On the day when ninety-one thousand civil service jobs were declared superfluous and a Russian tank battalion sank in the Sivertsy Donets we had our leavers’ assemblies. Shirt-signing in the yard and a big group photo, then into the hall. Frankly, I’d expected better weather. Some have been wearing sunhats for weeks, entirely unnecessarily. Anyway, the vibe was happy and this year’s fashion included shirts with golden names stuck on the back and some seemingly bespoke for the purpose of signing.

It's not the first time we’ve ever done these assemblies, but the echoes of Covid ring loud and long. While I was listening to the end of Ms taking leave of her year group, I was transported back two years, to a hastily-cobbled-together assembly in March 2020 to say goodbye to year 11 because lockdown was beginning and school was closing, suddenly. I felt quite queasy. 

The day itself isn’t like leavers’ days of old. We don’t do lengthy study leave any more and this one was put in to mark the transition from the ordinary timetable to the exam prep sessions adjacent to the big days. The very do itself today abutted the first external exam just after lunchtime. Timing was key but the gods of Friday 13th will have their fun and we had a total AV and IT collapse at the very assembly when slideshows and photomontages with emotional soundtracks are de rigeur. Doughty Ms and her team had to busk while technicians of all kinds clustered around and eventually a trolley, like a mobile ICU, was rushed in. The careful dovetailing - getting Year 11 out so Year 13 can get in – all went to pot. I intervened and moved the boundaries. Everyone was supportive. Children of all ages and sizes had a lovely time. See you on Monday, exams are upon us.

Today, their tutors praised them and reminisced publicly. Some sang, some rapped, all gave awards – for character, and Goats. Goats were new to me as I don’t mix with sporting types, but it pleases me as an acronym and it worked for the tutors. Greatest Of All Time at….arguing, football, falling off chairs, organising, saying hello to everyone, looking after new people, keeping the peace, being tannoyed for, speaking the truth without fear or favour, looking good…. while Sir and Ms blinked back the tears.

These young people have had such a rocky time. We were interviewed by the BBC for a piece to go out on Monday about the return of exams, so I had seven in the Sports Hall yesterday pretending to sit at exam desks (‘Quick! No! Get tidier ones out!’). They all spoke urbanely and calmly about their preparation and how they’re feeling. Ready, but anxious. Who knew? The Beeb may have wanted something more hysterical, but we’re too cool for that. As the soundtrack to one of the slideshows today said:

I am indebted in this blog to Paul Muldoon’s volume of poetry of the same title, and, in particular, his 1916: the Eoghan Rua Variations. In it, he discusses the contrary nature of the longevity of English power in Ireland. Caesar and Alexander fell, so why not the English? Well worth a read.
Faber London 2019 ISBN 978-0-571-35499-8.
​

Some people are a pundit’s gift. Social Mobility Chair Katherine Birbalsingh is a worthy successor to  Lord Agnew and Gavin Williamson in these Pulitzer-worthy pieces. You’ll recall that I heard her say (to a thousand school leaders) that she didn’t know what the Social Mobility Commission was doing? This week she’s said that she has no idea how DfE White Paper GCSE targets can be met, and that fewer girls choose physics because “physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy……they don’t like it. There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do.” This she backs up fully with detailed evidence: “The research generally … just says that’s a natural thing….I don’t think there’s anything external.” Surely her days are numbered?
 
As the Grauniad said, this prompted anger from leading scientists.
 
‘Dame Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics and master of Churchill College, Cambridge, said the comments were “terrifying” and “quite damaging” and questioned to which research Birbalsingh was referring in suggesting that girls had an intrinsic lack of appetite for maths and physics.
 
Dr Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who campaigns for equality in science, said: “I honestly can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. It’s patronising, it’s infuriating, and it’s closing doors to exciting careers in physics and engineering for generations of young women. Whilst girls and boys currently choose A-level subjects differently, there is absolutely no evidence to show intrinsic differences in their abilities or preference.”
 
Rachel Youngman, the deputy chief executive of the Institute of Physics, said: “The IOP is very concerned at the continued use of outdated stereotypes as we firmly believe physics is for everyone regardless of their background or gender.”
 
Surely the inevitable will eventually take its course? Surely she’ll eventually be moving along?
 
Sadly, as with the PM, no one is surprised. KB was the Deputy Head who sank her own school at the Conservative Party Conference in 2011. Four years later she set up a Free School and now calls herself the strictest headmistress in the country, as if that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers. Invited to reflect on the scalability of her model, she says – all schools should be like mine, look at the quality of the artwork. (This echoes her 2011 claim that children in state schools didn’t read whole books, in comparison to fee-paying children who might read four or six a year). What? I saw the artwork, which was nice, but lots of us have remarkable teachers eliciting fabulous stuff. Many of our students would think four to six books a year pretty thin stuff. Her pronouncements are often met with well-raised eyebrows. Surely one day she’ll have to give up?
 
I wonder. We have a DfE which appears to be better led in the ‘I want this: Ofsted will inspect it and I’ll name and shame those who aren’t managing it’ style. Around, above and below sit all kinds of Tsars and Tsarinas, favourite MATs and pseudo-research. KB is, to the current government, a very attractive figurehead for the not-very Tory endeavour of social mobility, her media-savvy performances a wonderful distraction from the job in hand. Just like the PM.
 
And yet why say that about girls? KB’s school-based pronouncements about the need for total control and discipline are all about clearing a space for potentially disadvantaged students to not-fail. Because they aren’t given any choice, they are freed to achieve. It is an argument, certainly. So why doesn’t it work for girls doing physics? Shouldn’t the same lie in store for girls with no family history or university or science thinking about storming that citadel? As Mandela said, freedom is indivisible. You can’t raise the economically disadvantaged while oppressing those disadvantaged by gender. Why would you?
 
Part of me wonders, flying in the face of the political zeitgeist, if this latest set of gaffes might dislodge her from favour. Perhaps the cup might pass to someone else’s more reliable lips? Perhaps she’ll get what’s coming to her? Then I look hard at the evidence before me and the sorry context in which we’re in and give myself a shake.  Personal integrity is less important than a snappy soundbite: blame and distancing are more worthwhile than trying to solve an intractable problem; sounding iconoclastic is all that matters. Brexit happened thus, and we sink under its weight.
 
Clever people don’t make accidental gaffes. The PM has never said anything he didn’t mean to say, whether he meant it or not. Oxford-graduate KB may or may not care about girls in physics, but she cares hugely about herself, her profile and her future. Raising the numbers of girls in A level physics and Further Maths has been a long and painful journey for all thinking schools. I wonder if she knows this, has tried her best and not-quite succeeded?  She’s had all the plaudits for so long that perhaps she can’t risk-assess admitting failure. 
​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This blog has been written largely by others. The first two stories are courtesy of that organ of truth, Schools Week, all power to their shorthand notebooks. The third was heard by my own ears at a very large conference in Birmingham on Saturday March 12 2022.

The fourth is in the form of a response written by a year 10 Tallis student. I don’t need to repeat the brutality of that story.

News Story 1: ‘Elite Sixth Forms’
Eton and a group of successful academies called the Star Academy trust intend to bid in the next wave of free schools to open ‘elite’ sixth forms in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham in 2025. They will provide “knowledge-rich teaching from subject-specialists; access to talks, academic essay prizes and debate clubs; Oxbridge-style tutorial sessions and the chance to learn Latin”. They will also be subsidised to the happy tune of £4000 PER STUDENT on top of the funding we all get.

I’d like to set a few essay questions on this topic, if I may? 20 marks a pop.

1. If Eton need £4k more per child to do a good job, what are the rest of us supposed to do with just the taxpayer’s shilling? 
2. What is the alternative to ‘knowledge-rich teaching from subject-specialists’ and, for the love of Mike, what do they think the rest of us are doing?
3. What are extant local sixth form providers meant to do when their results plummet because the elite have lured a particular group into their gold-plated lairs?
4. What would happen if all 6F providers in the poorest areas got an extra £4k pp?
5. Why perpetuate the language of elites and Eton-gets-you-into-Oxford?  What is preventing Gasworks Comp form getting children into Cambridge who are suited to that kind of education? (The answer may be in the question.)

News Story 2: Lord Agnew’s champagne.
‘Agnew famously said in 2018 he would bet any headteacher “a bottle of champagne and a letter of commendation” his advisers could find savings in their schools – and likened himself to “a pig hunting truffles” in his pursuit of efficiencies. [but] …… cost-cutters failed to identify savings at more than one in ten schools they visited, new figures show….When asked if Agnew had in fact sent those schools a bottle of champagne, the DfE reiterated, “opportunities were identified in these cases but they were not costed or reported.”’

1. Discuss Agnew’s working hypothesis that all HTs mismanage budgets.
2. Locate the missing champagne.
3. Will Roberts have to stop writing about this now?

 
News Story 3: The Chair of the Social Mobility Commission doesn’t know what the Social Mobility Commission plans to do.

1. Why not?
2. Who does?

 
But the fourth news story cannot be treated lightly.
 
Today at Tallis we held an act of solidarity for Child Q. This is the speech that a 15-year-old girl wrote and read to our community, at break.  
 
In North-East London, a 15 year old black girl went into her school to take a mock exam. Her parents put their trust in the school to keep her safe but instead... they accused her of being in possession of drugs. They searched her. Called the police and allowed her to be strip searched without her parent’s knowledge or consent. 

This happened because black children are often not seen as innocent. And not even seen as children.

No one should EVER have to experience such harmful actions caused by racial bias. 

The safety of children and education are basic rights. Fairness shouldn’t have to be fought for. No matter the race, gender, class, abilities, or beliefs of anyone. Dignity is for all. It isn’t fair that we aren’t the first generation to fight for our human rights. But we can strive to ensure that we will be the last. 

So what are we doing to change this? If we are being persecuted in our youth and we do nothing about it, then are we any better than the persecutors? What happened to integrity?

Martin Luther King's dream is still only a dream but we can make that OUR reality. We stand for equity, for it is a necessity no matter identity. I want to live in a world where everyone feels safe around the police and not fear an abuse of their power. Where adults advocate for children. Where anyone can excel.  For that to stop happening we have to remove these stereotypes from the media, from our curriculum, from what we say, the way we treat certain groups or certain people and even the jokes we make. Small things can make such a big difference once we apply them to everyday life.

We can all make a change now. It doesn’t matter if it’s not a major change. We can be an ally. We can demonstrate solidarity with Child Q. Napoleon Hill once said...“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way”. 
Stand in solidarity with Child Q and respond to our call of ‘we deserve better: we can do better’.

And so we did.

I’ve seen a couple of children wearing splendid origami crowns this week. I’d like to give every child one, to demonstrate that we respect them, protect them, take them seriously and try to build a better world for them. 

The composite news story of the week has been of division, arrogance, indolence, brutality and a blinkered refusal to see the big picture we are all painting for young people. We are a very long way from changing the world for the better. I don’t have any more words for this.
 
CR 25.3.22

Dear Sir Gavin,
What a flap your knighthood caused! I was at a Heads’ Conference just after it landed and really, we could hardly concentrate on budgets, absence, exams, staffing, budgets, racism, teacher shortages, budgets, sexual violence, climate emergency, budgets and political impartiality when we had your good news to discuss. When I got back, I opened Brighouse and Waters’ new 640-page About Our Schools for solace and launched into Danny Dorling’s preface. I wonder if his first line: ‘we often don’t truly value something until we’ve lost it’ was about you? 

I don’t know if you saw it, Sir, but sadly, political impartiality prevents me from reporting the reaction of the shadow education secretary. I can tell you that Mr Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said head teachers and parents would be surprised to learn the news. He admitted that the pandemic would have been challenging for any education secretary but, a teacher himself, couldn’t help but observe that your tenure had been one of endless muddle and inevitable U-turns. Gosh. Me, I just don’t think we ever grasped the master plan. Am I right?

You could have helped us, though, so I expect you’ll welcome two suggestions. They’re both from our latest Teaching and Learning Newsletter which, though we say it ourselves, is pretty sharp. 

The first is about using metacognitive and self-regulatory strategies by modelling your thought processes out loud. That’s when teachers explain their thinking when interpreting a text or solving a mathematical task or whatever.  The best ones can simultaneously explain how it relates to bigger objectives and suchlike. You could have tried that?

The second is about producing beautiful work, as I’m sure you were frustrated by the quality of some of your outputs. It can happen to any of us, and I know I would have been. Mary Myatt, for example, talks about eliciting and celebrating work that is original, that represents the fruits of considerable labour and which is worth keeping.
She describes it as a ‘worthwhile endeavour not just for pupils, but for adults as well. It shifts the landscape, it raises the game and it means that we have to continually ask, is this the best it can be? It’s a question worth asking: What do standards actually look like when met with integrity, depth, and imagination?’ Great questions. I wonder if you might have time to reflect on them, from the back benches, or do the fireplaces’ siren calls lure you out of public service? Ah well.

Worse things than old Barton’s opprobrium happen at sea, as I’m sure you discovered, Sir G, when you were in Defence. I was musing on this these with a trainee teacher of my acquaintance, not at this school. She described a (to her) nightmare experience with year 9s which sounded OK to me for someone of her inexperience. It could have been worse, I consoled. How? How? she goggled. Well, she could have had a wasp in the room. Hymenoptera care nothing for a sassy lesson plan. Speaking of, I was nearly flattened by two enormous year 10 girls this very morning, leaping into each other’s arms to avoid ‘a really big bee’, so I know about being blown off course
However, the new tack brought me face to face with a larger youth surreptitiously blowing into a prototype water bomb-balloon affair. We dealt with that silently. I frowned, he raised an eyebrow to demonstrate he’d considered fronting it out, but I won and it went in the bin. Perhaps silence could have been a strategy for you, Sir? Less retrofitting strategy required? It can be tiring.

Indoors – it was a bit parky to stay out - I perused the breaktime hordes in the canteen. They were doing their muttering and eating thing, some reading books, others bickering, some sharing phones, some with the bacon or sausage sandwich fare that so tantalises the tastebuds at 11:00 here in SE3. Others were extracting snacks from pockets, bags, marmalade sandwiches from under hats and suchlike.

After that, mock exam-gathering at one end of the canteen while year 7 and 8 took their turn to gather at the south end to be ushered reluctantly into a singing workshop. They really didn’t want to do it, but the leader was compelling and lured them in. It's lovely to hear children in unison and even better, given the last year or so, to watch them too, laughing and gesturing despite themselves keen to respond to the big character stomping in the big boots and making them SING. One head of year stayed for two hours.

Would a song help, Sir Gavin? Gavin is derivative of the Old English Gawain, of the Green Knight fame. His quest was also tricky, if I may quote the Armitage translation?

In a strange region he scales steep slopes;
far from his friends he cuts a lonely figure.
Where he bridges a brook or wades through a waterway
ill fortune brings him face to face with a foe
so foul or fierce he is bound to use force.
So momentous are his travels among the mountains
to tell just a tenth would be a tall order.

It must have all been very tricky. How we do feel for you. If only you could have been rewarded somehow, for everything you must have wanted to do.

But what am I like? I nearly forgot where we started: you were given a knighthood!

​Did you miss my letters, Sir Gavin? Send me your new address: I’m happy to oblige.
 
CR
9.3.22
 
 
 

Oh give me a break. Buffeted by Cornish winds, I’m warned to be politically impartial and then there’s a war. Given that all sides of the House agree that this is a result of unprecedented aggression etc, am I allowed to talk about peace? What is balance, this week? Do I just teach one side? Please don’t answer. I’m sure it’ll get us into trouble somehow.

When the western political situation took a turn for the worse with the previous inhabitant of the White House and depressing shenanigans this side of the pond, I decamped from Radio 4 to 3 avoid it all. This time, I’m taking refuge in the Thinking with Pinker podcasts, a short course in cogitational improvement. One episode is called ‘You Can’t Say That’ and it’s on ‘taboos, heresies and counterfactuals’. I’m swum in the seas of religion all my life so I know a bit about these. I like to think that makes me reasonably sharp at spotting myth, sentiment, falsehood and claims of destiny. Before you get cross, Pinker isn’t talking about the language of racism and misogyny: rudeness and oppression are always wrong. He’s talking about the ruts of acceptable thought in which we stick ourselves.

We love this in education. We’re counterintuitively keen on confining thought and easily attached to totems. Exams, for instance. Rather than looking at the current circumstance as a chance radically to reform the whole outlandish structure, we’re swimming frantically back through the shark-infested waters of memory testing and cheap proxies to replant our flag in the Land of the Forgotten Third. And we delude ourselves and yes, I have an example, a sub-heading on the BBC Family and Education page asking ‘How will my exams be different this year?’.
This makes no sense. For a start, a child wouldn’t ask it. Barely a one sitting public examination this year will have ever taken one before. Year 13 didn’t do GCSEs. They have no idea what’s different, or similar. The question actually being asked, by anxious adults, is ‘are exams children take this year worth anything to the elitist calibration mindset we’re trapped in?’. If it was a child asking, the question would be ‘What’s happening and what do I need to do? Will I need a pen?’

I’m not opposed to exams. It's reasonable to measure learning, not least to assess current aptitude for choices at 18. It’s also perfectly legitimate for the state to want to measure its system. But we could do so much better. My counterfactual would run: ‘If we already knew that exams were a flawed way of measuring children’s learning, we would have seized the opportunity of the pandemic to ……’ Why can’t we think about that? If not now, when?

Children, however, can turn their minds to other things. Wandering about to spy on the choices Deputy Head candidates made at break I chanced upon the conversion of a bench seat to a table tennis table, requiring the game to be played inelegantly at the stoop, then the peer-review of an engineering prototype. This latter was a small boy whose friend claimed he’d made a device to extract apple juice from apples. I thought it needed further development, myself. Squeezing the air out of one of those tiny soy sauce bottles and trying to jam it into the side of a Gala didn’t appear to be extracting a marketable product, and at least one of the potential investors thought it was disgusting, but a refined model may have legs? Or show signs of being remotely able to work.
 
Year 8 have been thinking about what they can do to help children in Ukraine. They settled on a sort-of sponsored walk (steps in tutor time) for War Child. This seems like a sensible way of expressing concern and fits with one of our repeated sayings, on every Christmas Card since 2014, Eglantyne Jebb’s ‘all wars are wars against children.'

Good for them. Meanwhile, in peace time, we were trying desperately to track down some Food Bank vouchers.   
But by the time you read this we’ll have appointed a new Deputy Head and that’s always exciting. Deputies forecast, control and make the weather in school and good ones are beyond rubies. Lots of people have been involved: students, teachers, classes, year groups, support staff and governors over a two-day grilling process. I did this twenty-five years ago. I didn’t get the first one I applied for, largely because I couldn’t express a thought about the curriculum. I got the second one and it changed my family’s life. It’s a great job in the right school.

I have put some time into thinking about the curriculum since then, despite national lurching from one set of ossified prescriptions to another ever since. We think a lot at Tallis, and we try to teach the children that an unexamined life is perhaps less rewarding than one where you create informed choices. As a colleague said at the end of term, we try to link our epistemology to our ethos here, which is great if you can remember what epistemology means. As we say to the children – we know we’re learning when we’re thinking very hard – but within the bounds of kindness and respect, the blessed exam specifications and the impartiality rules, we can think what we like. Impartiality is the child of considered thought
 
CR
2.3.22

Last month I was baggy at the seams to but this month, to use a trade term, it's all a bit raggy. What means this, you cry? Like a Rag Week? Clever teasing all over the place from Block 6 to the MUGA? Sadly, no. Just a feeling that things could be tighter, could be tidier, could be more neatly tied up.

I don’t usually fess up to such given that my reader is likely to be a parent so I avoid horse-frightening. However, desperate times and so on. Here’s what we’re dealing with.

The blindingly obvious and unbelievably tedious Covid experience is largely of absence now, rather than illness, and folks having to be off for the regulation 5 days knocks a hole in teaching. Teaching is the heart and root of our endeavour so once that starts to wobble, unhelpful waves are set up (I’m no physicist, I’ve said it before). It was worse, before Christmas, but last week we had eight supply teachers in as well as using every spare ounce of in-house capacity. That’s a lot of children without their familiar adult in front of them, a lot of learning from textbooks. It’s a lot of classroom doors without anyone scanning the corridors and a lot of teachers’ desks in disarray. It’s a lot of seating plans being not quite enforced and a lot of independent learning not being set in the usual way. I’m not saying things have fallen apart, I’m saying that there is more room for the unexpected.

Adventurous souls may love this, encountering the mystery in daily life and so on. We pride ourselves on our creativity and inquisitiveness, our exploration and openness at Tallis, but adolescents need and really value security and structures. They don’t tell you this, of course, because they’re programmed to be risk-takers and to kick against restrictions while they find their feet in the world. It just so happens that the conditions for safe curiosity and happy investigation are optimum when the enfolding arms of the school are absolutely reliable and almost tiresomely predictable. And punctuated by frequent reminders and helpful hassling by tutors and assemblies. I cannot overstate the importance of this undersung aspect of the English school system. I’ve written about tutors before, the family unit of any school, especially important in a big one. We try to double-staff tutor groups to safeguard daily continuity but there are limits. No one is staffed for a pandemic. Without every tutor being in place, messages don’t carry. Troubles are missed. Children bottle things up and then unbottle themselves unusually.

Piling Pelion upon Ossa, we’ve lost assemblies. Yes, we have them online and Heads of Year deliver their brisk and uplifting messages through cameras showing children in tutor rooms sitting neatly and listening quietly, but it’s just not the same. You can’t eyeball a fidgeter through a camera. You can’t calm 270 people into silence and quietly move them to a spotlit room where a communal experience reinforces the ethos and mores of the institution. You can’t laugh with them, and you certainly can’t give them a good old-fashioned piece of your mind when daily routines show signs of wear and tear. Schools miss assemblies when we can’t have them: that’s why we go through all sorts of shoe removal malarkey to do them in PE spaces in exam season, but for two years we’ve hardly been able to have them at all. Three year groups are frankly unfamiliar with the whole concept and the older ones have forgotten. That means that children don’t see the school in session formally, don’t experience the obvious manifestation of the secure boundaries, don’t understand themselves as a valued participant in a community endeavour. They’re left to make sense of their immediate, personal, experience which is harder to interpret when the faces at the front are unfamiliar, even a bit confused themselves, perhaps.

I took part in a survey this week. The new Secretary of State seems keen on finding stuff out, which is a welcome change from his predecessor who didn’t give two hoots. One of the (admittedly fatuous) questions was about the impact of the call for ex- or retired teachers to rally to the colours with their board markers akimbo. What? There has been absolutely no impact. Has anyone seen one, anywhere?*

It wouldn’t have made any difference, except in basic supervision. The thing we’re really up against in secondary can’t be helped by strangers, supply teachers or Sally Slapcabbage. The second problem is, already weighted down by absence. We’re drowning in exams. It's good that the specification reductions have been declared by the exam boards and reasonable that it was done at this point so that most children might have been taught most of the courses. It's unavoidable that people are irritated by the timing or the contents - we live on our wits and we argue with the furniture if there isn’t anyone else around. It’s just that the contingency arrangements for no-exams have to run alongside the arrangements for having exams. That means that we have to have three formally assessed piece of work ready in school, just in case, as well as finishing the courses and getting children who have never taken formal exams ready to do it. In a school with a big sixth form, that’s wall-to-wall examining since early December meaning more lesson disruption followed by endless, endless marking as well as preparation for teaching and now, reorganising schemes of learning to reflect the reduced content. No wonder everyone’s a bit twitchy.

But the mopping up of quotidian flotsam caused by staff absence has to take precedence, so time is concentrated even further and everyone gets a bit more frantic. You can’t lock yourself away to mark or plan if the exam class next door hasn’t got a specialist teacher or the little ones look as though they might behave foolishly. I’m not complaining, just explaining. I wonder, had the PM given any thought to lifting the contingency requirements when he was boldly announcing that we’d be free of all restrictions by the end of Feb so that he didn’t have to apologise to the former DPP? What? Hadn’t thought it through? Really? Hasn’t he got advisors? Oh wait….
 
CR
10.2.22
 
*SEND Green Paper, Mr Zahawi?       

Oh! Lord Agnew! My dear!

Regular readers may recall this Agnew’s previous appearances in this column in his former guise as Academies Minister. The eminence grise behind the Inspiration Trust, from where we also got our Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza, he once made an offer we could almost all refuse. Putting accountants on the road, he promised a bottle of champagne to any school where his people couldn’t find savings, though whether Chateau Co-op or Pol Roger remained mysterious. ‘Use curriculum driven budgeting’ he cried, as if there was any other sensible way of desperately trying to make four bob educate two thousand people for thirty-eight weeks.
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I can forgive him all for this, however, for his magnificent appearance in the Lords last week, resigning furiously over the amount of money wasted by government through ‘schoolboy errors, arrogance, indolence and ignorance’. As minister in charge of counter-fraud he had no alternative but to resign, what with the mountains of fraud hemming him in on every side. 

Such behaviour has a touch of retro-novelty in these troubled times. A man is given a job to do, finds he can’t and so resigns. Gosh. From Richard Cromwell to John Major this was once taken as read as principled behaviour, but standards have slipped this last decade and now it seems perfectly reasonable for the power-mad to cling to power no matter what. I write, of course, before the publication of that report, so by the time you read this I may be embarrassingly out of date.

We’re quite big on schoolboy errors here, as we have a lot of actual schoolboys. Picture the scene. A class of twelve-year olds is released form bondage at 12:20 to go to lunch. Queues form in a big community so it’s in their interest to stave off starvation by pegging it down the corridor the faster to bucket across the yard. A man of some experience plonks himself sturdily in their way and after cartoon screeching-to-halts the matter is put up for discussion. He sympathises, but makes them walk. I know what you’re doing because I used to do it. It’s obvious, but still a bit dangerous, you have to walk in the same way that I had to walk. Sorry, lunchers. Committing traditional mistakes anew is a schoolboy error. Getting caught is a schoolboy error.

But there’s a reason for the nomenclature. Schoolboys have infuriating, reckless and bizarre in their job description. While their synapses are forming they’re meant to make errors because they don’t know any better. From footballs to eating to hoods indoors and missing homework, schoolboys through the ages have tended to the random and boisterous, to the flying-by-the-seat-of-the pants, to justifying actions in risible ways, citing necessity, dogs, love or hunger. They don’t always take instruction and they can make you seize your own head in despair.

Much is forgivable in the young but mind-boggling in the old. I wouldn’t expect much sympathy if all of my countless and tedious parent emails since March 2020 had begun with ‘I don’t know what’s right or wrong’ or ‘no-one’s told me what to do’. We’ve lived through a time when everyone was telling us what to do and we, the people, largely embraced it with stoicism and good sense. Birthdays were unmarked, family celebrations postponed, spontaneity disappeared. We thought everyone was doing it – but it seems not. 

There’s nothing wrong with childlike-ness. Being relatively innocent and inquisitive, seeking to enjoy life in the moment and to its fullest has a lot to be said for it. We rate optimism and inquisitiveness on planet Tallis.  Childishness is another matter. Seeking to excuse oneself, refusing to learn from mistakes, wiggling around the facts and expecting others to love your whim and caprice so much that you can do what you like is not adult, moral behaviour. Bleak House may be Dickens’ finest novel but the creepiest, flesh-crawling-est character is the venial Harold Skimpole, masking greed and irresponsibility in tedious foibles while fleecing his friends and abandoning his dependents.

It's not for me to say what must be done on the national stage (though you might guess what I think), but I refer you to previous messages. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship. All adults are role models to the young, and the higher they’re exalted, the more important the modelling. We have standards for public life, of selflessness, integrity, openness, honesty, objectivity, accountability and leadership. They’re not hard, but they need attention. It’s not always fun to be good, but it is always right.

Agnew’s an unlikely hero. He couldn’t abide being made a fool of and nor, I think, can the rest of us. For me, the example being set to the young is irretrievable. It undermines the democracy and the rule of law that we’re meant to teach as a Fundamental British Values for Pete’s sake. All our lives have been made materially harder by sloppy national leadership.

I’m enjoying Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House. I like a bit of good chairing and he’s a delight. Last week he was trying to calm everyone down, little knowing that he’d still have to be doing it a week later. ‘You may not like this day’ he advised, ‘but this is the day we’ve got’. May it pass briskly, for all of our children’s sakes.  
 
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27.1.22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the other thing I want for schools’ stockings is a bit of imagination in the system as well as coherence. There’s a lot of content in the NPQs but not much room for imagination or flair. That’s another consequence of parsimony: thinking deep and free takes time, which costs. When all your lemons look the same, even golden threads don’t make your system sparkle with the reflected light of the sheer joy of learning in communities of children.
 
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10.12.21

The calendar gods decree that I write a blog on Community Days. This week is the big autumn event with all year groups doing slightly different things – sustainability, identity, oppression, relationships, careers, debating, revising, wellbeing, planning and budgeting.  Something for everyone, for every eventuality on adult life’s thorniest pathways. From our experience and scholarship to the brains of the young, engagingly delivered. That’s what the recipients of the cry ‘HB to the sports hall’ are off to, in their usual shambling, bickering and tripping manner.
I was Performance Managed yesterday which focuses the mind. I’ve been a Head for 20 years in three different places, and I reckon I’ve got rules of thumb or mental lists to deal with most eventualities. These were, of course, expanded by new stuff we absorbed under lockdown about how to run a school when the children aren’t allowed to come to it, but there’s a new dimension to educating at the moment with which I’m tussling. Remember that as you read, breathlessly, on.

I don’t know how they do things in the independent sector, but I assume they have time to organise a thought, hence the heads’ hutches being called studies, which would explain the number of books old Seldon wrote while he was high heid-yin at Wellington, for example. But I digress. Anyone been to Peppa Pig world? Anyway, the president of the Girls’ Schools Association made a whole load of very good points yesterday, summarised on the Beeb.   

She said: parents and teachers should keep up with young people who are genuinely worried about racism, sexism and climate change and want to address them with support from adults. Adults who complain that today's teenagers are judgemental and speak a different language so adults ‘can't say anything without being called out by PC children’ should get with it. Times have changed, and we need to keep up. This nastily-dismissed 'woke' generation are actually young people who are worried about things. We teach them to be kind but when they grow up to be impressively so with an understanding and appreciation for the world around them, we mock them, or dismiss them as unrealistic do-gooders. Nicely put, Ma’am.

Contrast this with the Social Mobility Chair’s end of the forest. She thinks that children need to be very strictly controlled, so they’re habituated into choosing good over evil because they’re all wicked underneath. We can train good behaviour into them, but left their own devices, keep clear, they’re pretty unsavoury. Original Sin.

Ah me. Which side of the fence whereon to plummet? Obviously with young people trying to change the world for the better, but what about the echo of reality hiding in the misogynist retro-theology? Children can be horrible to each other as they explore, or are fearful about, the boundaries of their world. Why is that?

Well, part of the problem is the example adults set, hypocrisy in particular. Why can’t I speak in the corridor at school, no one talks to me at home? Why should I worry about getting a job when the world’s about to end?  What’s the point of learning to be fair if I’m judged by the colour of my skin, or kind, if I’m not safe walking home? What exactly have you done, Sir, to make the world a better place?

Some years ago I wrote ten precepts underpinning the curriculum which still have an interesting half-life in the edu-ether. I started from the importance of knowledge and ended with adult authority and the teacher’s skill. But the problem I’m wrestling with now is this: how to be educators at a time when adults are demonstrably the problem?  I’m reading about wicked problems, again, and worrying about the shallow simplistic solutions that schools have been forced into for so long that now we’re hooked on the superficial, the tick-boxable, the headline-grabbing, the Emperor’s new clothes.

One of the chaps I wrote that book with has just died. He was a great comprehensive school Head for yonks, twenty years older than me. One of the best things about the writing process was talking to him about leading a school yesterday, as it were, the past being a different country. Now I think I need to revise myself, to include the mortal dangers and injustices we knew were around the corner all along, but that young people won’t ignore any more.

My Year 13 class and I keep company with some very old white male theologians as we head toward liberation theology at the end of the syllabus. We drop in on Karl Barth, whose magnum opus was Church Dogmatics in fourteen volumes over thirty-five years. If I had the headspace I’d start on some School Pragmatics, on the lessons of the sum of all my days since 1983. Guilt will probably feature, but not sin. Look out for the next list.
 
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23.11.21

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

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

There is a part of the forest specialising in lethal mutations. Current scuffling under the foliage from Sanctuary Buildings appears to be muffled mutterings about academisation, of interest to those 21% of us secondary schools still blessedly council-run. SoS Zahawi hasn’t really said anything and Herrington the Schools Commissioner says there isn’t a master plan yet. But soft! In a dull-sounding consultation entitled ‘Reforming how local authorities’ school improvement functions are funded’, launched inevitably during half-term, we find:

– an end point which a number of councils are already closing in on, where councils would no longer maintain schools.

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

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

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

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

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

Part 700 of an Occasional Series on the Misuse of Great Poetry

Actually, my objection is not to the PM’s use of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. He didn’t misquote it, engrave part of a misconstrued sentence on his walls or force children to recite it while eschewing non-reciters.  I’ll tell you my problem later. You’ll need something to look forward to.

We are tacking against a head-wind towards the jetty that is the blessed October half term hol. Since September we’ve seen reunion, controversy, death and outrage as well as joyfulness, dancing, chuckling and solidarity. So in order to nail the zeitgeist I headed to the Midlands for an information conference, invariably time well spent when the decisions of the day are offered in handy pre-digested form to twitching school leaders. I reckoned I could do the important bits and get back in time for Governors at six, updated with the savviest news, while saving the taxpayer’s outlay with my Senior Railcard.

My train got as far as Wembley, where it stopped for an hour. We reached the glorious second city 70 minutes late where I decided that what with finding a taxi, getting to the hotel, leaving early and getting back I’d probably manage about 15 minutes of conference and an hour of lunch break. Therefore, I crossed the platform (metaphorically, it’s not that easy at New Street) and got on the next train back. I read the slides by myself and got loads more done besides. Cripes, this is a dull story.

But not if you were on the train!  Simon our train manager was a message masterclass. He communicated frequently and clearly.  He described the exact problem, involving a person on the tracks (‘the DC rail used by the Overground’). He did it with respect and humanity and by collectivising our experience, though this may be a word and concept I’ve just made up. He explained how many people there were on the train (have a guess) and appreciating how worried we were about the person on the line, how patient we were glad to be while the emergency services did their work, how relieved we all were that the person was still alive and going to hospital, how calm we were being about our missed appointments, how easy it would be to get a refund and how pleased the driver was with a hot cup of coffee. From my seat in a quiet coach all that turned out to be true and I heard not one fulmination. (190) 

He was like a teacher skilled in positive discipline. He identified what was needed, thanked the people for doing it, created the conditions in which it could actually be attempted (in that order) and got happy compliance almost by sleight of hand. It was magnificent, expert work. It made us better people.

Rather like our decision to send almost all of year 11 on Duke of Edinburgh’s Award practices and expeditions this week. It seemed important, after we missed it in the summer. Of course, the weather was capricious with a buffeting monsoon on night testing cluelessly inexperienced campers. One of them, with floods of tears, laughter and outrage, described it all to as many teachers as she could buttonhole in the darkening gloom of the concourse on Open Night where, despite trench foot and incipient malnutrition she’d still come to be a guide and model student. And the probably large proportion of the 1559 guests loved it. So friendly!  So articulate!

This particular Tallis-ite is never far from a madding crowd’s ignoble strife, and would never dream of blushing unseen. She’s nothing like a mute inglorious Milton nor is she ever likely to keep a noiseless tenor in a cool sequester’d vale. Chill penury has not repress’d her noble rage nor, more importantly, froze the genial current of her soul. But she, a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown, like all her contemporaries, is expected to put up with this rot when the elected politicians wade through slaughter to a throne and shut the gates of mercy on mankind. 
Too harsh? My abiding feeling at the end of this half term is of fury. Fury that policymakers who have served not one day in the classroom can claim that they’ll liberate the disadvantaged without any attempt to fund schools properly so we can care properly for the children of austerity who need us to see, know and love them.

It’s not enough to claim you’re levelling up just so you can say the other lot like levelling down. It's not enough to quote old poetry to evoke a misty-eyed nostalgia of a silent, humble poor. Most country churchyards closed decades ago but every year there are young people who can change the world for the better trapped to plod their way in neglected spots. Let not ambition mock their useful toils, but give them opportunities in a fair society to command the applause of listening senates.

You don’t have time for poetry, Mr Johnson. I’ve got next week off, but you? Do some work.
 
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21.10.21
  

A bustling child at shoulder height clutching an open planner barrels past me on the bridge muttering, Mad Hatterishly, I didn’t know it was a science test today I just didn’t know. What he lacked in direction I made up for in briskitude so I held the block 2 door open for him.  Keep calm, I counselled. It’ll be fine. You don’t know Sir came the receding reply. I’d news for him. I do know Sir, all the Sirs. This test will not have been sprung on you. It is a lesson, in every way.

On the way back I thought about all the children in the history of schooling who have been surprised by tests. I was one myself in younger years. What is it that makes some children so well organised but puts others perpetually on the back foot? I couldn’t even reliably bring a pen to school until I was in the sixth form.

Meeting with a group of youth never surprised by anything, I ask their advice. What can we do to improve? Lots of ideas, from class organisation to decolonising the curriculum to lunch queues to extra-curricular philosophy and the perennial problem of rewards. Anything else? One seized the edge of the table ‘I can’t word it. I can’t get it from an idea in my head to my mouth making sense. I’ll have to come back to you.’ I look forward to it. I’m more of a splurge-and-then-sort-out-the- words-as-they-emerge sorta gal.  You know how some people used to have wristbands that said PUSH (pray until something happens)? Mine would be ‘talk until something happens’. I make no remark about the political conference season. Tush tush.

It is wise to think first. Yard duti-ers are perpetually troubled by what might be the best form of words to stop children kicking footballs or bouncing basketballs as they return to class, or to get them to put them back in the sack. Try out some of those instructions for yourself. See what I mean? 

I struggle for the right words with a group of people who’ve come to leaflet the children against vaccination, after school. We’re not anti-vax or conspiracy theorists, they say, while handing me leaflets against this particular vaccination because it has been ‘rushed through’. ‘We’re just educating the children about their human rights’. I tell them that we do that pretty emphatically in any case, to put their minds at rest. Others appear, and, knowing I have no power to move concerned citizens from the public footpath, I decide on a tactic. One calls me ‘my darling’ and I ask her not to, then I just talk at them, arguing every toss, until I notice from the corner of my eye that most of the children have gone. ‘I don’t know what your point is’, one of the protestors says to me sadly. I do. It was a filibuster. I’ve talked until something happened, or in this case, didn’t happen. Tush to you, mate.

It’s my turn to have a door held open for me on my return. I say thank you and the large youth reassures me that it was no problem. He means well, but I sigh as I round the corner. What does that mean?  If it was a problem he wouldn’t have done it? That it might be a problem in the future if I make a habit of going through doors? I used to say ‘don’t mention it’ when I was thanked until someone said that sounded as though I didn’t care. And once when I asked how I could help someone who’d rung me up, they said it put them in a subservient position. Manners are a minefield. What to do? Outlaw ‘no problem’ and insist on ‘you’re welcome’? Schools appear in newspapers when they try to adjust language. 

Not to despair. Human relationships can be difficult and adolescent ones triply so. Schools are perfect places to try out stuff which oils the wheels of the human journey. I met with another group for children today, ten boys who felt aggrieved. They expressed themselves beautifully, concisely and with immense dignity. They were truthful but without rancour or grandstanding. That’s a model for a better world. I was quite moved by the experience – and I’m hard to move. Dear me, yes.

And that was the second time on a day which started with the terrible death of a former student, the second in six months. So many young lives ruined by adults or circumstance, so little hope for some while others find life so easy. ‘And what about those in the middle?’ one of the earlier young people said. Who notices them?

It National Poetry today and I find myself thinking again about a poem I discovered recently. It was written the year I was born, by a poet who left teaching, Daniel Huws in his collection Noth. It is almost unbearably eloquent.  Here’s the last verse:

And a friend offers congratulations, echoing
Complaints I should have kept unsaid:
‘My God, you must be glad to leave.’ My children,
For his ignorance I could strike him dead.
 
It’s been a difficult day, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Sometimes words don’t make sense but yet they’re all we have. And with that, I’m off to address the parents of Year 11.
 
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7.10.21

It’s our only uniform requirement post-16 so without the lanyard, I said to three giant youths at the block five bridge door, you are essentially naked. Two wearers chuckled and one did the walking while talking and rummaging thing, eventually slinging it over one ear while we discussed his A levels: Chemistry, Maths and ICT. You can change the world with those, I inevitably said. He said he intended to once he’d stopped feeling dizzy in Chemistry.

I sympathised. I’d been feeling discombobulated since discovering at 0610 that morning that the lid of my portable teacup had other plans for itself leaving me with tea, yes, but stored loose in my bag and right trouser leg. My dark walk has a brutalist beauty of its own and the buses themselves are like great illuminated tea-clippers buffeting through the streets, to a station with a great café. I usually cycle and occasionally drive but am an enthusiast for buses, tubes, trains and riverboats, especially now I’m over 60, thank you taxpayer. The gloomy bus stop offered enough cover for mopping.

Mr Gibb, former Schools Minister, is also over 60 and has just been ferried away from Sanctuary Buildings where he has kept an iron and hitherto permanent grip on education policy. This is Gibb of phonics, Gibb of the Ebacc, Gibb of 11 years, Gibb the immoveable – gorn. Not without a shout over his shoulder, though ‘Don’t dumb down. Don’t let the softies take over. Don’t get all child-centred. There’s only one way’ meaning that education left to educators must necessarily be rubbish.  But we don’t know if that’s true or not, do we? Not since 1988 and the Great Reform Act. Since then, it’s been dominated by regulators and politicians. At least Gibb stuck with it. Belloc springs to mind, as ever ‘always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse.’ Or as the zen masters have it: who knows what is good or bad? Too early to tell, I’ll keep you informed.

But in the evening of the tea catastrophe I found myself at the station in the dark, trying to get home. I had phone calls to make and a book to read so it wasn’t until I was on the train that I remembered the murder of a young teacher about 300 metres away, the previous Friday. Should I have been worried? A parent had congratulated me for being northern just that home-time (though its not something I had much choice about as a child). Was I being tough and gung-ho to have forgotten the danger, or is that something to do with being 60 too?

Women are in danger on our streets. Violence against women and girls is global and endemic. No amount of telling women to stay out of dark areas or carry gadgets or walk in groups alters that. We need proper laws about violence against women upheld by sufficient police and courts. We need to talk about it in schools and make sure that our young men are women’s allies, and we need enough public servants at ground level to make the world a better place. 

What would have been the point of worrying on the station? Would it have got me home faster? I don’t go out at night much, but I tell people that’s because I’m tired and antisocial, not because I’m fearful of the streets. But what if the one is so deeply engrained that the other follows? Have I lived, have all women lived, constrained lives because of the undercurrent of violence? What if that is too terrible to contemplate, so we just work around it?
Sometimes adults tell me that young people make the streets dangerous and frightening. In turn, I sometimes say that one solution would be for adults literally to get out more, so that the streets are mixed and passively supervised by ordinary people going about their business. But Sabina Nessa was doing just that, going home, through a pleasant neighbourhood, after a day spent serving the young as an educator. What else was she meant to do? Live at work?

We’re going to mark Sabina Nessa’s death with a moment of whole-school reflection. It's right that we do, because of our commitment to ending violence against women and because the murder was so very close.  But it won’t bring her back, or all the women before her or all the ones who’ll come after. Talking to another woman at school, she said ‘When you read of another murder you always sort-of hope there’s a link, a reason, that makes the next one less likely to be you. I know it’s wrong to think like that’. What have we become?

Women and girls aren’t the only people in danger in our world, but they are in danger, far and near. Violent misogyny won’t be solved by vigils and candles, but by concerted, expensive effort to remove the threat. Given the sum of human knowledge and learning, sensitivity and inventiveness, couldn’t we care enough to solve this, soon?
 
CR
23.9.21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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10.9.21    
 
 
 
 

Never in my life before have I started a staff end-of-term-do with ‘what a terrible year’ but what else was there to say?

On the last day of the year on Planet Tallis we herd the youth into the sports hall for a rousing send-off with bands and uplifting speeches. Such things – what with us not being Silverstone or a night club – are still being frowned on here so we made do with year 10 being live on spaced-out chairs. They’re a pleasant bunch and we reflected on the year together.

This doesn’t involve free discussion, you understand, assemblies are assemblies no matter what, but we did have awards and a couple of bands played. All very nice.  We all the tutors said a few words and we made some awards to the most imaginative, disciplined, persistent, inquisitive, collaborative young people, then the most respectful, fair, honest, optimistic and kind. Then the ones who turned up for 100% of the time, with no negative points and full participation in all that life offers here. Then it got a bit complicated. Their Head of Year is on maternity leave, and I’ve just promoted their interim Head of Year to Head of year 7 from September, so the person who’s just stopped being Head of year 12 and is now Director of KS4 Achievement is stepping in until the original HOY comes back in October.

This is the kind of thing you can’t sustain too much of. The reason that stability in school staffing is a prize above rubies is that young people need to feel that the adults around them are in it for the long term, know what they’re doing, are absolutely committed to their jobs and the young people who may need their undivided and expert attention at any moment. Thankfully, attached Sir is a constant force of nature with the team and duly got rapturous applause.

Having a captive audience and time to spare, I gave them the benefit of some of my school experiences. I told them that being as old as the hills, I took the 11+, and benefited from its class bias and random educational attachment to verbal reasoning. That grammar school turned comprehensive in my second year, so 120 of us proceeded up the school on top of a growing ten-form-entry comprehensive. Some of the teachers weren’t quite up to it, some aspects of the building – beautiful in its way – weren’t quite built for it and the rest of my compulsory school experience was characterised by a vague feeling of it being made up as we went along. This is not good for adolescents, who are making up their own lives as they go along and need to be protected by stability, predictability and expertise in school. I said I hoped that there was enough of Tallis to keep them confident, no matter what was happening in the outside world and no matter what bizarre and half-thought instructions we’d been tossed about on this year. And the one before it.

Adults can cope with more of this, and, following my uplifting start last night, I reflected to staff on a hot summer day’s experience nearly forty years ago in Leicestershire. I visited the Cheshire Home at Staunton Harold and talked to an old lady who spoke of Group Captain Cheshire – the WW2 fighter pilot who set up the nationwide homes – as a personal friend, who’d taken an interest in every piece of furniture she’d brought with her. I was moved that, in a large organisation, the vulnerable old people felt a personal bond with the man. It made them feel safer and loved. I thanked staff for that same work they do and that same bound they have with the children, so important through the pandemic, a lifeline for some.

Next door to the home stands a church which I’ve probably bored you with before. Built, almost uniquely, at the start of the Commonwealth in 1653 when church building wasn’t really a thing, it bears this lovely inscription to the man who financed it:

Whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in ye worst times and hoped them in the most callamitous.’

​You can’t say fairer than that. We’ve tried our best.
 
CR
22.7.21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite a week, then. Having worked us into a frenzy over Teacher Assessed Grades, everyone submitted them on the 18th then mopped themselves down ready for the next excitement, samples of evidence to go to the board. The message promised on Monday (21st) with a 48-hour turnaround uploading time arrived at about 2200 but with the same window as if it had arrived 14 hours earlier. We don’t think so, said the nation’s Deputy Heads. Shall we call it Thursday morning?. ‘Oh, sorry, didn’t think, yes’. The exam boards have been writing to us about this since Trump was in the White House. They had one job: send us a request on time. Ah well.

I’ve worked with some unbelievably fussy people in my time. People who straighten pictures or match their hair bobble to their underwear (I’m told), people who calculate the time lag developing between school clocks and the BBC and tell the Head exactly how many seconds need finding; statisticians in their upstairs cupboards for whom a progress prediction to three decimal places is evidence of sloppy thinking. You’d imagine exam boards have loads of those folks, but where are they? Locked in a drawer? Messages don’t send themselves. They have to be primed and fired, like those in the Education Select Committee Report published this week.
In the interests of balance, I’ll tell you what’s good about it first.  

1. The giant problem of the underachievement of poor white children and blighted generations in endemically disadvantaged places certainly needs close attention.
2. Teachers have not been blamed entirely, which is a novelty: poverty, alienation, isolation and disempowerment are all mentioned.
3. It is good to see a tidy focus on early years and careers.
4. The report’s recurring emphasis on the need for live deprivation statistics accurate to neighbourhood level so they can be used to target particular needs is long overdue.
5. There is a knockabout routine involving pointy questions on the curriculum and the Minister of State’s rambly answers which would be amusing if it weren’t depressing. 

However,

1. This government has been in power for 11 years and needs to take responsibility for the prevailing conditions.  Austerity is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon, like cold weather at the Summer Solstice.
2. The teacher supply nightmare is unaddressed. A pandemic bounce won’t sustain us for long.
3. The extremely successful New Labour Sure Start early years intervention didn’t close itself. If you dig something out, do you expect the wound to heal over or fester?
4. If a government strips the Office of National Statistics, argues with every release and generalises inaccurately about big datasets rather than neighbourhood information, the stats are compromised.  Go figure.  
5. Curriculum matters. An untargeted focus on academic learning brings an EBacc-heavy curriculum that doesn’t engage children who need a different way into school success. Also, only 37% of poor white children get a grade 4 in English or Maths. The minister says: we need more time to check that everyone’s doing it right, teaching phonics in the one true way, only using approved maths methods. The report says: 25% EBacc isn’t much to show for eleven years. This curriculum drains all the life out of learning unless you happen to love writing and exams above all things. Schools are too timid to broaden the subjects offered in case their progress score doesn’t stack up: it is assumed this is the way of things.

The report covers the ground. Until this point, it’s probably better than nothing. Some feet are held to a warm-ish flame. But all documents are products of their time and I don’t suppose this one could get to the photocopier without being checked for culture-war dog-whistles. In a document of 154 paragraphs, 8 are about ‘White Privilege’, 6% of the total. Why?

The report argues that any school talking about white privilege has been duped by shady academics into divisive (‘pernicious’) thinking that is meaningless to most white people, especially the most disadvantaged. This hides the level of disadvantage they are suffering from the poor white people themselves. Schools should stop talking about race and focus on disadvantage.

What? I was born in Middlesbrough and I’ve worked in Sunderland, Hartlepool and on the outer estates and former mining towns of the Midlands. Disadvantage is not in short supply: there is plenty to go around. Identifying disadvantage in one group does not take suffering away from another and restricting disadvantage, as if only a few people deserve it, is strange thinking. 

The National Curriculum starts with these words:

Three small boys rushed me with a request. ‘Can we start our own club?’ I said it depended on the topic. ‘Japanese Culture’. ‘Manga?’, ‘No, Japanese Culture generally’. I declared in favour with the all-purpose answer ‘Talk to your Head of Year’. Their leader commanded ‘All eyes on Rawlings’ as they charged off. Arigato gozaimasou.

Boys are in the news with the ghastly OFSTED report (as in, a report on a ghastly matter rather than the other thing) into sexual harassment in schools. HMCI was pursued by the Today programme this week on the lines of ‘why haven’t you tackled this before?’ but to be fair to the clipboards, they are at the mercy of Sanctuary Buildings, whom we know to be a bit slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, my Westminster correspondent saw the Secretary of State in the street again at the end of May, customarily laden with bags, describing him as looking like a man about to take the last ferry out. As you would be if your catch-up plan lay in ridicule and tatters and your Tsar had abdicated.

The problem with tackling sexual harassment in schools isn’t having rules and issuing punishments but hearing about the problems to start with. Young women expect that the world will treat them shabbily and therefore put up with outrageous impositions on their persons and emotions. They look upon it as normal to be prodded and put upon, they think they should accept that physical and mental assaults are normal. The report talks about girls being sent dozens of requests for nude pictures and getting dozens of foul nude pictures from boys and men every day. Yet young women are more empowered, more up-front, more determined to stamp out inequity then ever before.  How did we arrive at a position where these irreconcilables co-exist?

Ofsted’s report has recommendations for schools, partners and government:

This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

All of this is important and true and we’ll try to do all of it, but schools can’t turn the tide alone. Violent coercive behaviour towards women is not new, and I wrote last time about the tsunami of pornography that overwhelms our young. Whom does that serve?

And yet, I read in the news today about another school that’s banned skirts. I’m interested in this kind of thing, as long-term readers know to their cost. Banning skirts, on the face of it, could be a liberating act to remove oppressive gender norms from a community. Tell me more, I thought.

Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, the school has banned skirts because ‘members of the public’ have contacted them to complain. Staff are included in complaints, apparently. The usual sorts of words are used: the need for appropriate schoolwear, of appropriate length adding up to appropriate workplace attire. What?

I was reading Hilary Mantel’s essays in the Lake District sun last week. In one, she takes issue with a writer, saying,
"You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares."

I think that about ‘appropriate’. Appropriate schoolwear is clothes that don’t prevent children from learning and rushing about in the sun, that wash easily, dry quickly and don’t break the bank. Appropriate length, is a skirt that’s not going to trip you up on the stairs. Appropriate workplace attire is – well, who knows? It depends on the workplace: what’s appropriate in a blast furnace might be odd in a tea shop. But what business is what children wear to the man in the street?

We are obsessed with surface solutions. Do girls in schools feel sexually oppressed? Send OFSTED to inspect it. Some witchfinder general thinks that skirts are too short – ban skirts. Really? When will we start a discussion about freedom to co-exist peacefully, without prejudice, fear and oppression?

A young woman dropped by to read me a poem. It was about her struggles and triumph and about her determination to make a mark on the world and change it for the better. Perhaps she’ll start the serious global conversation about the mindset change needed to set girls free. I wouldn’t put it past her. I hope we’ve prepared her.
 
CR
11.6.21