An interesting week in schools all over the place and also on Planet Tallis. I, however, had the chance to talk to a very affable bunch of year 7s: approximately the top 10% of the industrious, those who’ve thrown themselves into school life and are really, really enjoying it. I congratulated them on their production and assured them that effort was a very reliable route to success. After that, I trespassed on their good nature to ask questions three.

First: what could we improve about school? Sadly, this stumped them because they think it’s great. When pressed they said that they’d like to have their own week in the Library, that the water fountains could be cleaner and that the bridge got a bit crowded at lesson change. Oh, and on the matter of lesson change, how could they get from one to another without any travelling time? How indeed. A conundrum of school life. We need another library, cleaner plumbing, a wider bridge and, I believe, physics. (We don’t give travel time because it encourages loafing.)

Second, what did they think we did well? Clubs, trips and visits. The opportunity to do extra things (like Latin), the food, rugby. And subjects, they’re really interesting.

Having expected the first question to take longer, which it certainly does by year 9, I hastily invented a third. If you ruled the world, and who’s to say you won’t one day, how would you make it a better place for young people? They talked to one another – quite loudly – and wanted to solve the following. Ending knife crime so fewer young people die. Lowering the voting age so old people don’t make bad decisions they won’t have to live with.  Better free facilities in local areas, like swimming pools and wildlife parks. Ending discrimination and racism so that everything is fair. Stopping littering. Helping people with rent and food costs. Not cutting down trees. Teaching black history. Sign language a compulsory part of the curriculum. More poetry. More food banks so that everyone can get what they need.

Hold on, I said, trying not to be too tough on a young altruistic thinker. Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world where we didn’t need food banks. He had to think a bit. Yes, obviously, he said, with the air of youth kindly tolerating dotage. But ... It doesn’t have to be like this, I said. Food Banks used to be very, very, rare, for people on the very margins of society. Not in every community, not for people in work. Note to self: remember this conversation.

Later the same day I read the Leading in Practice review by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, just published last month. Ethics remain in the news, with the report on the former Secretary of State and his subsequent departure from his subsequent role, and there’s at least another one on the stocks. One would hope that the Committee for Standards in Public Life was buoyant.

​Page 15, however, is terrifying:

Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon reported from a North Sea trawler to which he was poorly suited, being too tall and argumentative, and sick all the time. He described ‘six degrees of freedom’ at sea as pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I found that helpful when I was a young Head in stormy waters but I think we’re all feeling it nationally at the moment. Yaw now?

Heavy weather requires something to cling to so I’m returning to my moutons in the woolly shape of some principles I wrote 11 years ago. These have developed a edu-zeitgeist half-life as well as being inflicted on every group of people I’ve ever met. They are a sort-of answer to the perennial question of ‘what are schools for?’ and I wrote them at the time of the coalition government and to help make sense of Gove’s curriculum reforms. Here they are:

1. Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
2. Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society.We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
3. Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities.We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
4. Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world.Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
5. Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
6. Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
7. Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
8. It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
9. Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission.The teacher’s authority to transmit or broker knowledge is given and valued by society
10. Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

 
At the time I was collaborating with Prof Michael Young of the Institute on a book that was published in 2014 and is still being read, called Knowledge and the Future School. Michael and I are chums, so he won’t mind me observing that he’s roughly 200 years old but nonetheless keeps thoughtful tabs on what schools are doing, and why. He’s concerned that schools leap from one two-dimensional solution to another without sufficient mental scrutiny, without thought and without reflection.

In 2011 it was important to conceptualise and reassert the primacy of knowledge in learning – but now we’re in danger again. Post-Covid, people are lurching towards off-the-peg curricula, like the Oak National Academy that sprang up to assist in desperate times but is now set to take over the thinking of a generation of teachers, a Japanese Knotweed of curriculum development. And perhaps schools can’t find space to see that or worry about it in the context of the unfunded pay award, the energy crisis, the fact that families can’t afford to eat and the missing of teacher recruitment targets in eight of the last nine years. By a mile. (Not that we’ll be able to measure anything in a future without maths or geography teachers.)

So what principles might we cling to in this particularly prolonged storm, with buckets of hail being thrown from each side and the siren call of off-the-peg answers sounding through the surge? Here’s my thinking so far:   

1. Knowledge is powerful: it can change the world, person by person.
2. Children need knowledge to interpret the world and broaden their possibilities.
3. Knowledge and understanding bring freedom and requires us to choose how to live
4. Knowledge is real but provisional: it endures and changes.
5. Knowledge gives people the power to think and act in new and better ways
6. Knowledge is social, produced in history: good communities are built on shared knowledge
7. Inequitable distribution of shared and powerful knowledge undermines democracy
8. Schools give unique access to knowledge, skilfully tailored to the growing human
9. Learners volunteer to acquire knowledge when enabled by skilled teachers
10. Good education is not inevitable.  It must not be withheld, misused or devalued.

​Comments welcome, of course.

I was watching a staircase last week and found a youth walking up it backwards, with one hand for the ship, the better to lecture his comrades. This caused significant embouteillage upstream so I issued a cease and desist. He apologised nicely, but I couldn’t tell if it was incipient demagoguery or a concern for safety that inspired him. 

When I visited the Capitol in 1999 the guides walked backward in front of us to prevent anyone slipping off to install Communism. It does feel as though we’re being led backwards at the moment, without reason or rationale.
Pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw are only good to look back on if you didn’t go under. Here’s hoping, for us all.
 
CR
31.9.22    

The calendar gods decree that I write a blog on Community Days. This week is the big autumn event with all year groups doing slightly different things – sustainability, identity, oppression, relationships, careers, debating, revising, wellbeing, planning and budgeting.  Something for everyone, for every eventuality on adult life’s thorniest pathways. From our experience and scholarship to the brains of the young, engagingly delivered. That’s what the recipients of the cry ‘HB to the sports hall’ are off to, in their usual shambling, bickering and tripping manner.
I was Performance Managed yesterday which focuses the mind. I’ve been a Head for 20 years in three different places, and I reckon I’ve got rules of thumb or mental lists to deal with most eventualities. These were, of course, expanded by new stuff we absorbed under lockdown about how to run a school when the children aren’t allowed to come to it, but there’s a new dimension to educating at the moment with which I’m tussling. Remember that as you read, breathlessly, on.

I don’t know how they do things in the independent sector, but I assume they have time to organise a thought, hence the heads’ hutches being called studies, which would explain the number of books old Seldon wrote while he was high heid-yin at Wellington, for example. But I digress. Anyone been to Peppa Pig world? Anyway, the president of the Girls’ Schools Association made a whole load of very good points yesterday, summarised on the Beeb.   

She said: parents and teachers should keep up with young people who are genuinely worried about racism, sexism and climate change and want to address them with support from adults. Adults who complain that today's teenagers are judgemental and speak a different language so adults ‘can't say anything without being called out by PC children’ should get with it. Times have changed, and we need to keep up. This nastily-dismissed 'woke' generation are actually young people who are worried about things. We teach them to be kind but when they grow up to be impressively so with an understanding and appreciation for the world around them, we mock them, or dismiss them as unrealistic do-gooders. Nicely put, Ma’am.

Contrast this with the Social Mobility Chair’s end of the forest. She thinks that children need to be very strictly controlled, so they’re habituated into choosing good over evil because they’re all wicked underneath. We can train good behaviour into them, but left their own devices, keep clear, they’re pretty unsavoury. Original Sin.

Ah me. Which side of the fence whereon to plummet? Obviously with young people trying to change the world for the better, but what about the echo of reality hiding in the misogynist retro-theology? Children can be horrible to each other as they explore, or are fearful about, the boundaries of their world. Why is that?

Well, part of the problem is the example adults set, hypocrisy in particular. Why can’t I speak in the corridor at school, no one talks to me at home? Why should I worry about getting a job when the world’s about to end?  What’s the point of learning to be fair if I’m judged by the colour of my skin, or kind, if I’m not safe walking home? What exactly have you done, Sir, to make the world a better place?

Some years ago I wrote ten precepts underpinning the curriculum which still have an interesting half-life in the edu-ether. I started from the importance of knowledge and ended with adult authority and the teacher’s skill. But the problem I’m wrestling with now is this: how to be educators at a time when adults are demonstrably the problem?  I’m reading about wicked problems, again, and worrying about the shallow simplistic solutions that schools have been forced into for so long that now we’re hooked on the superficial, the tick-boxable, the headline-grabbing, the Emperor’s new clothes.

One of the chaps I wrote that book with has just died. He was a great comprehensive school Head for yonks, twenty years older than me. One of the best things about the writing process was talking to him about leading a school yesterday, as it were, the past being a different country. Now I think I need to revise myself, to include the mortal dangers and injustices we knew were around the corner all along, but that young people won’t ignore any more.

My Year 13 class and I keep company with some very old white male theologians as we head toward liberation theology at the end of the syllabus. We drop in on Karl Barth, whose magnum opus was Church Dogmatics in fourteen volumes over thirty-five years. If I had the headspace I’d start on some School Pragmatics, on the lessons of the sum of all my days since 1983. Guilt will probably feature, but not sin. Look out for the next list.
 
CR
23.11.21

A bustling child at shoulder height clutching an open planner barrels past me on the bridge muttering, Mad Hatterishly, I didn’t know it was a science test today I just didn’t know. What he lacked in direction I made up for in briskitude so I held the block 2 door open for him.  Keep calm, I counselled. It’ll be fine. You don’t know Sir came the receding reply. I’d news for him. I do know Sir, all the Sirs. This test will not have been sprung on you. It is a lesson, in every way.

On the way back I thought about all the children in the history of schooling who have been surprised by tests. I was one myself in younger years. What is it that makes some children so well organised but puts others perpetually on the back foot? I couldn’t even reliably bring a pen to school until I was in the sixth form.

Meeting with a group of youth never surprised by anything, I ask their advice. What can we do to improve? Lots of ideas, from class organisation to decolonising the curriculum to lunch queues to extra-curricular philosophy and the perennial problem of rewards. Anything else? One seized the edge of the table ‘I can’t word it. I can’t get it from an idea in my head to my mouth making sense. I’ll have to come back to you.’ I look forward to it. I’m more of a splurge-and-then-sort-out-the- words-as-they-emerge sorta gal.  You know how some people used to have wristbands that said PUSH (pray until something happens)? Mine would be ‘talk until something happens’. I make no remark about the political conference season. Tush tush.

It is wise to think first. Yard duti-ers are perpetually troubled by what might be the best form of words to stop children kicking footballs or bouncing basketballs as they return to class, or to get them to put them back in the sack. Try out some of those instructions for yourself. See what I mean? 

I struggle for the right words with a group of people who’ve come to leaflet the children against vaccination, after school. We’re not anti-vax or conspiracy theorists, they say, while handing me leaflets against this particular vaccination because it has been ‘rushed through’. ‘We’re just educating the children about their human rights’. I tell them that we do that pretty emphatically in any case, to put their minds at rest. Others appear, and, knowing I have no power to move concerned citizens from the public footpath, I decide on a tactic. One calls me ‘my darling’ and I ask her not to, then I just talk at them, arguing every toss, until I notice from the corner of my eye that most of the children have gone. ‘I don’t know what your point is’, one of the protestors says to me sadly. I do. It was a filibuster. I’ve talked until something happened, or in this case, didn’t happen. Tush to you, mate.

It’s my turn to have a door held open for me on my return. I say thank you and the large youth reassures me that it was no problem. He means well, but I sigh as I round the corner. What does that mean?  If it was a problem he wouldn’t have done it? That it might be a problem in the future if I make a habit of going through doors? I used to say ‘don’t mention it’ when I was thanked until someone said that sounded as though I didn’t care. And once when I asked how I could help someone who’d rung me up, they said it put them in a subservient position. Manners are a minefield. What to do? Outlaw ‘no problem’ and insist on ‘you’re welcome’? Schools appear in newspapers when they try to adjust language. 

Not to despair. Human relationships can be difficult and adolescent ones triply so. Schools are perfect places to try out stuff which oils the wheels of the human journey. I met with another group for children today, ten boys who felt aggrieved. They expressed themselves beautifully, concisely and with immense dignity. They were truthful but without rancour or grandstanding. That’s a model for a better world. I was quite moved by the experience – and I’m hard to move. Dear me, yes.

And that was the second time on a day which started with the terrible death of a former student, the second in six months. So many young lives ruined by adults or circumstance, so little hope for some while others find life so easy. ‘And what about those in the middle?’ one of the earlier young people said. Who notices them?

It National Poetry today and I find myself thinking again about a poem I discovered recently. It was written the year I was born, by a poet who left teaching, Daniel Huws in his collection Noth. It is almost unbearably eloquent.  Here’s the last verse:

And a friend offers congratulations, echoing
Complaints I should have kept unsaid:
‘My God, you must be glad to leave.’ My children,
For his ignorance I could strike him dead.
 
It’s been a difficult day, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Sometimes words don’t make sense but yet they’re all we have. And with that, I’m off to address the parents of Year 11.
 
CR
7.10.21

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.  

1. The giant problem of the underachievement of poor white children and blighted generations in endemically disadvantaged places certainly needs close attention.
2. Teachers have not been blamed entirely, which is a novelty: poverty, alienation, isolation and disempowerment are all mentioned.
3. It is good to see a tidy focus on early years and careers.
4. 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.
5. 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,

1. 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.
2. The teacher supply nightmare is unaddressed. A pandemic bounce won’t sustain us for long.
3. 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?
4. 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.  
5. 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:

For years people have been extolling the virtues of filming teachers in classrooms so that we can be critiqued for what we do on our hind legs with board marker. It came up in a meeting yesterday and I was surprised by a response from an expert colleague who was resistant. Viscerally so, yet with nothing to fear. He’d be great on film. My mistake.

Me, I’ve been through it. In a previous school a thrusting Assistant Head wanted everyone to be filmed so somewhere in the ether floats a film of me in a pencil skirt with a mixed bag of year sevens in a draughty room doing Baptism. I had paper cups, water, locusts and honey, the lot. I did my best Colombo meets Billy Connolly routine which worked pretty well on film, I thought, until the end when I asked ‘who are the main characters in this story’? One child correctly identified John the Baptist, but the next offered ‘Jordan River’, whom she had assumed, for 50 minutes, was a person. As a seasoned professional I could put her right with a labelled diagram, but the camera-operator corpsed and film quality was distinctly shaky as I tied up the loose ends.

You never know what children are thinking. The simplest fact can be misheard and when young memory banks are scanned for matching information, they don’t have much to go on. Tackling misconceptions is key to good teaching. Check what you’ve said, check what they’ve heard.

We’ve been tackling racism this term at Tallis and booting a few misconceptions about.  It’s a long job and we’ve made a determined start. This week, we’ve also been thinking about the issues raised under the Everyone Invited umbrella, where young women have talked about their experiences of sexual violence and oppression at school. I’d like to remind readers that this began as an expose of practices in a small group of schools, largely in the 7% of fee-paying schools.  However, the net is wider now and many young women from the other 93% have told their stories too. It’s shocking and tragic, but I don’t know why it is surprising or unexpected. Misogyny is rife, even in an advanced liberal democracy and we feed it not less than all the time.

If we didn’t have a broad and balanced curriculum to follow I could arrange for teachers to talk to students 100% of the time about the need for kind, respectful and consensual relationships but it might not make any difference. We place powerful machines in the hands of children on which they can watch violent pornography twenty-four hours a day. Good parents model good relationships, monitor phones and talk to their children, especially their sons, but the money-makers can break thorough to children again and again. A child who is remotely sexually inquisitive can find terrible images online, and a child who is not even looking for information will be bombarded with offers of, or ways into, pornography which sets up horrible expectations. It's harder to avoid than it is to get.

Young people take risks. They push boundaries, they try to make sense of the world for themselves. They find it very hard to resist finding or doing things of which adults disapprove. If adults themselves think that such pornography is acceptable, or harmless, or funny, then it becomes normal for children. They don’t know about real adult relationships – how could they? – so they assume that what they see on screen is what everyone does.  In this way, the unthinkable is normalised and adolescent exploration exploited. And it makes money for criminals and for the unscrupulous, who then invite young people to join in its creation so that they may become notorious, or so that they can groom them or trap them.

Depressing? Yes. It takes a village to raise a child and that’s true whether your village has 20 people in it or 60 million. It’s just not good enough to say that freedom of expression has to bear this burden: we shouldn’t be free to ruin young lives.

And the final misconception is that schools have been oblivious to this developing sexual culture. Most of us haven’t been. Most of us have been running flat out just to keep up with the ways that young people can get hold of images that they will never un-see and which some of them will try to repeat.  We can’t do it alone. We can’t stop this with policies or petitions or armbands or punishments. We’ll only be able to keep girls safe when society agrees that girls should be kept safe and when women’s bodies are not objectified – and then takes steps designed to protect children from it.  

It’s been a long term and I didn’t mean to end on a gloomy note. This morning year 7 gathered in family tutor groups all over the concourse to share successes and certificates and awards.  The sun shone and someone mentioned sports day (I’ve got them in training. I’m bringing in weights next term’). We couldn’t have been happier. A small pair rushed off towards the loo and one announced ‘I’ve got a zombie in my bag’. Her mate said ‘Tell it violence is never the answer!’. That’ll do me. We’ll fight the zombie of sexual exploitation and oppression together to change the world for the better. Perhaps we can start by turning off the screens for a bit.
 
CR
31.3.21      

Trigger warning: another rant about the misuse of Victorian poetry follows. Stop after para 6 if you just can’t stomach it. ​

Once upon a time Headteachers had to be trained for the job. During my second Headship I did the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH).  Stop fidgeting, this will get more interesting. Winter 2006, York, as cold as it gets. I bought extra tights to put on under the several pairs I was already wearing.

It left two very clear memories. First, of an ice-breaker task on the first residential. If you’ve been on leadership training you’ll recognise the type of thing, build the tallest free-standing structure you can with newspaper, string, straws and suchlike. I thrust myself into a leadership space pronto and we set about winning the session.  

Not only did we lose but collapsed without a useful tower of any height because I’d put myself into a position for which I didn’t have the skills. I’m spatially poor and struggle to imagine or manipulate shapes in my head, the last person you want engineering any kind of tower. I had no idea how to do the task and failed, taking others with me. In the collective debrief, I became angrily defensive and quite upset. Too few educators have those experiences, so common to children, yet still they bone on about resilience. Hold that thought.

The other memory is of my group of three for the year-long programme. A colleague served at the school in Middlesbrough where a child was stabbed to death by an intruder in 1994. Wisely, he wouldn’t be drawn on how the school was recovering, always answering ‘too early to tell’. 

We’ve had quite an exciting time since I last wrote, but it’s too early to tell how it’s all going to go. We won’t really know for at least 10 years, actually. An unexciting half-term break was followed by announcements about the return and the not-exams. Tallis logisticians and the blessed LA have leapt into action and we’ll manage the return just fine, looking forward to it. The not-exams are more complicated and we are slowly gathering guidance from exam boards, to whom we are still paying huge amounts this year. Which seems peculiar, but there you are. Old rope, anyone?

Playing alongside, the relentless refrain about lost learning, catch-up and recovery, about potential lost earnings and disadvantage all as a result of lockdown. We use no such language on HMS Tallis. The children have had an extraordinary experience and they know less stuff, but they’re still adolescents with expanding and developing brains, which will get back to feeding properly very soon. Politicians, be quiet.

Which led to a discussion about the budget. I say discussion, but actually I was arrested by my interlocutor’s opening gambit: why are very rich people allowed to make decisions about money for poor people? She got the benefit of Roberts’ maxim 427 which is that no one who’s never stood in a supermarket queue worrying that their card will be declined should serve in Parliament. Young Sunak not being short of a bob.

Following it up in the paper yesterday morning, I discover that Sunak quoted old Tennyson’s wondrous Ulysses.  Well, he said ‘that which we are, we are’.  

For the greater good, I stay at arm’s length from social media. Other Heads are all over it, dispensing wisdoms and being useful but, like chip shops, I stay away from temptation. I’m way too fond of a smart remark and a brisk retort to resist putting people right about stuff that’s none of my business. I’d have to spend my life apologising.  Also, my phone is fully occupied with answering emails, reading novels and looking at pictures of my granddaughter so I don’t really have time for other hobbies.

If I did follow the twitts, I’d apparently be in a proper state about OFSTED and the application of their spiffy new framework. After not being interested in it for years, the clipboard brigade are very keen to uncover the intent, implementation and impact of a school’s curriculum and the first reports are piling up now. Schools have prepared, even retooled, to demonstrate their knowledge-rich curricula and their plans for a future liberated from the short-termism and exam fixes which OFSTED used to like under its previous pugilistic proprietor.  Good news.  What could possibly go wrong?

Thirty-odd years ago I used occasionally betake myself to Sheffield to hear a radical Methodist theologian of advanced years. He once said, woundingly, that there was nothing good that the CofE couldn’t get wrong and I sometimes, sorrowfully, feel this about OFSTED. These tweeted early reports have commented not so much on the curriculum, but on whether schools have a 2- or 3- year key stage 3 and what % are doing the EBacc. Hmmm. Key stage length is a school choice and the EBacc is the Department’s political ambition, not OFSTED’s. Righteous indignation enters stage right, to be met by obfuscation from the left. What exactly are OFSTED looking at? On whose behalf? Curriculum, or cheap-to-measure markers? Children’s learning or White Paper lunacy?  

Our own visiting clipboards, you will recall, popped a similar question. Observing that we talked a good game about a broad curriculum entitlement but that we let too many drop arts, DT or languages at the end of year 8, they suggested that we might consider the impact of the 2-year KS3 on our claim of a broad curriculum until year 11.   Fair point, but our lead inspector was a subtle and thoughtful man who took time over his words. Other reports have been rather more direct: change your key stages.

Ofsted are right to be worried about curriculum breadth and integrity and to look at it closely. They are responding to the madness caused by over-simplified high-stakes inspection measures which drove Heads mad and made some narrow the curriculum and dilute knowledge in order to meet performance metrics. Originally, lengthening KS4 to three years was a way of doing this.  Hothouse the GCSEs for longer, get better results. About half of secondary schools did it. 

Undoing it will be troublesome because GCSEs are now much heavier in content and harder in assessment. Doing them in two years rather than three is fine for those who are fully attuned to education and assimilate book-learning easily.  It’ll require wall-to-wall didacticism, and I’m not sure that the research on how children learn values that so highly. Doing them over three years gives a bit of space for unpacking the context of particular learning and for imagination and discovery – and other things that the current captains and the kings particularly don’t like. We’ve been thinking about this here since January. We’re not stupid: if there was a simple answer, we’d have found it.

But is this thoughtful uncertainty a luxury? It’s not as if our GCSE results couldn’t be improved. Shouldn’t we just do as we’re told and follow the instructions of the regulator and the DfE?    

The confusion in the system, from which OFSTED suffer, is deeply rooted. We have a system that bizarrely prizes autonomy above almost everything else. Making the right curriculum decision is a matter therefore for the school, not the state.  Only LA schools are actually still bound by the National Curriculum (wrongly, mistakenly). School curriculum decisions are a matter for schools, except when there’s a political panic. Then the independent regulator – OFSTED – is put to the service of the manifesto promises and the whole structure is revealed, shaky as a weak jelly.

If we knew what schools were for, then we’d make better decisions. If we could agree about what children should learn, then we could have a real, proper, broad National Curriculum that schools could adapt to their circumstances. If we trained and supported Heads properly rather than measuring them cheaply we’d have a system second to none. But that takes time and money, cool longitudinal research and a realisation that twitter-feeding isn’t the same as educational leadership.

We are the advocates for the nation’s young. Ethical leadership demands that we hold trust on their behalf and should use our wisdom, knowledge and insight wisely and kindly.  We should seek to serve justly, courageously and optimistically and continue to argue calmly and in detail for the best curriculum for our schools.

I looked out of the window and couldn’t work out why flags-of-the-nations bunting was being put up inexpertly by some sixth form, helped by every passing advisor. Then I remembered today was our Black History Month festival at lunchtime, the nearly-end of three weeks of activity.  First lunch was sunny and dancy, second lunch wet and huddly, but never mind, we’ve had a lovely time; informative, challenging and interesting. Just like a good curriculum...

A teacher comes to visit and tells me she’s wearing her geek trousers. I think we should all put some on, take a breath and think calmly and professionally - preferably behind closed doors for a while. OFSTED evaluation frameworks usually take a while to bed in and there’s no need to panic. We’re way off getting this right, but the system is thinking better and about the things that matter. As we say in every room here: we know we are learning when we are thinking very hard.      
 
CR 17.10.19                       

I am now in a position to report back to you on these little ones who are now 15 and 16. That position is lying flat, running on the spot, saluting the sun or exhaling carefully from each nostril, because I found myself eyeballing yoga in the Dojo with one of the above classes this week. Let me tell you, they’re looking pretty chipper and they’re very bendy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may know that Ofsted have been thinking, which is good. It’s even better that they’ve been thinking about ‘What is the real substance of education?’ or as a normal person might put it ‘what are schools for?’

​HMCI commentary: curriculum and the new education inspection framework
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The clipboard brigade make several points, all of which deserve a big tick. I thought you might like a digest, shamelessly condensed and filtered through my own prejudices. They say:

1. Education is the vast, accumulated wealth of human knowledge, and what we choose to pass on to the next generation. A ‘curriculum gives a school purpose’. Hurrah!
2. That curriculum is the heart of education. It requires the pursuit of real, deep knowledge and understanding of subjects.
3. In too many schools, the curriculum is just a combination of the exam board specification, the timetable and the exam results. Not enough schools really think about what they want children to learn. This leads to a narrow range of subjects being taught and too much ‘teaching to the test’.
4. Inspections have placed too much weight on exam results.
5. The 2019 inspection framework will emphasise ‘the curriculum as the substance of education’. Inspectors will look at a school’s ‘curriculum intent’.
6. They’d like to see schools focusing on subjects and subject vocabulary.  
7. They’d like to be sure that ‘disadvantaged pupils are not put onto a stripped-back curriculum’.
8. They observed that expert teachers in the schools they visited ‘lived and breathed their curriculum’ and that good subject teachers are likely to stay in schools where subjects are valued.
9. A well-constructed, well-taught curriculum will lead to good results because those results will be a reflection of what pupils have learned. 
10. Parents need to know the substance of what their children are learning throughout their time spent in school. 

So far so good. Tallis approves Ofsted’s new thoughts, which will doubtless be a relief to them. But hold on!  What’s this? They don’t like three-year key stage fours, like we have. Why?
 
Three-year key stage fours originated at a time of intense exam pressure. Lots of schools did it to give more time to GCSEs and therefore improve results. This is part of the reason for the current panic about schools just focusing on English, maths, science, history, geography and languages, because that’s what’s been valued in national education talk in recent years. Therefore, lots of schools just do a quick rotation of arts subjects in year 7 and 8 and then don’t offer them much at KS4 so they can tick the ‘EBacc’ box of the subjects above. 
 
Tallis doesn’t do that. We have a very broad curriculum at key stage three with six hours a week of dance, drama, music, art and DT and a very large range of options in KS4. Choosing options early means that our children – who do one more option than many other schools, in any case – have the chance over three years to get into deep subject content, absorb it and make it their own. When I arrived at Tallis six years ago, I was very sceptical about choosing options in year 8 but was quickly converted. That’s not to say that we couldn’t improve the way we do it, of course. So, when the moment comes and we have to defend ourselves, we’ll have a few thoughts to offer inspectors about the what and the why, and how our choices enable us to keep a broad curriculum for everyone. Hurrah again!
 
It’s good news for everyone that Ofsted have made this commitment to the curriculum. I’m not just saying that because it’s Ofsted, but because it’s right. Schools are where society looks after its young, and the curriculum is what society thinks they should know. A broad, common curriculum which enables young people to think and reflect also means that the democracy speaks a common language. It builds up our communal life. That’s why good comprehensive schools with a wide curriculum are every bit as important to the health of the nation as the NHS.  A nation educated together across the whole range of human experience should be well-equipped to understand and change the world for the better. Hold on a minute, that sounds familiar…..
 
Speaking of which: Black History Month. We’ve had dancing, eating, talking, films and workshops. We’ve had two mini carnivals with mass dancing and Caribbean Come Dine with Me.  It’s been a joy. During the lower school carnival I was having our performance review with our Local Authority School Improvement Partner. I had to keep making excuses to sneak looks out of the window to see the children dancing to Sir’s music. They sent me up a plateful of outrageously good food but it didn’t make up for not being outside in the sun. A new colleague said ‘some schools would worry about losing control’ but we don’t. Our systems are good, our community strong and we love to dance, sing, cook and make things. We’re confident to do it because we value it, we do it all the time, and when we go back to class we know each other well enough to settle back down.

What are schools for? Being able to celebrate diversity and inclusivity with laughter and exuberance. That’s not a test you can teach to.
 
CR
18.10.18

I’m humming Bugsy as I potter about our scorched landscape. I love this show. It’s a perfect school musical: very little plot, and lots of opportunities for outrageous accents and hamming it up. Much like….anyway, Bugsy next week, get your ticket while you can.

This week was taster days for the New Year 12s and Headstart Day for the new year 7s. Taster day is the only time year 12 spend break and lunch on the yard.  Once they get into the swing of things in September they stay indoors, basking in a very small privilege and an even smaller canteen. Year 7 get an even less realistic experience. They’re met late at the gate, guided to where they need to be, ushered round by current year 7 sheepdogs, given a snack at break and lunch without others looking on. They don’t need to carry or remember anything other than their manners.
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Just as well we keep them a bit apart so they can get the feel of the huge building, protected from fearsome sights. Mr Pape raising money for his tutor group’s trip using the wet sponge method: as a Mackem he’s used to cold.  Or the small youth I encountered last week with his jacket over his head, ruler in teeth, pencil case under one arm, water bottle between his knees, bag on back, and football under the other arm, looking for all the world like Jagger’s Great Western Memorial soldier at Paddington. ‘I’m a bit overloaded’ he remarked as we tried to rationalise his accoutrements.

And in a fit of forward planning we’ve actually been thinking about the Great War, and how to mark the 100th anniversary of its end. We’re inspired by work with the Imperial War Museum and we’d like to broaden our remembrance to fit our community, so if you know people who’ve served in any war and would like to help us, do get in touch.

Our curriculum consultation is spreading too. We had a meeting this week about the issue of the EBacc and whether the Tallis curriculum should change so that all our children take French or Spanish and history or geography to GCSE as well as English, maths and science. The government have an ‘ambition’ for 90% of children to do this by 2025. We are some distance from this figure and even further from liking it. We’re not convinced it’ll help children be anything that they wanted to be. Anyway, there’s a targeted survey out to 300 parents so if you’ve had one please fill it in.

Back to the year 7s. I passed a bunch of them on the stairs outside block one beside themselves with excitement, Sir bringing up the rear. A veteran of many campaigns he’s pleased to get some little ones to lick into shape. Other tutors will themselves be new so have the double bewilderment of guiding new children round a strange land. If you’re newly-qualified there’s a third confusion of quite reasonably not knowing what you’re doing at all, with children, who you’ve just met, in a building you don’t know, where the room numbering is like Esperanto (looks clear but is actually really foreign). Hence the 12-year-old sheepdogs.

However, there’s nothing like a year 6 for finding out information. We had a minor glitch before lunch was ready so the assembly-training needed to stretch a bit. Head of Year sought my public wittering skills but once I’d covered sleep, breakfast, bag-packing, buses, homework and queueing even I ran out of steam so threw it open to the floor. Unsurprisingly, this knocks all other methods of information-sharing into a cocked hat. We’ll build in henceforth.  ‘What do you do if you fall over?’ ‘When is the library open’ ‘What clubs are available?’ ‘How do I start my own’ ‘What if I forget something?’Go to reception. Morning, noon and night. Wait for announcements. Talk to your tutor. Learn to remember. The same answer really: time to stand on your own feet, but we’ll help you to do it. Like our chap with the kit crisis.

So after an afternoon’s whole-staff training on speech, language, communication and memory there’s a gap between school and Prom. Wednesday was the year 13 party, Friday the formal leaving ceremonies for the 16- and 18-year-olds who represent our finished product, our gift to the nation. Thursday a gaggle of staff in various levels of party gear await the antepenultimate viewing of year 11. Mr H has secured bling for the occasion. New year 7’s new Sir is year 11’s Mr Chips. 

This year: more navy or red dresses, a minor outbreak of burgundy suits, three pairs of velvety trainers covered with little spikes, gents’ jackets worn short and tight, one pair gold-tipped loafers, one newly-purple hair (previously blue), one surprisingly impressive beard, Head of Year regretting changing out of her trainers. At the door, the usual security, Ms Gallagher’s speech ‘You look great, we’ll check you over, have a great night’ and me gawping.  No horse and carriage, I’m sad to report, only a Tesla that wouldn’t oblige with a dance. Some of the suits don’t fit and the heels are more trouble than they’re worth, but that can happen at any age.

They could be anything that they wanted to be. Next week is Bugsy Malone, then the final week, then we stop, reset, and start again.
 
CR
6.7.18

Funny how the world turns when you’re not looking. Distracted by turquoised youths and unable to use technological social megaphones I have a limited world-view. For example, I try not to think about academies but that doesn’t alter the fact that 70% of secondary schools are academies or Free Schools now, and that those of us who stood still are in a minority. 36% of schools are part of MATs (multi-academy trusts), many of them big ‘uns. This is interesting (really, bear with me) because the larger MATs are developing their management and their economies of scale. The most successful in terms of GCSE outcomes - because that’s the only way success is measured – have developed very safe ways of getting results. As you’d hope.

First among those methods is standardisation of processes across schools. So, a large MAT will employ a Director of Curriculum and subject specialists. They design and write the curriculum for, say, History, or Science, and how it is to be taught in the MATs schools.

In the old days, Local Education Authorities kept a stable of such folks, and schools used or adapted the materials according to need, inclination or diktat. When the funding went, the Advisors and Inspectors disappeared from County Hall. Once performance tables became the only measure of the system, curriculum design merged with the GCSE syllabus.
  
This didn’t do anyone any good because exams measure knowledge, they don’t define it. That’s a different rant, however, and my point is that we are now in interesting times If by interesting you mean ‘things that make me chew off my fingerends’. The big MATS (I said MATs, not Macs, do pay attention) don’t just appoint the expert and issue the curriculum, but they also give teachers scripts. Scripts, like in a play.

What kind of news is this? It might help the workload crisis that we face: teachers don’t have to prepare the teaching materials or write or adapt the curriculum. They just have a script and then can concentrate on making sure that children are progressing, intervening when they need to. Given that for the third successive year we’ve nationally failed to meet teacher training recruitment targets by a mile, we could perhaps do with some scripts. And someone to read them out.

Or it might be terrible. Pundits luurrve to say ‘we don’t want teachers reinventing the wheel’ which is head-bangingly obvious, but it doesn’t cover it. The best teachers burn with a love of their subject and take intense satisfaction in devising new and interesting ways to teach it. They create, experiment and refine. They recycle stuff that works and ditch stuff that doesn’t. They tinker and tune, and get the results. They use their learning and their own habits to lead and support the little learner in front of them. They share and steal, they revel in the stuff.  Some of them take over the department and write their own curricula and give it away to others. Some take over schools, and put knowledge and creative learning at their heart

All of that takes time, which, in a horrifically underfunded system, is beyond rubies. So the big MATs with their Curriculum Directors work one way, and we try to do it the old way: good schemes of work, good shared resources and planning, freedom in the classroom to adapt and adopt, as long as it works. Would workload be reduced if we handed everyone a script? I don’t know. What would that cost? What kind of people would we become?

Which takes me back to last Wednesday when I went to a gig for my dear chum Prof Michael Young, to celebrate his 50 years at the Institute of Education. He’s see a lot, and he’s worried about the future for schools when teachers don’t have to think it through for themselves from first principles. Worried about the scripts.      

Another Prof, our school chum Bill Lucas, has been namechecking us this month, thank you kindly. He’s worked with us for years on our habits and dispositions, on our creativity and love of learning. Now he’s working with PISA to get that into the international measures. I’m pretty sure there won’t be a script for it. 

Anyway, we had Community Day this week, thinking about our futures with lots of career-friendly activities: planning, debating, collaborating, thinking. Year 11 did yoga and spacehoppers as well as thinking about their Tallis legacy and revision timetables. Everyone branched out a bit, and thought expansively.

I walk out into a snow flurry at break and everyone was ridiculously squealing and shrieking. Teachers who get them into class afterwards need to use all their skills to dial down the excitement and turn their minds to thinking hard. Would you have a special script, for a snowy day in London?

I don’t know where this curriculum path will lead us all and I might be worrying about nothing. The MATs are dominant, though, and big enough to sit an elephant on. And you know what happens when they get into the room.
 
CR
31.11.17   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A young inmate with an eccentric gait came to see me because his trousers had split 'picking up a pen in Geography'. Keeping him at a distance I said it wasn't obvious and he should carry on regardless. He thanked me kindly and rushed off. I think parents expect much the same: they need to trust us to make sensible judgements and carry on. The old and the new combine here too I suppose: we worry about our service to children not less than all of the time, and we deal with each new challenge as it comes along. It's an intense game, and we laugh when we can, but only the young ones roll on the grass. 
 
CR 28.9.17 
 ​

I like a bit of punctuation and envy the sticky apostrophe first aid kits carried by obsessives. Similarly (to use a recognised connective) I challenged the overeducated amongst whom I spent the Bank Hol to define a fronted adverbial. Year 5 can, and these guys were way older than that. All night long, we bickered. Grammar matters too.  A well-turned sentence is a creative act in itself and we need to keep our standards up as darkness falls: Churchillian in the blitz.

There’s anger about the approach to writing represented by the fronted adverbial thing, and you should tread warily near a primary school teacher as it really isn’t a joke. I’m part of the generation who weren’t taught any English grammar at primary in the late sixties and secondary in the seventies. We were taught to spell and to write with structure, clarity and creativity, but not how to take the stuff apart and analyse it. I took German O level and was properly bamboozled by the sheer tonnage of grammar required accurately to describe a Danube steamer. (I cannot tell you how useful that’s been). In the mother tongue we were expected to write well because we read widely. It was a bit of a devil-take-the-hindmost approach and those whose lives weren’t full of books by background or inclination fended for themselves. That’s not fair education.

This month we approach the new GCSEs in English and maths. They’ve been attractively described as big and fat, meaning that a huge amount of knowledge and understanding is required and young people have to be able to manipulate their learning to perform well. Government, Ofsted and the exam boards are putting on a show of being reasonable about expectations. Everyone hopes they’re working hard to create a system in which children’s learning can be sensibly structured and assessed and, so far, tarantara, no-one’s said that everyone has to be above average.

A visitor came to see me about knowledge and we chewed the fat for a bit. We talked about the journey of the last seven years and the importance of putting knowledge and learning, rather than assessment and school performance, front and centre of the curriculum. We walked around school and I felt a bit of a fraud because everyone was doing exams and testing, but it is May. The artists and dancers were actually being examined, but all exuded a zen-like calm.

We wondered what will the new government do about the Ebacc? I formulated a view. When the curriculum was being weakened by performance incentives there had to be a way of stopping it. That turned out to be a debate about what’s important to learn and how we should assess it. It’s still a work in progress but the structural impediments have been adjusted: therefore, does the Ebacc need to be pushed all the way? Can the nation not devise a way to work together with trusted school leaders to judge if a school has a solid and sensible curriculum without a binary judgement? Ebacc good, Nobacc bad?

I understand entirely the notion of entitlement. A child should get, at any school, a curriculum that enables him to compete with the unreasonably privileged. But the Ebacc raises so many insurmountables: no teachers, no money, skewed calibration of GCSE languages which make them exceptionally daunting to slower acquirers, brexitty populism, overloading of English and maths, preservation of the arts and not enough time. I worry that the big fat specifications will be unmanageable for human students of all abilities unless we can really learn some new language about what constitutes progress.

However, young people have their own imperatives. Two year seven girls wielded a clipboard of their own devising at me, action researching into that great mystery, the pronunciation of Primark. I supported the majority view. The Guitar Night ended with some blues and an arrangement of the Game of Thrones theme beautifully played by young peoples 11-18 of all shapes and sizes. Our own politics is marginally less blood-sodden, I suppose.
Thursday’s Evening Standard headline was a marvel of punctuation:

A year 11 solicits my opinion on his burgundy fleece gloves, ridiculed as effeminate by his chums. I agreed this was unjust. Another inquires politely after my health and asks for advice on cough remedies. I’m available for comment on most things, but I generally try to specialise in two areas. For the record, those are knowledge and the curriculum, and ethical leadership. However, if you’d like my opinion on any other aspect of education, literature, life, politics, fashion or domestic poultry I’ll happily give it. I may not be well-informed, but I’m articulate.

I’d been asked for a piece on knowledge for an outfit of whom I was suspicious. I arranged to get up close to the commissioner one dark afternoon before agreeing. I went easy on him as he was so baby-faced he could have passed unnoticed among year 10 without the tweed jacket. He reassured me he was old enough to be out buying coffee for women so we agreed on the article and then he asked me about centralised detention.

My hearing isn’t great in a crowded room. What? I said: do you mean where an Assistant Head gathers all the sluggards who’ve been late for lessons into the canteen at the end of the day and annoys them? Like when a Deputy, steeped in treachery and low cunning, sits with egregious offenders until 16:30 on a Friday? Or a Head of Department gathers homework defaulters on a Tuesday?  Or a Head of Year gets irritants together on Thursday and badgers them for an hour? Yes. It was a bit like being asked how I feel about GCSEs, or assemblies, or lining up for a fire practice. As kindly as I could, I said: I don’t think it’s new. He said, everyone’s talking about it on the blogosphere. I made a cross-eyed face: is that a fact?    

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later the uber-school of the new rigidity advertised for a Director of Detention. Is that all they’re going to do? Someone described it as recruiting an official school bully, but that’s unfair. We all do detentions. Our own good Sheedy could be called Director of Detention, but its only part of his work on engagement and good behaviour. I’m amused by this oldest and unsubtlest of sanctions being gussied up by new schools who are very keen on saying what they DON’T do: they don’t mark books, they don’t do wall displays, they don’t let children talk, but they’re very keen on detention. Surprised they need it. Funny old world.

New schools in a deregulated landscape are on my mind. We’ve been talking to anyone who’ll listen about an aspect of the Progress 8 measure. P8 is a good measure in that it doesn’t present perverse incentives at the C/D borderline which skews schools’ approach to teaching. All grades count equally and the school is judged on its average deviation from the national norm, each year a different dataset. (Actually, all grades don’t count equally until next year, therefore favouring the grammar schools, but that’s a rant for another day). The problem is the disproportionate effect a non-achieving child has on the whole outcome. So, our final grade for 2016 is -0.05 against a national average of -0.03. That includes 8 young people (of a year group of 270) who, for a range of sad reasons, weren’t with us daily by the end of year 11. Without them, it would have been 0.1, quite a different outcome. But we weren’t without them.

So, this year there’ll be consequences of compassion again. We have young people not in school. Some did things that mean that they can’t be in the Tallis community, some are ill, others the victims of atrocious circumstance. All are being educated otherwise, but they remain on our roll until the end because we chose to find them a positive alternative to the oblivion-risk of a permanent exclusion in KS4, or keep trying. Local Authorities do the same.  However, the protocols that bind all schools together where we share the most challenging young people appropriately and fairly are stretched by the proliferation of schools sailing under different flags. Some partner with us closely, others are more distant. They can’t be compelled to take children who’ll endanger their results.
Harbingers of doom said that the academy programme would lead to the abandonment of the vulnerable. As always, the regulator steps in to prevent sharp practice, so the last school the child went to gets his results. We’re proud to be one of those schools, proud to be inclusive and give everyone another chance and we’ve a lot of colleagues whose expertise makes that possible.

The future is troubling. The planned funding formula endangers support services and therefore further endangers children to whom life has already dealt a duff hand. Who’ll care for the children who are harder to love? Who’ll go the extra mile for children who can’t offer much in return? I’ve an opinion on that too.
 
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9.2.17

You can start a year where you like, but it has to end at some point and another one begins. Years actually start in September, but I understand that others may believe it to be January. Seems odd to me: it’s very dark, and cold even here in the south, and by January we’re actually nearly halfway through the real year which starts mellowly in September and chugs on until the examiners have had their pound of flesh. January with its much-hyped resolutions is just a reboot to keep us going until the sun comes back.

Year 11 had a nasty shock in December with mock exams based on what the new GCSEs will look like. You understand that I’m talking about maths and English here, where A*-G is being replaced by 9-1 and no one really knows what's going to happen. Well, year 11 do. They had a look at a maths paper produced by the exam board and it had given them pause for thought. Revision sessions were popular this week. Perhaps we’ll even offer biscuits. We hand out the mock results in a mock-August manner early next week, in the hope of focusing the mind of those who lack imagination about how they might feel on the actual day. It works for some, but for others 8 months is an eternal sort of time, even 5 months to the exams is unfathomable, like the age of the earth or the distance to Jupiter. One pleasant sort of chap told me he’d not done much revision because he wanted to find out how well he’d do without it. He knows now. Resolutions all round.

Just as well the young ones aren’t in charge of the institution (for all sorts of reasons, really). They’re easily distracted and very much concerned with the interior of others’ heads and phones, rather than devoting themselves to defeating the examiners. As I heard one remark to another ‘Yes, but you’re just trying to impress Ellen’. Has she noticed?

I go upstairs to take issue with year 9, the awkward squad of any school. This particular bunch of comedians was inhospitable to a visiting teacher and will be mending their ways. Some get to spend extra time reflecting on their manners. At lunchtime the dining room’s overcrowded because of the rain and there’s some huffing. I see some of them later, the huffers and ill-mannered, in punctuality detention. Every term the same, we re-embed the rules with those whose lives mean they forget them over unstructured holidays. Every term’s a new year.

And I make a hash of having a new idea and in fine cart-before-horsing put out a proposal without any time to discuss it or refine it. It’s not Machiavellian, just inept, so I press pause and give us all time to think. There’s a lot going on and just because the government change everything every year until our heads are spinning doesn’t mean that we should do it in school. There’s always time to think. Well, nearly always, and when there isn’t, you’d better be pretty experienced at making snap decisions.  I am pretty experienced, but still spooked this week by a combination of budget reduction, accountability measures, assessment and curriculum change.

But I enjoyed a few minutes this morning watching a new teacher talking to an old stager across the yard. I couldn’t hear them but the hand gestures were magnificent. If they were devising an entirely new language, its one I want to learn. We can add it to the gestures we already use in school such as  ‘take your coat off’ (plucking your own shoulder), ‘get in a line’ (a sort of repeated flapping motion) and ‘Really? Would you like to reconsider that action?’ (hands thrust outwards combined with a Gallic shrug, outraged  eyebrows and goggly eyes, try it at home). All those being ones teachers have to avoid using when out and about among the populace in the holidays and at weekends, for fear of being incarcerated.

I think the latter gesture would work well for the West Sussex Heads, the unlikely shock troops of the Reasonable and Exasperated Tendency, as they take on the Department over the money issue. How are we to make the books balance? Employ fewer teachers for more students? Close for half a day? Turn the heating off? Stop doing all the things that have made such a difference to vulnerable  children’s lives over the last 15 years? Altogether now: shall we reconsider?

I gesture at the weather as the sun suddenly goes in as we approach break. Snow. Really? 
 
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13.1.17

All this against a background of hysterical squealing and rushing to hug each other before the world ended. It takes industrial shushing to recover from the wrath of God in the last 10 minutes of lunchtime.

​Undeterred, year 7 consider the Dalai Lama. I’m an old cynic and was touched by how impressed they were by his thoughts. Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them. Some squirreled the sheet into their bags for further reading: one made a public vow to be kinder to his brother. You forget how easily moved and spontaneously happy a young person can be, despite the prevailing wind.  A helpful student enjoys hosting an open evening for next year’s  year 12s ‘. "Our school is full of joy" she said. "There's always laughter".  

A correspondent wants to discuss Picketty’s Capital with me and I am happy (but ill-equipped) to oblige. Capital as a concept is important to educators because it helps us think about the contribution we make to our children’s futures.  It straddles raw achievement, the education of the whole child and our work for a just and sustainable democracy (as the old National Curriculum used to have it). Picketty’s schtick is that that returns on capital are more important than the outputs of work. Education is the best method for building up capital and achieving equality, because economic growth is simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope. However, those who already have capital try very hard to reproduce structures of professional and social control down the generations. We have to create specific institutions to alter this. Turning schools into academies by lure or fatwah will serve to prevent debate in the public forum of local democracy about how we finance the key mechanism in reducing social inequality: schools need to be products of democracy if they are to be agents of social change. But if you don’t want to schools to change the distribution of capital in any form, then removing them from democratic control is probably a very effective way of doing it. 
       
A representative of the people comes to visit. She’s thoughtful and interested, so we offer her school cakes, honest reflection on our pennilessness and a trip round the reservation. She liked the photography and had a trip through the Narnia door into the dark room. At the end, a verdict: ‘you feel at one here: it’s happy’. 
​
A happy and just school isn’t accidental. Schools make commitments to their values and their methods and have to make sure that they work to create educated people to play a part in a just social order. It’s not easily reducible to metrics. The 90% Ebacc-ers – with whom, in another context I used to have more sympathy than I do now – argue that the capital of traditional subjects is greater than that of drama or art. Is it? Or is it just easier to maintain the current social order if no one has the articulacy to challenge it? Roll of thunder, hear our cry.
 
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28.4.16

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

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

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

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

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

We are foxed by the room number so I have time to tell her that when I was a lad we spent our lives covering and never got a free lesson from one year’s end to the next. I once worked in an excitable sort of school where someone set fire to the cover sheet on the staffroom noticeboard as a leaving gift. Workforce reform in 2001 put paid to that, but we’ve devised new ways of making teacher workloads unmanageable since then. 

Year 11 emerge from History with mixed interpretations, appropriately enough. We loiter and question. After GCSE maths last week one teacher ran a masterclass debriefing in the yard, working out what’s yet to be asked. When I was a lad (2) we invigilated all the exams so we watched it happen, but that went the way of workforce reform too. Science offered yard advice on Friday afternoon about revision: get up after Fajr prayers, that’s a good time to start (0340). Oh my days, as they say.      

Year 8 return from Sports Day chuffed with themselves so lunchtime is louder. I wander to see how many Tallis Rules posters are still on the walls in June and order some more. A colleague returns, be-shorted, from the Geography trip and presents me with a pencil which I lose immediately. He turns up the volume at the end of the day, admonishing a swearer ‘you in the grey jumper, wait outside my office’. Tallis wears grey jumpers so that’s a bit like shouting ‘you with the arms’. However, the jumper recognises itself and trudges off, minding its mouth.

In the promised land of the summer term we have to do all the things we promised we’d do. I like trips, so we’re Tallising about all over the place. I’ve a minor speaking gig in sunny Birmingham, two colleagues are working with a partner school in Copenhagen. Back on the mothership, controlled assessments battle with speaking tests, opportunities for Taekwondo with science assessments. Everyone’s eyeing up space for next year and I’m worrying about stuff. 

The timetabler is having a day off at a conference on costing the curriculum. He’ll come back with bad news because there’s no good news to be had, even for ready money. 16-19 funding is going to be about half of what it was in 2011 and all kinds of things are at risk, everywhere. Nothing we do is free of cost, but some of what we’re used to might prove to be luxurious, superfluous to the austerity imperative. Pastoral care, enrichment activities, work experience, A level languages, economics, further maths, music:  all the things that give a poor young person a fair chance against a rich one for a competitive university place. All to go, to keep taxes down?

The Secretary of State talks of languishing? Show me the languishing, as young people are hassled from pillar to post to meet facile targets amidst constant turbulence. Show me the languishing as we work through the night to second-guess and justify our every action. Show me the languishing as we wait for the cynical release of the next wave of changes, probably in August? So I was delighted to hear Nick Gibb promise us lead-in time for the next set of changes. I’ll gladly believe when I see it: ‘You in the grey suit, give us a break’. 

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12.6.15

Mrs Morgan is underwhelmed: ‘what our children learn in school should be determined by our democratically elected representatives’.  

I used to agree with this because I’m all for democracy, but I’m done with it now. Politicians have an eye on the electorate, the press and their legacies (3 eyes in total). They know precious little about children and less of pedagogy or epistemology. Few of the current cabinet went to state schools and the current enthusiasm for the excellent Greycoat Hospital does not make them curriculum thinkers. Even the CBI despairs, begging for schools to be allowed to offer the rounded and grounded curriculum that their members crave. I strive to be apolitical but here’s what Roberts thinks: stack the commission if you will, fill every position from Chair to tea-boy with political placemen but give us a break.  One mega idea (diplomas, EBacc, grit, phonics, Mockingbird) every five years will still get you into the history books but it might mean that a child has only two major upheavals in his school life, three if she’s unlucky. Leave us alone, to think, to plan, to teach. Struth. Commission the thing, would you?

A smaller national conference happened in terrific Tallis last week. We shared a love of expansive education, helping young people think and make links with the world. Two delegates nearly didn’t make it at all because their train went the wrong way out of London Bridge and, in the manner of a Secretary of State, without planning, warning, apology or support, deposited them in Hither Green. Isn’t it the whole point of trains that they don’t get lost? However, our people are teachers and despite all provocation got back on track and arrived on time.

As did the hundreds of young people from other schools we interviewed for our sixth form, the parents who came to find out about revision and the friends who joined the PTA’s Wine and Chocolate evening. We did it wearing lurid socks for Down Syndrome, eating cakes for Ecuador, setting off to Zaragoza or Santander or the history trip or Snowdon or the Maths Feast. We did it winning the year 8 London Sportshall Athletics finals or at the Fashion Show Abstract Couture. We did it because you can trust us to teach our hearts out, if you just let us.

I told them all this in a recent speaking tour of Germany. I describe it thus because saying ‘some nice German English teachers were kind to me in Leipzig and Duisburg’ doesn’t sound quite so grand. I talked to teachers brought together by Klett publishers who use Tallis and Greenwich as a way to learn English. They were interested in our pastoral work and outraged by interference in the guise of accountability. The teachers wanted to know about the triumphs of multiculturalism and goggled at photos of our building and laughed with our Good Morning video. 100 German 12 year olds shared their excitement with us this week: we love this link.  

The Germans know a thing or two about politics and the curriculum. Perhaps that Commission isn’t such a bad idea.            

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23.3.15