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.
 
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Thomas Tallis starts the year with Thomas Tallis. I play a little bit of the great man’s polyphony Spem in Alium at all the assemblies and this year I’ve used this Charles Causley poem too:

It’s a lovely image of the daily church service of choral evensong and Tallis’s matchless music summoning the ghosts of the Tudor monarchs under which he lived and prospered. Tallis lived and prospered at court despite their bloodthirstiness and was both successful and happy.

I usually go on to tell my captive audience about particular challenges the world has thrown up that they will need to face as they prepare to be adult citizens, and what they can do in school to prepare.

I’d decided that I needed to explain what proroguing parliament meant, but ‘twixt writing the slides on Friday and doing the deed on Wednesday I was properly out of date and had to add deselection and the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. However, the message about being kind, polite and respectful didn’t need any adjustment, and I only had to ask one 13-year old to sit up. Who apologised, unlike some.

After that, off to class. Life’s full-on at Tallis so by break they’d already had one lesson and the littlest set off at the charge to get to our inexplicably-numbered rooms. I say ‘floor, block, room’ 20 times. It is a bit of a test.

Everyone seems pleased to see each other apart from a few international-standard grudge-bearers who are taken away to be reset. There is much jumping up and down and hugging, squeaky or semi-manly. It would be unfair to say that it was the same when the staff assembled on Monday. We are generally calmer and cooler and we thought about our future carefully and busily, looking at this year’s plan and working out where the priorities lie (simple enough – maintain post-16 excellence, improve GCSE progress). Expectations, effort, engagement. 

Speaking of GCSEs there was an interesting press piece in the holidays about the fee-paying sector’s use of iGCSEs. The ‘i’ stands for ‘international’. This is nothing new, they’ve used them for years. Many state schools used to use them too, if the course suited children better: more coursework, for example, which helps some. I wasn’t too keen, not just because I’m a simple soul but because I think a nation’s children should be educated as one. If we say we’re doing GCSEs then that’s what people expect, not some fancy alternative.

So we’re now in a position where the children of the 7% use different qualifications from the 93% which is troubling. If schools share and transmit knowledge on behalf of society and if shared knowledge is fundamental to democracy and allows children to become useful citizens, shouldn’t they all have the same learning at school? Might that help breach the unbearable divides in our public life?

Directing zippy 11-year olds to their next berth is one thing, but teaching and modelling the values of good citizenship is another. We try very hard to tell children that the key to a successful life is hard work and kindness, but it doesn’t help when political leadership on both sides of the pond is characterised by inherited privilege, bluster and bullying.

I’m re-reading and re-watching Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, a real treat. In the first book he describes the British in India after the fall of Singapore hoping for ‘time, stability and loyalty, which are not things usually to be reaped without first being sown’. Perhaps that’s the government’s problem.
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Tallis succeeded through creativity, endeavour and endurance despite the mixed behaviour of the kings and queens he served. As we prepare our children to understand the world and change it for the better let’s hope that we can also give them the skills to recognise the good and reject the rest.     
 
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I am now in a position to report back to you on these little ones who are now 15 and 16. That position is lying flat, running on the spot, saluting the sun or exhaling carefully from each nostril, because I found myself eyeballing yoga in the Dojo with one of the above classes this week. Let me tell you, they’re looking pretty chipper and they’re very bendy.

You might be tempted to ask why a woman of my stature – and I mean that literally – is doing yoga with children, but you’d be better off asking how. It’s not easy with my arthritic knees, and I could only do some of it and yes, yes, I know that if I did more of it I could do more of it. I didn’t even close my eyes, for example, which seems important in yoga and remains within my physical capacity.

As a general rule, parents expect those charged with the care of their young to keep their eyes open, if not peeled. I can’t imagine a teacher anywhere who would close her eyes with 50 year 11s in the room. Anyway, if I’d closed my eyes I wouldn’t have seen them and the seeing was the joy: my physical flexibility is nothing to do with the case.   
These fidgety and energetic young people were model yogis. They were entranced by it. Artfully arranged by Sir so that they weren’t burdened by peer pressure they were free to listen, watch, try and relax. They breathed, lay, stretched, and ran like good ‘uns. Not one of them let embarrassment stop them participating.  Each of them, after a full hour of pretty silent concentration, was wreathed in smiles. One asked for the name of the music. One said she didn’t like her leggings, but got over it.

Good grief, why? Why weren’t they in maths? I hear you ask. This was one of our Community Days in which we try to give young people a bit of exposure to aspects of adult life. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship, and there’s quite a lot to that. Keeping control of yourself and not getting overwhelmed is the message we give to year 11 on this particular annual day. We do team games, revision planning and, yes, yoga. All year groups do something a bit different. Year 10 worked with external partners about avoiding gangs and violence, for example. Year 12 debated. We usually take year 7 for a walk, but the weather was against us.  

One of the other year 11 sessions was mindfulness with crochet. I didn’t get to that, but you’d probably like to know that though my knitting is serviceable, I’ve never crocheted but I can at least pronounce the word, which sets me apart from the crowd, it seems. A senior person confused governors almost beyond endurance with talk of crotchet training, and year 11 themselves made only garbled sounds. 

Having something to do with your hands is important if you’re a fidgeter. HMCI Spielman has been seen to crochet, and I once went to a lecture by the late Heinz Wolff where he gave us bits of Meccano to fiddle with while he spoke. This amused the nuns siting behind me, one of whom poked me in the back and said it was the first time I’d sat still all day. 

But today I sat tidily with the Director in the Woolwich Centre while we talked about our plans for this year 11 and two weeks ago I sat still into the night chairing a meeting about the usefulness of arts research and measurement to school decision-making. A Tallis friend, Tate’s Anna Cutler, talked about measurement, about space, time, content and method. She said two very arresting things. The first was obvious: art and schools have endured and will be around for a long time, despite current measurement trends. The second was chilling. She talked about South Korea’s reviewing of their school curriculum in the light of an unacceptable level of child suicide. What, she posed, would be an acceptable level?

We know that the way we measure children has got out of kilter with the things we value in life. We try to mitigate a little of that in a small way at Tallis while still doing what we’re expected to do to equip them with the qualifications for the adult world. Don’t begrudge them a couple of hours in the year focusing on deep breathing: it’s the least we can do.   
 
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29.11.18        
 
  

So much of what we believe now about human rights is rooted in the soil of Auschwitz. Children’s rights pre-date that. The plight of small blockaded children after the First War compelled Eglantine Jebb to start Save the Children, but nothing saved them from Hitler. French primary schools commemorate exactly this. Since 1997 plaques have appeared in Paris and beyond explaining exactly what happened. From this school, this arondissement, such-and-such number of pupils were deported as a result of Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the Vichy government.  Those headteachers of the little ecoles maternelle and splendid lycees: what did they think they were doing? Did they believe the rhetoric? Were they just following orders? Were they protecting their own income and fragile safety under the jackboot of tyranny? What would you do?        

Children are easy to miss. Many of them are small and all of them are powerless. They are either weak and easy to neglect or adolescently strong and easy to corrupt. They like certainty and are poor judges of what is good for them. They get hungry and tired quickly. They can’t vote and don’t pay taxes. They are easy to kill.     

Schools keep children alive because schools are where this society looks after its young. School attendance is a human good. If we see them every day we know they are fit and well while we try to push a bit of Spanish or algebra into them. School is about regularity, routine, walls of safety to batter against until you can look after yourself. Chasing persistent non-attenders is depressingly hard and helping children escape from that chaos unbelievably difficult. It can’t all be done by a workforce occupied in the parts of a volcano or the uses of copper sulphate. An old head once described the perfect Education Welfare Officer as having the personality of a Sergeant-Major and the speed of Linford Christie (it was a while ago), but they are disappearing with the fading of public services. How does a school, or a council, choose between keeping children warm or paying the people who’ll check that they’re still alive?    

Free schooling up to adulthood is a great achievement of civilisation and education makes people live longer. We have a duty in school to make sure that adults don’t mess up children’s lives by withholding or denigrating education. Here’s to the schools that know where all their children are, every day, and here’s to the workforce who make that possible. Here’s to the attendance officers, social workers, youth workers and police officers who support us and the parents who persevere. Here’s to the whining school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school and here’s to the teachers who make sure he knows that Shakespeare said it. 

It takes a village to raise a child and some of our villagers have council identity tags and unreasonable workloads. We are partners in protecting ourselves from error and our children from harm. Who’s campaigning on that manifesto?

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Therefore, allow me to fill the space. We’re pretty pleased with our results here at Tallis, our best ever. We’re pleased for our young people who’ve got what they need to go to university and we’re confident that we can support those who’ll rethink their plans. The internet makes the whole UCAS process much simpler and quicker now most young people know if they’ve got into university by the time they come to school to get the results. It’s a bit more humane than it used to be, I think. Is it as good as it could be? Here are a few questions.

Wouldn’t post-qualification university application take some more uncertainty out of the system? Universities argue that it would disadvantage academically able applicants from poorer backgrounds, but would it have to? We’d have to change the shape of our year, both in school and university, but isn’t that overdue? Wouldn’t it be more transparent? Isn’t that a good in public life? 

How well are we served by having competing commercial examination boards? Why are our young people’s futures left up to an (admittedly regulated) market?

Is the government going to make a quiet u-turn on the Goveite AS fiasco? When schools and universities agree that AS grades aid transparency in university admission and career planning does it really need to be a political issue? When the Secretary of State for Education Secretary says the government is "lifting the cap on aspiration" what on earth does that mean? Does the quiet news today suggest that education is becoming less of a political football?

I’m grateful for an A level results day that hasn’t seen our hard work disparaged by defenders of a system designed to generate an elite rather than educate the nation. I may raise a glass (tonight) to the teachers and parents who have worked, worried and loved our students through to adulthood. I’ll certainly raise one to year 13 themselves who, despite the trials and indignities of adolescence, the incessant fiddling about with education throughout their entire school careers and the ambivalent attitude this society has towards its young, have come through. 

So here’s to the elated and the tearful, to your futures close to home or in a new city, to the difference you’ll make and the citizens you’ll be. Let’s hope that Tallis really has given you an education to understand the world and change it for the better. Good luck, don’t forget us, and thank you for sharing your lives with us.


CR 14.8.14    

After that it was half term. I had a wet week in Germany and visited the Nuremburg courtroom, where genuine British values played a part ‘the tribute of power to reason’ that picked up the stitches of civilisation again. US Judge Jackson’s speech for the prosecution is an astonishing feat of rhetoric, but it was Maxwell-Fyfe’s calm and methodical cross-examination which broke Goering. Unflashy but effective is a British value too.

The memories of wars are heavy this year. Before half term we’d met with our vicar to plan our part in the redevelopment of the war memorial in St James’ Kidbrooke. We think it’ll be interesting to find out who we’re related to and what happened to them. We need to think about the D Day anniversary too, once we can have some assemblies again after exams. Remembering (and getting round to it in the end) are British values too.

And so is going to Tyn y Berth for a week with year 8 to be outdoorsy or walking down to Sports Day in Sutcliffe Park or selling doughnuts for charity or other ordinary things. It’s being so astonished by the sun that you get half-dressed outside after PE just for the feel of it, or getting really cross with an inanimate object and having to climb down afterwards. But it’s also putting other people first and creating the circumstances for everyone to get along together, and taking care of the hard-won victories of democracy and equality. Trying to make things better for everyone is surely a British Value?

There are so many irritating factors in the Trojan Horse furore, so many ways in which conspiracy may be alleged on all sides that paranoia and suspicion may well have become British values as well as Corporal Jones-y panic. Useless to speculate on Wilshaw, Gove or May’s motives but I wouldn’t be British if I didn’t add my two-penn’orth. We HAD a statement of British Values for schools – it was in the preamble to the 2008 version of the National Curriculum and it was wonderful.  It said

We have them in the Teachers’ Standards 2012, telling us that teachers must not 

We had all this and a great Citizenship Curriculum. We’ve standing orders for RE which ensure children learn about and from religion. We’ve a distinguished tradition of assemblies and community activities and an inspection system that, until two weeks ago, was in grave danger of working sensibly. Struth, we know what to do. But now we’ve got academies and free schools that don’t have to build up the common good, a moral panic just before an election, knee-jerk reactions, and wanton ignorance of the honourable purposes that direct daily life in school.  Such a shame that hypocrisy is a British value too.

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11.6.14

Wednesday is sixth form council. They reminisce about life lower down the school, how to encourage that happy absorption in interesting events in their younger colleagues.  ‘Fairtrade Week!’ one cries, others groan. I make peace with a young chap who acted foolishly and apologises graciously. Year 12 have mock results and a parents’ evening. It’s lovely to see personal traits we know well reflected in parents.  We see different faces of the child: one who’s painful at home may be all charm at school, and the opposite. Parents want to know what we’re doing and we are pleased to be accountable. Year 11 have mock exams but the weather gods are only partially kind to PE while the sports hall is full of anxious desks. All 21 staff who took level 1 BSL have passed. More ukeleles appear.

Thursday we review our new improved lunch queuing system, instigated by communal outrage from the small about pushing in from the large. We face the challenge of a dining room built without space to train The Great British Queue of the future. Young people simultaneously demand and resist change, and support and complain about decisions. They want to know why we decide as we do.  We’ve brought the queue indoors and it’s quick but loud.  A slow-loading computer poses problems for the year 9s presenting assembly: they react with aplomb. I read OFSTED’s latest guidance so to predict their scrutiny when it comes.     

Friday is observing in history. Year 8 students tussle with the ending of the slave trade in Britain. Despite complexity, they articulate honourable and economic reasons. They understand pragmatism and moral imperatives and contort themselves across chairs the better to make their points in group debate. I talk to a man about door-stops who thinks children are much bigger than when he was at school. Are they? Everyone over 12 looks tall to me. I give the Director of Education a Thomas Tallis umbrella.

So ends a week that began on Sunday with teacher licensing on the news.  I was irritated that politicians and press think this might annoy or challenge us. We are analysed and examined from every angle all the time and none of that as closely as we study ourselves.  At least it’ll expose the old lie that there are thousands of incompetent teachers skulking in the staffrooms of the nation.  I planned to mull it over in church, but the sermon was too interesting.

Monday of week 18 we start again.  Notwithstanding alarums and excursions, about 3,500 lessons will be planned and taught, 40,000 pieces of work created and 8,000 or more lunches cooked.  An inestimable number of pens will have run out and homework sheets been glued in upside down.  We’ll have theatre trips, job interviews, residential visits and visitors from 6 countries. 

Tallis spends another week fulfilling our responsibility to the community’s young under the public’s eye.  Changing the world, one day at a time. 

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16.1.14

On the way the usual number tripped over each other, jammed themselves in doorways or sought a scenic route, but within 10 minutes we were settled again and back to work. The memory of the dead faded and we returned to endothermic reactions, French verbs and, inevitably, the Treaty of Versailles.

The visiting trumpeter expressed admiration for our solemnity and then asked me why children hug each other so much now. This is a reasonable question as hugging has developed to such an extent that many a child’s 20 minute break is made up entirely of hugging friends in sheer relief that they have survived the last two hours and then hugging again to fortify them for the next two. Being a northerner, I’ve always assumed it was a cheap way of keeping warm and wished it had been invented when I was freezing half to death in the 70s. He observed ‘Your children seem very happy.  It’s not like it was when I was at school’. I resisted the temptation to give him my usual spiel about children being generally happy and schools being society’s best hope for the future and just grinned like a lunatic, proud of a happy community.

Anyway, his validation of our best efforts to honour the dead within the confines of a multi-use games area mattered to us and I’ll pass it on to young people and staff alike. Better still, his joining us and taking part, and liking us.

Good local schools run best when the community knows them, loves them and want to support them. From the governors who discuss everything from toilet flushing to school vision on endless dark winter nights, to the retired professional who gave us a Mozart and Debussy recital at lunchtime; from the lady over the road who called in to admire our new building, to the 700 families who came to sixth form open night; from the church over the road who pray for us to the man at the bus stop who tells us when the hordes behave well as well as when they behave stupidly. We need you all: everyone who understands that teenagers can be unwieldy and foolish and everyone who smiles at us and wants to know us better. You help our children understand that communities involve effort and a just and sustainable democracy is made up of local people of good heart.

So, a great big Tallis tick to our Poppy Day hero, an unknown citizen who made our act of remembrance his own. His courteous participation turned our school effort into something as meaningful for us as the Cenotaph ceremony and authenticated 1800 young efforts. Digger man – thank you.                                                                                                                                                                                

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