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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I picked up two from a conference in March. You should read Steve Peters’ ‘The Chimp Paradox’ about human behaviour and self-control: it’s an engaging and interesting book from a witty and brilliant man. Or you could read Michael Barber’s ‘How To Run a Government So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy’. I was at the conference with an old friend, a considerable thinker, who wouldn't even stay for the lunch in case he accidentally heard Barber speak. I thought he was so interesting that I bought the book. Call me dim, but I don’t think I'd twigged that it would be all about deliverance, and not in the theological sense.

Barber was Blair’s deliverer. He set and monitored targets so that public services could be improved in a principled, systematic way based on serious and sensible aims to improve everyone's lot. I'm entirely in favour of accountability, targets and planning. You'd imagine I'd enjoy the book.

Barber’s a brilliant man by his own admission, and I don't necessarily object to that. He often has exactly the right question to unblock a problem and the leadership to solve it. He recognises brilliance in others. His examples from world public service and history are diverting. He quotes Ontario and Adonis on making changes for the long run and seeing things through, on irreversibility, so that good change stays put and can't be unpicked. But I read his chapter on leadership with one eye while looking at another announcement about coasting schools with another (and poking myself in both in preference to either).

Deliverology (yes!) should build up our public services and reassure the taxpayer. However, I searched in vain for an analysis of Campbell's Law (the target is skewed by the pressure exerted on it). There was little on perverse incentives. Barber reflects on the success of the literacy strategy but doesn't consider the longer supply-side issue of de-professionalising teachers when they became regurgitators of processed materials. He doesn’t address and didn’t predict the current chaos over the mysterious number of teachers in training (we don't really know how many there are) and the huge issue with headteacher recruitment as football manager syndrome decimates our numbers.

Barber tells the bible story of Joseph to illustrate proper financial planning but the dichotomy between determining to achieve a thing and giving it time to happen remains. And don't tell me that children only have one chance at education. Do you think we don't know that? The Joseph story takes at least 14 years: it’s about violence, loss, reconciliation, faithfulness and joy in the beauty and gifts of a child. It might be about deliverance in the older sense and it’s just not that easy.

I stood in the drama studio on Friday morning and looked at 18-year-old Charlotte personally painted in gold leaf. She took my breath away.  The installation - for A level art, about purity and decay - is as good a piece as you'd see in the galleries of the world, as I told year 9 waiting to go in. Celia, giving out the information, is a writer of similar brilliance. Together they'll change the world. But it is their own determination and the depth of care their teachers have taken, over the years spent with these children and thousands of others that brought this wonderful moment. Deliverology stops you squandering public money, but it doesn't bring you a golden girl.

What am I reading? Barber and the Old Testament, Charlotte and Celia.

CR 20.5.15

And as the outside world turns, Mr Gove falls off. A remarkably long-lived post holder, did we lose him because he picked too many fights, or because 1 in 10 women work in education and there’s a women issue? Have we got Ms Morgan because she’s calmer or because she’s female? When will we next have a Secretary of State of any party who went to a state school? Where are the 93% in politics? Why are the 7% in charge even in Sanctuary Buildings? Is there no one who understands how we live, to direct what we become?

In the week when the Trojan Horse inquiry reports, perhaps we should muse on our sun-loungers on where the manipulation of schooling structures has brought us. Autonomy is not an educational good of itself and neither is freedom. What joins us together is worth more than what sets us apart.  We need the Nolan values of selflessness, honesty, objectivity, leadership, openness, integrity and accountability. We need the principles of public education to be publicly understood and agreed. 

However, it is week 39 and I won’t solve that this term. I’m a fan of the Cornish poet Charles Causley, a former primary school teacher. He wrote a wonderful poem about the end of a school day whose opening words fit the end of term too:

                  At 4 o’clock the building enters harbour
                  All day it seems that we have been at sea
                  Now having lurched through the last of the water
                  We lie stone-safe beside the jumping quay.   

The good ship Tallis has reached safe harbour for 2013-4 and now we’ll take a little shore leave. We’ll see what August brings and chart our next course from September. Wherever your dinghy takes you over the summer, I hope the weather is set fair for you and yours. 

CR 22.7.14  

But our highlights were the TTRA Ceremonies for years 11 and 13. We’ve been looking forward to this all year but frankly, I didn’t know what to expect. My last entanglement with a record of achievement was when some Secretary of State decreed burgundy vinyl folders containing one’s life: a sort of judgement-day tome in plastic sleeves.Our day was wonderful! Yes, there were folders (blue), but our real achievement was gussied up in their smartest, ready to be applauded. Our young people came to celebrate their school life with their peers, their teachers and their families. We had hundreds of names, speeches, prizes, awards, the inevitable hugging, a buffet afterwards and lovely photos taken.  We had music and goodbyes especially to the year 11 band – their final final act – and to Ms Armstrong. She sang Thank You for the Days to the 240 young people she’s loved and hassled for five years: not a dry eye in the house.

Leaving only time for me to spill cream down my big green dress and wash it in the sink, the evening celebration was for year 13. In an evening beautifully compered by students we had goodbyes from form tutors, another final final band performance, Schubert and Shakespeare and two old boys come to tell us about the world outside. This young surgeon and barrister talked about the community and support, the teaching and the values, the Tallis bonus that still gives them the edge. There were prizes at both of these gatherings, for excellence and for effort, but do you know what was the best thing about them? We celebrated our young people before the exams calibrate and codify them. Real young people, real achievement, measured and assessed by real people.

Did you spot a note of asperity there? Apols. We’ve celebrated a good year in a strong school but the national rhetoric still swirls a fog around us. Isn’t it a hoot when we’re getting used to structures being dismantled to hear that HMCI thinks Local Authorities should have the oversight of schools in an area? Isn’t it just a scream when increased freedom means favouring one sort of school? And don’t you just love it when the dirigiste reappears and whacks you in the face. Of course we care about FGM and we’ll do anything we can to stop such inhumanity, but this year’s Most Risible Sound Bite prize goes to Monday’s threat that schools will have funding withheld if the Head hasn’t read the Safeguarding Guidance. Good grief. Why wouldn‘t we read it? Which bit of the money is going to be cut, from which children? Who’s going to come and test me? Will that stop it happening? Exactly what kind of freedom is this, underpinned by what sort of trust?

So we’ve another week-and-a half to go, with everything from Dr Bike and his puncture repairs (free breakfast for cyclists) to an open forum for parents and the launch of our grand piano.  We’ll have some staff farewells (sad) and other end-of-term shenanigans, (generally happy). I’ll thank leaving colleagues for their years of service to the children and to a job both inspiring and infuriating, then I’ll go and lie down quietly for a couple of weeks. 

A very happy summer to all our readers!

CR

10.7.14  

Anyway, I have had cause to consider the measuring of what we do. Is it reasonable to measure the progress of children and schools?  Yes. Is it reasonable to investigate whether that achievement, behaviour, teaching and leadership are up to scratch? Yes. Does this damage schools?  Probably not: the new schedule, as we winsomely call it, is much more sensible than it has ever been before. Does it give a full picture? Maybe not. As Dougal once said to Father Ted about bishops ‘Ah Ted, they just come in, fumigate the place and then they’re gone.’

Children are both oblivious to and troubled by OFSTED. Generally speaking, adult concerns are tedious and while they are nosey about what’s going on, they get back to the dramas of their own existence sharpish. Suits and clipboards are not crowd-pullers. They’re more likely to be outraged by the sheer impertinence of inspection – who are these people?  What do you mean, they’re seeing if the school’s alright? Of course it is. Young people see themselves as arbiters of quality: who are these amateurs?

One inspector had had a conversation with a couple of young people over a bin. The responses were thoughtful and interesting, one pictures chin-stroking. I think that’s a good way to find out about a school, but the child was unimpressed ‘He talked to me over a bin.  Seriously?’ Another small member was perturbed by the whole experience. Tuesday break he asked me if they’d arrived, and at lunchtime how long they were staying.  When we reconvened Wednesday break he shook his head in disbelief that they were still among us. ‘How long can this go on?’ he despaired. He’d have hated it when they stayed for a week.

But after it was over school life picked up again as if the previous 54 hours hadn’t happened. Last week’s dance showcase had fully 29 acts and the time flew, like the dancers. Despite the suits we had a street hockey launch day with remarkably few bruises. 30 Norwegians came to maths. New teachers have been interviewed and appointed for this expanding school: 4 this week, despite OFSTED. Outdoor ping pong proves popular. Photography and art exams happen.  

Last night, immediately post inspection, our A level creative writing students performed work from their residential week, to a packed studio audience. Their poetry and prose was witty, poised, serious and a balm to the soul. The anthology is called Everything In between, an apt title for the week. We’ve been scrutinised and picked over, our practice laid bare under 4 inspection headings but it’s everything in between that makes us what we are and who we are: Tallis happy, Tallis proud.

CR 2.5.14