Category: Building

Feeling it

21/7/2022

At the beginning of this auspicious Tallis 50 year I undertook to write a daily diary as a record. I expected to generate a pithy epigram or even a lasting aphorism that, taken collectively would sum up what a good big school is like, how the year goes and the seasons change. It would be a magnificent tone poem, a hymn of praise to the comprehensive school in all its glory. I would capture that ineffable ‘feel’ of a school, that thing that happens when you walk in and know what it’s like, within seconds, and want to run a mile or stay forever.

Anyone looking at the diary on the Tallis 50 site will know that I have signally failed in this task. It started off longer and vaguely elegantly worded but has now descended into a sort of gruff telegraphese which those in charge have had to hassle me to finish as I’d lost heart. The best I can hope is that it works in the future as a sort of record of what a school year’s like. The diary – as opposed to the year - is actually not very interesting at all, while being absolutely fascinating in another dimension.

It’s a bit like asking a teenager ‘what did you do at school today?’ and being met with a grunt that means – this stretch of time was important to me. It’s been interesting in a way I’m still processing. You wouldn’t understand, and I’m not sure I do, yet.

The diary was another attempt to encapsulate what good schools do. They breath, they sing, they hum over a sort of heartbeat of their own. They are reliable, solid, steady but also surprising, flexible and a bit unpredictable in the right way. The way other people measure schools is wrong, but the way we measure them is impossibly unpindownable, about character and ethos, yes, but about the feel.

Anyway. Final weeks of term are always showcases for character or characters. Teachers are hauling themselves to that finish line, other staff looking ahead to a tidier new year which, in real terms is minutes away. Children are irritable but vaguely excited.

The added gift this year has been the heatwave, a sure sign of the climate disaster to come, but also similar to the great three-week heat of ’76 when I was in the fourth year (year 10 in old money). I actually don’t remember much about it except a vague disappointment that it didn’t happen the following year when I had more time for it. This week’s heat was extraordinary, and we only had about half the children in school, due to what was, I think, inevitably poor quality government messaging. Our blessed building is large and mostly well ventilated, cool in some parts but too hot in others. For for the children there was enough shade and the chance to sit under a veranda, a tree, or indoors in the cool of the hall and talk.

I insisted on staying open for two reasons. First, because schools should be open. We must be completely reliable organisations, at the heart of society, calm and consistent especially for children who yearn to find that in adults. Second because our big space, no matter how hot block 1 got, is cooler and airier than a crowded flat with no garden. Children deserve us when the going gets tough. And besides, end of year awards assemblies gotta happen.

So my thanks to the teachers who saw their colleagues in other schools sent home early, but struggled with our inconsistent air-handling and PFI response systems. My thanks to the premises staff on the ground who worked so hard to help us, and my thanks to the community who made a new memory together. No thanks to the Tory leadership candidates who’ll dump the green levy and sacrifice us all in their mendacious pursuits. My thanks to the architects of Tallis 50: we’ve had a great year. If you’d like a copy of our souvenir booklet do call into reception or email me. It’s an easy read.

My thanks to everyone aboard HMS Tallis As the year ends and we enter harbour, especially to those who disembark for good this year. They’ve made their mark and we are better for their company on the voyage.
And my thanks to this remarkable school. Together, we have our imperfections. We’re necessarily fluid, experimental and messy, but our journey together is into the heart of education for the big world, that we need first to understand, and then change.

Auf wiedersehen. September will soon be upon us.

CR
21.7.22

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Finding my mojo in Block 3

19/9/2020

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I apologise for the quality of last week’s blog. I was suffering from a surfeit of exercise and the old bones were struggling. Yesterday I rallied miraculously, which I will explain in tedious detail below. Oh yes, worth reading all the way.

The lines are going well, thank you, on Planet Tallis and must be visible from space. Youthful exuberance in the line-ups is being suppressed and the crocodiles meander across the swamp largely elegantly and without snapping at the legs of others. Some old folks are relatively enthusiastic about them and the sheer number of steps being taken has generated mild competition.

One way to get the steps up is to teach year 9 who are banished to the MUGA, a 3-minute walk away. I got down there on Tuesday to encourage the lines when a youth called me into a goalmouth. ‘Look miss, spider’s eggs’. These were undoubtedly large seeds from a nearby shrub so I asked him to think about the size of the spider who laid them. Unconvinced, he threw me a challenge: ‘You stand on them then, I wouldn’t’.

Tuesday had sadly started with a terrible accident close by, the aftermath of which several hundred children saw. I was at the front gate, interrogating. A Year 8 assured me that it was all right because ‘there are literally millions of police cars and all the helicopters’. A word to both maths and English required, perhaps.

Conkers also hove into view, in some cases at a considerable velocity. We have a couple of what I refuse to call conker trees as the Horse and its Chestnut are worthy of the name. Piling children up in very particular corners of the site have focused our minds. Children have probably always behaved foolishly with conkers, but now it’s in plain sight and annoying everyone. This too will pass.

Wednesday brought a furniture tussle in the outer office here. Removers counselled us to be sure we really wanted their services. ‘There’s a shortage of cupboards. They’re like gold dust’. Cupboards? The day declined further with a reasonable complaint from a local resident about children fly tipping in her bins. Good that they were looking for a bin, actually, but annoying nonetheless when the resident was fined for poor bin habits. We grovelled. Our own training session crowned a perfect day with muffling and blurrs as we enthusiastically but imperfectly broadcast building to building.

Thursday Governors came to look at the lines (and other procedures, obviously). They declared themselves satisfied. Spilt sanitiser was categorised as a hazard – very slippy, don’t try it at home.

By this time I felt as though I was about to breathe my last. What with the cycling and the zooms, the lines and the walks, reading the matchless prose of the daily DfE, agonising over what the government like to call ‘systems of controls’ and remembering my face mask I’d seriously lost my mojo. I’m experimenting with personal decaffeination at precisely the moment I need it most and I was aged mutton rather than spring lamb as I trudged down to pick up my Year 7 class from a year group disgracing themselves with an insufficiently serious approach to lining.

When I was a deckhand in the schools of the 80s and 90s I scoffed and chortled when ranking officers said that they found teaching a tonic, a break from the other business. Not 9F3 on a Tuesday afternoon, mateys, I thought. But I got just that tonic on Thursday from two groups of sweaty and dishevelled eleven-year olds. There’s just something about the Q and A, the back and forth, the uncovering of knowledge that reduced my age by about 200 years in the course of an afternoon. Having spent six months not really being able to answer any question with any certainty I was surfing a wave at the black of Block 3: ask me another – I know this stuff.

And so I look out of the window and see a retro sweet cart and perhaps the skeleton of a pigeon cree being ferried across the yard by fine specimens of Block 2. I’ve no idea what that’s about but I don’t mind. Board marker in one hand and seating plan in the other, I’ve remembered what kept me going with 9F3, and its wonderful.

CR
18 9 20

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Becoming thankful

24/4/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

You’ve got a lot on and it looks as though it’s getting on top of you. If you need some peace and quiet to think, Tallis-the-building has got that. Tallis-the-school, however, is trying to keep itself going.

Let me tell you about the building first. There are so few people here that any movement catches my eye. I looked up yesterday to see a colleague going into one of the blocks. She turned and looked wistfully at the empty concourse before heading into the dark to lead a live A-level lesson. She’s lost family in the virus and may have been thinking about that, but she looked like she was hearing what I hear, the hollow sound of a building holding its breath.

Teachers laugh about school without children being peaceful and tidy, but it’s not new. Anyone who comes in to work in the holidays hears a silence, but it’s different to this silence. Holiday silence is about taking a breath, settling and regrouping ready for the next foray. This silence is different, an absence, not a breather. It’s as if the bricks, the glass and the mighty steel frames are asking what’s happened? Where are they?

We know where they are, but it isn’t here. So I’m wondering about what it’ll sound like when they’re back, and trying to analyse what I’m missing. Noise and busy-ness obviously. The particular sound of the little crossroads outside my office at lesson change contrasting with the purring motor of the main office next door; the racket of 11RA seizing and gathering for afternoon tutor and the Deaf children talking and signing as they go for support. The personal leitmotif of a colleague’s keys and whistle, of another’s heels and the clatter of the fire door against my wall because the doorstop’s in the wrong place.

The work we’re doing at the moment is all about maintaining the bones of a school: checking children are OK, sending work, teaching lessons where we can and sorting out work to keep people going. Governance, budgets, teacher recruitment for September. We’re just about holding it together under the circumstances and we’re waiting to hear what happens next. We’ll hear it from you, Mr Williamson, but we’ll hear it from the children too.

And there’s the problem. Schools are designed to be full of bustle, even a bit squashed in parts. They’re designed to be community crucibles in which children learn how to deal with themselves and others. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to look after themselves, and we do it in batches. Social distancing is the opposite of what we do and the infrastructure is all against it.

Practically speaking, we could keep children 2m apart in class if we had 10 (out of 30) to a standard classroom. We’d be hard pressed to do it in the corridors and we could probably only feed 60 at once. Children would have to be kept indoors all day to enforce it, being taken out for walks occasionally. We could do this – we could do whatever it takes - but we could only do it for a small number. Even on a giant site like ours that would perhaps be 500 at most – 25%. Which 25%?

Lockdown’s five weeks old now and it's hard, very hard for some. We need to remember why we’re doing it and take care that our next actions are measured and rational. Life will never be the same again and we can’t make up the time we’re losing to Covid-19. We mustn’t unpick the good that’s been done by our unusual national self-discipline and we must especially guard against controversy-as-an-antidote-to-boredom that panics shaky politicians into making bad decisions. This disease kills people who are unprepared, and both our national health and National Health remain at the mercy of national unreadiness.

Whatever happens to bring us out of this will have a cost, which we’ll pay for a long time. Some children will learn less than they expected over the course of their school careers, but if we get it right they’ll have the rest of their lives to learn in. If we get it wrong, some of them, and their teachers, won’t.

There are 53 Thankful Villages in England and Wales who lost no one in the Great War. There are tens of thousands of villages and towns who lost people, singly or in big numbers, whole street-fulls in the Blitz, of course. Whatever happens next, we need our schools to come through this Thankful. We need our young people for a better future. We need to keep them safe now.

Take care, Mr Williamson.

Yours in hope

CR
24.4.19

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A mighty storm

2/11/2018

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It’s a wet day and a small child is tangled in his mum’s folding umbrella in block 5. I assist and we proceed companionably upstairs, gradually uncovering destination cluelessness. He needs repeater stations to get him from place to place so we set one up with Miss in my office to complement the nice ladies on reception. Miss provides him with a post-it – his second of the day - to help. He sticks this on his jumper to keep it dry while repeating the umbrella experience with a sausage sandwich.

Outside, we are buffeted by elements. A year 9 eccentric advises ‘we should put these clouds in the IER for throwing wet at people’ so we discuss if that would be foggy in a room. ‘No, but there’d be a lot of banging’. What?

We’ve had trouble with water all week. First we didn’t have enough, then it went a bit cloudy, now it’s falling from the sky. At least the roofs don’t leak. If they did, though, we’d have £50k to spend on it, thanks to the Budget. Tallis is lucky to be watertight, though we pay for the PFI privilege.

As the National Audit Office reckons schools need over £6.5bn just to bring buildings up to standard. The budget announcement was not warmly welcomed by school leaders. Tin-eared was used, also patronising. Demeaning was accurately applied by one Head who wrote:

This “little extra” certainly does not touch the real and ongoing burden of escalating salary costs which are crippling schools each and every year. These are not “Little Extras” they are the specialist Maths teacher in your child’s classroom, the LSA who helps your child learn to read, the specialist Physics teacher supporting your daughter in her A level, the pastoral support worker helping your son manage a family bereavement or breakup. What we needed was the improved annual per-pupil spending that allows us to pay teachers’ and support staff salaries.

What we needed and what we will demand from the Comprehensive Spending Review is a root and branch overhaul of the austerity shouldered by schools who now represent the 4th emergency service for our communities plugging gaps in social, emotional and health provision; at times providing transport, food and clothing for families where austerity politics have left children without.

Quite.

We had sad news this week that the founding Headteacher of Thomas Tallis, Beryl Husain, has died. Her successor Colin Yardley wrote this piece which, with thanks to him, I reproduce here. Plus ca change.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA), which replaced the LCC, was building a new secondary school to serve the massive Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, then under construction by the Greater London Council. The First Oil Crisis hit the economy and all public spending. Even while it was being built, the school suffered cuts, narrowing the corridors, losing a couple of staircases and lopping some classrooms and the assembly hall. Of course, the building was not completed in time for its planned opening. It was due to be a mixed comprehensive school, but had to start life in a nearby secondary modern boys’ school, Briset Road School. After a couple of years there was eventually the move to the new building, which was still not finished.

Not only was a large part of the building still in the hands of contractors, but incessant cuts left it shoddily constructed, with the flat roof leaking from day one. All of this amounted to an inauspicious beginning for Thomas Tallis School, named after the Tudor-period composer who had local connections. Fortunately for all concerned, especially the children, Beryl had been appointed Headteacher. She immediately proved her mettle by refusing to have the school officially opened because the building was, in her view, far from finished. In fact, that first building was never officially opened. She insisted on compensation in the form of an on-site playing field for the school, pointing out that all the ILEA had to do was buy an adjacent private sports ground and give it to her. She won that battle.

Beryl knew that, in order to survive, let alone thrive, Tallis had to compete with the surrounding well established schools and win. She appointed a young staff, most of them in their first job and over half of them women. It was to be mixed ability teaching in all subjects and at all levels. Homework was obligatory for all. All assemblies, notwithstanding the law, were non-religious.

A predominantly young staff could be moulded in her own image. Beryl considered herself a trainer, as well as the leader. One of her catch-phrases was: “Look after the nitty-gritty.” In other words, get the detail consistently right and the rest will follow. During the 1980s the school became fully subscribed and the hottest ticket in town. In 1990, it was at the centre of the Greenwich Judgement saga. Greenwich had just become an education authority on Thatcher’s break-up of the ILEA. The Council declared a new policy that only children resident within the borough could be admitted to the borough’s schools. This brought an end to the free movement across borders under the all-embracing ILEA. A group of parents just across the border in Lewisham kicked up a mighty storm. They resented the prospect of being unable to send their children to the school they considered their best choice ─ Tallis. The case had to reach the House of Lords before it was determined that free movement had to be maintained.

By the time Beryl retired in 1986, the windows still rattled and the roof still leaked, but she had built a dedicated and outstanding staff and her school had the best results of the Greenwich county schools and was heavily over-subscribed. A measure of its success was the fact that the staff sent enough of their own children to the school to muster two football teams. Beryl was a bundle of energy and enthused all around her. She is remembered with admiration and affection.

What a wonderful eulogy: I am very sorry not to have known her. I’d like to have seen her response to the plumbing difficulties we had this week.

Please accept this wisdom from other Heads this week, as a respite from my ranting. I need to concentrate on communicating with the young after another child stopped me on the bridge. ‘Why is it’ he demanded ‘that every time I look up Thomas Tallis I just get a picture of some guy with long hair?’ So much for my September assembly on the man and his music. I’ll have to remind them about the ‘mild and quyet’ Tallis, ‘O happy man’. We’ll all have to remind the government that schools can’t run on thin air, insults and lies.

CR
1.11.18

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Future Shock

7/10/2016

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I avoid being an early adopter. I shudder when anyone asks what’s new? and usually say oh, you know, we chug along. I fear being in the vanguard of anything and when pundits moan on about our schools being run on Victorian lines I want to say at least that demonstrates a bit of continuity about education and society, at least we still think it’s worth doing. Anyway, schools aren’t a bit like Victorian ones. We’ve got heating, biros and girls. Some of us have flush toilets and we all know that progress isn’t the same as results. All I’m trying to say is that there’s valuing in continuity.

New buildings were meant to transform schooling when they arrived in the early years of the century and they’re especially popular at Open Evening time. Parents educated in the buildings of the Thatcher years goggle. ‘We didn’t have all this when I was at school’ they marvel. Didn’t they? I spent my first year teaching in a room with broken windows in south Birmingham, but we did a pretty good job. I committed myself and my own children to a school with 16 dilapidated prefabs and outside lavs because the teaching was rock-solid. Tallis made its name as a school of exceptional creativity in a collapsing building. Its good to be warm and safe, but its not enough.

The same goes for technology. iPads not books! Carry your DT coursework on a stick! Email your homework! Look at all the books in the world online! Read around the subject! Become a digital native: all that’s great because we educate young people for the world we’re in. ‘Classes of 100 being taught remotely and poverty ended by a computer on the wall in Kolkata’ was an odd exemplar for the digital classroom: freedom and flexibility, everything you ever need to know, at the press of a switch.

I’m not a neoluddite. I resist powerpoint but I couldn’t do without either of my phones and I’ve thought onto screen for 20 years, but digital or analogue isn’t what matters and my response to the above is hmmm. Schools exist because education happens at the point of empowerment between teacher and child, when he has to think hard and take a big step or a little step over the threshold into a bigger world of ideas, with a trusted and savvy adult giving a little prod in the right direction. Its human interaction between teacher and child that brokers a new vision of the world, where the young learner takes everything we’ve got and makes it just the start of a new understanding. Hard to see, but perhaps that’s what the Victorians wanted too.

And yet today I’ve seen funding proposals that freeze the blood. Cuts into the future for all schools that’ll change the way we teach and endanger the very thing that has worked for generations, the relationship between teacher and learner, between adult and child in a community of endeavour. Our budgets are dominated by staff costs and we have no other savings left to make: if funding falls classes get bigger. If funding falls subjects get fewer hours. If funding falls there’s no flexibility to rescue the awkward, the disaffected, the bewildered, the terrified because there’s no one with time to spend on them. Hear me well: this isn’t Tallis, its everywhere.

You know I think that education involves learning stuff and that children like getting cleverer. They enjoy learning how to manipulate the facts that decode the world. They need those lightbulb moments and they need them with people who could still capture their attention and change their world with pencil and paper. Schools aren’t wasteful but people are expensive and highly educated ones doubly so. There are no more economies of scale to make that aren’t an outrageous assault on the education of the people. We can share business and HR functions, we can economically procure ourselves until its one book between 6 and coats on in the classroom, but we can’t economise on teachers. 30 in a class up to year 11 is big enough. How big do you think an A level class should be? Double it.

We were proud to welcome 1800 guests to Open Evening. Most of them liked what they saw and were impressed by the public investment and state-of-the-art kit in our beautiful building. I can’t guarantee much as we look into an austere future (no matter what Mr Hammond says) but I’ll commit myself to this: I’ll get the best teachers and the wisest humans we can afford and make sure that your child is enabled to understand the world and change it for the better. With or without money, there’s nothing else to do.

CR
7.10.16

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Roberts on tour. Honore et Labore

29/5/2016

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I’ve been spending a bit of time in another school, lending a hand as best I can. To a teacher another school is a simultaneously fascinating and terrifying place. We’re all pretty nosy, hence the fascination, but there’s a terror in the almost-familiar like meeting your doppelgänger in the Co-op. It’s a bit like going to the States where we understand the language but not what they’re talking about.

Their motto’s lovely and Latin but schools are similar. There are yards, classrooms and lavatories, tidy and untidy, fragrant and smelly. There are teachers scooping up stragglers with threats and jokes. There are local rules: don’t ask for cups, don’t knock on this door. There are queues being supervised simultaneously by the highest and lowest paid. There are traps for the adult unwary at every stage. How do you get in if the door’s locked? Where exactly is the loo? Is there a sink anywhere or shall I do that teacher thing and only wash my cup every half term in the dishwasher at home?

In the old days you found out through the staffroom. After waiting some weeks to be invited to sit, a new teacher would worm his way into a sub-group. You’d soon know where new exercise books slept unattended or another department’s photocopying code. Segregated by age, you could moan about your elders or recent graduates. You could unite in dismissal of the senior team and lay traps for the uppity, useless or ambitious. You could argue, play cards, mark books in a hassled sort of way, knit or, in the old days, smoke yourself to death.My first job was a huge school in south Birmingham. There wasn’t a smoking room but a smoking end, which you couldn’t see through the fumes: we were all smokers there, passive or active. My second staffroom was dominated by Marxist vegetarians and the third by a scots ex-PE teacher who’d had to come in from the cold when his knees went and learn how to teach poetry. (Which he did through Phil Collins lyrics: I taught in the room next door). That school was half-empty in a post-pit town. We huddled together at one end of a giant room like shipwrecked mariners, appositely sharing a dramatic sea view.

My first London staffroom was angry and overcrowded. It had a tea lady and a bar after hours on Fridays. There was a staffroom committee and the Head was only allowed in by invitation. The next one had staffrooms and smoking rooms on two sites, one in a barely-converted lavvy. It had a whiff of the grammar school with large tables and traditional seating arrangements. Colleagues would trick you into sitting in Miss’s armchair then watch her take your ears off. My final oldschool staffroom had the remnants of a school flat from secondary modern Domestic Science. One inhabitant rearranged the furniture whenever he fell out with someone so it was hard to know where to sit and impossible to know where not to.

Once we started rebuilding schools staffrooms died. Teachers got space to work in their departments, a huge improvement to working conditions but a genuine loss to school life. People don’t mix up so well any more and you have to make a real effort to meet. Worst of all, for the Head, you can’t just wander in and take the school’s temperature anymore. Everything’s a bit more formal, and we need to guard against too much of that. ‘Reply all’ emails, the scourge of modern life, don’t really do the trick.

But anyway, it’s on the concourses, corridors and yards of these beautiful new buildings that you really get the temperature. I’ve hardly had a moment to meet a child at the other school, but three year nines dropped by to bring me an ulterior motive. ‘Hello Miss’ they greeted me, politely. ‘Are you from Tallis? Does that mean we can wear trainers?’. So much for our marketing as the place for creativity and A level excellence, it’s the footwear options they’re interested in. I gave it to ‘em straight: ‘No’. An omnicompetent Scotsman appeared through the carpet. ’You taking a chance, boys? Away with you!’ They laughed, he shooed, learning was resumed.

The much-misquoted ED Hirsch described state schools as common schools not because we’re lowly but because we all do the same thing. Our character isn’t in besieged staffrooms but the characters of our young people. We should serve and support one another as we serve and support our young. It’s good to see that reflected in a another place, and to be welcomed. Honore et labore.

CR
26.5.16

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Feeling it

Finding my mojo in Block 3

Becoming thankful

A mighty storm

Future Shock

Roberts on tour. Honore et Labore

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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