How time flies. I went north in half term to reconnect with the haggis, the midge and the tent, returning for a wash and to finish off maths revision week before the exam on Election Day. A steady flow of revisers all week, checking and remembering, worrying and planning.  

We also had a week feeling the pinch of reduced public services: school staff who should have been on holiday actually on the phone all week for and with parents and children, trying to get referrals into overstretched social care and mental health provision. These good colleagues take calls everywhere: on holiday, on balconies, at relations, in supermarkets, in despair that there’ll ever be a service sufficient to need. Is this how the taxpayer imagines children should be cared for?

Still, summer’s apparently here so we come back to school and it’s like jumping into one of those lifts from the 80s that just kept rattling on round a loop. 6 weeks to go. Good grief.

Our Business Director hasn’t done a whole year in school before. She fears September careering towards her with so much to do.  I try to explain the dreamtime myth of ‘in the summer’ in schools. We imagine there’s world enough and time to do everything we postponed until after the exams, knowing full well that the half term vanishes and the gap between July 21st and September 4th is telescopic, actually only a few days once the August excitements are over. I’ve said it before: September’s about 7 weeks away and time’s a funny thing.

All the more so as the clocks (and inexplicably, my watch) have all slowed down and we’re a bit adrift. We don’t have pips and we can’t use the tannoy during exams. I led the minute’s silence on Tuesday after the English exam and it took us a while to settle on when 11 o’clock actually was.

At sports days on the back field, time is success. 270 year sevens buffeted by the wind.  Rain drives us indoors at lunchtime and Lake Tallis reappears on the yard (No Swimming). We fill the unforgiving hour with 60 seconds worth of distance run. And despite the unpredictable new exams and inexplicable cuts about to ruin us, we throw ourselves at every day. We live as if we are immortal.

Which is just how the people on London Bridge approached Saturday night. While I was cycling back over Lambeth Bridge from watching our violinists at the Albert Hall, guests to our city and locals died crudely and cruelly. ‘You are the best of us’ the Mayor said of the public servants who responded so quickly. Good people, doing what they can, cheerfully or fearfully getting through the minutes as well as the years, never knowing when darkness lies one step ahead. They didn’t enter the public service to be the best, but because they know that life is short and it could be better.

Which is why this election, like the European vote before it, has been such a monumental exercise in hubris. Quelle distraction. We all have jobs to do and impossible decisions to make because government sentimentality about public service doesn't extend to financing it properly. Persuading people to concentrate on froth and verbiage for 8 weeks doesn’t stop the young, the old and the sick needing more spent on them. Hollow election rhetoric doesn’t put police on the streets and it won't get a sick teenager a doctor. We didn’t have time for this vain campaign.
Our year 9 political correspondent and I convened on the stone stage on Tuesday.  She’s enjoyed the campaign, which demonstrates the optimism of youth. She predicted a hung parliament: Hayley for PM. Tallis, as usual, had a Labour landslide. We know what we value: fairness, and decent public sector funding giving a helping hand for those in need.  

Do we know what the future holds? Grammar School expansion should return to the grave and the Funding Formula enabled to work by dropping a whole lot more money into the pot. Perhaps someone will be put in charge at Sanctuary Buildings who’ll sort out the teacher shortage – but I mustn’t get carried away.  

So while the parties fight it out in the Palace of Westminster we need them to look hard at what they say they value and think again about the state of the nation. It's time to start governing for the people not the politicians.  Get on with it, would you, please?
 
CR
9.6.17
 

I don’t need to tell you the facts, you can read them anywhere. Grammar schools do not help social mobility, they restrict it. Grammar schools do not spread advantage, they entrench disadvantage. Progress for clever children is not better in grammar schools. Very few children from disadvantaged households go to grammar schools.

​Grammar school places are won by children whose upbringing predisposes them to pass the 11+ or whose parents have paid for tutoring. Grammar schools existed when we needed a blue-collar/white collar work force. Passing the 11+ and keeping that achievement level going is exceptionally stressful for children who know that their parents have their hearts set on it. 

I’m writing carefully for a particular audience. If you live in a selective area, you’ve got to make the best of it. I’m not getting at you, but the state should protect children from harm, and selection harms children. School places should be planned, not established on a whim. Free School sponsors should be able to demonstrate that any educational provision for which they clamour, to which a Free School is apparently the answer, serves the needs of the democracy, the common good. Greening’s bizarre assertion that selection can be casualty-free is from someone who hasn’t thought through what that means to the child who is not selected.Intelligence is not fixed at 11. The 11+ is a poor indicator of anything but family income. A child may be good at tests or too distracted for tests at 10 or 11 but that means precisely nothing about his or her chances in the future.  Intelligence isn’t about to run out and challenging academic education does not have to be rationed. It’s not a zero-sum game unless the structures make it so.

This school is in Greenwich. We are fabulously comprehensive, educators for the world city. Over our southern borders lies selection. Sometimes our year 11s go to look at the grammar schools when they’re deciding about whether to stay on with us. Sometimes a child likely to get a hatful of top grades at GCSE tells us that they have definitely decided to go to one of the grammars. We tell them the facts: that they’ll do as well as or better here and that others in their position have come back, sharpish. They look embarrassed and tell us that their parents have their hearts set on it or ‘My community think this is best’. What would you say?  

Grammar schools are a proxy for parental fear: so here’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about grammar schools.  ‘I don’t want my child’s education to be dragged down by slow, naughty or disrespectful children.  I don’t want her to learn bad habits or fall in with the wrong crowd. I want him to make his choices within a limited range of options so he can’t make a mistake and end up on drugs and die young.  I want him to get the kind of job that posh kids get. I want him to be happy.’  Of course you do, but hoping that your little one is a quick acquirer by the age of 10 and therefore insulated for life doesn’t make sense. It certainly doesn’t make for a stable, just and excellent education system for everyone’s little one. 

Parents’ fear is rooted in another zero-sum myth: comprehensive schools are all terrible so we need to replace them with grammar schools for 20% of children because there isn’t enough good education to go around. But comprehensive schools are not all terrible.  Very few of them are terrible. Some grammar schools are terrible. Most comprehensive schools are very good and loads of them are absolutely fantastic. The postcode selection trope  trotted out by the PM - that good comprehensives only exist in rich areas – is just not true.  London proves that, as HMCI (a man incapable of telling it other than it is) has trenchantly said. Tosh and nonsense indeed. 

This isn’t policy, but education as nostalgia, a dog-whistle to a bygone era of class distinction and limited mobility.  Even David Cameron called it ‘splashing around in the shallow end of educational debate’. It’s part of the anti-intellectualism of the Conservative government, where anyone on top of the facts, from sugar to Europe, is disregarded as an expert. It is the stuff of despair. 

When our sixth form leave us we tell them to be kind to people at university who haven’t had their advantages, whose parental choice of school for them has made them uncertain about people from different backgrounds. We tell our young people to share their ease and confidence so that the gifts of a comprehensive education are shared with those whom privilege has restricted.

We do this because comprehensive education is an honourable and visionary undertaking every bit as important as the NHS. It preserves the fabric of our democracy and gives us all the chance to lay the foundations for a model society. These great schools work brilliantly for all our children. Parents love them and communities thrive. We have everything to lose as a nation if they are destroyed. We should rise up as one against this shallow, cynical, divisive, wicked and ignorant project.
 
CR
7.9.16
 
 
 
Distant star:
We should never judge children by their qualifications.  We need to get out of this mess.

I read a couple of pages before going to another school for lunch to talk with the HT about what the thing that neither of us had had time to read might mean. Then another 2 pages before talking to a science teacher about the future then Parent Forum (eSafety with Mr Pape) and home. 

​Tuesday was bound to be more productive, so the WP roosted on the table overnight.  Only what with the Head of Maths, year 10 assembly, more parents, break duty, meeting the union reps, tracking down a child, talking to the Chief Scientist about the future (physicists, they see the future everywhere), trying to get out on lunch duty, meeting the Deputies, writing to other parents, leadership group meeting and then Governors, I didn’t make much headway.  Certainly my goal of being able to refer the WP knowledgeably at Governors was properly fettled, so thank goodness they postponed discussion. Wednesday?

Business Manager and I had to catch up then there were farewells at the briefing. I teach on Wednesday, which was Community Day this week (Tallis Law) so we talked about the foundation of law in ancient religions and meandered through the byways of Leviticus.  The Iceland trip needed discussing, then a different union rep dropped in. Jess came to tell me how well she’s doing, then there was the secret photograph for Mr Quigg’s farewell.  All 300 of year 7, being noisily secret on the yard in plain sight: it’s the thought that counts. Year 8's Great Debate couldn’t judge itself, then I visited the scientists in person which they civilly reciprocated an hour later. After that the Fashion Show: if only I’d got there sooner I could have eaten more of year 10’s canapés. Then home.

Thursday morning after the 0745 meeting didn’t turn up I put the damn thing in a folder to take home to read on the train a week on Monday. I predicted that what with the saying goodbyes, writing the bulletin, sounding out old stagers, getting through the list of 24 things to do before term ended (reached number 12), seeing a parent, trying to solve a wicked (as in currently insoluble) problem, meeting a maths man, an English man and the HR advisor again that I might conquer the next 101 pages. I’m not telling you this to annoy, just to explain why it is that this game-changing paper hasn’t been committed to the Roberts memory yet. Of course, if the SoS had taken the chance with 1100 school leaders two weeks ago and actually told us what was going to happen, then I’d know more.

Just in case you’re worried, talking to unions is normal once a half term and the HR chap is a blessing. Science are hatching a plan, always good. But on Wednesday night I saw the Fashion Show and it was just wonderful. Dancers, singers and models, led by the sixth form designers and supported by media, art and technology made for an evening of joy and wonder, with teachers’ small children dancing in the aisles. Most wonderfully, a repeat of the year 9 dance company’s Run Boy Run first shown at Christmas. Fast and moving with an explosion of exuberant speed and leaping acrobatics at the end, it’s made hard- hearted old me cry twice now. Again!
​
Chuckle and marvel all we like, but the truth is that the White Paper will require careful reading and a lot of thought. Governors are meeting on a Saturday soon to talk about it. Autonomy isn’t apathy, but interdependence isn’t compromise and democracy isn’t under-aspiration. Tinkering isn’t strengthening and deregulation isn’t determination. Legislation isn’t a leaping year 9 who tried to behave so he can be allowed to dance. Forgive me if I’ve postponed reading more.
 
CR 24.3.16

Not so much with the election: I regret to report that politicians have not fared so well. Two of the leaders grew tidy Hitler moustaches mysteriously overnight and have had to be replaced (the pictures, not the leaders). Instructions about the democratic process have been reiterated: we don’t deface, we vent our feelings in the ballot box. Participate civilly!

I’m not surprised that the Get Over It campaign was more respected than some politicians. Young people cannot fathom the ways of the old. It is blindingly obvious to most of them that inclusivity is the right way to live. They’re interested in people’s struggles and would like to understand the world and change it for the better. Prurient prejudice is incomprehensible: why would you be bothered about sexuality? What is the matter with you people?    

Politics, however, is encouraged by a bad press which gives an excuse for not voting. Young people and non-voting adults believe that politicians lie and can’t be trusted. One reason is that it’s hard to make a political promise – an economic promise - that is simultaneously easy to understand and true. Politics involves compromise, and you need a clear understanding of the flawed possibilities of human life to keep cheerful about it. Being outraged about inequality and politicians’ refusal to tackle it is reasonable and understandable: not voting is unreasonable and nihilist. Decisions are made by those who show up. We do the best we can. 

However, one does sympathise with despair at political pronouncements. The government have decreed that all year 7 students who didn’t meet the expected standard (what we used to call level 4) in reading, writing and maths in year 6 will have to take the tests again. That was 21% in 2014.  21% of Year 6 students have SEN and are mostly exempt from the proposed re-sits. So who’ll do the tests? When? Will secondaries keep these little ones out of the timetable until they pass? Will that help them get cleverer? How will Ofsted measure it?

And so to #2 in an occasional series of Things Overheard That Make Me Want To Bang My Head Against A Wall. A renowned prep school was being discussed at a small hotel to which I betook my weary bones after Easter. Thus: ‘It’s wonderful, so very child-centred. They value childhood and even teach some of them how to be children. Oh, and they all swim across the river with their clothes on.’ Try that in a state school and count the days until the Head appears in the paper and her job in the TES. I hope that none of the children frittering away their time learning to swim were under par in the KS2 tests.  Oh, I forgot: they don’t have to do them in the private schools. Endless testing: good for other people’s children. Learning how to save your own life and have fun too: good for rich people’s children.

Sometimes at school we have hard messages to impart which help young people grow up. We tell them if they generally tell the truth, try hard and act honestly that they will be believed. If they generally behave unfairly or thoughtlessly they are less likely to be trusted when it matters most to them. Children understand that so most of them learn that honest error is forgivable but sustained deception makes community life unsustainable. We teach them to make up their minds about people based on how they treat others. And then we tell them to vote.  

CR 22.4.15

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.            

CR

23.3.15

This is perfectly reasonable but utterly maddening to the young. There is nothing an irritated 16-year-old likes more than to accuse an adult of hypocrisy. Righteous Indignation for the Young: bottled, it would run the heating for a year. How come teachers can say what they want but we can’t? Why are adults so po-faced when it comes to banter? We’re only having a laugh.

I’ve worked in schools where a range of expressions were banned, on top of the obvious obscenities and abuse. One school banned innit, another (quite reasonably) your Mum. I taught in a school on the Durham coalfield which banned Pitmatic at the same time as you could buy nostalgic primers in lefty bookshops. Schools help young people develop a way of speaking which will help them prosper in life.  Sometimes that’s at odds with language used at home. It’s hard to learn, harder to remember if the groundwork isn’t laid young.

We’re thinking about talking and listening this term at Tallis. The great education thinker John McBeath tells us that 60% of children at school never have a conversation with an adult. They hear content and receive instructions but never exchange deep thoughts or affable pleasantries, so we’re trying to chew the fat a bit this term. No problem for me. I’m from a region where not discussing every item at the checkout is just bad manners.

I went out at lesson change to nobble some passers-by.  It was cold, windy and sunny and my aged eyes watered. ‘Are you OK Miss?’ bellowed a young person with a complicated hairdo so we talked a bit about the weather and waterproof mascara.  I continued into block 2 with a loquacious young chap. We discussed the temperature and the perpetual controversy surrounding Tallis knitwear. We sniffed the air: ‘Someone’s burning something’ he observed sagely as we moved through DT.  He carried on the conversation with himself as he dashed up to Science: ‘How can we breathe?’

Freedom of speech is really hard to understand. We run our schools as if it doesn’t exist and teach our children that there are things that may never be said. Through this, we hope that they will grow into adults who will protect free expression. It’s not as contradictory as it sounds.  Free speech, like strong drink or violent films, is an adult choice informed by mature values and serious consideration.  If it offends, that offence must be pursued through the law, and it is the law that acts as moderator for what may or may not be said.  So as we help our young people to understand freedom we also need to understand about the law, citizenship, community, beliefs, history and democracy.

Adolescents need conversation like they need food and exercise. They need to be able to practice the words that build up democracy and community.  They need to be able to verbalise really complicated things. The best we can do for them is to carry on talking to them, explaining again and again, helping them articulate and search, and listening, no matter how bizarre the tangents.  It makes family life happier. It enables our young to grow into people who’ll talk to their neighbours and understand them. Who’ll understand that freedom is precious and nihilism is utterly useless to humanity.

Talk to your teenager.  Talk about the weather or the pencils.  Talk so that they’ll breathe freely as adults.  Talk until the killing stops.

CR

15.1.15

Therefore, allow me to fill the space. We’re pretty pleased with our results here at Tallis, our best ever. We’re pleased for our young people who’ve got what they need to go to university and we’re confident that we can support those who’ll rethink their plans. The internet makes the whole UCAS process much simpler and quicker now most young people know if they’ve got into university by the time they come to school to get the results. It’s a bit more humane than it used to be, I think. Is it as good as it could be? Here are a few questions.

Wouldn’t post-qualification university application take some more uncertainty out of the system? Universities argue that it would disadvantage academically able applicants from poorer backgrounds, but would it have to? We’d have to change the shape of our year, both in school and university, but isn’t that overdue? Wouldn’t it be more transparent? Isn’t that a good in public life? 

How well are we served by having competing commercial examination boards? Why are our young people’s futures left up to an (admittedly regulated) market?

Is the government going to make a quiet u-turn on the Goveite AS fiasco? When schools and universities agree that AS grades aid transparency in university admission and career planning does it really need to be a political issue? When the Secretary of State for Education Secretary says the government is "lifting the cap on aspiration" what on earth does that mean? Does the quiet news today suggest that education is becoming less of a political football?

I’m grateful for an A level results day that hasn’t seen our hard work disparaged by defenders of a system designed to generate an elite rather than educate the nation. I may raise a glass (tonight) to the teachers and parents who have worked, worried and loved our students through to adulthood. I’ll certainly raise one to year 13 themselves who, despite the trials and indignities of adolescence, the incessant fiddling about with education throughout their entire school careers and the ambivalent attitude this society has towards its young, have come through. 

So here’s to the elated and the tearful, to your futures close to home or in a new city, to the difference you’ll make and the citizens you’ll be. Let’s hope that Tallis really has given you an education to understand the world and change it for the better. Good luck, don’t forget us, and thank you for sharing your lives with us.


CR 14.8.14    

After that it was half term. I had a wet week in Germany and visited the Nuremburg courtroom, where genuine British values played a part ‘the tribute of power to reason’ that picked up the stitches of civilisation again. US Judge Jackson’s speech for the prosecution is an astonishing feat of rhetoric, but it was Maxwell-Fyfe’s calm and methodical cross-examination which broke Goering. Unflashy but effective is a British value too.

The memories of wars are heavy this year. Before half term we’d met with our vicar to plan our part in the redevelopment of the war memorial in St James’ Kidbrooke. We think it’ll be interesting to find out who we’re related to and what happened to them. We need to think about the D Day anniversary too, once we can have some assemblies again after exams. Remembering (and getting round to it in the end) are British values too.

And so is going to Tyn y Berth for a week with year 8 to be outdoorsy or walking down to Sports Day in Sutcliffe Park or selling doughnuts for charity or other ordinary things. It’s being so astonished by the sun that you get half-dressed outside after PE just for the feel of it, or getting really cross with an inanimate object and having to climb down afterwards. But it’s also putting other people first and creating the circumstances for everyone to get along together, and taking care of the hard-won victories of democracy and equality. Trying to make things better for everyone is surely a British Value?

There are so many irritating factors in the Trojan Horse furore, so many ways in which conspiracy may be alleged on all sides that paranoia and suspicion may well have become British values as well as Corporal Jones-y panic. Useless to speculate on Wilshaw, Gove or May’s motives but I wouldn’t be British if I didn’t add my two-penn’orth. We HAD a statement of British Values for schools – it was in the preamble to the 2008 version of the National Curriculum and it was wonderful.  It said

We have them in the Teachers’ Standards 2012, telling us that teachers must not 

We had all this and a great Citizenship Curriculum. We’ve standing orders for RE which ensure children learn about and from religion. We’ve a distinguished tradition of assemblies and community activities and an inspection system that, until two weeks ago, was in grave danger of working sensibly. Struth, we know what to do. But now we’ve got academies and free schools that don’t have to build up the common good, a moral panic just before an election, knee-jerk reactions, and wanton ignorance of the honourable purposes that direct daily life in school.  Such a shame that hypocrisy is a British value too.

CR

11.6.14

As it was, we tried to work out which friends our new children and their parents could agree on liking, which classes to group them in and how to get that perfect mix of background, test scores and gender in every single form group. We hoped for a balanced intake, but had no means of promoting it.   

In London admissions are different. Children take a test in year 5 and are allocated one of 4 ability bands: this combines with parental preference to give schools a balanced basketful of children. This wise process is reinforced by the Sutton Trust’s latest characteristically sensible publication.  Last month’s report on Banding and Ballots recommends banding to achieve a comprehensive intake, especially in urban areas. It meets the Trust’s laudable aim of improving social mobility through education.

Why is this important? Why is it right to divide children up and then spread them out? Is this not social engineering of the worst sort?  Why not make every child go to its local school and let the devil take the hindmost? Why not leave year 7 to the market and the pointy elbows of the argumentative classes?

A good comprehensive school like Tallis is a work of art and a force of nature. It contains within its warm and cheerful walls the raw materials of the good society. Children of all kinds thrown together make friends across the divides and learn something about how to bear one another’s foibles and burdens and how to respect one another. They reject snobbery and develop an immense pride in diversity, community, fairness and justice.   

A Head I worked with had a leaving speech for his upper sixth which I’ve plagiarised shamelessly ever since. He would warn those heading off to university to be understanding towards people who had not enjoyed their advantages.  He spoke pityingly of young people from dull schools where everyone was alike, who then might find it hard to get along in real life. He said that being an alumnus of a comprehensive school was the best possible preparation for life, and that such young people had a responsibility to keep to the values that formed them, to make the world a better place.

We have to be organised about what we believe is right for our society and our young people.  Parents are individually and collectively wonderful, but they need a structure to relax against, where what is right for their children is also right for other peoples. A proper, balanced comprehensive school gives us a glimpse of a just society in which no-one is disadvantaged by money.

It’s not easy to balance all schools and is almost impossible in rural and post-industrial places. Children in some areas would have to spend hours on buses to be part of banded intakes, and that wouldn’t be right either. School buses are at the mercy of the Lord of the Flies at the best of times.  Heads in London have little idea of the time it can take to resolve a bus disagreement including soup and chewing gum. But a good is a good, and just because something’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it. If we thought that, who would understand A level Economics, surds or the offside rule?  We need banded and balanced intakes in all our schools for the common good. Time to try harder. 

CR 12.3.14

On the way the usual number tripped over each other, jammed themselves in doorways or sought a scenic route, but within 10 minutes we were settled again and back to work. The memory of the dead faded and we returned to endothermic reactions, French verbs and, inevitably, the Treaty of Versailles.

The visiting trumpeter expressed admiration for our solemnity and then asked me why children hug each other so much now. This is a reasonable question as hugging has developed to such an extent that many a child’s 20 minute break is made up entirely of hugging friends in sheer relief that they have survived the last two hours and then hugging again to fortify them for the next two. Being a northerner, I’ve always assumed it was a cheap way of keeping warm and wished it had been invented when I was freezing half to death in the 70s. He observed ‘Your children seem very happy.  It’s not like it was when I was at school’. I resisted the temptation to give him my usual spiel about children being generally happy and schools being society’s best hope for the future and just grinned like a lunatic, proud of a happy community.

Anyway, his validation of our best efforts to honour the dead within the confines of a multi-use games area mattered to us and I’ll pass it on to young people and staff alike. Better still, his joining us and taking part, and liking us.

Good local schools run best when the community knows them, loves them and want to support them. From the governors who discuss everything from toilet flushing to school vision on endless dark winter nights, to the retired professional who gave us a Mozart and Debussy recital at lunchtime; from the lady over the road who called in to admire our new building, to the 700 families who came to sixth form open night; from the church over the road who pray for us to the man at the bus stop who tells us when the hordes behave well as well as when they behave stupidly. We need you all: everyone who understands that teenagers can be unwieldy and foolish and everyone who smiles at us and wants to know us better. You help our children understand that communities involve effort and a just and sustainable democracy is made up of local people of good heart.

So, a great big Tallis tick to our Poppy Day hero, an unknown citizen who made our act of remembrance his own. His courteous participation turned our school effort into something as meaningful for us as the Cenotaph ceremony and authenticated 1800 young efforts. Digger man – thank you.                                                                                                                                                                                

CR 14.11.13