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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

On checklists and their use

12/7/2020

1 Comment

 
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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.
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(*This is new. Is it the tradecraft of Smiley’s people and picking up rumours on the street or me ringing the Head next door and asking how attendance is in their castle?)

So at the end of a long struggle since March, you decide to issue a statement of the blindingly obvious?  Is that time well spent?  Some heads are really agitated about Ofsted kindly offering to do some checking visits to see how its all going next term. I’m not that bothered, they have to earn their keep. But I’ve said it before, Mr Williamson, you’re putty in the hands of your leader. The PM’s flinging blame about. He’s started on the care homes and it’ll be social workers next. He daren’t blame the NHS but no one in any government has ever batted an eyelid at blaming schools for anything and everything. 

Austerity, poverty, elitism, the Hostile Environment, racism, Brexit and an education-as-exams policy which sacrifices a third of children are the problems that lead to disengagement, poor behaviour and truancy. Our systems work pretty well, but they cost a lot and I’m worried about what Rishi Sunak will do when he’s finished carrying plates about for the cameras. You’re all limbering up to blame schools and then you’ll turn the screw.  What will it be? Further reduced budgets or super-strict behaviour policies? Both?

Me, I’ve got to reopen a school that keeps children safe and helps them think about the state of the world. I have to be ready for rain and shine, for anger as well as relief. I’ve got to keep everyone with me while we steer this supertanker around the rocks. If you’re going to advise me, make it useful. If you can’t do that, leave me alone. The children expect a better world, and I must look to them.
 
CR
10.7.20
1 Comment

We're a long way from Waterloo Road

29/2/2020

1 Comment

 
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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:
...it was never going to win any BAFTAs. The plotlines are preposterous and the script heavy-handed. It ….offered sympathetic readings of unsympathetic characters and showed teachers, exhausted, spread too thinly between demanding pupils and inflexible higher-ups.  It’s nuanced and unashamedly pro-public sector workers.
She goes on to talk about the different way we’d handle some issues now but then delivers a killer punch that Tyson Fury would envy.
What’s more jarring though is a sense of faith in the state. If the students just achieve the grades they need they’ll ‘go on to college and get a great job’. It feels very New Labour and sort of quaint. …Writing in the same month David Cameron published his memoirs of the 2008 financial crash and the opportunity-crushing austerity it would bring in, this straightforward reading of the trajectory of social mobility no longer holds. It’s not the haircuts and early depictions of cyberbullying which make Waterloo Road a cultural artefact, it’s a belief in a societal system which was poised so imminently to come crashing down.
I’m worrying about this a lot at the moment, Mr Williamson. Left to their own devices, children have idiosyncratic priorities. Schools have to coax most of them into learning. We do this by painting a vivid picture of the benefits of education. If you work hard and do as you are told, you’ll succeed and live a successful and happy adult life. 

There are, of course, schools where this is absolutely true. The outputs and attitudes of those educated exclusively in the private schools or selectively in the grammar schools are exceptionally well-matched to adult success. It is bizarre, then, that current education policy often appears to believe that ‘If only all our children went to schools like the public schools or the grammar schools, they would all be as successful as the children who went to those schools.’ They are not scalable because their ‘success’ depends upon their exclusivity.

What are our children to do? Our children with their individually crushing austerity life-events, their bewilderment at the world’s leaders and their ghastly struggle against an educational system that requires 33% of them to fail every year no matter how hard they try. Will they all get good jobs, Mr Williamson? Is the window of opportunity going to open again for them, some day?

I note – also from the Guardian, apols - that Michael Rosen is writing to you too. He knows a thing or two about children’s books and the values of World Book Day and can spot fiction with the best of us. I note there’s going to be money for rough sleeping, police constables and hospitals. When will we get some money to support the Shakespeares, Rowlings and Blackmans of the future, the children from ordinary backgrounds who changed the world by their writing?

I’m looking at your government and trying to hold my breath. Is it going to ration education or fling the window open? What will I have recognised when I say ‘ah, that’s what this is’?     
 
CR
27.2.20
1 Comment

Sticky Labels

11/2/2020

0 Comments

 
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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:
……wise Romans did not wish to add difficulties and dangers to a thing in itself difficult and dangerous, since they thought that if they added them, no one would ever work virtuously.
Do the current performance and regulatory systems add difficulties and dangers to schools already struggling against fearful odds? That’s another question for you to get stuck into, Mr Williamson.
   

So, before I sign off, let me encourage your doubtless tireless work behind the scenes to repair ten years of austerity and child poverty. Accountability is legitimate, but openness, wisdom, justice, service and courage are what children and their communities need. And much, much more money.

​Remaining your servant and trusting in your good intentions,

Yours
CR
7.2.20
0 Comments

Walk a mile in their shoes

18/5/2019

1 Comment

 
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I’m a fan of Timpsons, the shoe-mending folks who sort you out with watch batteries and keys and all those other things you could easily plan for in advance but because you haven’t, become a sudden and urgent need. They’re a brilliant employer of ex-offenders, did you know?

Currently, there are approximately 10 million people in the UK with a criminal conviction. At Timpson we believe it is madness to throw such a large section of society on the employment scrapheap. By carefully selecting the right individuals to work in our business, we have enabled thousands of ex-offenders to have a second chance in life and go on to have rewarding careers. Often, other employers don’t realise they can be missing out on some very talented, hardworking individuals. Their loss is our gain. Currently, our retention rate for colleagues who we have recruited from prison or who have a criminal conviction is approximately 75%. This means that the vast majority of colleagues that we employ from prison do not re-offend.

They are a principled, effective and successful outfit as far as I am able to tell. Forgive me, but the same cannot be said for our current government or their political opponents. 

We’ve been reading the Timpson Report on Exclusions this week. I don’t think former Education Minister Edward Timpson is a scion of the cobbler Timpsons, but he grew up in a family which fostered almost 90 children. He was handed a difficult job which he fulfilled diligently. He made 100 visits and took 1000 submissions, completing the report at the turn of the year only for it to be sat on by the department for months while they wrangled about money and power (I’m told).
​
There are 30 recommendations, which said department has agreed ‘in principle’. I’ll spare you the detail but here are the key points:
  • Schools should be made responsible for the children they exclude, no matter when they exclude them by being accountable for their GCSE results. 
  • Headteachers must retain the power to exclude pupils where necessary  
  • A small number of schools are off-rolling (where children are made to leave a school without the proper process being followed) for their own interests.
  • Councils must be advocates for vulnerable children to make sure they are well-placed
  • Funding is a problem but good practice is still possible
  • Most schools take a balanced and measured approach to using exclusion but some don’t
  • Boys are substantially more likely to be excluded in primary school than girls.
  • Persistent disruptive behaviour accounts for around a third of all exclusions
  • Alternative Provision provides education to excluded pupils but it is often not very good
  • Schools face a particular challenge in recognising, understanding and meeting the needs of children in, or on the edge of, the care system.    
  • Ofsted should ‘consistently recognise’ inclusive schools
 
All of this is pretty obvious so I shall make obvious points in my turn. The biggest problems in our system are these:
  • It values autonomy above all things, which means that there are over 20000 individual decision-makers making decisions behind closed doors.
  • It values simple outcomes such as GCSE results because they are cheap to measure. This has driven the system mad. Troubled, vulnerable and needy children do not get good exam results so schools who are in trouble or who wish to seek pre-eminence by exam results are reluctant to admit them or keep them.
  • There are too few teachers in the system and all of them are working harder. This means that behaviour support is stretched.
  • Schools have no money. They have to prioritise teaching so all the pastoral support has withered away.
  • Political decisions have stripped the public sector to the bone. As well as too few police there are too few youth workers, psychologists, social workers. There is no one to turn to.
As the man said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We’ve spent billions of pounds on structural and management alterations in public services and Brexit. If we cared about children we’d have spent the money on them. Vulnerable children don’t care whether their school is community or academy and they certainly don’t care whether they might get blue or red passports. They can’t see the long-term, they’re very likely to end up in prison and they make terrible decisions because they’re trying desperately to protect themselves from further harm. 

Austerity has taken a terrible toll on its children.

Timpson described a system where the best hope for an excluded child might be Timpson’s. How do we live with that?
 
CR
17.5.19 
1 Comment

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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115   F: +44 (0)208 331 3004   E: headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
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