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 

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

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

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:

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:

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      

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

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

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:

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

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.

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:

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

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   

‘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:
​

1. Human beings are born free and equal
2. Everyone in the world is entitled to these rights and freedoms
3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person
4. Slavery must be outlawed
5. Torture or inhuman punishment is outlawed
6. Everyone must be recognised before the law
7. Everyone has an equal right to the law
8. Every country should uphold these rights
9. No one should be arbitrarily arrested, detained or exiled
10. Rights should be upheld fairly and publicly
11. People are innocent until proved guilty
12. Private and family life, honour and reputation must be protected
13. People may freely move around the world
14. Asylum from persecution should be provided internationally
15. Everyone has the right to a nationality
16. Marriage should be freely and equally entered into and dissolved
17. Everyone has the right to own property and not have it taken off them arbitrarily
18. People must have freedom of thought, conscience and religion
19. People must have freedom of opinion and expression
20. People must be free to assemble and associate peacefully
21. People need free elections, democracy and public services
22. Social security and cultural rights are needed to safeguard the dignity of the person
23. Everyone has a right to work, equal pay, trade unions and protection against unemployment
24. Everyone has a right to leisure, limited working hours and holidays with pay
25. Everyone has a right to basic healthcare, especially children and mothers
26. Education must be free, accessible and allow for full personal development
27. Everyone has a right to culture, arts, science and the fruits of their own production
28. Everyone has a right to a social order which protects all of these
29. Everyone has duties to the community
30. 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.

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   

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

Our dining room’s a funny shape. I said this to a visiting Head and he got a bit shirty, giving me the full Four Yorkshiremen (he was from Harrogate). At least you’ve got a dining room, at least it’s a decent size, at least it’s joined on to the school, at least it’s on planet earth, not full of dung and so on, luxury. All true, but it’s still longways on with no thought given to the need to queue.

In cold weather this glorious green space – which only one person ever calls the Tallis Bistro – is quite the place to be. As someone who turned never-going-outside-in-cold-weather into an art form in my own schooldays way north of Harrogate I have every sympathy with the inmates. That doesn’t extend to sympathy with shoving and other uncivilised behaviour when there are a hundred or so more souls than usual indoors who may not be entirely occupied with nutritious eating. In order to prevent annoying clumping we’ve therefore removed most of the pundit chairs at the high benches. This caused a wave of concern among little chaps who like to keep an eye on the scraps for Sir’s dog and the ganneting teachers around the plates trolley, so we saved a couple for them.

Children are creatures of habit, and those habits, good or bad, are largely formed by the adults around them.  Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to assume the mantle of adult citizenship and everything the adults in schools do is scrutinised by young people, both the what and the how. Those teachers aren’t just modelling eating standing up while using a knife and fork properly, but food choices, friendly conversation and eyes in the back of their heads.

And so much more. We had a governor visit to scrutinise how we spend our Pupil Premium funding and whether it is having any impact. PP money is meant to improve the educational experience and therefore outcomes of children who meet one of a series of disadvantage indicators. We get about £400k a year, so it’s important to our (£13m pa) budget. We have to account for what we spend it on and the statutory document is available on the website here. (Just before you get too excited about it, PP was a Coalition hat put on money already in the system, so the idea that schools had the leisure to spend it on anything new and innovative was always a bit of a stretch.)

We spend a lot of our PP money on our ‘first class’ Pastoral Welfare Team, who wear out their sturdy shoes supporting behaviour management. Governors asked some PP-attracting children about this: did they think this was a good thing? Oh yes, yes indeed.

This is interesting, money spent on adults who spend all their time talking to children about how to behave is seen as an obvious good by the children. They’re not just modelling Tallis Character but the values and virtues of the good life, how to be honest, fair, respectful, kind and optimistic. The children see that in adults other than teachers (who are a breed apart and tend to go on about this kind of stuff) personal virtue, taking responsibility for your actions, is important.

I’m thinking about this on a national scale. The Ethical Leadership Commission I wrote about in June launched its report in January and since them we’ve had quite a bit of publicity. Our thoughts aren’t revolutionary, but fundamental. Children will only learn how to behave well if adults behave well. Adults running schools have to put this above all other structural considerations. Fancy outcomes or badges can’t be got at the price of poor behaviour. We have to do right, or do another job.

The Ethical Leadership Commission now has a Framework set of words, a pathfinder programme which 200 schools have already signed up to, some developing work in teacher and leader training and a new Ethics Committee and open forum at the Chartered College of Teaching. Tallis’s governors are pathfinders. It's slightly terrifying work: there’s a real risk in sticking your dishevelled head above the parapet and saying ‘we should behave as good role models for children’. Everyone’s made mistakes, but the real human skill is reflection and change, in a spirit of humility. I’ve written a book concurrently too, but that’s me ranting, not the measured tones of the great and good commissioners.     
 
Reflecting on our own behaviour doesn’t mean introversion or compliance with injustice. So much school policy in the last 20 years has danced around the elephant of privilege guarding the powerful. Ring-fencing money to support disadvantaged children is good, but it’s an Elastoplast on inequality. Our responsibility as good adults isn’t just as models of good character. Society should be fair and children’s lives not blighted by poverty and struggle. Those who have never needed any funding to give them a leg-up, or who have never known want, or who exist only within a bubble of other privileged people undermine the fair chances of the many by passing power around among themselves. Good people should be outraged abut this.  

I’m reading (myself obvs, matchless prose, but also) Friedman and Laurison’s The Class Ceiling. They observe: 
   

As ever, I can’t tell you about last week’s visitors until so long afterwards that you might have forgotten we ever had them. They’ll send their thank-you letter in January, so that’s something to look forward to once the sprouts are gone.

So, a little round-up of the end of term. Last week was Tallis through the Wardrobe, a magnificent evening in best surreal Tallis style. Dancers, singers, performers of all sorts from the tiniest to the biggest. It was a happy show. I’d been temporarily deprived of hearing so I didn’t get much of the detail, but the atmosphere was lovely. I didn’t have the brass neck to ask them to do it all again, for a third time, just for me, once I’d had my ears washed out, though it would have been nice.

One of the advantages of being at a school for a bit – this is now my sixth year – is that you see the children grow.  The little ones who bounced squeakily in 2013 are now loping year 12s who can barely see me from their great height: piping singing boys now beautiful basso profondos. As I write, the gallery next door to me is full of this year’s year 7s taking part in a week-long world peace game. They’re pretty ear-piercing when tackling the arms dealers amongst them but it’s going to be a great long-term memory. One is urgently shouting ‘Charlie, Charlie’, perhaps modelling global leadership on POTUS, or the Queen. Knowing how to solve the world’s problems at 11 is a pretty good training for life, no?

As are the inevitable. I told you about our preparation for mock exams with year 11, yoga, revision timetables and what not. Now the poor souls are staggering towards the end of it and reflecting on what they’ve done and left undone. One leaned on the doorpost this morning and told me he was too busy revising to have written a revision timetable. Poor chap thought I’d believe him, but when he says he’s worried about Computer Science, I believe that. Study Hall (a history classroom) was stowed out yesterday, flash cards from wall to wall, a marked improvement on just gazing into the middle distance in the hope of accidentally remembering something. 

You know how we make a mega-production over exam rituals? Meeting in the Bistro, reminding about the structure of the exams, walking quietly upstairs clutching the see-through pencil case, all under the beady eye of senior staff who happen to be free, subject leads, the vast army of invigilators and their Head of Year. Sir and his giant parka arrange the confident, reassure the anxious and hassle the late. I’ve asked it before: what’s the equivalent of a Head of Year in adult life?

Their performances in assemblies this week has been memorable too, cheesy in the extreme. Concealed in the aforementioned wardrobe, elf-behatted HoYs and other ancillary services have been jumping out to sing to the people. Year 7 nearly died of excitement yesterday morning: year 9 were more phlegmatic on Monday.  
  
So, having established that Heads of Year of any size are inherently comical in conical hats, we prohibited any kind of excitement going into assembly as the 270 assemblees had to be threaded through the up-to-270 revisionists to get into the hall. Simple instructions were sufficient, we assume that sporadic reminders instil precise cooperation. Crucial, daily orders were implemented effectively, for which we show our gratitude. Do you see what I did there?  11 words of the week!  Impressive or what?

Were I younger, I could be rewarded for such egregious compliance. Certainly M, who visited me three times on Thursday, seems to feel that his devotion should reap points of some kind. He’s got 87 points and is keen to make 100. He may have left it too late.

This afternoon we rest from our labours after our traditional Christmas whole-school assembly, the only time we’re all together as a school. It takes 200% longer than the assembly itself to get everyone in and out, but we think it worth doing just for the spectacle and the experience. This is our school, our village, our home from home for the days and the years and it’s good to be together once a year.

Next door a bell rings for four Prime Ministers and the Secretary General to reflect on their achieving world peace.  Compared to the scenes in Parliament yesterday, their noisy excitement is enthusiastic and positive. They know that far-sightedness and cooperation are vital to policy-making and the security of the people.

The originator of the wardrobe, C S Lewis, who I otherwise find irritating, once said:

I could talk about Ofsted or the snow but I’d rather talk about year 9. If you’d rather think about the other things, please see last week’s or this week’s newsletter.

We’re looking at what happens in tutor group time this half-term. There’s a programme for each year group that involves reading, news, equipment, revision and so on, according to age and proximity of examination and we extended the time to make it better last year. I’ve been allocated year 9. Year 9, as I’ve said before, are always a bit odd. They lack the winsome charm of year 7, they’re more sluggish than year 8 but they can’t quite focus on the future in the way that year 10 nearly can and most of year 11 do. Year 9, against all the evidence, believe themselves to be quite the models of maturity.

Tutor groups are eccentric beasts too. They’re like a large family of up to 30 children with only one parent (perhaps a second if other adults hitch their caravans to this particular train). Tutors demonstrate a range of parenting skills in this rather challenging task. I scuttled round all nine groups one week to assess the weather and this is what I found.

Two groups were watching Newsround and there were the makings of intelligent discussion on current affairs. Two groups were reading the year group’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. What joy to start the day thus! One group was competing ferociously in an on-line book quiz and couldn’t spare the time to be interrupted by me. One group’s tutor had just returned from a residential trip so the family were going through notices that might have been missed. Another group’s tutor was on jury service so the atmosphere was a bit different. Groups like to see the same community parent’s face every day and don’t really like substitution.
One group was having an equipment inspection. This was being done in total silence and, the merest twitch of the tutor’s eyebrow cause the requisite items to be brandished. ‘Two sharpened pencils? Calculator? Two working pens?’ Tutor was just about satisfied by 99% compliance. The shirker didn’t even convince himself that he’d looked hard enough to find his planner.

Next door, however, there was much in hand. Tutor posed the question ‘Why are we so useless at Sports Day?’ and got many answers including the perfidy of other groups, lack of girls or boys of sufficient prowess in all the events, most of the form being too short, tall or weak or having the wrong kit, inclination or motivation. Dismissing all this as losers’ thinking, Tutor then showed a bit of Coach Carter and set out his plans for world domination.  Introducing novelty concepts entirely in line with our Habits ‘We are going to train’  he said ‘We are going to practice’, to a chorus of much groaning.

We assign tutors at the start of year 7 in the hope that most last until year 11. It’s a wonderful thing to be the school parent of a group of growing children, though it doesn’t necessarily feel like that every single morning and afternoon. Children make mistakes, and personalities change through hormones or circumstance, just like at home.  Friendships emerge and disband, some thrive and some don’t. Some like the relative informality of form time, some hate it.

We try very hard to make tutor groups balanced but aspects of adolescent character are unpredictable. Sometimes groups become collectively unhappy and hard to manage, so we move people around. Some groups stay the same for five years and their sense of family and nostalgia when they part at the end of year 11 is heartbreaking.

I had a tutor group for years in a different part of the forest in another century. Our tutor room was a demountable classroom (hut, terrapin, call it what you will) on the far periphery of a single story site housing a 10-form-entry 11-16 school. Tutorial lessons for PSE happened on Friday afternoons for year 9s but we had RE together after that. Including afternoon reg, that was two-and-a-half hours together to round off the week. We had our ups and downs, but we knew each other pretty well by the end of the year. I can’t say that I begged the timetabler for a repeat in year 10, but when we all  left I was touched by the group memories of long cosy afternoons in a warm room with the rain coming down outside. We planned some cracking events that year for team building and charity: car washing, kayak trips, abseiling. We celebrated birthdays and I visited the reluctant attenders. I saw shocking poverty in some of their homes and learned a lot from all of them.

Schools have different traditions and use different language for the same things. I range through form tutor, registration and tutor group to the bewilderment of children I’m interrogating. Tallisees call the group and the person by the same name: ‘Tutor’. As in, ‘I’m off to tutor to see my tutor’. I like that, the group and the person as one thing with one purpose.

So here’s to the form tutors of the land. May you be a good parent to your many children in your busy rooms. May you build up happy memories. May you know them as they want to be known and smile at them every day, even if they’re useless at the shot putt.

CR
8.3.18

The White House book sounds gripping. I picture the Wolff man sitting quietly in a corridor smiling pleasantly so that people stop for a chat. Perhaps he had cakes. Who can resist someone listening sympathetically when you’re tired and irritated?

If OFSTED had any sense, that’s what they’d do. A day spent in reception with an open smile and some fancy biscuits and you’d learn a lot. Who’s late, who’s angry, who’s ill, who’s in tears, who’s got time to talk, how many supply teachers are signing in, why are the Police there, who is that bedraggled old soul who never remembers she needs her keys to get back? Ah, that’s the Head. 

Daily sights are available to any watcher. Monday Mr Springall had trousers on. (Not that he’s usually overexposed, you understand, just that he lives in shorts and generally only wears trousers for awards ceremonies. I didn’t think he’d been issued with tracksuit bottoms.) Tuesday I admired a matching pair of hair ribbons and the wearers gave me the biggest smiles. Wednesday I took issue with a camouflaged hat. Thursday the police came to tell us something we’d told them. Friday I returned to the classroom as a rusty supply teacher.

So that means that Monday everybody was cold, Tuesday year 7 are still perky and charming 16 weeks in.  Wednesday ‘It’s been a week now. No hats indoors no matter how new.’ Thursday nearly working in partnership with external agencies. Friday another nasty case of bronchitis so Roberts had to dust off her Religious Attitudes to Crime and Punishment.

This at least demonstrates I’ve put in a whole week. We came back on Wednesday last week but I spent Thursday to Saturday at a conference in Oxford, talking with philosophers and ethicists from around the world on Civic Friendship. It was the intellectual equivalent of a Christmas Dinner and I’m still digesting it. In particular, from Berkowitz of St Louis-Missouri University’s nugget ‘Children are the only known raw material from which adults can be made.’   
 
So Tuesday wasn’t just hair ribbons. Tuesday was early close for training, on trauma, on understanding the causes and damage of early childhood trauma and looking at how this might affect young people’s approach to adults, to school, to experiences, to life. Once you’ve grasped that, some inexplicables start to make sense. Why might some children be fearful and angry all the time? Why does the slightest change to routine throw some completely off kilter? Why is it important for teachers to be predictable, consistent, reliable, calm and – to return to the White House – stable?
 
It’s important because kindness and empathy can repair some of the damage already done, and even if it couldn’t it would still be the right way to live. When I looked round Tallis one of the things that made me want to come and serve out my twilight years here was the sight and sound of teachers talking calmly, firmly and kindly to struggling souls, about a better way to be. It permeates the place. Civic friendship indeed. 

I try to show this to visitors so I make them look out of my window at lesson change. It’s a bit of a risky strategy as you never know what might emerge in human community, but as a spectacle it’s never let me down (though Toby Young didn’t quite know what to make of it when he watched in May). New governors yesterday had been on a guided tour with some exceptionally loquacious year 8s who’d even commissioned a dance performance en route, so could be forgiven for wondering why it took 55 minutes to get around the building when 1900 people could emerge and disappear in 4.

But the best uncapturable moment of the week was Thursday in the quiet of the after-school gloaming, hearing George whistling Auld Lang Syne as he crossed the yard. 
                 
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne. 
 
Don’t be anxious about willie waught. Loosely translated it means ‘take my hand in friendship and make a toast to the times we’ve known’. That’s as good for a new start as for an ending, for a reunion as for a parting. Here we are, the raw materials of civic life, holding out a hand to each other as we reboot Tallis for 2018.    
 
CR
12.1.18

We know it’s Christmas at Tallis when the red tags are issued to decorate the trees with messages of hope and happiness. Thursday was Christmas Show day with lots of excitable Tallisees running about in dancing gear and suchlike, feeling important by being on the wrong lunch and performing while their compatriots are slogging through the curriculum. 

Yea, even unto week 14 and in these last two weeks, mock GCSEs. The new exams have a lot of stuff in them and year 11 looked distinctly queasy by Wednesday. We teach them the right behaviour for the task so lining up in the canteen, ushering upstairs in silence to the be-desked Sports Hall, shushed by Sir on the landing, Miss on the stairs, Sir at the door. And me, hassling thoughtlessly raucous small inmates: ‘Stand aside! These people are going to an exam!’ as if they were slightly bemused gods progressing to a test on Mount Olympus. Anyway, its back to basketball in the big space now, until we gather as a whole village on Wednesday for the Christmas Assembly.
Likewise the Gallery, a much-used space. Exams this week, governors’ meetings, anti-Gangs work and a visit from a team of researchers at the British Museum interspersed by tetchiness ‘who left the tables like this?’. And the hall: exams, staff briefing, assembly, and tonight the Christmas show Tallis in the Woods. Spaces have specific meaning in schools but flexible spaces are where we train our young for the unpredictability of the outside world. This is what’s expected, these are the conventions, don’t worry about how to behave, we’ll teach you to be secure so we can teach you to be confident. That being said, in the last staff briefing of 2017 I amused myself gathering views through the medium of head shaking and nodding. Funnier for me than them, I said. Sorry.

‘Something Christmassy?’ requested Heads of Year 7 and 8 so I was away. Having watched Cressida Dick on the news, I was impressed by the quantity and inventiveness of her hand gestures even when sitting with a select committee. So we gathered in the Sports Hall, I waved my arms about a lot and got 540 11-13 year olds to think about the shape of the school year, festivals of light, nativity plays in their past and how all the characters in the ancient story behave unexpectedly. I asked them which parts they’d played and then had to stretch my interpretation to cover ‘trees’ and ‘bales of hay’, let alone donkeys. Bales of hay? That’s a primary school with more actors than useful parts.

Something Christmassy in maths too this week. Venn diagrams: what’s warm, what’s festive, what’s made of fruit? Lee was away with dreams of a warm mince pie: Tommy trying to persuade Sir that turkey is fruit-based. What falls outside the circles? Shoes! Dogs!  Another maths lesson, another set of sets (vets’ clients) and Mario’s howl ‘I’m having trouble with the dogs’. We teach children to categorise and analyse so they can contain the world in their heads, but sometimes stuff doesn’t fit and we need to find a way through uncertainty.

Which is why herself had to forage in the archives for a new box of hankies. My room has multiple uses too: meetings, interviews, book looks, arguments, crises, exasperations and the imponderables of human life. Hankies provided, if we can find a new box. I’m writing our Christmas cards today. No winsome drawings of robins and Santa by a perky year 7 for us. Christmas is about a baby, the only character who behaves as expected in the nativity play, the eternal symbol of hope. Our card this year is another lovely sixth form portrait of a young person, and a line from Eglantyne Jebb whose work founded Save the Children: all wars are wars against children.

So as their government forget to count the Rohingya refugee children we look on the clear-eyed face of a girl and try to think about a better future. Tallis in the Woods combined all sorts of music, dance, film and drama with Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and a mystery demon caretaker in an anarchic feast of harmony and wit. As the song says, how do you measure a year? 525 600 minutes? We measure it by hours, lessons, breaks, queues, jokes, plays, trips, events, detentions, quiet, nudging, scuffling and forests of hands up. It’s a training for life until they’re old enough to put it behind them and change the world for the better. Who says that won’t require dancing?  
 
CR
15.12.17

Everything from playing the piano to the daily-changing examination system that passes pressure from the government through schools to young people. 

We have to moderate and normalise it for them: don’t worry, work steadily, think hard. That’s why a brisk, cheerful and unemotional approach is usually right. Queen of the brisk remark is our senior dinner lady who retires this week after 30 Tallis years. Everyone will miss her and our little world of 2000 will be changed by the absence of one person. 

Pressure does derange one: the aforementioned Christmas tree, festooned with red tags has two sets of lights on it.  One string is super-bright but the other looks as though it’s not making any effort at all. I was away with it – what if OFSTED did Christmas tree lights? Would you know what the judgement was going to be by the wattage they sent? What if your lights don’t reach the plug, like the ones in the hall? Really, I need a break.

30 year 7s appeared with a wish to sing to me in Spanish: Noche de Paz and Feliz Navidad. When they sing in the office we press the tannoy button so that everyone hears. Some have Santa hats and one a pair of sunglasses with Christmas Trees on: I love it that some do and some don’t and no one minds. At the concert the Flute Choir wore wearing smart black dresses and antlers with bells on. They were utterly deadpan when I congratulated them and smiled graciously about their playing but looked at me as if I was mad when I mentioned the headgear. Antlers? What antlers? 

Then news arrives on wings of another musician – a sixth former to whom the Greenwich Music Trust had to give a piano and whose neighbours complained when she practiced has won a place at the Royal College of Music. Joy to the world!

Our Christmas card this year isn’t so cheerful, but then advent is a season for reflection on hope in the darkness. It’s a drawing of Syrians queuing for food in Damascus. One of our year 9s won the Big Draw competition with it – a sea of humanity trapped in a once-beautiful city, ancient places of the earth bombed to destruction while their people hope not to starve. On the back of the card I’ve adapted a quotation from the wonderful Eglantyne Jebb, who founded Save the Children during the refugee crisis after the First War. She said of the fund:
‘It must not be content to save children from the hardships of life - it must abolish these hardships; nor think it suffices to save them from immediate menace - it must place in their hands the means of saving themselves and so of saving the world.’

These last couple of days of term we do our year group Celebration Assemblies where bands play and tutors say a few words about their groups.  Year 9 dancers (40 of them) reduced some grizzled old souls to tears with their exuberance. It’s a bit of horizontal bonding in a big school and an excellent Tallis tradition. We’re brisk and sometimes a bit sharp for most of the year but we do actually tell our young people we love them (in one way or another) at the end of term. So, given the state of the world, let’s take our responsibilities to them seriously and share a bit of love with any children within reach this Christmas, no matter how adolescent and awkward. 

Have a lovely Christmas. January comes soon enough, and we need to be refreshed and ready for abolishing hardships and changing the world, one child at a time.

CR
17.12.15