Category: Children

If You Think It’s Wrong, Act On It

10/11/2022

A long-ish blog, second in a quadrennial series on Fury Resulting From Adverts On Trains.

Heading north for a family funeral I had stuffed my rather stylish new handbag with reports I hadn’t had time to read. The first, a cross-sector (heads’ associations, Chartered College and suchlike) legal advisory briefing on gender issues in schools was a fine piece, detailed and helpful. I shall keep it to hand.

The second was the excellent and extremely depressing final report from former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield's Commission on Young Lives 'Hidden in Plain Sight: A national plan of action to support vulnerable teenagers to succeed and to protect them from adversity, exploitation and harm'. It's quite long but I think everyone ought to read it. This blog therefore is a bit of a precis, with the added bonus of Roberts’ General Asperity.

I quote:

Government statistics published last week reveal that in 2021/22 there were over 16,000 instances in England where child sexual exploitation was identified by local authorities as a factor at the end of an assessment by social workers. There were 11,600 instances where gangs were a factor and 10,140 instances where Child Criminal Exploitation was a factor. These numbers are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Those involved in gang activity and criminal exploitation are disproportionately young, vulnerable, and unknown to services. It has been estimated that there could be as many as 200,000 children in England aged 11 to 17 who are vulnerable to serious violence. The report says there are already huge stresses on over-stretched services and the public purse due to a lack of early intervention, and that a combination of Covid, a cost-of-living crisis, and any return to austerity would be a gift to those who exploit children. Over the last year, the Commission has heard from multiple professionals working with vulnerable children that many of these problems have become more extreme since the pandemic, including the ages of those running gangs becoming even younger. It has also heard countless examples of children from suburban, middle-class England being groomed by criminals who have spotted a vulnerability and moved in with clinical ruthlessness.

Imagine the outcry if 200,000 Conservative voters were vulnerable to serious violence?

Notably, clearly and sensibly, Anne Longfield (with whom I have not always agreed) said:

There are parts of our country where the state is completely failing in its duty to protect vulnerable children from the ongoing epidemic of county lines, criminal exploitation, and serious violence. This is a problem hidden in plain sight, rocket-boosted by Covid, which is disproportionately affecting teenagers in deprived and minority ethnic communities and also some families living in leafy suburbs.
It is a national threat to our country's prosperity and security, a threat which is ruining lives and scarring communities, and which is costing the NHS, schools, the police and criminal justice system, and the children's social care system billions of pounds every year.

So, the report recommends:

The Prime Minister recognises the national threat to prosperity and security by the scourge of serious violence, criminal exploitation, and harm and convenes regular COBRA meetings to tackle the root causes of these problems. The Children’s Minister of State should attend Cabinet.
The Department of Education returns to its previous incarnation of Children, Schools, and Families, reflecting the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world class education system.
The Government establishes a new Sure Start Plus Programme, a “Sure Start for Teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. ‘We have chosen to incorporate the name Sure Start as it is a well-recognised and well-respected programme, which we believe was a mistake to dismantle.’ [Not half, say I]
The Government sets a target of 1,000 Sure Start Plus Hubs by 2027 to co-ordinate and deliver health and education support for vulnerable teenagers. Established in and around schools, the hubs will be run by charities, public bodies, business, and philanthropy organisations.
A new drive across Government to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, including the re-establishment of a Child Poverty Unit in Whitehall.
The Government leads a national mission to identify and remove racial bias in the systems that are currently failing many Black, Brown and Minority Ethnic children.
The Government takes a new “Family First” approach that supports families with children at risk of becoming involved with gangs, serious violence, or criminal exploitation and which prevents crisis, financed through the implementation of Children’s Social Care reforms, and delivered by local authorities and family organisations.
Reform of the children’s social care system to provide high quality care for all teenagers, taking an invest-to-save approach and delivered by a partnership of Government, local authorities and the third sector. Implementation of the Independent Review into Children’s Social Care recommendations delivered at pace.
The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community, financed by funds from the proceeds of crime and administered by a collaboration of national charities.
Opening all secondary school buildings before and after school, at weekends and during holidays, to provide safe and appealing places for teenagers, financed by funds from dormant bank accounts and National Lottery community funding.
The Government to promote a new era of inclusive education, ending the culture of exclusion and helping all children to succeed in their education.
One-off £1bn children and young people’s mental health recovery programme, part-financed by a levy on social media companies and mobile phone providers.
Reform the youth justice system to accelerate moves towards a fully welfare based, trauma-informed Child First approach.

To my mind, these proposals are absolutely excellent and should be enacted at once. Youth work is always the first to go under revisionist government, and we’ve had 12 years without it now. The Cabinet’s not short of what we now coyly call ‘high net worth individuals’. Perhaps they could prime the philanthropy for 3 and 4?

Back on the train, I was heading for Cambridgeshire and reading fast. I thought of another vision for education, that of Henry Morris and the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges from the 1920s onwards. He determined that everyone, no matter how poor, should have access to good education in an inspiring setting. The village colleges were secondary schools and community facilities at the same time, focal points in villages where people of all ages came to learn, mix, be entertained and even get babies weighed. Henry Morris didn’t just create village colleges that were big schools – he created community education. Community education where everyone was in it together, where the whole village raised the children and support each other throughout their lives. When I was offering my skills in Leics in the eighties, their Community Colleges had the same vision.

So what have we now? Narrow education behind locked gates, for safety. Education at which many must fail to keep allegedly elite standards high while the country is run by the 7% who went to fee-paying schools and where a mere millionaire just isn’t trying hard enough. Where a known bully and incompetent can be promoted again and again, knighted for his services to the destruction of trust and integrity in public life: obviously a perfect person to be Secretary of State for Education at the time of the biggest increase in child poverty in modern times. I apologise for writing light-heartedly about such a one in blogs passim.

But finally, the advert. As I arranged my affairs, discovered I had only one contact lens and no charging plug for the Great Northern Electrostar making irregular terrifying banging noises upon which I travelled, I read the wall. There was a government poster about sexual harassment in the workplace, showing some concerned citizens saying what they would do to stop it. Good stuff, though not nearly as good as the Scottish That Guy campaign. But it was the sign-off that got me.

HM Government say ‘If you think it's wrong, act on it’.

Tell that to Anne Longfield and the 200,000 terrified children, Rishi.

CR
10.11.22

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Feeling it

21/7/2022

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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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We Deserve Better. We Can Do Better.

27/3/2022

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This blog has been written largely by others. The first two stories are courtesy of that organ of truth, Schools Week, all power to their shorthand notebooks. The third was heard by my own ears at a very large conference in Birmingham on Saturday March 12 2022.

The fourth is in the form of a response written by a year 10 Tallis student. I don’t need to repeat the brutality of that story.

News Story 1: ‘Elite Sixth Forms’
Eton and a group of successful academies called the Star Academy trust intend to bid in the next wave of free schools to open ‘elite’ sixth forms in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham in 2025. They will provide “knowledge-rich teaching from subject-specialists; access to talks, academic essay prizes and debate clubs; Oxbridge-style tutorial sessions and the chance to learn Latin”. They will also be subsidised to the happy tune of £4000 PER STUDENT on top of the funding we all get.

I’d like to set a few essay questions on this topic, if I may? 20 marks a pop.

If Eton need £4k more per child to do a good job, what are the rest of us supposed to do with just the taxpayer’s shilling?
What is the alternative to ‘knowledge-rich teaching from subject-specialists’ and, for the love of Mike, what do they think the rest of us are doing?
What are extant local sixth form providers meant to do when their results plummet because the elite have lured a particular group into their gold-plated lairs?
What would happen if all 6F providers in the poorest areas got an extra £4k pp?
Why perpetuate the language of elites and Eton-gets-you-into-Oxford? What is preventing Gasworks Comp form getting children into Cambridge who are suited to that kind of education? (The answer may be in the question.)

News Story 2: Lord Agnew’s champagne.
‘Agnew famously said in 2018 he would bet any headteacher “a bottle of champagne and a letter of commendation” his advisers could find savings in their schools – and likened himself to “a pig hunting truffles” in his pursuit of efficiencies. [but] …… cost-cutters failed to identify savings at more than one in ten schools they visited, new figures show….When asked if Agnew had in fact sent those schools a bottle of champagne, the DfE reiterated, “opportunities were identified in these cases but they were not costed or reported.”’

Discuss Agnew’s working hypothesis that all HTs mismanage budgets.
Locate the missing champagne.
Will Roberts have to stop writing about this now?

News Story 3: The Chair of the Social Mobility Commission doesn’t know what the Social Mobility Commission plans to do.

Why not?
Who does?

But the fourth news story cannot be treated lightly.

Today at Tallis we held an act of solidarity for Child Q. This is the speech that a 15-year-old girl wrote and read to our community, at break.

In North-East London, a 15 year old black girl went into her school to take a mock exam. Her parents put their trust in the school to keep her safe but instead... they accused her of being in possession of drugs. They searched her. Called the police and allowed her to be strip searched without her parent’s knowledge or consent.

This happened because black children are often not seen as innocent. And not even seen as children.

No one should EVER have to experience such harmful actions caused by racial bias.

The safety of children and education are basic rights. Fairness shouldn’t have to be fought for. No matter the race, gender, class, abilities, or beliefs of anyone. Dignity is for all. It isn’t fair that we aren’t the first generation to fight for our human rights. But we can strive to ensure that we will be the last.

So what are we doing to change this? If we are being persecuted in our youth and we do nothing about it, then are we any better than the persecutors? What happened to integrity?

Martin Luther King's dream is still only a dream but we can make that OUR reality. We stand for equity, for it is a necessity no matter identity. I want to live in a world where everyone feels safe around the police and not fear an abuse of their power. Where adults advocate for children. Where anyone can excel. For that to stop happening we have to remove these stereotypes from the media, from our curriculum, from what we say, the way we treat certain groups or certain people and even the jokes we make. Small things can make such a big difference once we apply them to everyday life.

We can all make a change now. It doesn’t matter if it’s not a major change. We can be an ally. We can demonstrate solidarity with Child Q. Napoleon Hill once said...“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way”.
Stand in solidarity with Child Q and respond to our call of ‘we deserve better: we can do better’.

And so we did.

I’ve seen a couple of children wearing splendid origami crowns this week. I’d like to give every child one, to demonstrate that we respect them, protect them, take them seriously and try to build a better world for them.

The composite news story of the week has been of division, arrogance, indolence, brutality and a blinkered refusal to see the big picture we are all painting for young people. We are a very long way from changing the world for the better. I don’t have any more words for this.

CR 25.3.22

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On Golden Threads and Lemons

11/12/2021

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If I were a better physicist, I’d understand how time simultaneously contracts and expands. Why is it that watching the end of the year 7 Languages Spelling Bee – which took about 5 minutes – felt like such a blessed episode of calm in the week, while the five hours spent writing a zillion school Christmas cards seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye? Why is it that standing on the yard for 15 minutes in the cold feels like a lifetime but discussing feminism with year 13 for an hour was over in seconds with only a tenth of the arguments covered? Why is it that anyone wants me to give any more minutes of my remaining years to hearing about the reformed NPQs?

Once upon a time we had coherent way of entering teaching but a wide range of incoherent and usually meaningless ways to perk up your skills once you’d become a professional custodian of a dry-wipe marker. This wouldn’t do, obviously, because other countries do it much better and manage to keep hold of their teachers for longer. So, we invented the National Professional Qualifications and spent a few years oscillating like loons between making them compulsory or totally irrelevant. Now, everyone’s had to work for what feels like aeons on How to Do It Better. Result? Utterly incoherent ways of becoming a teacher, numberless as the stars in the sky, but a spiffy new set of free NPQs with, I kid you not, a ‘golden thread’ running through them.

Some of us have an incoherent hinterland in our own heads and can’t just accept a metaphor like that. Golden thread? Is it Ariadne’s? Is it close-binding all mankind? Does it twitch like Father Brown’s? Does it weave a magic spell of rainbow design? Why does it have to be dressed up so? If we had a system fit for grown-ups we could just say that we finally have a set of National Professional Qualifications that build on the same principles, from early career teachers to Heads, soup to nuts. We could say, as has one of its architects, that it has a clear structure, more coherence, a better evidence base, can be done alongside the day job rather than requiring Einsteinian time-bending and includes the SEND skills we all need. Why do we need jollying along like three-year olds?

Some of what we do in school is really quite hard. We have to think a lot, at the same time as preventing children from getting jammed in doors or falling downstairs. We have to consider the purpose of education while handing out glue sticks and marking A-level pieces. We have to explain what acid can do to people who might want to taste it to find out for themselves. We have to have a rationale for teaching Spanish grammar and Venn diagrams at a time of plague; volcanoes and poetry while racism, misogyny and climate disaster mess with the future. We have enough threads going on in our heads to knit a Fair Isle jumper. All we require of policy-makers is that they speak plainly and respect our intelligence.

I’ll get over the confounded golden thread, but it won’t solve the teacher crisis. We need more money in the system so that there can be more teachers so that the teachers we have can have some time to think. That’s how they keep them in other countries, as well as coherent training. We need both.

I worry about the future, of course, for all sorts of reasons. As well as all the above, there’s a nagging fear that people don’t expect enough of one another, enough seriousness or enough concentration. I’m sure that the golden thread is a lovely way of describing some worthy training courses but to me it doubles as a tightening noose of over-simplification in our education system caused by cheapness. What do I want in my metaphorical stocking? A system where more funding buys more time, where academic research is respected and teachers’ intellects taken seriously, for the long term.

I’m one to talk, though. I’ve been pointing at children and saying ‘no noses’ all week like a mad thing which has kept me amused as I hand out masks we can’t afford to children who forget where they’ve put them. I delayed the start of a meeting on the content of the visual arts curriculum by telling the trapped assembled about the plastic lemons my mother hung on her Christmas tree, which I’ve inherited. ‘Was it a recycling thing?’ one asked carefully. In the sixties? No, she thought they looked nice and she didn’t have much spare cash. I think a Christmas tree looks unfinished without them, but that just shows what you can do with a child’s brain if you start early enough. One year she experimented with a special total-lemon tree and we were all surprised by how dull it looked.

Perhaps the other thing I want for schools’ stockings is a bit of imagination in the system as well as coherence. There’s a lot of content in the NPQs but not much room for imagination or flair. That’s another consequence of parsimony: thinking deep and free takes time, which costs. When all your lemons look the same, even golden threads don’t make your system sparkle with the reflected light of the sheer joy of learning in communities of children.

CR
10.12.21

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My Magnificent Octopus

27/11/2021

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The calendar gods decree that I write a blog on Community Days. This week is the big autumn event with all year groups doing slightly different things – sustainability, identity, oppression, relationships, careers, debating, revising, wellbeing, planning and budgeting. Something for everyone, for every eventuality on adult life’s thorniest pathways. From our experience and scholarship to the brains of the young, engagingly delivered. That’s what the recipients of the cry ‘HB to the sports hall’ are off to, in their usual shambling, bickering and tripping manner.
I was Performance Managed yesterday which focuses the mind. I’ve been a Head for 20 years in three different places, and I reckon I’ve got rules of thumb or mental lists to deal with most eventualities. These were, of course, expanded by new stuff we absorbed under lockdown about how to run a school when the children aren’t allowed to come to it, but there’s a new dimension to educating at the moment with which I’m tussling. Remember that as you read, breathlessly, on.

I don’t know how they do things in the independent sector, but I assume they have time to organise a thought, hence the heads’ hutches being called studies, which would explain the number of books old Seldon wrote while he was high heid-yin at Wellington, for example. But I digress. Anyone been to Peppa Pig world? Anyway, the president of the Girls’ Schools Association made a whole load of very good points yesterday, summarised on the Beeb.

She said: parents and teachers should keep up with young people who are genuinely worried about racism, sexism and climate change and want to address them with support from adults. Adults who complain that today's teenagers are judgemental and speak a different language so adults ‘can't say anything without being called out by PC children’ should get with it. Times have changed, and we need to keep up. This nastily-dismissed 'woke' generation are actually young people who are worried about things. We teach them to be kind but when they grow up to be impressively so with an understanding and appreciation for the world around them, we mock them, or dismiss them as unrealistic do-gooders. Nicely put, Ma’am.

Contrast this with the Social Mobility Chair’s end of the forest. She thinks that children need to be very strictly controlled, so they’re habituated into choosing good over evil because they’re all wicked underneath. We can train good behaviour into them, but left their own devices, keep clear, they’re pretty unsavoury. Original Sin.

Ah me. Which side of the fence whereon to plummet? Obviously with young people trying to change the world for the better, but what about the echo of reality hiding in the misogynist retro-theology? Children can be horrible to each other as they explore, or are fearful about, the boundaries of their world. Why is that?

Well, part of the problem is the example adults set, hypocrisy in particular. Why can’t I speak in the corridor at school, no one talks to me at home? Why should I worry about getting a job when the world’s about to end? What’s the point of learning to be fair if I’m judged by the colour of my skin, or kind, if I’m not safe walking home? What exactly have you done, Sir, to make the world a better place?

Some years ago I wrote ten precepts underpinning the curriculum which still have an interesting half-life in the edu-ether. I started from the importance of knowledge and ended with adult authority and the teacher’s skill. But the problem I’m wrestling with now is this: how to be educators at a time when adults are demonstrably the problem? I’m reading about wicked problems, again, and worrying about the shallow simplistic solutions that schools have been forced into for so long that now we’re hooked on the superficial, the tick-boxable, the headline-grabbing, the Emperor’s new clothes.

One of the chaps I wrote that book with has just died. He was a great comprehensive school Head for yonks, twenty years older than me. One of the best things about the writing process was talking to him about leading a school yesterday, as it were, the past being a different country. Now I think I need to revise myself, to include the mortal dangers and injustices we knew were around the corner all along, but that young people won’t ignore any more.

My Year 13 class and I keep company with some very old white male theologians as we head toward liberation theology at the end of the syllabus. We drop in on Karl Barth, whose magnum opus was Church Dogmatics in fourteen volumes over thirty-five years. If I had the headspace I’d start on some School Pragmatics, on the lessons of the sum of all my days since 1983. Guilt will probably feature, but not sin. Look out for the next list.

CR
23.11.21

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Misconceptions

1/4/2021

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For years people have been extolling the virtues of filming teachers in classrooms so that we can be critiqued for what we do on our hind legs with board marker. It came up in a meeting yesterday and I was surprised by a response from an expert colleague who was resistant. Viscerally so, yet with nothing to fear. He’d be great on film. My mistake.

Me, I’ve been through it. In a previous school a thrusting Assistant Head wanted everyone to be filmed so somewhere in the ether floats a film of me in a pencil skirt with a mixed bag of year sevens in a draughty room doing Baptism. I had paper cups, water, locusts and honey, the lot. I did my best Colombo meets Billy Connolly routine which worked pretty well on film, I thought, until the end when I asked ‘who are the main characters in this story’? One child correctly identified John the Baptist, but the next offered ‘Jordan River’, whom she had assumed, for 50 minutes, was a person. As a seasoned professional I could put her right with a labelled diagram, but the camera-operator corpsed and film quality was distinctly shaky as I tied up the loose ends.

You never know what children are thinking. The simplest fact can be misheard and when young memory banks are scanned for matching information, they don’t have much to go on. Tackling misconceptions is key to good teaching. Check what you’ve said, check what they’ve heard.

We’ve been tackling racism this term at Tallis and booting a few misconceptions about. It’s a long job and we’ve made a determined start. This week, we’ve also been thinking about the issues raised under the Everyone Invited umbrella, where young women have talked about their experiences of sexual violence and oppression at school. I’d like to remind readers that this began as an expose of practices in a small group of schools, largely in the 7% of fee-paying schools. However, the net is wider now and many young women from the other 93% have told their stories too. It’s shocking and tragic, but I don’t know why it is surprising or unexpected. Misogyny is rife, even in an advanced liberal democracy and we feed it not less than all the time.

If we didn’t have a broad and balanced curriculum to follow I could arrange for teachers to talk to students 100% of the time about the need for kind, respectful and consensual relationships but it might not make any difference. We place powerful machines in the hands of children on which they can watch violent pornography twenty-four hours a day. Good parents model good relationships, monitor phones and talk to their children, especially their sons, but the money-makers can break thorough to children again and again. A child who is remotely sexually inquisitive can find terrible images online, and a child who is not even looking for information will be bombarded with offers of, or ways into, pornography which sets up horrible expectations. It's harder to avoid than it is to get.

Young people take risks. They push boundaries, they try to make sense of the world for themselves. They find it very hard to resist finding or doing things of which adults disapprove. If adults themselves think that such pornography is acceptable, or harmless, or funny, then it becomes normal for children. They don’t know about real adult relationships – how could they? – so they assume that what they see on screen is what everyone does. In this way, the unthinkable is normalised and adolescent exploration exploited. And it makes money for criminals and for the unscrupulous, who then invite young people to join in its creation so that they may become notorious, or so that they can groom them or trap them.

Depressing? Yes. It takes a village to raise a child and that’s true whether your village has 20 people in it or 60 million. It’s just not good enough to say that freedom of expression has to bear this burden: we shouldn’t be free to ruin young lives.

And the final misconception is that schools have been oblivious to this developing sexual culture. Most of us haven’t been. Most of us have been running flat out just to keep up with the ways that young people can get hold of images that they will never un-see and which some of them will try to repeat. We can’t do it alone. We can’t stop this with policies or petitions or armbands or punishments. We’ll only be able to keep girls safe when society agrees that girls should be kept safe and when women’s bodies are not objectified – and then takes steps designed to protect children from it.

It’s been a long term and I didn’t mean to end on a gloomy note. This morning year 7 gathered in family tutor groups all over the concourse to share successes and certificates and awards. The sun shone and someone mentioned sports day (I’ve got them in training. I’m bringing in weights next term’). We couldn’t have been happier. A small pair rushed off towards the loo and one announced ‘I’ve got a zombie in my bag’. Her mate said ‘Tell it violence is never the answer!’. That’ll do me. We’ll fight the zombie of sexual exploitation and oppression together to change the world for the better. Perhaps we can start by turning off the screens for a bit.

CR
31.3.21

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You heard it here first

7/1/2021

5 Comments

How are you?

Fine, thank you. What difference would it make if I wasn’t?

May I call you Caroline?

No.

How many children do you have in school?

Usually over 2000. Between 30 and 60 since Monday.

Weren’t you annoyed at the sudden closure? How could you get ready for remote learning overnight?

All schools had to be ready for lockdown from September. It’s been a long night.

What about the exams?

That’s a vg q. The PM cancelled the exams on Monday and Mr Williamson says they’ll be replaced with teacher-based assessments.

How do you feel about that?

Fine and dandy. It’s the only remotely fair possible solution. As a teacher it's good to see someone learning from their mistakes and trying to improve.

Won’t teachers inflate the grades so that they’re meaningless and no one has a proper qualification and the world ends?

No, calm down. As long as results are used wisely everyone will play their part honestly. Since you’ve asked, might I rant on about this for a bit?

The ring is yours. Knock yourself out.

Thank you. Problem A is how to grade the children. They’re not less clever than children in previous years, they just know less stuff. Problem B is that our exam-based system uses memory as a proxy for intellect so we struggle to decouple exams from learning. Problem C is that this particular exam-based system rations grades so you can only get a grade 5 if someone else doesn’t. Problem D is that you’re much more likely to get a grade 5 if you’ve been really well taught and you’ve done all the homework, which depends on your school and home life. Problem E is that there is a teacher shortage and the schools serving the poorest have trouble recruiting teachers. Problem F is that if you are poor, you’re less likely to have the space to do the homework or parents with the time to help you or a good laptop and connection for the online stuff, so you might get a worse grade because you haven’t been able to keep up. Problem G is that government describes a third of grades as a fail. So, you might be trying really hard against the odds and end up with a fail.

That’s why schools have to stay open! It’s all fair then!

Had I finished?

Sorry, carry on.

None of this is new. The achievement gap between poor children and richer children is hard-wired into our system. The current GCSE model makes it worse. We’ve been campaigning about this for years, but the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said that proved that Heads were enemies of promise with the soft bigotry of low expectations, also enslaved to The Blob.

Harsh?

Shameful.

Hopeless?

Mr Gove? I’ve seen worse. The exam system? Hmmm. We need a different way of assessing learning. We could start by agreeing that exams are a measure, not the purpose, of education. Might we do that this year, as part of all this, d’you think?

Search me. Ahem. What about the Beetex?

They’re more flexible. The school or college can decide on the configuration of exams and coursework for each candidate, within reason, although since 2016 there are more exams in it. We don’t really understand why.

Really?

No, sorry, that was a lie. We absolutely understand why. It’s because there’s a doctrinaire elitist view afoot at Sanctuary Buildings that all learning has to be validated by exams which a portion of the cohort have to fail, or else they look too easy. Are you sure there isn’t another question you should ask about this?

Curses, you rumbled me. What are Beetex?

Well done, I thought you were struggling. It’s always best to ask when you don’t understand. First, snappier pronunciation please – Be-tek. No bees. Second, BTECs are the qualifications organised by the Business and Technology Education Council. They run alongside GCSEs and A levels, you can mix ‘em up, and they’re based on the world of work. They’re modular, and you can resit bits of them. They’re useful qualifications and most universities like them.

Why don’t I know this?

Same way that the PM and Mr Williamson didn’t appear to know or care that they existed. Because of our ridiculous system that prioritises academic qualifications over anything with a vocational slant. Your editor probably thinks they fall into the category of ‘courses for other peoples’ children’ but then he may be a fool.
I’m not allowed to think like that, but thanks. May I move on?

Knock yourself out.

Shall we have mock exams?

Yes. We need to find out how the children are doing so we know what to remedy.

Isn’t that too stressful?

Not for most. We can make arrangements for others.

Are you Covid-testing at school? Who?

Yes, we’re all ready. Tables, screens, swabs, people, the lot. Staff, at the moment. Children who are in school next. The Local Authority is helping us.

What about the children who’ll be really frightened by this?

What do you take us for?

What do you think of the PM?

I’ve seen better.

How stressed are you?

Not very. I’m pretty old.

How annoyed with the government are you?

On a scale of 1-10? 400.

Can I ring you up?

Happy to oblige. Ask me about the National Tutoring Programme.

CR
6.1.21

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Kipling again

3/1/2021

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For a man who seems likely to resort to Kipling at any point, the PM’s been a bit remiss, in this our hour of need. People quote If at the drop of a hat, except when it might actually help, it seems.

If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

I’m happy with the first verse which brings me succour. The chances of my ever looking too good or talking too wise are vanishingly small at the best of times and hopeless now when the guidance I get changes each sixty-second minute. I’ll steer clear of the third and fourth verses abut gambling and being a man, but the second part of the second verse is helpful, situated as we are in the middle of an almighty fight between the DfE and the teacher associations and unions.

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

A word on nomenclature here. Unions are precisely that. They are affiliated to the TUC and exist to get the best working conditions for their members commensurate with the job actually being done. I’ve been a member of both the big teachers’ unions: the NASUWT because I qualified in Birmingham and worked in the north-east, both NASUWT-dominated areas. I was a member of the NUT (now NEU) when I worked in London in the 90s, because that was stronger there/here. I was appointed a Deputy Head by John Dunford, and dragooned into membership of SHA, the Secondary Heads Association, of which he became General Secretary and which later became ASCL. I held office in ASCL and have come to know office-holders in the other unions: all good people, all committed to children and schools.

One problem in education is that the same organisations end up trying to speak for schools, teachers and children. This is confusing and it’s why the Charted College of Teaching is so important. The CCT should be able to work tirelessly to improve teaching without having to foreground protecting jobs and improving working conditions. Unions can think about those while the DfE then runs the schools in the way that the nation thinks best for children and all our futures.

It’s a pity that it doesn’t quite work like this. The CCT is young but strong. It will play the part of the medical Royal Colleges for us in the future. The unions are trying to protect their members’ physical health in a global pandemic – and trying to get someone to speak for children. The department are trying to keep schools open no matter what.
While a three-legged stool is extremely stable (even according to the Foreign Office, you’d think they had other things to worry about), a two-legged stool is a ladder to nowhere and the one-legged version is just Gavin Williamson hopping off as fast as he can. Despite the significant collective brain power available in the teacher associations and the Chartered College, the department prefers – or is forced – to make predictable doctrinaire pronouncements that don’t move at the speed of the virus. Of course it is better for children to be at school but that’s only true while it can be done safely, which has to include the safety of the adults who look after them.

I was a member of ASCL executive for four years and I take my hat off to Geoff Barton and his colleagues trying to steer a typically moderate course through this hurricane. ASCL and the Chartered College are right about the questions that need answering: what did we learn about infection rates once schools were fully re-opened in September? What is the risk to children and teachers of different ages, in school, now? Why not vaccinate all school staff immediately after NHS staff and keep schools open that way? To which we have to add: what is to be done about the department’s new focus on poverty, disadvantage and children’s mental health in the immediate, medium and long-term? And why, oh why will no-one make a sensible decision about exams in 2021?

I know that children and teachers don’t come very high in the government’s priorities but it has to be possible to do better than this. Shouting at schools through a megaphone then running off and hiding behind a curtain for a few days, releasing the press attack-dogs when the unions patiently explain why it can’t be done that way then bellowing another, contradictory, muffled message a couple of days later that has to be reacted to all over again is not good for any of us.

Mr Williamson, work with schools. Work with teachers. Work with those of us who have devoted ourselves to this corner of the nation’s vineyard for years and let’s try to sort it out peacefully together. If you can’t, then hand over the job to someone who really can keep their head.

Hoping the New Year gets happier.

CR
3.1.21

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Lest we forget ourselves

7/11/2020

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I’ve been guilty of appalling double standards this very day. I took a turn around the estate at break and had five very interesting encounters.

The first was with a colleague. We’ve been considering de-gendering some staff loos to reduce travel time. This colleague had expressed concern and we had an unsurprisingly frank exchange on Lavatory Habits I Have Known.
The second was with my old friend the political correspondent who is now, can you believe it, in year 13. We stood together to discuss the US presidency when she was a mere stripling in year 9 and were happy to pick it up again. We speculated on the Electoral Colleges – as if either of us knew what we were talking about – and the international coarsening of public discourse. We were foxed by the simultaneous demands of agitated groups to count votes and stop counting votes and agreed that a hallmark of democracy was probably counting all the votes.
I then pottered over to the year 7 zone where some smaller youth were egregiously not learning from previous mistakes. While Head of Year was dealing with it perfectly accurately, it attracted the attention of me and a Deputy Head. Outrage and the summoning of parents were mooted.

Proceeding in an easterly direction to block 5, my ear was assaulted by a shrill and regular dinging sound. I raised an eyebrow at the culprit who’d found a nice magnet and was trying it on the sturdy metal pillars of the canteen verandah. All of them. We agreed that the magnet should be returning to its siblings in block 2 while he, it transpired, was needed elsewhere.

Then I smiled at two colleagues on toilet duty (student loos, you understand, we don’t monitor the staff ones) as I headed through the door. We noted that masks require more eyebrow effort when greeting with a smile. They managed it elegantly and with some subtlety, I look like a goggling lunatic.

Then I found myself alone on a deserted staircase with metal handrails and a confiscated magnet that itched in the palm. I may have done some dinging of my own and I may have experimented with picking up my keys with it when I should have been concentrating on a budgetary matter. It may still be on my desk in a paperclip sculpture of my own devising.

Later still I taught my year 13s and made them chuckle more than once and saw a child pelting across the grass, arms wide as if practising for flight in the same was as my tiny granddaughter does. (Though she may be being a duck, toddlers keep their own counsel on these matters.) It was a good day.

Earlier I’d recorded a Remembrance assembly piece. I looked at images and words, what we see and hear when we look at or listen to Remembrance. Setting the record straight on who fought in the wars of history is easier now: the archive is unfolding its treasures and all of our young people can recognise themselves in the house of remembrance. The words are more difficult: I talked a bit about Binyon’s 1914 For the Fallen, the Kohima Epitaph of 1944 – and Kipling’s 1897 Recessional because all of them are used, all over the place.

You go too far! you cry. Invictus was bad enough but Recessional? Ghastly Empire Stuff. Yes. It is, but as long as the Remembrance people produce flags, car stickers, mugs, hats and so on with ‘Lest We Forget’ on then I’ll carry on trying to explain precisely what it means.

Kipling wrote Recessional in 1887 for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It’s a eight-line five-verser with the refrain ‘Lest we forget – lest we forget’. That echoes a bit of Deuteronomy which, in the old version reads, ‘then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.’ So the forgetting which we should be lesting not is not the dead, but the hand of God. Here endeth.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that this may not be exactly where the thoughts of youth may tend on Wednesday. Maybe so, but the sentiment of lest we forget is about the fragile foothold each generation has in history. That empire, those wars were huge, terrible, brutal and costly – but they passed away. No one is alive who read Kipling’s poem in the Spectator in 1897, no-one who fought in the Great War, barely anyone who survived Kohima. Did any of it matter?

We are rightly obsessed with our own terrible times – the virus, furloughs, lockdowns and the US election. Our grasp on the present feels so weak that we might cling to alleged certainties of the past. But as Kipling said - "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre." What will remain of us? Looking into the future, what have we got?

No previous generation has ever tried educating so many young people for so long. We’d better hope that it will help them to understand the world and change it for the better. It will be through them that our best hopes survive. Love, I hope, and goodness. Fairness, honesty, respect, optimism and kindness. Inquisitiveness, discipline, collaboration, persistence, and imagination. No matter what else we lose in the current battles, surely these must never pass away? Lest we forget.

CR
6.11.20

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The Menace of the Years

18/10/2020

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Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Protection of Invictus. Someone has to act: things have got out of hand.

My mother didn’t care for poetry, but she furnished my habit from youth and provided the Oxford Book of English Verse from the Literary Guild Book Club. I liked gung-ho stuff and learned a lot of it. Invictus was a favourite as I was all for self-realisation – though she had another term for it. It drives me MAD when I see it misused.

When I read of a school where everyone has to ‘follow Invictus’ and the children are encouraged to learn it by heart I nearly had to self-isolate with rage. I may be misinformed but apparently they suggest that children choose their friends by whether or not they’ve committed this Henley to memory. You can picture the windswept coastal playground chat:

I say old man, have you learnt Invictus yet? It’s bally good, you know.

Sorry, old thing, don’t think I’ll bother. Prefer to focus on the ladies, what?

Well I’m the sorrier, old fruit. I’m afraid it’s curtains for you and me. Can’t be seen with chaps of your sort. The Chief wants us all to make our own path by following his every instruction and you just can’t argue with that. No need to make a face, it’s perfectly clear to me. Toodle-oo.

What kind of person wouldn’t take up this challenge? asks the school. Well, one who had read the poem.

Invictus is a great piece of Victorian rhetoric written by someone who had a terrible early life (and incidentally may have been the model for Long John Silver). It speaks of the undefeated human spirit and is where we get the phrase ‘bloodied but unbowed’. Allow me to quote the last verse:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Schools are pretty hot on charging scrolls with punishments. We call them detention lists, or sanctions or corrections. Children who do their own thing no matter what are prone to end up on these scrolls. If they persist in being master of their own fate they will, sooner or later, be shown the door and invited to take their unconquerable souls elsewhere. Invictus is not about conformity, uniformity or obedience. It is about taking a long view of the difficulties of life and deciding to win through endurance.

Don’t misunderstand me. Telling children that they can escape the grinding poverty and hopelessness of their birth is an entirely good thing. I’ve led a school in those circumstances and I sympathise with the aim – but it can’t be at the expense of truth. Captaining your soul to a good berth requires a following wind and predictable seas.

The photographer Chris Killip died this week and his collection In Flagrante has followed me from house to house. They’re photos taken in the north-east between 1973 and 1985 and illuminate my memories of the same time in the same place. ‘Youth on a wall, Jarrow, 1976’ was for many the definitive image of the time, but as a work of art it is itself timeless.

The school that the boy on the wall went to wouldn’t have bothered much about Invictus. The education he got might not have been up to much and he was probably selected for it, luckily or unluckily. In Jarrow in the seventies his prospects would have looked pretty bleak at 16, but he’d have been used to bleakness. Would it have helped him to go to a school where he had to learn Invictus by heart? Hard to say. If the school was well-run and kindly, energetic in finding jobs and filled with skilled teachers then the poetry could have been an added bonus, a consolation in troubled times to come. If not? Would he have turned the blame in on himself for being insufficiently unbowed? What does the picture say to you?

And now? He sits on the wall rather than going to school. He missed 6 months of education last year and ran wild in that time, with criminals. He might get a grade 3 in English if he works hard with a gifted teacher, but its still a fail. He can enrol at a college with next-to-nothing, but he’ll have to carry on fighting GCSE maths until he’s 19 while youth unemployment heads for 20%. With what does he captain the small ship of his fate through these menaced waters?

Children deserve to be told the truth. They are free to read poetry and they are the master of their souls but neither puts food on the table. Learning Invictus and repeating it in a community of Invictus-chanters will not prevent you from failure in a system that requires 30% to fail. We can choose as a nation not to provide for the most vulnerable but we cannot escape our responsibility.

It is shameful to download the failure of the state into the hearts of our children and mask it with the 19th century equivalent of ‘just follow your dreams’. They deserve the truth – and they deserve an education system that cares about them all.

CR
16.10.20

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On Time and Money

28/9/2020

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I was invited to be an on-screen pundit for the launch of two reports commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation into the effects of CV-19 on schools and children, and on the efficacy or otherwise of home learning. If the session had gone according to plan, this is what I would have said.

Schools are where children look after their young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship. They should model a better world. If we want a better future, we need to care for our young people better. Schools and their classrooms are test-beds for this and they should transmit and embody three things. First, the learning we value and want to pass on. Second, the attributes that children need in order to prosper as adults. Third, the characteristics that build up the common good.

However, in recent times education has become skewed so that it is synonymous with assessment. That’s why we hear this bizarre and despairing language of children being ‘left behind’ and needing to ‘catch up’. Behind what? With whom? Time and learning are not inextricably linked. Children missed six months of school, but that doesn’t make them stupider. They just know less stuff. So, examine less.

Further, the national outrage about the disproportionate effect that missed schooling has on already-disadvantaged students is just disingenuous. Of course they were affected more, because poverty is expressed in housing, stability and possessions. But they have always suffered. They have been left behind their prosperous peers for a very long time. Let’s not pretend that this is new, though a bit of national self-flagellation for our studied refusal to look the problem in the face is long overdue. Keir Starmer has called for an inquiry into this achievement gap, and he’s right.

Children need schools that represent and strive for what’s best in life. At this particular time, we need intelligent, sensible and centrally-driven adjustment to exams and assessment in 2021 and an acceptance that remote learning cannot replace school not just because lots of children don’t have a laptop, but because the value of the relationship with learning brokered by the classroom experience is irreducible. If schools close, teachers are remote, in every sense.

Robert Halfon, King of the Select Committee described school closure as a national disaster and put out some sensible challenges to government to do better. He’s always worth listening to, but sorting this out is a wicked problem, where every attempt to help seems to make it worse.

So many disadvantaged students are part of the ‘forgotten third’. No matter how hard they work, they’ll only get grades 1 to 3 at GCSE. We’ve decided, nationally, to call that a fail, insofar as grades 4 and above are passes. What’s their motivation to tune into complicated remote learning? Why should they fight with their families for the single device just to be told that their work won’t ever meet the grade? From where do they get the resilience in circumstances with which most adults would struggle? What can we learn from this to change an assessment system that demands self-directed learning while discarding a third of its learners?

The demands on schools to sort out the effects of lockdown in terms of young people’s mental health as well as attendance, on top of their learning are next to impossible. There is no capacity in the system because there is no money. Money buys time in school, of extra teachers to make classes smaller, for IT technicians to manage the huge number of extra machines needed in schools and attached from home, for teachers to have time when they’re not teaching to plan their remote learning, for counsellors and attendance officers. The blessed National Tutoring Programme about which we are being bombarded with dense information this week will be hugely challenging to run. Who will supervise inexperienced strangers trying to encourage the disaffected to renew their relationship with ideas? How reliably will they do a very difficult job? Where will the time come from to chase up the reluctant and the defaulters?

And in the meantime, what am I to do about the extra hundred year 12s we’ve taken on, about the space and time they need?

Anyway, the timings went a bit awry so I had to say all this in a minute and a half. I probably didn’t even need that long to say that what we really need are policies to end poverty.

When it was over I managed a line-up and fired a class of year 7s towards lesson 3. One of them literally jumped for joy. ‘Computer Science! They have spinning chairs.’ Oh, to be 11.

CR

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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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Lines

12/9/2020

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An old hand dropped by to muse ‘It’s always useful to throw our processes in the air and see what we can do better’. Good grief, matey, I said. We’ve done nothing else since March. I distantly ran into another of similar vintage on the stairs later the same day. His view was that ‘It’s best to keep things as normal as possible’. Scowling at myself for inconsistency, I agreed warmly as he rushed upstairs to barter with the timetabler. Stap me, but both of them are right.

The things that really matter in school are very simple. Safety, good teachers and good relationships cover it all. Safety is foremost now and our response is rooted in my love of a queue. Lots of lovely lines in zones that keep year groups apart as best we can and every class has to be fetched and returned, like a very unwieldy library book. The lines are a nice way to start the day in nice weather, The solution to not-so-nice weather is best described as a work in progress involving umbrellas. Students being towed from place to place by teachers means they don’t all get jammed in doorways with other year groups.

Its 0905 and from my eyrie there’s a beautiful sight of different aged-lines fanning out like a sunburst from the entrance to block 2, waiting patiently and chatting happily. Some schools do this all the time. It's popular in the newer schools where young peoples’ unquestioning compliance is highly valued. There’s never one solution in schools, though, which is why governments find them so infuriating to run. Safety and compliance are central, but so are questioning and individuality. You can prevent harm, but you can’t prescribe brilliance. Speaking of which.
One of the most irritating training sessions I ever sat through was from a person who billed himself as an iconoclast. He’d written a book that had its moment in the sun so we shelled out for a session. He began with a line-related expansive flinging of the arms. ‘If you imagine a continuum with Ken Robinson at one end, Michael Gove is at the other’. Oh dear. We were partial to Sir Ken, may he rest in peace, at Tallis, not just because of his TED talk (‘Do schools kill creativity?’) that everyone in the world watched, but because he talked sense that reached deeply into our history at Tallis. He wasn’t at one end of anyone’s line.

Robinson was a former teacher and distinguished education academic who finally ended up working for the Getty Foundation. He argued that children do not grow into artistic creativity but are educated out of it by school systems that focus on academic achievement and conformity instead of liberating imagination and initiative. He feared that ‘our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity.’ He wanted a system that didn’t treat children as the same or try to ‘over-programme them’. He wanted all children to be able to to find their talents by being able to try things out at school.

Robinson wasn’t opposed to academic learning or a national curriculum and those who say he was are just wrong. He wanted a curriculum judged by different priorities with parity of esteem between core subjects and the arts. Tony Blair asked him to chair a National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education and the 1998 report ‘All Our Futures’ argues:

that no education system can be world-class without valuing and integrating creativity in teaching and learning, in the curriculum, in management and leadership and without linking this to promoting knowledge and understanding of cultural change and diversity.

Michael Gove trashed him in his puerile ‘blob’ rhetoric, rather than saying: this is best but fiendishly hard to get right. Let’s look at it seriously and build up a wonderful education system, rather than a cheap one that easier to measure.

Ken Robinson used Mick Fleetwood as an example in one of his books. Our Fleetwood Mac man was written off at school, distracted, unfocused, always thinking about something else – but what a legacy. Is there anyone over 40 who wouldn’t recognise Albatross, or whistle along to Rumours, if whistling were permitted?

Which reminded me of the Norman Rockwell picture of the Soviet schoolroom. Look at it carefully. The children are tidily uniformed. There’s an exhortation on the wall about ‘study and learn’ and everyone is focused except for the child looking out of the window. Is Rockwell just making an obvious cold war point about the crushing of individuality and the yearning of the human soul? Or is he saying something about a universal experience of children? About the child who’ll still think his own thoughts no matter what the classroom climate – and the teacher who recognises it?

Yet this picture illustrates much of what’s currently praised in secondary education: absolute conformity, even down to the level of all eyes ‘tracking the teacher’. That distracted thinker would be sanctioned in many schools, and his teacher would certainly be criticised by inspectors. But what is he thinking of? What memory, what experience of school does the picture bring back to you? (Ignore the bust of Lenin, though I did serve in a County Durham school with a bas-relief of Peter Lee on the hall wall who could easily have doubled for Lenin. I thought it was him until I got up close.)

We are constantly distracted by easy ways to fix education or loud ways to argue about it. Robinson wasn’t at one end of anyone’s continuum but wanted a way of combining the best in a good and lively system. Responding to the virus doesn’t meant that we start from scratch nationally, but it doesn’t mean that we pretend nothing’s happened. Learning lines at Tallis doesn’t mean that we’ll always do it – but we might learn something new that helps us. Both of my chaps are undoubtedly right.

I followed a matching pair of year 10s along an orderly and well-spaced-out corridor. As they went outside I’m certain that one said to the other ‘my mask smells of roman numerals’. If he did, what wonderful poetry and maths awaits us in the future?

CR 10.9.20

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On checklists and their use

12/7/2020

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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.

(*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

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Hancock's Half Hour

13/6/2020

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Hancock’s Half-Hour

Dear Mr Williamson,

You look more than usually frazzled at the moment so I thought I’d try to cheer you up. Would you like a joke about the Marmite shortage? It’s all stuck in a lorry travelling yeastbound. Sorry, perhaps that’s the wrong joke for someone accused of being asleep at the wheel this week.

Perhaps an undemanding film would help? Steve Martin’s 1987 Roxanne has long been a favourite on the Roberts sofa. He plays the frustrated Fire Chief of a small town whose crew are hard to train. At one point he says:

I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.

I have a sinking feeling when the Department’s daily briefing flops into my inbox that it’s not quite the first place I expect to find clear and precise advice. Sorry.

Maybe a political Drama? I’d steer clear of The Thick of It, to be honest, under the circumstances, but there’s a favourite episode of The West Wing where a briefing goes all to pot. (Series 1 Celestial Navigation). The Deputy Chief of Staff takes the podium instead of the usual spokesperson and ends up saying that the President has a secret plan to fight inflation which he’s not going to tell anyone about. I think a secret plan’s probably on a par with a ‘very big plan’ for getting everyone back to school or a ‘huge job’ to catch up disadvantaged children. The PM’s such a joker, isn’t he?

Children’s laughter is missing from HMS Tallis at the moment. While teenagers can be hard to amuse its great fun when you manage it. Even the coolest adolescent will eventually let a chuckle slip and the rolling eye and weary sigh is just a different sort of belly-laugh. Classes love to be diverted with a groan-worthily predictable witticism that makes a teacher memorable and a ridiculous joke can make the driest content palatable. I once heard a lunatic maths teacher declare that ‘fractions make you taller and more attractive to the opposite sex’ to year 9 and I worked next to a gifted mimic twenty-odd years ago who could do a whole lesson in a voice of the class’s choice. Myself, I use the Billy Conolly method and laugh immoderately at my own jokes well before I tell ‘em.
Of course, this only works if humour adds to the security and quality of the classroom. A good teacher keeps it witty and prevents sarcasm or unpleasantness. Children soon twig on if jokes are a distraction from a teacher not knowing their stuff: chaos follows that. No amount of droll banter appeases a class if their books are never marked or the lessons are rudderless and drifty. You have to earn their laughter.

We keep it light at Tallis and we try to look as if we’re enjoying ourselves, because we usually are. Sometimes levity’s just wrong – this isn’t a piece about racism, for example. Judging content and tone takes skill and experience. Everyone remembers cringeworthy moments when you’ve got it wrong, and can issue a quiet shudder. Leaders need to set the tone at every gathering, and I wonder if that’s what troubling you, Mr Williamson? You know, I don’t think it’s entirely your fault?

What about some poetry, then? One of my favourite recitations is Siegfried Sassoon’s The General which if you don’t mind I’ll quote in full:

Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Oof. I wonder, Mr Williamson, if this strikes a chord?

One of my personal cringe regrets is laughing at Boris Johnson when he used to be on Have I Got News For You. Sober analysts at the time warned me this was a ploy to get into the nation’s easily-amused hearts, but I still chortled through his blundering routines. He’s harmless, I said. A frothy cross between Stephen Fry and Bertie Wooster, a buffoon in the English upper-class-twit tradition.

But where has it led us? The CV-19 crisis lurches between underaction, overpromise and retreat. The star turn is exposed without the braying laugh-track of the Commons and his flannel misses the note nearly every time. It’s too painful to watch. A cheery old card indeed, and he may have done for us all, in one way or another, by his plan of attack.

Mr Williamson, there’s a time to weep and a time to laugh. For so many reasons, this is the weeping time. You look as though you might know that. Your colleague the Secretary of State for Health certainly does. He could have been the man of the moment. In March he looked reliable and on top of his brief but now he looks exhausted, all at sea. In his half-hours at the briefing he looks like he’s given way more than an armful.

I’m grateful to a colleague for this witticism, but it’s not really funny, is it?

Yours ever,

Carolyn Roberts
12.6.20

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Tell it to the Bees

12/3/2020

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Well, Mr Williamson, I’m disappointed. Months of waiting and what do we get? Silent corridors and phone bans? Really? When I wrote two weeks ago that I’d recognise what you were going to be like by the first things you said I didn’t expect them to be quite so, what shall I say, dog-whistly. Oh dear me no. When we think of the virus and the curriculum, the scrap with Ofsted, the funding, the reappearance of teaching-as-a-career adverts, the recruitment crisis and the sad state of our zero-sum, zero-tolerated young I had hoped for something a bit more hopeful.

Phones are still an open debate in my head but not the corridors. Let me dispense with this. Children talk. They have a range of volumes available to them and a plethora of topics. Some of the foregoing are more acceptable to the genteel adult ear than others. If they’re too loud this can easily be fixed by saying ‘shush’ while applying the finger to the lips. If their discussion lacks civility that can be dealt with by removing them into a corner to offer counsel and issue instruction. However, most of the time they’re talking at a reasonable volume about music, love, books, lessons, teachers, sport, gossip, animals, wars, food and Playstations. You might not tackle to their taste, but civil conversation is good for them and offsets all kinds of problems, from inarticulacy to isolation. Since I last ranted about this I’ve visited Roedean which I’m sure you’ll think is a model to us all. Their corridors sound like ours, full of children talking. What does silence bring? Control, is all.

Enough of this. I heard the wonderful Will Gompertz talk last week and he told a great story about children describing their GCSE results to each other. One told of a string of A*s and As, another chirpily claimed to be able to beat that because ‘I can spell BEEF DUDE with mine’. How I know that child and how I can picture them falling about with laughter and tears, clutching each other for support. What a racket, what a memory, what a lesson. Both men are successful now, the dude richer than the A, if that’s what matters.

But he also talked about the twin pillars of teen life: social media and exams. Both are solitary, isolating and largely uncontrollable, especially under comparable outcomes and the requirement of a third to fail GCSE. What are we doing to our children?

Anyway, back at Tallis, I was summoned into action by Head of Year 7. ‘I need you to finish off assembly. I have to go and teach and it’ll overrun because of the bees.’ Happy to oblige and make myself unusually useful, I started it off too. Depositing year 7 neatly in rows on the Sports Hall floor we started with coronavirus and the handwashing-Happy Birthday thing. One of the great things about year 7 is that they are young enough to be openly curious and uninhibited enough to prefer an answer to anonymity. A hand shot up. ‘How long it lasts depends on the person’s name, doesn’t it?’ Yes indeed. Let’s call her Eglantyne and practise that.

However, the bee man was unpacking his affairs by then and attention was elsewhere. He had bees, he had hives, he had boxes and he had honey. At some point I ended up holding bees while the younger element asked questions. Some got to hold bees too and some were rewarded with honey. Loads of previously bee-indifferent city dwellers asked detailed and imaginative questions. We frequently had to pause while they discussed bee-related issues with one another and when I finally handed my green parcels back and shooed them off to class the bee-debate was stretching from block 5 to the furthest reach of period 1. (Oh, the green parcels were the bees. Hibernating – do you think I’m mad?) As I remarked to the meeting I was 20 minutes late for and the phone call I forgot altogether until break – never work with children or bees. All your best lines are lost.

Mr Williamson, wouldn’t it have been a waste if the children had had to be quiet all the way to Art? They were so excited, astounded, bemused about what they’d seen they wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves talking. We’d have had to shush them and tell them off, some might have needed punishing, for talking, about an endangered wonder of creation. Who would have benefited? The bees lived again in the retelling as well as in the buzzing and flapping and the silly laughter as 270 11 and 12-year olds swarmed across the yard. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Well, I suppose that if you’re frightened of children, or if you’re not confident in your relationships with them, or if you think they have nothing to say or nothing to share, or if being in control is more important than teaching children a good way to live you might want it, but it still wouldn’t make sense.

And I suppose that when your corridors are silent you’ll never here the quiet admissions, friend to friend. I’m frightened to go home. I’m hungry again. I don’t want to stay alive. I know something dangerous. I don’t know who to tell. And you don’t get the friend’s advice: tell Miss, tell Sir, come with me and I’ll help.

It’s not just bees who hold us together. Children’s voices frame the world for some of us, and we count ourselves lucky.

CR
12.3.20

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Listening and travelling

19/12/2019

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A creature of habit, I have a view about how long terms should be. 15 weeks is fine for Autumn, but it should be 8 followed by 7, not what we’ve just had. I’ll complain to someone about it. Anyway, we’ve got there. T.S. Eliot’s Magi knew a bit about endurance, as they reflect in old age on the journey to follow the star.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

And how deep the winter has been so far. All that shouting, all that messy politics, all that dislike and distrust as darkness deepens in just the worst time of year.

A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

The end of the autumn term does feel like we’ve been travelling all night, coming to school in the dark and leaving in the dark. And folly is easy to find this December. Folly in the mad consumption of Christmas, folly in austerity’s punishment of children, folly in the state of the climate, folly in leadership of all kinds.

However, we take our pleasures where we may. We’ve been having a great time in assemblies this week rockin’ around the (dancing) Christmas tree, Heads of Year in Santa hats, Pastoral Welfare Team in tinsel, Parris on drums and Tomlin on the old joanna. Hearing’s only part of the experience, and it takes time before it turns into listening. We heard an enthusiastic rendering of an old hit: we listened to a slightly raucous gift of love from people whose working life is devoted to the children’s welfare.

The penny doesn’t always drop quickly. I was directing traffic indoors at the crossroads of block 5 and 6 when two girls waltzed past, one saying ‘but I hate my name, I’d rather be called Val or Tina’. No disrespect to any so-called readers but I thought these were old-fashioned sort of names. It was a day before I realised she’d said ‘Valentina’.

Governors visited a couple of weeks ago to give us the once-over. They talked to some BTEC students in the sixth form about their work, their endeavours and their plans. Students said ‘we love it, but there is a stigma attached to BTECs that is completely unfair’. We can’t do anything about the ridiculous way qualifications are turned into a snobbish calibration of worth but we can do something about hearing their anger, listening to their complaint and advocating for them.

We should understand this at Tallis. Our lives are enhanced by our deaf students and their skilled signers, teachers and advocates. It adds a dimension to our experience that some communities never know. Likewise our students for whom language itself poses a problem and for whom the world is full of discordances and jarringly inexplicable noise. People who can’t hear can still listen: people who hate noise can teach us to long for calm.

Not that adolescence lends itself to quietude. I joined a science class who chunter on so much they can’t hear themselves think, the concept of an unexpressed thought alien to them. They were all wittering about work but there’s only so much ‘I need a pen, have you got one, does the stapler work, why not, where’s the pencil sharpener, what did you get for number 4, why is number 10 wrong I thought it was right, what’s wrong with my formula, what’s the pass mark, I’ve stapled the wrong bits together, Miss! what does this say, what did you ask us to do?’ one can take. After a bit I called a halt and blessed silence engulfed us so we had the chance to organise a thought, to listen to our learning.

The advantage of the election being over, and it being nearly Christmas is that we all might get a similar break from each other in national life. Having been a Radio 4 addict since I first encountered it at 19 I’ve found news so difficult in the Trump-Brexit era that I’ve avoided it. I know a whole lot more about Radio 3 than I used to, which really does require listening. However, this ostrichy approach must end with the old year. I must return to the fray in 2020.

The three kings in the poem reach their destination and don’t quite know where they’ve arrived they’ve got to

Finding the place it was, you may say, satisfactory.

But that’s not how it ends. Children are a gift and a life, exuberant, reflective or both at once is never satisfactory but wonderful, terrifying, joyful or desperate. We can’t be indifferent to children, and we can’t ignore them. We have to hear them, listen to them, travel with them and resist folly as we serve them with integrity, courage and kindness. Here’s to Christmas, and a better New Year.

CR
19.12.9

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Whereas

6/7/2019

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‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’

Available in more than 360 languages, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is the most translated document in the world. It provides a foundation for a just and decent future for everyone, and gives people everywhere a powerful tool in the fight against oppression and affronts to human dignity.

The declaration is 70 years old this year and Ai Weiwei has designed a flag to celebrate it, which we’ve got three of. Some of our children went to meet him and all of our children have looked closely at the declaration on our very successful community day on 19 June. We had a wonderful display of pennants of rights all around the concourse, but weather intervened and they had to go.

You could stop reading at this point and watch the film, but just in case I’m invited to become PM in the absence of any other reasonable candidate, I thought you should be reassured about our stance on Human Rights at Tallis.
It is very important that we all know and support these hard-won rights which protect and support us all. Here they are, very briefly paraphrased by me:

Human beings are born free and equal
Everyone in the world is entitled to these rights and freedoms
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person
Slavery must be outlawed
Torture or inhuman punishment is outlawed
Everyone must be recognised before the law
Everyone has an equal right to the law
Every country should uphold these rights
No one should be arbitrarily arrested, detained or exiled
Rights should be upheld fairly and publicly
People are innocent until proved guilty
Private and family life, honour and reputation must be protected
People may freely move around the world
Asylum from persecution should be provided internationally
Everyone has the right to a nationality
Marriage should be freely and equally entered into and dissolved
Everyone has the right to own property and not have it taken off them arbitrarily
People must have freedom of thought, conscience and religion
People must have freedom of opinion and expression
People must be free to assemble and associate peacefully
People need free elections, democracy and public services
Social security and cultural rights are needed to safeguard the dignity of the person
Everyone has a right to work, equal pay, trade unions and protection against unemployment
Everyone has a right to leisure, limited working hours and holidays with pay
Everyone has a right to basic healthcare, especially children and mothers
Education must be free, accessible and allow for full personal development
Everyone has a right to culture, arts, science and the fruits of their own production
Everyone has a right to a social order which protects all of these
Everyone has duties to the community
No one may try to destroy any of these rights and freedoms.

Here, in this advanced democracy, now, I’m worried about 17 of these. I’m worried about the Hostile Environment policy, internet trolling that destroys lives, vanishing public services, removal of legal aid for the poorest, zero-hours contracts and the functionalism of education. I could go on.

One of those rights, of course, is to an education. Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre includes a wonderful sculptured layout of 90 tonnes of straightened steel reinforcing bars from substandard regional government buildings that didn’t survive the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. So many of them were schools which collapsed on top of the children and teachers. When I saw it in the Royal Academy a couple of years ago it was like seeing the timbers of Aberfan laid out before you, and hearing the cries of crushed children.

But young people are defined by optimism and they love to learn something new. Our film explains their ‘favourite’ human rights and gives a flavour of the deep learning that happened on that day. And one of the groups came up with this. The future’s in safe hands.

CR 5.7.19

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Chalk and talk

4/5/2019

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Changeable as the May weather, we waltz towards the exam room with year 11. Some are ready, some resentful, some panicky, all a bit nervous. Some show welcome signs of maturity, others not yet. Some do foolish things, but on Tuesday night we were treated to a wonderful evening of dance, and on Wednesday night, at Bromley FC and in a new strip, our boys WON! The final of the London U16 cup. Both evenings were characterise by elegance, patience, enthusiasm, dedication, collaboration and skill.

I didn’t play footy or dance at school but I did act and speak and I remember very clearly the excitement of participating and cooperating and the uncertainty of the unique performance on the night, of triumphing over the unknown. It’s completely different to the classroom experience.

A person who qualified in the same decade as me came calling and we reminisced. She said, rather tentatively, ‘you know, I don’t think it was all bad, in the old days’. Of course it wasn’t. Her comment transported me to a meeting room next to a canal in Sheffield four years ago where a Young Thing gave a group of us to understand that the past was such rubbish that it effectively needed to be erased from the history of education.

I had a few words in response. It wasn’t perfect, but then we’re not perfect now. Children went to school, teachers worked hard, stuff got learned, art was made, cups were won and exams were taken. What is this trope that schools are uniquely culpable for being the product of their times? Do we blame the Army for not having the right boots in the Falklands, and insist they’re sorry about it all the time? Do we say to the NHS ‘why did so many people die in the 90s, what were you thinking of?’ Not so much. So why do it to schools? Times change, things improve or get worse, we reflect the society in which we are situated, for good and ill.

Oh, and we talked about chalk. There are fewer of us who remember that quintessential teaching skill and the challenge of looking after a beautiful diagram you’d drawn and coloured nicely (I was talking to a geographer). I told her about the old soul I worked with who hoovered up the school’s chalk stocks when the whiteboards first arrived, hoarding it against an upturn in the market. He may have been a mathematician but the gamble didn’t work and when he retired he was offered the chalk to take home. One of our own Young Things was in this conversation with us. She’d had a terrifying and entirely unexpected encounter with chalk in rural Yorkshire, this decade. Taught her a thing or two about thinking on her feet.

Which is what the young people in the exams have already started learning quickly. The language speaking tests are situated near me so I can see them sitting mouthing the phrases, going over everything they’ve learned and worrying about facing the unexpected. The value of examinations is arguable but one of the useful things they promote is the development of confident and lucid responses in uncertain circumstances. There’s value in that experience which our obsessive high-stakes culture has dissipated.

Life is both untidy and unpredictable so schools have to prepare young people for that too. Learning to face things when you’re not ready is also a life skill. Even the young people who struggle against the exam hall tractor-beam know that.

Mind, some embrace uncertainty early. I was emerging from a difficult conversation when two small boys accosted me politely. In a conspiratorial whisper, one with sticky-up hair asked ‘have you got the rugby ball?’ This I could answer definitively. ‘No.’ ‘Someone’s taken it off us’ ‘Who?’ ‘We don’t know’ they chorused. We looked at each other for a moment then parted company, none the wiser on either side. I await developments.

A larger boy stopped me abruptly, silently, later on the bridge. I laid some groundwork for the exchange. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m good’ (not strictly true). He investigated my habits. ‘Have you seen Endgame?’ ‘No, is it good?’ ‘I can’t tell you, it’ll spoil it’. Once again, none the wiser. He has some distance to travel before work as a film critic puts food on his table, I fear.

And a man from Australia who joined the school in 1971 wrote to us. He wants to contact his English teacher. With the benefit of many years, he recognised those whose creativity and relationships formed him and made him. That’s what he remembered, and that’s what we try to do in every age. Knowing things and getting qualifications are important. Knowing that life takes unexpected turns is also important. Learning it in a positive community is priceless.

CR
2.5.19

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‘We can’t arrest our way out of this’. Discuss.

2/4/2019

1 Comment

I suppose that fury kick-starts the week as well as anything. A journalist asked me for a comment on Sajid Javid’s ‘consultation to assess whether there is a public health duty to report concerns over children at risk of involvement in violent crime’. I told her it was shameful. Why?

Objection 1, m’lud
WE ALREADY DO IT. Schools collect evidence, act on hunches, assess the weather and ring anyone, everyone who we think might help our children. There’s no-one with the capacity to do it. The police, the hospitals and social services have financial problems as bad as ours. We already report it but they can’t resolve it.

Objection 2
Reporting knife crime as a public health duty is based on Scotland’s success with inter-agency work. They invest heavily in their public services in the land of the haggis and the reporting duty rests on the secure foundations of well-funded public service. Yes, teachers and nurses have a duty to report, but the reporting is then picked up by dedicated specialist teams in the police, the hospitals and the local authorities. If you ring it in, they pick it up. Here, if we pick up the phone no one picks up the case. There’s no one left to do it.

Objection 3
Consequently, far from being early identification for early help, our thresholds in England have risen to make intervention manageable for the few staff left to do it. A child has to be well-steeped in violence, danger and risk before anyone outside school will pick it up. Police and social care just don’t have the capacity. You’ve got a reasonable hunch and a bit of evidence that a child is in danger? Sort it out in school.

Objection 4
“It is hard to see how it would be either workable or reasonable to make teachers accountable for preventing knife crime. What sort of behaviour would they be expected to report and who would they report to? How would they be held accountable, for what, and what would the consequences be? How would the government prevent the likelihood of over-reporting caused by the fear of these consequences? Aside from the practical considerations, we have to ask whether it is fair to put the onus on teachers for what is essentially a government failure to put enough police on the streets.”

Thank you Mr Barton of ASCL. Other teaching unions are available. They all say the same.

Objection 5
We have a large and expensive pastoral and inclusion set-up at Tallis. We include everyone we can without endangering others. We manage a curfew at 1600 way out of sight of our school and last week – not unusually – we worked with the police to clear hundreds of people gathering for blood at a local green space. We haven’t had a permanent Safer Schools Officer for two years because of staffing problems in the Met. All the good work we once did to build bridges between the police and these 2000 young people has been wasted away by austerity.

Partnership needs funding.

Objection 6
Knife crime is an adult problem. The deaths in London last weekend were adults, killed by adults. Its adults who run the gangs and the drugs, and its adults who send out children to die for them on the streets. Our young are a human shield for the drugs gangs, and they can only be saved by policing. Teachers are irrelevant to adult criminals.

Objection 7
The PM said ‘We can’t arrest our way out of this problem’. Who says? How does she know? Has anyone tried? Durham County Council transformed itself into a model of effective policing by focusing relentlessly and remorselessly on 400 criminals. Has anyone tried that in London? No, because it would cost. How does arresting teachers and nurses for not-reporting make any sense at all?

Objection 8
If we cared about children, we’d spend money on this. If we cared about children, we’d spend money on schools. If we cared. The best thing we can say about Brexit at this point is that we’ve wasted a billion pounds on nothing. That would have made a start on responsive policing and social care. ASCL knows that it’ll take another 4.5 billion to offer an acceptable standard of education. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

At the end of the day I was on College Green being interviewed by Ben Brown for the BBC. I made my point, but here’s what I didn’t say.

The Home Secretary’s remark was shamefully misinformed. The Prime Minister’s soundbite was disingenuous. Politicians thrash around for someone to blame while children die in the streets at the hand of the unscrupulous. They’ve lost control of the government but we haven’t lost control of our schools. Stop wasting money and listen to us

CR
1.4.19

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

If You Think It’s Wrong, Act On It

Feeling it

We Deserve Better. We Can Do Better.

On Golden Threads and Lemons

My Magnificent Octopus

Misconceptions

You heard it here first

Kipling again

Lest we forget ourselves

The Menace of the Years

On Time and Money

Finding my mojo in Block 3

Lines

On checklists and their use

Hancock's Half Hour

Tell it to the Bees

Listening and travelling

Whereas

Chalk and talk

‘We can’t arrest our way out of this’. Discuss.

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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