Category: Dance

Seeing past gloom

22/4/2023

How the years tick by. It’s five years since we launched the Ethical Leadership Commission, and now it’s time to reconvene.

What am I on about?

Older readers will remember that this commission was a thing I chaired on behalf of a load of people way more important than I. It was a group of 18 leads of all sorts of organisations, from Ofsted to the National Governance Association, the professional associations, the C of E, academics and suchlike. We even had a resident philosopher. After what felt like aeons of deliberation – but which was actually only 6 meetings – we devised the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education which was then enthusiastically adopted by hundreds of schools. It challenged school leaders to know and follow the Principles for Public Life (selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership) and adopt seven professional virtues (trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism). It even featured in the year’s annual report of the national Committee for Standards in Public Life, as a good example of a sector getting to grips with responsible behaviour.

The original commissioners (it sounds as though we had gold braid and bag-carriers) hoped it would make a difference to schools. We hoped the values and virtues would help leaders in times of trouble - but so much of the world has changed since we launched our report in 2019. Retrospectively, we were clueless about the full range of actual troubles that were about to fall upon us.

So we may well have some meaty questions to ask. Here’s a few that spring to mind:

Did closing schools during Covid demonstrate holding trust for children?
Did honesty stand up to the pressures of Centre-Assessed and Teacher Assessed Grades?
What is the balance between accountability and wisdom in the current furore about OFSTED, its grades and its approach?
Why didn’t we include equity, or anything about diversity? How diverse was the commission? (not at all, is the answer).
How does justice help Heads make choices without funding?
Do we have the courage to defend our broad curricula when the shouty orthodoxy is to retreat into a narrow range of courses?
What does it say for the national understanding of the Standards for Public Life when the most vulnerable children – with SEND – are served by such inadequate funding and services?
What use is a commitment to kindness alongside year-long waits for CAMHS assessments?
Does the adoption of such airy principles help teachers stay in teaching?
What might the framework say about teacher strikes?

And so on. You might have questions yourself: I’d be glad to hear them.

Unlike my co-meeting-ites in Woolwich this morning who were too kind to tell me how sick they were of hearing me going on about stuff. In the end I apologised after my fourth gloom-laden intervention. If I’d had my diary with me I’d have quoted a brilliant assessment of the state of the world that I cut out of the London Review of Books magazine in March. Philosopher and art historian Lorna Finlayson wrote:

If the educational costs of all this are great, the human ones are greater……What is needed is something quite unlike both past and present. But you don’t have to be a nostalgic to see that the present is worse than the recent past, and that for many it is scarcely bearable. Whatever success looks like, this is failure.

But the A-level Dance showcase last night was an hour of wonder, young people throwing themselves all over the place with grace, wit and artistry. We’ve watched some of them dance for years and wallowed in the brilliance of the mature product, as we do with sport, and drama, and everything else we uncover or draw out over the years the children loan us.

I’m watching them go home at the end of the week. They’re rushing to see their friends: some charging backwards through crowds to embrace a long lost (since lunchtime) mate. Some walk backwards hazardously to declaim the exigencies of the day to their group. A beanpole-type grasps a chum half his height. Two more gallop like elephants. One is entirely enveloped in a hood, another laden with a vast birthday badge. Every year is different to them, but some things stay the same for us. Despite difficulties we try to make it all fresh, living and breathing the optimism we treasure.

Friday is usually worth celebrating. The dramas of our lives need attention, and institutional troubles can wait until Monday. We handed out tiny bits of chocolate on beautiful strings this week to recognise good deeds in the holy month. Eid Mubarak!

CR
21.4.23

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Chalk and talk

4/5/2019

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Changeable as the May weather, we waltz towards the exam room with year 11. Some are ready, some resentful, some panicky, all a bit nervous. Some show welcome signs of maturity, others not yet. Some do foolish things, but on Tuesday night we were treated to a wonderful evening of dance, and on Wednesday night, at Bromley FC and in a new strip, our boys WON! The final of the London U16 cup. Both evenings were characterise by elegance, patience, enthusiasm, dedication, collaboration and skill.

I didn’t play footy or dance at school but I did act and speak and I remember very clearly the excitement of participating and cooperating and the uncertainty of the unique performance on the night, of triumphing over the unknown. It’s completely different to the classroom experience.

A person who qualified in the same decade as me came calling and we reminisced. She said, rather tentatively, ‘you know, I don’t think it was all bad, in the old days’. Of course it wasn’t. Her comment transported me to a meeting room next to a canal in Sheffield four years ago where a Young Thing gave a group of us to understand that the past was such rubbish that it effectively needed to be erased from the history of education.

I had a few words in response. It wasn’t perfect, but then we’re not perfect now. Children went to school, teachers worked hard, stuff got learned, art was made, cups were won and exams were taken. What is this trope that schools are uniquely culpable for being the product of their times? Do we blame the Army for not having the right boots in the Falklands, and insist they’re sorry about it all the time? Do we say to the NHS ‘why did so many people die in the 90s, what were you thinking of?’ Not so much. So why do it to schools? Times change, things improve or get worse, we reflect the society in which we are situated, for good and ill.

Oh, and we talked about chalk. There are fewer of us who remember that quintessential teaching skill and the challenge of looking after a beautiful diagram you’d drawn and coloured nicely (I was talking to a geographer). I told her about the old soul I worked with who hoovered up the school’s chalk stocks when the whiteboards first arrived, hoarding it against an upturn in the market. He may have been a mathematician but the gamble didn’t work and when he retired he was offered the chalk to take home. One of our own Young Things was in this conversation with us. She’d had a terrifying and entirely unexpected encounter with chalk in rural Yorkshire, this decade. Taught her a thing or two about thinking on her feet.

Which is what the young people in the exams have already started learning quickly. The language speaking tests are situated near me so I can see them sitting mouthing the phrases, going over everything they’ve learned and worrying about facing the unexpected. The value of examinations is arguable but one of the useful things they promote is the development of confident and lucid responses in uncertain circumstances. There’s value in that experience which our obsessive high-stakes culture has dissipated.

Life is both untidy and unpredictable so schools have to prepare young people for that too. Learning to face things when you’re not ready is also a life skill. Even the young people who struggle against the exam hall tractor-beam know that.

Mind, some embrace uncertainty early. I was emerging from a difficult conversation when two small boys accosted me politely. In a conspiratorial whisper, one with sticky-up hair asked ‘have you got the rugby ball?’ This I could answer definitively. ‘No.’ ‘Someone’s taken it off us’ ‘Who?’ ‘We don’t know’ they chorused. We looked at each other for a moment then parted company, none the wiser on either side. I await developments.

A larger boy stopped me abruptly, silently, later on the bridge. I laid some groundwork for the exchange. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m good’ (not strictly true). He investigated my habits. ‘Have you seen Endgame?’ ‘No, is it good?’ ‘I can’t tell you, it’ll spoil it’. Once again, none the wiser. He has some distance to travel before work as a film critic puts food on his table, I fear.

And a man from Australia who joined the school in 1971 wrote to us. He wants to contact his English teacher. With the benefit of many years, he recognised those whose creativity and relationships formed him and made him. That’s what he remembered, and that’s what we try to do in every age. Knowing things and getting qualifications are important. Knowing that life takes unexpected turns is also important. Learning it in a positive community is priceless.

CR
2.5.19

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Auld Lang Syne

12/1/2018

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The White House book sounds gripping. I picture the Wolff man sitting quietly in a corridor smiling pleasantly so that people stop for a chat. Perhaps he had cakes. Who can resist someone listening sympathetically when you’re tired and irritated?

If OFSTED had any sense, that’s what they’d do. A day spent in reception with an open smile and some fancy biscuits and you’d learn a lot. Who’s late, who’s angry, who’s ill, who’s in tears, who’s got time to talk, how many supply teachers are signing in, why are the Police there, who is that bedraggled old soul who never remembers she needs her keys to get back? Ah, that’s the Head.

Daily sights are available to any watcher. Monday Mr Springall had trousers on. (Not that he’s usually overexposed, you understand, just that he lives in shorts and generally only wears trousers for awards ceremonies. I didn’t think he’d been issued with tracksuit bottoms.) Tuesday I admired a matching pair of hair ribbons and the wearers gave me the biggest smiles. Wednesday I took issue with a camouflaged hat. Thursday the police came to tell us something we’d told them. Friday I returned to the classroom as a rusty supply teacher.

So that means that Monday everybody was cold, Tuesday year 7 are still perky and charming 16 weeks in. Wednesday ‘It’s been a week now. No hats indoors no matter how new.’ Thursday nearly working in partnership with external agencies. Friday another nasty case of bronchitis so Roberts had to dust off her Religious Attitudes to Crime and Punishment.

This at least demonstrates I’ve put in a whole week. We came back on Wednesday last week but I spent Thursday to Saturday at a conference in Oxford, talking with philosophers and ethicists from around the world on Civic Friendship. It was the intellectual equivalent of a Christmas Dinner and I’m still digesting it. In particular, from Berkowitz of St Louis-Missouri University’s nugget ‘Children are the only known raw material from which adults can be made.’

So Tuesday wasn’t just hair ribbons. Tuesday was early close for training, on trauma, on understanding the causes and damage of early childhood trauma and looking at how this might affect young people’s approach to adults, to school, to experiences, to life. Once you’ve grasped that, some inexplicables start to make sense. Why might some children be fearful and angry all the time? Why does the slightest change to routine throw some completely off kilter? Why is it important for teachers to be predictable, consistent, reliable, calm and – to return to the White House – stable?

It’s important because kindness and empathy can repair some of the damage already done, and even if it couldn’t it would still be the right way to live. When I looked round Tallis one of the things that made me want to come and serve out my twilight years here was the sight and sound of teachers talking calmly, firmly and kindly to struggling souls, about a better way to be. It permeates the place. Civic friendship indeed.

I try to show this to visitors so I make them look out of my window at lesson change. It’s a bit of a risky strategy as you never know what might emerge in human community, but as a spectacle it’s never let me down (though Toby Young didn’t quite know what to make of it when he watched in May). New governors yesterday had been on a guided tour with some exceptionally loquacious year 8s who’d even commissioned a dance performance en route, so could be forgiven for wondering why it took 55 minutes to get around the building when 1900 people could emerge and disappear in 4.

But the best uncapturable moment of the week was Thursday in the quiet of the after-school gloaming, hearing George whistling Auld Lang Syne as he crossed the yard.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

Don’t be anxious about willie waught. Loosely translated it means ‘take my hand in friendship and make a toast to the times we’ve known’. That’s as good for a new start as for an ending, for a reunion as for a parting. Here we are, the raw materials of civic life, holding out a hand to each other as we reboot Tallis for 2018.

CR
12.1.18

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Tallis in the woods

17/12/2017

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We know it’s Christmas at Tallis when the red tags are issued to decorate the trees with messages of hope and happiness. Thursday was Christmas Show day with lots of excitable Tallisees running about in dancing gear and suchlike, feeling important by being on the wrong lunch and performing while their compatriots are slogging through the curriculum.

Yea, even unto week 14 and in these last two weeks, mock GCSEs. The new exams have a lot of stuff in them and year 11 looked distinctly queasy by Wednesday. We teach them the right behaviour for the task so lining up in the canteen, ushering upstairs in silence to the be-desked Sports Hall, shushed by Sir on the landing, Miss on the stairs, Sir at the door. And me, hassling thoughtlessly raucous small inmates: ‘Stand aside! These people are going to an exam!’ as if they were slightly bemused gods progressing to a test on Mount Olympus. Anyway, its back to basketball in the big space now, until we gather as a whole village on Wednesday for the Christmas Assembly.
Likewise the Gallery, a much-used space. Exams this week, governors’ meetings, anti-Gangs work and a visit from a team of researchers at the British Museum interspersed by tetchiness ‘who left the tables like this?’. And the hall: exams, staff briefing, assembly, and tonight the Christmas show Tallis in the Woods. Spaces have specific meaning in schools but flexible spaces are where we train our young for the unpredictability of the outside world. This is what’s expected, these are the conventions, don’t worry about how to behave, we’ll teach you to be secure so we can teach you to be confident. That being said, in the last staff briefing of 2017 I amused myself gathering views through the medium of head shaking and nodding. Funnier for me than them, I said. Sorry.

‘Something Christmassy?’ requested Heads of Year 7 and 8 so I was away. Having watched Cressida Dick on the news, I was impressed by the quantity and inventiveness of her hand gestures even when sitting with a select committee. So we gathered in the Sports Hall, I waved my arms about a lot and got 540 11-13 year olds to think about the shape of the school year, festivals of light, nativity plays in their past and how all the characters in the ancient story behave unexpectedly. I asked them which parts they’d played and then had to stretch my interpretation to cover ‘trees’ and ‘bales of hay’, let alone donkeys. Bales of hay? That’s a primary school with more actors than useful parts.

Something Christmassy in maths too this week. Venn diagrams: what’s warm, what’s festive, what’s made of fruit? Lee was away with dreams of a warm mince pie: Tommy trying to persuade Sir that turkey is fruit-based. What falls outside the circles? Shoes! Dogs! Another maths lesson, another set of sets (vets’ clients) and Mario’s howl ‘I’m having trouble with the dogs’. We teach children to categorise and analyse so they can contain the world in their heads, but sometimes stuff doesn’t fit and we need to find a way through uncertainty.

Which is why herself had to forage in the archives for a new box of hankies. My room has multiple uses too: meetings, interviews, book looks, arguments, crises, exasperations and the imponderables of human life. Hankies provided, if we can find a new box. I’m writing our Christmas cards today. No winsome drawings of robins and Santa by a perky year 7 for us. Christmas is about a baby, the only character who behaves as expected in the nativity play, the eternal symbol of hope. Our card this year is another lovely sixth form portrait of a young person, and a line from Eglantyne Jebb whose work founded Save the Children: all wars are wars against children.

So as their government forget to count the Rohingya refugee children we look on the clear-eyed face of a girl and try to think about a better future. Tallis in the Woods combined all sorts of music, dance, film and drama with Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and a mystery demon caretaker in an anarchic feast of harmony and wit. As the song says, how do you measure a year? 525 600 minutes? We measure it by hours, lessons, breaks, queues, jokes, plays, trips, events, detentions, quiet, nudging, scuffling and forests of hands up. It’s a training for life until they’re old enough to put it behind them and change the world for the better. Who says that won’t require dancing?

CR
15.12.17

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Commentary

20/5/2017

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A dog came to visit me last week before helping on a Duke of Edinburgh trip. We’re pretty comatose at 0730 but as she set off for a lie-down in block one, children appeared from all over running to inspect such a novelty item. How we enjoy diversion. Then we had two great events in a week, which helped. The first was the dance showcase on Friday, cast of thousands, exuberantly bursting and a real demonstration of a broad curriculum. The second was a London Schools footie final at Crystal Palace, Tallis U15 v London Nautical (2-2, shared the trophy). Our boys were tenacious and determined, Tallis habits throughout.

It was a while since I’d been to a football stadium. 39 years. Let me tell you Selhurst Park was considerably more fragrant than Ayresome Park in 1978 and I’d forgotten how diverting others’ commentaries are. A Dad in front of us didn’t let up with focused, specific, very loud tips for the team, each repeated 3 times, throughout the match. I especially liked ‘get organised early’ and, when he’d yelled himself into a frenzy, ‘settle down’.

I’m much the same now its OFSTED season. Three years is up so the clipboarders could parachute in at any point. This is how it goes: we wait in quivering panic by the phone every Monday-Thursday lesson 3. (Anyone else ringing at that point risks castigation as an unfeeling oaf) When I say quivering, I mean that we remind ourselves to quiver while doing something else. If they ring, they’d tell us they’d be there in the morning at 0800, for a day. In that time they’d check that senior staff know what they’re doing and everyone is competent and able to answer questions intelligently. Entry level, but we do practice. They watch lessons and behaviour and give our safeguarding processes a good going-over, then check that we took them seriously when last they visited. If that goes well, we stay ‘good’. If not, or if we’re better, they invite themselves for a second day. Some of you may have relations a bit like this. Or as Father Dougal said of bishops ‘They come in, they strip the wallpaper, they fumigate the place and then they’re gone’.

Why do Heads moan on about it so much, I hear you cry? There’s nothing wrong with being accountable. There’s nothing Ofsted do that isn’t a reasonable public service, but the conclusions drawn from it have, in recent years, been a bit outré. People lose their jobs after critical comments in reports. Sometimes that may be right, but really? Inspection, like Radio 2, shouldn’t really be telling you anything you don’t know already. So my zen-like calm, which may just be old age, suffers a ruffle in the middle of the day. Truly, when the call comes, you’ll be among the first to know. We’ve got the text ready.

A chum stops me as we enter the building at crack of dawn this morning. ‘Are they coming, or should we stand down?’ Wish I knew. The talk is that they’re behind schedule, but then sometimes they’re bang on. This is literally 50% of what heads talk about when we meet, and I can’t do anything other than issue contradictory instructions: ‘Get organised early! Settle down!’

And year 11 had their final full day in school and assembly, shirt-signing etc. All very pleasant and cordial, a song from the Head of Year and a Purple Rain pianist who thanked his 270 peers for ‘accepting me as who I am, so I don’t have to feel ashamed’.

We had a non-Ofsted visitor a bit ago who was very pleasant. We talked buildings and went for a wander around to see the hordes at work. I’ve picked up a bit of knowledge on this over the years and can have a superficial discussion on BB99, nickel sulphide inclusion and post-torsioned concrete with anyone. I showed him the hall and it was a sight to behold, GCSE Dance warming up with stretches, chairs, bowler hats etc. He hadn’t realised that dance was offered at GCSE or A level and had to assimilate this into his worldview. I wondered, as I watched the cogs turning, how many others are oblivious to the arts, which may be why they’re not bothered about the cuts. If you don’t know what can be done, how can you regret its passing? The parents at the Dance Showcase knew, and some volunteered to help campaign to protect the arts.

Dance, like PE, reaches the parts other subjects can’t, and it’s physically good for you. Children need exercise and confidence: dance and football both provide it. At a time of obesity, worrying mental health problems among the young and shifting accountability through Ofsted and others, schools will have to balance their budgets by looking closely at anything that falls out of the Ebacc, but none of those involve physical exercise or self-expression. It just doesn’t make any sense. ‘Look where you’re running’ Dad shouted last night. Too right.

CR
16.5.17

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Little Red Roosters

22/4/2017

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How often do you think about red roosters? Twice a day? Then this column’s for you: read on.

A mixed pair of year 8s are gazing at something so I get between them. This new pound coin? What’s it worth? Ever the educator, I can help: ‘A pound’. ‘Yes, yes, but what’s it worth, I mean, how long’s it been around?’ This is, I suspect, precisely the existential question that standardised coinage is meant to prevent. Rather like you and I, dear child, worth does not depend on age.

We’re obsessed with money this week as the future is grim. Successive governments have longed for a schools’ National Fair Funding Formula but shied away from the cost or the carnage until now. This lot are doing it within the funding envelope, as we say now. The same money, shared out fairly. It has a brutal logic as a cold fiscal fix. As a way to support a the nations’ young, it is utterly inexplicable. Why disinvest from children?

Tallis’s total budget is about £12 million a year. For the financial year 2017- 18 we’ve been given about £326,000 less, a drop of -2.7%. We‘ll face further reductions next year, and then that lowest level of funding will be the new normal. Over the next two years we’ll try to plan to lose over half a million pounds. Which may not be possible.
Such brutality does interesting things to language. The ‘Fair’ was dropped a while ago so it’s just a formula, rage against the machine. Similarly the parroted ‘we are spending a record amount on schools’ makes my head swivel on its stalk before exploding. School funding is frozen, with inflation and other factors meaning schools have to make huge cuts on top of Coalition cuts.

So, pottering home after the A level dance showcase (brilliant, with a matchless first Little Red Rooster) I thought out loud (thankfully not on the bus), about the rationale for slashing expenditure on schools. Hana’s questions recurred: What’s it worth and how long’s it been around?

The best schools have a grand narrative: this is what we are, this our history, this our aim. Ancient schools know: educating the poor of the parish for 500 years, Honore et Labore, Sapere Aude, like we have Education to understand the world and change it for the better. But quality education for the masses is very recent, a post-war, comprehensive dream. Most of our schools, in historical terms, are modern. Does that make us less valuable?
From the standpoint of the privately educated, this must all look very clear. If schools were better they’d have nothing to fear. Most schools are not very old so they haven’t survived for a long time, and they’re not very attractive to rich people, they’re obviously not very good. Ergo, they’re not worth much, so they must be improved in whatever way seems economical at the time. Or starved of cash so the weak go to the wall. Or altered again and again and again by successive ranks of politicians who have no clue that stability and trust are crucial to public institutions.

So, Hana, perhaps the government sees it your way. We can tell what schools are worth by how long they last. In a future without enough money, subject to measurements that change every year, without enough teachers and with people rightly fearful of becoming headteachers, let’s see how they last. Like the rooster-less barnyard: everything in the farm yard upset in every way, the dogs begin to bark and hounds begin to howl.

Our friends from Taiwan came to visit to protect us from gloom, dancing and singing. 20 year 8s had a great day with them and there was much hugging and tears when they left, having given us a second rooster. It’s got a money-box slot, so we’ll perch it on reception and see if it can lay us a load of cash. The attributes of the year of the rooster, I discover, are fidelity and punctuality, and you can’t have too much of either of those in school.
So I turned to Confucius and the wisdom of the structured life. As he said:

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

All the government have to do to get a really bad outcome from schools is to carry on as they are. Finding money to fund us all really fairly, with the money we need, would be difficult, and it would be good. Leaving us alone for a few years to generate stability and do our jobs would be even better. We value things that last on this damp island. Loving our schools and letting them flourish would be a public good.

CR
21.4.17

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Aboard the Tiger

16/12/2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR
15.12.16

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Roll of thunder, hear my cry

1/5/2016

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Bertolt Brecht, 1948 Credit: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Drama plumbs depths in the young. Year 11 final devised pieces can be stories of Shakespearean perfidy. In past lives I’ve watched scenes that would make Jeremy Kyle wince with angry foghorns drowning out nuanced human experience. I worry that yelling is the lingua franca of too many homes, while noting its experimentalism in other thespians from very quiet homes. This week was wonderfully different: four pieces on night two of the rehearsals bringing gripping and complex stories, broken hearts and agitprop, physical and verbal dexterity, the odd laugh amidst the agony. Young people who struggle to express themselves elsewhere perform with confidence and power through skilled teaching. Drama is key to any curriculum that offers a voice to the voiceless. It’s not that voices aren’t annoying elsewhere.

This mad weather is no friend to the teacher on yard duty: we expect balmy sunshine in the summer term and are infuriated by cold and rain. Tuesday afternoon started with ear-splitting thunder and stuff falling from the sky. Some year 8 boys approached me, undeterred by the leaky down jacket that makes me look like a seagull pie demanding ‘Is this snow?’ I regarded them and prevaricated (snow excites the young). The Person In Charge of Weather put us right; ‘light hail from an arctic maritime front’. They were disappointed. ‘Don’t hailstones knock you out?’

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.

CR
28.4.16

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Crass or Class?

28/2/2016

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Sean Scully - Morocco, 1995

Wednesday I was at Emily’s piano recital but Thursday I gave the wind-up speech at a conference in in town. One of the previous speakers had an interestingly fancy day-shape, but another made me want to bang my head on the table: ‘Building ethos through teacher rewards’. Not as in hard cash or time off, elegant performance-related pay review or a glowing reference. No, visiting classrooms and handing teachers postcards. Writing to them on Fridays ‘so they get a doormat thank you waking up a bit growly after a few cheeky beers’. ‘Corridor chats’ were recommended, and namedropping in briefings, because everyone loves that.

To my certain knowledge there’s only one person in a school who loves briefings. They’re catnip to the head but dentistry to everyone else. I’ve had leadership teams volunteer for bus duty in snow rather than sub for me at briefing.

Despite terminal nosiness, I didn’t enjoy them that much when I was a footsoldier and being publicly complimented made me want to tunnel out. I’ve served with people who gave out light-hearted awards in briefing and the ice still makes me shiver. I’m here to tell you that no teacher likes chirpy public thanks amongst their grizzled and witty chums.

Why so ungrateful? Why do I think this goodhearted Head so squirmingly wrong? First, teaching is a public service to be rewarded with decent pay and conditions and public respect. ‘A finger of fudge’ awarded in briefing (yes, really) is demeaning not amusing. Second, teachers choose the job and are paid for it: they don’t need corralling into a jolly gang but professional guidance and support to do well. Third, good teachers are tuned into the personalities in a room and are skilled at trying not to embarrass people. Fourth, teachers are not children.

Treating adults in a way that’s too crass even for most adolescents is symptomatic of a gimmicky, shortcutting, undermining approach to educating the nation’s young. Maybe I don’t thank teachers enough, but I know that their hard work and motivation aren’t reliant on clumsy presents from a corporate mother. Teachers are public intellectuals with advanced interpersonal skills and a liking for children. Being good at it can’t rely on superficial activities. It takes time, years of it.

Some training routes for teachers underplay this and undermine young colleagues with false promises. They breed an expectation that the institution will always do all the heavy lifting in terms of adolescent formation through uniform and behaviour proxies, silence and compliance. It’s just not as easy as that: a school’s strength relies on individuals and their relationships in classrooms, labs, studios, fields, offices, corridors and yards. Young people make choices and it’s in the nature of youth to make the wrong ones. They have to be educated and turned to face the light so they can grow.
Chatting on the corridor (oh all right) we tell Thos to take his coat off. He does, slowly. Sir remarks: we could have yelled at him and destroyed him on the spot, then he’d yell back and we’d have to exclude him. What would be the point? We like simple rules that build up our common life, so Thos has to take his coat off because the sea of Tallis turquoise indoors shows that we all belong together. As we explain again.

I collide with a class of year 7s rushing to watch a primary dance showcase that’s been practising on our lovely hall floor. They are beyond excited at a change to routine as we sheepdog and shush them into the hall, and the little ones gaze on these giants with awe. The dancing is blissful and the audience immaculate. Is that compliance, or happiness and human interest in a secure atmosphere? Year 13 assembly this morning was Caleb on gender construction: clear as a bell. ‘He couldn’t have done that when he was younger’ his form tutor beams.

Earlier I’d been to admire the new whiteboards in maths. We’ve got ‘em on all four walls in the rooms now and the mathematicians love them for their squares. ‘Maths teachers love squared things’ I remarked to a class which amuses Peter the wonderful band singer. Small groups help each other with topics from the mock. ‘I’ve just not been comfortable with this decimal!’ shouts Ahmed. ‘It made me panic in the exam and I lost 3 marks! I insist on doing it again tonight! ’

Some of them came to school for four days over half term and with skilled help are edging ever closer to success. How do you reward that public servant with a bar of chocolate?

CR
24.2.16

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Seeing past gloom

Chalk and talk

Auld Lang Syne

Tallis in the woods

Commentary

Little Red Roosters

Aboard the Tiger

Roll of thunder, hear my cry

Crass or Class?

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