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
 

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

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

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.

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.

1. Disadvantaged pupils always do badly in school: no, successful systems mitigate social inequalities.
   
2. Immigrants lower results: no, not anywhere. 
3. It’s all about money: no, there is no correlation.
4. Smaller class sizes raise standards: no, teacher quality and workload reduction raise standards.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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:

1. Stop describing poor families as a drain on the system
2. Stop talking rubbish about immigration
3. Stop fiddling with school funding
4. Sort out teacher recruitment and workload
5. Value comprehensive schools
6. Stop adding things to the curriculum
7. 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