For a man who seems likely to resort to Kipling at any point, the PM’s been a bit remiss, in this our hour of need. People quote If at the drop of a hat, except when it might actually help, it seems.

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
 
I’m happy with the first verse which brings me succour. The chances of my ever looking too good or talking too wise are vanishingly small at the best of times and hopeless now when the guidance I get changes each sixty-second minute. I’ll steer clear of the third and fourth verses abut gambling and being a man, but the second part of the second verse is helpful, situated as we are in the middle of an almighty fight between the DfE and the teacher associations and unions. 

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
 
A word on nomenclature here. Unions are precisely that. They are affiliated to the TUC and exist to get the best working conditions for their members commensurate with the job actually being done. I’ve been a member of both the big teachers’ unions: the NASUWT because I qualified in Birmingham and worked in the north-east, both NASUWT-dominated areas. I was a member of the NUT (now NEU) when I worked in London in the 90s, because that was stronger there/here. I was appointed a Deputy Head by John Dunford, and dragooned into membership of SHA, the Secondary Heads Association, of which he became General Secretary and which later became ASCL. I held office in ASCL and have come to know office-holders in the other unions: all good people, all committed to children and schools.

One problem in education is that the same organisations end up trying to speak for schools, teachers and children.  This is confusing and it’s why the Charted College of Teaching is so important. The CCT should be able to work tirelessly to improve teaching without having to foreground protecting jobs and improving working conditions.  Unions can think about those while the DfE then runs the schools in the way that the nation thinks best for children and all our futures.

It’s a pity that it doesn’t quite work like this. The CCT is young but strong. It will play the part of the medical Royal Colleges for us in the future. The unions are trying to protect their members’ physical health in a global pandemic – and trying to get someone to speak for children. The department are trying to keep schools open no matter what. 
While a three-legged stool is extremely stable (even according to the Foreign Office, you’d think they had other things to worry about), a two-legged stool is a ladder to nowhere and the one-legged version is just Gavin Williamson hopping off as fast as he can. Despite the significant collective brain power available in the teacher associations and the Chartered College, the department prefers – or is forced – to make predictable doctrinaire pronouncements that don’t move at the speed of the virus. Of course it is better for children to be at school but that’s only true while it can be done safely, which has to include the safety of the adults who look after them.

I was a member of ASCL executive for four years and I take my hat off to Geoff Barton and his colleagues trying to steer a typically moderate course through this hurricane. ASCL and the Chartered College are right about the questions that need answering: what did we learn about infection rates once schools were fully re-opened in September? What is the risk to children and teachers of different ages, in school, now?  Why not vaccinate all school staff immediately after NHS staff and keep schools open that way? To which we have to add: what is to be done about the department’s new focus on poverty, disadvantage and children’s mental health in the immediate, medium and long-term? And why, oh why will no-one make a sensible decision about exams in 2021? 

I know that children and teachers don’t come very high in the government’s priorities but it has to be possible to do better than this. Shouting at schools through a megaphone then running off and hiding behind a curtain for a few days, releasing the press attack-dogs when the unions patiently explain why it can’t be done that way then bellowing another, contradictory, muffled message a couple of days later that has to be reacted to all over again is not good for any of us. 

Mr Williamson, work with schools. Work with teachers. Work with those of us who have devoted ourselves to this corner of the nation’s vineyard for years and let’s try to sort it out peacefully together. If you can’t, then hand over the job to someone who really can keep their head.

Hoping the New Year gets happier.

CR
3.1.21

Do you remember interference? It was a big feature of my childhood. You couldn’t hear the radio when the hoover was on because it went all crackly. The telly was sensitive to interference too and even the sharpest of slaps on the top or fiddling with the vertical hold knob didn’t always fix it. Happy days. The car I sometimes drive is ten years old with an FM radio. Reception is crackly between Deptford and Peckham. I’ve got used to it and – as if you couldn’t hear this analogy galloping towards you out of the squiggly mist of a 1960s television screen – I’ve got used to government interference too.

May I set out a few thoughts on the surprise announcement to finish this term a day early, and how irritable everyone has been about it?

First, the government needs to be pulling out all the stops to tackle Covid. Whether you think they have or not is up to you. Whether you think they can or not is more worrying. However, like the geography of Derbyshire, that is not the purpose of this piece. 

Second, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to have a view on the purpose of education, a national curriculum, an inspection process and a fair funding mechanism. Whether or not this can all be achieved smoothly when the focus for the last 20 years has been on a spurious ‘autonomy’ for Headteachers is more worrying. However, like the poetry of Thomas Hardy, that is not the purpose of this piece.

Third, it is reasonable that decisions about schools will have to be made quickly in a pandemic. Whether the Secretary of State’s pandemic-handling so far gives one confidence for future decision-making is worrying.  However, like the exams debacle, the laptop promise, the food vouchers, the BBC lessons, rotas and the October firebreak, that too is not the purpose of this piece.

What is, then? you cry, put us out of our misery, would you, please? No, the focus of this piece is how schools have once again been cast as shiftless villains only interested in a day off, in some parts of the media, this week. Given we’ve been working flat out, how did this happen? Might I try to shed light?

No one asked for a day off. Unions, professional associations and other groups made the point severally and singly with evidence and justification that it was no surprise that when schools reopened, infection rates among children rose. Therefore, once Christmas was declared open and restrictions lifted from the day before Christmas Eve to the day after Boxing Day, schools spotted an issue. Covid-infected or Covid-carrying children may be a risk to older people. As Christmas is invariably spent in multi-generational close proximity, young people may well endanger the health of older people. Gran and Max may have missed each other desperately since the start of lockdown, but it would be a pity if the visit had to be summarily cancelled, made her ill or worse. Therefore, schools’ tribunes said, since we are all capable of remote learning now, had you thought about making the week beginning 14th December a remote learning week and protecting everyone?

A further complication was schools’ responsibilities for contact tracing. If the end of term broke into the 6-day incubation period, schools would need to be making phone calls about infections on Christmas Eve, or later.  This required schools in some way to be open to do that – even if it was just the Head, or the Business Manager, or whoever has been in charge of the process.

And now we get to the bit that enrages the public. Heads said: everyone is exhausted and working over the actual Christmas Eve-Day-Boxing-Day stretch is hard to bear. Some of us (not me) haven’t had much of a break since March. Is there a way of avoiding being responsible for contact tracing all over Christmas?

The solution, declaring Friday 18 December to be an in-service training day must have seemed like a reasonable one to the government. We’re not giving a week of remote learning because everyone has had enough of that, Mr Williamson might have thought – though I suspect it's Gibb the Schools Minister who does the thinking at Sanctuary Buildings. Friday the 18th removes schools from contact tracing over the actual heart of the festivities.  Excellent plan! So why was this not met with general applause?

Well, the difficulty is in the nature of training days. These are not invented on the hoof and they are not meant to be a time when everyone catches up on their marking. They are for actual training to improve classroom practice, planned as part of the school’s improvement planning over the course of the year. They are to be taken seriously. If the training is not done that day, then it is acceptable for the equivalent number of hours to be made up at other points in the year, in planned after-school training time. What the DfE should have done is to declare that this Inset day is a one-off under extraordinary circumstances, unlike others, with other rules. What they have done is to tie everyone up in knotted red tape.

Worse, lots of schools – especially primaries, I suspect - had planned some appropriately-distanced festivities which couldn’t easily be reorganised. We don’t do a lot of that here. The tree’s up, Christmas Lunch is on Tuesday, I’ve recorded a verse of the song we’ll broadcast on Thursday and I’m writing this in a Christmas-y jumper wearing antlers, but that‘s as far as it goes. But now I’m embarrassed that the nation thinks we’re slackers. ‘Teachers say not enough time off’ shrieks the headline.

Everybody’s tired. Children of all ages and dispositions have found the last 15 weeks exhausting and so have the adults around them. The zoning separation of year groups eats away at the teaching day and at any semblance of freedom that the children had. This is hard for adolescents to bear who are wired for developing independence in these years: tempers are frayed. It is immeasurably worse for those who’ve had to isolate, some of them, by the cruel hand of fate, for weeks on end. We understand that many parents are struggling. Some heads and teachers have said regrettable things on social media – but that’s tired human nature broadcasting out loud in the modern world.

Which brings me back to the crackle of interference. Fourth (for those of you who haven’t fallen off the chair with boredom yet) it is shoddy for a government to conduct business by press briefing. Whether the current leaders of a parliament which used to be the model and envy of the world can get over this is debatable. However, like Paine’s Rights of Man, that is not the purpose of this piece.

I trust that these extraordinary circumstances will end some day. Until then, we need to look after each other and try to be kind. So, finally, fifth: it is a pity that so much of the media can’t abide teachers and attack schools at the drop of a hat. However, like the apparently perfectly acceptable decision of Eton to close early to protect families at Christmas, that is not the purpose of this piece. But perhaps it should be?     
 
CR
11.12.20

My session is on Ethical Leadership, wittily entitled The Real Teacher Standards.  I encourage these dedicated youngish folk to consider the principles that inform their every action. I pose them a few questions. 

​Do you know the Principles for Public Life? What matters to you? Can you recognise malpractice and irregularity? Has anyone tried to make you do something professionally you know to be wrong? On what grounds do you make decisions?
 
We look at the Aristotelean virtues of courage, temperance, greatness of soul, magnificence, friendliness, justice, wit, friendship, generosity, even temper and truthfulness. We think about what kind of role models we are to the young. We consider old Kant who said that our duty to make children's lives bearable is a consequence of the act of procreation. We reflect on justice and I tell them that equal opportunities lip-service just gets you meritocracy, a cabinet full of old Etonians and a list of top 20 universities with shameful numbers of undergraduates educated at state schools. 
 
We move on to the great American jurist Rawls and his Veil of Ignorance : if you knew nothing at all about this child, would this education you offer be right, be just? We consider the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the failure of schools under murderous regimes to protect their young. I suggest (tediously, year after endless year) that we need a code of ethics, like the medical Royal Colleges. After that, good old English case law can do its stuff and build up our understanding and our practice. I make them think about how their teams and their future schools should run on ethical principles. About how to translate all of this into talking to actual teachers about their actual behaviour and practice and making children's lives better.
 
So aren't I Mrs Perfect with all this theory? Never an error, never a duff decision, philosophical purity perpetually oiling the Tallis wheels? One of the exercises in the sessions is to plan a meeting to set out the way a staff team should behave. I'm not talking about inspirational visionary speeches to launch a new role: any old fool can use fine words with people you don't know. I get them to think about what they'll say to people with whom they have some history, where emotion and embarrassment might blister fine words a bit. About trying to make the right decisions in circumstances of unavoidable ambiguity, about marrying fundamental principles and democratic demands, about the pitch and roll of school life. About doing the best you can.
 
Madam can be manipulative and witty, furious and foul, but this week she made a split-second decision that required getting over herself. She came up against someone else’s pain and put herself second. She had faith she'd find help because she trusted her teachers to be unyielding walls of security against which to batter herself in safety. In an optimistic moment, before she drives me barmy again I dream that one day she'll remember that kindness, integrity and learning go hand in hand, and that might help her into the future. It heartens me, when times are out of joint.
 
Unlike the Irritating Pronouncement From An Academy Chain Leader #400 this month. Say it in an outrageous Yorkshire accent: 'You can turn a school round in 7 weeks' [whatever that means]. No you can't. You can make self-satisfyingly macho decisions in 7 weeks, and change some stuff that's egregiously wrong. Building a community on right principles takes years, and it involves, maddeningly, keeping faith with Madam.
 
I finally read Harper Lee on the train last week and her magnificent musing on morality, principle and relationships. Bringing up Madam takes time. Don’t cut corners. Look to your ethics. Go set a watchman.
 
CR 8.2.16