I love a bit of advice. Following it is an entirely different matter but hearing it is interesting. Even annoying advice can be diverting, and the kind that makes you put on a cross-eyed face and bang your head on the table often makes a good story once you’ve had a cup of tea.

Its Open Day season, so the BBC – whose mission is to inform, educate and entertain – have combined all three kinds of advice in their Family and Education news page item School open days: eight things to look for. They ask ‘How can parents get behind the glossy prospectuses and slick presentations and decide whether this is the school for their child?’ Advice is given by three notables: former Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw; General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders Geoff Barton; and acting Chief of the organisation Parentkind, the umbrella group for PTAs and similar, Michelle Doyle Wildman. They don’t always agree. 

I thought I’d put a Tallis take on the tips in the hope of being helpful. We have Open Evening next week and then a weekly opportunity to come and see us at work on Tuesday mornings. For the record, our prospectus is matt not glossy, and slick would be accidental. We aim for honest and hope you also get engaging!
 
BBC Tip 1: Quiz those handpicked pupils who show you around
‘Handpicked’ suggests we send you round school with only the cleanest and shiniest students who’ve been trained up to say particular and positive things. On Open Evening we ask for volunteers, from children whose attendance and behaviour deserve recognition. On Open Mornings, however, we’ll dragoon a whole class or more to take people round. The only children we don’t use are those who are too shy to talk to strangers – and even then sometimes we pair them up so you might get a silent and loquacious duo. No one has a script. They say what they think is important and answer your questions honestly. If they make stuff up, we have no way of knowing. Adults wait at the return point, and you can ask for interpretation then if your guide has befuzzled you.  

Sir M says ‘ask them about progress since primary schools and if they’re in sets or mixed-ability classes.’ It sounds as though he has a view on the superiority of the former over the latter, for which there is no evidence. We’ll tell you about class organisation in our talk. Asking children how they think they’re doing is a sensible idea, though some year 7s will be going over previous learning – especially in maths – to check it hasn’t fallen out of their heads since the SATs. 
 
BBC Tip 2: Ask to go to the toilet
You’re very welcome to go to the loo at Tallis. Geoff Barton says that ‘the toilets pupils use say a lot about a school’s values’ and that is also true. Be our guest.   
 
BBC Tip 3: Bring your child
Of course. Michelle Doyle Wildman says ‘Gauge their reaction, let the visit sink in’ rather than asking what they think straight away. Can I be honest? Choosing a school is a parent’s job. Children know too little about anything to make an informed choice. Of course, if a child declares he won’t eat or sleep if he has to go to Gasworks High and you think Bog Standard Comp is just as good, that’s a reasonable discussion. Don’t let your child make what you think is a bad choice. It’s not fair on them, and it will lead to endless unhappy conflict between school, parents and child.   
 
BBC Tip 4: Listen to the HT speech
Well hello there. What a rare treat that will be. Naturally the Head will educate, inform and entertain with matchless erudition, learning and good sense. I’m unscripted, but we always talk about children’s experience and our hope to fulfil our aim of education to understand the world and change it for the better.

Sir M says ‘leadership is everything in a school…... make sure he or she talks about progress and outcomes and is the sort of person and personality that will drive the school forward’. I’m not sure that leadership is everything. Leaders have to provide the conditions for success, but a good school is a good school because everyone there believes in it and works to make it better.

We will talk about progress and achievement at our Open Evening but the structure of the new system means that we might not have our GCSE Progress 8 result before the day. That result shows how well we’ve done compared to all other schools. I’ll tell you the scores, but they are a bit meaningless without comparison. I’ll also tell you what we’re working on and what we’re proud of, and what our priorities for the year are. I may mention in passing that we got 7 young people into Oxford and Cambridge this year, 2 into Central St Martin’s and 180 into university. I well may.

It’s rare that results are the biggest issue for prospective year 7 parents, to be honest. We’re more likely to be asked about the curriculum, happiness and the prevalence or absence of bullying. That’ll be why Michelle Doyle Wildman says ‘is the school taking a whole-child approach or is it more focused on the academic achievement? That’s a nuance you want to get in this process of looking at schools’.

Two different bits of advice there, folks. At Tallis, we’re whole-child-focused. We don’t look on children as output or yield for the good of the school, and we believe that school is where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizens. We want to help them become rounded, self-regulating, kind and useful people. We want them to be well qualified, but we don’t judge the worth of a child by her potential exam results.   
 
BBC Tip 5: Ask tough questions
We like that. Ask away. Sir M says they should be about progress, strategies, interventions, provision for underachievers and destinations. Ask us anything.  
 
BBC Tip 6: Take a good look at the teachers
Geoff Barton says that the teachers ‘should look like a corporate body, welcoming and keen to talk about the school’. I’m wary of corporate looks, so you won’t find us in matching outfits, but we will be welcoming and talk about Tallis until you beg us to stop.

Sir M says ‘Do they look professional? Do they look like teachers? Are they well turned-out?’ What does a teacher look like? My mother and grandmother were both teachers – is that what they look like? Tweed jackets? M&S Suits? Knee-length skirt and sensible shoes? Heels and a silk scarf? A good teacher has a glittering eye and can’t stop talking about the wonders of the subject. He or she may be slightly unkempt from running fingers through hair for a large part of the day. Or damp round the edges from yard duty. Or covered in paint, sawdust, or whiteboard grime. Or carrying piles of books. Or in a tracksuit. It’s whether they seize and hold your attention that’s important. Look out for that.

Sir M says – ask about ‘unfilled teaching vacancies and the number of temporary or supply teachers’? That’s a good question in an obvious way. We have hardly any: 3 temporary teachers out of a force of 120. One of those is covering a maternity leave. Does that count? Another is a bit of extra staffing we put in just in case. Another is in a subject area of serious national shortage. 

There are 40,000 fewer teachers than we need in our school system. If a school has loads of temporary or supply teachers it might be because it isn’t a good place to work, but it’s more likely to be because there simply aren’t enough teachers. That’s a national scandal, not one school’s fault.    
 
BBC Tip 7: Visit again at home-time
If you like being surrounded by hundreds, even thousands of teenagers then home-time is just the place for you. If you are of a more timid disposition, you might want to watch from a distance. Sir M says is ‘uniform still worn properly, whether they’re congregating outside fast-food outlets misbehaving..…are there staff outside the school?’ All those are good to see, but schools are not police and the amount of time we can spend outside school supervising the streets is limited. At Tallis we enforce a curfew point at the Dover Patrol shops at 1600, but after that it is reasonable to expect parents to take responsibility for their offspring’s whereabouts.
 
BBC Tip 8: Write the date on your calendar
This may fall into the category of cross-eyed face and banging head on table. Of course you would.
 
We hope you come to see us next week and at other points if you would like to. We hope you find us engaging and interesting. We hope you’d entrust your child to us. Most of all, we hope you find us honest and humane partners in the crucial business of raising our children together. Welcome to Tallis!
 
CR
20.9.18

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

I'd been in town pestering the great and the good and pottered back from the station at break time. Children often imagine that the road elevation of the grassy knoll to the east of the site is invisible, despite the see-through fence, and can be startled by a known person apparating in front of them.  

Not so the cheery year 7 boys I chanced upon, sitting in a row, phones in hand, chortling and shoving each other hilariously. I asked if they were spying on the road and they leapt up and gestured through the bars at me, explaining enthusiastically that they were 'playing a very intense game'. Parents fear that phones mean the loss of all social skills but not with these chaps. While it did involve phones, the intense game also seemed to require raucous laughter, throwing themselves about on the grass in the way of 11-year-olds, and much rolling around. The old and the new. 
 
Last night was Open Night and we had upwards of 1500 visitors through the doors. Head of Year 7 and I did 6 hall-fulls (with extra chairs). We also combine the old and the new as she's a lot younger than me. Our hall is pretty nice, being newish, and with a film of year 7 at work running on the back wall, flowers on the Tallis turquoise cloths, the stage lights and Freddie on the old Joanna, it's a stylish venue. We don't do the PowerPoint thing, so we talk about what parents worry about: transition to a big school, pastoral care, curriculum choice, break and lunch, form groups. Of course we cover the other things, but we talk about the whole child before we break him into constituent parts.  We'll take care of your little one and try to give her a memorable, happy education.  

This neatly leads me to tell the people about our new school plan's 3 parts: curriculum, inclusion and community. Curriculum: we want to preserve the broadest offer, it's a struggle predicting the future, this is what we do at KS3. Teaching's good, staff are stable (no reflection on their mental state, I mean that we don't have a high turnover). A level and BTEC results are very good, young people come from miles around to study with us in the sixth form. GCSEs need to improve but who knows what this year's results actually mean. So many re-marks, so much alteration. Inclusion's nex, in four parts: provision for learning for everyone and the wonderful work of our Deaf Support and Speech and Language centres. Wellbeing and our concern for mental health. Safeguarding and the time we put into it, and behaviour. We're relaxed but not sloppy. We're fussy about relationships and their development and maintenance. Finally, Community: we want to serve. Join in with us, please.  

I don't know if that's what parents expect to hear but it seemed to go down well. Behind the scenes, we're tussling this week with the progress accountability score. Context is everything here: we have room to improve but we took a principled stand with the year group when the new measures came in and didn't force them to change options so the school would score better. Oh for a national accountability system that's risk-assessed for its impact on children's experience of school. 

(The adults' experience can be mixed, mind you. There was huge excitement - everything's relative - about the Tidy Staff Room competition. You may be interested to know that Visual and Media Arts won the silver Desk Tidy for Most Improved, but Design Technology took gold for Best in Show.  

But reflecting on the week, it's the tensions that stick. We'd been waiting for the progress information so that we could get stuck into the metrics. We're committed to our support services but there's no money to fund them. We'd like to represent our community better.  

When parents come to see us, what do they want to see? How much information helps them choose? We talk a good game, but we're not complacent. We don't stop picking over results in good years or bad until October. We plan for the short and the long term. Do they want to look under the bonnet?  

A young inmate with an eccentric gait came to see me because his trousers had split 'picking up a pen in Geography'. Keeping him at a distance I said it wasn't obvious and he should carry on regardless. He thanked me kindly and rushed off. I think parents expect much the same: they need to trust us to make sensible judgements and carry on. The old and the new combine here too I suppose: we worry about our service to children not less than all of the time, and we deal with each new challenge as it comes along. It's an intense game, and we laugh when we can, but only the young ones roll on the grass. 
 
CR 28.9.17 
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My brooding on the freedom of the press was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of 12-year-olds legging it down the corridor. By the time I’d leapt from my reverie, found my shoes and set off in pursuit, my admonitions went unheard above shrieks of joy. What I lack in speed I make up for in determination and tracked them down to block 3 where I found previously blameless children excited beyond containment by water squirting ‘outside the library Miss that corner near drama’ as if I needed a 6-figure map reference. That made it worse (Books! Water!) so they got some thoughts at old-fashioned volume about the dangers of running in the corridors. 20 minutes later, letters of apology appeared, nicely written and heartfelt.
 
I was out the next morning learning about empathy (really, you couldn’t make this up) and felt rather ashamed of myself. I trotted off at moderate pace to apologise at afternoon tutor. I shared my nightmare vision of a tripped-up child’s head trodden on accidentally and we nodded sagely to each other and looked sad. Then we perked up again. The squirtee grinned happily at me at parents’ evening and I kept my counsel when other parents hoved to.  
 
There’s a covenant between teacher and child which shouldn’t be overlooked no matter how closely school and home work together. You make mistakes at school and sometimes the sheer joie de vivre of being young takes over. As long as you’re not doing it all the time, we deal briskly with a first minor offence. Forgetting homework, being late once, running in the corridor, wearing the wrong jumper, not having your kit, trying to subvert the dinner queue – all can be quietly nipped in the bud.
 
Parents might hear from us for a first offence if it’s cruel or anti-community: oppressive language, spreading rumours, fighting, undermining teachers. Whether you hear from us or not, we’ve made a judgement about the severity of the incident and we’re either just raising an institutional eyebrow with a bit of a glare or we’re pressing a reset button and we’d like it pressed at home too, please. 
 
I think most parents are happy with that – it’s a matter of us using our judgement. Sometimes we’re challenged for not reporting every infringement, and allowing things to stack up before parents know about it, so the first conversation between school and home is more difficult than it might have been. Hard to know what to do.
 
Some schools are really big on sweating the small stuff (not that I really know what that means) and believe it makes all the difference to children’s self-regulation. Like uniform, it’s a matter of school ethos. I was out and about at an unusual hour today and passing through communities at school’s out time. Young people everywhere, happily drifting around the pavements, walking backwards, shoving each other a bit, grasping each other doubled up with laughter. And if I was to go into any of those schools in the morning I’d get a feel for the way it is and how it holds together – and if that’s missing, you miss it straight away. I can’t explain that either, but a safe and happy school makes you smile when you walk into it, and the opposite makes you look for the door.
 
Upstairs, year 10 are practising exams-in-the-hall while we all practice what-will-the-marks-mean? I take a guest to lunch and we chuckle at year 9 alone, vaguely wondering where everyone else is, as if year 10 and 11 might be hidden behind a pillar. They’re growing up, my dears, examined and gone, or under invigilation. Yes, even at lunchtime. The guest is blown away by the articulacy of the chat and the quality of the sausages. We’ve Jamie Oliver to thank for the sausages, but we do the chat ourselves.
 
A tall colleague comes and takes me surreptitiously by the elbow. ‘Press photographer outside’. But it isn’t and after a pleasant chat I wander back through reception. The sun shines through the back windows as if we could disembark onto the happy lands and I pass some drama rehearsing in the corridor. ‘Come and see our piece, Miss, we all die’. Later, we look out of the window and see children dancing wearing cloth and bamboo structures, being photographed by their peers. Very Tallisy, all’s well.
 
Learning and kindness are important, happy schools are important, freedom of expression’s important, space to make a mistake’s important and the freedom of the press is important. With children, every day’s a new one.
 
CR
28.6.17 

Pardon me for mentioning it but I was in the loo of the Wig and Mitre in Lincoln on All Saints Day when I saw the Ask for Angela poster and thought that’s a damn good idea. If you've missed this – and I’m not often up with the zeitgeist – this is a dating safety genius from Lincolnshire County Council. The little posters say something like if your date’s not going well and you're worried about your safety, if you think there’s something a bit weird, go to bar and ask for Angela. The staff will know what you mean and will quietly get you out and whisked off to a safe place of your choosing. Angela the guardian angel, obviously.

Angela replicates for adults the safety nets we know are vital for children. From Childline to the NSPCC, from the trusted Form Tutor to the kindly dinner lady, we expect a worried child to be comforted and protected. We do it all the time. I was on the gate this week and a small person presented himself. It was Tuesday, moved house on Monday and he couldn't remember how to get home. That's a pretty panicky place to be for an 11 year old so we rushed to Reception where Miss even extracted a smile from the sobbing lost soul as she made the necessary calls. Everyone needs an angel when they're in trouble, someone who'll reach out into the hostile world and map you to safety.

We've entertained another Civil Servant from the DfE this week as part of our mission to change the world for the better. He did three days, glued first to a friendly child and then a range of impossible jobs so he could see what we do to protect our communities from political whim. He admitted on arrival (it was a good job l warmed to him) to expecting a big city comprehensive to be a bit chaotic but was bowled over by our calm and happy vibe. He saw English, maths, art, geography, break and lunch duty, staff room life,timetable, data, inclusion, deaf support, the dreaded IER and even did some speed networking for the Year 10 careers gig. He liked the warmth and safety that he felt, and the care he saw in action. He also saw the budget. And what the future looks like.

But we talked about teacher retention and what to do to restock the classroom for the longer term, and stop teachers bailing out. I went off on one as per about intelligent accountability, assessment expectations and unscrupulous school leaders wringing the life out of young teachers but we also talked about the effect of the myriad routes into teaching and the ethical underpinnings of the profession. Except I called it a service, because I think that helps. Decentralised recruitment and training needs really tight principles and explicit expectations if we're to preserve something that was once taken for granted. Kindness, optimism, scholarship (let alone tea and queuing) don’t survive accidentally. Old git, moi?

Which seamlessly segues into part one of a limited series entitled Reasons We Might Miss Michael Willshaw. Himself talked eloquently this week about schools being the glue of a cohesive society which any selection interference will wreck. Go to it, Sir! All power to your irritating elbow! Unfortunately he also blamed local colleagues for not preventing a nasty fight out of hours recently. A tad unjust: these things are the devil to manage and he just wasn't there. Still, one out of two ain’t bad.

We had Year 11 maths and English night on this week and Year 10 careers speed networking with 40 volunteers. Wednesday night was the wonderful Shakespeare Schools Festival at the Greenwich Theatre, complete with an authentically Shakespearean audience, where our young people were slick and witty, Puck on a skateboard, top marks for Bottom. The Dream lives on.

Life should be better than it is for a lot of people. Women ought not to fear for their safety when they're on a date. Everyone should look out for one another and any of us should feel able to ask for help. Our Tallis community isn't perfect, but it’s characterised by genuine warmth not based on a spurious grit ‘n' resilience tick list. Our children have the right to expect kindness and a helping hand when they leave us, and throughout their lives. I'd be proud to think one of them thought up Ask for Angela. #NO MORE.

CR
4.11.16

October blows towards half term and I take a turn outside to check the elephants and the miasmas and the general views (as Stevie Smith once said). The view from the bridge is diverting, watching the Brownian motion of folks as they rush about carrying news or just chasing each other. Heading back to another meeting I’m surrounded by a group at scuttling height, half a dozen shepherded by a smiley adult. I investigate their purpose. ‘We’re in transition’ they tell me and I have to laugh. ‘What?’ ‘We’re going to Transition, it’s our last Transition Group’. I suggest that they’re in transit to Transition which amuses at least one of them as they rush past. Transition’s what we do for the little ones who might need a hand settling into our big community: looks like it’s worked with this bunch.

I muse about this as we do our second big set-piece of the season, Sixth Form Open Night. We’re a huge sixth form and a big importer, so it’s important to give local and distant sixteen-year-olds a gander at what we offer. Head of Sixth (by his own admission dressed like an accountant for the gig) and I (dressed to match the tablecloths) give it our rhetorical best.  He’s inclined to the expansive but assures me he’s timed himself and so he has, 20 minutes delivered four times faultlessly, graphs, charts, the lot. The stars, however, are the extant sixth formers who charm the crowd. Ellen’s been with us since she was a rusher and chaser, subtle and stylish in black and applying to Oxford, couldn’t do it without Ms McG and the History department. Grace is newer, in a sort of transition too, been here seven weeks and already running the show. She’s got a lab coat over her Tallis Habits tee shirt and dashes off between speeches to check up on science.  

As we manage this year 11 to 12 transition we try make sure that young people don’t make the wrong choices for the wrong reasons. We don’t keep everyone here: our sixth form is largely A levels and solely level 3 courses, so some of our own go elsewhere to get the courses they need. Some want to spread their wings. A few, however, are persuaded by parents to move on when they’d rather stay and this worries us. One or two leave us every year to go to grammar school sixths over the border, which really doesn’t make sense. Our results are excellent and our value-added is outstanding – top 15% of sixth forms anywhere. Stay with us and you get a grade higher than you might expect, including in the grammar schools. Do well in a comprehensive school sixth form and admissions tutors at competitive universities love you. Our people make better undergraduates than those from independent and selective schools because they have their work habits embedded for themselves, in their own habits and minds. However, it’s hard for some parents to see beyond the brand hype of grammar schools and they worry that their beloveds might lose the chance to get ahead of the game. We find new ways of explaining it, so we’ve two enormous banners showing where last year’s year 13s went to university. It’s pretty impressive but a pity that the architecture of the foyer gives you a crick in your neck if you try to read them. 

Chair of Governors wanders around talking to staff between presentations and demos. He wants to hear their thoughts on workload and how the new day feels. We’ve changed the transitional parts of the day; added time to registration and separated the rushers from the moochers in two shorter lunchtimes. Governors worry when staff say it feels exhausting: I worry too. It works for the children but it’s harder on the adults, so we’ll need to keep an eye on it.

Friday is Black History Month Own Clothes Day. The year 10 girls who’ve organised it are clear, committed and very organised and their doughnuts sell out in minutes. A group of boys come to talk about some work they’re doing with Barclays and ask if they can hold a talent show. They all impress me: confident, articulate, brave. But I’ve stuff to worry about: money largely, and the pressures of cyberspace, body image and street life. How we sustain what we do and ease transitions for all our children. How we offer education for the hand and the heart as well as the head. How we change the world for the better.
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Good job its half term, a transitional point to clear the mind. And new drains to come back to!
CR
21.10.16

I don’t need to tell you the facts, you can read them anywhere. Grammar schools do not help social mobility, they restrict it. Grammar schools do not spread advantage, they entrench disadvantage. Progress for clever children is not better in grammar schools. Very few children from disadvantaged households go to grammar schools.

​Grammar school places are won by children whose upbringing predisposes them to pass the 11+ or whose parents have paid for tutoring. Grammar schools existed when we needed a blue-collar/white collar work force. Passing the 11+ and keeping that achievement level going is exceptionally stressful for children who know that their parents have their hearts set on it. 

I’m writing carefully for a particular audience. If you live in a selective area, you’ve got to make the best of it. I’m not getting at you, but the state should protect children from harm, and selection harms children. School places should be planned, not established on a whim. Free School sponsors should be able to demonstrate that any educational provision for which they clamour, to which a Free School is apparently the answer, serves the needs of the democracy, the common good. Greening’s bizarre assertion that selection can be casualty-free is from someone who hasn’t thought through what that means to the child who is not selected.Intelligence is not fixed at 11. The 11+ is a poor indicator of anything but family income. A child may be good at tests or too distracted for tests at 10 or 11 but that means precisely nothing about his or her chances in the future.  Intelligence isn’t about to run out and challenging academic education does not have to be rationed. It’s not a zero-sum game unless the structures make it so.

This school is in Greenwich. We are fabulously comprehensive, educators for the world city. Over our southern borders lies selection. Sometimes our year 11s go to look at the grammar schools when they’re deciding about whether to stay on with us. Sometimes a child likely to get a hatful of top grades at GCSE tells us that they have definitely decided to go to one of the grammars. We tell them the facts: that they’ll do as well as or better here and that others in their position have come back, sharpish. They look embarrassed and tell us that their parents have their hearts set on it or ‘My community think this is best’. What would you say?  

Grammar schools are a proxy for parental fear: so here’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about grammar schools.  ‘I don’t want my child’s education to be dragged down by slow, naughty or disrespectful children.  I don’t want her to learn bad habits or fall in with the wrong crowd. I want him to make his choices within a limited range of options so he can’t make a mistake and end up on drugs and die young.  I want him to get the kind of job that posh kids get. I want him to be happy.’  Of course you do, but hoping that your little one is a quick acquirer by the age of 10 and therefore insulated for life doesn’t make sense. It certainly doesn’t make for a stable, just and excellent education system for everyone’s little one. 

Parents’ fear is rooted in another zero-sum myth: comprehensive schools are all terrible so we need to replace them with grammar schools for 20% of children because there isn’t enough good education to go around. But comprehensive schools are not all terrible.  Very few of them are terrible. Some grammar schools are terrible. Most comprehensive schools are very good and loads of them are absolutely fantastic. The postcode selection trope  trotted out by the PM - that good comprehensives only exist in rich areas – is just not true.  London proves that, as HMCI (a man incapable of telling it other than it is) has trenchantly said. Tosh and nonsense indeed. 

This isn’t policy, but education as nostalgia, a dog-whistle to a bygone era of class distinction and limited mobility.  Even David Cameron called it ‘splashing around in the shallow end of educational debate’. It’s part of the anti-intellectualism of the Conservative government, where anyone on top of the facts, from sugar to Europe, is disregarded as an expert. It is the stuff of despair. 

When our sixth form leave us we tell them to be kind to people at university who haven’t had their advantages, whose parental choice of school for them has made them uncertain about people from different backgrounds. We tell our young people to share their ease and confidence so that the gifts of a comprehensive education are shared with those whom privilege has restricted.

We do this because comprehensive education is an honourable and visionary undertaking every bit as important as the NHS. It preserves the fabric of our democracy and gives us all the chance to lay the foundations for a model society. These great schools work brilliantly for all our children. Parents love them and communities thrive. We have everything to lose as a nation if they are destroyed. We should rise up as one against this shallow, cynical, divisive, wicked and ignorant project.
 
CR
7.9.16
 
 
 
Distant star:
We should never judge children by their qualifications.  We need to get out of this mess.

I check the education websites most mornings over breakfast (yogurt and an egg at the moment, but it’s just a phase). Most of the stuff is irritating but there was a much-read story for a week which made me want to chew the carpet. ‘Girls wear shorts under skirts’. Who knew? Of course they do.

I’ve long been of the view that if skirts were sensible and practical attire, men would wear them. I have a couple myself for state occasions. They’re all very well, but the ones that don’t flap about in the wind restrict the movement of your legs. Then there’s the shoes issue, and tights, and before you know it you’ve spent a fortune and need to get up half an hour before a man just to get dressed in time. However, consenting adults must do as they wish and many a fabulous teacher totters about in heels and a pencil skirt (though not at Tallis where the bridge is a heel-trap).

School uniform lists and dress codes torture themselves over skirts because they present huge issues that can only be solved in ways unacceptable to a thinking person. We say ‘skirts must be of a reasonable length’ – but what’s a reasonable length? A shorter girl can get away with a skimpier skirt than a taller girl simply because the amount of leg on show isn’t as noticeable. And then there’s the leg itself. If you conform to skeletal media expectations is the leg acceptable, but if you’re a bit fatter should it be hidden? And why must it be of a reasonable length? Obviously, one that drags around the floor may constitute a trip hazard, but that’s not the issue, is it? 

​The reasonable length is to do with what’s underneath the skirt, and not wanting to see it in school. What’s wrong with bare legs and shorts to cover up your pants, if you’re not allowed to wear shorts as uniform? And why can’t we wear shorts, ask the boys? Girls can wear skirts. ​

​It is a serious issue. The article that attracted attention said that due to oppressive behaviour in schools, girls have to wear shorts under skirts to protect their dignity, because boys assault or abuse them. We’ve got pretty good in schools at stamping out overtly racist or homophobic attitudes and language, but are less good at old-fashioned sexism. Girls in many schools think they have to get used to being groped or having their skirts lifted so it’s no wonder they wear shorts. But the skirt is just the presenting issue on the front of oppressive attitudes in society.  As long as we collude in the policing of women’s bodies then boys will think it’s OK to make girls’ lives miserable with their looks, words and hands. Girls ought to be able to wear short skirts in school without fear of molestation, as their mothers and sisters should be able to walk down the street without fear. Human beings should be able to go about their business without intimidation, no matter what they look like. 

Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not quite a free-for-all.  We wouldn’t like bikinis or swastikas or balaclavas. But we should make sure our dress codes don’t perpetuate the idea that women’s bodies need closer attention than men’s. Boys’ uniform is easier to set and enforce than girls’ because the basics, the clerk-class jacket and tie, is menswear. Skirts are not designed to be practical work attire so once we start policing them, that can of worms is all over our laps. Once we start specifying acceptable coverage for girls – like some of the fancier academies with their tartan regalia - we add a second inequality. At £45 for a skirt while boys’ trousers are two pairs a tenner from the supermarket all of a sudden girls’ education is more expensive than boys’. How is this legal?   
     
You know that I think that school uniform’s prime function is as a community builder, with a secondary aim of relieving parents and children from unaffordable consumerist fashion demands. Uniforms should be simple, cheap and practical. They should be the same for girls and boys and we should think very hard about how we describe our standards.  And we should put some serious time into working towards a world where girls and women are safer than they are now. It’s not the shorts, it’s the sexism we should worry about. Perhaps our new HMCI can turn her mind to that: understanding equalities doesn’t require school experience.  

In other news Tallis are at the opening of the Switch House at Tate Modern as I write so more on that next time.  And the exams are drawing to a merciful close.  Shouldn’t we reconsider GCSE?
 
CR
16.6.16

I read a couple of pages before going to another school for lunch to talk with the HT about what the thing that neither of us had had time to read might mean. Then another 2 pages before talking to a science teacher about the future then Parent Forum (eSafety with Mr Pape) and home. 

​Tuesday was bound to be more productive, so the WP roosted on the table overnight.  Only what with the Head of Maths, year 10 assembly, more parents, break duty, meeting the union reps, tracking down a child, talking to the Chief Scientist about the future (physicists, they see the future everywhere), trying to get out on lunch duty, meeting the Deputies, writing to other parents, leadership group meeting and then Governors, I didn’t make much headway.  Certainly my goal of being able to refer the WP knowledgeably at Governors was properly fettled, so thank goodness they postponed discussion. Wednesday?

Business Manager and I had to catch up then there were farewells at the briefing. I teach on Wednesday, which was Community Day this week (Tallis Law) so we talked about the foundation of law in ancient religions and meandered through the byways of Leviticus.  The Iceland trip needed discussing, then a different union rep dropped in. Jess came to tell me how well she’s doing, then there was the secret photograph for Mr Quigg’s farewell.  All 300 of year 7, being noisily secret on the yard in plain sight: it’s the thought that counts. Year 8's Great Debate couldn’t judge itself, then I visited the scientists in person which they civilly reciprocated an hour later. After that the Fashion Show: if only I’d got there sooner I could have eaten more of year 10’s canapés. Then home.

Thursday morning after the 0745 meeting didn’t turn up I put the damn thing in a folder to take home to read on the train a week on Monday. I predicted that what with the saying goodbyes, writing the bulletin, sounding out old stagers, getting through the list of 24 things to do before term ended (reached number 12), seeing a parent, trying to solve a wicked (as in currently insoluble) problem, meeting a maths man, an English man and the HR advisor again that I might conquer the next 101 pages. I’m not telling you this to annoy, just to explain why it is that this game-changing paper hasn’t been committed to the Roberts memory yet. Of course, if the SoS had taken the chance with 1100 school leaders two weeks ago and actually told us what was going to happen, then I’d know more.

Just in case you’re worried, talking to unions is normal once a half term and the HR chap is a blessing. Science are hatching a plan, always good. But on Wednesday night I saw the Fashion Show and it was just wonderful. Dancers, singers and models, led by the sixth form designers and supported by media, art and technology made for an evening of joy and wonder, with teachers’ small children dancing in the aisles. Most wonderfully, a repeat of the year 9 dance company’s Run Boy Run first shown at Christmas. Fast and moving with an explosion of exuberant speed and leaping acrobatics at the end, it’s made hard- hearted old me cry twice now. Again!
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Chuckle and marvel all we like, but the truth is that the White Paper will require careful reading and a lot of thought. Governors are meeting on a Saturday soon to talk about it. Autonomy isn’t apathy, but interdependence isn’t compromise and democracy isn’t under-aspiration. Tinkering isn’t strengthening and deregulation isn’t determination. Legislation isn’t a leaping year 9 who tried to behave so he can be allowed to dance. Forgive me if I’ve postponed reading more.
 
CR 24.3.16

The third category visitor is from Sanctuary Buildings, on an immersion visit. This great scheme puts civil servants into schools for three days to see what kinds of legs policies have and what schools are actually like. I’ve had a few over the years largely, in the north east, from the Finance and Pensions department in Darlington. Useful, but…. This week’s was from Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism which was apposite as we’ve been considering our Prevent duty. We were glad to talk and learned from each other. A contribution to the system!
 
We lay on the full Monty for visitors – trips round the building, meetings, shadowing students, party bags to take home – including this time a vuist to my own classroom where the civil servant enjoyed cutting and sticking on comparative religion. (I still see Pritt as a classroom luxury : Gloy used to ruin exercise books.)  ‘How studious the children are, how confident.’
 
More policy legs in discussion up in town next day, explaining how progress measures feel on the ground, how accountability bites. I’m working up a snake-in-the-grass image. How we prefer the predictable to the unfathomable, the stable to the whimsical. The legislators listened so were also issued with an open invitation to the good ship Tallis.
 
Both Deputies were out training, one on mental health and one on assessment, though a combined session might be very useful. Returning to the mothership, I received the command back from the unflappable F. He’d navigated smoothly through the morning, but the afternoon was all excitement. A lunchtime delegation to complain about a peer who’s become deranged with power since joining the Police Cadets. He’s been threatened with the removal of his hi-vis jacket. A welcome return of a colleague from illness. A training session on dyslexia. Preparation for a hearing. A brainstorming session, teachers and students, on branding Tallis character: we’ve no time to do it in and no money to do it with, but it’ll be great. 
 
Downstairs, fever pitch. Hundreds auditioning for We Will Rock You prepare for stardom at the south end of the dining room. At the north end The Big Book Sale could take over Hay on Wye. The year 9s in charge have baked a sorting hat and made notices. One lurches towards me despairingly and takes his coat out of his mouth (we have rules about that sort of thing) to complain. ‘ I’ve been REALLY ill for THREE days but I’ve got 100% attendance for three YEARS so my mum won’t let me stay at home.’ I congratulate him on his persistence and advise him to drink more tea. He droops even further: ‘my Mum MADE me some tea in one of those hot coffee cups but I FORGOT it so I’ll have to drink it when I get home. ‘
 
At the end of the week, some hard decisions. Comes with the territory. 
 
Best of all it’s red tags week now the trees are up. Everyone writes a message and the lunch time ladies kindly hang them on the trees. For the last two years some of them have had to be censored but this time there’s only one unsuitable joke. I read some as I pass. One is ‘I hope for good enough GCSEs to get into the sixth form and peace in Syria.’ Perfect, the personal and the global from a young person who values his own future in a safer world.  Education to understand the world and change it for the better.

CR
2.11.15

Those who have violence at their fingertips have a tendency to use it: the armed against the unarmed, the strong against the weak. They listened carefully and thought hard. We remembered 7/7 – and the bombing campaigns of the 70s. We are not afraid.

​Regular readers know that my year 7 groups act as a touchstone for the zeitgeist. We pondered Paley’s metaphor of the watchmaker and started to wonder in a more systematic way than in September if there was a God. Putting that on hold, we returned to our regular current affairs slot. I told them that I didn’t think Instagram was a reliable news source (World War 3 starting next Tuesday, targeting schools – God, I hope I’m right) and we thought a bit about the best response to terrorism. I don’t usually allow football as a news story, but the Wembley match was ripe for discussion. As was the breaking news from Paris: why do terrorists use bits from the Qur’an?  It’s really embarrassing, said one.  Why indeed?

These little ones are getting their feet under the table now. They’re relaxing and thinking, starting to see the seven-year path to adulthood unrolling in the wide corridors and high level walkways of this place. Every so often you get a glimpse of the adult within: a doer, a joker, a worrier. Some will take on the world, some may wish to abdicate responsibility for others. Some who’ll come to love money above all things and some who’ll be fired with righteous fury to change the world for the better. Their faces illuminate the future. Seeing a hall full of them is a wonderful thing.

Lots of adults who drop by under different guises also have children here in school. Sometimes the fates combine to give them a glimpse of the beloved child in a corridor or over my Juliet balcony (oh yes). There’s not a parent in the world who doesn’t grin from ear to ear when the young one flits by, so assured, so capable. Teachers do a lot of that. We seek out the faces in the crowd of the child we want to see, we can scan a thousand faces to find the one who needs a particular word, a helping hand, a reminder or reprimand, a nibble round the edges until the work is done.

I’m always worried that I won’t see the face I’m looking for in a crowd. That there’ll be someone close by who needs something I can offer and I’ll miss it through doziness or preoccupation. I have no idea how you go about blowing up a crowd.  Looking at ours on Wednesday and Monday, how could you lay waste to people? I’m pretty sure that some people just love violence for its own sake and then have to find a way to justify it. Their arguments are vapid and cynical, looking for easy answers in a world of compromise. It’s not new, but it is newly awful.

I often quote the great Rob Coe of Durham University, a neighbour of mine in former days. After years of world-leading research, he’ll only say that children learn when they have to think really hard. The most important thing we can do in our schools is to teach them to think really hard so that when the inexplicable happens they have the wherewithal to reflect sensibly and find ways to resist and survive. To identify a good argument and reject a rubbish one. To care and serve, no matter how annoying, rather than seethe and hate. That’s why our happy communities, noisy with discussion and lit up by faces we love in the crowd might help to save the world. There’s a time for talking and a time for silence, but I don’t want to blow that whistle again for another year.
 
CR
18.11.15

Assemblies are bin themed.  Sir and Sir have a nice little routine about shared spaces climaxing with the launch of a competition to design bins with added personality. Enter the binion! This is greeted with enthusiasm by the lower years and chuckles despite themselves by year 10 and 11. A large one arrives at the end of the queue and has to sit in the very front row. At 6’2 not including the hairdo he fidgets so much that I fear he’s maddened by the bin or about to be sick but no, just a boy in a big man’s body, struggling with chairs that are too small. ​

There’s an extra assembly for year 11 girls to discuss the sending of photos on phones. We are brisk with them. Don’t be stupid.  Nothing in cyberspace is ever lost. Take yourselves seriously.  One offers a view: ‘You don’t need to tell us. Girls who do this, they know it’s dangerous. Maybe they don’t care?’ Or maybe they make a mistake that they can’t undo. In the old days, you could act unadvisedly and it would be forgotten.  Nothing’s forgotten in the ether, a problem for teenagers who’re growing their brains and can’t think straight. Planning ahead is hard, the long game too long by half. ‘Those going on the Oxford visit stay behind’: we need you to think about the future tomorrow.
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Just before half term was sixth form open evening, a triumph with 1200 visitors. Outstanding results and a huge range of courses make us attractive and everyone who visits seems to love us. We forget this as we return to the perennial problem of hooking the sixth form out of the café at the end of break. They’re like all the others, except that the future is nearly upon them so they have to walk really slowly in case they get there too quickly. One with green hair and a woolly hat reads an essay as she walks along, another wears vintage driving goggles on the head, all the time, protection against speed.

Tallis was on tour this week. We do The Tempest in the Shakespeare Schools Festival and despite Prospero’s cloak clasp acquit ourselves beautifully. Six of us go to visit a school in Kent to help our thinking. It’s very different, fascinating.  Will it transfer? The children look so different but you grow used to your own. Are we as strange to them?  I talk to a colleague who fancies doing a senior placement with us and we watch the hordes at lesson change. She’s impressed by how smooth and orderly it is and I have a smug attack. An hour later the very same spot grinds to a halt through foolishness and has to be unblocked with whistles and wild gesturing.

In the outside world, the curriculum decision looks as though it’s finally been made.  90% EBacc so we start thinking about options to judge how far our staffing’s adrift. The advantage of children is that each batch is new and though we think they’ll expect what’s gone before, most of them are oblivious to it. They have nothing to which to compare their education, except the parents and any siblings hanging around the house.  Their trust and their needs are terrifying: we have to get it right, for the future we can’t predict and they can’t see.

We have a handful of little ones who need to be escorted from place to place. If they break free they run after the seagulls and pigeons, laughing and clapping, their chirping and hooting part of the sound of Tallis. We start up again to chat, chuckles, bins, whistles, questioning, fidgeting, hassling and listening for the sound of the future.
 
CR
5.11.15   

I like to think that my innovative intervention early in last year’s open evening, which deftly reduced weeks of careful planning to chaos, was a useful learning experience for everyone. It certainly meant that this year’s planning was done secretly by the crack KS3 logistics team and I was kept locked in a cupboard until it was time to brush me down and stand me up. Hats off to them, though: it was a cracking evening, as far as I could see from my position chained to the piano.

I’d thought about what I was going to say and even went so far as to prepare a few slides. I talked about our 4 values (creativity, community, engagement and excellence), our Habits ( inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline, imagination), our character (fairness, kindness, honesty, optimism and respect), our beliefs (education to understand the world and change it for the better) and the great mantra of Coe of Durham (whom I didn’t acknowledge) that children learn when they have to think really hard. I described us as a ‘blue-plaque comprehensive school’, faithful to those visionary values.

I trumpeted our sixth form results. Top 10% of all sixth forms for progress, 160 into top universities, 40 to art college, 3 into Cambridge, our 7 year education and our three year plan. And I agonised over our GCSE results, below national average last year and this, particularly in maths (a well-staffed and stable department who do well at A level). Should I talk about GCSE or flannel? Should I go into the whole thing about tiers of entry and the inflationary legacy of the past? Should I talk about what happens when you recalibrate behaviour and set a school on a long-term journey to reconsider the whole curriculum? Or should we go smartly into KS3’s pictures of children on mountain tops and teachers in fields?

We chose our character traits together last year, and honesty is one of them. I talked about GCSE as a changing picture and was clear that we need to improve. I didn’t compare us with other schools, but with our own aspirations and hoped that parents would respect our determination and optimism. I tried to be fair. A few parents wanted to talk more, afterwards, and I was frank and open. (I could hardly be anything else, handcuffed to the flower stand.) 

Afterwards, I reflected on 3 comments. One was ‘you glossed over GCSE’. I didn’t, and I’ll talk to anyone about it at any length, but it’s not really what year 6 come to Open Night for. Parent Forum is the grilling arena. One was ‘do you ban mobile phones?’ No, but we confiscate them if they get annoying. A third was: ‘you’re very liberal here, aren’t you’, caused mainly by our relaxed uniform and chatty manner.  In that regard, we are. Do liberal values preclude quality education? When five sittings were done and I was freed into the foyer to talk to departing folks (logistics determining that there was nothing left for me to damage) only one person wanted to talk about GCSE. 

So what is the truth?  Should our GCSE results (50% 5+A*-CEM) have been better? Yes. Do we know what went wrong? Yes. Can we fix it? Yes. And there is another truth, which I found myself saying, unplanned, in sittings 3, 4 and 5.  It was that I’ve seen too many young people over the years with exam results driven by the perverse and shallow incentives of the performance tables, and that I want our Tallis future to be of deep learning and lifelong understanding. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, but it happens to be true.  

Education to understand the world and change it for the better: there are no easy options. 


CR

25.9.15 

Imagine my concern, then, when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools started in about the crisps. Apparently an inspector was out inspecting and was going about with the Head. Students were eating crisps on the floor blocking the corridor and they didn’t move, so the pair of them had to step over ‘prone’ bodies. Ofsted are going to inspect for that kind of thing from September and woe betide any school with supine crisp-eating barbarians. 

I’m a bit of a behaviour nerd and I like things to be orderly and pleasant with only as many rules as are needed to discourage foolishness. Calm is generally good, but young people need memorable experiences so we sometimes generate a bit of noise and excitement. (Street dance flashmob last week, Tallis Festival today). Children should be polite and well-mannered and the crisps incident sounds pretty shabby. But this was all rolled up with children having to stand when teachers enter a room and a quarter of headteachers not knowing what day it was. I’ve been thinking about this on my bicycle and unpicking my disquiet. For what it’s worth, here’s where I am.

Schools are where society looks after its young. We educate them to understand the world and change it for the better, and develop the lifelong skills of inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline and imagination. We enable them to make a relationship with the ideas that define and unite us. That’s brokered by strong relationships between teachers and students, the heart and root of education. It happens in school communities which are safe and happy and where progress is good.

Beyond that, what? If I go into a classroom I expect everyone to be engaged in learning. If I go into an assembly I expect silence. If I go into the yard I expect rushing about. If I go along a corridor I expect pointless chat. We don’t call students ‘mate’ but I call everyone ‘dear’. We also don’t have HMCI’s favourite standing-up rule, silent corridor rule, tie-up-to-the-neck rule (we don’t have ties). We do have stringent rules about oppressive language and violence, and we’ve decided, all 1800 of us, that we value honesty, respect, fairness, optimism and kindness. We work damn hard to create a place where young people learn to live well in community. We enjoy ourselves together.

Sir Michael, I think I saw you on London Bridge station a couple of weeks ago and you looked pretty tired. I’m pretty tired myself. If we make all the above work, will that do? Do we have to stand up as well?         

CR 16.7.15

   

Not so much with the election: I regret to report that politicians have not fared so well. Two of the leaders grew tidy Hitler moustaches mysteriously overnight and have had to be replaced (the pictures, not the leaders). Instructions about the democratic process have been reiterated: we don’t deface, we vent our feelings in the ballot box. Participate civilly!

I’m not surprised that the Get Over It campaign was more respected than some politicians. Young people cannot fathom the ways of the old. It is blindingly obvious to most of them that inclusivity is the right way to live. They’re interested in people’s struggles and would like to understand the world and change it for the better. Prurient prejudice is incomprehensible: why would you be bothered about sexuality? What is the matter with you people?    

Politics, however, is encouraged by a bad press which gives an excuse for not voting. Young people and non-voting adults believe that politicians lie and can’t be trusted. One reason is that it’s hard to make a political promise – an economic promise - that is simultaneously easy to understand and true. Politics involves compromise, and you need a clear understanding of the flawed possibilities of human life to keep cheerful about it. Being outraged about inequality and politicians’ refusal to tackle it is reasonable and understandable: not voting is unreasonable and nihilist. Decisions are made by those who show up. We do the best we can. 

However, one does sympathise with despair at political pronouncements. The government have decreed that all year 7 students who didn’t meet the expected standard (what we used to call level 4) in reading, writing and maths in year 6 will have to take the tests again. That was 21% in 2014.  21% of Year 6 students have SEN and are mostly exempt from the proposed re-sits. So who’ll do the tests? When? Will secondaries keep these little ones out of the timetable until they pass? Will that help them get cleverer? How will Ofsted measure it?

And so to #2 in an occasional series of Things Overheard That Make Me Want To Bang My Head Against A Wall. A renowned prep school was being discussed at a small hotel to which I betook my weary bones after Easter. Thus: ‘It’s wonderful, so very child-centred. They value childhood and even teach some of them how to be children. Oh, and they all swim across the river with their clothes on.’ Try that in a state school and count the days until the Head appears in the paper and her job in the TES. I hope that none of the children frittering away their time learning to swim were under par in the KS2 tests.  Oh, I forgot: they don’t have to do them in the private schools. Endless testing: good for other people’s children. Learning how to save your own life and have fun too: good for rich people’s children.

Sometimes at school we have hard messages to impart which help young people grow up. We tell them if they generally tell the truth, try hard and act honestly that they will be believed. If they generally behave unfairly or thoughtlessly they are less likely to be trusted when it matters most to them. Children understand that so most of them learn that honest error is forgivable but sustained deception makes community life unsustainable. We teach them to make up their minds about people based on how they treat others. And then we tell them to vote.  

CR 22.4.15

Finding out what parents think is a holy grail for secondary schools and we try to bridge the obstacles of adolescence, scale and distance in different ways. I’m terrifically grateful to the parents of Tallis PTA and I’m indebted to the 84% who turned out for year 8 Parents’ Evening. I do like seeing parents with their youths. Spotting family relationships is interesting for the nosey, and seeing resemblances is fascinating. Year 8 are particularly funny. They’re way too old to sit on Mum’s knee so they usually lean in a sort-of chummy manner, while things are going well.  When they’re not they can be as huffy and flouncy as a year 12, or resort to comically guilty despondent expressions, like a Boxer dog with a mouthful of Christmas cake.

We’re pretty pleased with our new reports this term so year 8 were experimented on. That happens a lot to year 8, just as well no-one’s stuck there permanently. Parents could see at a glance where offspring were doing well by the jolly shades of green: yellow and red not such happy news. Wily parents grasped this instantaneously and couldn’t be thrown off course by flimsy excuses. ‘Very useful’ one grimaced at me as she dragged the Boxer off to account for himself in Science.

He’ll recover. I stood on the bridge today and watched Break. Children swarm and mooch, muttering and shouting. I watched a new starter rush to hug her new friend (she’s got that Tallis habit quickly) and some older boys trying to eat crisps and chase each other at the same time. A laughing year 10 was having her hair re-done. Footballs were being simultaneously confiscated and encouraged depending on the zone. At the end we did our outrageous whistling, clapping, shooing and shouting routine to hassle the hordes back into class. I explained for the fiftieth time why we’ve put part of the bridge out of bounds and thought for the sixtieth time about whether there’s a better way of doing it.  

We’ve invited consultants amongst us recently to give a couple of areas the onceover. They’ve been worth every penny, encouraging us to think in a slightly different way about the future. How do you get the Boxer dog to a state where he can’t stop himself explaining tort law at the bus stop? How do you get the reluctant 12 year old scientist onto a space shuttle?

We start with the end in mind while seizing the present reality of a child. It’s quite a balancing act: we value the person she is now while we hope to help her become someone we won’t know and may not even recognise. We do it in partnership with parents and the people at the bus stop. We let them be children while we form then into adults that might make a better go of changing the world. And the richness of our community gives them something extra so they can hope to breach the fortresses of privileges. They have to smoke and play poker in their own time.

CR

10.3.15

 

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?

CR 12.2.15