Category: Culture

Bring me a Shofar

28/5/2022

Looking forward to half term? I’m not following my usual May path of getting onto a train somewhere hot straight after school, but going to West Wales and back for the Jubilee. Time’s running out for us older folks – not including the Queen, of course – and I may safely bank on not seeing another Platinum Jubilee. It seemed churlish not to return to London to potter about in the crowds.

I like to do a bit of shopping on my hols, between books. Even a different supermarket is interesting to me and I’m a sucker for everything from weaving in the wilds to the magnificent pharmacies of France.

We’ve been having two different kinds of trouble with shopping here. The first is linked to two large shops of the modern type which opened opposite us but don’t really want children’s custom. I get that hordes of youths hell-bent on unhealthy snackage deters other shoppers who may have more cash. I know that handling teenagers isn’t to everyone’s taste and fear arouses anger which generates trouble, especially when highly caffeinated comestibles are in the case, but it's not as if the existence of the school was hidden to the planners. We are big enough to see.

Similar happened in my last school, with a magnet sixth form like Tallis, but gathering also from semi-rural areas. Young drivers couldn’t park in the car park but could in the local streets. This drove residents crazy. Yes, they needed practice parking tidily, but didn’t we all? Young citizens with full licences and insured cars also have parking rights. Responsible young shoppers, some picking up a few things for the family on the way home, could be allowed to go to the shops everyone else goes to, with a bit of planning. We’re working on it.

The second shopping trouble isn’t actually about the shopping. Our local parade, as local readers know, can be a troubled spot, so we operate a post-school curfew. From time to time, working with the police, we ban everyone for a day or two. This infuriates lots of people, but keeps our children safer for a while. Supervising the streets, however, is hard, and one of the things that would help is good CCTV. Some adults have strong feelings about being filmed: I have strong feelings about keeping children safe. We could work together on this.

Anyway, returning to the shopping, I am delighted to update you on Lord Agnew and his champagne. From Schools Week:

The government will not reveal its costcutting advisers’ recommendations to balance the books at two Hackney schools held up as success stories of the controversial scheme… [They] found savings totalling £303 million after visiting around 1,000 schools and trusts. Just £17 million of savings had been made six months after visits. But neither the DfE, the schools nor Hackney council – which commissioned the visits – would release the reports following a Freedom of Information request. Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “If you’re going to say that if you get these cost-cutters in you can all save money, then there absolutely is an obligation to say how it is done. An FOI previously revealed that the government’s own research indicated more than half of schools reported the advisers did not identify new ways of saving money.”

I expect the fridges full of Pol Roger are still humming along, if they weren’t raided for lockdown parties. Perhaps they were part of the Wine Time Friday fridge battery (WTF as the acronym apparently used, do they think we’re stupid?). Obviously they don’t have to worry about the electricity bill.

I look out of the window onto a sunny day and a sprinkling of cultural dress for the eponymous day. Does what I wear every day count for the cultural dress of an English Headteacher? An online assembly - we have to have them online at the moment because every space is taken up for exams, 22 room changes today - is about to start for year 10 on the Jubilee.

Bradshaw’s been delivering these assemblies which explain everything about the monarchy in 15 minutes. We start with the meaning of Jubilee, a concept first used about 2700 years ago, meaning a shout for joy which started a time of rejoicing or a time of release. After 7 years a year of Jubilee required people to review their community relationships and debts, even more so after 49 years. We could do with that.

When the Queen was 21 she made the famous speech in which she said:

I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service.

Which, monarchist or no, you have to admit has a better tone than either WTF, taxpayers or sorry we upset people, didn’t realise it was banned, didn’t know it was a party. Could we all perhaps try a little devotion to service?

There’s a Tallis English challenge for over the hols that invites age-appropriate use of 18 words. I’ve inaccurately divided them into two groups. For your Jubilee homework, which best fits the Queen and which best fits the government? Give reasons, 19 marks.

Gumption, humungous, iconic, lucid, esoteric, Zeitgeist
Kerfuffle, quaver, cantankerous, miffed, obsequious, discombobulate, defunct, collywobbles, capricious, ennui, idiosyncratic, ubiquitous, Zeitgeist

Jubilees in the ancient world started with a blast on the shofar. Find me a ram.

CR
27.5.22

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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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‘The Forgotten: how white working class pupils have been let down, and how to change it’ HC85

26/6/2021

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Quite a week, then. Having worked us into a frenzy over Teacher Assessed Grades, everyone submitted them on the 18th then mopped themselves down ready for the next excitement, samples of evidence to go to the board. The message promised on Monday (21st) with a 48-hour turnaround uploading time arrived at about 2200 but with the same window as if it had arrived 14 hours earlier. We don’t think so, said the nation’s Deputy Heads. Shall we call it Thursday morning?. ‘Oh, sorry, didn’t think, yes’. The exam boards have been writing to us about this since Trump was in the White House. They had one job: send us a request on time. Ah well.

I’ve worked with some unbelievably fussy people in my time. People who straighten pictures or match their hair bobble to their underwear (I’m told), people who calculate the time lag developing between school clocks and the BBC and tell the Head exactly how many seconds need finding; statisticians in their upstairs cupboards for whom a progress prediction to three decimal places is evidence of sloppy thinking. You’d imagine exam boards have loads of those folks, but where are they? Locked in a drawer? Messages don’t send themselves. They have to be primed and fired, like those in the Education Select Committee Report published this week.
In the interests of balance, I’ll tell you what’s good about it first.

The giant problem of the underachievement of poor white children and blighted generations in endemically disadvantaged places certainly needs close attention.
Teachers have not been blamed entirely, which is a novelty: poverty, alienation, isolation and disempowerment are all mentioned.
It is good to see a tidy focus on early years and careers.
The report’s recurring emphasis on the need for live deprivation statistics accurate to neighbourhood level so they can be used to target particular needs is long overdue.
There is a knockabout routine involving pointy questions on the curriculum and the Minister of State’s rambly answers which would be amusing if it weren’t depressing.

However,

This government has been in power for 11 years and needs to take responsibility for the prevailing conditions. Austerity is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon, like cold weather at the Summer Solstice.
The teacher supply nightmare is unaddressed. A pandemic bounce won’t sustain us for long.
The extremely successful New Labour Sure Start early years intervention didn’t close itself. If you dig something out, do you expect the wound to heal over or fester?
If a government strips the Office of National Statistics, argues with every release and generalises inaccurately about big datasets rather than neighbourhood information, the stats are compromised. Go figure.
Curriculum matters. An untargeted focus on academic learning brings an EBacc-heavy curriculum that doesn’t engage children who need a different way into school success. Also, only 37% of poor white children get a grade 4 in English or Maths. The minister says: we need more time to check that everyone’s doing it right, teaching phonics in the one true way, only using approved maths methods. The report says: 25% EBacc isn’t much to show for eleven years. This curriculum drains all the life out of learning unless you happen to love writing and exams above all things. Schools are too timid to broaden the subjects offered in case their progress score doesn’t stack up: it is assumed this is the way of things.

The report covers the ground. Until this point, it’s probably better than nothing. Some feet are held to a warm-ish flame. But all documents are products of their time and I don’t suppose this one could get to the photocopier without being checked for culture-war dog-whistles. In a document of 154 paragraphs, 8 are about ‘White Privilege’, 6% of the total. Why?

The report argues that any school talking about white privilege has been duped by shady academics into divisive (‘pernicious’) thinking that is meaningless to most white people, especially the most disadvantaged. This hides the level of disadvantage they are suffering from the poor white people themselves. Schools should stop talking about race and focus on disadvantage.

What? I was born in Middlesbrough and I’ve worked in Sunderland, Hartlepool and on the outer estates and former mining towns of the Midlands. Disadvantage is not in short supply: there is plenty to go around. Identifying disadvantage in one group does not take suffering away from another and restricting disadvantage, as if only a few people deserve it, is strange thinking.

The National Curriculum starts with these words:

Every state-funded school must offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based and which:
• promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and
• prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.

Given the state of the world, doesn’t this include talking about racism? And gender, democracy, economics and the climate emergency?

It cannot possibly be the case that the DfE want to quash critical thinking in schools. Creativity and argumentativeness are pretty fundamental British values as well as tolerance, respect, democracy and the rule of law. Individual liberty is one of those values: surely that includes the freedom to criticise, discuss, hypothesise, understand and think?

Its second lunch and year 9 are charging about like five-year olds, temporarily oblivious to the divisions being sown amongst them while year 7 participants in the Peace Game are staring it in the face. This report seems to suggest that if we just stop talking about racism, the poorest in the country will do much better. With respect, Mr Halfon, if that were true we wouldn’t be in this mess.

CR
25.6.21

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Hymn Sheets

16/9/2017

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I was goggling at the injuries our Head of Geography returned from cycling round the world was laughing off, while she talked about plans for the year. Her team can look forward to some quality time together with all the affordances and accoutrements of the modern department. Rounding off the list she declared happily ‘We’ll all be singing from the same hymn sheet’. And I was off.

Hannah may not get very close to an actual hymn sheet, but I’ve done my time with them. I’ve been around schools for such a long time I’ve done hymns in assembly and hymn practice as a punishment. From Victorian doggerel to fancy modern jobs reeking of substitutionary atonement Ive shouted ‘Louder!’ with the best of them. Having a full set of the same hymn sheets was a luxury. Some partially eaten, many illegible. Some had hymns under different numbers, others unpredictable new words. Hymn sheet rustling was another irritant: rehearsals for cathedral events involved training hordes in picking up and putting down a hymn sheet QUIETLY. We moved on to projectors, overhead then digital, with a trusty child to move the words on while everyone looked upwards angelically to sing from one glorious hymn sheet with ginormous writing.

If you’ll bear with what’s obviously a metaphor extended beyond endurance, there's a further complication on Sundays. Hymns have been rewritten or adjusted to improve or take out the gratuitously offensive. A lucky congregation has a full set with the same words, but people remember the old words and sing them instead. Or do it from memory and ignore the hymn book altogether. I may be one of those people. Then there’s the curve ball of Right Hymn but Wrong Tune.

Singing from the same hymn sheet with up-to-date and acceptable words to the right tune is obviously the harmonious way to go. The Geographers above will do it naturally. Doing it across school is a sine qua non of effective leadership, every procedure clear, everyone knowing what they're doing. I love an agreed procedure, but only where necessary. If all of life is scripted, when do we write our own lines?

Single hymnsheet-ness is big in schools. We are trusted to look after the nation’s young, so we shouldn’t do it randomly. We’re paid by the state so we should plan it carefully. We’re highly educated so so we should do it effectively. We're human, so we should do it humanely.

There’s been a bit of a to-do this term about schools with fixed rules. One was about trousers in Houghton-le-Spring. I was Head of RE there for 3 years, and once had a conversation about lecterns with a child that I still can’t fathom. (How exactly do they run up and down the street all night, banging on doors and windows?). Uniform in most schools is the uber-hymn sheet, but you’ve heard me on that before. The second, Great Yarmouth, story which has attracted so much interest it could almost be upgraded to a hoo-hah, is about the single hymn sheet for everything. Uniform, listening, pencil cases, walking, going home, bed time, coat hangers, sitting up straight. It's a bit extra, but schools have always had different ways of going about stuff and what appears oppressive to one child may be liberation to another.

However, given that the unexamined life is not worth living, we have to be prepared to live with the examining. Where is the line between wanting to enable children to escape generational poverty, and denigrating the efforts of those who have loved and supported their children despite it? If a school wishes its children to transcend their parents lives, what are we saying about our fellow citizens’ choices? If uniform is exposed as being all about conformity and conservatism, what to do with the child wired as a rugged individual? Is the single hymn sheet always a good thing? What if the words don’t make any sense? What if there’s another tune?

I'm a tidy soul and can see that purity of heart is to will one thing, but I struggle when that becomes a red line. We all have our fancy rules to keep one another safe and make it possible to teach and to learn but further than that, what? We can’t claim we’ve learned anything about social justice, that’s for sure. Or defeating poverty. Or making children happier. How is a zero-tolerance hymn sheet riffing on conformity and conservatism the answer?

The best school hymn was written in 1931 by the agnostic Jan Struther to a folk tune called Stowey, a three-verse metaphor requiring no faith assumptions. When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old ends with
And let me set free with the sword of my youth
From the dragons of anger, the power of the truth.

It’s a hymn worth learning off by heart to sing on your own no matter what everyone else has on their hymn sheet. What kind of school enables children to embark on battle and adventure to understand the world and change it for the better?

CR
15.9.17

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What would you cut?

10/3/2017

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Not many jokes this week, apols. I thought I'd try to explain something about school funding cuts so that, as we go into the darkness, everyone understands just why an anodyne lie from government leads to heads having to switch the lights off.

There’s a great campaign called #whatwouldyoucut but because I don’t really know how to tweet I haven’t contributed much. Nonetheless, the question is the right one. And, because we’re like that at Tallis, we have a list. Hold that outrage, it's not a list of what we would cut, but the things that a conservative government with a functionalist view of education informed by nostalgia, class constructs, elitism, obsession with the markets and sheer not-knowing-what-we-do-all-day-ness think we should do without. The list is about the extra things about which we shouldn't forget to tell an inspector calling. Mr Tomlin and Mr Nicholls are list-keepers-general for this purpose, thank you Sirs. It includes (fanfare drumroll deep breath)

Workshops, visiting authors, dance and drama companies. Trips and visits (about 150 a year) near and far, the mosque, the Wallace Collection, Norway. Performances and exhibitions. Competitions: debating, football, anything. Prince's Teaching Institute work (school of the week twice). Creative studying group workshops for year 10. Maths Day rock competition (and the concert tickets we won). GCSE Pod, the revision app (top 7% of users in country). Artsmark (hoping to get the platinum award). Thomas Tallis Centre for Contemporary Art, our Tate Exchange project (we're the only Associate school). The Shakespeare Schools Festival. The Wandering Bears photographic collective for year 9 & 10. Mentoring between years 12 and 11/7. A reduced curriculum in year 11 for those struggling (with additional maths and English support provided). PET Xi intensive specialist revision, weekend and holiday support sessions. Year 8 boys visiting primaries to read with their students. Primary school science workshops. 36 clubs (from ukulele & astronomy to ninja school). World Challenge To Ecuador. Charlton Athletic Academy. Tech Club and the go- bat-cart, Productions, (We Will Rock You in 2016). Year 7 and 8 outdoor events in June 2016, the jolly old Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, counselling, internal elections (mayoral, general elections, Brexit, school council). Teens and Toddlers Programme, attendance reward trips. International links with Taiwan. Free tea for staff at break time, Parent Coffee Mornings every week, a weekly newsletter with 1700+ subscribers. Psychologists, family support, on-call behaviour support.

We’ve got them on our list and they'd all of 'em be missed. Not that they're about to disappear at Tallis, I'm just showing the working needed to balance a budget.

I bet some readers are thinking 'some of those sound pretty cheap, so why the panic. Won't they carry on with less money, or are teachers doing that goodwill thing they did years ago?'. May I explain a bit about this?

Our money comes to us in age-weighted pupil units. We spend it on employing the teachers we need to teach the number of children we have, and ancillary services. Saying that money to schools is increasing doesn't prove anything other than that there are more children. More children need more teachers. (They're hard to find, so they're getting more expensive, but that's another story). If the amount of funding per pupil isn't enough to pay the teachers we need, then we have to cut.

Schools look at making other savings before they look at cutting teaching. That means less money for books, equipment and suchlike. Exams are expensive: up to £200k a year in a big school and we can't reduce that - though why the examination boards have to be profit-making and not free to schools is a mystery to me. If like us you have a PFI building with an annual charge to the school budget you can't save money on building maintenance, costs or heating, which is what schools traditionally do in hard times. We can't let it out and make money, because it's not ours.

So, heads finally look at how to take money from the teaching budget, by reducing the number of teachers or by having cheaper ones. If you reduce the number then you have to increase class sizes or increase the hours a week that a teacher teaches, or both.

Once either of the above happens, then, with the best will in the world, teachers have to reserve their energies for the day job. If you don't get a free period until Wednesday your capacity to run a club or a team, or a revision session is limited. If lunchtime's shortened so that supervision is safer with the same expenditure, then your day's more pressured.

School trips take a bit of planning so the time for that might be hard to find. Trips require teachers to be covered, which costs either extra school staffing or supply teachers.

And don't get me started on schools that only employ young teachers because they're cheap. Young is buzzy but older is important and young people need to know that wise people dedicate their lives to their service. I was a young teacher once.

Oh, and all those insights about how our children need pastoral care and help with the worries and anxieties that the twin pressures of cool and school bring? Forget them. Skilled support staff are expensive too, and there's no separate budget for them.

Does that help understand the debate? Does Philip Hammond understand why Band Night with 20 acts is important? Will Justine Greening calm an angry child? Can George Osborne give us a bit of his retainer to keep the visits going? Hands up at the back there, if the teacher can see that far.

I'd found a hat on the floor and recognised it as one I'd confiscated and returned a while ago. After a week I sought its owner and there was an emotional reunion. The hat-wearer in question is new to the UK and thought it perfectly reasonable to hug me in thanks, so we had a chat about that. I should have said: here are some more UK traditions. Slashing public spending and blaming the public servants. Not caring about children unless they’re like you. Grammar schools, and all they stand for.

CR 10.3.17

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Aboard the Tiger

16/12/2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR
15.12.16

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How does the term begin?

13/9/2015

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Kenneth Noland, Beginning, 1958

September and teachers settle into the school halls of the land for HTs’ call to arms. I can’t speak for others, but mine was absolutely gripping. Then we remind each other of routines and expectations, spend time in departments and, whoosh, the hordes descend. Two hours bonding with the form tutor, assembly, timetables, routines and expectations then lessons start after break and we’re off. See you in 195 days.

If you’re in year 7 all this is a bit of a blur. Everything is new and, while exciting, very little makes sense. Where’s the next lesson? The nearest toilet? It’s a long time since breakfast: where’s lunch? And the next lesson? What do I need for PE? How does my planner work? What’s my log-in? Which door do I go through to get to music? Really? Do I know you? Are you in my tutor group? What, registration again?

New year 12s have to seem a bit cooler. They can’t bucket about the place like turbocharged squirrels. They develop a mooch, a sort of quick saunter, and ask for advice judiciously where they can’t be overheard, all the while wondering if their chosen outfit really expresses what they intended. Some can’t quite pluck up courage to spend time in the sixth form rooms at break and still occupy the yard. The weather usually forces them indoors.

New teachers are the same. If you’re newly qualified then you expect to not know which way you’re up for a year and asking about everything is required. If you have arrived with – ahem – a position of responsibility then you worry that people expect you to be abreast of the arcane. You may know the lot about all possible A level specifications, the latest Statutory Instrument or recite pi to 4000 places but what do you if your computer’s in a huff? Where do you take a child who’s poked himself in the eye? Where exactly is the door to the library? We like to keep people on their toes at Tallis with a byzantine room numbering system. Now in my third year, I direct people with confidence. Floor, block, room number, unless you’re talking to premises staff who need you to convert your answer into algebra where x = 5.

The start of the year is curtain-up on the preceding 6 months’ planning and rehearsal: recruitment, staffing, exams, cleaning and tidying, bright ideas and missives from the government. This summer, precious little on the exam results in the press (hooray hooray) but lots about academies and free schools, again. A rallying-call from the Secretary of State arrives simultaneously with Ofsted’s report on KS3, neutrally entitled ‘KS3: The Wasted Years?’ Why, thank you, Sir.

I talk to a highly effective and perpetually cheerful colleague who reflects on the pace of activity as we start the year, how it takes a few days to get to peak speed, even for the best of us. Another says: we get it, we really get it, but the pace is daunting. I stop a year 8 youth who appears to have doubled in height over the summer. Perhaps his parents stand him in compost every night. He’s proud to be taller than me, but we agree that he could literally aim higher. His little mate is downcast, but it’ll come.

Like growing a teenager, some things take time and can’t be forced. Schools have focused on KS4 because that’s where the national focus is. Loopholes allowed some to adapt procedures to influence outcomes without putting the leg work into learning. Now, the pressure is in a better place, but it’s still oddly expressed. If I was HMCI or the SoS – an outcome as likely as growing 6 inches over the summer, curses – this is what I’d say.

Over the last 20 years or so we were really worried that lots of young people left school without the qualifications they needed to prosper. We devised systems so that school leaders had to focus on this. We combined that with macho rhetoric about school leadership, and a hero-head cult that, in retrospect, was unfortunate. It’s taken us a while to redevelop the qualifications and performance measures to our satisfaction, but we’re very nearly done. Unfortunately, the KS4 focus of the past led pressured secondary schools to undervalue consolidating the excellent work of primary schools. Our report demonstrates this, and we are sorry. Now we intend to support schools to make KS3 the best it can be and we will inspect for this - not this year, but from September 2016.

How does term begin? With optimism.

CR

10.9.15

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Cultural Revolution

1/3/2015

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Bob and Roberta Smith, Portrait of Michael Gove, 2013

Genuinely, I like politicians and take my hat off to those who throw themselves into public service. Sure, there’s a risk of self-aggrandisement, but that’s true of any job requiring a bit of performance. You should meet some headteachers. You won’t be surprised to know that this one is a Radio 4 listener who has her horizons widened by arts programming.

So, knee-deep in half term’s laundry (my own, you understand, I don’t take in washing for the community) I heard young Miliband explaining his aim to beef up arts, culture and creativity, a response to the Warwick Report demonstrating how creative and cultural opportunities for young people have vanished from schools. He cursed Gove and all Goveites and set out on a mission “to guarantee every young person, from whatever background, access to the arts and culture: a universal entitlement to a creative education for every child”. OFSTED bloodhounds will seek it out.

Hmm, I said to the socks. In 2011 Darren Henley (Classic FM and the Arts Council) produced the excellent Cultural Education in England for the DfE and DCMS. It made 24 recommendations, 15 directly involving schools. So what happened to culture in school?

Gove’s Ebacc was too small. It didn’t include an arts or practical subject. I assume this was so it wouldn’t look like the National Curriculum, which enshrined an entitlement to the broad and balanced curriculum including the arts. So, this happened. The requirements of the NC were lifted, pressures to increase results every year increased, schools focused time and money on English and maths, undervalued arts withered and died. No one banned arts, but everything else was compulsory. Labour and Coalition trussed up schools in the lunatic knitting of cash flow and the performance tables.

Arts decline easily. Despite our pre-eminence as a creative nation, we leave culture to the same divisive market forces as everything else. We don’t prioritise access to the arts in school because Secretaries of State say things like ‘I want England to be top five PISA for English and maths by 2020’. They don’t realise that if state schools have to increase time and funding for maths and English then other things go and the arts deficit isn’t made up by children going to the opera with their parents.

As I remarked to the tea towels, politicians misunderstand the purpose of education and are diverted by falsehoods. Here are 7 that were comprehensively debunked by the OECD earlier this month.

Disadvantaged pupils always do badly in school: no, successful systems mitigate social inequalities.
Immigrants lower results: no, not anywhere.
It’s all about money: no, there is no correlation.
Smaller class sizes raise standards: no, teacher quality and workload reduction raise standards.
Comprehensive systems are fair but you need academic selection for higher results: no, there is no tracking, streaming or grade repetition in top performing systems.
The digital world needs new subjects and a wider curriculum: no, in top systems the curriculum is rigorous, with subjects taught well and in great depth.
Success is about being born talented: no, all children can achieve at very high levels. Top systems "level up" so that all students meet standards formerly expected only from elite students.

So if the current SoS wants to be top 5 she’s going to have to look coolly at some vote-losing issues:

Stop describing poor families as a drain on the system
Stop talking rubbish about immigration
Stop fiddling with school funding
Sort out teacher recruitment and workload
Value comprehensive schools
Stop adding things to the curriculum
Believe that all children can learn

A more equal society raises standards and a less equal one depresses them. Schools should enable children to build a better future and wedge the doors open to their cultural birthright, starting with the arts. Systematically open up the palaces of privilege and high culture. Dial down the exclusive rhetoric on STEM and the economic functionality of education, talk up the balance of things that help children fly. Architects need artistry, maths and music go hand in hand, science needs philosophy, drama explains everything and what is life without poetry?

At Tallis every week is culture week but children still need persuading that this is theirs too. So this week we've hosted a world famous violinist, 100 year 8s have made a film, year 9 premiered a National Theatre competition performance, sixth form artists are in Berlin, we hosted hundreds of little dancers from primary schools yesterday and trained colleagues from a nearby PRU. We value equality and justice and culture opens doors. Education to understand the world and change it for the better.

CR

26.2.15

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