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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

If You Think It’s Wrong, Act On It

10/11/2022

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

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

The second was the excellent and extremely depressing final report from former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield's Commission on Young Lives 'Hidden in Plain Sight: A national plan of action to support vulnerable teenagers to succeed and to protect them from adversity, exploitation and harm'. It's quite long but I think everyone ought to read it. This blog therefore is a bit of a precis, with the added bonus of Roberts’ General Asperity.
​
I quote:
Government statistics published last week reveal that in 2021/22 there were over 16,000 instances in England where child sexual exploitation was identified by local authorities as a factor at the end of an assessment by social workers. There were 11,600 instances where gangs were a factor and 10,140 instances where Child Criminal Exploitation was a factor. These numbers are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Those involved in gang activity and criminal exploitation are disproportionately young, vulnerable, and unknown to services. It has been estimated that there could be as many as 200,000 children in England aged 11 to 17 who are vulnerable to serious violence. The report says there are already huge stresses on over-stretched services and the public purse due to a lack of early intervention, and that a combination of Covid, a cost-of-living crisis, and any return to austerity would be a gift to those who exploit children. Over the last year, the Commission has heard from multiple professionals working with vulnerable children that many of these problems have become more extreme since the pandemic, including the ages of those running gangs becoming even younger. It has also heard countless examples of children from suburban, middle-class England being groomed by criminals who have spotted a vulnerability and moved in with clinical ruthlessness.
Imagine the outcry if 200,000 Conservative voters were vulnerable to serious violence? 

Notably, clearly and sensibly, Anne Longfield (with whom I have not always agreed) said:
There are parts of our country where the state is completely failing in its duty to protect vulnerable children from the ongoing epidemic of county lines, criminal exploitation, and serious violence. This is a problem hidden in plain sight, rocket-boosted by Covid, which is disproportionately affecting teenagers in deprived and minority ethnic communities and also some families living in leafy suburbs.
It is a national threat to our country's prosperity and security, a threat which is ruining lives and scarring communities, and which is costing the NHS, schools, the police and criminal justice system, and the children's social care system billions of pounds every year.
So, the report recommends:
  1. The Prime Minister recognises the national threat to prosperity and security by the scourge of serious violence, criminal exploitation, and harm and convenes regular COBRA meetings to tackle the root causes of these problems. The Children’s Minister of State should attend Cabinet.
  2. The Department of Education returns to its previous incarnation of Children, Schools, and Families, reflecting the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world class education system.
  3. The Government establishes a new Sure Start Plus Programme, a “Sure Start for Teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. ‘We have chosen to incorporate the name Sure Start as it is a well-recognised and well-respected programme, which we believe was a mistake to dismantle.’ [Not half, say I]
  4. The Government sets a target of 1,000 Sure Start Plus Hubs by 2027 to co-ordinate and deliver health and education support for vulnerable teenagers. Established in and around schools, the hubs will be run by charities, public bodies, business, and philanthropy organisations.
  5. A new drive across Government to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, including the re-establishment of a Child Poverty Unit in Whitehall.
  6. The Government leads a national mission to identify and remove racial bias in the systems that are currently failing many Black, Brown and Minority Ethnic children.
  7. The Government takes a new “Family First” approach that supports families with children at risk of becoming involved with gangs, serious violence, or criminal exploitation and which prevents crisis, financed through the implementation of Children’s Social Care reforms, and delivered by local authorities and family organisations.
  8. Reform of the children’s social care system to provide high quality care for all teenagers, taking an invest-to-save approach and delivered by a partnership of Government, local authorities and the third sector. Implementation of the Independent Review into Children’s Social Care recommendations delivered at pace.
  9. The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community, financed by funds from the proceeds of crime and administered by a collaboration of national charities.
  10. Opening all secondary school buildings before and after school, at weekends and during holidays, to provide safe and appealing places for teenagers, financed by funds from dormant bank accounts and National Lottery community funding.
  11. The Government to promote a new era of inclusive education, ending the culture of exclusion and helping all children to succeed in their education.
  12. One-off £1bn children and young people’s mental health recovery programme, part-financed by a levy on social media companies and mobile phone providers.
  13. Reform the youth justice system to accelerate moves towards a fully welfare based, trauma-informed Child First approach.
 
To my mind, these proposals are absolutely excellent and should be enacted at once. Youth work is always the first to go under revisionist government, and we’ve had 12 years without it now. The Cabinet’s not short of what we now coyly call ‘high net worth individuals’. Perhaps they could prime the philanthropy for 3 and 4?

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

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

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

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

Tell that to Anne Longfield and the 200,000 terrified children, Rishi.
 
CR
10.11.22
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An Epilogue with Goats

15/5/2022

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On the day when ninety-one thousand civil service jobs were declared superfluous and a Russian tank battalion sank in the Sivertsy Donets we had our leavers’ assemblies. Shirt-signing in the yard and a big group photo, then into the hall. Frankly, I’d expected better weather. Some have been wearing sunhats for weeks, entirely unnecessarily. Anyway, the vibe was happy and this year’s fashion included shirts with golden names stuck on the back and some seemingly bespoke for the purpose of signing.

It's not the first time we’ve ever done these assemblies, but the echoes of Covid ring loud and long. While I was listening to the end of Ms taking leave of her year group, I was transported back two years, to a hastily-cobbled-together assembly in March 2020 to say goodbye to year 11 because lockdown was beginning and school was closing, suddenly. I felt quite queasy. 

The day itself isn’t like leavers’ days of old. We don’t do lengthy study leave any more and this one was put in to mark the transition from the ordinary timetable to the exam prep sessions adjacent to the big days. The very do itself today abutted the first external exam just after lunchtime. Timing was key but the gods of Friday 13th will have their fun and we had a total AV and IT collapse at the very assembly when slideshows and photomontages with emotional soundtracks are de rigeur. Doughty Ms and her team had to busk while technicians of all kinds clustered around and eventually a trolley, like a mobile ICU, was rushed in. The careful dovetailing - getting Year 11 out so Year 13 can get in – all went to pot. I intervened and moved the boundaries. Everyone was supportive. Children of all ages and sizes had a lovely time. See you on Monday, exams are upon us.

Today, their tutors praised them and reminisced publicly. Some sang, some rapped, all gave awards – for character, and Goats. Goats were new to me as I don’t mix with sporting types, but it pleases me as an acronym and it worked for the tutors. Greatest Of All Time at….arguing, football, falling off chairs, organising, saying hello to everyone, looking after new people, keeping the peace, being tannoyed for, speaking the truth without fear or favour, looking good…. while Sir and Ms blinked back the tears.

These young people have had such a rocky time. We were interviewed by the BBC for a piece to go out on Monday about the return of exams, so I had seven in the Sports Hall yesterday pretending to sit at exam desks (‘Quick! No! Get tidier ones out!’). They all spoke urbanely and calmly about their preparation and how they’re feeling. Ready, but anxious. Who knew? The Beeb may have wanted something more hysterical, but we’re too cool for that. As the soundtrack to one of the slideshows today said:

Feeling my way through the darkness
Guided by a beating heart
I can't tell where the journey will end
But I know where to start
​

I think they do. I hope they do. But the world they navigate is more difficult than it used to be and harder than it needs to be. Our national discourse is polarised and unreasonable and no one cares about the example that sets young people. Measured argument is rare, and the things the adolescent brain likes – a laugh, a bold insight, a new fact, a bit of outrage – have run riot like knotweed. It takes real commitment and determination to want to see the full scope of an issue, to want to create a thoughtful, reasoned view without being ridiculed, to resist the superficial, the easy answers.  It’s so hard when you’re young and don’t know anything else.

Today would have been my grandmother’s 121st birthday, but, obviously, she isn’t around to blow out what would be an impressive range of candles. She was a clever girl from a modest background who became a teacher. She used to quote poetry and I think I first heard Masefield’s Epilogue with her Geordie accent. It's not a piece I recite to children because they might think I’m making personal remarks, which we’re stamping out at Tallis. But it’s what I thought of today when I watched six hundred young people emerge from the hall, rubbing their eyes in the sudden sunlight and wondering what will happen next.

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.

CR
13.5.22
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Raggy at the Seams

12/2/2022

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Last month I was baggy at the seams to but this month, to use a trade term, it's all a bit raggy. What means this, you cry? Like a Rag Week? Clever teasing all over the place from Block 6 to the MUGA? Sadly, no. Just a feeling that things could be tighter, could be tidier, could be more neatly tied up.

I don’t usually fess up to such given that my reader is likely to be a parent so I avoid horse-frightening. However, desperate times and so on. Here’s what we’re dealing with.

The blindingly obvious and unbelievably tedious Covid experience is largely of absence now, rather than illness, and folks having to be off for the regulation 5 days knocks a hole in teaching. Teaching is the heart and root of our endeavour so once that starts to wobble, unhelpful waves are set up (I’m no physicist, I’ve said it before). It was worse, before Christmas, but last week we had eight supply teachers in as well as using every spare ounce of in-house capacity. That’s a lot of children without their familiar adult in front of them, a lot of learning from textbooks. It’s a lot of classroom doors without anyone scanning the corridors and a lot of teachers’ desks in disarray. It’s a lot of seating plans being not quite enforced and a lot of independent learning not being set in the usual way. I’m not saying things have fallen apart, I’m saying that there is more room for the unexpected.

Adventurous souls may love this, encountering the mystery in daily life and so on. We pride ourselves on our creativity and inquisitiveness, our exploration and openness at Tallis, but adolescents need and really value security and structures. They don’t tell you this, of course, because they’re programmed to be risk-takers and to kick against restrictions while they find their feet in the world. It just so happens that the conditions for safe curiosity and happy investigation are optimum when the enfolding arms of the school are absolutely reliable and almost tiresomely predictable. And punctuated by frequent reminders and helpful hassling by tutors and assemblies. I cannot overstate the importance of this undersung aspect of the English school system. I’ve written about tutors before, the family unit of any school, especially important in a big one. We try to double-staff tutor groups to safeguard daily continuity but there are limits. No one is staffed for a pandemic. Without every tutor being in place, messages don’t carry. Troubles are missed. Children bottle things up and then unbottle themselves unusually.

Piling Pelion upon Ossa, we’ve lost assemblies. Yes, we have them online and Heads of Year deliver their brisk and uplifting messages through cameras showing children in tutor rooms sitting neatly and listening quietly, but it’s just not the same. You can’t eyeball a fidgeter through a camera. You can’t calm 270 people into silence and quietly move them to a spotlit room where a communal experience reinforces the ethos and mores of the institution. You can’t laugh with them, and you certainly can’t give them a good old-fashioned piece of your mind when daily routines show signs of wear and tear. Schools miss assemblies when we can’t have them: that’s why we go through all sorts of shoe removal malarkey to do them in PE spaces in exam season, but for two years we’ve hardly been able to have them at all. Three year groups are frankly unfamiliar with the whole concept and the older ones have forgotten. That means that children don’t see the school in session formally, don’t experience the obvious manifestation of the secure boundaries, don’t understand themselves as a valued participant in a community endeavour. They’re left to make sense of their immediate, personal, experience which is harder to interpret when the faces at the front are unfamiliar, even a bit confused themselves, perhaps.

I took part in a survey this week. The new Secretary of State seems keen on finding stuff out, which is a welcome change from his predecessor who didn’t give two hoots. One of the (admittedly fatuous) questions was about the impact of the call for ex- or retired teachers to rally to the colours with their board markers akimbo. What? There has been absolutely no impact. Has anyone seen one, anywhere?*

It wouldn’t have made any difference, except in basic supervision. The thing we’re really up against in secondary can’t be helped by strangers, supply teachers or Sally Slapcabbage. The second problem is, already weighted down by absence. We’re drowning in exams. It's good that the specification reductions have been declared by the exam boards and reasonable that it was done at this point so that most children might have been taught most of the courses. It's unavoidable that people are irritated by the timing or the contents - we live on our wits and we argue with the furniture if there isn’t anyone else around. It’s just that the contingency arrangements for no-exams have to run alongside the arrangements for having exams. That means that we have to have three formally assessed piece of work ready in school, just in case, as well as finishing the courses and getting children who have never taken formal exams ready to do it. In a school with a big sixth form, that’s wall-to-wall examining since early December meaning more lesson disruption followed by endless, endless marking as well as preparation for teaching and now, reorganising schemes of learning to reflect the reduced content. No wonder everyone’s a bit twitchy.

But the mopping up of quotidian flotsam caused by staff absence has to take precedence, so time is concentrated even further and everyone gets a bit more frantic. You can’t lock yourself away to mark or plan if the exam class next door hasn’t got a specialist teacher or the little ones look as though they might behave foolishly. I’m not complaining, just explaining. I wonder, had the PM given any thought to lifting the contingency requirements when he was boldly announcing that we’d be free of all restrictions by the end of Feb so that he didn’t have to apologise to the former DPP? What? Hadn’t thought it through? Really? Hasn’t he got advisors? Oh wait….
 
CR
10.2.22
 
*SEND Green Paper, Mr Zahawi?       
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Hello Possums

13/9/2021

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We nearly didn’t get away on 21st July. At about 0930 vans arrived to dig up the pavement and the zebra outside the Tallis moat. I have experience of this. I once couldn’t open a new school because the pavement needed re-laying so I had visions of us all trapped together for weeks, unable to open the gates, still attempting to tunnel out in early August. However, pickaxes were packed up by 1230 so everyone escaped as planned, as you may have noticed to the detriment of your hot water supply, fridge contents and remote controls.

Since then, exam results have been distributed, training undertaken, testing trudged through, timetables issued and now, a full week completed. All’s well.

Or is it? Holidays are meant to help you cope by forgetting the things you were worried about. At my age I genuinely forget what I was worried about and so write myself notes in July to remember them, which then, during results weeks, I transcribe from old diary to new. Some are diverting: ‘Pie chrts sort out’, some worrying ‘Ofsted?!!!!’, some deeply mysterious ‘Top slice 9th won’t you?’. Pie charts are the concern of the top floor of block 3, and the 9th passed without slicing required. As for Ofsted? Death and taxes, I say to you.

Worry was encouraged, though, last term. Apart from the virus itself, all messages were tinted with doom. Teacher grades can’t be trusted. Everyone will be unhappy with grades. Appeals will be unmanageable. Universities won’t offer enough places. There’s no money for recovery. The Department should know better. No child will know anything in September. And what about the National Tutoring Programme?

When the so-called Recovery Czar resigned because government wouldn’t stump up the cash they denied ever promising, some educators became transfixed with horror. Without money, how could the compulsory holiday provisions and the lengthening of the school day needed until the end of time to address the loss be financed?  What to do?

May I deal with these one by one? Exam grades were arrived at fairly and concerns could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Teachers are trusted – though some sectors have questions to answer. Universities offered places and what might have been a clearing-heavy year turned out to be nothing of the sort. Who expected money for recovery, really, or anything else? The department remains strangely led. Children know all sorts of things, perhaps not all of them useful. The National Tutor Programme? Pshaw.

Me, I always assume there’s no money for anything so trim my expectations accordingly. It seemed egregiously unfair to children and unreasonable to teachers to punish them for not being able to be at school last year by making them be there longer this year. That’s not how you develop a self-directed lifelong love of learning – though it is how you cram people for exams. It seemed to me that we would have to teach fewer things in greater depth and make sure that children understand the how as well as the what so they can pick up missed content as they grow.

Imagine my gratitude when Prof Oates of Cambridge threw himself into the debate. ‘Recovery’ is a ridiculous concept, he said. What we need is acceleration, in class, as usual. Find out how each child has been affected. Make sure reading, writing and number are solid. Reinforce core subject concepts and don’t panic. Use what you have wisely and don’t look for centralised support or guidance from soundbite politics. He might have added – especially from a man who can’t tell his blindside flanker from his attacking left-winger. Oh, what a message is there. More on this anon.

But on Planet Tallis we’ve been basking in the sun and getting used to one another again. That’s not always straightforward, especially for troubled children, so we try to make sure we remember the systems that protect everyone and have support at hand for the bewildered, agitated, confused, new and angry. Adolescence is tricky and, as Machiavelli said of the Romans, wisdom demands that difficult things aren’t made any harder if you want to get anything done. 

We’ve even kept a few of the odder Covid habits. We’re still lining up year 7 and 8 four times a day and I’ve noted a common addition to the repertoire of teachers’ silent instructions.  It’s a barely-perceptible twitch of the head, to left or right, that means ‘This line isn’t very straight and you, child, stick out messily. Align yourself with colleagues fore and aft so we may all depart in peace, if you’d be so good, pronto.’

We can be as cross as we like with government ministers and grade inflators but the day job returns like joy in the morning. I was trying to attach a mask without losing an ear while holding a cup of hot tea when year 13 Rose brisked past, clutching gladioli to gladden the heart of Dame Edna. She smiled pleasantly. ‘I want to give these to my tutor but she keeps changing rooms’ I’ll track her down, though’.  Its good to have you back, possums.

CR
10.9.21    
 
 
 
 
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​The Best of things in the Worst of times

23/7/2021

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Never in my life before have I started a staff end-of-term-do with ‘what a terrible year’ but what else was there to say?

On the last day of the year on Planet Tallis we herd the youth into the sports hall for a rousing send-off with bands and uplifting speeches. Such things – what with us not being Silverstone or a night club – are still being frowned on here so we made do with year 10 being live on spaced-out chairs. They’re a pleasant bunch and we reflected on the year together.

This doesn’t involve free discussion, you understand, assemblies are assemblies no matter what, but we did have awards and a couple of bands played. All very nice.  We all the tutors said a few words and we made some awards to the most imaginative, disciplined, persistent, inquisitive, collaborative young people, then the most respectful, fair, honest, optimistic and kind. Then the ones who turned up for 100% of the time, with no negative points and full participation in all that life offers here. Then it got a bit complicated. Their Head of Year is on maternity leave, and I’ve just promoted their interim Head of Year to Head of year 7 from September, so the person who’s just stopped being Head of year 12 and is now Director of KS4 Achievement is stepping in until the original HOY comes back in October.

This is the kind of thing you can’t sustain too much of. The reason that stability in school staffing is a prize above rubies is that young people need to feel that the adults around them are in it for the long term, know what they’re doing, are absolutely committed to their jobs and the young people who may need their undivided and expert attention at any moment. Thankfully, attached Sir is a constant force of nature with the team and duly got rapturous applause.

Having a captive audience and time to spare, I gave them the benefit of some of my school experiences. I told them that being as old as the hills, I took the 11+, and benefited from its class bias and random educational attachment to verbal reasoning. That grammar school turned comprehensive in my second year, so 120 of us proceeded up the school on top of a growing ten-form-entry comprehensive. Some of the teachers weren’t quite up to it, some aspects of the building – beautiful in its way – weren’t quite built for it and the rest of my compulsory school experience was characterised by a vague feeling of it being made up as we went along. This is not good for adolescents, who are making up their own lives as they go along and need to be protected by stability, predictability and expertise in school. I said I hoped that there was enough of Tallis to keep them confident, no matter what was happening in the outside world and no matter what bizarre and half-thought instructions we’d been tossed about on this year. And the one before it.

Adults can cope with more of this, and, following my uplifting start last night, I reflected to staff on a hot summer day’s experience nearly forty years ago in Leicestershire. I visited the Cheshire Home at Staunton Harold and talked to an old lady who spoke of Group Captain Cheshire – the WW2 fighter pilot who set up the nationwide homes – as a personal friend, who’d taken an interest in every piece of furniture she’d brought with her. I was moved that, in a large organisation, the vulnerable old people felt a personal bond with the man. It made them feel safer and loved. I thanked staff for that same work they do and that same bound they have with the children, so important through the pandemic, a lifeline for some.

Next door to the home stands a church which I’ve probably bored you with before. Built, almost uniquely, at the start of the Commonwealth in 1653 when church building wasn’t really a thing, it bears this lovely inscription to the man who financed it:

Whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in ye worst times and hoped them in the most callamitous.’

​You can’t say fairer than that. We’ve tried our best.
 
CR
22.7.21
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Fidgeting for Tallis

6/2/2021

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This is about several of my failings, one of which is a predilection for business as usual no matter what. I’ll come to that later, but let me focus on my onscreen shortcomings first by walking you through my week in meetings. I claim no special sympathy for this experience. The children and classroom teachers have it much worse and manage it much better, but I’m the one writing the blog.

Here we go: three lessons with my year 13 class. Two meetings with the PTI. One with the school union representatives. Three hours in a review with governors and the local authority. Two leadership group meetings, a meeting with the departed Mr Tomlin, two with the deputy heads. One with an achievement advisor who freezes. Several brisk ones with my Head of Department, eight slots at year 13 parents evening. An hour with some local heads, a Saturday morning meeting online with the full Board of Governors. A podcast panel discussion and a 30-minute keynote. In the middle, a bit of time out to have a call with my sister and a solicitor about our mother’s will.
I’ve seen into people’s kitchens, been shown decoration in progress and I’ve marvelled at their pictures and lighting. I’ve asked nosy questions about now-familiar spaces: why is that coffee pot always on the piano? I see family members I’d never otherwise meet and the Clerk to the Governors’ cat. I’ve made remarks that would have been better unsaid, telling Mr Bradshaw that he appeared to be turning into Russell Crowe or at best, Michael Sheen. I admired the Chief Executive of the Chartered College’s matching jumper and crockery. I enjoy it when Mr Malik’s blurred background looks as though it’s consuming him and I’m working my way through Mr Williams’ bookcase.   Tomlin showed me around his new office, beset with cricketing memorabilia.

I’m not great on the phone. I actually prefer online meetings now and I think that it’ll make a big difference to the way we do stuff in the future, less time out of school, but good grief, I’m going to have to improve my game. They truly bring out the worst in me.

A caveat: I can concentrate with the best of them while I’m teaching, but that’s because I’m so worried about looking like a dim-witted oldster with the tech that I’m in a fever of anxiety in case I press a button that loses everyone. Also, like all Heads, I like the sound of my own voice and I have a captive audience to go with my unadventurous slides.  

Teams, Zoom or GoToMeeting, I’m the same in them all. I fidget. I tidy my desktop in the literal sense. I pick at my face, fiddle with my hair, chew my fingers. I pour tea out of a teapot noisily and then slurp it. I rearrange pencils and sharpen them with a retro device clipped to the edge of the desk just like the one in my mother’s classroom in the 60s. I mess about with hand cream and occasionally file my nails. I stare at my hair and wonder what can be done, then I shake it like a dusty dog all over my keyboard so then I have to use the toothbrush in my desk drawer to clear it out. I poke further in the desk drawers to see if anything new has incarnated therein since the last look, then I eat a Fisherman’s Friend. I look out of the window or stand up and walk about.  I think about other things and ignore the proceedings. I interrupt, I roll my eyes, I swivel my chair. I slump, so now I’ve a pain in my lower back. I take my glasses off and on, which in a live meeting signals I’ve run out of patience.

I’m more than usually irritable. I forget to mute and unmute myself but I show little patience with others who do exactly the same. When I’m chairing meetings I can’t read the body language accurately and sometimes get people in the wrong order, adding to annoyance and tension. Because I’m a gazer-about (in real life too) I miss people gesticulating wildly at me to be allowed to speak. And I’ve done something to Teams that means that I’m literally hands-free in that I can’t see the little yellow hands when they go up and I can’t put mine up because it tells me that I don’t have permission. How can that be true?    

Oh get over yourself, you cry. We all have this and some of us spend eight solid hours a day on screen with barely a break. Worse, we expect our children to learn this way, so that they can complete an education that is, in some mystical way, meant to be comparable with the usual sort.

I write in the twilight zone between the exams consultation and its findings. Somehow we’re going to have to make the best of this for our year 11s and 13s and safeguard their futures. Some of them struggle in this world designed for adults with offices, desks, swivel chairs and teapots. Some of them have managed, many fall between, most of them miss each other. We miss all of them and Tallis has to be ready to welcome them back. That’s why we have all these benighted and tortuous meetings, why we try to make sure we’re not letting anything slip that we can help.

We hold trust for our young people whether they are with us or not. We try our best while we’re chartering these deadly waters, but we need to be ready to take them back calmly, warmly, readily when we reach the shore. I’m not going to any meetings that don’t tend to that welcoming.
 
CR
4.2.21
0 Comments

You heard it here first

7/1/2021

5 Comments

 
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How are you?

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

May I call you Caroline?

No.

How many children do you have in school?

Usually over 2000. Between 30 and 60 since Monday.

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

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

What about the exams?

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

How do you feel about that?

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

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

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

The ring is yours. Knock yourself out.

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

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

Had I finished?

Sorry, carry on.

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

Harsh?

Shameful.

Hopeless?

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

Search me. Ahem. What about the Beetex?

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

Really?

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

Curses, you rumbled me. What are Beetex?

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

Why don’t I know this?

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

Knock yourself out.

Shall we have mock exams?

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

Isn’t that too stressful?

Not for most. We can make arrangements for others.

Are you Covid-testing at school? Who?

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

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

What do you take us for? 

What do you think of the PM?

I’ve seen better.

How stressed are you?

Not very. I’m pretty old.

How annoyed with the government are you?

On a scale of 1-10? 400.  

Can I ring you up?

Happy to oblige. Ask me about the National Tutoring Programme.
 
CR
6.1.21 
5 Comments

Interference

12/12/2020

2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we alone?

21/11/2020

0 Comments

 
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I used to work in a central London school with a wonderful indoor concourse that served as a yard because we didn’t have much outdoor space. The senior Deputy Head there used to work in a corner of the staffroom, probably to keep abreast of the temperature therein as we tended to the excitable in the early 90s. Anyway, I needed counsel from this kindly geezer on managing a colleague. I may actually have used the words ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ ten years before Lionel Shriver made her fortune from them. My share, please, Madam.

He suggested we talk without flapping ears so we went onto the concourse and leaned on a banister. ‘We’re alone now’ he said, looking at the – perhaps 400 - children swirling fore and aft. I remember laughing out loud and thinking, yes, we are.  None of them are paying us the slightest attention and the noise covers everything. It’s part of my repertoire now, of course.  
 
I moved on after a bit and didn’t see him again until the day London got the Olympics. He was the Head by then and we were being briefed by the Specialist Schools Trust at a hotel in Chelsea to which I’d made the trek from Durham. It was nice to talk but he looked shattered. He resigned a couple of years later, the school was academised, knocked down, rebuilt. Story of our times.

When I read of Heads deciding stop, to leave, I often think of the man with the exhausted face I met among the happy car-horn hooting of that July day. As an inexperienced Head of Department he was my go-to guy and if I had any success, it was with his calm and constant support.

It's easy to feel alone as a Headteacher. No matter how friendly the staffroom or how long you’ve been there, decisions stop with you and if things are going wrong, its you that has to find a way to put it right. I work hard to gather good people around me, whose integrity and expertise can sort the trickiest problem. If you don’t have those people to hand, or if you’re in a really small school you can feel desperately isolated.

The man above’s movements coincided with the decline of the Local Authorities. I’d worked with a gifted RE advisor in that authority and moved to a city where there was still a full stable of advisors, and then again to another.But those were in the municipal socialist red wall authorities of the north east where the erosion of local capacity took longer. In my first headship, in a tiny authority, there was still good cover for a new head. When I encountered problems – with staffing, with violence, with an arson attack that wiped out a third of our classrooms overnight – there was someone on the end of the phone less than a mile away who would come and, as it were, talk about Kevin. Indeed, when I encountered my first budget deficit I actually sobbed over the phone and the help I needed was there within half an hour.  

I’m not a young or a new head (I say that in case you mistook me for thirty-five) and I don’t know how it feels now.  I’m not surprised that the current circumstances make people want to give up. We’re all reeling from the sheer quantity of previously undreamt-of actions that need to be taken. Not just trying to prevent children or staff getting the damn thing, but then what to do once there is a case. Sending children home en masse used to be something that happened once every ten years for a boiler or water failure, once every couple of years for snow if you were holding the north. We’ve done it twice this week.

It's November, so all schools will be looking at their finances, especially those whose budgets run with the calendar year. There is no money promised for Covid, so we are all looking at unsustainable levels of spending. Some Heads of tiny schools have already spent more than their whole budget on the Covid response.

So imagine how beleaguered, lonely and worried heads, new and old, read this on Tuesday 17 November:
The new UK Border Operating Model will apply to all goods entering the UK from 11pm on 31 December 2020.  It is important for all schools, FE colleges and local authorities to prepare for potential changes to food supplies so they can minimise the effect on pupils and young people in their care……You should contact any food suppliers before 1 January 2021, to check whether….changes are necessary. These might include:
  • • varying the timing and number of deliveries to allow for transport delays
  • • being as flexible as possible on delivery times during the day
  • • ordering longer shelf life products during this period, such as frozen foods or foods that can be safely stored at room temperature
Imagine yourself the new Head of a standalone academy – that is, a school which did exactly as the government of the day wanted and broke free of the LA – without a trust or an LA to help you. Imagine yourself the Head of a small school which manages its own catering. Imagine yourself the Acting Head of a school that can’t get a Head. Imagine yourself surrounded daily by children you know to be at risk of going hungry.  Imagine yourself with a Cook who is isolating. Imagine yourself already at your wits’ end. Is it any wonder that half the heads in the NAHT survey thought they might retire early, or just leave teaching? What kind of government is this?

On the same day a very large child loomed at the door of our office and asked my PA for a mask, please. She was all for packing him off, our office not being a general depot for the disorganised. But he was being pursued by a very determined teacher and when he looked soulfully at me I saw a pleasant and diligent 11-year old with whom I’d whiled away happy hours back in the day and provided the face gear. ‘Bless you, Miss’ he said. I wished God’s blessings on him too but told him to provide his own masks in future. He didn’t need to be alone to be savaged by the wrath who was gaining on him along the corridor.  I was glad to help.     

The great Irish poet Derek Mahon died in October and you’ll have been waiting for me to quote Everything is Going to be All Right, his best-known poem. Not this week, mateys. Here’s the last verse of his beautiful Day Trip to Donegal which I quote in sympathy with everyone despairing of doing the job right, this year, under these circumstances. 
​At dawn I was alone far out at sea
without skill or reassurance – nobody
to show me how, no promise of rescue –
cursing my constant failure to take due
forethought for this; contriving vain
overtures to the vindictive wind and rain 
May we all protect each other from being alone, for blaming ourselves, for calling out for help and hearing no answer. Time to change the world for the better.
​ 

CR 20.11.20
0 Comments

On Time and Money

28/9/2020

0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lines

12/9/2020

0 Comments

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

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

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

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

Robinson wasn’t opposed to academic learning or a national curriculum and those who say he was are just wrong. He wanted a curriculum judged by different priorities with parity of esteem between core subjects and the arts.  Tony Blair asked him to chair a National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education and the 1998 report ‘All Our Futures’ argues:
that no education system can be world-class without valuing and integrating creativity in teaching and learning, in the curriculum, in management and leadership and without linking this to promoting knowledge and understanding of cultural change and diversity.
Michael Gove trashed him in his puerile ‘blob’ rhetoric, rather than saying: this is best but fiendishly hard to get right. Let’s look at it seriously and build up a wonderful education system, rather than a cheap one that easier to measure.

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

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

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

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

I followed a matching pair of year 10s along an orderly and well-spaced-out corridor. As they went outside I’m certain that one said to the other ‘my mask smells of roman numerals’. If he did, what wonderful poetry and maths awaits us in the future?
 
CR 10.9.20
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Fare Thee Well

19/7/2020

1 Comment

 
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A three-part blog this week.

First: this one is some of what I said in the final assembly – do watch it if you haven’t already. It contains singing and everything!

This is what I said to the children:
We said goodbye in winter, and now it is summer and we say goodbye again.  The word goodbye is a contraction of ‘God be with you’, a blessing or wish from one person to another as they part. It’s a hope of protection in uncertain times. Farewell means the same – I hope you do well, that nothing terrible happens to you until we meet again. All the other languages you speak will have similar words, usually based on an ancient ‘go with God’ or ‘until we meet again'. Although where I come from people say ‘ta ta’ or ‘ta ra then’, which doesn’t really mean anything, to be honest.

Since March, the words ‘stay safe’ have appeared instead of goodbye, all over the place. That’s very specific in some ways, it means ‘I hope you don’t catch the virus’ or even ‘I hope you don’t die’. It sounds new, but it’s really just a way of saying ‘God be with you’ or ‘until we meet again’ in a modern way.

When we said goodbye we didn’t really know what was about to happen. We didn’t know if we’d all be safe, or if we’d all meet again. Some of you, sadly, have lost people you loved to the virus, and that’s tragic. No one at Tallis has died. With the exception of year 11 and year 13 all of us who left in March will be back in September. That makes us very lucky. 

We don’t know if the virus will come back and we don’t know what it will do if it does. We all have to be careful, so when you come back in September you’ll find a whole new range of routines and things which are designed to keep you safe, designed to fight it off. Be prepared for change!

And speaking of change. We know that the virus hasn’t been fair in the same way that lots of our experiences as humans aren’t fair. Most of the 60,000 people who’ve died have been old or ill. People were also much more likely to catch it if they are poor or live in overcrowded housing. Too many black and minority ethnic people in England are disadvantaged in these ways, so they were more likely to get sick than white people. And that’s not fair. The Black Lives Matter protests point out the other ways in which the way we live is unjust, and we all need to do something about that. 

Fairness is big for us at Tallis. You expect your school to be fair and with your help we try to make it so. We are one big family from all sorts of backgrounds, but we’ve been lucky and we’ll all be together again.

As a way of celebrating our good fortune we should commit ourselves to fairness, to understanding injustice and to rooting it out. Be ready in September to change the world for the better.

Enjoy the sun.  Stay safe. Fight injustice and come back to us fit and well in
September.
This is part of what I said about Mr Tomlin leaving us:
When I was clawing my way up the greasy pole, what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a Deputy Head. I worked with 11 before I got there and they ranged from those who never left their offices or the staff smoking room to those who did absolutely everything, but who you didn’t dare ask a question because they looked as though they were about to burst. I became a young Deputy in a stable of three on a split site school: I learned the most when I went to manage the lower school site alone. In 19 years as a Head I’ve had 10 Deputies.

For me, the biggest wrench returning to London in 2013 was leaving a brilliant senior team behind which had taken me 6 years to gather. The Tallis I joined was emerging from choppy waters: I inherited 4 Deputy Heads and made some adjustments during the course of the year. Ashley Tomlin was Head of Sixth at the time, but I changed that to Pastoral Deputy at Easter 2014 – minutes before Ofsted appeared – then again to Curriculum when Douglas Grieg first took on Plumstead Manor in October 2014. I changed it back to Pastoral in September 2018: he has had a full training programme for headship here.

With typical thoroughness Ashley came to visit me in Durham before I started here. Ostensibly to see what we did with our sixth form but probably actually to see if the school was what I claimed it to be. He’d decided by then to give me a year and move on if I didn’t suit.  It is with a certain amount of pride therefore that I say goodbye to him after 7. [The full contents of that speech contain anecdote, rambling, some violent references and occasional coarse language and are therefore unsuitable for the website!]

However, on behalf of us all, I’d like to say thank you for all of Ashley’s incredible hard work and determination, his tenacity and commitment – not only exemplified in his hands-on strategic work in school but also in his appearance at the Dover night after night: a feat of courage and determination to help our young people to live safer lives.

As you’ve gathered, I like to be busy in the wider school system in one way or another. This would be impossible without someone very reliable to hold the fort, someone whose judgement I trust completely. Without Ashley, the Ethical Leadership Commission would never have happened: the whole system owes him a debt for this. He’ll tell you that he’s moving largely because of the journey form Gravesend, but that’s not true. Ashley has been more than ready for his own school for years now but stayed here through loyalty to the children. Borden School don’t know how lucky they are in their new Head. We thank him for everything he’s done for Tallis.
And finally.

On my desk this year I’ve had two small bits of paper. One is a newspaper cut-out of an artwork by Douglas Coupland. He has others more apposite in this year, but I like this.
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It keeps me calm when the national leadership and advice we get doesn’t quite hit the spot.  

The second is an extract from a David Harsent poem – I can’t remember which one.
            ‘
If nothing’s changed

An hour from now, we’ve won:
Survivors of the wind, the streaming glass,
the life outside.
 
The hour has come to us survivors of the virus, the empty school, the life online. We hope for a different year in September, but if we don’t get one, it won’t surprise us: we know what to do.    
 
Have a happy summer, whatever it brings and thank you for your support.
       
Carolyn Roberts
17.7.20
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Hancock's Half Hour

13/6/2020

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Hancock’s Half-Hour
 
Dear Mr Williamson,

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

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

I  have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.
I have a sinking feeling when the Department’s daily briefing flops into my inbox that it’s not quite the first place I expect to find clear and precise advice. Sorry. 

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

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

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

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

Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
 
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.    
 
Oof. I wonder, Mr Williamson, if this strikes a chord?

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

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

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

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

Yours ever,

​Carolyn Roberts
12.6.20        
       
 
 
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Warning: Adult Language

22/5/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

It’s a while since I’ve bothered you with my thoughts, so I expect you’re pleased to hear from me. I thought you’d like to know a bit more about my childhood?

I may have mentioned that my mother was a teacher, and her mother before her, und so weiter. This, combined with very fixed views on child-rearing much less common in the early 60s than they are now, lent a particular tone to my upbringing. I never had a book that reinforced gender roles or a pink toy. Dolls were out, and she once gave a present back to Santa in Robinson’s department store because it was a girlie one and took one from the bin marked Boys. (A plastic Tommy gun, a story for another day). She particularly objected to the reinforcement of middle-class values and twee-ness in children’s literature. You can imagine that I never went to Narnia, but I did smuggle school stories in when I was old enough to buy them myself.

This has obviously set me up for life pretty well but with attendant scarring. One such is that I cannot abide childish language in adults: the word ‘yummy’, for example, brings me out in a rash. It was this phobia that made me so cross all last Saturday to the extent that one of my housemates took to the cocktail handbook to find a cure.  What am I blithering on about? This:
It is now up to the Government and the teaching unions to work together, along with the many teachers who are not in unions, to find solutions in the best interests of children and make this work – while doing all they can keep children and staff safe. We cannot afford to wait for a vaccine, which may never arrive, before children are back in school. It’s time to stop squabbling and agree a staggered, safe return that is accompanied by rigorous testing of teachers, children and families.
This was the final part of the Children’s Commissioner’s press release on the controversy about reopening schools. You can read it all here.

I could be annoyed by the inference that the teacher unions don’t represent the huge majority of teachers, or the outrageous suggestion that they – and schools – are not trying to keep children safe. I could be annoyed about the assumption that the government are foolishly relying on a vaccine: they can defend themselves. I’m absolutely incandescent about ‘squabbling’.

The Children’s Commissioner’s role is to advocate for the most vulnerable and she and her predecessors have done it admirably. It is an important and distinguished public office and a hallmark of a civilised society. So why denigrate, belittle, ridicule the efforts of the only universal service for children? Why use baby language, as if government and those who represent teachers were naughty toddlers, or just need their heads banging together, taking one to bray the other as we used to say in the peace-loving Republic of Teesside? I’d have tutted at the radio if she’d used ‘arguing’ but I wouldn’t have been grinding my teeth about it nearly a week later.

Why? There is an assumption perpetually lurking just under the surface in England that almost anyone could run schools better than teachers, that almost anyone has the best interests of children closer to their hearts than teachers and that teachers are only after long holidays and lounging around being retro-Communists. This assumption has popped its head above the grimy water in the last week, fished up by Gove, and added absolutely no nutritional value to the discussion. Primary Heads are being asked to do the impossible with such weak guidance that it is negligent. Secondaries haven’t had any guidance at all yet – and all this because the PM had to have a sound-bite a week gone Sunday rather than a plan. Were you warned, Mr Williamson?

I’m very willing to admit that this is misplaced annoyance. I warned you about my upbringing in the first paragraph. It's just a word. But to me it is a word that plays to the gallery, that treats teachers as if they were children and just need to stop being silly. That imagines that people who work with children do it because they’re immature in some way and need to be told what to do by people with proper jobs. 
           
The teacher unions have been around for a long time. They represent an educated workforce that is professionally incapable of being fobbed off. I’ve written endlessly that teachers are both public servants and role models in society: in neither of those roles can we take instruction or information on trust without questioning it. It’s just not in our DNA. At our best, we cannot stop questioning until we reach the truth – because that’s what you want us to instil in all our children. Yes, the conversations are, I believe, very difficult for all concerned, but as they concern the health of the national children, why shouldn’t they be, Mr Williamson?

We’re nearly done for half term and we’ll be closed on Monday for the first time in ages – before being open for the rest of the week. It’s the kind of weather that would make for a lively Friday afternoon before a holiday in normal time. Our young inmates finish the week cheerfully, rushing around the daily mile today circling and chasing each other like lion cubs in the wind. Our buildings stand clean and quiet. We’re waving at a distance until we welcome them back, safely. Are you waving or drowning, Mr Williamson?

As ever,

​CR
22.5.20
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Becoming thankful

24/4/2020

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Dear Mr Williamson,

You’ve got a lot on and it looks as though it’s getting on top of you. If you need some peace and quiet to think, Tallis-the-building has got that. Tallis-the-school, however, is trying to keep itself going.  
 
Let me tell you about the building first. There are so few people here that any movement catches my eye. I looked up yesterday to see a colleague going into one of the blocks. She turned and looked wistfully at the empty concourse before heading into the dark to lead a live A-level lesson. She’s lost family in the virus and may have been thinking about that, but she looked like she was hearing what I hear, the hollow sound of a building holding its breath. 
 
Teachers laugh about school without children being peaceful and tidy, but it’s not new. Anyone who comes in to work in the holidays hears a silence, but it’s different to this silence. Holiday silence is about taking a breath, settling and regrouping ready for the next foray. This silence is different, an absence, not a breather. It’s as if the bricks, the glass and the mighty steel frames are asking what’s happened? Where are they?

We know where they are, but it isn’t here. So I’m wondering about what it’ll sound like when they’re back, and trying to analyse what I’m missing. Noise and busy-ness obviously. The particular sound of the little crossroads outside my office at lesson change contrasting with the purring motor of the main office next door; the racket of 11RA seizing and gathering for afternoon tutor and the Deaf children talking and signing as they go for support.  The personal leitmotif of a colleague’s keys and whistle, of another’s heels and the clatter of the fire door against my wall because the doorstop’s in the wrong place. 

The work we’re doing at the moment is all about maintaining the bones of a school: checking children are OK, sending work, teaching lessons where we can and sorting out work to keep people going. Governance, budgets, teacher recruitment for September. We’re just about holding it together under the circumstances and we’re waiting to hear what happens next. We’ll hear it from you, Mr Williamson, but we’ll hear it from the children too.

And there’s the problem. Schools are designed to be full of bustle, even a bit squashed in parts. They’re designed to be community crucibles in which children learn how to deal with themselves and others. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to look after themselves, and we do it in batches. Social distancing is the opposite of what we do and the infrastructure is all against it. 

Practically speaking, we could keep children 2m apart in class if we had 10 (out of 30) to a standard classroom.  We’d be hard pressed to do it in the corridors and we could probably only feed 60 at once. Children would have to be kept indoors all day to enforce it, being taken out for walks occasionally. We could do this – we could do whatever it takes - but we could only do it for a small number. Even on a giant site like ours that would perhaps be 500 at most – 25%. Which 25%?

Lockdown’s five weeks old now and it's hard, very hard for some. We need to remember why we’re doing it and take care that our next actions are measured and rational. Life will never be the same again and we can’t make up the time we’re losing to Covid-19. We mustn’t unpick the good that’s been done by our unusual national self-discipline and we must especially guard against controversy-as-an-antidote-to-boredom that panics shaky politicians into making bad decisions. This disease kills people who are unprepared, and both our national health and National Health remain at the mercy of national unreadiness.
 
Whatever happens to bring us out of this will have a cost, which we’ll pay for a long time. Some children will learn less than they expected over the course of their school careers, but if we get it right they’ll have the rest of their lives to learn in. If we get it wrong, some of them, and their teachers, won’t.

There are 53 Thankful Villages in England and Wales who lost no one in the Great War. There are tens of thousands of villages and towns who lost people, singly or in big numbers, whole street-fulls in the Blitz, of course. Whatever happens next, we need our schools to come through this Thankful. We need our young people for a better future.  We need to keep them safe now. 

Take care, Mr Williamson.

Yours in hope

CR
24.4.19
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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115   F: +44 (0)208 331 3004   E: headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
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