We had a visitor to Geography yesterday, entirely friendly. He’d heard of the interesting things our map-and-rock folks do so he came to give them the once-over and put them in the running for an award. We rolled out a reddish carpet and he saw some lessons, talked to staff and children and even to me. We went so far as to insert mince pies into the sandwich lunch to butter him up.

The students, of course, were the star turns. Our man put them through their paces on whether or not the opening of a new coalmine in Whitehaven is a good thing or a bad thing and was much impressed at the breadth of their considered replies. Three of the students want to study Geog at university and could reflect knowledgeably on the relative merits not only of the courses under advisement, but also interesting features of their localities. One is havering between Sussex and Newcastle and I am ready to advise on that.

I know three things about Whitehaven. First, a woman once pushed her partner’s van into the harbour because she was sick of him. He obviously hadn’t worked out it was best to stay on good terms with a person who can shove Transits about. Second, it used to have a really good second-hand bookshop from which I got a nice early copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Third, it has a Weather Museum where you can do your own forecast, blue screen and all, outside of which I was once prevented from parking by an angry goose. It is to the benefit of youth that they don’t have their heads clogged up with such, or they’d never get a single A level.

Sunday and Monday’s weather was so pretty it was worthy of a gallery rather than a museum. Despite hopeful emails from students asking if we would close, we didn’t, of course, and made the best of it. Snow is nobody’s friend up close and much better looked out at from a warm indoors if you’re over 18. We were 27 teachers down at the start of the day with not a supply teacher to be had, but people got in eventually and everyone mucked in. Managing snow excitement is demanding at this end of term, but we did that too. I thought, as I picked my way gingerly across the yard, people can’t afford to heat their flats and houses or feed their children. We have to stay open, no matter what, just for that.

So how are we feeling as we trudge or slip towards the end of term? I’ve got Ofsted’s Annual Report neatly printed out waiting for me on the settee in my office, observing that SEND structures and funding are very far from working. Next to it is the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Annual Report into Education Spending. They say:

St Lucy’s Day on Tuesday and in the time I’d put aside to start on one of them Ahmed buttonholed me to say that his Spanish classroom smelled of seaweed, and what was I going to do about it? Nothing. Seaweed has many nutritional properties so he shouldn’t worry. While responding to a request elsewhere, I overheard a much larger soul telling another he was ‘frankly, heartbroken’ but I couldn’t work out if it was the state of the nation, a lover’s spurning or a disappointing Chemistry test. Arrived at my destination (the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter) I put a cover class right on the mature way to deal with a room change (replacing hysteria with industry), observing that I was a sixty-one-year-old woman with a heavy cold and they wouldn’t want a return visit.

John Donne said ‘tis the year’s midnight’ in A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day. That's how it feels, perhaps this year more than most. We’ll talk about light, hope and love in Assembly tomorrow and then give each other a break until the New Year. No matter what the problems around us, we’ll try to make 2023 the best yet. 

​Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
 
CR
14.12.22  

Despite an omnicompetent staff I try to remain personally useful at school. I’m getting too old to charge about, so I regularly position myself at lesson change on the middle landing of the block 4 stairs. Just after half term a small girl said to me ‘Don’t you get bored, standing there all day, Miss?’

Another day I was dispensing current affairs stuff for my year 13s to analyse when one of them spotted that document was recent. From last week, in fact. In a moment of head-clutching revelation he demanded ‘Do you read up-to-date stuff?’. As a theologian there’s always the risk that I won’t have truck with anything after Augustine of Hippo, but actually, yes, I do. And what’s more, matey, next lesson I’ve got something hot off the press from the Bishop of Sheffield (whose daughters I taught) which opens up the established church to good sense and justice on sexuality. We can all question how that might go.

I last wrote about questions in about 2014, I think. I was remarking on the tendency of posh people to interrogate one so that they can find common ground to pin you down upon. I’ve assumed this was so they can run a mile if you prove to be an unsuitable companion. This can’t have been the reasoning behind the palace questioning – so why do it? What kind of good manners pursues a question your guest has already answered, as if it wasn’t true?

We had ourselves a training session on questioning this week. It’s a basic teacherly skill, which, like so many, developed a sheen of rust over lockdown and needs buffing up. We looked at open questions ‘What do you think is the biggest factor in the climate emergency?’, closed questions ‘What is Hamlet doing in Act 4?’, hinge questions ‘So what were the advantages of the Black Death?’, multiple choice questions checking for misconceptions ‘Hands up for a, b, c or d.’ and cold-calling questions ‘Derek, what is the area of this irregular polygon?’. We practised them on each other and undertook to do it better.

I love that stuff. Give me a roomful of people and questions from the floor and there’s no reason why I should ever stop talking, but I’m not so loquacious when the clipboarders shin up the rope ladders. Those are questions to be answered precisely and economically with a pleasant smile and fingers crossed for no devious follow-up. 

That’s because questions usually have a power dimension, where the searcher after knowledge and the broker of knowledge have a different roles. Refusing to answer a question can be awkward. Teachers might do it if the they’re faced with a vexatious interlocutor who just wants to avoid tackling the paragraph or is keen to amuse the hordes with impertinence. Anyone might do it if they don’t know the answer: ‘I’ll find out. Leave it with me’ is also part of the teacher’s armoury. But what happens if the questioner just goes on? What happens when you feel uncomfortable, got-at and doubt their motives?

Nick Cave answers questions in The Red Hand Files from time to time. This month he talked about good faith conversations.

This is worth knowing. Inquisitiveness is good, one of our Tallis Habits. We want our young people to wonder, explore, investigate and challenge. We want them to ask, speculate and examine. We want them to do it to understand the world and change it for the better, and we want them to do it kindly, and respectfully.  

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

Do you remember interference? It was a big feature of my childhood. You couldn’t hear the radio when the hoover was on because it went all crackly. The telly was sensitive to interference too and even the sharpest of slaps on the top or fiddling with the vertical hold knob didn’t always fix it. Happy days. The car I sometimes drive is ten years old with an FM radio. Reception is crackly between Deptford and Peckham. I’ve got used to it and – as if you couldn’t hear this analogy galloping towards you out of the squiggly mist of a 1960s television screen – I’ve got used to government interference too.

May I set out a few thoughts on the surprise announcement to finish this term a day early, and how irritable everyone has been about it?

First, the government needs to be pulling out all the stops to tackle Covid. Whether you think they have or not is up to you. Whether you think they can or not is more worrying. However, like the geography of Derbyshire, that is not the purpose of this piece. 

Second, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to have a view on the purpose of education, a national curriculum, an inspection process and a fair funding mechanism. Whether or not this can all be achieved smoothly when the focus for the last 20 years has been on a spurious ‘autonomy’ for Headteachers is more worrying. However, like the poetry of Thomas Hardy, that is not the purpose of this piece.

Third, it is reasonable that decisions about schools will have to be made quickly in a pandemic. Whether the Secretary of State’s pandemic-handling so far gives one confidence for future decision-making is worrying.  However, like the exams debacle, the laptop promise, the food vouchers, the BBC lessons, rotas and the October firebreak, that too is not the purpose of this piece.

What is, then? you cry, put us out of our misery, would you, please? No, the focus of this piece is how schools have once again been cast as shiftless villains only interested in a day off, in some parts of the media, this week. Given we’ve been working flat out, how did this happen? Might I try to shed light?

No one asked for a day off. Unions, professional associations and other groups made the point severally and singly with evidence and justification that it was no surprise that when schools reopened, infection rates among children rose. Therefore, once Christmas was declared open and restrictions lifted from the day before Christmas Eve to the day after Boxing Day, schools spotted an issue. Covid-infected or Covid-carrying children may be a risk to older people. As Christmas is invariably spent in multi-generational close proximity, young people may well endanger the health of older people. Gran and Max may have missed each other desperately since the start of lockdown, but it would be a pity if the visit had to be summarily cancelled, made her ill or worse. Therefore, schools’ tribunes said, since we are all capable of remote learning now, had you thought about making the week beginning 14th December a remote learning week and protecting everyone?

A further complication was schools’ responsibilities for contact tracing. If the end of term broke into the 6-day incubation period, schools would need to be making phone calls about infections on Christmas Eve, or later.  This required schools in some way to be open to do that – even if it was just the Head, or the Business Manager, or whoever has been in charge of the process.

And now we get to the bit that enrages the public. Heads said: everyone is exhausted and working over the actual Christmas Eve-Day-Boxing-Day stretch is hard to bear. Some of us (not me) haven’t had much of a break since March. Is there a way of avoiding being responsible for contact tracing all over Christmas?

The solution, declaring Friday 18 December to be an in-service training day must have seemed like a reasonable one to the government. We’re not giving a week of remote learning because everyone has had enough of that, Mr Williamson might have thought – though I suspect it's Gibb the Schools Minister who does the thinking at Sanctuary Buildings. Friday the 18th removes schools from contact tracing over the actual heart of the festivities.  Excellent plan! So why was this not met with general applause?

Well, the difficulty is in the nature of training days. These are not invented on the hoof and they are not meant to be a time when everyone catches up on their marking. They are for actual training to improve classroom practice, planned as part of the school’s improvement planning over the course of the year. They are to be taken seriously. If the training is not done that day, then it is acceptable for the equivalent number of hours to be made up at other points in the year, in planned after-school training time. What the DfE should have done is to declare that this Inset day is a one-off under extraordinary circumstances, unlike others, with other rules. What they have done is to tie everyone up in knotted red tape.

Worse, lots of schools – especially primaries, I suspect - had planned some appropriately-distanced festivities which couldn’t easily be reorganised. We don’t do a lot of that here. The tree’s up, Christmas Lunch is on Tuesday, I’ve recorded a verse of the song we’ll broadcast on Thursday and I’m writing this in a Christmas-y jumper wearing antlers, but that‘s as far as it goes. But now I’m embarrassed that the nation thinks we’re slackers. ‘Teachers say not enough time off’ shrieks the headline.

Everybody’s tired. Children of all ages and dispositions have found the last 15 weeks exhausting and so have the adults around them. The zoning separation of year groups eats away at the teaching day and at any semblance of freedom that the children had. This is hard for adolescents to bear who are wired for developing independence in these years: tempers are frayed. It is immeasurably worse for those who’ve had to isolate, some of them, by the cruel hand of fate, for weeks on end. We understand that many parents are struggling. Some heads and teachers have said regrettable things on social media – but that’s tired human nature broadcasting out loud in the modern world.

Which brings me back to the crackle of interference. Fourth (for those of you who haven’t fallen off the chair with boredom yet) it is shoddy for a government to conduct business by press briefing. Whether the current leaders of a parliament which used to be the model and envy of the world can get over this is debatable. However, like Paine’s Rights of Man, that is not the purpose of this piece.

I trust that these extraordinary circumstances will end some day. Until then, we need to look after each other and try to be kind. So, finally, fifth: it is a pity that so much of the media can’t abide teachers and attack schools at the drop of a hat. However, like the apparently perfectly acceptable decision of Eton to close early to protect families at Christmas, that is not the purpose of this piece. But perhaps it should be?     
 
CR
11.12.20

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   

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:

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

Our 2009 summer holiday was Syria by public transport: Durham to Damascus, one world heritage site to another.  We had a vague plan which was almost literally derailed by being shunted into a siding in Belgrade for 12 hours. Consequently, we missed the twice-weekly train from Istanbul Haydarpasa, so did the final leg to Aleppo flying at night from Ataturk because the Syrians didn’t allow air traffic in daylight.

Aleppo was exotic, a flight of fancy from the witches in Macbeth, Aleppo bound aboard the Tiger, a terrifying taxi ride to Agatha Christie’s Baron Hotel, needing US dollars in hand. The Baron was a bit edgy for me so we decamped to a coolly soulless modern hotel. We explored the second century Citadel on a site used since 3000 BCE in 40 degrees of heat and nearly dehydrated to death without cash to buy water. A friendly shopkeeper took us in, explained that the government didn’t deal with capitalist Visa and told us where the cashpoint was for the odd European traveller. The next day we wandered off to find beautiful 13th century Madrasa Firdows and sat on a wall watching children on what looked like a holiday school at the mosque, supervised by a young man with a limp. Round the corner was the 10th century Maqam Ibrahim Salihin, with a rock ‘honoured by Abraham’s transit from Ur to Hebron’. We ate inflated bread and I was issued an all-in-one gown with a pointy hood to go into the Ummayyad Mosque where the courtyard was too hot to walk on. In the suq I regretted some pretty nifty, pretty pricy earrings in gold with red and green dangly hoops.

A punctual train got us to Damascus and another unnerving taxi to a palace hotel in the old town for days of investigation: the head of John the Baptist, Saladin’s tomb, Straight Street and the National Archaeological Museum, one of the finest on earth. We saw paintings from the third century Douro-Europos synagogue, exhumed from the desert, alone of its kind. And the train back at the end of it all from Damascus to Aleppo where we watched pilgrims hustling an elderly Imam from the station mosque onto a rusty train to Tehran. We crossed the border overnight to Adana with its Hadrian bridge and the best sleeper train I’ve ever been on, to Ankara and the Gilgamesh bas-reliefs, half as old as time.

Aleppo wasn’t perfect. A hotel man stood by to climb on the roof to start the petrol generator when the grid gave up. It chugged along with every household’s, adding nothing to the air quality. We got a dose of the lurgy, but I’ve had that in Copenhagen. The banks were tricky, but the streets were safer than Sofia en route. The tragedy of Syria isn’t that it was a bit rickety or that the jewels of humanity have been blown to bits. The tragedy is that the people are dead and the children orphaned and dying in an ancient place where men and women have lived good and fulfilled and creative lives for thousands of years and no one can stop it.

But this week was Tallis in Wonderland. We had dance, drama and music, from the tiniest to the biggest, stylish and happy. We had comperes and a Mad Hatter and film of Alice in Tallisland. We had dancing boys and an acapella choir, a clapping song, leaping girls, wonderful bands: White Rabbit and A Town Called Malice in A School Called Tallis.

According to the theology rooted in the streets of Damascus, Christmas is about birth and hope. A few train journeys west we take it for granted that the electricity works so the hospitals are safe and the schools won’t be shelled. We expect that there’ll be clean lavatories, mock exams, a Christmas Show and visits to the museums and galleries of the capital. We expect a Drawing Exhibition on the theme of Obsession and a visit to Barclays to talk to the mentors in front of people who make financial weather in the world. We expect Duke of Edinburgh’s Award badges and performance management and governor elections and Christmas lunch with free food for those fallen on hard times. We expect a clear policy for dealing with Harmful and Abusive Behaviour. We expect not to die, every day.

While Samira hurdles over the benches in the yard at the end of lunch and Ellis bounces at his friend, while Jane re-reads a favourite novel as she walks through block 5 and Jebi the Sapeur struts his stuff in SE3, the children of Aleppo are terrified and cruelly murdered. And we in the west, through fear, apathy, pork-barrel politics, obsession with nationality and disregard for humanity, can’t do a thing. The world’s been changed for the worse in Syria, and we must do better.       
 
CR
15.12.16

​​We have about 600 new starters every year in year 7 and 12 and by the beginning of October everyone’s largely settled in. Those who are showing signs of regret, rebellion or difficulty are coaxed along a bit. New staff can find their way from classroom to staffroom and home without a minder or string. We’ve looked over the results, worked out what to do next and where the holes are. Performance Management is done, new shoes defeated. 75% of plans are underway and the other 25% recognised as ridiculous ideas.

​By half term the engines tick along nicely. We’ve had open evenings and the new starters are confident enough to do the selling for us: the books are open for next year. By Christmas we’ve got going on parents’ evenings and mocks and looked next year’s budget in the eye. Predictions are telling us what we want to hear, or not. Action is being taken on two thousand fronts.
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By January, we’re halfway through the year.  The countdown clocks in assembly appear to speed up.  We’ve got used to each other. Tallis is universally cheerful but Year 7 are also terrifically enthusiastic, year 8 cocky, year 9 irritating, year 10 gloomy and year 11 working like Trojans. Year 12 are in denial and year 13 beside themselves. Awkward squads are decommissioned. At February half term we work out what needs fixing and panic about the arrangement of weeks before Easter. I call for the Easter holiday to be fixed, but not to anyone who can make the slightest impact on it. We worry about the exams and terrify ourselves with mad rumours of this year’s government interference.After Easter we’re like hamsters on a wheel for weeks. The exams are here for good or ill, we sort out staffing and the budget. Everyone over 15’s panicking about something. Then there’s another hol with revision sessions, and a mad rush to get everything finished for the summer and the new year? All in place? Off we go.

Over the summer holiday we worry about the exams. A bit of time to reflect and it washes over you. I’ve worried about results in areas of outstanding natural beauty and in front of the major cultural artefacts of the world, in spiffy new museums and edgy galleries of modern art, over exotic cuisine and accompanied by interesting wines, on trains, boats and planes and in cathedrals ancient and modern. All that being said, I’m reasonably good at compartmentalising until the final 24 hours. This year I then betook myself to Edinburgh and drowned paranoia with bagpipes and detective stories.

On the day, we meet at school and fulfil our various roles. The news comes to me in the form of himself in shorts, with a post-it. This year’s post-it was a jolly one. Good, good, good news all round.  Big smile, shoulders back, stand up straight, certificates in envelopes, smile for the camera.

So September, this September, is as it should be, full of hope, excitement and new beginnings not regret, recrimination and exhumation. We re-embark and launch out from the quay for another year at sea, ready for any weather.  Sea boots on for September. Welcome back!
 
CR 30.8.16

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 

What do we believe in, I asked year 9. Education to understand the world and change it for the better, we agreed. I am ashamed, I said, to be a 50-something in a wealthy democracy where hunger seems commonplace, accepted. How has this happened? If my generation has created - or failed to prevent - this, what can I say to you? Please make it stop in yours?

Here are some things I didn't say : put your hand up if you didn't have breakfast because there wasn't any. Put your hand up if you had a meal last night. Put your hand up if you're hungry now at ten to nine. Put your hand up if you know there'll be food at home when you get in. Put your hand up if you're dreading Christmas because it makes you feel poor or if being away from your free school meal leaves you hungry for a fortnight. Head of year finished off: wear a Christmas jumper and bring in some thing for the hamper. You can do both - and most of our young people can, and will.

But I read that soldiers are needed to demonstrate character and grit to our children? I've seen skinny reprobates turned into respectable men by the army and, for some young people, it works a treat. Almost all the cases I remember were where young men were given some pretty basic support when they joined up: regular meals, reliable laundry, exercise, less access to drink and drugs, and a couple of years to grow up in.  It's a rare serving soldier who's cold and hungry at home. What'll they say to a hungry and angry teenager? Join the army for a square meal? Show grit and determination in the food bank queue? Has anyone factored the high levels of ex-servicemen ending up in prison into this cosy picture?

I'm fed up with trivial and risible advice. We teach our young people character every day because its part of helping them grow up and we don't need a national award scheme to make us do it. True grit is doing your best under any circumstances without any hope of reward. Doing it when you're tired, upset, confused, cold, hungry. When no one's watching and it seems as if no one cares.

And fiddling about with private schools' charitable status is even more irrelevant. Are we meant to be grateful? Show me the public school with children who know how a food bank makes you feel.  Show me the ancient foundation built for the poor that now serves only the unbelievably wealthy and the historically privileged and I'll show you a better way. And don't mistake privilege with learning: I'll match you top graduate for top graduate on my teaching staff and we'll see who can teach the hungry and the dispossessed and who only knows how to teach the wealthy.

The Tallis Christmas card says 'we remember the gift of children and our responsibilities to them'. To their development of character and learning, and to the things that'll help them grow up well and prosper, to succeed from a position of love and comfort or from a position where the bare necessities are sometimes out of reach.

Our Christmas concert was called Apricity - the warmth of the sun in winter. We'll have that warmth at our end of term celebrations as we enjoy each others' talents and idiosyncrasies. A bit of warmth and the light of understanding from government would be a welcome gift. Merry Christmas!

CR

11.12.14

Having inserted the lost form we started the music and singing. I hadn’t seen the massed Tallis before and the sea of well-behaved cheery turquoise and sophisticated sixth form lifted my spirits. I told them that they were a gift to the future, we congratulated the hamper winners and the bands played. We sang, we clapped, we wished each other Merry Christmas and went home. 

This week we regroup and continue our journey into the future from Twelfth Night. Christmas and New Year can distract even the most assiduous teacher from his or her planning and marking so people usually come back in cheery spirits, occasionally accompanied by a diverting garment to add to their school repertoire.

One of the odder things I was asked by Tallis men when I arrived was if I felt strongly about flowery shirts as if my own paisley trousers weren’t enough of a hint.  Brilliant teaching is a matter of hard work, determination, scholarship and communication. As long as a chap is pressed and freshly laundered I don’t need to choose his clothes. I’d baulk at tee shirts and jeans, but really, let a thousand flowers bloom.  What’s wrong with showing young people that you can be a learned public servant and trusted with your own eccentricities? Teachers need to be clever, well trained, decently paid and expert in developing hardworking relationships with young people. They need to be fully professional, that is, able to make the right decisions when faced with unavoidable ambiguity. Shirt design is neither here nor there. 

It’s not surprising, however. The kind of command structure common in schools that can make the proscribing of flowery shirts seem like a reasonable act has its roots in a fear of the human spirit and the difficult journey. Even allowing children to chat in corridors is banned in some lauded schools. Our combination of teachers in flowery shirts encouraging civilised small talk while one group made a longer journey to join the community is far from the prevailing orthodoxy about behaviour management.      

The finale at our Christmas assembly was a huge performance of One Day Like This by a hundred young musicians. If you don’t know the song, let me recommend it to you. As they sang about throwing the curtains wide and the samba drummers raised the temperature I hoped that 2014 might bring an outbreak of understanding of the human spirit and the human journey. That maybe one day the sheer joy and exuberance found in communities of growing human beings led by devoted adults might be trusted and valued as part of our national life.  That one day the comprehensive ideal which encapsulates all our hopes might be recognised as a vision every bit as great as the foundation of the NHS. As the song says: one day like this a year would see me right.

Happy 2014!      

CR 2.1.14

Barack Obama said at Mandela’s memorial service that ‘nothing he achieved was inevitable’. I’m ridiculously irritated by cheesy school mottos, and would like to decree that this should replace every single one of which I disapprove. Nothing we achieve is inevitable, nothing that children become is inevitable. There is always a choice and a chance to set them on another path. 

We’ve worked very hard in schools for years now to know everything we possibly can about every child’s skills and achievements. We have data enough to submerge us and acronyms sufficient to launch a new language. But my second pause for thought of the week related to the dreaded PISA. There’s some evidence, apparently, that more successful countries know less about individual children than we do and therefore expect more of all of them. This is really interesting: do we serve our young people better by knowing their ability inside out or by not knowing them? Do we expect the inevitable or plan to avoid it? Our schools have always been built on care for the whole child but does detailed achievement data free us to help them more or less?  No doubt OFSTED will tell me what to think.  

However, we try not to be inevitable here at Tallis. Our young people incline to the quirky and we put a premium on creativity. As I write 20 students are working with a designer to try to perk up our reception area which will look even duller once the red tag tree departs.  While a suggested slide and ball pool may present a challenge too far for the reception staff I quite fancy the comfy seating and 2000 hellos of another option. That’s something to look forward to after Christmas.

One of the red tags on the smaller tree says ‘I want to be less bad next year’. A plangent human hope, perhaps from a child who experiences the trials of adolescence as inevitable? He wants to escape from badness’s consequences: failure at school, unhappy relationships, frustration and disillusionment. I hope those around him will be less bad too: more patient, more generous with their time, more structured.  Being less bad demands more than not making off with your colleagues’ whiteboard markers or making cutting remarks to the cat. It involves making changes that model the kind of world we want to live in. It involves taking hold of ourselves, deciding that what we are now doesn’t necessarily dictate what we become and what we think or know about children doesn’t become their inevitability.

So, here’s to the red tree, the less bad New Year and confounding the inevitable. May all your Christmas trees be covered with cheery messages and if a ball pool or a slide would improve your workplace, consider them. If you know any children, get them to write you a message for your Christmas tree.  You’ll see that nothing is inevitable to them until we make it so.      

CR 12.12.13