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

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 

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.
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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.
 
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5.11.15   

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.

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!

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11.12.14

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

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

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.

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11.6.14

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. 

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30.1.14