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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Fare Thee Well

19/7/2020

1 Comment

 
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A three-part blog this week.

First: this one is some of what I said in the final assembly – do watch it if you haven’t already. It contains singing and everything!

This is what I said to the children:
We said goodbye in winter, and now it is summer and we say goodbye again.  The word goodbye is a contraction of ‘God be with you’, a blessing or wish from one person to another as they part. It’s a hope of protection in uncertain times. Farewell means the same – I hope you do well, that nothing terrible happens to you until we meet again. All the other languages you speak will have similar words, usually based on an ancient ‘go with God’ or ‘until we meet again'. Although where I come from people say ‘ta ta’ or ‘ta ra then’, which doesn’t really mean anything, to be honest.

Since March, the words ‘stay safe’ have appeared instead of goodbye, all over the place. That’s very specific in some ways, it means ‘I hope you don’t catch the virus’ or even ‘I hope you don’t die’. It sounds new, but it’s really just a way of saying ‘God be with you’ or ‘until we meet again’ in a modern way.

When we said goodbye we didn’t really know what was about to happen. We didn’t know if we’d all be safe, or if we’d all meet again. Some of you, sadly, have lost people you loved to the virus, and that’s tragic. No one at Tallis has died. With the exception of year 11 and year 13 all of us who left in March will be back in September. That makes us very lucky. 

We don’t know if the virus will come back and we don’t know what it will do if it does. We all have to be careful, so when you come back in September you’ll find a whole new range of routines and things which are designed to keep you safe, designed to fight it off. Be prepared for change!

And speaking of change. We know that the virus hasn’t been fair in the same way that lots of our experiences as humans aren’t fair. Most of the 60,000 people who’ve died have been old or ill. People were also much more likely to catch it if they are poor or live in overcrowded housing. Too many black and minority ethnic people in England are disadvantaged in these ways, so they were more likely to get sick than white people. And that’s not fair. The Black Lives Matter protests point out the other ways in which the way we live is unjust, and we all need to do something about that. 

Fairness is big for us at Tallis. You expect your school to be fair and with your help we try to make it so. We are one big family from all sorts of backgrounds, but we’ve been lucky and we’ll all be together again.

As a way of celebrating our good fortune we should commit ourselves to fairness, to understanding injustice and to rooting it out. Be ready in September to change the world for the better.

Enjoy the sun.  Stay safe. Fight injustice and come back to us fit and well in
September.
This is part of what I said about Mr Tomlin leaving us:
When I was clawing my way up the greasy pole, what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a Deputy Head. I worked with 11 before I got there and they ranged from those who never left their offices or the staff smoking room to those who did absolutely everything, but who you didn’t dare ask a question because they looked as though they were about to burst. I became a young Deputy in a stable of three on a split site school: I learned the most when I went to manage the lower school site alone. In 19 years as a Head I’ve had 10 Deputies.

For me, the biggest wrench returning to London in 2013 was leaving a brilliant senior team behind which had taken me 6 years to gather. The Tallis I joined was emerging from choppy waters: I inherited 4 Deputy Heads and made some adjustments during the course of the year. Ashley Tomlin was Head of Sixth at the time, but I changed that to Pastoral Deputy at Easter 2014 – minutes before Ofsted appeared – then again to Curriculum when Douglas Grieg first took on Plumstead Manor in October 2014. I changed it back to Pastoral in September 2018: he has had a full training programme for headship here.

With typical thoroughness Ashley came to visit me in Durham before I started here. Ostensibly to see what we did with our sixth form but probably actually to see if the school was what I claimed it to be. He’d decided by then to give me a year and move on if I didn’t suit.  It is with a certain amount of pride therefore that I say goodbye to him after 7. [The full contents of that speech contain anecdote, rambling, some violent references and occasional coarse language and are therefore unsuitable for the website!]

However, on behalf of us all, I’d like to say thank you for all of Ashley’s incredible hard work and determination, his tenacity and commitment – not only exemplified in his hands-on strategic work in school but also in his appearance at the Dover night after night: a feat of courage and determination to help our young people to live safer lives.

As you’ve gathered, I like to be busy in the wider school system in one way or another. This would be impossible without someone very reliable to hold the fort, someone whose judgement I trust completely. Without Ashley, the Ethical Leadership Commission would never have happened: the whole system owes him a debt for this. He’ll tell you that he’s moving largely because of the journey form Gravesend, but that’s not true. Ashley has been more than ready for his own school for years now but stayed here through loyalty to the children. Borden School don’t know how lucky they are in their new Head. We thank him for everything he’s done for Tallis.
And finally.

On my desk this year I’ve had two small bits of paper. One is a newspaper cut-out of an artwork by Douglas Coupland. He has others more apposite in this year, but I like this.
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It keeps me calm when the national leadership and advice we get doesn’t quite hit the spot.  

The second is an extract from a David Harsent poem – I can’t remember which one.
            ‘
If nothing’s changed

An hour from now, we’ve won:
Survivors of the wind, the streaming glass,
the life outside.
 
The hour has come to us survivors of the virus, the empty school, the life online. We hope for a different year in September, but if we don’t get one, it won’t surprise us: we know what to do.    
 
Have a happy summer, whatever it brings and thank you for your support.
       
Carolyn Roberts
17.7.20
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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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Ahoy there!

24/8/2014

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Sir John Everett Millais The Boyhood of Raleigh, 1870
Perhaps the stripy tops and nautical imagery have overwhelmed me this week. If we were a ship entering harbour at the end of term then what are we doing now? In dock being - what's the term? - fitted out? What happens in school in the hols? 

Infrastructure, enabling works, drainage on the west field, painting and decorating. Refurbishing the foyer, tidying classrooms, clearing emails, moving offices, not being ruled by the bells but working at another pace. Wandering about without any shoes on, archiving stuff, battening down the hatches for when we put to sea again. 

And much more. Thinking, preparing for new roles, writing schemes of work, hosting the summer school, sixth form enrolment. Quiet reflection on what we know, about our subjects and how to teach them. Reading new books, and research, reflecting on our pedagogy: what went well, what needs changing, what could be better, what’s new. Dragging our families to bizarrely fascinating subject-related destinations. And we think about the assessments we have and the progress that our young people have made. National attention is focused on the 16 and 18 year olds, but we are on a longer voyage.    
Is the weather set fair? I observed a lack of national excitement after the A level results last week, and posed some questions about the way we do A levels and whether the structure of the examination system serves us well. This week, approaching GCSE results, a different kind of commentator joined in when the Head of Eton described the whole examination system as ‘archaic’. The wonderful Professor Michael Young wrote a response on the Institute of Education’s blog,  part of which I reproduce here: 
What really would be news would be if Eton decided to stop entering pupils for any public examinations until the system was reformed. Then, especially if a number of other such schools followed suit, we might get a Royal Commission with the remit to examine both why such an anti-educational system of examinations had emerged and what might be the alternatives.

No complex modern education system could exist without some form of examination system….. The problem is that the relationships between public examinations, the curriculum …and the professional work of teachers, have become grossly distorted. Instead of examinations guiding teachers and students and providing feedback on the curriculum, they have come to replace the curriculum in deciding what is taught and how, and to be a major control force over teachers’ pedagogy and student learning. Taken to its limits, this turns teachers into technicians and all but the very highest achieving students into exam fodder, those that do not give up.

This is a constant struggle, but we still find time sensibly to assimilate and use the subject knowledge we believe to be important despite the constant churn of national curriculum and examination specifications which require different changes for different reasons almost every year.   

Ten years or so ago I read Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler in which this greatest of travel writers is quietly but comprehensively terrified by everything about an Orkney trawler in the North Atlantic. At one point he clutches the arms of his chair in a force 8 gale and remembers the 'six degrees of freedom' he'd read about somewhere: pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I’ve had this in my diary ever since.  It serves as a useful, if unfortunate metaphor for the education policies that create our weather.  

This year’s GCSEs nationally are characterised either by recalibration or volatility, depending on your commentator. Either way, they call for sturdy sea legs, but this is nothing new. It is always the case that results are simultaneously wonderful and disappointing, and young people euphoric and upset. 

The change in the weather that would make the most difference to schools is for us to enter a period of calm so that we may concentrate on our scholarly curriculum and expert teaching. That’s something else we do in the holidays: think about knowledge that is powerful and important for our young people and how to make it irresistible to them. Let’s hope the exam debate attracts a following wind so we get a better chance to do it.

It only remains for me to cry ahoy there to our new staff, new year 7, our biggest ever year 12 and all their parents. And ahoy there to all those who've sailed with us before. We're glad you've chosen us and we're ready, whatever the weather. 

CR

23.8.14
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Entering harbour

23/7/2014

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Alfred Wallis, The Schooner the Beata, Penzance, Mount’s Bay, and Newlyn Harbour
We bought a grand piano in the early spring and last week we launched it. We had a recital with pianists of many ages, guitarists, singers, films and so forth. It was quite wonderful, Chopin to Hendrix, Beethoven to Glass played by young people, staff, friends and a remarkable old boy.  It was, in the best sense, a bit of a do - drinks on the concourse, posh nibbles. That was Thursday. Friday was a languages extravaganza for year 7, France v Spain in cooking, dance, sport, everything. Tallis beribboned, bedecked, singing and dancing on the concourse, Spanish-quality sunshine. 

What else has happened as we sail for harbour? Year 8 have been to the Tate Modern. PE won a quality mark. Year 10 had a Directions Day to help them think about the future.  We’ve interviewed young people about our three-year KS4. There’s been a Tour de Greenwich for year 7 cyclists and apprenticeships for Business students. We had year 12 taster week and geography field trips. The foyer designs starts to happen. Some staff are leaving, some changing roles, all are thanked, clapped and smiled on their way. We’ve had celebration assemblies – year 7 so enthusiastic they nearly missed lunch. The timetable is roomed, we ready ourselves for exam results and wonder how this term got to be quite so long.  
And as the outside world turns, Mr Gove falls off. A remarkably long-lived post holder, did we lose him because he picked too many fights, or because 1 in 10 women work in education and there’s a women issue? Have we got Ms Morgan because she’s calmer or because she’s female? When will we next have a Secretary of State of any party who went to a state school? Where are the 93% in politics? Why are the 7% in charge even in Sanctuary Buildings? Is there no one who understands how we live, to direct what we become?

In the week when the Trojan Horse inquiry reports, perhaps we should muse on our sun-loungers on where the manipulation of schooling structures has brought us. Autonomy is not an educational good of itself and neither is freedom. What joins us together is worth more than what sets us apart.  We need the Nolan values of selflessness, honesty, objectivity, leadership, openness, integrity and accountability. We need the principles of public education to be publicly understood and agreed. 

However, it is week 39 and I won’t solve that this term. I’m a fan of the Cornish poet Charles Causley, a former primary school teacher. He wrote a wonderful poem about the end of a school day whose opening words fit the end of term too:

                  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.   

The good ship Tallis has reached safe harbour for 2013-4 and now we’ll take a little shore leave. We’ll see what August brings and chart our next course from September. Wherever your dinghy takes you over the summer, I hope the weather is set fair for you and yours. 

CR 22.7.14  

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Life as a leaf

26/11/2013

3 Comments

 
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'Ejiri in Suruga Province' also known as "A Sudden Gist of Wind' by Katsushika Hokusai
Teachers say that young people are excited by wind. Undoubtedly true, but they are also excited by chips, rain, wasps, blinds falling down and pheasants tapping the window in geography. You have to get your excitement where you can in school and being buffeted by elemental forces and shrieking as you bucket across to Art is more fun than walking with due care and attention to other yard users.

There is a cosiness to the warm and hardworking indoors while a storm rages outside. I love the Rolls Royce purr of an expert’s classroom and the happy immersion of young people tussling with something they’re just working out how to do, that’s just beyond their grasp. I love hearing teachers and children confident in technical language. I love seeing them seize really powerful knowledge, to understand the world and change it for the better. I especially love going to Maths and seeing young people chewing their pens and clutching their hair while they try to repeat something Sir made look pretty straighforward.  
I am ashamed to say I have been skittish with maths teachers – I once described a conversation between a timetabler and the Head of Maths as dinosaurs calling across the swamp – but because I’m the Head they have to be patient with me.  While I chuckle at a former colleague describing A level Further Maths as The Sum of all their Fears, they treat me kindly, hoping I’ll find my way back to the yard soon and leave them to get on with the numbers that keep the building standing and make the earth turn.

It was maths in the wind last week that stopped me chuckling. Looking up from upper and lower bounds through a lot of hair Child, 14, grasped her neighbour’s arm with ‘but what would it be like to be a LEAF?’  We looked through the window at the storm and the poplar trees swaying and the leaves swirling, then got back to work. I thought – but the world would make you a leaf caught in the wind. Unless we are very careful with you it would exploit you and measure you and design you with a template and scissors and hurl you from one expectation to another.  I thought - we know a bit in schools about being leaves in the wind, about being at the whim of changing external forces so that we are blown hither and yon, castigated for raising a thoughtful protest as we try to protect you from the storms of change.  

How different our lives would be without that wind beyond the window. If education was de-politicised.  If there was a check on change that meant that no child could have his examination course changed mid-track. If the role and value of teachers and schools, of knowledge and scholarship and the needs of a good society could be decoupled from the election cycle.  If a College – like the medics have – could be a gatekeeper for our training and development, and speak for us in a calm and scholarly manner. A check and a College – now that would be a change in the weather.

Poetry, like maths, usually has an answer.  I never see a windy tree without hearing great Larkin challenging me to begin afresh, afresh, afresh.  Our great good fortune in school is that we can do that with every young person who shares part of a life with us, and while they’re young they can experiment and make mistakes secure in the knowledge that we’ll help them to begin afresh. Yet young life is so complicated and unforgiving now. Mistakes are preserved in cyberspace in perpetuity making a fresh start harder.  Poverty and debt makes it hard to feel free as a leaf on the wind.  And the education system, which should give them a reliable and secure start is recalibrated annually, trapping young people in caprice and uncertainty.

What would it be like to be a leaf?  I’d love it if she never knew.

CR 26.11.13

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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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