If you can name that song you’re at least as old as me, so well done twice. Though it didn’t feature in Band Night this week, unlike Hendrix, Clapton and a bit of punk.

Its jolly nice to be back after half term. Holidays are funny things: we press pause for a few days, then start again exactly as before, knowing what we’re doing and when, pressing play on the second half of the year. Schools are always running. No matter where in the world you are, someone is teaching fractions, someone is asking a child a rhetorical question, someone is mopping a tearstained face and someone is irritably counting back scissors.

We’ve had a visitor this week to the show that never ends, another civil servant on the DfE Immersion Scheme. It’s good to be put on the spot by an intelligent stranger who’s come to learn. The first thing they say is ‘I thought it would be different’ meaning ‘inner-city, multi-ethnic, big, sweatshirted, I expected to be terrified’. The second thing is to try to make sense of what they’re seeing through the lens of their own experience at school. We all do that and it’s a besetting problem in education policy. Everyone’s been to school, so we carry our bags, heavy or light, from that experience for the rest of our lives. Adults either want schools to be better for children now, or as good as they used to be. Generally, it doesn’t make for clear analytical thought.

Despite that, we had lots of long and really interesting conversations. Our guest met with Head of year 11 and learned some pretty arresting facts about children who don’t have much English. He tangled with our budget and the flexibilities (ahem) of the PFI scheme that maintains our building. He spent time talking about teaching quality, and teacher workload, and reflecting on the pressures that social media bring to the nation’s young. He did a walkabout and couple of break and lunch duties, and some A level philosophy. He heard an options assembly and spent three hours in the same seat in a classroom watching a skilled teacher swap from A level, to mixed ability year 8, to a group of children for whom learning is more slowly acquired. And he asked a lot of questions about policy, and why we aren’t an academy. And while he watched and asked, the show went on.

The sharper readers will have spotted ’walkabout’ above and might have raised a quizzical eyebrow. We have a timetable of senior staff who use non-teaching time to keep an eye on the place and monitor behaviour and learning. We literally walk about, covering the whole building every hour, all by slightly different routes and methods. It takes me nearly an hour to get around, but I am shorter in the leg as well as longer in the tooth. Others nip around quicker, other stop to chat. Sometimes you can be waylaid by an incident that means you don’t get very far: a truculent child, a seagull in the building, a nasty smell. Usually everything is quiet, the show running smoothly.

In school there’s always something to do next and somewhere to go, something to discover and something to achieve and the show is multidimensional. But as you leave block one and go to block two, art and English don’t stop existing because you’re looking at science and tech, and the children you see in year 10 are still the same people you taught in year 8. ‘Walkabout’ isn’t a derogatory use of an ancient spiritual quest, but a vital experience for all of us who do it, convenient or not. As we walk we interpret the school as it develops and the children grow around us. The show is never-ending and always the same, but the children are all different from the others who have gone before and from who they were themselves a year ago, a week ago, a day ago. Our institution protects them because we’re unending and stable, always the same but always changing too. With all that going on, we walk it because we have to know it.

When I set out on Tuesday I saw a pair of year 8 girls whom I love to watch at play. Both had an awkward and difficult start to year 7. It took time and tears to settle, too much of it alone. Somehow, someone put them together and now, utterly inseparable, gloriously happy in each other’s company they laugh all the time and it make me smile just to see them. I hope their friendship is a show that never ends.
 
And I hope our guest remembers the never-ending show when he’s back in Sanctuary Buildings. When I waved him off I told him to come back any time. He’s been on walkabout too and he can come back to check out his thinking.  We’ll all be the better for it, now and into future. Come inside, come inside.
 
CR
23.2.18

Just for excitement as we swim for shore, a fire drill. We hadn’t had one for a bit so it was beyond exciting for the hordes. Consequently, squealing at the start. Subsequently, a repeat next week, quietly. 

On my way to my appointed perch I was introduced to a famous photographer, a distinguished-looking chap. On my way back, I reprimanded a small child for practicing leaping right over benches while 1600 people were moving around. I may need to return to him, but he won’t be hard to find.

Last week was busy busy: a super-cool concert for the Greenwich Music Trust, a day out at Tate Exchange for Curriculum Leaders to think, sixth form taster days, Headstart Day for year 6, a visiting author, a Holocaust survivor, the Visual and Media Arts Exhibition, Sixth form Party, Year 11 Prom (including pink and white carriage and horses), a community day on food, year 11 and 13 leaving ceremonies and the early close that went with them and a new curfew at the shops to enforce.

This week so far: new staff induction day, a piano and singing concert, governors, a tea party for older folks, more camping (further afield, wetter), university visits, UCAS clinics, teachers’ research projects deadline, year 10 careers events, non-uniform day for the Red Cross, a controversy about gazebos, as I write, the Piano Recital. Tomorrow the last internal interview of the year and a governor visit about student anxiety. Next week: an international food fair, the year 7 disco, a farewell barbecue, the Curious Incident, a visit from another school’s sixth form team, four awards assemblies and finally, the big gathering that marks close of play. 

All this, you understand, on top of the teacher’s day job, teaching and learning, timetabling and planning, rewriting schemes, tidying round, assessment and testing, sharing skills, worrying, supporting, negotiating with the world and more trips and visits. Next year’s plans not just to write but set up. Building maintenance, and wondering what to do now so many budget headings are empty four twelfths of the way through the year. It’s no wonder when the dog visited again before camping in Kent we fell on her as if she was a therapy animal.

So you can imagine I’ve had a few thoughts about the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendation that the 1% cap on teacher pay stays firmly pulled down over the ears of the profession. No money, they said, but we’re ‘deeply concerned about the cumulative effect’ of five body blows teaching’s sustained:

1. 35,000 teachers left in 2015, and it’s a bigger number every year
2. Retention rates are plummeting (and there are more children every year)
3. Teacher pay’s fallen behind other graduate sectors
4. Recruitment targets for teachers have been missed for four years
5. There’s no money in the system.  Even the 1% is unfunded.

Schools therefore are ‘expected to make choices’ about who gets a pay rise and who doesn’t, based on performance. This makes perfect sense except that in the best schools all the teachers will be performing well, and there’s not an education system in the world where performance related pay’s changed anything. The raw materials teachers work with are too unpredictable, the outputs notoriously tricky to measure: put pressure on one part of the system and other parts suffer. The STRB opined that falling teacher retention rates and missed recruitment targets present ‘a substantial risk to the functioning of an effective education system’. Isn’t anyone worried about that outside teaching? We’re the lucky ones. Few new posts, few leavers. 
  
Here are some other things we’ve done this week. Engaged with the process of enabling young people from other schools to have a fresh start, from both ends. Waited for the phone to ring from the clipboard brigade. Tried to do our best for angry, unwell, distraught children and their parents. Tried to plan for examination courses where the specifications are barely approved. Taken part in the inspection of the local authority’s special needs work. Followed instructions from Operation Sceptre to tackle knife crime, in a context of no funding for youth work. Thought about money not less than all of the time. 
   
I quoted Causley’s great poem about the end of the school day being like a ship re-entering harbour in July 2014, after our first Piano Recital. After this, our third, it feels as though we’ve been out at sea all year on government storms. Do we long for doldrums?

Saxophone music drifted across the concourse as performers rush to hug one another before the concert and the young chefs prepare nibbles. Pianists gather in shirts and ties, unusual for Tallis, and discuss formal wear. I don’t mean to sound as if it’s just perseverance or endurance at this time of year or that misery dogs our days, far from it.  

It’s a joy. Thank you for sharing your children with us.
 
CR 14.7.17

How often do you think about red roosters? Twice a day? Then this column’s for you: read on.

A mixed pair of year 8s are gazing at something so I get between them. This new pound coin? What’s it worth? Ever the educator, I can help: ‘A pound’. ‘Yes, yes, but what’s it worth, I mean, how long’s it been around?’ This is, I suspect, precisely the existential question that standardised coinage is meant to prevent. Rather like you and I, dear child, worth does not depend on age. 

We’re obsessed with money this week as the future is grim. Successive governments have longed for a schools’ National Fair Funding Formula but shied away from the cost or the carnage until now. This lot are doing it within the funding envelope, as we say now. The same money, shared out fairly. It has a brutal logic as a cold fiscal fix. As a way to support a the nations’ young, it is utterly inexplicable. Why disinvest from children? 

Tallis’s total budget is about £12 million a year. For the financial year 2017- 18 we’ve been given about £326,000 less, a drop of -2.7%. We‘ll face further reductions next year, and then that lowest level of funding will be the new normal. Over the next two years we’ll try to plan to lose over half a million pounds.  Which may not be possible.   
Such brutality does interesting things to language. The ‘Fair’ was dropped a while ago so it’s just a formula, rage against the machine. Similarly the parroted ‘we are spending a record amount on schools’ makes my head swivel on its stalk before exploding. School funding is frozen, with inflation and other factors meaning schools have to make huge cuts on top of Coalition cuts.

So, pottering home after the A level dance showcase (brilliant, with a matchless first Little Red Rooster) I thought out loud (thankfully not on the bus), about the rationale for slashing expenditure on schools. Hana’s questions recurred: What’s it worth and how long’s it been around?

The best schools have a grand narrative: this is what we are, this our history, this our aim. Ancient schools know: educating the poor of the parish for 500 years, Honore et Labore, Sapere Aude, like we have Education to understand the world and change it for the better. But quality education for the masses is very recent, a post-war, comprehensive dream. Most of our schools, in historical terms, are modern. Does that make us less valuable?
From the standpoint of the privately educated, this must all look very clear. If schools were better they’d have nothing to fear. Most schools are not very old so they haven’t survived for a long time, and they’re not very attractive to rich people, they’re obviously not very good. Ergo, they’re not worth much, so they must be improved in whatever way seems economical at the time. Or starved of cash so the weak go to the wall. Or altered again and again and again by successive ranks of politicians who have no clue that stability and trust are crucial to public institutions.

So, Hana, perhaps the government sees it your way. We can tell what schools are worth by how long they last. In a future without enough money, subject to measurements that change every year, without enough teachers and with people rightly fearful of becoming headteachers, let’s see how they last. Like the rooster-less barnyard: everything in the farm yard upset in every way, the dogs begin to bark and hounds begin to howl.

Our friends from Taiwan came to visit to protect us from gloom, dancing and singing. 20 year 8s had a great day with them and there was much hugging and tears when they left, having given us a second rooster. It’s got a money-box slot, so we’ll perch it on reception and see if it can lay us a load of cash. The attributes of the year of the rooster, I discover, are fidelity and punctuality, and you can’t have too much of either of those in school.
So I turned to Confucius and the wisdom of the structured life. As he said: