It’s a wet day and a small child is tangled in his mum’s folding umbrella in block 5. I assist and we proceed companionably upstairs, gradually uncovering destination cluelessness. He needs repeater stations to get him from place to place so we set one up with Miss in my office to complement the nice ladies on reception. Miss provides him with a post-it – his second of the day - to help. He sticks this on his jumper to keep it dry while repeating the umbrella experience with a sausage sandwich. 
 
Outside, we are buffeted by elements. A year 9 eccentric advises ‘we should put these clouds in the IER for throwing wet at people’ so we discuss if that would be foggy in a room. ‘No, but there’d be a lot of banging’. What? 

We’ve had trouble with water all week. First we didn’t have enough, then it went a bit cloudy, now it’s falling from the sky. At least the roofs don’t leak. If they did, though, we’d have £50k to spend on it, thanks to the Budget. Tallis is lucky to be watertight, though we pay for the PFI privilege. 
 
As the National Audit Office reckons schools need over £6.5bn just to bring buildings up to standard. The budget announcement was not warmly welcomed by school leaders. Tin-eared was used, also patronising. Demeaning was accurately applied by one Head who wrote:

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

I avoid being an early adopter. I shudder when anyone asks what’s new? and usually say oh, you know, we chug along. I fear being in the vanguard of anything and when pundits moan on about our schools being run on Victorian lines I want to say at least that demonstrates a bit of continuity about education and society, at least we still think it’s worth doing. Anyway, schools aren’t a bit like Victorian ones. We’ve got heating, biros and girls.  Some of us have flush toilets and we all know that progress isn’t the same as results. All I’m trying to say is that there’s valuing in continuity. 

New buildings were meant to transform schooling when they arrived in the early years of the century and they’re especially popular at Open Evening time. Parents educated in the buildings of the Thatcher years goggle. ‘We didn’t have all this when I was at school’ they marvel. Didn’t they? I spent my first year teaching in a room with broken windows in south Birmingham, but we did a pretty good job. I committed myself and my own children to a school with 16 dilapidated prefabs and outside lavs because the teaching was rock-solid.  Tallis made its name as a school of exceptional creativity in a collapsing building. Its good to be warm and safe, but its not enough. 

The same goes for technology. iPads not books! Carry your DT coursework on a stick! Email your homework! Look at all the books in the world online! Read around the subject! Become a digital native: all that’s great because we educate young people for the world we’re in. ‘Classes of 100 being taught remotely and poverty ended by a computer on the wall in Kolkata’ was an odd exemplar for the digital classroom: freedom and flexibility, everything you ever need to know, at the press of a switch.

I’m not a neoluddite. I resist powerpoint but I couldn’t do without either of my phones and I’ve thought onto screen for 20 years, but digital or analogue isn’t what matters and my response to the above is hmmm. Schools exist because education happens at the point of empowerment between teacher and child, when he has to think hard and take a big step or a little step over the threshold into a bigger world of ideas, with a trusted and savvy adult giving a little prod in the right direction. Its human interaction between teacher and child that brokers a new vision of the world, where the young learner takes everything we’ve got and makes it just the start of a new understanding. Hard to see, but perhaps that’s what the Victorians wanted too.

And yet today I’ve seen funding proposals that freeze the blood. Cuts into the future for all schools that’ll change the way we teach and endanger the very thing that has worked for generations, the relationship between teacher and learner, between adult and child in a community of endeavour. Our budgets are dominated by staff costs and we have no other savings left to make: if funding falls classes get bigger. If funding falls subjects get fewer hours. If funding falls there’s no flexibility to rescue the awkward, the disaffected, the bewildered, the terrified because there’s no one with time to spend on them. Hear me well: this isn’t Tallis, its everywhere.    
  
You know I think that education involves learning stuff and that children like getting cleverer. They enjoy learning how to manipulate the facts that decode the world. They need those lightbulb moments and they need them with people who could still capture their attention and change their world with pencil and paper. Schools aren’t wasteful but people are expensive and highly educated ones doubly so. There are no more economies of scale to make that aren’t an outrageous assault on the education of the people. We can share business and HR functions, we can economically procure ourselves until its one book between 6 and coats on in the classroom, but we can’t economise on teachers. 30 in a class up to year 11 is big enough. How big do you think an A level class should be?  Double it.  

We were proud to welcome 1800 guests to Open Evening. Most of them liked what they saw and were impressed by the public investment and state-of-the-art kit in our beautiful building. I can’t guarantee much as we look into an austere future (no matter what Mr Hammond says) but I’ll commit myself to this: I’ll get the best teachers and the wisest humans we can afford and make sure that your child is enabled to understand the world and change it for the better. With or without money, there’s nothing else to do.
 
CR
7.10.16