Fifteen or twenty papers over a matter of weeks? Is this a sensible way to educate eleven-year-olds? Why have we got into such a state?

Third, a YouTube experience that’s an absolute joy. It’s the magnificent Phil Beadle talking to someone I don’t know, about SLANT. SLANT’s a zombie classroom management technique dressed up as good teaching, invented and abandoned in the US, that won’t die here. I’ve written about it before, but to recap, it stands for something like sit up straight, lean forward, ask and answer, nod for understanding and track the speaker. It’s in the news because an academy chain is making a big thing of it and some of their teachers and parents are revolting. Beadle destroyed it in his magnificent 2020 book The Fascist Painting but you can’t help some folks.

At the end of the film, having been laughed at more than once, Beadle departs himself abruptly, advising his interlocutor that he needs to up his intellectual game. He’s a genius and an English teacher so why would you want to film yourself arguing with him? Yet the enthusiasm for this kind of short cuts persist in English schools. Why have we got into such a state?

Allow me to posit some views. First, the government doesn’t really believe that people are actually hungry, and besides, it’s the economy, Tina. There is no alternative so everyone has to wait for things to pick up. This is fine if you’ve just unpacked your Waitrose order but its not so good if you have to live on expensive terrible non-food from the only shop you can get to, or the food bank.  
 
Second, as a result of target-setting and an obsession with cheap measurement we like to test our children. This is sort-of OK, but test-driven teaching only measures how well children have imbibed the test-related materials they’ve been taught. Its not real education, and it doesn’t last. Set a tricky paper, but all means – but don’t give child-level results. Use it to test teaching levels and keep the results at school- or national level to inform detailed, longitudinal school improvement work. Let the children learn widely and excitingly in primary school. 

Third, building on the above, put some effort into behaviour management by making relationships with the children. Don’t interfere with their bodies by telling them how to sit and don’t interfere with their thinking processes by telling them what to look at. Did the school leaders who love this stuff have to learn like this?

Last week we said good luck to year 11 as the GCSEs started. A highlight of the day was a youth who’s photocopied seemingly hundreds of A4 portraits of himself which he handed out to anyone who’d take one. It was a kind-of art installation in itself, a performance. He was encapsulating our mutual loss and his own happy confidence in the future, as all children should.

This stuff is hard to get right and we all make mistakes. We really need to find a new way of living that doesn’t pit flawed crass certainties against each other at the expense of our young. We dislike serious thought in this country but we need some new paradigms. I  hope that, despite the way we conduct schooling, our young people will still be able to change the world for the better.
 
CR
18.5.23

It is impossible to know what young people are thinking. While popular convention imagines they think only subversion and mayhem, the evidence is different. What with food, love, football, hair and a bit of learning, teenage brain space is disputed territory. I’ve just overheard one talking to three captive mates about gravitational fields. Another passed me on the stairs deep in a conversation about betrayal. One asked me what day it was. Best of all, I was sitting at the bus stop two weeks ago, seeking Penge, when three chaps in year 10 or 11 walked past.  Their topic was unexpected for 1710: ‘the Irish economy’s a different matter. You have to understand what’s going on there, regarding growth.’

I’m thinking about this because as well as anger over Ofsted and despair about funding there’s a worry about behaviour in schools. Hold onto your hats: that’s not to say that there’s general mayhem in the corridors and classrooms of Tallis or the nation: 95-odd percent of children still behave well at school and largely enjoy it, whether they admit it or not. But all institutions are feeling the pressure post-lockdown. Some are anxious, many are absent and a minority have got the idea that aspects of school are negotiable. Its happening everywhere: we’re all having to dig in extra-deep and re-establish boundaries. One of the Heads’ unions has gathered information nationally about behaviour this week, and the picture is – unnerving.

So I find myself asking: was it right to close schools during the plague? It seemed unavoidable at the time. But looking back? How can we balance the damage done to individuals’ learning and institutional integrity with the risk as it turned out? This isn’t a rhetorical question. There’s a 15 year research programme needed to assess the impact on learning, life-chances and social cohesion. If 5-10% of young people and their families have decided that schooling is optional, how will that play out in the next generation? 

The context is further complicated by two boggy factors. One inevitably is funding, more below. The other is the way we see things now. Hard to express, here goes, sorry if I get it wrong.

The nation expects schools to be stable, bulwarks against the exigencies of life. The fundamental truth of safeguarding practice is that children are safest in school. So we have to get them all there, not 91% of them.
Schools are bulk institutions with baked-in economies of scale. We have classrooms of a standard 30-seat size, teachers trained and skilled in working with large groups, standard operating procedures that rely on consent and compliance, backed up by parents and society. A liberal outfit like Tallis is like all other schools in these respects. 

We all need children to follow instructions: the difference between schools is how the instructions are given.
That means, necessarily, that the amount of individual negotiation any school can manage with a child is limited. A child with a severe, diagnosed need might be excused Spanish. A child who just doesn’t fancy it and would prefer to wander about …. hard luck, in you go. However, as a society we are much more likely now to take account of individuals’ needs and choices, and we are more likely to give some of those needs or desires a name. That means that some children and families wish for special treatment that schools will not and cannot give. It's not that we don’t care, and it's not that we see children as cogs in a machine. We’re literally built to function in a particular way, in communities where everyone has to play their part and children’s singular wishes usually have to be subsumed to the common good. we don’t just do it because of economics, conservatism or cussedness. We do it because that’s how the world works.   
 
This is particularly difficult in secondary schools because between 10 and 19, those parts of the brain involved in planning and social interactions are still maturing. As the scientists say, this lengthy period of our lives is unusually challenging. Challenging for the adolescent, and challenging for everyone who cares for them.
 
You know that I believe that schools should be model communities of learning and social good, and that comprehensive schools in particular should demonstrate the best kind of equal and equitable society. It only works if everyone’s there, and we all work together. Some of our young people have suffered from the disruption of the plague in a particular way and perhaps do have a time-constrained special need that needs a particular kind of response. There was much money spent on the architecture of disease – testing, vaccinating and the economic support that sort-of followed – but now we need similar spending for the follow-on. We need attendance officers, behaviour staff, welfare teams, family liaison workers, counsellors, mental health specialists and educational psychologists. And we need teachers who have time to think, and plan. Currently – well, you’ve heard me on this before. We don’t have them and soon we won’t be able to afford anyone. And there’s hardly anyone to appoint even if we had the money.

I have a mixed relationship with The Guardian these days, but Zoe Williams wrote an interesting piece a couple of weeks ago about how the public schools reshape themselves every generation to produce what  society wants from them: colonists, soldiers, politicians of a particular kind. I don’t think our public-school-dominated government is deliberately running state education into the ground, but I know plenty people who do think that. I just think they don’t know what we do, or what will happen when we can’t.

Many young people are still reeling from the brutal withdrawal of the major structure in their lives during the massive brain re-ordering of adolescence. They need enough good adults to support and manage them.  Government, for the love of God, turn your thoughts to us, the universal service for children. If you destroy us, you destroy the future.
 
CR
5.5.23

How the years tick by.  It’s five years since we launched the Ethical Leadership Commission, and now it’s time to reconvene.

What am I on about?

Older readers will remember that this commission was a thing I chaired on behalf of a load of people way more important than I. It was a group of 18 leads of all sorts of organisations, from Ofsted to the National Governance Association, the professional associations, the C of E, academics and suchlike. We even had a resident philosopher.  After what felt like aeons of deliberation – but which was actually only 6 meetings – we devised the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education which was then enthusiastically adopted by hundreds of schools. It challenged school leaders to know and follow the Principles for Public Life (selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership) and adopt seven professional virtues (trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism). It even featured in the year’s annual report of the national Committee for Standards in Public Life, as a good example of a sector getting to grips with responsible behaviour.

The original commissioners (it sounds as though we had gold braid and bag-carriers) hoped it would make a difference to schools.  We hoped the values and virtues would help leaders in times of trouble - but so much of the world has changed since we launched our report in 2019. Retrospectively, we were clueless about the full range of actual troubles that were about to fall upon us. 

So we may well have some meaty questions to ask.  Here’s a few that spring to mind:

• Did closing schools during Covid demonstrate holding trust for children?
• Did honesty stand up to the pressures of Centre-Assessed and Teacher Assessed Grades?
• What is the balance between accountability and wisdom in the current furore about OFSTED, its grades and its approach?
• Why didn’t we include equity, or anything about diversity? How diverse was the commission? (not at all, is the answer).
• How does justice help Heads make choices without funding?
• Do we have the courage to defend our broad curricula when the shouty orthodoxy is to retreat into a narrow range of courses?
• What does it say for the national understanding of the Standards for Public Life when the most vulnerable children – with SEND – are served by such inadequate funding and services?
• What use is a commitment to kindness alongside year-long waits for CAMHS assessments?
• Does the adoption of such airy principles help teachers stay in teaching?
• What might the framework say about teacher strikes?

And so on. You might have questions yourself: I’d be glad to hear them.

Unlike my co-meeting-ites in Woolwich this morning who were too kind to tell me how sick they were of hearing me going on about stuff. In the end I apologised after my fourth gloom-laden intervention. If I’d had my diary with me I’d have quoted a brilliant assessment of the state of the world that I cut out of the London Review of Books magazine in March. Philosopher and art historian Lorna Finlayson wrote:

I want to write about the terribly sad story of Ruth Perry, the Headteacher who killed herself after an Ofsted inspection, but I don’t know how. I’ll start with Tallis life this week and see where it takes me.

Well. Last week’s top news was the Geography Department winning a national award from the PTI, the curriculum training charity from where we get the bulk of our external training. The judges were blown away by the vision, the enthusiasm of teachers and students and the vast range of extra-curricular activities. Top sausage!

We had a wonderful music concert on Monday last with superb performances. I wrote my report to Governors for the spring term and had a phone call from the Chair. We had a grilling from the people who look over our results. I talked to a former colleague who’s now a Head. I went to a few meetings and advertised some posts for September. We’ve dealt with staff absences and crises. We had a visit from the Leader of the Council, to find out about the pressures in schools and how we’re doing. There was a Governors’ Achievement Committee meeting and a touring dance performance form our friends at Trinity Laban. Year 8 have been weighed and measured. I’ve had countless cheerful conversations with staff and a couple of trickier ones. We had a virtual meeting with a school who can help us improve our TOFFS project. We’ve absorbed the fallout from some nasty incidents in the streets after school and tried to balance next year’s budget. We’ve put a few children right on some misapprehensions.  We’ve taught, marked, planned, monitored, worried and celebrated. We’ve sorted out scuffles and rumours and home lives breaking up. I’ve responded formally to a long complaint.

On one of the teachers strike days I looked out of the window on the glorious sight of a year 11s progressing coolly from one thing to another whirling his jumper around his head like a toddler pretending to be a helicopter. He may have mastered the vertical take-off by the time the examiners call.

And  throughout all this, every time the blessed phone rings in the morning I leap from my moorings. Why? Because mornings, Monday to Wednesday are when Ofsted ring telling us they’ll be in tomorrow, and we’re sort-of due. That’s worrying in itself but nothing compared to sitting in the daily meeting with the assembled clipboarders while they attend to their idiosyncratic knitting and assemble a judgement in one word or two.

And so to Ruth Perry, a victim of the system: not the only one. What are we to make of this? No-one knows what’s in the mind of a person who makes this decision, but there’s context that’s now becoming more widely known and, unsurprisingly, I’d like to offer my two penn’orth.

It’s perfectly reasonable for the state to inspect its schools, but they need to do it properly. Inspection can’t be done properly on the cheap. It should take time and combine critical analysis with expertise and support. Large expert teams should visit for longer. Areas that need improving should be explained and the school given a chance to work with inspectors on the headlines of a plan. The final report should assess all aspects of the school and be expressed clearly in a balanced, detailed and rational manner. Parents are perfectly capable of reading.         
Inspectors perform a public service and they should be valued. I understand the argument that values school leaders as inspectors, but I’m no longer convinced. Inspection is a profession, with its own expertise and body of knowledge. The consistency required to inspect a whole system cannot be achieved with an army of contracted folks temporarily out of their schools, no matter how brilliant they are. The costs – standardised language and template judgments - are too high and the quality control of rogue inspectors too weak. I’d perhaps put one serving leader on a team, to give practical advice to inspectors and support to the inspected head.  
     
Obviously, urgent and dangerous issues in a school need swift restorative action. No one would argue with that.  Some schools will get bad reports for good reasons and no one would want to prevent that. The problem with the current system is that, in the name of public accountability and easy reading, a complex and critical universal service is reduced to terminology that cannot possibly convey its fullness. As the writer of the Book of Sirach (fka Ecclesiasticus) said of judges in the second century BCE:

Our current system was designed before social media took over and the quality of public discourse downgraded. It doesn’t serve schools, families or children well. It fuels twitter trolls, public shamers and the sensationalist newspapers who habitually hate teachers, and perhaps that’s where Ruth Perry found herself, overwhelmed with guilt, or bewilderment, with nowhere to turn. Actually, much of our accountability system looks as though it is designed precisely for this; accountability dreams of the 90s have become fuel for the frenzy. It’s no way to improve public education.  

When we wrote the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2019 we couldn’t express the ‘wisdom’ briefly. We said that leaders needed to use experience, knowledge and insight, moderation and self-awareness, and act calmly and rationally serving schools with propriety and good sense. That’s what we need from our inspectors.  It costs, but the price of the alternative is too high.

CR
24.3.23
 
 

Ouch. Given the Gavin Williamson tweetgate (‘heads really really hate work’) you’d have thought she might come to soothe. Or perhaps that’s why not? She should calm herself: it’s not as if we’re unruly. Mr Barton manages the thousand or so delegates like a big assembly and gives us a look if there’s even any rustling. Heckling would be unthinkable.

Back at freezing Tallis, much afoot. We’re talking with good folks who fancy governing. They express an interest to the Chair for which they’re rewarded with a visit and, special gift, a conducted tour with year 9. These youth fling themselves into the task, devising long routes and answering questions freestyle and at length. Today’s visitor got the full service, including being taken to places with which the guides were unfamiliar. ‘What happens in these rooms?’ ‘We don’t know’. I’m hoping this was, perhaps, the sixth form silent study area rather than the boiler house.  

And on Wednesday, year 13 parents’ evening, the final countdown. We made some innovative changes to the distribution of teachers which confused everyone, especially the most experienced. Someone still complimented me on our efficiency, which was perhaps an aggregated kindness. I’m thinking now about something to mark this passage, the end of some 2-year but many 7-year relationships. The commitment of your beloved child to a neighbourhood school that you support and value – with eyes open to our limitations and alarums -  is a social action that builds up the common good.  We can’t afford to have medals struck, but we might run to a card.
Which brings me to Community Day today, where the whole school thinks about a theme.

Using and strengthening local and community links is one of the aspects of our School Plan so today we’re all thinking about A Sense of Place, about being formed by, and our relationship with a particular area. This we merge with aspects of the history of Greenwich and our immediate locality to give us all a better understanding. So many young people without cash or confidence to spare rarely stray from their immediate locality. It’s the same in London as on the estates of the north and the bus-deprived rural villages. We try our best to help them live on a larger map, but seeking richness and understanding on your doorstep is also valuable and validating.

​This is one of the quotations we’re using:

In the spirit of asperity I’ve adopted so far, I object to showing people something that can only be demonstrated by doing. Our sixth form would call that performatism.
 
Protecting the wellbeing and mental health of staff is:

1. essential for improving morale and productivity
2. critical to recruiting and retaining good staff
3. a legal duty: employers are required by law to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees
4. taken account of as part of Ofsted inspection   

 
How’s that going? Is morale improving? What, precisely, in education is productivity? Student progress? Attendance? None of these are improving, and recruitment and retention is catastrophic. Of course we have to do what the law requires to look after our people, but OFSTED? Here I skid to a halt. That’s why people have signed up to it. It’s certainly why we have.
 
Here’s the wording from OFSTED’s ‘evaluation of leadership and management’. Inspectors will look at the extent to which leaders take into account the workload and well-being of their staff, while also developing and strengthening the quality of the workforce. (para 313)
 
Which might get you the ‘outstanding’ grade descriptor where leaders ensure that highly effective and meaningful engagement takes place with staff at all levels and that issues are identified. When issues are identified, in particular about workload, they are consistently dealt with appropriately and quickly. Staff consistently report high levels of support for well-being issues. (para 416)  
 
I’m not decrying schools’ attempts to make the difficult bearable or even enjoyable. Lord knows we try. But what does it mean? Proper HR, of course, a bit of flexibility when family life bangs on the door, respect in the workplace, evidence that discussion is welcomed, free tea, umbrellas and a decent behaviour policy, a dress code that doesn’t require you to look like an idiot, plans, policies and leadership that explain themselves. Email curfews. Kindness. Wisdom.
 
But all of these should be normal. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if a school was being run madly and badly, by people hooked on robust leadership tropes. It would be good if Ofsted could uncover some of that, as opposed to lauding it, which they used to.         
 
What teachers really need, as well as decent pay that respects their training and professionalism, and their value to society, is time. Time to think, collaborate, learn, plan, keep up with their subject. Time to care. Time to have fun in the classroom. All of that costs money. What I need is funding that allows me to put at least an extra hour of professional thinking time back into teachers’ weeks.  And, if there are really going to be no other services available to children and their families, another hour on top of that to listen and talk to children about their lives.

I need that money now, and I need it on top of the budget I already have. An uplift of about 5% would do it. The last budget settlement just postponed disaster: it didn’t allow any of this.

What really drives teachers, social workers and medics out is moral injury. That’s when the workplace doesn’t match the vocation and good people have to make bad decisions either because they’re told to or because there isn’t the money to do better. When learning is secondary to outcomes, when compliance is substituted for character, when recruitment and training is bungled and cheapened again and again and again: it’s no wonder people leave. 

Don’t ask us how we are. Don’t lodge the system’s failures in the hearts of teachers. Don’t pretend there are cheap alternatives. As far as I’m concerned, teacher wellbeing is all about the money. 
 
CR
23.2.22

An interesting week in schools all over the place and also on Planet Tallis. I, however, had the chance to talk to a very affable bunch of year 7s: approximately the top 10% of the industrious, those who’ve thrown themselves into school life and are really, really enjoying it. I congratulated them on their production and assured them that effort was a very reliable route to success. After that, I trespassed on their good nature to ask questions three.

First: what could we improve about school? Sadly, this stumped them because they think it’s great. When pressed they said that they’d like to have their own week in the Library, that the water fountains could be cleaner and that the bridge got a bit crowded at lesson change. Oh, and on the matter of lesson change, how could they get from one to another without any travelling time? How indeed. A conundrum of school life. We need another library, cleaner plumbing, a wider bridge and, I believe, physics. (We don’t give travel time because it encourages loafing.)

Second, what did they think we did well? Clubs, trips and visits. The opportunity to do extra things (like Latin), the food, rugby. And subjects, they’re really interesting.

Having expected the first question to take longer, which it certainly does by year 9, I hastily invented a third. If you ruled the world, and who’s to say you won’t one day, how would you make it a better place for young people? They talked to one another – quite loudly – and wanted to solve the following. Ending knife crime so fewer young people die. Lowering the voting age so old people don’t make bad decisions they won’t have to live with.  Better free facilities in local areas, like swimming pools and wildlife parks. Ending discrimination and racism so that everything is fair. Stopping littering. Helping people with rent and food costs. Not cutting down trees. Teaching black history. Sign language a compulsory part of the curriculum. More poetry. More food banks so that everyone can get what they need.

Hold on, I said, trying not to be too tough on a young altruistic thinker. Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world where we didn’t need food banks. He had to think a bit. Yes, obviously, he said, with the air of youth kindly tolerating dotage. But ... It doesn’t have to be like this, I said. Food Banks used to be very, very, rare, for people on the very margins of society. Not in every community, not for people in work. Note to self: remember this conversation.

Later the same day I read the Leading in Practice review by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, just published last month. Ethics remain in the news, with the report on the former Secretary of State and his subsequent departure from his subsequent role, and there’s at least another one on the stocks. One would hope that the Committee for Standards in Public Life was buoyant.

​Page 15, however, is terrifying:

I was at a meeting with civilians where the teachers’ strikes announcement generated tutting and eye-rolling. Intervening would have prolonged an event form which I needed to scuttle at the end, so I kept my peace. Or I think I did. Who knows what the body language or the studious avoidance of eye contact may have conveyed? It did make me think, however, about how to explain the action, so I thought I’d experiment on you, dear readers.

Today brought another meeting where we chewed it over, a professionals’ gathering where the image of the Front Door is often conjured, so I thought I’d press this rather exhausted metaphor into service.

Schools, like other services, are sometimes called the Front Door because that’s the place you go, the one-stop-shop, if you’re lucky, to get the support and the entitlement the state has decreed, devised and funded. The GP surgery is the front door of the NHS, the desk sergeant is literally at the front door of policing and the school is the front door to education. Our Tallis front door is rather nice, approached under a canopy with brightly decorated pillars and sometime festooned with flags for whatever we’re celebrating. We hope this is a welcoming place, where our warm friends behind the desk will try to meet your every need. 

The school is the front door to the belief in and investment of the state in the future of our young. It is the place where accepted and verified knowledge is taught and the community where acceptable social norms are transmitted. With luck, it’s also a place where a good experience of growing-up may be gathered and from where a happy adult life may be approached. That’s quite a lot for one building, let alone one door, to represent.

It is reasonable, therefore, for the tax-payer to expect that, once the door is broached, the service behind it will be top-notch. In the case of a school, that should be everything that the good parent would want for the child, in loco parentis. It’s a contract made between education, the state and the population. We will take your money and your dreams and use them wisely and well. We will look after your children as well as you could possibly want, and do our very best for them. This compact is the foundation stone of our system. We fail in our duty if, once the shiny front door is opened, the education and the experience behind it is patched together, fragile and unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. It's no way to run a health service and its no way to run a school.

So teachers are striking because they have run out of other options to bring the parlous state of our service to the nation’s young to government’s attention. They are not just striking about pay, though that is a huge part of the problem. Poor pay for a highly trained and skilled graduate profession working in high-pressure settings means that fewer and fewer people want to do the job. Even a recession, historically the teacher workforce’s friend, hasn’t worked this time. The workload and remuneration are so out of kilter with other career options that no one wants to be a teacher. Under 60% of secondary recruitment targets have been met this year in most subjects, again, in a ninth out of ten years of missed targets. Only the first lockdown brought an upsurge in interest in teaching as a career, and that quickly failed.

And last year’s pay rise, announced in the last week of term without funding to pay it? It nearly broke us all.

Workload and burnout are significant pressures of the job. Each is inextricably linked to funding, and this is the root of the strike action. Because there aren’t enough teachers, the teachers we do have have to shoulder more of the burden. If, for example, and this is not the case at Tallis, a school can’t get maths teachers and so must rely on graduates in other disciplines to teach maths, that’s a triangle of problems (maths teachers love triangles). The French or PE or whatever teacher will find the teaching stressful, the Head of Maths will find the constant setting-of-work for a potentially floundering colleague exhausting and the children will inhabit the teacher’s anxiety, every single lesson. Behaviour will be scratchy, outcomes poor and enjoyment absent. The teachers’ strikes aren’t just about pay, they’re about recruitment and retention, SEND promises made that can’t be kept, unpalatable choices made to keep or scrap curriculum areas or behaviour support, no educational psychologists or speech therapists and six-month waiting lists for mental health services for desperate teenagers. 

They’re also about better funding and a way out of crisis management and the constant attrition of the things the reasonable citizen believes we have promised and expects us to do well. It’s a crisis a dozen years in the making.

But last night was Year 7 parents’ evening, the contract in motion. I perched as ever near the front door (in many jumpers and then my coat), ready to chat helpfully and absorb complaints. I heard about a child who’s lost four jumpers so far (we’ll provide a stock of pre-loved garb) and another who’s only lost his Spanish book (we have spares). But most of all, I heard compliments and thanks from parents who trusted us with their beloved, who decided that we meant what we said about a broad curriculum and an inclusive vibe and are grateful and happy for what we’re doing. They were glad they’d found our door.

Given the prevailing gloom of the foregoing, it was a lovely experience. I just hope that we can find the funding to keep it all going, and to keep our promises. Our door is always open.
 
CR
19.1.23

How’s your New Year so far? Jaunty, optimistic, full of the joys? Lots of useful resolutions? Giving up drink, taking up yoga, running a marathon, re-reading Proust, learning Polish, eating fewer sausages, painting the landing, psychoanalysing the cat? Sorry if you’ve got more pressing concerns, like heating or food or the unsettling weather or what on earth the future holds for the children or any of us. But we live in the days as well as the years and we have to be optimistic. That’s why resolutions, after the festivals, help us through the winter. We can change, and we can do it ourselves. Or with a bit of help.

Just before we broke up I’d wearied of a little troupe of year seven boys who found the long first floor corridor joining blocks four, five and six irresistible for time trials. Despite the impediment of fully four sets of fire doors, they bucketed along every lunchtime like cheetahs in clogs, guffawing all the while. It's not a corridor with classrooms opening directly onto it, and by the time I heard the clatter of tiny feet I couldn’t get out fast enough to seize them. Curses. Possible solution? Involve Mr Parris, more devious and fleeter of foot to catch ‘em by the simple expedient of being able to apparate silently through the lino at the requisite time. Imagine their surprise.

On being ushered into the presence to account for themselves, they took a telling and demonstrated sufficient remorse. When nudged to apologise, the Usain Bolt of the outfit did his best with ‘Sorry guys’, thereby devising another problem for himself before being taken away for reprogramming. In his favour, he’s 11 and foolish with more energy than sense. He’ll learn. As might the year 9 girls who absented themselves from their legitimate berth to flounce about in righteous indignation seeking an audience for a grievance. They progressed southwards with hands on hips, and returned northbound with outraged gestures before being posted into place. It does take time to settle back in. Mistakes are made.

And I do approve of vision-informed planning. We should all be clear about what we want and work systematically towards it. Some temperaments are better at systems than others so sometimes it goes a bit wrong, but a sincere apology is remarkably cheap and helps all parties.

Which brings me inevitably to Mr Sunak and his plan for everybody to study maths up to 18. I think it’s a great idea, especially if it can be made really practical, for those who didn’t really enjoy it much up to year 11. If we believe (and we do at Tallis) that education gives young people powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world so they are not dependent upon those who might misuse them, then it is obviously a change for the better if everyone’s abreast of the numbers. In his speech Mr Sunak said we must "reimagine our approach to numeracy" so people have the skills they needed ‘to feel confident with finances and things like mortgage deals’. Yes indeed. As long as they don’t actually apply for a mortgage in London or look too closely at their finances anywhere I’m sure they’ll all feel confident. They’ll be able to sort out their heating and food bills, their taxes and their likelihood of getting a doctor’s appointment, having an operation or matching their parents’ standard of living. 

The PM goes on. "In a world where data is everywhere and statistics underpin every job, letting our children out into that world without those skills is letting our children down,.

Yes, it is. But who’s doing the letting-down? It’s a great idea, but who’s going to teach it? We don’t have enough maths teachers for our current courses, let alone invented new ones. Teacher recruitment targets have been missed nine years out of ten, only 59% of secondary training places are filled this year and 47% of schools use non-specialists to teach maths. And I’m not talking about obliging physicists or economists. I’m talking about willing French or PE teachers, anyone with a GCSE and a couple of spare hours. Schools in areas of real hardship don’t have the luxury of a stableful of pedigree mathematicians happily loving algebra together. Dreaming the extra-maths dream is meaningless unless there’s a plan to make it come true.

And a plan to stop preventing it coming true. So while schools are underfunded and teachers leaving in busloads, while the DfE promote online programmes rather than investing in time and training for real people, while recruitment’s skewed by try-teaching-for-a-couple-of-years-before-settling-for-something-easier-and-better-paid kind of talk, Mr Sunak’s dream will float off like those of his many predecessors.

Even a ‘sorry, guys’ would have made this wafty thinking more palatable. Sorry that education funding as a percentage of public spending has dropped to 1992 levels since 2010. Sorry that there aren’t enough doctors, nurses or teachers. Sorry that people are going on strike. Sorry that people die waiting for ambulances. Sorry that there still isn’t a plan.
​
My last maths lesson was in 1977, but even I can work out that this isn’t going to change much.
 
CR
5.1.23

We had a visitor to Geography yesterday, entirely friendly. He’d heard of the interesting things our map-and-rock folks do so he came to give them the once-over and put them in the running for an award. We rolled out a reddish carpet and he saw some lessons, talked to staff and children and even to me. We went so far as to insert mince pies into the sandwich lunch to butter him up.

The students, of course, were the star turns. Our man put them through their paces on whether or not the opening of a new coalmine in Whitehaven is a good thing or a bad thing and was much impressed at the breadth of their considered replies. Three of the students want to study Geog at university and could reflect knowledgeably on the relative merits not only of the courses under advisement, but also interesting features of their localities. One is havering between Sussex and Newcastle and I am ready to advise on that.

I know three things about Whitehaven. First, a woman once pushed her partner’s van into the harbour because she was sick of him. He obviously hadn’t worked out it was best to stay on good terms with a person who can shove Transits about. Second, it used to have a really good second-hand bookshop from which I got a nice early copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Third, it has a Weather Museum where you can do your own forecast, blue screen and all, outside of which I was once prevented from parking by an angry goose. It is to the benefit of youth that they don’t have their heads clogged up with such, or they’d never get a single A level.

Sunday and Monday’s weather was so pretty it was worthy of a gallery rather than a museum. Despite hopeful emails from students asking if we would close, we didn’t, of course, and made the best of it. Snow is nobody’s friend up close and much better looked out at from a warm indoors if you’re over 18. We were 27 teachers down at the start of the day with not a supply teacher to be had, but people got in eventually and everyone mucked in. Managing snow excitement is demanding at this end of term, but we did that too. I thought, as I picked my way gingerly across the yard, people can’t afford to heat their flats and houses or feed their children. We have to stay open, no matter what, just for that.

So how are we feeling as we trudge or slip towards the end of term? I’ve got Ofsted’s Annual Report neatly printed out waiting for me on the settee in my office, observing that SEND structures and funding are very far from working. Next to it is the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Annual Report into Education Spending. They say:

St Lucy’s Day on Tuesday and in the time I’d put aside to start on one of them Ahmed buttonholed me to say that his Spanish classroom smelled of seaweed, and what was I going to do about it? Nothing. Seaweed has many nutritional properties so he shouldn’t worry. While responding to a request elsewhere, I overheard a much larger soul telling another he was ‘frankly, heartbroken’ but I couldn’t work out if it was the state of the nation, a lover’s spurning or a disappointing Chemistry test. Arrived at my destination (the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter) I put a cover class right on the mature way to deal with a room change (replacing hysteria with industry), observing that I was a sixty-one-year-old woman with a heavy cold and they wouldn’t want a return visit.

John Donne said ‘tis the year’s midnight’ in A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day. That's how it feels, perhaps this year more than most. We’ll talk about light, hope and love in Assembly tomorrow and then give each other a break until the New Year. No matter what the problems around us, we’ll try to make 2023 the best yet. 

​Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
 
CR
14.12.22  

Despite an omnicompetent staff I try to remain personally useful at school. I’m getting too old to charge about, so I regularly position myself at lesson change on the middle landing of the block 4 stairs. Just after half term a small girl said to me ‘Don’t you get bored, standing there all day, Miss?’

Another day I was dispensing current affairs stuff for my year 13s to analyse when one of them spotted that document was recent. From last week, in fact. In a moment of head-clutching revelation he demanded ‘Do you read up-to-date stuff?’. As a theologian there’s always the risk that I won’t have truck with anything after Augustine of Hippo, but actually, yes, I do. And what’s more, matey, next lesson I’ve got something hot off the press from the Bishop of Sheffield (whose daughters I taught) which opens up the established church to good sense and justice on sexuality. We can all question how that might go.

I last wrote about questions in about 2014, I think. I was remarking on the tendency of posh people to interrogate one so that they can find common ground to pin you down upon. I’ve assumed this was so they can run a mile if you prove to be an unsuitable companion. This can’t have been the reasoning behind the palace questioning – so why do it? What kind of good manners pursues a question your guest has already answered, as if it wasn’t true?

We had ourselves a training session on questioning this week. It’s a basic teacherly skill, which, like so many, developed a sheen of rust over lockdown and needs buffing up. We looked at open questions ‘What do you think is the biggest factor in the climate emergency?’, closed questions ‘What is Hamlet doing in Act 4?’, hinge questions ‘So what were the advantages of the Black Death?’, multiple choice questions checking for misconceptions ‘Hands up for a, b, c or d.’ and cold-calling questions ‘Derek, what is the area of this irregular polygon?’. We practised them on each other and undertook to do it better.

I love that stuff. Give me a roomful of people and questions from the floor and there’s no reason why I should ever stop talking, but I’m not so loquacious when the clipboarders shin up the rope ladders. Those are questions to be answered precisely and economically with a pleasant smile and fingers crossed for no devious follow-up. 

That’s because questions usually have a power dimension, where the searcher after knowledge and the broker of knowledge have a different roles. Refusing to answer a question can be awkward. Teachers might do it if the they’re faced with a vexatious interlocutor who just wants to avoid tackling the paragraph or is keen to amuse the hordes with impertinence. Anyone might do it if they don’t know the answer: ‘I’ll find out. Leave it with me’ is also part of the teacher’s armoury. But what happens if the questioner just goes on? What happens when you feel uncomfortable, got-at and doubt their motives?

Nick Cave answers questions in The Red Hand Files from time to time. This month he talked about good faith conversations.

This is worth knowing. Inquisitiveness is good, one of our Tallis Habits. We want our young people to wonder, explore, investigate and challenge. We want them to ask, speculate and examine. We want them to do it to understand the world and change it for the better, and we want them to do it kindly, and respectfully.  

I’m starting to write this before the Autumn Statement, as we may not be able to afford to type afterwards.

A month or so ago I berthed alongside one of the movers and shakers of the pre-Coalition education world. We lamented the present and made helpful suggestions for the future. Unfortunately, none of the recent Secretaries of State for Education were within earshot, but the retro-Scandi décor very much appreciated our wisdom, I felt. At one point he asked ‘Do your teachers call each other Sir and Miss’? I knew what he was driving at.
 
We weren’t talking about the semi-formal way a pair of teachers might refer to one another while talking to children – as in ‘Sir told you not to reproduce the Rokeby Venus on the corridor wall, didn’t he?’ to which Sir might respond, in serious tones, ‘Indeed I did, Miss, and I checked he understood that Spanish Golden Age is next term, not this.’ I’m talking about conversations without children, but where the child-facing persona seeps into ordinary professional conversations. ‘Did you bring the year 11 predictions, Ms, and what are you going to do about them?’ ‘I did, Sir, and have many innovative plans’.

It's quicker than names, of course. School life is brisk and I can see that Mr Fotherington-Thomas talking to Ms Potter-Pirbright might take up more time than anyone has left, but they could be Clive and Gert behind closed doors without frightening the horses. What my interlocutor sought was further evidence of the creeping infantilisation of teachers. He had a hunch that leaders insist on teachers calling each other Sir and Miss as part of a focus on ‘professionalism’ which is anything but.

I wrote a piece for the trade press last week in which I discussed this in a slightly less abstruse way. I won’t rehearse it here, but it was about government support for a particular brand of online learning, whether that meant that online learning was being proposed as a solution to the crippling national teacher shortage, and whether that meant that teachers as a species of skilled scholars with a deep intellectual hinterland is further endangered. Will cheap and easy solutions lead to cheapened education planning? Autumn statement notwithstanding, the answer mustn’t be yes.

Anyway, as the gods of Blackheath Hill decreed that my driving needed attention, I found myself on a Speed Awareness Course. I must say that it was excellent, especially when the facilitator led the ten of us to a point of action-planning our new lives as safer drivers. He didn’t quite call it that, but he forced (enabled) us to tackle our habits thuswise:

1. This is the problem…..
2. It might be caused by….
3. I could fix it by…..
4. Why might that not work?.....
5. To help my plan I will…..

 
Isn’t that fabulously clear? Google offers me a 46-page guide to action planning that the NHS uses, even my own goes on a bit, but any decent plan covers the same ground. So, if we apply this to the matter in hand:

1. The problem is that we don’t have enough teachers
2. This might be caused by low salaries compared to other postgraduate professionals and an unreasonable expectation to solve all the nation’s ills all day every day
3. We could fix it by funding education better so that we train teachers properly and give Clive and Gertie time to think and refresh their training, as professionals do
4. Why might that not work? Because we hold children in little value in the UK. We refuse to fund the education system properly so everything we do, we do cheaply. This treats Sir and Miss like children or expendable units, so they leave.
5. To help the plan we should fund the education system in a way that treats teachers as part of the solution rather than the problem, attracts and retains high-quality teachers, supports and develops our young people and builds up the nation’s life. My shaker and I don’t think this is unreasonable.

 
I note as I finish that, according to the BBC, J Hunt has pledged £2.3bn, for education. I’m not sure that’s a big number and I don’t know how much of it has already been announced or promised. More on this next time.
 
Hunt’s done whatever he’s done as part of a government running a country in what Gramsci called a state of catastrophic equilibrium, where everything is simultaneously failing and stable, where things can’t carry on but nevertheless must, year after year. That’s where we are in schools. He needs to have done enough to tip the balance back towards equilibrium from collapse, but it needs more than that to educate a people, to save the future.
 
CR
17.11.22

So, the report recommends:

1. The Prime Minister recognises the national threat to prosperity and security by the scourge of serious violence, criminal exploitation, and harm and convenes regular COBRA meetings to tackle the root causes of these problems. The Children’s Minister of State should attend Cabinet.
2. The Department of Education returns to its previous incarnation of Children, Schools, and Families, reflecting the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world class education system.
3. The Government establishes a new Sure Start Plus Programme, a “Sure Start for Teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. ‘We have chosen to incorporate the name Sure Start as it is a well-recognised and well-respected programme, which we believe was a mistake to dismantle.’ [Not half, say I]
4. The Government sets a target of 1,000 Sure Start Plus Hubs by 2027 to co-ordinate and deliver health and education support for vulnerable teenagers. Established in and around schools, the hubs will be run by charities, public bodies, business, and philanthropy organisations.
5. A new drive across Government to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, including the re-establishment of a Child Poverty Unit in Whitehall.
6. The Government leads a national mission to identify and remove racial bias in the systems that are currently failing many Black, Brown and Minority Ethnic children.
7. The Government takes a new “Family First” approach that supports families with children at risk of becoming involved with gangs, serious violence, or criminal exploitation and which prevents crisis, financed through the implementation of Children’s Social Care reforms, and delivered by local authorities and family organisations.
8. Reform of the children’s social care system to provide high quality care for all teenagers, taking an invest-to-save approach and delivered by a partnership of Government, local authorities and the third sector. Implementation of the Independent Review into Children’s Social Care recommendations delivered at pace.
9. The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community, financed by funds from the proceeds of crime and administered by a collaboration of national charities.
10. Opening all secondary school buildings before and after school, at weekends and during holidays, to provide safe and appealing places for teenagers, financed by funds from dormant bank accounts and National Lottery community funding.
11. The Government to promote a new era of inclusive education, ending the culture of exclusion and helping all children to succeed in their education.
12. One-off £1bn children and young people’s mental health recovery programme, part-financed by a levy on social media companies and mobile phone providers.
13. Reform the youth justice system to accelerate moves towards a fully welfare based, trauma-informed Child First approach.

 
To my mind, these proposals are absolutely excellent and should be enacted at once. Youth work is always the first to go under revisionist government, and we’ve had 12 years without it now. The Cabinet’s not short of what we now coyly call ‘high net worth individuals’. Perhaps they could prime the philanthropy for 3 and 4?

Back on the train, I was heading for Cambridgeshire and reading fast. I thought of another vision for education, that of Henry Morris and the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges from the 1920s onwards. He determined that everyone, no matter how poor, should have access to good education in an inspiring setting. The village colleges were secondary schools and community facilities at the same time, focal points in villages where people of all ages came to learn, mix, be entertained and even get babies weighed. Henry Morris didn’t just create village colleges that were big schools – he created community education. Community education where everyone was in it together, where the whole village raised the children and support each other throughout their lives. When I was offering my skills in Leics in the eighties, their Community Colleges had the same vision.

So what have we now? Narrow education behind locked gates, for safety. Education at which many must fail to keep allegedly elite standards high while the country is run by the 7% who went to fee-paying schools and where a mere millionaire just isn’t trying hard enough. Where a known bully and incompetent can be promoted again and again, knighted for his services to the destruction of trust and integrity in public life: obviously a perfect person to be Secretary of State for Education at the time of the biggest increase in child poverty in modern times. I apologise for writing light-heartedly about such a one in blogs passim.

But finally, the advert. As I arranged my affairs, discovered I had only one contact lens and no charging plug for the Great Northern Electrostar making irregular terrifying banging noises upon which I travelled, I read the wall. There was a government poster about sexual harassment in the workplace, showing some concerned citizens saying what they would do to stop it. Good stuff, though not nearly as good as the Scottish That Guy campaign. But it was the sign-off that got me.

HM Government say ‘If you think it's wrong, act on it’. 

Tell that to Anne Longfield and the 200,000 terrified children, Rishi.
 
CR
10.11.22

Picture the concourse with its bridge running round it? There’s a jutting-out bit outside block two from which one might sing, survey troops or start a revolution. This never-before contested spot has been adopted at break and lunchtimes by a small group of year 7 girls who can barely see over the railing. They keep a close eye on everything and appear to have found a way to track my (random even to me) movements. Today I was fruitlessly searching for The Colleague With The Answer and these ladies apparated before me in two out of three blocks. I have high hopes for them. If you’ve read Anna Burns’ Milkman - and if not, why not? - they are the Wee Sisters. Intelligent, determined, resourceful, good-humoured and not to be underestimated.

Speaking of what you may not have read, among other journals my household takes the Church Times. My co-inmate, who may be reasonably expected to value this organ of the Church of England, curses it roundly and reliably every time it assaults the letterbox, demanding of the heavens why he is expected to read such drivel. Me, I like the cartoons, the minor gossip and reading just how badly church people can behave to one another when they forget themselves. One article this week looked at values having replaced religion in binding people together.  That’s fine when the values are such as equality, justice, accountability, kindness and honesty – but what if the values are self-referential, are about ‘living your best life’ or similar?

Watching the sorry spectacle of current parliamentary politics, it occurs to me that the former PM must have really wanted to be PM. Perhaps she thought she deserved it. Perhaps they all did, all the ministers and who’ve come and gone recently. Perhaps they wanted their hour on the stage, their soundbite moment. Perhaps refusing to talk to the OBR about policies already shared over champagne by the super-rich, or dreaming of planes to Rwanda, or bullying other adults in the lobby queue, or spouting crude tropes about the wokerati or taxis, North London and the BBC were so exciting, so life-enhancing that subsequent ignominy will be worth it? The tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Most of us in the public sector would prefer a better résumé.

Two men present themselves to my mind’s eye. One is the former PM, at whose feet much of the blame for the collapse of behaviour in public office must lie. The second is the Secretary of State for Education, Kit Malthouse.  He chose to characterise school and college leaders as ‘hanging on to mediocrity’ and needing ‘constant attention and constant pressure’ to ‘drive it forward’. At least we know where he stands, but upon what evidence does he erect this calumny? I expect he believes that everyone outside the privileged bubble is necessarily mediocre and that all we need is a good shake so that we can be thrustingly excellent like…… Like who, exactly? Like the private schools whose results mysteriously dropped by 40% now that exams are back? Like Tory MPs?

If I wasn’t too mediocre to write a piece on values and virtues, I’d start with the hollowing-out of public life when assertion is the key performance indicator. That what enables the party of law and order to starve the police and the courts of money, the party of levelling-up to give tax relief to the super-rich. Twenty years ago we smarted under deliverance as a political mechanism, where measurement seemed to be more important than content, but that looks like responsible government now. At least politicians were trying to do something rather than just be someone.

And so we need to be really careful about how we teach children to be in schools. Innocent aspirational slogans like ‘Be the best you can be’ or irritating reminders to ‘Follow your dreams’ really won’t do. I’ve ranted at length about schools adopting canonical verse from If to Invictus and what that might mean for humanity, captain of my soul and all that. Self-actualisation is laudable as long as it is not at others’ expense. Our skills must be put to the public service and the common good. Kindness, fairness, honesty, respect and optimism are more important than trampling your neighbour because you‘re worth it.

We had 1525 people through the doors last night for post-16 open night. Everyone one of those young people had hopes and dreams. We’ll try to help as many we can get the qualifications that should open doors, if the vested interests of the elite don’t hold them shut, and if they can afford to eat while studying. Over the years, I’ve met young people who were entirely self-centred at the end of year 13, but they were my failures and they are few.  Most of them are fired with the passion to change the world for the better. Now my fear is that exhortations to do good and serve humanity look hopelessly old-fashioned. I tell children that they could be Prime Minister – but please, not like these people.

Ladies on the bridge, over to you.
 
CR
20.10.22

Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon reported from a North Sea trawler to which he was poorly suited, being too tall and argumentative, and sick all the time. He described ‘six degrees of freedom’ at sea as pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I found that helpful when I was a young Head in stormy waters but I think we’re all feeling it nationally at the moment. Yaw now?

Heavy weather requires something to cling to so I’m returning to my moutons in the woolly shape of some principles I wrote 11 years ago. These have developed a edu-zeitgeist half-life as well as being inflicted on every group of people I’ve ever met. They are a sort-of answer to the perennial question of ‘what are schools for?’ and I wrote them at the time of the coalition government and to help make sense of Gove’s curriculum reforms. Here they are:

1. Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
2. Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society.We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
3. Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities.We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
4. Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world.Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
5. Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
6. Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
7. Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
8. It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
9. Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission.The teacher’s authority to transmit or broker knowledge is given and valued by society
10. Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

 
At the time I was collaborating with Prof Michael Young of the Institute on a book that was published in 2014 and is still being read, called Knowledge and the Future School. Michael and I are chums, so he won’t mind me observing that he’s roughly 200 years old but nonetheless keeps thoughtful tabs on what schools are doing, and why. He’s concerned that schools leap from one two-dimensional solution to another without sufficient mental scrutiny, without thought and without reflection.

In 2011 it was important to conceptualise and reassert the primacy of knowledge in learning – but now we’re in danger again. Post-Covid, people are lurching towards off-the-peg curricula, like the Oak National Academy that sprang up to assist in desperate times but is now set to take over the thinking of a generation of teachers, a Japanese Knotweed of curriculum development. And perhaps schools can’t find space to see that or worry about it in the context of the unfunded pay award, the energy crisis, the fact that families can’t afford to eat and the missing of teacher recruitment targets in eight of the last nine years. By a mile. (Not that we’ll be able to measure anything in a future without maths or geography teachers.)

So what principles might we cling to in this particularly prolonged storm, with buckets of hail being thrown from each side and the siren call of off-the-peg answers sounding through the surge? Here’s my thinking so far:   

1. Knowledge is powerful: it can change the world, person by person.
2. Children need knowledge to interpret the world and broaden their possibilities.
3. Knowledge and understanding bring freedom and requires us to choose how to live
4. Knowledge is real but provisional: it endures and changes.
5. Knowledge gives people the power to think and act in new and better ways
6. Knowledge is social, produced in history: good communities are built on shared knowledge
7. Inequitable distribution of shared and powerful knowledge undermines democracy
8. Schools give unique access to knowledge, skilfully tailored to the growing human
9. Learners volunteer to acquire knowledge when enabled by skilled teachers
10. Good education is not inevitable.  It must not be withheld, misused or devalued.

​Comments welcome, of course.

I was watching a staircase last week and found a youth walking up it backwards, with one hand for the ship, the better to lecture his comrades. This caused significant embouteillage upstream so I issued a cease and desist. He apologised nicely, but I couldn’t tell if it was incipient demagoguery or a concern for safety that inspired him. 

When I visited the Capitol in 1999 the guides walked backward in front of us to prevent anyone slipping off to install Communism. It does feel as though we’re being led backwards at the moment, without reason or rationale.
Pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw are only good to look back on if you didn’t go under. Here’s hoping, for us all.
 
CR
31.9.22    

If you’ve ever corresponded with me you’ll see I have a long sign-off. This is v fashionable among Heads so I have to keep up. Among other things it tells you what I’m reading, that we are an Arts Mark Platinum school (huzzah!), that I’m a Fellow of the Chartered College and that we try to be ethical in all our dealings. It also says that I’m Co-Director of an outfit called the PTI, which stands for Professional Teaching Institute. You’re bored already, but bear with.

This PTI was set up by the former Prince of Wales twenty years ago and used to be called the Prince’s Teaching Institute. It was a school-led response to an increasing centralisation and prescription of what teachers taught and how, a reaction to concerns that children were only being drilled to pass exams and not being offered real, deep, interesting learning. It's never been a pressure group, but an organisation where teachers work with academics, public thinkers and other teachers to share their love of their subjects and find interesting ways of teaching them.  It's independent of government and funded by charitable donation, by philanthropists. The former Prince of Wales was enthusiastic to play a central part.

I got involved about 15 years ago and my last school was an enthusiastic consumer of the PTI’s courses. Tallis is too and we have a PTI Mark for four subject departments and for Leadership. Some of our subject leaders run sessions for other PTI teachers, and we get all of this, residential weekend conferences too in nice venues, for a very small contribution.  

PTI has a full-time Director and I was asked to become Co-Director in 2019: I’m just starting my fourth year. It means that PTI buy a bit under a day a week of my time from Tallis, for which they refund the school at the right rate. I advise them on what’s afoot in schools, and I can talk with donors and such. And that’s how I met the King, our Royal Patron.

When I say ‘met the King’, I mean I’ve met him four times. We’ve talked and he has expressed his concerns and views. He’s interested in schools and young people – as the long-term success of the excellent Prince’s Trust shows – and in what they can learn. The photo is of me being introduced to for the first time at a dinner (hence my extraordinary outfit).
​
So when the papers say that the King has a real interest in the education and wellbeing of all young people, I can tell you that’s true. I’ve heard it from the man himself. I think that’s a good thing. I’ll invite him to visit!
 
CR
14.9.22

Today’s the day when we get year 7 and year 12 into school. They’ve made a good start – quiet, cheerful and as efficient as young people get. Year 7’s bags are gleamingly clean, their turquoise polos shine in the sun and new shoes of all stiffnesses doing well so far.

We have over 400 year 12s and every one of them has agonised over their outfit so they’re a good-looking bunch. Why so many? Well, London results stayed high so lots of children met the entry requirements and we try to offer them places. Enrolment took all day and – first come, first served – caused some upset. We’ll think about another way of doing it but it's hard to see what’s fairest.

They can at least eat quickly. Year 7 do take their time with lunch: what with the choice, the explaining, the thumbprints and account top-ups. That’s OK today, but from tomorrow there’ll be 540 others in the same space for lunch desperate for food and familiar with the system. We’ll start year 7 early for a while so that they get fed while being gradually speeded up. One young chap in the queue today spotted a fire alarm point’s protective cover saying ‘LIFT HERE’. Being an orderly soul, he did and was promptly swooped upon in a neat pincher by two chaps offering advice. He may not do it again. A life lesson learned: not all instructions are for you. 

As I write, footballs and skipping ropes are being offered in a non-gendered manner and a request for a couple of big chess sets made. How big? Bring-your-own-horse big? Everyone’s telling me that year 7 look older and bigger than usual but I hadn’t spotted it. I start from a pretty low level in any case. Height-wise. It’s not that I have low standards about how tall eleven-year olds should be.

Oh, all right then, the new PM. Well – she’s worked up through local democracy, she was on Greenwich council, she lives locally and she went to a comprehensive school in Leeds. All these are positive. She’s not a public schoolboy and that certainly is. She went to Oxford from Roundhay School and yet said that it had low expectations? Hmm. I once had a conversation with a Deputy Head Girl in another school. She’d got top grades and one of the university hot tickets, but gave the school satisfactory grades for how they’d supported her. Frankly, they’d bent over backwards but I wasn’t worried: young people are naturally solipsistic. You just hope that hindsight develops a clearer picture over the years. Perhaps the new PM can’t unsay things. Is that a good thing?

Today’s speech did, however, stick a couple of things in my itchy old ears. Boris Johnson, she said, was admired from Kyiv to Carlisle. Rapturous applause was slightly delayed, perhaps because it had to be relayed from Kyiv at a time when they’ve other things to think about. Then she asserted that the Conservative Party is the greatest political party on earth, which they applauded more sharply. Really? Were they breathlessly awaiting the 1922 committee verdict across the continents and oceans of the planet? And even if it were, pulling back on climate crisis measures should dent that claim a little? Or is there greatness yet to unleash, unseen in my lifetime so far? Excellent news if so.

Ms Truss is my 13th PM, but that’s not her fault. Democracy is rooted in optimism so we always hope for the best.   That’s what I’ll tell the young when I’m let loose on assemblies next week: we do the best of things in the worst of times and hope in the face of adversity. That’ll be after I’ve told the staff to keep their fears about heating and food bills to themselves. Tallis will be warm enough, and the children fed every day. The safe boundary around school will be maintained and we will proceed calmly and reliably as the year goes by and the outside world buffets itself to bits.

Year 12 will be set loose upon the world in 2024, old enough to vote. The eleven-year olds in year 7 have only lived under one kind of government. The Financial Times predicts a change for the better coming soon. I hope they’re right.   

At the beginning of this auspicious Tallis 50 year I undertook to write a daily diary as a record. I expected to generate a pithy epigram or even a lasting aphorism that, taken collectively would sum up what a good big school is like, how the year goes and the seasons change. It would be a magnificent tone poem, a hymn of praise to the comprehensive school in all its glory. I would capture that ineffable ‘feel’ of a school, that thing that happens when you walk in and know what it’s like, within seconds, and want to run a mile or stay forever.

Anyone looking at the diary on the Tallis 50 site will know that I have signally failed in this task. It started off longer and vaguely elegantly worded but has now descended into a sort of gruff telegraphese which those in charge have had to hassle me to finish as I’d lost heart. The best I can hope is that it works in the future as a sort of record of what a school year’s like. The diary – as opposed to the year -  is actually not very interesting at all, while being absolutely fascinating in another dimension.

It’s a bit like asking a teenager ‘what did you do at school today?’ and being met with a grunt that means – this stretch of time was important to me. It’s been interesting in a way I’m still processing. You wouldn’t understand, and I’m not sure I do, yet. 

The diary was another attempt to encapsulate what good schools do. They breath, they sing, they hum over a sort of heartbeat of their own. They are reliable, solid, steady but also surprising, flexible and a bit unpredictable in the right way. The way other people measure schools is wrong, but the way we measure them is impossibly unpindownable, about character and ethos, yes, but about the feel.

Anyway. Final weeks of term are always showcases for character or characters. Teachers are hauling themselves to that finish line, other staff looking ahead to a tidier new year which, in real terms is minutes away. Children are irritable but vaguely excited.

The added gift this year has been the heatwave, a sure sign of the climate disaster to come, but also similar to the great three-week heat of ’76 when I was in the fourth year (year 10 in old money). I actually don’t remember much about it except a vague disappointment that it didn’t happen the following year when I had more time for it. This week’s heat was extraordinary, and we only had about half the children in school, due to what was, I think, inevitably poor quality government messaging. Our blessed building is large and mostly well ventilated, cool in some parts but too hot in others. For for the children there was enough shade and the chance to sit under a veranda, a tree, or indoors in the cool of the hall and talk.

I insisted on staying open for two reasons. First, because schools should be open. We must be completely reliable organisations, at the heart of society, calm and consistent especially for children who yearn to find that in adults.  Second because our big space, no matter how hot block 1 got, is cooler and airier than a crowded flat with no garden. Children deserve us when the going gets tough. And besides, end of year awards assemblies gotta happen.

So my thanks to the teachers who saw their colleagues in other schools sent home early, but struggled with our inconsistent air-handling and PFI response systems. My thanks to the premises staff on the ground who worked so hard to help us, and my thanks to the community who made a new memory together. No thanks to the Tory leadership candidates who’ll dump the green levy and sacrifice us all in their mendacious pursuits. My thanks to the architects of Tallis 50: we’ve had a great year. If you’d like a copy of our souvenir booklet do call into reception or email me. It’s an easy read. 

My thanks to everyone aboard HMS Tallis As the year ends and we enter harbour, especially to those who disembark for good this year. They’ve made their mark and we are better for their company on the voyage.
And my thanks to this remarkable school. Together, we have our imperfections. We’re necessarily fluid, experimental and messy, but our journey together is into the heart of education for the big world, that we need first to understand, and then change.

Auf wiedersehen. September will soon be upon us.

CR  
21.7.22

Monday I was talking to a group of arts educators at the Royal Opera House. I told them a few war stories and talked about the need for courage in school leadership, not to be blown about by conformity, government or exam board whims and exigencies, but to be principled and take the long view.

Actually, it was a wonder I spoke at all. While I was waiting to perform I took the radical step of checking my notes, a single page printout of nine slides. Upon reading, I was seized with panic that this was the day when I was finally exposed as having comprehensively lost it. Excellent individual points but joined up randomly, conveying no sense even to me. Struth, what to do? It was a 20-minute ‘provocation’ slot so I could potentially do it slide-less, but incoherent ramblings seemed unnecessarily provoking for an outfit paying Tallis for my services. Taking a last despairing breath I shook myself and looked again, just to discover that the printout was vertical but I’d been reading it horizontally like an idiot. It now made perfect sense. Revival of stout party.

I tell you this as it took me right back to being in exams at school, reading something that I thought I knew but actually didn’t recognise at all. It is absolutely terrifying, and I was filled with admiration for the fortitude of our young people walking calmly into so many exam rooms this last six long weeks rather than screaming in terror and fastening themselves to the banisters, which I very nearly did.

It was a joy, therefore, next morning at Tallis, to chance upon 5 questing chaps who introduced themselves as four astronomers and a Russian speaker in search of exams. I found the room, they thanked me gravely and unflappably and went to face their foe.

Back at the Opera House, I told them about visiting the RA Summer Exhibition last Saturday where himself and I engaged in pointless bickering in the shop afterwards. He concluded with a flourish, declaring ‘your trouble, Carolyn, is that you’re a conformist’. This stung, and despite many witty ripostes in the following week it repeats.

Thursday I found myself gladly introducing and welcoming five visiting academics to the inaugural Tallis Philosophy conference in partnership with the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I said that it was often frustrating to children to discover that what we teach them, especially in exam years, is partial and not the totality of human knowledge on a subject. What about all the other stuff they might be interested in? I found myself saying that schools are essentially conservative institutions and that’s why we need close links with the academy, to keep in touch with what’s new, to keep in touch with professional thinkers.

It's odd to be conservative, liberal and radical at the same time, but that’s what we try to be at Tallis. We fulfil the role of a school (a bit conservative) but we allow a lot of freedoms within that boundary (liberal) and we challenge outdated views as we try to change the world for the better (radical). You need your wits about you to manage all three. Getting your slides in order would be a start.

People are therefore kind enough to give me leadership books from time to time and I’ve been amusing myself by opening a volume on the transferable lessons of commanding a submarine, when I write the staff bulletin every week. This week was about ‘maintaining the tickler’. If you don’t mind me asking, how’s yours?

Returning to the arts, last year someone gave me a beautiful edition of Philip Larkin’s poems. Larkin has been quite in the news, having been excised from exam board OCR’s GCSE Eng Lit specification, so that the assigned poets might be more representative of global writing. The Secretary of State, among others, is furious about this, saying that Larkin was his gateway to poetry and that all children should read him, that to deny him was denying great art to students who might never get it otherwise.  
 
Hmmm. It is the gateway that’s the thing. Teachers always ask themselves: what do we want children to learn and to know? What do we want alongside them as they leave the room? All other arguments notwithstanding, what I want is for children to love poetry and to want to read it, to find within it an expression of their unspoken feelings, fears and worries, hopes and dreams. Therefore, it has to make sense to them at the time. It has to be readable and speak to their condition.

Larkin’s poetry will survive whether or not every sixteen-year-old is forced to read it and, crucially, more of them might seek him out as adults if they’ve been introduced to other poetry that seizes their souls when they’re in school. Teaching poetry at all might be seen as a conservative or radical act by some, but engaging with art in any form should never be about conformity.  We don’t all have to read the same verses, but the verses that open the doors to the child, at that time.  Enabling children to see something of themselves in the curriculum choices we make should help them, to make interesting choices for themselves as adults. We are laying the foundation to build a better world. Or, as the man says, in his first published poem, a different ship:

Well, Lord Geidt, quite the stir. Despite a mini-obsession with ethics, I hadn’t really clocked him until this week. I was still stuck on the resignation of the last one, Alexander Allen over Priti Patel’s bullying and didn’t realise the PM had got on with recruiting and destroying another one. He is a busy bee. This Geidt looks pretty tough on Google.  Perhaps he decided that life in Downing Street compared badly with Bosnia and other war zones of his military and diplomatic service, or with his years at The Palace, though I expect it can get pretty excitable there.

Tim Harford was writing about ethics, or more particularly about metacognition versus virtue in the FT last Saturday (don’t worry, this’ll get scrappier soon). Metacognition, teaching people how to think is next to impossible to define, so what about looking at what kind of people emerge from education? How have their temperaments and virtues benefitted from years of investment? Harford suggests love of truth, honesty about one’s failings, fair-mindedness, humility and a willingness to seek help, perseverance, courage, good listening, perspective-taking, empathy and wisdom make for better learners. Others added the ability to see connections and a sense of humour, humanity and getting-stuff-done-ness. Persuasiveness (hmmm). Curiosity. 

One of Harford’s correspondents objected, saying it wasn’t her place to teach students how to be good people. But if not, who?  He ends the piece, having admirably made not one reference to the PM, with ‘And if we don’t know who will teach those virtues or how to teach them, that explains a lot about the world in which we now live’.
You heard it here first. We‘re queasy about the language of virtue, and the churches don’t fill the space any more, so who teaches young people how to live a good life? Obviously: we do. Teachers and parents, schools. Unfortunately, the cheaply functionalist, any-means-necessary, measure-by-results, structure-not-quality mechanisms of our system drown the virtuous route: sustained endeavour, curiosity, substance, breadth, depth, kindness and selflessness.

Did the Times Education Commission report, published this week to deafening fanfares, dive into this, I hear you cry? Not so much. Their twelve-point, forty-five recommendation plan is interesting. There is much collusion with government policy hidden in the very small print, such as the outrageous ‘elite sixth forms’ cuckooed into disadvantaged areas, for example. Some of the narrative smacks of poverty tourism and paternalism such as ‘private schools understand all too well that there must be more to education than knowledge’. The ‘teachers are heroes’ damaging trope is given another run out – heroes don’t need paying properly, of course – as is the inevitable Birbalsingh. While any document using ‘superhead’ should be flung across the room, the commitment to broad, deep and memorable educational experiences appears to be real.  It would be churlish not to quote the first two recommendations, a 15-year strategy for education run by an independent body, and an end to three-year funding cycles. Oh yes.

The other report this week is from the Rethinking Assessment group, a coalition of educators trying to reframe the way we assess schooling and what children know. There’s much to be said for this. Perhaps the combination of the two might dislodge something?
 
What’s not included, in either, is a broad, deep or even memorable critique of our divided society, and the effects of cynicism, slovenliness and playing it for laughs in public life on our children. Both reports have a serious tone, but the Department is congenitally obsessed with structural reform, and the PM doesn’t seem to have time to care about anything other than continuing to be PM against the odds. I’m not holding my breath. 
 
But I write this at lunchtime on the hottest day of the year and, despite some rather coarse inter-student shouting I can hear through my open window, all are cheerful. We got through year 9 Sports Day with a gentle breeze before someone turned the gas up, and when I held the block 4 bridge door open for the hordes almost every single one of them said ‘thank you’ or asked me how I was.  One even blessed me from under a straw hat as she scuttled past determinedly. Three teacher trainees called in to say goodbye at the end of their placements, the GCSE Art moderator has been and gone and, fabulously, among the exams of the day have been Persian and Astronomy.  Wouldn’t it be great if Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar were among the candidates?

We had Tim Oates in school this week, talking about the long-term educational effects of the pandemic and the things we should focus on.  It was good to have him in in the flesh: we started the year thinking about his insights, in September.  And we’ll return to it this September, because in the end, these children in this place haven’t time to wait for the tanker to turn round, even if the order is sent down from the bridge. We have to look to our own skills in teaching and questioning, reading and really thinking hard about the concepts that unlock doors in children’s brains and make them yearn to find out more. We need to put our learning virtues to work. 

Good people, good learning, good classrooms, good schools. If the PM can’t find a replacement for Lord Geidt he doesn’t need to scrap the post. Lots of us could do it. At your service, matey.
 
CR
17.5.22