s quality might be judged by their ability to change, to learn, to start again and to endure. Anything we put in the way of that, any crass, shallow, populist, elitist, cheap or divisive measurement makes our children miserable and undermines our collective future. Let our national memorial to these two principled people be society based on equality, understanding and hope.    
 
CR 6.12.19

I often tell you that I’m looking out of the window. I wouldn’t want you to think that’s all I did, but my window – as is befitting – is a particularly interesting one with much to see. It’s sometimes so interesting that I have to intervene. On Wednesday I looked up and saw a small person sitting on a bench at A Time Not Authorised for Sitting Outside. Fortunately a teacher much more experienced with the older sort skidded to a halt and parked himself. I watched their deep conversation during which it transpired that she’d taken being ‘sent out’ literally.  Children in the northeast used always to describe being sent out as being ‘flung out’, conjuring an image of centrifugal force, but even that didn’t extend to leaving the building. 

You never know what they don’t know. We discovered some 16-year-olds yesterday who’d never played a board game, had no idea of the conventions, didn’t know any card games. They were offered this chance as part of the Tallis Choices Community Day. Younger year groups had time on sustainability, relationships, violence, drugs and careers, but year 11 get a bit of support in how to make the right choices in a year full of exams. This included what to do to relax, on the grounds that many of them are a bit anxious, and mocks start in a fortnight. Yoga, team games, board games, relaxation, meditation and a bit of optional crochet. 

But you never know how they see themselves. One chap who’d opted for the crochet fetched up in XFN Study Hall (expectations, effort, engagement) with it later and calmly sat down to while away an hour with the wool. XFN isn’t optional and it’s only for those who’re strangers to the flashcard. You don’t have time to crochet quotations from An Inspector Calls even in 1 hour 45 exam, so that little bit of creativity had to be suppressed.  Kindly. There are places to relax and there are places to work.

And places where sitting zipped into your puffa with your bag on your back ready to spring is a little unnerving.  Year 12 were debating all day and I muscled in to judge the final. The chair was inexperienced and keen to learn, but didn’t look very relaxed and also had to be warned about applauding one side more than the other. Be more Bercow, I advised. On the way in I followed some people so tall I couldn’t see their heads, boys whom the gutter press would characterise as arrogant yobboes, clinging to one another in case they have to articulate an unprepared thought. ‘I’m going to sit next to you. I can’t speak out loud even if I’m asked’. Mind, off-the cuff may make more sense than another who confidently told me ‘you can catch death from meningitis’.

Either of which were preferable to year 11 on healthy eating. How was it? ‘It’s all about the poo, Miss. You’ve got to get it just right.’  Thank you, indeed it is. Oh look, there’s someone I can talk to about the weather.

Or politics! Which brings me neatly to heads’ priorities for school funding which I’d like to share with you in the necessary purdah-imperative spirit of impartiality, having taken my puffa off.

• An adequately-funded National Funding Formula for all schools
• Proper funding for SEND and High Needs provision which is in crisis
• Adequate post-16 per pupil funding rising from £4000 to £4760, not £4188 as planned
• Funding for social care, policing, counselling, behaviour support and all the other unfunded extras now expected and required of schools

• A published 10 Year funding plan as recommended by the Education Select Committee
• Clarity about future costs and future revenue streams
• Salary increases fully funded by new money.
• An independently verified benchmarking tool for school funding
• Independent statistical analysis so the system doesn’t have to rely on the IFS and EPI for accurate and unvarnished funding analysis. (On this last, government have referred to a headline investment of £14 billion into schools and the UK Statistics Agency riposted  “There is, however, a risk that the figures could mislead: for example, people who read no further might expect that the headline figure of £14 billion refers to an annual increase.  We therefore encourage the Department and Ministers to continue to provide appropriate context when making statements on school funding.” 

 
Does this sound unreasonable? I don’t think so. If we really cared about children we’d have 10-year funding plans which couldn’t be unpicked by governments. Children’s futures are too important to leave to politicians.
 
I discovered a brilliant poem two weeks ago, Anne Carson on Troy.  It ends

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   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crossing the yard I encounter a group of year 11 boys, usually of the laid-back sort, hopping about in an agitated manner emitting squaws. ‘It’s the bees, Miss’. I can’t see any bees, so I issue a sympathetic tut and counsel them to have a care for easily crushable smaller children. 

These smaller members are more confident now and generally navigating themselves accurately. Just as well, as the only bottleneck I’ve seen this term was caused by a kind year 10 stopping to explain and direct. At lesson change.  On the bridge. He hadn’t done the mental risk assessment: the child could have fended for himself until he got inside a building rather than bringing a third of the school to a standstill.  Still, everyone was patient and it’s the thought that counts. The same small scholar was being towed about by a teacher next I saw him.  Perhaps he’s not good with maps, timetables, diagrams: it takes all sorts.

I met with the new teachers – those just starting out on their careers - and we talked about ethics and the values behind their work. We tried to root the language of ethics in daily experience. Selflessness in helping a child at break or taking a job off a burdened colleague. Integrity in the rock-like consistency of the everyday. Objectivity in marking and assessment and how hard it is, in dealing with facts and not opinions. Accountability in handing over the test scores to your head of department no matter how ropey they are.  Openness in asking for help. Leadership in being a tutor, a role model, always the adult in the room.

And the personal virtues: trust that fairness will prevail. Wisdom in planning for student misunderstandings and knowing what to worry about. Kindness in every interaction. Justice in handling disputes. Service in seeing the task through. Courage in apologising when you’ve made a mistake, or being brave enough to speak out in a meeting, or dealing with angry parents. Optimism after watching an expert at work in the classroom and believing that you’ll get there, believing things will go well even on an overwhelming day.

I’ve devoted years to making sure that that first list – the Principles of Public Life – are better known in schools.  They bind us all and we should use the language as we go about the formation of children in loco parentis. The second list are the personal virtues that make us worthy to be in charge of the nation’s young, that means parents can trust us. What we do is important, but so is how we do it.  Remembering that every day is a true mark of our profession.

Someone sends me a poem he thinks I’ll like for Poetry Day, St Kilda’s Parliament by Douglas Dunn. I do. I’m trying very hard not to think about parliaments at the moment but this moving piece is based on a photograph taken in 1879 by Washington Wilson, fifty years before the islands were abandoned and the people chose to move to the mainland. 

The parliament of the island’s adult males met daily every weekday morning in the village street. Women had their own meeting.  Without rules or a single leader it considered the work to be done that day according to each family's abilities and divided up the resources according to their needs. Everything was done for the common good. Wilson wrote ‘by a majority the order of the day is fixed, and no single individual takes it upon himself to arrange his own business until after they unitedly decide what is best’.

In the picture the men stand in two rows looking at the camera and the poet, in the photographer’s voice, talks of the community’s life on the poor land, and how he imagines they see themselves. The final lines are calming and unnerving all at once.

Outside a parliament, looking at them,
As they, too, must always look at me
Looking through my apparatus at them
Looking. Benevolent, or malign? But who,
At this late stage, could tell, or think it worth it?
For I was there, and am, and I forget.

Perhaps the best we can hope at the end of this particularly agitated and unpleasant phase of our national life, outside a parliament, looking at them, is that we forget and look back with equanimity and wonder if it was worth it. But benevolent or malign? Who will make that judgement?

I’m saddened that the Principles of Public Life haven’t been invoked in parliament this autumn. The standard of national debate would have been improved by them and our community spirit less coarsened. I’m saddened that we are so divided. I’m saddened so many of our leaders are cynical rather than principled, insulated when they should be embedded, reckless where they should be careful, flippant where they should be serious and sloppy where they should be diligent.

I discover that the people of St Kilda had never seen a bee, unlike my jumpy boys. I wish that was the biggest trouble that lay in store for them as they grow up. Most of all, I wish for a recommitment to the common good.
 
CR
4.10.19

Week three and some small girls accost me with a legitimate grievance. They offer documentation in support. ‘Miss, it says in the uniform list in the planner that you can’t wear false eyelashes or nails, but we’ve seen loads of people wearing them.’ They’re right on all counts. I tell them I’ll do better in future. Revision required. Truth to power, bang to rights.

Truth matters. HM Government has been reprimanded in the past by the Office of National Statistics for telling untruths about school funding. Because of this track record of mendacity the recent funding undertakings have been met with moderate enthusiasm by Heads. So, today, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a second annual report on education spending in England, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. I only quote the bits that affect children in our age group, but it is worth a read.

Spending by local authorities on services for children and young people is increasingly focused on mandatory elements and responses to crises. Spending on children looked after by the state is up nearly 20% since 2010 and spending on children’s social care is up 9%. However, spending on preventative services has been cut significantly. Spending on Sure Start is down 62% and spending on services for young people is down 65%.

Extra funding announced in the spending round effectively reverses past cuts to school spending per pupil [but that’s all it does].

• Total per-pupil spending on schools in England has fallen by about 8% in real terms since 2009–10. This is largely driven by a 57% cut in spending per pupil on services provided by local authorities and a cut of more than 20% in sixth-form funding per pupil.
• Funding per pupil in primary and secondary schools fell by 5% in real terms between 2015–16 and 2019–20.
• The government proposes teacher starting salaries of £30,000 for 2022, an increase of about £6,000 or 23% on current levels. Few details are available on how this will be delivered, but such details will be very important in determining likely pressures on school budgets.
• Despite the increase announced for 2020, funding per student aged 16–18 has seen the biggest squeeze of all stages of education in recent years. School sixth forms have faced budget cuts of 23% per student since their peak in 2010–11. The 2019 Spending Round allocated a further £300 million for 2020–21. This represents a 4% real-terms increase in spending per student, but will still leave spending per student in further education over 7% down on 2010.
• Student numbers are growing, so an additional £300 million on top of current plans would be required by 2022–23 just to avoid further cuts in per-student funding. Fully reversing cuts since 2010–11 would cost £1.1 billion on top of current plans by 2022–23.

It may be better than nothing. It may look really encouraging, but school funding isn’t index linked, it doesn’t go up with inflation. This proposed increase, however welcome, is less than the rate at which costs are rising. Will the promise mean additional teachers, resources or extra staff? Will it cut down Tallis sixth form class sizes or reduce our teacher workload? I shouldn’t think so.  

The little ones have got more confident and are picking up speed. Long shiny corridors are irresistible to an 11-year old in new trainers and our day is punctuated by cries of ‘Walk!’ I direct some to Drama every day: ‘Go through all the double doors until you hit the wall then look for your class on the left.’ One looks impatiently at me, as to an eccentric who’s gone too far. ‘I don’t really think we need to hit the wall, Miss.’

Year 11 are facing up to a misspent year 10. Some are being given extra support in Study Hall after school every day, not entirely voluntarily. Some have sought to elude this, outraged by the sheer persistence of adults in league against their frittering away the year. We bring them a motivational speaker of unashamed cheesiness: he’s captivating, and they love it. I sit in on a debate about sex and religion in RE which is loud and beautifully respectful, though distracted by gay penguins. ‘Really?’

I talk to the sixth form about the Supreme Court, and Fuller’s 17th Century dictum be ye never so high, the law is above you. I tell them we live in extraordinary times but they assume that all times are like this and can’t imagine a calmer way to regulate national life, can’t imagine a world in which truth is reliable, systematic, embedded, irrepressible.

We claim of ourselves at Tallis that we mean what we say. The small girls are asking me if it’s true, or if we’re just some more adults who promise one thing but mean something else. They’d really like an answer. I have high hopes for them. 
 
CR
19.1.19

Thomas Tallis starts the year with Thomas Tallis. I play a little bit of the great man’s polyphony Spem in Alium at all the assemblies and this year I’ve used this Charles Causley poem too:

It’s a lovely image of the daily church service of choral evensong and Tallis’s matchless music summoning the ghosts of the Tudor monarchs under which he lived and prospered. Tallis lived and prospered at court despite their bloodthirstiness and was both successful and happy.

I usually go on to tell my captive audience about particular challenges the world has thrown up that they will need to face as they prepare to be adult citizens, and what they can do in school to prepare.

I’d decided that I needed to explain what proroguing parliament meant, but ‘twixt writing the slides on Friday and doing the deed on Wednesday I was properly out of date and had to add deselection and the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. However, the message about being kind, polite and respectful didn’t need any adjustment, and I only had to ask one 13-year old to sit up. Who apologised, unlike some.

After that, off to class. Life’s full-on at Tallis so by break they’d already had one lesson and the littlest set off at the charge to get to our inexplicably-numbered rooms. I say ‘floor, block, room’ 20 times. It is a bit of a test.

Everyone seems pleased to see each other apart from a few international-standard grudge-bearers who are taken away to be reset. There is much jumping up and down and hugging, squeaky or semi-manly. It would be unfair to say that it was the same when the staff assembled on Monday. We are generally calmer and cooler and we thought about our future carefully and busily, looking at this year’s plan and working out where the priorities lie (simple enough – maintain post-16 excellence, improve GCSE progress). Expectations, effort, engagement. 

Speaking of GCSEs there was an interesting press piece in the holidays about the fee-paying sector’s use of iGCSEs. The ‘i’ stands for ‘international’. This is nothing new, they’ve used them for years. Many state schools used to use them too, if the course suited children better: more coursework, for example, which helps some. I wasn’t too keen, not just because I’m a simple soul but because I think a nation’s children should be educated as one. If we say we’re doing GCSEs then that’s what people expect, not some fancy alternative.

So we’re now in a position where the children of the 7% use different qualifications from the 93% which is troubling. If schools share and transmit knowledge on behalf of society and if shared knowledge is fundamental to democracy and allows children to become useful citizens, shouldn’t they all have the same learning at school? Might that help breach the unbearable divides in our public life?

Directing zippy 11-year olds to their next berth is one thing, but teaching and modelling the values of good citizenship is another. We try very hard to tell children that the key to a successful life is hard work and kindness, but it doesn’t help when political leadership on both sides of the pond is characterised by inherited privilege, bluster and bullying.

I’m re-reading and re-watching Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, a real treat. In the first book he describes the British in India after the fall of Singapore hoping for ‘time, stability and loyalty, which are not things usually to be reaped without first being sown’. Perhaps that’s the government’s problem.
​
Tallis succeeded through creativity, endeavour and endurance despite the mixed behaviour of the kings and queens he served. As we prepare our children to understand the world and change it for the better let’s hope that we can also give them the skills to recognise the good and reject the rest.     
 
CR 4.9.19
 ​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’

Available in more than 360 languages, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is the most translated document in the world. It provides a foundation for a just and decent future for everyone, and gives people everywhere a powerful tool in the fight against oppression and affronts to human dignity.

The declaration is 70 years old this year and Ai Weiwei has designed a flag to celebrate it, which we’ve got three of.  Some of our children went to meet him and all of our children have looked closely at the declaration on our very successful community day on 19 June. We had a wonderful display of pennants of rights all around the concourse, but weather intervened and they had to go.
 
You could stop reading at this point and watch the film, but just in case I’m invited to become PM in the absence of any other reasonable candidate, I thought you should be reassured about our stance on Human Rights at Tallis. 
It is very important that we all know and support these hard-won rights which protect and support us all. Here they are, very briefly paraphrased by me:
​

1. Human beings are born free and equal
2. Everyone in the world is entitled to these rights and freedoms
3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person
4. Slavery must be outlawed
5. Torture or inhuman punishment is outlawed
6. Everyone must be recognised before the law
7. Everyone has an equal right to the law
8. Every country should uphold these rights
9. No one should be arbitrarily arrested, detained or exiled
10. Rights should be upheld fairly and publicly
11. People are innocent until proved guilty
12. Private and family life, honour and reputation must be protected
13. People may freely move around the world
14. Asylum from persecution should be provided internationally
15. Everyone has the right to a nationality
16. Marriage should be freely and equally entered into and dissolved
17. Everyone has the right to own property and not have it taken off them arbitrarily
18. People must have freedom of thought, conscience and religion
19. People must have freedom of opinion and expression
20. People must be free to assemble and associate peacefully
21. People need free elections, democracy and public services
22. Social security and cultural rights are needed to safeguard the dignity of the person
23. Everyone has a right to work, equal pay, trade unions and protection against unemployment
24. Everyone has a right to leisure, limited working hours and holidays with pay
25. Everyone has a right to basic healthcare, especially children and mothers
26. Education must be free, accessible and allow for full personal development
27. Everyone has a right to culture, arts, science and the fruits of their own production
28. Everyone has a right to a social order which protects all of these
29. Everyone has duties to the community
30. No one may try to destroy any of these rights and freedoms.

Here, in this advanced democracy, now, I’m worried about 17 of these. I’m worried about the Hostile Environment policy, internet trolling that destroys lives, vanishing public services, removal of legal aid for the poorest, zero-hours contracts and the functionalism of education. I could go on.

One of those rights, of course, is to an education. Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre includes a wonderful sculptured layout of 90 tonnes of straightened steel reinforcing bars from substandard regional government buildings that didn’t survive the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. So many of them were schools which collapsed on top of the children and teachers. When I saw it in the Royal Academy a couple of years ago it was like seeing the timbers of Aberfan laid out before you, and hearing the cries of crushed children.

But young people are defined by optimism and they love to learn something new. Our film explains their ‘favourite’ human rights and gives a flavour of the deep learning that happened on that day. And one of the groups came up with this. The future’s in safe hands.

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

I wandered onto the concourse in a sort of drizzle and was approached for pleasantries by a young person with her sweatshirt tied over her head and under her chin, like the Queen’s headscarf. We’ve been talking about uniform this week, but I hadn’t thought to explain which parts of the body each bit goes on. My son used to do this when he was being a centurion and my daughter put tomato ketchup on her hair to keep it blonde so I was open to a range of explanations. However, after agreeing that we were both well, I discovered she was just keeping her do dry in case it shrank. 

Which reminded me of a conversation with a Head of Year a long time ago, watching some boys playing padder tennis without bats and in the oddest PE kit they could exhume from the spare kit box. ‘Children are mad’ I offered. ‘Yes’ she said ‘and they make no attempt to hide it’. And of another experience in a coastal school where a year 9 history group appeared with stiff PE shorts on their heads with cries of ‘we’re chefs, Miss’. Ah, the charm of the fourteen-year-old.

Speaking of charm, I turn now to Sean Harford, National Director for Education at Ofsted. This Harford is an avuncular chap whom I’ve heard pronounce on this and that, here and there. He’s reasonable and usually makes sense and I’ve always assumed he was behind the clarifications and mythbusters that Ofsted put out from time to time. He was in the trade press last week allegedly saying three things that made me long for something to put over my head.

1. While Ofsted’s reports show behaviour as good or better in 90% of schools, he doesn’t believe it. There are ‘real issues’ with inspecting behaviour and Ofsted can do ‘a whole bunch of things’ better, like talking to new or lunchtime staff who might see the worst of it. Yes indeedy.
2. The curriculum ‘started to suffer’ when schools became academies. Ofsted ‘missed a trick’ because it was slow to respond to schools having ‘freedoms to do different stuff’. They assumed that everyone would preserve the well-established national curriculum and not narrow choices unreasonably. This took how long to spot?
3. Ofsted don’t have enough cash to inspect properly and were therefore over-dependent on performance data, so that made everything worse. Mighty thinking, Maestro.

I itinerate around the building to calm myself and potter past an intense exchange in block 1 on the films of Quentin Tarantino. On this, I have wisdom to share. Inglourious Basterds is a work of art, the rest, not so much.   The year 12 critics may or may not have been interested, but it has relevance in my junkyard brain.
  
At the end of the film quite a lot of things have gone badly, so much so that someone tells the sort-of hero, Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine he’ll be shot. ‘Nah’ he says sanguinely. ‘More like chewed out. I been chewed out before’. 
Mr Director’s been on the electronic loudhailer to say he’s been misquoted. I hope that’s true because the alternative is that he’s just twigged onto something so blindingly obvious that I assumed we took it for granted. Obviously a day in school doesn’t show you what behaviour is like. Obviously autonomy combined with punitive accountability leads to fearful decision-making. Obviously inspection on the cheap is faulty.

Being honest is good. Thinking out loud is refreshing, but Harford isn’t Brad Pitt and breezy won’t do. Children’s education suffered, good people lost their jobs and teacher recruitment has fallen through the floor during this madness. As the damage is huge, so repentance has to be proportionate and lead to real change.

Forgive me, there’s more. Aldo Raine helpfully points out during the film that fighting in a basement offers a lot of difficulties, number one being that you’re fighting in a basement. I wonder if Sean Harford meant to say something like that: lack of money offers a lot of difficulties, number one being we didn’t have any money - so we had to do a cheap job. That raises more questions: if the money isn’t going to be put back, what kind of inspection can we expect? What scheme will overcome the difficulties?

Many head teachers might bring other Tarantinos to mind when contemplating Ofsted, but I prefer his smart remarks to the bloodbath movies and I don’t want to annihilate other public servants. Inspecting schools is a democratic duty, but we do it with at least one hand tied behind our backs. It’s not just the money, it’s the vision. Because we don’t know what our schools are for we don’t know what to inspect them for. We don’t care enough about children or state education to fund any of it properly so we make blindingly obvious mistakes. After decades of inspection, our data is corrupted, its use is shallow and we’re no wiser about trends or effectiveness because the goalposts move so often they must be on castors. 

As Aldo Raine says ‘it behooves oneself to keep his wits’. The Director and HMCI are smart and honest folks: I hope something better comes out of this garbled messaging. 
 
CR
6.6.19

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

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

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

We’ve been reading the Timpson Report on Exclusions this week. I don’t think former Education Minister Edward Timpson is a scion of the cobbler Timpsons, but he grew up in a family which fostered almost 90 children. He was handed a difficult job which he fulfilled diligently. He made 100 visits and took 1000 submissions, completing the report at the turn of the year only for it to be sat on by the department for months while they wrangled about money and power (I’m told).
​
There are 30 recommendations, which said department has agreed ‘in principle’. I’ll spare you the detail but here are the key points:

• Schools should be made responsible for the children they exclude, no matter when they exclude them by being accountable for their GCSE results. 
• Headteachers must retain the power to exclude pupils where necessary  

• A small number of schools are off-rolling (where children are made to leave a school without the proper process being followed) for their own interests.
• Councils must be advocates for vulnerable children to make sure they are well-placed
• Funding is a problem but good practice is still possible
• Most schools take a balanced and measured approach to using exclusion but some don’t
• Boys are substantially more likely to be excluded in primary school than girls.
• Persistent disruptive behaviour accounts for around a third of all exclusions
• Alternative Provision provides education to excluded pupils but it is often not very good
• Schools face a particular challenge in recognising, understanding and meeting the needs of children in, or on the edge of, the care system.    
• Ofsted should ‘consistently recognise’ inclusive schools

 
All of this is pretty obvious so I shall make obvious points in my turn. The biggest problems in our system are these:

• It values autonomy above all things, which means that there are over 20000 individual decision-makers making decisions behind closed doors.
• It values simple outcomes such as GCSE results because they are cheap to measure. This has driven the system mad. Troubled, vulnerable and needy children do not get good exam results so schools who are in trouble or who wish to seek pre-eminence by exam results are reluctant to admit them or keep them.
• There are too few teachers in the system and all of them are working harder. This means that behaviour support is stretched.
• Schools have no money. They have to prioritise teaching so all the pastoral support has withered away.
• Political decisions have stripped the public sector to the bone. As well as too few police there are too few youth workers, psychologists, social workers. There is no one to turn to.

As the man said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We’ve spent billions of pounds on structural and management alterations in public services and Brexit. If we cared about children we’d have spent the money on them. Vulnerable children don’t care whether their school is community or academy and they certainly don’t care whether they might get blue or red passports. They can’t see the long-term, they’re very likely to end up in prison and they make terrible decisions because they’re trying desperately to protect themselves from further harm. 

Austerity has taken a terrible toll on its children.

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

Changeable as the May weather, we waltz towards the exam room with year 11. Some are ready, some resentful, some panicky, all a bit nervous. Some show welcome signs of maturity, others not yet. Some do foolish things, but on Tuesday night we were treated to a wonderful evening of dance, and on Wednesday night, at Bromley FC and in a new strip, our boys WON! The final of the London U16 cup. Both evenings were characterise by elegance, patience, enthusiasm, dedication, collaboration and skill.

I didn’t play footy or dance at school but I did act and speak and I remember very clearly the excitement of participating and cooperating and the uncertainty of the unique performance on the night, of triumphing over the unknown. It’s completely different to the classroom experience.
 
A person who qualified in the same decade as me came calling and we reminisced. She said, rather tentatively, ‘you know, I don’t think it was all bad, in the old days’. Of course it wasn’t. Her comment transported me to a meeting room next to a canal in Sheffield four years ago where a Young Thing gave a group of us to understand that the past was such rubbish that it effectively needed to be erased from the history of education.

I had a few words in response. It wasn’t perfect, but then we’re not perfect now. Children went to school, teachers worked hard, stuff got learned, art was made, cups were won and exams were taken. What is this trope that schools are uniquely culpable for being the product of their times? Do we blame the Army for not having the right boots in the Falklands, and insist they’re sorry about it all the time? Do we say to the NHS ‘why did so many people die in the 90s, what were you thinking of?’ Not so much. So why do it to schools? Times change, things improve or get worse, we reflect the society in which we are situated, for good and ill. 

Oh, and we talked about chalk. There are fewer of us who remember that quintessential teaching skill and the challenge of looking after a beautiful diagram you’d drawn and coloured nicely (I was talking to a geographer). I told her about the old soul I worked with who hoovered up the school’s chalk stocks when the whiteboards first arrived, hoarding it against an upturn in the market. He may have been a mathematician but the gamble didn’t work and when he retired he was offered the chalk to take home. One of our own Young Things was in this conversation with us. She’d had a terrifying and entirely unexpected encounter with chalk in rural Yorkshire, this decade. Taught her a thing or two about thinking on her feet.

Which is what the young people in the exams have already started learning quickly. The language speaking tests are situated near me so I can see them sitting mouthing the phrases, going over everything they’ve learned and worrying about facing the unexpected. The value of examinations is arguable but one of the useful things they promote is the development of confident and lucid responses in uncertain circumstances. There’s value in that experience which our obsessive high-stakes culture has dissipated. 

Life is both untidy and unpredictable so schools have to prepare young people for that too. Learning to face things when you’re not ready is also a life skill. Even the young people who struggle against the exam hall tractor-beam know that. 

Mind, some embrace uncertainty early. I was emerging from a difficult conversation when two small boys accosted me politely. In a conspiratorial whisper, one with sticky-up hair asked ‘have you got the rugby ball?’ This I could answer definitively. ‘No.’ ‘Someone’s taken it off us’ ‘Who?’ ‘We don’t know’ they chorused. We looked at each other for a moment then parted company, none the wiser on either side. I await developments.

A larger boy stopped me abruptly, silently, later on the bridge. I laid some groundwork for the exchange. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m good’ (not strictly true). He investigated my habits. ‘Have you seen Endgame?’ ‘No, is it good?’ ‘I can’t tell you, it’ll spoil it’. Once again, none the wiser. He has some distance to travel before work as a film critic puts food on his table, I fear.

And a man from Australia who joined the school in 1971 wrote to us. He wants to contact his English teacher. With the benefit of many years, he recognised those whose creativity and relationships formed him and made him.  That’s what he remembered, and that’s what we try to do in every age. Knowing things and getting qualifications are important. Knowing that life takes unexpected turns is also important. Learning it in a positive community is priceless. 
 
CR
2.5.19   

I arrived late for a workshop session at a conference – not one I was leading, you understand – and was handed a piece of Winnie-the-Pooh to read out. I love this stuff and the Bear has been my companion these 57 years. 

​“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.”

The quotation introduces the interim report of ASCL’s new Commission called The Forgotten Third. It is apposite.
Each year in England over half a million 16-year-olds take their GCSEs. A third of these students do not achieve at least a standard pass (grade 4) in English and mathematics.

The commission is asking some pointed questions, common to all subjects:

1. Why is it that a third of 16-year-olds, after twelve years of compulsory schooling, cannot reach what the Department for Education (DfE) describes as ‘standard pass’ level?
2. Why is there not proper recognition of the progress these young people have made as they move on to further education and employment?
3. At age 11, as they leave primary school, a similar third of children fail to reach expected national standards in reading, writing and mathematics. What is happening in homes and schools that means too many children and young people are judged not to be competent at a basic level?
4. Does the answer lie with: a. the students; b. their parents; c. teachers; d. the content of the GCSEs e. the design of the examination system; f. the national accountability measures?
5. As one 17-year-old student, with a grade 3 in English Language, asked the Commission: “Do a third of us always have to fail so that two-thirds pass?”

​A thinking nation should be asking all of these questions. Might I suggest some answers?

A very small number of children will underachieve because they haven’t worked hard enough. Adolescence is distracting. I’m leaving them on one side.  

Some children may appear to be underachieving, but actually they’re doing pretty well, because their KS2 grade may not reflect their true ability in year 6. This is for two reasons. First, published performance tables do terrible things to education: watch Monday 25 March 2019’s Panorama for more on this. Second, national progression data works well in big datasets but is hopeless at individual progress level.  

The very concept of a GCSE ‘pass’ at grade 4 standard or grade 5 higher is troubling. We have a single examination to assess every child at all levels of aptitude for testing. So why do some grades have more intrinsic worth than others? Again, two reasons. There are levels of skill that are obviously important for adult life. If you’re secure at that level, you may find adult life easier. Employers expect a level of competence, fair enough. Not all jobs, however, require this level and not all children progress at the same speed. 

The real reason for the ‘pass’ nomenclature is a combination of elitism and international comparison. Singapore or Ontario or Finland or Shanghai have a certain proportion of children able to do certain things by the age of 16, so the UK will only be globally competitive if we do too. That’s a superficially attractive argument, but it wobbles in the slightest breeze, like Winnie-the-Pooh’s spelling. Other jurisdictions aren’t committed to inclusive schooling where every child is included in the common school system and its measured outcomes. Other jurisdictions are not beset by a zombie obsession with selection at 11 which serves no educational purpose and depresses the achievement of children in selective areas. Other jurisdictions are not beset by class obsession with private education which undermines national pride in our common schools. 

And finally, the very slightly improved accountability measure of P8 itself remains shamefully dismissive of children’s endeavour. ‘Comparable outcomes’ require some children to fail so that others may succeed. It has to produces a failed bottom third if it has willed that the top two-thirds pass.

We value what we measure. In England we appear to value ranking and blame, and their brothers elitism and failure.  It’s no way to model human value. We could make a very small step in the right direction by refusing to use the word ‘pass’ altogether. We could make a bigger step by finally, permanently rejecting any threshold measure in school performance. We could change the world by valuing perseverance and effort over accidents of birth and social standing.   
    
I’m happy that people should have to pass a driving test.  I’m happy that children should learn how to work hard and stick at it.  I’m furious that only the two-thirds who are good at tests are allowed to value their effort and experience after 12 years of compulsory schooling. This can’t be what we intended. As Winnie says:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little brain, and you Think Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

This is one of them. 

My title is the incomparable Beachcomber’s parody of one of A A Milne’s more sugary poems, but it captures the DfE’s view of 170 000 of our young people, every year. Look again, Secretary of State.
 
CR
5.4.19

I suppose that fury kick-starts the week as well as anything. A journalist asked me for a comment on Sajid Javid’s ‘consultation to assess whether there is a public health duty to report concerns over children at risk of involvement in violent crime’. I told her it was shameful. Why?
 
Objection 1, m’lud
WE ALREADY DO IT. Schools collect evidence, act on hunches, assess the weather and ring anyone, everyone who we think might help our children. There’s no-one with the capacity to do it. The police, the hospitals and social services have financial problems as bad as ours. We already report it but they can’t resolve it.
 
Objection 2
Reporting knife crime as a public health duty is based on Scotland’s success with inter-agency work. They invest heavily in their public services in the land of the haggis and the reporting duty rests on the secure foundations of well-funded public service. Yes, teachers and nurses have a duty to report, but the reporting is then picked up by dedicated specialist teams in the police, the hospitals and the local authorities. If you ring it in, they pick it up.  Here, if we pick up the phone no one picks up the case. There’s no one left to do it.
 
Objection 3
Consequently, far from being early identification for early help, our thresholds in England have risen to make intervention manageable for the few staff left to do it. A child has to be well-steeped in violence, danger and risk before anyone outside school will pick it up. Police and social care just don’t have the capacity. You’ve got a reasonable hunch and a bit of evidence that a child is in danger? Sort it out in school.  
 
Objection 4
“It is hard to see how it would be either workable or reasonable to make teachers accountable for preventing knife crime. What sort of behaviour would they be expected to report and who would they report to? How would they be held accountable, for what, and what would the consequences be? How would the government prevent the likelihood of over-reporting caused by the fear of these consequences? Aside from the practical considerations, we have to ask whether it is fair to put the onus on teachers for what is essentially a government failure to put enough police on the streets.”

Thank you Mr Barton of ASCL. Other teaching unions are available. They all say the same.  
 
Objection 5
We have a large and expensive pastoral and inclusion set-up at Tallis. We include everyone we can without endangering others. We manage a curfew at 1600 way out of sight of our school and last week – not unusually – we worked with the police to clear hundreds of people gathering for blood at a local green space. We haven’t had a permanent Safer Schools Officer for two years because of staffing problems in the Met. All the good work we once did to build bridges between the police and these 2000 young people has been wasted away by austerity. 

Partnership needs funding.
 
Objection 6
Knife crime is an adult problem. The deaths in London last weekend were adults, killed by adults. Its adults who run the gangs and the drugs, and its adults who send out children to die for them on the streets. Our young are a human shield for the drugs gangs, and they can only be saved by policing. Teachers are irrelevant to adult criminals.
 
Objection 7
The PM said ‘We can’t arrest our way out of this problem’. Who says? How does she know?  Has anyone tried? Durham County Council transformed itself into a model of effective policing by focusing relentlessly and remorselessly on 400 criminals. Has anyone tried that in London? No, because it would cost. How does arresting teachers and nurses for not-reporting make any sense at all?
 
Objection 8
If we cared about children, we’d spend money on this. If we cared about children, we’d spend money on schools. If we cared. The best thing we can say about Brexit at this point is that we’ve wasted a billion pounds on nothing. That would have made a start on responsive policing and social care. ASCL knows that it’ll take another 4.5 billion to offer an acceptable standard of education. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
 
At the end of the day I was on College Green being interviewed by Ben Brown for the BBC. I made my point, but here’s what I didn’t say.

The Home Secretary’s remark was shamefully misinformed. The Prime Minister’s soundbite was disingenuous. Politicians thrash around for someone to blame while children die in the streets at the hand of the unscrupulous.    They’ve lost control of the government but we haven’t lost control of our schools. Stop wasting money and listen to us
 
CR
1.4.19

Last night was options evening, a reasonably jolly occasion. It’s the first time that children really get a choice about what they study and it’s always interesting to see how they respond. Options had an added soupçon of excitement for us this year as our advent visitors from Ofsted Towers gave us a Paddington stare on the matter. Pray tell us why, they said, you have a three-year key stage four when you know we disapprove? Enlighten us, would you, as to its purpose? And what, for the love of Mike, are you doing with year 9? As I’ve said before, we had ready answers. As I’ve said before, they raised their eyebrows and narrowed their eyes a little. Then it appeared in the Things To Do list they kindly left us.  

After Ms Dedman, Tyla and Engen had spoken (admirably plainly and passionately) I addressed the assembled families in the hall. Reporting on the Lead Inspector’s thousand-yard stare I asked parents to tell me what they thought. Half a dozen sought me out, all of who approved of what we did and liked the early choice. They talked about motivation and freedom and taking on adult responsibility. Their children nodded sagely – but they don’t know anything else.

Some parents rested their weary elbows on the canteen pundit benches and probed gently. Why did we introduce a three-year key stage four, then? Well, it was before my time, but in an era when it was not only common practice in schools, but admired good practice. It gave children the chance to study for (sometimes modular) GCSEs in a flexible way, perhaps resitting where necessary, or even passing something in year 10 and doing new courses in year 11. It helped maximise results.

Most of those conditions have gone now. GCSEs have much more content, the modules are gone, and the chance of assimilating enough content and knowledge before the end of year 11 is frankly unlikely. Schools don’t do so many GCSEs and it’s not possible to hoist up results that way in any case anymore. Not that that was ever a justification.

Tallis has found itself in an interesting position. When I arrived in 2013, the first year of year 8 options, many staff begged me to return to options in year 9. I prefer to take a long view and had no experience of a three year key stage four, so I didn’t act precipitously.  By the time we got to a second year, and certainly by the time the revised specifications for GCSE appeared, Tallis teachers had grown fond of the new division and much preferred it. Three years at key stage four gives you time to take the higher levels of content more slowly. It means that year 9 can be a foundation year, where children are spared exam questions and can really immerse themselves in the subject and what it means.

However, the visitors didn’t quite experience it like that. They were left with the impression that too many children are doing exam practice for too long. We shouldn’t be doing that. Fair point.

There’s another matter too. Three years is a long time to study one thing. It’s as long as a degree, but with much less lounging about. A thirteen-year-old is a different beast to a sixteen-year-old and there’s a risk of them forgetting by year 11 everything that they knew in year 9 (as well as their name, address, PE kit, timetable, friends, enemies and sandwiches). The year 9 introduction year works really well if it’s a foundation year, but the exam prep really should be left to year 11.

Why don’t we just stop it and go back to three-year key stage three?  Well, three years is as long as a degree and they’re too young for all that coffee. Year 9 in a subject you can’t wait to drop is a long year, at just the wrong developmental age, when you find it really hard to concentrate on anything except yourself and are just getting into your stride as Outraged of Greenwich. Perhaps we should do something else with year 9 altogether?
So we’ve got a working group together and we’re thinking of both obvious and creative solutions. Everything is on the table and we’ll decide what to do by October, ready for next year. We’ll invite parents’ views too: watch this space.     

But the really nice thing about options evening, like any parents’ evening is seeing our inmates with their elders, the way they talk to one another, lean on each other, tut and roll their eyes at each other, gasp in blank incomprehension at each other then leave arm-in-arm. Love takes so many forms, some of which are also confusion and worry. We need families to have patience, and keep talking , and make their good choices together, no matter how old they are.

I’m glad to be part of the same human family as New Zealand. When their PM’s ready, would she like to come and sort us out?  
 
CR
21.3.19

Today I take my texts from the great poet Tomlin. We’ve adjusted our mobile phone rules, on which I have pontificated at length in the past and even in the press. 
 
This was tannoy 1 on Tuesday, day 2 of the new jurisdiction. It caused groans. 
 
The corridors, the walkway and the blocks are no phone zones
Don’t forget this simple rule also includes headphones
 
Things, as Mr Blair didn’t say, could only get worse. Changeover 2 cause people to bang their heads on desks, though I thought it a great improvement.
  
Help us keep a great big smile on all your teachers’ faces
By only using phones at social times in social spaces
 
This was followed by a specific warning at changeover 3. I think the scansion needs attention and there’s too much dangle in the second line. 
 
Help us keep your phones and keep them firmly in your pocket
You don’t want to get to lunch when it’s allowed, but you have lost it.
 
He busked the next one but the final exhortation was perhaps the worst of all.
 
Thanks to all those students who can now go straight on home
For the rest, attend the green canteen for some harsh words and your phone
 
See how we model creativity to the children? I shall enter him for the Forward Prize for Poetry next year.
 
Changing a rule in school is an interesting process. It takes us a long time to decide and we have to argue amongst ourselves for weeks until we come up with an agreement. Children then have to be warned and the infrastructure put into place. In this case, consistent instructions, seven assemblies, tutor group scripts, padded reusable envelopes with labels, lists of names, boxes to put them in, safe places to store them, return mechanisms, FAQs with staff and, after a pilot week, tweaks to the system and a clear message for parents in the newsletter. That’s the easy part.

The harder part is actually changing our daily actions. In this case, moving the ‘no phones’ rule back from the classroom door to the outside door, and developing a consistent and safe way of removing offending items and retraining their owners. After that we work through the ones who just forgot, the ones who thought it wouldn’t happen to them, the ones who thought they’d test a new system until we’re left with the dogged recidivists who can’t let it go. That’ll take a while.

It’s been interesting to see how annoyed some older students have been by this. Unusually, we made the new rule fit post-16 students too, except for subjects where teachers need them to use their phones, or where it has long been allowed in a very thoughtful and controlled manner. We thought long and hard about this, worrying that years 12 and 13 would feel affronted by being treated the same as the younger ones – but then decided that the new rule was whole school.

Why? Because we try to model a way of living in community that will help young people understand the world and change it for the better. While we don’t demonise phones as such, we were losing too much lesson time arguing over them and that was in the sixth form too. We decided collectively that we weren’t helping our young people learn a more sensible way to be, and we’ve changed our minds.

And we’ve changed the way the adults act too. We’re not checking our phones all the time or walking along looking at them, except for the safeguarding team. We’re all in this together, because phones are addictive to adults as well as children and we can all demonstrate a bit of self-control.

The poet Nick Drake wrote about the ancient Aztec rubber ball game, in the voice of a young missionary priest who becomes captivated by it. He describes the ball:

I have it now
In the palm of my hand.
It is a small, dark ball, warm
As an egg, or a fallen star,
And decorated with skulls;
It is heavy as a stone, and yet
What spirit moves it? Whose god
Created such a wonder 
That leaps for joy? And why 
Does my body tremble with delight
To play the game again? 
Pray for me, now –
For I find I cannot let it go.

Isn’t that like a phone? There’s a fear in the last line of being overtaken by something that you chose to do but can’t stop. That’s always terrified me. I think our new rule is both moderate and humane and I hope it helps young people to put their phones down from time to time outside school too. Perhaps to play football or write poetry, who knows?

Changing your mind after reflection and investigation is a sign of good learning and a hallmark of adult life. Our legislators could learn from this.
 
CR
7.3.19