Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Thank you for the guidance which arrived last week and then, oh joy, more today. The 35 pages on full reopening is pitched well to annoy heads who want more guidance and heads who want less, so it is probably about right.  Apart from asking us to do the impossible, it is a reasonable effort. Separating year groups is a great idea – if you have a 1970s building with year bases, like the old Tallis or the old Pimlico. That was a lesson from the past that no one wanted to revisit during Building Schools for the Future, where we all had to cut down on communal space and no one has anywhere to put children when it rains at lunchtime.
 
So dining is on my mind. I get up early so there’s a long gap after breakfast. That means I go to first lunch with y7 and 8, the bonus being that I can see over the littlest ones’ heads. First lunch is a melee of 500-odd 11-13s, organising themselves pretty well, grasping food and cackling happily as they review the morning, perfectly safe and orderly while making an ear-piercing racket quite different to the rumbling of older children. Second lunch is more crowded with over 800 bigger and hungrier diners reading, tutting, strutting and preening.
 
Let me tell you, we can solve ordinary lunch with no year group mingling but wet lunch? Oh my. Several people have suggested, helpfully, that we could roof over the spaces between the blocks. Well thank you. What? How? And have you seen the cost of a PFI building adjustment? OK, they say, saddened by my mindset: what about a big gazebo? It’d have to be semi-permanent: we’re built on a swamp like Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs and an hour’s rain gives us trench foot and quacking. Umbrellas?   
 
An email enticingly titled ‘toilet amendments’ has just hopped into view. Anyone for latrine detail?
 
The School Council have been reflecting on weightier matters, reviewing our performance since March. They liked the work set and the support, they like Teams. They didn’t like timetable clashes or other students being late for lessons.  They’re doing but missing learning. They want to see their teachers and their friends. Most of all, they want to be together to do something about Black Lives Matter, to talk about it, to demonstrate, to learn about institutional racism and to hold us to account. Other things can wait: ‘all of the focus at the moment needs to be on Black Lives Matter.’  We expected no less and we’re on it. See what happens when a school focuses on understanding the world and changing it for the better?
 
Returning to the matter under advisement, Mr Williamson, I cannot tell a lie. Your other guidance has annoyed me.  Today we got 4 pages: a Checklist for school leaders to support full opening: behaviour and attendance. First, a quibble. A checklist needs boxes to tick. Scattering it with bullet-point ticks makes it instructions. Second, its really annoying. 

Simon Hoggart, may he rest in peace, invented his Law of Inverse Absurdity one Saturday morning in the Guardian for just such a document. Let me entertain you.

Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Part 1: Thursday 25 June
You were spotted in SW1 earlier this week and the fieldman’s report (I’m reading Le Carré) classified you as ‘preoccupied’. I’m not surprised. I feared for your state of mind before the current shenanigans began and I can’t imagine what it’s like navigating the corridors of power with your colleagues. Seeing them on the telly requires nerves of steel.

Unlike watching us! Tallis was on the box on Monday. BBC London came and filmed a newly-regathered half A-level Psychology class, interviewed Mr Smith, four thoughtful youths and me. They said that being back helped focus their minds: I said that having no children was scrambling mine but that the 2m rule would need to be gone – and all the bubble talk – before we could reassemble.

So we plugged the gogglebox in the dining room in on Tuesday lunchtime to watch the PM forecast the future. Social distancing meant those at the reception end needed binoculars, but never mind, I had a front seat. Good news: everyone back to school in September! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear and I tried to encourage moderate cheering. Some HTs are worried about the detail, but I’m sure you have it all under control. In fact, my pavement artist (Le Carré again) said it looked as though it was all in your bag.   
 
Perhaps one of those bright young things who nip around ministers fore and aft could sort it out a bit for you, though? Headteachers are fussy and we like things to be clear. It would be great to see which rules we have to follow in school, which are optional, which just occurred to a front-bencher while they were cleaning their teeth, which have been abandoned, which denied and which are ideas being road-tested before becoming policy which may never be heard of again. My primary colleagues, blessings on their tiny furniture, were certainly shocked this week to be told that 2m in school had never been a rule for them. Are you sure? 

And what about this rumour afloat that the exams might be pushed back a few weeks next year to maximise teaching time. That’s partially a good idea – but oh my, wouldn’t it have been better to test it out below decks before musing from the bridge? Now everyone’s asking about it and no one has the foggiest.

And without wishing to reopen a wound, since The Drive To Barnard Castle the whole cabinet’s seaworthiness is questionable, like a teacher who lost control of a class in October but has to survive until July. Was he worth it?    

Mr Williamson, I’ve been thinking about exams too, nursing a fond hope that the experience of this year might usher in a better future. Why have GCSEs at all?  Why not base the 16-year-olds’ passport on teacher assessment, moderated in the way this year’s will be, properly evaluated and monitored by nerdy subject-based inspectors who really know their stuff? That’s who Her Majesty’s Inspectors were before Ofsted was invented. Wouldn’t it be great to liberate learning by dispensing with GCSE? Wouldn’t it be great if year 11 marked their transition without the examination hall as the rite of passage? Remember, it only remotely works for two thirds of them.

Like the hapless October teacher we’re not very good at some kinds of learning so we end up having to keep promising the same changes time and again. I took two years out of teaching before I had my children and worked as a Community Relations Officer in the midlands. The 80s were a time of disturbance in Birmingham and London which resulted in a significant amount of Home Office funding for projects to tackle the racism and social exclusion. Most of the focus was on anti-racism training for individuals, but we understood about institutionalised racism and encouraged institutions to scrutinise their processes to combat it. Fifteen years later there was the McPherson Report. Now, twenty years after that, ten years after the Public Sector Equality Duty, where are we, exactly? And how can any government mired in the Windrush depatriations and the Hostile Environment be believed?

I saw a photo in the paper of a novel idea in a Chinese school to keep small-ish children apart. They had very serious expressions for persons in purple paper wings but it just goes to show that children will accept anything as normal if an adult tells them so. Children will believe a lie if someone they trust tells it. That’s why we have to tell them the truth and that’s why we can’t keep fobbing them off with change tomorrow.

Education, equality and justice are really hard to get right. Your Shadow has fallen today. You’re picking your way, Mr Williamson, through very difficult circumstances and you don’t look very steady on your own feet. Tell us the truth, talk to us and trust us and we can rebuild something righteous and grand, together.

Yours, at some distance.
 
Carolyn Roberts
26.6.20 

Hancock’s Half-Hour
 
Dear Mr Williamson,

You look more than usually frazzled at the moment so I thought I’d try to cheer you up. Would you like a joke about the Marmite shortage? It’s all stuck in a lorry travelling yeastbound. Sorry, perhaps that’s the wrong joke for someone accused of being asleep at the wheel this week.

Perhaps an undemanding film would help? Steve Martin’s 1987 Roxanne has long been a favourite on the Roberts sofa. He plays the frustrated Fire Chief of a small town whose crew are hard to train. At one point he says:

Dear Mr Williamson,

It’s a while since I’ve bothered you with my thoughts, so I expect you’re pleased to hear from me. I thought you’d like to know a bit more about my childhood?

I may have mentioned that my mother was a teacher, and her mother before her, und so weiter. This, combined with very fixed views on child-rearing much less common in the early 60s than they are now, lent a particular tone to my upbringing. I never had a book that reinforced gender roles or a pink toy. Dolls were out, and she once gave a present back to Santa in Robinson’s department store because it was a girlie one and took one from the bin marked Boys. (A plastic Tommy gun, a story for another day). She particularly objected to the reinforcement of middle-class values and twee-ness in children’s literature. You can imagine that I never went to Narnia, but I did smuggle school stories in when I was old enough to buy them myself.

This has obviously set me up for life pretty well but with attendant scarring. One such is that I cannot abide childish language in adults: the word ‘yummy’, for example, brings me out in a rash. It was this phobia that made me so cross all last Saturday to the extent that one of my housemates took to the cocktail handbook to find a cure.  What am I blithering on about? This:

This was the final part of the Children’s Commissioner’s press release on the controversy about reopening schools. You can read it all here.

I could be annoyed by the inference that the teacher unions don’t represent the huge majority of teachers, or the outrageous suggestion that they – and schools – are not trying to keep children safe. I could be annoyed about the assumption that the government are foolishly relying on a vaccine: they can defend themselves. I’m absolutely incandescent about ‘squabbling’.

The Children’s Commissioner’s role is to advocate for the most vulnerable and she and her predecessors have done it admirably. It is an important and distinguished public office and a hallmark of a civilised society. So why denigrate, belittle, ridicule the efforts of the only universal service for children? Why use baby language, as if government and those who represent teachers were naughty toddlers, or just need their heads banging together, taking one to bray the other as we used to say in the peace-loving Republic of Teesside? I’d have tutted at the radio if she’d used ‘arguing’ but I wouldn’t have been grinding my teeth about it nearly a week later.

Why? There is an assumption perpetually lurking just under the surface in England that almost anyone could run schools better than teachers, that almost anyone has the best interests of children closer to their hearts than teachers and that teachers are only after long holidays and lounging around being retro-Communists. This assumption has popped its head above the grimy water in the last week, fished up by Gove, and added absolutely no nutritional value to the discussion. Primary Heads are being asked to do the impossible with such weak guidance that it is negligent. Secondaries haven’t had any guidance at all yet – and all this because the PM had to have a sound-bite a week gone Sunday rather than a plan. Were you warned, Mr Williamson?

I’m very willing to admit that this is misplaced annoyance. I warned you about my upbringing in the first paragraph. It's just a word. But to me it is a word that plays to the gallery, that treats teachers as if they were children and just need to stop being silly. That imagines that people who work with children do it because they’re immature in some way and need to be told what to do by people with proper jobs. 
           
The teacher unions have been around for a long time. They represent an educated workforce that is professionally incapable of being fobbed off. I’ve written endlessly that teachers are both public servants and role models in society: in neither of those roles can we take instruction or information on trust without questioning it. It’s just not in our DNA. At our best, we cannot stop questioning until we reach the truth – because that’s what you want us to instil in all our children. Yes, the conversations are, I believe, very difficult for all concerned, but as they concern the health of the national children, why shouldn’t they be, Mr Williamson?

We’re nearly done for half term and we’ll be closed on Monday for the first time in ages – before being open for the rest of the week. It’s the kind of weather that would make for a lively Friday afternoon before a holiday in normal time. Our young inmates finish the week cheerfully, rushing around the daily mile today circling and chasing each other like lion cubs in the wind. Our buildings stand clean and quiet. We’re waving at a distance until we welcome them back, safely. Are you waving or drowning, Mr Williamson?

As ever,

​CR
22.5.20

I don’t object to a rainbow. There’s a rainbow flag in the pen-pot on my desk that I crossed a rainbow zebra to get from Harvey Milk’s camera shop in the Castro in San Francisco. Our rainbow zebras in London remind us to be kind and fair while they brighten up the streets. Desmond Tutu gave Nelson Mandela ‘rainbow nation’, a vision of peace and hope. There are rainbow lanyards at Tallis. The current rainbows are cheerful and help us share a feeling. It’s nice to see them from my bike as I pass speedily along bus-free bus lanes. Can you feel a ‘but’ coming on?

I spent a lot of time in church in my youth and sometimes had to memorise bible texts including, as a small child, the end of the Noah story. In this the rainbow appears as the covenant between creator and people following the promise that – as I remember it - while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. This troubled me. I’d been shocked by TV pictures of Biafra and it seemed to me that seedtime and harvest were particularly unreliable in some places. The question is still indelible and unanswered in my head: what sort of promise was this?  

Well, rainbows are about hope, both in the present and the future. A rainbow says, ‘there’s a problem here which we can solve with goodwill on all sides.’ So, given the scale of the current problem, how do rainbows help? 

It's good to show solidarity with fellow public-servants working very hard to mitigate our problem. Thursday night pan-banging does the same. But forgive me for saying that neither rainbows nor pans solve the pandemic nor should they be used to distract our attention from sober analysis of its lessons. I can’t watch the news at the moment because it’s heavy on speculation and distraction and light on science, supplies and politics. Even with a pan in my paw and a rainbow shopper on my head on my doorstep, I’m still furious - if a ridiculous sight.       

Why? If you look on their website, the NHS describes its foundation thus:

‘the NHS was created out of the ideal that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth. When it was launched by the then minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, on July 5 1948, it was based on 3 core principles:

• that it meet the needs of everyone
• that it be free at the point of delivery
• that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay

 
The NHS Constitution of 2017 says goes on: the NHS belongs to the people and:
‘
It is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives. It works at the limits of science – bringing the highest levels of human knowledge and skill to save lives and improve health. It touches our lives at times of basic human need, when care and compassion are what matter most.’

The NHS is founded on a common set of principles and values that bind together the communities and people it serves – patients and public – and the staff who work for it.’

Yes, that’s what rainbows and the noise celebrate, but funding’s been an issue these ten years and no amount of clapping should distract us from that. There are too few staff and not enough money in the hospitals and surgeries of the land. No wonder government love us using ‘hero’ rhetoric – treating anyone under these circumstances is heroic, but that’s not how public services should function.

My last blog mentioned the silence of Tallis-the-building while Tallis-the-school works from home. I heard Larkin’s Churchgoing on the radio last weekend, about an empty building,  and it spoke anew to me. While the opening line ‘Once I am sure there’s nothing going on’ is true for vast tracts of the Tallis estate, it’s this last verse that speaks to my rainbow fury. 

Imagine the poet speaks not of churches but schools and hospitals:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

We have full hospitals and empty-ish schools. We want to get to a position of emptier hospitals and full schools. We need so to fund and respect both of them that their founding purpose can be fully realised, day by day, in a better world, not glued together and patched up for the short term in every crisis. Our schools and hospitals are serious sites, proper to grow wise in.   

I sit quietly in London sunlight. Parents email me, teachers phone and our little band of children go by on their daily mile. I’m loosely listening to a leadership webinar and reading the Department’s daily briefing. I think we’re doing a decent job under the circumstances but if we took our public services seriously and funded them accordingly when all this is over, we’d do better than that.  We’d honour the hopeful rainbows with better hospitals, a serious memorial to the so many dead.
 
CR
7.5.20   

Dear Mr Williamson,

You’ve got a lot on and it looks as though it’s getting on top of you. If you need some peace and quiet to think, Tallis-the-building has got that. Tallis-the-school, however, is trying to keep itself going.  
 
Let me tell you about the building first. There are so few people here that any movement catches my eye. I looked up yesterday to see a colleague going into one of the blocks. She turned and looked wistfully at the empty concourse before heading into the dark to lead a live A-level lesson. She’s lost family in the virus and may have been thinking about that, but she looked like she was hearing what I hear, the hollow sound of a building holding its breath. 
 
Teachers laugh about school without children being peaceful and tidy, but it’s not new. Anyone who comes in to work in the holidays hears a silence, but it’s different to this silence. Holiday silence is about taking a breath, settling and regrouping ready for the next foray. This silence is different, an absence, not a breather. It’s as if the bricks, the glass and the mighty steel frames are asking what’s happened? Where are they?

We know where they are, but it isn’t here. So I’m wondering about what it’ll sound like when they’re back, and trying to analyse what I’m missing. Noise and busy-ness obviously. The particular sound of the little crossroads outside my office at lesson change contrasting with the purring motor of the main office next door; the racket of 11RA seizing and gathering for afternoon tutor and the Deaf children talking and signing as they go for support.  The personal leitmotif of a colleague’s keys and whistle, of another’s heels and the clatter of the fire door against my wall because the doorstop’s in the wrong place. 

The work we’re doing at the moment is all about maintaining the bones of a school: checking children are OK, sending work, teaching lessons where we can and sorting out work to keep people going. Governance, budgets, teacher recruitment for September. We’re just about holding it together under the circumstances and we’re waiting to hear what happens next. We’ll hear it from you, Mr Williamson, but we’ll hear it from the children too.

And there’s the problem. Schools are designed to be full of bustle, even a bit squashed in parts. They’re designed to be community crucibles in which children learn how to deal with themselves and others. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to look after themselves, and we do it in batches. Social distancing is the opposite of what we do and the infrastructure is all against it. 

Practically speaking, we could keep children 2m apart in class if we had 10 (out of 30) to a standard classroom.  We’d be hard pressed to do it in the corridors and we could probably only feed 60 at once. Children would have to be kept indoors all day to enforce it, being taken out for walks occasionally. We could do this – we could do whatever it takes - but we could only do it for a small number. Even on a giant site like ours that would perhaps be 500 at most – 25%. Which 25%?

Lockdown’s five weeks old now and it's hard, very hard for some. We need to remember why we’re doing it and take care that our next actions are measured and rational. Life will never be the same again and we can’t make up the time we’re losing to Covid-19. We mustn’t unpick the good that’s been done by our unusual national self-discipline and we must especially guard against controversy-as-an-antidote-to-boredom that panics shaky politicians into making bad decisions. This disease kills people who are unprepared, and both our national health and National Health remain at the mercy of national unreadiness.
 
Whatever happens to bring us out of this will have a cost, which we’ll pay for a long time. Some children will learn less than they expected over the course of their school careers, but if we get it right they’ll have the rest of their lives to learn in. If we get it wrong, some of them, and their teachers, won’t.

There are 53 Thankful Villages in England and Wales who lost no one in the Great War. There are tens of thousands of villages and towns who lost people, singly or in big numbers, whole street-fulls in the Blitz, of course. Whatever happens next, we need our schools to come through this Thankful. We need our young people for a better future.  We need to keep them safe now. 

Take care, Mr Williamson.

Yours in hope

CR
24.4.19

Dear Mr Williamson,
​
It was the staircase that did for me on Thursday the 12th, the morning after the announcement that schools would close and the exams were cancelled. We had a mock GCSE Physics exam and proceeded as usual, corralled the youth into the dining room, instructed them about examiners’ wheezes and checked them for pens. Then we send them up to the sports hall in batches, a trip involving four sets of double doors, six sharp turns and two flights of stairs. Old folks position themselves on the stairs encouraging the youth to approach the exam hall in the zone, silently, thinking about physics or whatever tasty dish is on the menu.  

I was on the half landing and frankly, unimpressed. I said to myself ‘This’ll have to improve before the real exams start’ until, as they say in the six counties, I caught myself on. This was it. There weren’t going to be any real exams. It was a miracle of muscle memory and instilled habits that they were walking quietly up the stairs at all. They’d never take Physics GCSE again. Or any other. What? How could that be? What vacuum were we about to enter (as the physicists say)?

For the record, I think the closing of schools and the necessary cancelling of exams was done well and briskly. It gave us just enough time to organise and to talk to year 11 and 13 in particular about their futures. It gave them the chance to see how adults have to mobilise rapidly and change quickly when crisis headbutts the door. At least, I hope that’s what they saw. We’d been doing Virus Q&A in assemblies and had y11 on Wednesday afternoon, two hours before the announcement. The first Q to Roberts was ‘What will happen about the exams?’. ‘Keep working!’ quoth I – ‘Exams will happen no matter what’. When I climbed onto a bench to address y11 the next day had to begin with ‘so you remember the question about the exams?’. They were kind enough to laugh.

Trusting in your skills, sir, to make sure the solution this year is fair and good, this break in the cycle could be a great opportunity to improve education. You’d probably welcome my advice. Are you sitting comfortably?

There are many things wrong with GCSE but the biggest is that it’s completely unnecessary. Until 1951 children who stayed at school past 14 got a School Certificate. That was replaced by GCEs in 1951 for those who stayed on until they were 16. The GCE pointed towards ‘matriculation’ or university entry. Indeed, the exam board AQA was, in my time, the Joint Matriculation Board of the northern redbrick universities. OCR was Oxford and Cambridge, Pearson the London Board. The blessed GCSE was born in 1988 of GCE O-levels and the CSE. They were both qualifications for further study or the job market at 16. A-levels remaining unchanged for nearly 70 years were designed to assess whether a tiny minority of young people were university-ready. We scaled them up but didn’t change their purpose.   
May I pose three questions? The first is: why does everyone have to take an exam that is essentially a filter for university entry two years later, for a minority of students? The second is: If no one can leave school until they’re 18 why does everyone have to take an exam at 16? The third is about the forgotten third. What possible justification is there for an examination that a third of students have to fail?    

You’ll be desperate to hear my solutions so here they are. First, we need to rethink what we want for young people and the nation. University is only one pathway and many, many (most?) jobs are better served by apprenticeships or on-the-job learning at 18. Not everything is examinable by examination. If we finally, formally decoupled most of our assessment system from its elitist past we might also put ourselves in a better position to seek the holy grail for English education, proper parity between academic and vocational strands. Second, we’d still need some kind of assessment because we swap a lot of students around at 16. This remains sensible because they’re old enough to make choices about their aims in life. They need a passport to the next stage. That should be a reliable, trustworthy and standardised set of grades with a particular focus on proficiency in English and maths. Third, that passport needs to be fair and to assess endeavour, not advantage. A child who works very hard but achieves proficiency slowly needs a qualification which tells the receiver what she can do, not what she can’t do. 

The current system which officially uses the word ‘fail’ to describe the school careers of a third of children is not only wrong, but wicked. But my solution is rooted in something much, much bigger.

My passport at 16 would be assessed by teachers, the same teachers that taught the children. Why? Because they’re already there, thousands of skilled education assessors. How? Through assessment based on our current expertise, standardised through the National Reference Tests. These are maths and English tests that a selected sample of children take each year – Tallis did them in 2019. Teachers don’t see those tests or find out the results, but they’re designed to estimate the range of abilities present in a national year group. We have the data we need to do something completely different and much better.

It will require a leap of faith from some earthbound factions. Politicians and policy-makers will have to trust teachers. School leaders will have to trust teachers. Parents and students will have to trust teachers. All of them will have to understand that teachers have a particular skill in assessment that only fails when too much weight is put on it. That skill can easily bear the weight of a single child and it can stand firm under scrutiny, but it can’t be used to measure the success of a school. That needs to be done another way, by a properly funded expert inspectorate using serious longitudinal studies into what helps children learn and what doesn’t. 

Teachers will be honest about assessment if school leaders let them, and if we all agree to lay down the petty rivalries that brought our system to its knees. We can hold each other to account using a nifty little tool that’s live in the system already, the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education. That requires school leaders to show selflessness, integrity, optimism, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. It demands that we do it showing trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We could build a better system on a new level of professional trust.

Out of this terrible experience a better world might be born for our children. Future years might not equate education with exams and exams with failure. They might enjoy school a bit more and love learning for its own sake.  We might train and keep more teachers. Keep an eye on this year, Mr Williamson and have the courage to think big. Sure, we’ll still need some exams at 18, but they’re big enough to walk up the stairs on their own then.

Yours ever, CR   

27.3.20    

Well, Mr Williamson, I’m disappointed. Months of waiting and what do we get? Silent corridors and phone bans?  Really? When I wrote two weeks ago that I’d recognise what you were going to be like by the first things you said I didn’t expect them to be quite so, what shall I say, dog-whistly. Oh dear me no. When we think of the virus and the curriculum, the scrap with Ofsted, the funding, the reappearance of teaching-as-a-career adverts, the recruitment crisis and the sad state of our zero-sum, zero-tolerated young I had hoped for something a bit more hopeful.

Phones are still an open debate in my head but not the corridors. Let me dispense with this. Children talk. They have a range of volumes available to them and a plethora of topics. Some of the foregoing are more acceptable to the genteel adult ear than others. If they’re too loud this can easily be fixed by saying ‘shush’ while applying the finger to the lips. If their discussion lacks civility that can be dealt with by removing them into a corner to offer counsel and issue instruction. However, most of the time they’re talking at a reasonable volume about music, love, books, lessons, teachers, sport, gossip, animals, wars, food and Playstations. You might not tackle to their taste, but civil conversation is good for them and offsets all kinds of problems, from inarticulacy to isolation. Since I last ranted about this I’ve visited Roedean which I’m sure you’ll think is a model to us all. Their corridors sound like ours, full of children talking. What does silence bring? Control, is all. 

Enough of this. I heard the wonderful Will Gompertz talk last week and he told a great story about children describing their GCSE results to each other. One told of a string of A*s and As, another chirpily claimed to be able to beat that because ‘I can spell BEEF DUDE with mine’. How I know that child and how I can picture them falling about with laughter and tears, clutching each other for support. What a racket, what a memory, what a lesson. Both men are successful now, the dude richer than the A, if that’s what matters.

But he also talked about the twin pillars of teen life: social media and exams. Both are solitary, isolating and largely uncontrollable, especially under comparable outcomes and the requirement of a third to fail GCSE. What are we doing to our children?

Anyway, back at Tallis, I was summoned into action by Head of Year 7. ‘I need you to finish off assembly. I have to go and teach and it’ll overrun because of the bees.’ Happy to oblige and make myself unusually useful, I started it off too. Depositing year 7 neatly in rows on the Sports Hall floor we started with coronavirus and the handwashing-Happy Birthday thing. One of the great things about year 7 is that they are young enough to be openly curious and uninhibited enough to prefer an answer to anonymity. A hand shot up. ‘How long it lasts depends on the person’s name, doesn’t it?’ Yes indeed. Let’s call her Eglantyne and practise that.

However, the bee man was unpacking his affairs by then and attention was elsewhere. He had bees, he had hives, he had boxes and he had honey. At some point I ended up holding bees while the younger element asked questions. Some got to hold bees too and some were rewarded with honey. Loads of previously bee-indifferent city dwellers asked detailed and imaginative questions. We frequently had to pause while they discussed bee-related issues with one another and when I finally handed my green parcels back and shooed them off to class the bee-debate was stretching from block 5 to the furthest reach of period 1. (Oh, the green parcels were the bees.  Hibernating – do you think I’m mad?) As I remarked to the meeting I was 20 minutes late for and the phone call I forgot altogether until break – never work with children or bees. All your best lines are lost.

Mr Williamson, wouldn’t it have been a waste if the children had had to be quiet all the way to Art? They were so excited, astounded, bemused about what they’d seen they wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves talking. We’d have had to shush them and tell them off, some might have needed punishing, for talking, about an endangered wonder of creation. Who would have benefited? The bees lived again in the retelling as well as in the buzzing and flapping and the silly laughter as 270 11 and 12-year olds swarmed across the yard. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Well, I suppose that if you’re frightened of children, or if you’re not confident in your relationships with them, or if you think they have nothing to say or nothing to share, or if being in control is more important than teaching children a good way to live you might want it, but it still wouldn’t make sense.

And I suppose that when your corridors are silent you’ll never here the quiet admissions, friend to friend. I’m frightened to go home. I’m hungry again. I don’t want to stay alive. I know something dangerous. I don’t know who to tell. And you don’t get the friend’s advice: tell Miss, tell Sir, come with me and I’ll help. 

It’s not just bees who hold us together. Children’s voices frame the world for some of us, and we count ourselves lucky.
 
CR
12.3.20

Dear Mr Williamson,

I don’t know if you’d agree but some weeks are like an in-tray exercise in a particularly tricky interview. That’s not to say that we aren’t up to the challenge, of course: a good team can handle most things a large school throws up with calm and wit. You’ll find that with your new bunch. But some times are so unusual that you just have to wait and see what they resolve into, like one of those compressed towels in a glass of water. Ah, you say quietly after a while, that’s what this is. All hands to plan 7b.

World Book Day next week can also take some decoding. Some of the little ones like to dress up, but most characters in most books aren’t in any recognisable clothes. A general dress-as-a-character-in-your-favourite-book day just looks like an unfocused non-uniform day. Q: what have you come as? A: one of the class in Pig-Heart boy.  An investigator in Life of Pi. Christopher in the Dog in the Night-time. Vera Stanhope (that’s me, any day, but with a more convincing accent). So: IF your outfit isn’t instantly recognisable – Hamlet, Professor Snape, Fantastic Mr Fox – bring your favourite book in instead, eh? Show art some respect.

I read a lot of school stories as a child, Malory Towers, St Clare’s, Chalet School, but I was too old for Grange Hill and I still avoid school dramas on the telly. I like big schools and producers can’t ever reproduce the hustle and bustle with limited child actors: assemblies just look like a couple of classes have wandered into the hall. There was a Lenny Henry drama once where he ended up jumping off the roof, cheerful, a Julie Walters one where she was irascible all the time, Teachers where no one did any work, and then Waterloo Road. 

I was reminded of Waterloo Road by a young friend, Lucy Holt, winning the 2020 Anthony Burgess Prize for arts journalism last week. She observed:

Dear Mr Williamson,

​I’ve been watching ‘The Young Pope’ on the telly because I share a sofa so I don’t always get to choose what’s on. I’ve observed the scheming top Cardinal hassling the Pope to address the people. We’re still looking forward to hearing from you so may I beg you to do the same? In case you’ve forgotten, my helpful suggestions included school funding, teachers’ pay, school improvement and renationalising the National Curriculum.

Of course, you may be doing nothing at all and waiting for the shuffle, but as you promised to work hard, that can’t be true. I expect you’re locked in a dark room with the good accountants of the Treasury working out a long-term sustainable stable funding package to transform children’s lives.  All power to your manly elbow!

However, the schools of the nation continue to assemble every day and do our bit for the common good so you’ll probably appreciate being kept abreast of same. Items on the agenda at Tallis since we last corresponded include:

1. Getting external support to sort out the behaviour of troubled young folks
2. Dealing with troubled young folks without any support.
3. Telling some year 11s that closing their eyes and hoping they land somewhere in September does not constitute a careers strategy
4. Telling other year 11s that they might want to take a break from revision from time to time.
5. Talking to a DfE official about curriculum breadth and creativity
6. Preparing for a Saturday governor meeting to decide the shape of key stage three and four.
7. Drawing a line under sixth formers who haven’t done any work yet.
8. Thinking about next year’s staffing.
9. Hosting a visitor to look at behaviour and inclusion systems as we all struggle with the effects austerity has had on the stability of home life for the poorest families.   
10. Going to the funeral of a much-loved colleague who died at New Year
11. Trying to foresee all eventualities in our transgender policy
12. Dealing with criminality out of school seeping into school

On the agenda of young people at Tallis this week may have been some of the above plus

1. Wearing hoods indoors in contravention of local byelaws.
2. Learning the difference between the mournful, boisterous, friendly and annoying hug
3. Assessing the distinction between a large woolly hairband and a hat
4. Anticipating conversation at home after parents’ evening (year 8)

Youth ought to be generally carefree and I’m glad they don’t worry about everything we worry about. Mind, sometimes they are causes of worry. I encountered a youth helpfully carrying books from hither to yon, but inexpertly, as if he’d had them tipped into his arms from a laundry basket. We have a lot of stairs at Tallis but he assured me he’d get there safely. As for the books?

I write this with a local copper sitting in my office. He’s not arresting me for offences against the language but clearing up some issues in the locality. Simultaneously I note a campaign to Pause Ofsted in a ‘quiet revolution’ in order to bring about ‘fundamental reform’ in what it does. Have you seen this, Mr Williamson?

These campaigning colleagues believe that Ofsted increases problems for the most vulnerable schools. They make several unarguable points, specifically that the current inspection system

• Destroys the reputation of schools in deprived areas, which are doing the best work in the most difficult circumstances. These are not ‘stuck’, they have been let down by inadequate funding and support. Ofsted has consistently failed to call this out.
• Imposes inspection frameworks which are untried and untested on schools, leading to poor inspection judgements.
• Makes schools the scapegoat for rising child poverty which is the real enemy of learning and progress.

This has been brewing since Ofsted’s unfortunate description of schools whose inspection grades haven’t reached good for many years, or ever, as ‘stuck’. A crude and needlessly disparaging epithet, ‘stuck’ sounds as though no one’s really trying. When I led one of them, they were described as ‘schools facing challenging circumstances’ which is both accurate and respectful of the professionals and children therein. Did I mention offences against the language?

Instructed by one of my sofa-sharers I’ve been reading Machiavelli this week. He observed:

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

CR
​24.1.20

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

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

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

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

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

Yours,
CR

​8.1.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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