Mrs Roberts Writes

The Best of things in the Worst of times

23/7/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR
22.7.21

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The end of time

20/7/2019

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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:

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.

Causley talks about ‘a squabble of children’ wandering off, a lovely image. I’ve just watched ours go, from under the shelter of my Tallis umbrella, some with a bounce and a spring in their step, some filled with dread for the long weeks without the safety of school. Safe home, safe return.

And after that? The place will be clean, ready and open for the training days in September and on Wednesday 4th our children return to us. We will be utterly changed but absolutely the same. It’s a glorious privilege.

CR
19.7.19

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Time to press pause

20/7/2018

6 Comments

It is the end of the year. Let me tell you we have had the best end of year. The greatest. So good, the top end of special.

I apologise if this sounds Trumpery but fear not. When I say we’ve had the best end of term that’s what I actually mean. I don’t misspeak and say that we have had the worst end of term, depending on the audience. What are we meant to do with this stuff?

We have surely crammed a lot into the last weeks. Bugsy Malone was huge, over a hundred in the cast and running for four nights. Some parents came every night. Primary schools come to watch the show’s dress rehearsal and we got them settled. Then we offered a toilet opportunity, 100 of them take it up and we have to start all over again. Then the microphones don’t work – but it’s alright on the nights. The set is all-conquering. We certificate the sixth form leavers from Fat Sam’s Speakeasy, above the bar.

Our routines are a little affected. Year 10 line up for assembly tidily but I decide that occupying the hall on the morning of the first show might be best avoided. We walk year 10 in silence to the Dojo just to find the outdoor and adventurous activity briefing underway. We perform and about turn and walk up to the sports hall where muscle memory triggers crossed legs on the hard floor. It’s a surreal experience: 270 children and a dozen staff in search of an assembly. We could have kept walking until we’d done our daily mile: the yard was my last resort.
A colleague warns me she’s annoyed, but goes for a run and cheers up. A musician works with a dancer on Motion Sickness, cello and Bach as part of our practice-based appraisal option. A leaver sells his paintings for charity. New teachers visit. Newly-qualified teachers breathe a sigh of relief at another hurdle jumped. I follow a small child rushing over the bridge in pursuit of a youth too cool to listen to her frankly impertinent cry of ‘Alice’s brother! Alice’s brother! Come to me’.

Parents contact me: some to complain that early holiday isn’t authorised, some to congratulate on specific things we’ve done or the general way of things, some to ask questions, some to advise, some helpful ideas, some impossible, but all welcome.

There’s only one taker for Waistcoat Wednesday, though we like young Southgate who appears to value character. Others say allez le bleus, insouciant.

We celebrate too, assemblies with certificates for attendance, endeavour, habits and character with advice on how to be a good audience thrown in gratis. Some prizes come with a pre-installed learning experience. I encounter Ms S on the yard with her form: a prize box of chocs caused 12 wrappers on the floor so now everyone’s tidying the yard.

And a final visit from Mr Brown’s dog. She enjoys the sleep of the just in a leadership group meeting but wakes to snuffle around a bit, startling a member who suspects one of the blameless brethren of unprecedented inappropriateness. Mr Brown himself departs. I’ll miss his comprehensive range of opinions and barely-concealed righteous fury on behalf of the nation’s young.

Which is justifiable if for no other reason than we head into the hols with no word from the School Teachers’ Review Body. This affects everyone’s budgets: discovering in September that a proposed teacher pay deal might or might not happen, or be funded will make for an excitable start of term. Perhaps they’ll put out the news on the same day as the results in the hols, in the hopes Heads won’t see it. Or next week, when we’re all having a lie down. As the unions have said to the Secretary of State:

…it is surely not unreasonable to expect that a fundamental role of government is to govern in an orderly and timely manner and not precipitate uncertainty and a sense of crisis. The current delay fails this basic test and is entirely unacceptable.

It’ll affect school next year, and you’d expect me to be able to tell you how.

But our last assembly together was as lovely as ever. We change our world for the better year by year. Our children will have to do it for all of us when they take on the mantle of adult citizenry, but do you know something? I think we’re in good hands.

CR
20.7.18

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The calm before...

6/9/2017

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Welcome to new readers. I write a blog at least once a fortnight and more often if I feel particularly opinionated about something. Some blogs contain useful information, but there’s a lot of that elsewhere on the website, so these pieces are reflections on the state of education as seen, 39 weeks a yea,r on Kidbrooke Park Road.
This week’s piece is in two parts. Part 1 is before our children come back to us, part 2 after. I’ll tell you how the day went!

September 6th 2017 part 1

We’ve talked and tidied and ourselves for two days since the holidays ended and now we’re ready to welcome our young people back. We think we’re ready now, so we’ll fling wide the gates and get the show on the road for another year. Term begins with welcomes to new starters – largely year 7 and year 12 – lots of assemblies, raucous and refined reunions, some tears (from anxious parents) and a lot of hugging. Day 1 is peak hug, which is saying something.

Saying goodbye in the summer term is a really strange experience. We have a lovely last morning, a bit of a celebration and then everyone walks away and disappears back into the undergrowth. People joke about schools being very peaceful without children but actually, they’re not schools at all without children, just big public buildings filled with emptiness and unanswered questions. Two odd ones today. What’s the difference between a noticeboard and a sound baffle? and Have we enough desks? I’ve never given the former a moment’s thought or thought to worry about the latter. I expect it’ll all be fine. What if I’m wrong? No-one’ll be able to hear anything and everyone’ll have to squash up for a day or so. Of all the things I lost sleep over in August, they didn’t remotely feature. Cripes.

September is simultaneously the best and worst time to do new things in school. It’s the obvious time because it’s good to make improvements with a fresh start, and the worst because the holidays wipe your memory and you can’t remember the motivation for arcane changes. How did we say we’d avoid that bottleneck? No, really? Cor blimey. A new rota, please, pronto.

I’m not so cavalier about the other questions we think about before the year begins. Why are we teachers? What are we doing it for? What do we really want for our nations’ young people? Do we have any way at all of measuring it? I’ve not written yet about this year’s exam results, apart from the information on the website here. In a nutshell? Sixth form results were jolly good again, with lots of young people getting a great boost into next thing. Year 11 results are a bit impenetrable this year, as Mr Tomlin’s Q and A document explains here: everything’s changed again and will change again again next year. In both sets of results some amazing achievements at all levels, some triumphs against adversity, some just deserts, some inexplicables, some wild inaccuracy, some re-marks. Is it too soon to hope for a new emphasis on our children as children, not examination yields?

If only other education stories in the news had been so equivocal. In what seemed like three ghastly days we had scandals about pay, exams and sixth form admissions. I expect that parents are at a loss as to what Heads think they’re doing? May I offer a thought? If, nationally, we can’t agree whether it’s important to hitch up our international PISA scores or worry about children’s mental health, in a system so deregulated that no one can speak for anyone else, we shouldn’t be surprised if people make odd decisions. Confused? Who isn’t? Let me get back to my sound baffles.

We’ve committed ourselves at Tallis this week to keeping our eyes firmly on our children as children, on what they need to fulfil themselves today and this year. We’re thinking about our broad curriculum, our commitment to inclusion and our diverse community. We’re thinking about persistence, discipline, imagination, collaboration and inquisitiveness. We’re concentrating on kindness, fairness, respect, honesty and cheerfulness. We’ll do that all year, every year, and we’ll teach our young people everything we know. At a time of nuclear threat and wickedness the world over, we’ll strengthen their hands through education so they understand the world and can change it for the better.

CR 5.9.17

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A thousand things to do

22/6/2017

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Two year sevens career towards me lugging a bag big enough for two more. ‘This is too heavy, Miss, can we use the lift?’ ‘No’. They whoop as they lurch off up the stairs. I’m not worried about the bag. Its OAA time (Outdoor and Adventurous Activities) so they’ve got their survival gear in it: camping, skinning rabbits and suchlike. I encounter more near the block five loos where a young chap who obviously knows a thing or two makes a point:‘That’s not a camping mat’. The girl flounces a bit ‘I know! It’s a yoga mat! It’s all I’ve got! Don’t judge me’. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Tallis life. Let’s see how the double French plaits survive the night.

Thursday brought a visit from Anthony Horowitz. He held a crowd of 300 sitting on the sports hall floor for 2 hours, not an easy gig, captive. He talked about his awful boarding school experience and how villainous versions of his teachers die gruesomely in his novels. He said: what if the ghosts of the RAF pilots and the cold war spies once based here appeared in school?

I’d like to see them. I think they’d wonder what the hell was going on. I wrote the last blog after London Bridge and before the election. Since then, the election, Grenfell Tower and Finsbury Park mosque. I’ve never known what to do about angry men loving violence except to try to educate them out of it and encourage girls to walk away. I do know a bit about public services, though, and I’m up to my neck in compliance. Throw me a rope, would you?
Housing is difficult because no-one’s making any more land and the public’s assets were stripped a generation-and-a-half ago. It’s expensive to build, takes skill to manage and relies on assumptions about the common good that appear to be fading into the past. When Beveridge fought the Five Giants of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease housing was a key solution. We decided that people should have safe homes to live in and that the state would provide them. After that, we sold off loads of the stock, stripped councils of the money and the powers they needed to keep it safe and available and lauded those who reduce council tax so that the stock and the staff crumble.

And piling Pelion upon Ossa, compliance. That cladding might have been cheaper, but it was OK because it ticked a box, and another box marked ‘value engineering’, no doubt. And the response: it looked like chaos but it probably ticked its boxes. And the fire escape plan? Well, there was one. And the PM’s visit? Best described as a box left unticked. Good job the Queen knew what to say. On which part of planet Conservative and Unionist does that make sense?

Public services can’t be replaced by box-ticking. Targets are important, perhaps even necessary, but never sufficient. When you strip away all professionalism, all respect for the job and most of the money, and leave civic institutions with compliance matrices rather than public values then we’re all, literally and terrifyingly, at risk. Literally in schools where the cheapest and easiest exams became the system’s calibrations, terrifyingly in tower blocks where no one’s job was to worry about the welfare of the people. The strongest survive such blinkered negligence but the vulnerable suffer. Children always suffer.

Schools are model communities where we look after society’s young until they’re old enough and clever enough to fend for themselves. We have to chug along regardless while the world outside falls apart, so we’ve been entertaining ourselves in the mornings. One of the problems in exam season is that the big spaces are full of desks and anxious young people with see-through pencil cases and you can’t assemble for weeks. Assembly is the glue of a big school and things fall apart without them. So, brainwavingly, assembly in the dojo. Notwithstanding the awkward access, potential bottlenecks and the matter of the shoes, we’re loving it. Half a year squash up on the seats and the others sit barefoot and bootless on the mat. All facets of assemblies (uplifting thoughts, Byzantine instructions, the Reading of Lists, expressions of grave disappointment) are delivered in socks. Normal, even with year 9. We stand together and think about the lives of others. We did it on Thursday last, in assembly, because that’s what’s best to do. We didn’t need to be told.

Beveridge’s last words were ‘I have a thousand things to do’ but I worry that we’ve replaced symbolism with action. I worry that declaring a minute’s silence is intended to hide a tragedy of negligence in the clothing of a natural disaster. I worry that crowdfunding and selfless volunteering are expected to fill a vacuum left by an austere and individualist state. I worry that we value economy over responsibility and I worry all the time about the example set our children. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pilots and the spies decide to haunt us all.

CR 21.6.17

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The Sound of the Future

8/11/2015

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Luigi Russolo with his noise machines, 1913

Tallis starts up again after half term in countless pointless conversations. ‘Have you seen Joe’s hair?’ ‘What sort of a sandwich is that?’ ‘Hello, look, its Ellie’s sister’. These last two chaps potter off wittering like old codgers at a drinks do. ‘She was at my primary school but now I can’t remember her name and I started to say hello and it was so embarrassing’. I’m pottering in Science and apprehend a youth I know to be well-meaning. He’s defeated by a task and presents me with Viktor. ‘There’s no science on his timetable so I don’t know where to take him’. I rescue Viktor and ask him which school he’s joined us from. ‘Bulgaria’. He seems happy enough with the class I find him. I pass through the languages day celebration: Viktor will know a bit about that, I think. Didn’t we need a Bulgarian speaker a couple of weeks ago?

Assemblies are bin themed. Sir and Sir have a nice little routine about shared spaces climaxing with the launch of a competition to design bins with added personality. Enter the binion! This is greeted with enthusiasm by the lower years and chuckles despite themselves by year 10 and 11. A large one arrives at the end of the queue and has to sit in the very front row. At 6’2 not including the hairdo he fidgets so much that I fear he’s maddened by the bin or about to be sick but no, just a boy in a big man’s body, struggling with chairs that are too small.

There’s an extra assembly for year 11 girls to discuss the sending of photos on phones. We are brisk with them. Don’t be stupid. Nothing in cyberspace is ever lost. Take yourselves seriously. One offers a view: ‘You don’t need to tell us. Girls who do this, they know it’s dangerous. Maybe they don’t care?’ Or maybe they make a mistake that they can’t undo. In the old days, you could act unadvisedly and it would be forgotten. Nothing’s forgotten in the ether, a problem for teenagers who’re growing their brains and can’t think straight. Planning ahead is hard, the long game too long by half. ‘Those going on the Oxford visit stay behind’: we need you to think about the future tomorrow.

Just before half term was sixth form open evening, a triumph with 1200 visitors. Outstanding results and a huge range of courses make us attractive and everyone who visits seems to love us. We forget this as we return to the perennial problem of hooking the sixth form out of the café at the end of break. They’re like all the others, except that the future is nearly upon them so they have to walk really slowly in case they get there too quickly. One with green hair and a woolly hat reads an essay as she walks along, another wears vintage driving goggles on the head, all the time, protection against speed.

Tallis was on tour this week. We do The Tempest in the Shakespeare Schools Festival and despite Prospero’s cloak clasp acquit ourselves beautifully. Six of us go to visit a school in Kent to help our thinking. It’s very different, fascinating. Will it transfer? The children look so different but you grow used to your own. Are we as strange to them? I talk to a colleague who fancies doing a senior placement with us and we watch the hordes at lesson change. She’s impressed by how smooth and orderly it is and I have a smug attack. An hour later the very same spot grinds to a halt through foolishness and has to be unblocked with whistles and wild gesturing.

In the outside world, the curriculum decision looks as though it’s finally been made. 90% EBacc so we start thinking about options to judge how far our staffing’s adrift. The advantage of children is that each batch is new and though we think they’ll expect what’s gone before, most of them are oblivious to it. They have nothing to which to compare their education, except the parents and any siblings hanging around the house. Their trust and their needs are terrifying: we have to get it right, for the future we can’t predict and they can’t see.

We have a handful of little ones who need to be escorted from place to place. If they break free they run after the seagulls and pigeons, laughing and clapping, their chirping and hooting part of the sound of Tallis. We start up again to chat, chuckles, bins, whistles, questioning, fidgeting, hassling and listening for the sound of the future.

CR
5.11.15

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How does the term begin?

13/9/2015

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Kenneth Noland, Beginning, 1958

September and teachers settle into the school halls of the land for HTs’ call to arms. I can’t speak for others, but mine was absolutely gripping. Then we remind each other of routines and expectations, spend time in departments and, whoosh, the hordes descend. Two hours bonding with the form tutor, assembly, timetables, routines and expectations then lessons start after break and we’re off. See you in 195 days.

If you’re in year 7 all this is a bit of a blur. Everything is new and, while exciting, very little makes sense. Where’s the next lesson? The nearest toilet? It’s a long time since breakfast: where’s lunch? And the next lesson? What do I need for PE? How does my planner work? What’s my log-in? Which door do I go through to get to music? Really? Do I know you? Are you in my tutor group? What, registration again?

New year 12s have to seem a bit cooler. They can’t bucket about the place like turbocharged squirrels. They develop a mooch, a sort of quick saunter, and ask for advice judiciously where they can’t be overheard, all the while wondering if their chosen outfit really expresses what they intended. Some can’t quite pluck up courage to spend time in the sixth form rooms at break and still occupy the yard. The weather usually forces them indoors.

New teachers are the same. If you’re newly qualified then you expect to not know which way you’re up for a year and asking about everything is required. If you have arrived with – ahem – a position of responsibility then you worry that people expect you to be abreast of the arcane. You may know the lot about all possible A level specifications, the latest Statutory Instrument or recite pi to 4000 places but what do you if your computer’s in a huff? Where do you take a child who’s poked himself in the eye? Where exactly is the door to the library? We like to keep people on their toes at Tallis with a byzantine room numbering system. Now in my third year, I direct people with confidence. Floor, block, room number, unless you’re talking to premises staff who need you to convert your answer into algebra where x = 5.

The start of the year is curtain-up on the preceding 6 months’ planning and rehearsal: recruitment, staffing, exams, cleaning and tidying, bright ideas and missives from the government. This summer, precious little on the exam results in the press (hooray hooray) but lots about academies and free schools, again. A rallying-call from the Secretary of State arrives simultaneously with Ofsted’s report on KS3, neutrally entitled ‘KS3: The Wasted Years?’ Why, thank you, Sir.

I talk to a highly effective and perpetually cheerful colleague who reflects on the pace of activity as we start the year, how it takes a few days to get to peak speed, even for the best of us. Another says: we get it, we really get it, but the pace is daunting. I stop a year 8 youth who appears to have doubled in height over the summer. Perhaps his parents stand him in compost every night. He’s proud to be taller than me, but we agree that he could literally aim higher. His little mate is downcast, but it’ll come.

Like growing a teenager, some things take time and can’t be forced. Schools have focused on KS4 because that’s where the national focus is. Loopholes allowed some to adapt procedures to influence outcomes without putting the leg work into learning. Now, the pressure is in a better place, but it’s still oddly expressed. If I was HMCI or the SoS – an outcome as likely as growing 6 inches over the summer, curses – this is what I’d say.

Over the last 20 years or so we were really worried that lots of young people left school without the qualifications they needed to prosper. We devised systems so that school leaders had to focus on this. We combined that with macho rhetoric about school leadership, and a hero-head cult that, in retrospect, was unfortunate. It’s taken us a while to redevelop the qualifications and performance measures to our satisfaction, but we’re very nearly done. Unfortunately, the KS4 focus of the past led pressured secondary schools to undervalue consolidating the excellent work of primary schools. Our report demonstrates this, and we are sorry. Now we intend to support schools to make KS3 the best it can be and we will inspect for this - not this year, but from September 2016.

How does term begin? With optimism.

CR

10.9.15

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Christmas Dinner

14/12/2014

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James Gillray, Substitutes for Bread, 1795

Year 9 are a good distraction from education policy announcements. They lack the charm of children or the sense of adults and fall into disarray at the drop of a hat. Assembly presented some obstacles this week ; not huge, but they added up. 270 of them had to line up at the same time as 240 y11s doing a mock exam. A door to the hall was mysteriously locked. A step at the bottom of the raked seating was misplaced and much tripping begat some unseemly giggling, which had to be suppressed. Mind your step, we said. Don't be unkind. We are not toddlers.

Assembly started with a trailer for jolly jumper day, £1 for Young Epilepsy. We marvelled at year 12 Gina's jumper-I-made-earlier-out-of-one-of-my-gran's visual aid. Head of Year and I, doing our novelty double act, may have given the impression that we too would wear jolly jumpers of our own devising on Friday. Then we moved on to collections for Christmas hampers, as is our wont. The tone changed a bit then, to be honest.

What do we believe in, I asked year 9. Education to understand the world and change it for the better, we agreed. I am ashamed, I said, to be a 50-something in a wealthy democracy where hunger seems commonplace, accepted. How has this happened? If my generation has created - or failed to prevent - this, what can I say to you? Please make it stop in yours?

Here are some things I didn't say : put your hand up if you didn't have breakfast because there wasn't any. Put your hand up if you had a meal last night. Put your hand up if you're hungry now at ten to nine. Put your hand up if you know there'll be food at home when you get in. Put your hand up if you're dreading Christmas because it makes you feel poor or if being away from your free school meal leaves you hungry for a fortnight. Head of year finished off: wear a Christmas jumper and bring in some thing for the hamper. You can do both - and most of our young people can, and will.

But I read that soldiers are needed to demonstrate character and grit to our children? I've seen skinny reprobates turned into respectable men by the army and, for some young people, it works a treat. Almost all the cases I remember were where young men were given some pretty basic support when they joined up: regular meals, reliable laundry, exercise, less access to drink and drugs, and a couple of years to grow up in. It's a rare serving soldier who's cold and hungry at home. What'll they say to a hungry and angry teenager? Join the army for a square meal? Show grit and determination in the food bank queue? Has anyone factored the high levels of ex-servicemen ending up in prison into this cosy picture?

I'm fed up with trivial and risible advice. We teach our young people character every day because its part of helping them grow up and we don't need a national award scheme to make us do it. True grit is doing your best under any circumstances without any hope of reward. Doing it when you're tired, upset, confused, cold, hungry. When no one's watching and it seems as if no one cares.

And fiddling about with private schools' charitable status is even more irrelevant. Are we meant to be grateful? Show me the public school with children who know how a food bank makes you feel. Show me the ancient foundation built for the poor that now serves only the unbelievably wealthy and the historically privileged and I'll show you a better way. And don't mistake privilege with learning: I'll match you top graduate for top graduate on my teaching staff and we'll see who can teach the hungry and the dispossessed and who only knows how to teach the wealthy.

The Tallis Christmas card says 'we remember the gift of children and our responsibilities to them'. To their development of character and learning, and to the things that'll help them grow up well and prosper, to succeed from a position of love and comfort or from a position where the bare necessities are sometimes out of reach.

Our Christmas concert was called Apricity - the warmth of the sun in winter. We'll have that warmth at our end of term celebrations as we enjoy each others' talents and idiosyncrasies. A bit of warmth and the light of understanding from government would be a welcome gift. Merry Christmas!

CR

11.12.14

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British Values

15/6/2014

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The Mykonos Vase, c. 670 BC.

Such a long time since we talked. Keeping well? Good. I promised to tell you more about OFSTED, but compared to the Birmingham excitement, I don’t have much to say. Inspectors came, got us straight away and despite not being able to stop themselves asking finicky questions, delivered a clear and helpful report. In the through-the-looking-glass language of school accountability we got a good good. Fair play to them: a British value?

More excitingly, the week before half term was Deaf Awareness Week which we threw ourselves into with typical gusto. Huge prizes (small badges, wrist bands, useful leaflets) were offered to those who had another go at signing during sunny days in the yard. It seems as though everyone learned how to say good morning and good afternoon, and some could even say who they were – a benefit in any language. We made a little film in which we chuckle at ourselves a lot. Is not taking ourselves too seriously another British value?

After that it was half term. I had a wet week in Germany and visited the Nuremburg courtroom, where genuine British values played a part ‘the tribute of power to reason’ that picked up the stitches of civilisation again. US Judge Jackson’s speech for the prosecution is an astonishing feat of rhetoric, but it was Maxwell-Fyfe’s calm and methodical cross-examination which broke Goering. Unflashy but effective is a British value too.

The memories of wars are heavy this year. Before half term we’d met with our vicar to plan our part in the redevelopment of the war memorial in St James’ Kidbrooke. We think it’ll be interesting to find out who we’re related to and what happened to them. We need to think about the D Day anniversary too, once we can have some assemblies again after exams. Remembering (and getting round to it in the end) are British values too.

And so is going to Tyn y Berth for a week with year 8 to be outdoorsy or walking down to Sports Day in Sutcliffe Park or selling doughnuts for charity or other ordinary things. It’s being so astonished by the sun that you get half-dressed outside after PE just for the feel of it, or getting really cross with an inanimate object and having to climb down afterwards. But it’s also putting other people first and creating the circumstances for everyone to get along together, and taking care of the hard-won victories of democracy and equality. Trying to make things better for everyone is surely a British Value?

There are so many irritating factors in the Trojan Horse furore, so many ways in which conspiracy may be alleged on all sides that paranoia and suspicion may well have become British values as well as Corporal Jones-y panic. Useless to speculate on Wilshaw, Gove or May’s motives but I wouldn’t be British if I didn’t add my two-penn’orth. We HAD a statement of British Values for schools – it was in the preamble to the 2008 version of the National Curriculum and it was wonderful. It said

Education should reflect the enduring values that contribute to personal development and equality of opportunity for all, a healthy and just democracy, a productive economy, and sustainable development. These include values relating to the self, recognising that we are unique human beings capable of spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical growth and development, relationships as fundamental to the development and fulfilment of ourselves and others, and to the good of the community. We value others for themselves, not only for what they have or what they can do for us, the diversity in our society, where truth, freedom, justice, human rights, the rule of law and collective effort are valued for the common good.

We have them in the Teachers’ Standards 2012, telling us that teachers must not

undermine fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs;

We had all this and a great Citizenship Curriculum. We’ve standing orders for RE which ensure children learn about and from religion. We’ve a distinguished tradition of assemblies and community activities and an inspection system that, until two weeks ago, was in grave danger of working sensibly. Struth, we know what to do. But now we’ve got academies and free schools that don’t have to build up the common good, a moral panic just before an election, knee-jerk reactions, and wanton ignorance of the honourable purposes that direct daily life in school. Such a shame that hypocrisy is a British value too.

CR

11.6.14

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Helpful Advice

2/2/2014

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Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait, 1910

It appears that we are the best runners in the world. No surprise to me but nice to have it validated. We are the world champions and record holders for the Save the Children World Marathon Challenge at under 13. This means that our young people ran 105 laps of a 400m track faster than any other participants in the world, breaking our own previous world record. A nice chap from Save the Children came and told us what the money was spent on and advised us on charitable giving. Assembled Tallis, despite the hard floor, reflected on their advantages and their place in the world and applauded the athletes.

I say with tedious regularity that the only thing we teach in school that is actually proved to make people happier and live longer, is PE. A pity, therefore, that performance table obsessions of recent years have made it harder for schools to give the right place to mens sana in corpore sano. We need exercise to help us think straight and survive. So I was talking to some trainee young swimmers waiting for their bus when one asked me if I could swim. I said I could, so she sought advice: ‘How do you actually breathe?’ I said that I did it by an undignified combination of gasping and keeping my head well out of the water.

She gave me to understand that this advice was of doubtful utility and proceeded to demonstrate how it should be done, but she couldn’t help me further as we were distracted by a large youth tripping over a doorstop. He wished to replay the scene so I could explain to him the purpose of doorstops general and particular. I was glad to oblige, but he too was unconvinced by what I felt was a pretty clear explanation.

Young people receiving advice coolly is an occupational hazard. I once took part in an inspection. It was going well and the year 10 class was absorbed in geography until a child’s plaintive request diverted the silence. ‘Sir, is it normal to have the same weird dream night after endless night?’ Sir, as I recall, said it probably was OK unless it was really upsetting him. But ‘How weird is weird?’ was harder to answer using geographical terms accurately with two inspectors in the room. I used to teach The Parts of a Church. I was talking about lecterns (how we do live) when a child who had previously shown little aptitude for metaphor helpfully told me ‘I know all about lecterns. Up and down the street at all hours of the day and night, banging on people’s doors and windows.’ I felt compelled to point out that on the contrary, a lectern was a large reading stand, sometimes in the shape of a large eagle, often made of brass, invariably stationary. He said that I was mistaken, and warned me to be on my guard.

None of this accidentally substandard advice really matters, until it does. Monday was Holocaust Memorial Day and assemblies have also been plain and clear. We’ve heard haunting music and seen terrible images, reflected in silence and listened carefully. Young people of this generation cannot be expected to respond with the same shock and horror that was expected of older generations. The events are known facts, and the images and stories endlessly terrible. They are almost familiar, certainly to those who study history to GCSE and beyond. That’s’ not to say that young people aren’t moved by them, but what do we expect them to think? Or do? How may we advise them sensibly? Do we say – be careful? Do we say - don’t collude with genocide? Do we say – this is why we work endlessly to stamp out all kinds of hate and cruelty in school? Or do we say that human beings are capable of terrible acts and we should never underestimate our capacity for wickedness? Our advice – be kind and thoughtful, make your own decisions, work hard, learn how to read and measure the world, find comfort in art and literature, keep fit, learn from the past - seems unequal to the subject. How can we prevent them from making catastrophic errors or believing bad things? What do we advise, to save the world?

The best we do is to teach them to value one another and build up the common good. Not to categorise fellow humans or set themselves against each other. Not to measure a person’s worth by a single unchangeable feature, not to rank people’s value. Perhaps next time I’ll write about performance tables and what they do to children.

CR

30.1.14

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

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The end of time

Time to press pause

The calm before...

A thousand things to do

The Sound of the Future

How does the term begin?

Christmas Dinner

British Values

Helpful Advice

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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