It’s our only uniform requirement post-16 so without the lanyard, I said to three giant youths at the block five bridge door, you are essentially naked. Two wearers chuckled and one did the walking while talking and rummaging thing, eventually slinging it over one ear while we discussed his A levels: Chemistry, Maths and ICT. You can change the world with those, I inevitably said. He said he intended to once he’d stopped feeling dizzy in Chemistry.

I sympathised. I’d been feeling discombobulated since discovering at 0610 that morning that the lid of my portable teacup had other plans for itself leaving me with tea, yes, but stored loose in my bag and right trouser leg. My dark walk has a brutalist beauty of its own and the buses themselves are like great illuminated tea-clippers buffeting through the streets, to a station with a great café. I usually cycle and occasionally drive but am an enthusiast for buses, tubes, trains and riverboats, especially now I’m over 60, thank you taxpayer. The gloomy bus stop offered enough cover for mopping.

Mr Gibb, former Schools Minister, is also over 60 and has just been ferried away from Sanctuary Buildings where he has kept an iron and hitherto permanent grip on education policy. This is Gibb of phonics, Gibb of the Ebacc, Gibb of 11 years, Gibb the immoveable – gorn. Not without a shout over his shoulder, though ‘Don’t dumb down. Don’t let the softies take over. Don’t get all child-centred. There’s only one way’ meaning that education left to educators must necessarily be rubbish.  But we don’t know if that’s true or not, do we? Not since 1988 and the Great Reform Act. Since then, it’s been dominated by regulators and politicians. At least Gibb stuck with it. Belloc springs to mind, as ever ‘always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse.’ Or as the zen masters have it: who knows what is good or bad? Too early to tell, I’ll keep you informed.

But in the evening of the tea catastrophe I found myself at the station in the dark, trying to get home. I had phone calls to make and a book to read so it wasn’t until I was on the train that I remembered the murder of a young teacher about 300 metres away, the previous Friday. Should I have been worried? A parent had congratulated me for being northern just that home-time (though its not something I had much choice about as a child). Was I being tough and gung-ho to have forgotten the danger, or is that something to do with being 60 too?

Women are in danger on our streets. Violence against women and girls is global and endemic. No amount of telling women to stay out of dark areas or carry gadgets or walk in groups alters that. We need proper laws about violence against women upheld by sufficient police and courts. We need to talk about it in schools and make sure that our young men are women’s allies, and we need enough public servants at ground level to make the world a better place. 

What would have been the point of worrying on the station? Would it have got me home faster? I don’t go out at night much, but I tell people that’s because I’m tired and antisocial, not because I’m fearful of the streets. But what if the one is so deeply engrained that the other follows? Have I lived, have all women lived, constrained lives because of the undercurrent of violence? What if that is too terrible to contemplate, so we just work around it?
Sometimes adults tell me that young people make the streets dangerous and frightening. In turn, I sometimes say that one solution would be for adults literally to get out more, so that the streets are mixed and passively supervised by ordinary people going about their business. But Sabina Nessa was doing just that, going home, through a pleasant neighbourhood, after a day spent serving the young as an educator. What else was she meant to do? Live at work?

We’re going to mark Sabina Nessa’s death with a moment of whole-school reflection. It's right that we do, because of our commitment to ending violence against women and because the murder was so very close.  But it won’t bring her back, or all the women before her or all the ones who’ll come after. Talking to another woman at school, she said ‘When you read of another murder you always sort-of hope there’s a link, a reason, that makes the next one less likely to be you. I know it’s wrong to think like that’. What have we become?

Women and girls aren’t the only people in danger in our world, but they are in danger, far and near. Violent misogyny won’t be solved by vigils and candles, but by concerted, expensive effort to remove the threat. Given the sum of human knowledge and learning, sensitivity and inventiveness, couldn’t we care enough to solve this, soon?
 
CR
23.9.21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due to my advanced age and objection to any kind of cold weather I’m offered a lunch duty slot in the year 11 study hall. We say hall, but it’s actually 0311, a geography room of average size. 20 young comrades join me for 45 minutes of absolute, blessed silence. ‘It’s like a rest cure’ I remark to Sir as he barrels in at the front of a tidy line of 30 year 9s. We pause to retrieve a football appearing in entirely the wrong place. The ball’s owner is aggrieved: they took it off me, not my fault, not fair. He eventually agrees that all concerned should participate in brisk questioning after school and the resultant culprit issued with the appropriate sanction for the activation of a football indoors.
 
Fairness is one of our Tallis Character traits and particularly valued among the young, understandably as powerlessness attracts injustice in our flawed world and who has less power than a child? Football manager above didn’t want the indignity – or the football-affecting inconvenience? – of a conversation to establish how he got into trouble. Or perhaps he was wary of those whom he’d dropped in it. Perhaps dear readers are gnashing their teeth now. What a performance about a football  Haven’t they got something else to do? What about Sir’s lesson?
 
Don’t fret. While this 30-second legal wrangle was going on outside the door I was inside the door purring over the geographers, many of whom I’d known as puppies. I admired their height and wisdom and what a pleasant combination the gods of the option blocks had thrown together. I reminded a huge specimen that he’d been foolish in assembly and he had the grace to look sheepish. Books were given out, everyone settled. I didn’t even have time to ask what Zoe was reading before Sir, with a parting shot of ‘This is me being reasonable’ returned to the earth’s crust.
 
We’d had a furious complaint from a parent the previous night about our method of dispensing justice. Why must the innocent be questioned? Outrageous infringement of human rights. Well, we take rights seriously and the innocent must be questioned so that justice is dispensed fairly.  Innocence and justice must be protected and supported so that the community is safe and happy. We actually staff this. We spend money on it so there’s always someone to hear a story, take a statement, and, where possible and reasonable, broker restoration. When a youth comes blundering back into class late with the excuse ‘I had to have an RJ’ that’s what she means. Restorative Justice: a bit of a trade name, but useful none the less.
 
On Tuesday Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector offered reflections on the difference between education and examinations. She talked about the need to offer children real learning and the value of all the grades at GCSE. I’ve been arguing this point for years so I can’t disagree. What she says, however, feels different at the sharper end: fine words are bowdlerised into tick-lists for inspectors. Ofsted have tried to deal with that too. But HMCI can’t address the high-stakes accountability in which a confused system is mired and someone needs to be honest about that. But we can’t until we have a clear view of what education is and isn’t for, and what a civilised and developed democracy actually wants for its young and sets about doing it as fairly as possible. There needs to be a restorative process between the regulator, the department and the profession, which will take time and good will. At least she’s not calling us enemies of promise.
 
(I’ll return to the Ebacc argument in the piece when I can summon the strength. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.)
 
I’m a fan of the American philosopher and jurist John Rawls, insofar as I understand him and in particular, his fundamental principle of justice as fairness. Justice must not only be done, but must have a fair effect. Rawls underpins this with his concept of the veil of ignorance (I’ve have written about this before, sorry dear readers).  Imagine that you were setting up a system in which you have no idea about the characteristics of the people it serves, or your own characteristics. Will it work as well for rich and poor, for all genders, ethnicities, aptitudes? If it won’t, then its not fair. Try again. Try again DfE.
 
There’s a marvellous scene in that film of high art, Nuns on the Run. A hapless policeman lurches into a convent looking for the villains who are having jolly adventures disguised as nuns. After being unable to tell the Superior who or what he’s looking for, or why, she says ‘We’re all very busy here. When you know what you’re looking for, come back, and we’ll tell you if we’ve found it’.
 
It’s like that in education at the moment and all we can do in schools is to get on with the day job and account for ourselves as best we can. I’m trying very hard to persuade educators to think about the purpose of schools and our social role in loco parentis before we think about examinations and assessments. In the meantime, we’ll work hard like year 11 and try to be fair, like Sir and the indoor football.
 
CR
12.10.17
 
 
 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​2. Great teachers – everywhere they’re needed: teacher recruitment is becoming more difficult as the economy grows stronger (see what they did there?) but no mention of the confusion of deregulated routes into teaching. Teachers won’t qualify at the end of the NQT year, but be readied for assessment in their second year. Inspection reform giveth and taketh away in one sentence: OFSTED commit to not changing the handbook or schedule in-year, except when they do.

3. Great leaders running our schools and at the heart of the system: in an academised system where schools will be more locally accountable to academy trusts with whom parents have a direct relationship is followed by it is even more important that parents and governing boards should be able to challenge schools and hold them to account. Parent governors, however, are not necessary to achieve this.

4. A school-led system with every school an academy, empowered pupils, parents and communities and a clearly-defined role for local government: the biggest change for us is spreading excellent practice and ending the two-tier system where all schools will have to be academies by 2022 by which point local authorities will no longer maintain any schools. There it is.

5. Preventing underperformance and helping schools go from good to great: school-led improvement with scaffolding and support where it’s needed. Sounds OK.

6. High expectations and a world-leading curriculum for all: the EBacc is something the vast majority of pupils should study, the core academic curriculum for 90%.  The definition of mastery is helpful: designed to ensure that no pupil’s understanding is left to chance and each step of a lesson is deliberate, purposeful and precise.  

7. Fair, stretching accountability, ambitions for every child: accountability is still a little mealy-mouthed, but progress is the key. The scope of the statutory roles of Director of Children’s Services and Lead Member for Children will be reviewed. There is a description of the role of the Regional Schools Commissioners, appointed by central government.

8. The right resources in the right hands: investing every penny where it can do the most good. The Pupil Premium remains alongside a national funding formula for schools and on top of funding for disadvantaged schools and disadvantaged areas.  There’s a clearish explanation of the proposed system. LA funding methods stay as they are for two years, after that we will shift to a single national formula determining each school’s funding. 

Quick enough? Or this?

"We decided what to do and stripped away funding from any other structure.  We need the market to run the system so we can’t have democratic hindrances.  We don’t care enough about teaching to ensure regulated highly competitive entry to a well-paid profession. We’d like to tell you to teach what we got in our public schools, but Gove ended up an embarrassment so we backed off. We prefer tax cuts to investment, so we hope that you don’t realise that the same amount of money to educate loads more children is actually a reduction.  We’ll happily centralise everything that undermines local involvement, because we don’t trust the people to agree with us."

The good ship Royal College of Teachers seems to have run aground.  Their speaker also didn’t have much to say, so no news there either. Disappointing: I’d high hopes for it. Bennett the Behaviour Tsar recommended a fundamental text, Michael Marland's Craft of the Classroom (1975) so he's edging into my good books. Doubtless he’ll be relieved.

​We talked about curriculum and assessment change. When Balls steamrollered the impenetrable Diploma programme over us 10 years ago, it was fuelled by cash. Now that we're changing every grade every year for five years there's not a penny piece of publicity to help parents understand what's happening to their children. Why? Maybe the department don't understand it, or back it, or think democracy involves effort.
 
Her Majesty's Chief Inspector, on the other hand, was demob happy. He was semi-affable, alarming in itself. He warned schools against taking part in trash television or wasting money on charlatan consultants and mocksteds (huzzah!). He wouldn't be drawn on the Ebacc either, not even his own previous criticisms (boo!).
 
HMCI’s had quite the week. Wednesday was retro rant day: Heads are appeasers but should be Lone Warriors ‘fighting for righteousness’. Schools should be run by Teach Firsters full of vigour, not these lily-livered child-centred loons.  We need ‘bruisers and battleaxes’. (I refer you to AA Milne’s matchless Bad Sir Brian Botany) Thursday he was berating academy chains whose CEOs earn public money beyond the dreams of avarice.
 
He knows how to get into print. Unfortunately, the truth is out there. There aren't enough people to fill posts at any level, including headship. The pipeline of vigorous young leaders provides cannon fodder for academy chains to swap Heads every two or three years so nothing gets built up, only brought down. Teach Firsters quit in droves when the rhetoric of the meteoric rise crashes into the long game of quotidian relationships and real school leadership. While quality people might be attracted to a considered, responsible, vital and challenging public sector role, what kind of people aspire to be bruisers and battleaxes, exactly? And do we want them looking after the nation’s young? Why don't parents rise up as one against this stuff?  Then he started in on the private schools, so huzzah! again. Really, this is bad for my blood pressure. He is a bit right and very wrong, self-obsessed but fiercely independent. And yet, and yet – a Department yes-man to take over, or an elderly imported American?  It could actually be worse.
 
Not that schools will notice. We really won't know what day it is until 2018, when it might be safe to emerge from the stock cupboards into which we've locked ourselves and the children until the grading settles down.
 
Year 10 aren't bothered by this kind of stuff. They're being trained to sort themselves for exams.  We gather them in teaching groups, then they have to transform themselves into maths groups, then tutor groups. We did it in the dining room, using that comedy implement, the megaphone. Who's to say that its ear-splitting squawking was the Head of Year amusing herself at their expense?
 
We've got a theatre group and the Anne Frank exhibition. We had World Book Day, a brilliant transgender speaker and Severus Snape shouting ‘Hold My Wand’ to Tinkerbell as he broke up a skirmish. We had heats of the pi competition rewarded with pies. We're wrestling with the budget and the strangely short half term that the Archbishop's distraction-offer of sorting the date of Easter could really help. We're trying to balance every department's needs and probably failing.  We're still a bit cold and the new bins haven't arrived yet. Year 12 are on Science boot camp and we’ve the MultiMedia Show to look forward to soon!
 
So that’s me. I went out into the world but came back gratefully. We're working towards summer, and the light, and changing the world for the better.
 
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The new GCSE RS specification requires everyone to study Christianity and another religion. The world would be a better place if everyone understood Islam a bit better and calm teaching by skilled religious educators would be a public good. Put it in. 

​Third, bizarrely, if you do triple (separate) science, you have to do all three for two of them to count. That’s just barking. What’s wrong with doing chemistry and physics? Sort it out.

Fourth, languages. Take a deep breath. Tackling a foreign language is a hallmark of being civilised and languages rewire the brain in a particular way. I know some outstanding languages teachers, whole departments of them, but we’ve made a real pig's ear of languages education in the UK and we need to pause, reflect, plan, fund and start again. 

Why? We don’t have many languages teachers because we made languages optional at GCSE years ago. That meant fewer young people with languages A levels, fewer undergraduates und so weiter. Then there’s the British antipathy to the foreign tongue, so we behave as if languages were an unnecessary luxury. We beat ourselves up for not being like the Dutch and the Germans, but motivating a young person to learn globally dominant English is different to motivating them to learn a language for which they might not see a ready and pressing use. We should teach Mandarin and Arabic widely but that’ll take a generation and some serious funding to get the teachers.  Worth it if the result is an outbreak of global understanding?

But it gets worse. We need to overhaul how we examine languages because we do it really badly. GCSE languages are about the hardest of them all and the same paper is used for native speakers as for ab initio learners. Making any progress is hard even for acquirers of average speed, let alone those who take longer. We need a total redesign of assessment in languages so we can actually measure what children know, rather than what they don’t know. It’s a really depressing experience for a gloomed youth if, after a shedload of work with a gifted teacher over 2, 3 or 5 years he ends up with an F or a G. No Ebacc for you, chum, no matter how hard you’ve worked.

Which is my fifth point. Hiding under its umbrella of aspiration and rigour, the Ebacc is outrageously unfair and a denigration of slow and steady learners. There are two ways of solving this. If Ebacc was a progress rather than a threshold measure then it would encourage all learners to have a go at some hard stuff. If it was assessed at level 1 as well as level 2 we might have an education system that embraced rigour, knowledge and integrity for all. What does it say about us if we only value the swift? What does the fable say?

Year 11 are deep in the alternative reality of maths. There’s a joke doing the rounds from the States: ‘math, the only place in the world where someone buys 60 watermelons and no-one wonders why’. Today’s question considers Joe who bought a hot dog, a coffee and a cheese sandwich (and a prescription for statins), then Sita who buys two unspecified snacks followed immediately by Sam who wants a saxophone.  Sam’s in the wrong shop: he needs geography or business as well as maths and he needs music to be valued too. For the government as well as year 11 there is much work ahead.
 
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26.1.16

I borrowed the album: it wasn’t so much the songs but the friendly act that remains, the realisation at 12 that I could listen to the stuff that the cool kids liked, that Ziggy could tell a story that chimed enough with the little I knew of life to know that it was true like poetry was true. Life on Mars made perfect sense. ​

​The distance between my school days and how schools think now is like infinite space. In the 70s most of us looked on exams and assessment as a god-awful small affair, hoping that a bit of work at the end, aptitude, native wit and a winning smile would see us into adult life. I was pretty vague about revision. ​​We got our O level results by post and I can still see the envelope as it wetly arrived on a campsite in Wales containing what could be charitably described as mixed news.   
 
We had an envelope day this week. Year 11 mock results given out a bit like the real thing, in the hall. Tears for fears, praise and blame, now let’s go and talk about what it means. Some want teachers to open the envelope for them. I overheard a friend offering advice ‘You’ll have done more work than that in the summer, though, won’t you?’ The cheesy staging of the event has an effect.
 
Yet the exams that we practice are more like the 70s now than people realize. We use the supporting structures that we’ve developed over recent years when we were clear about assessment and grade boundaries, and what examiners are looking for, when we make predictions and divide up our young people according to the help they need. The trouble is that the goalposts have moved and are set to move every year until 2019 when proposed national benchmark tests bear fruit. GCSE results are a zero-sum game now where a school can only improve if another declines. The old numbers mean nothing. Grades are changing, the papers are harder and schools must plot in the new territory.  Nothing wrong with that in theory, but we never have a year when we don’t have young people taking the things so we can’t experiment in the lab before it really matters to someone.
 
Talking with Professor Michael Young of the Institute this week we chewed this over. Having booted the knowledge debate into the centre of the park in 2009 he argues that instruments of accountability (results) don’t define the educational goals of a school and that ‘satisfying efficiency criteria’ is not an end in itself. 

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

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

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

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

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

Item 1: GCSE grade 5. G5, as a spiffy young colleague called it, is the new C. G5 is where the measuring will happen, a bit higher than C, more of a B-lite. Got it? Our KS3 plan (taken us 9 months) won’t quite work so we needed to adjust, on Monday too. Stop me if I’m boring you. It’s not a big deal, but we’ll have to do a shedload of work again and it gives the lie to Morgan promises about lead-in time and workload. Who knew?

Staying calm, let us contemplate item 2: the EBacc, now compulsory for everyone starting year 7 in 2016. We’ll have to think. We spread KS4 over three years to develop a bit of depth, but that means we need to be ready for September 2018, which isn’t long if you have to retool without any money. We quite fancy a TBacc, which is EBacc with Tallis bonus, but we’re not through thinking yet. Perhaps we’ll install one of those French barber’s pole affairs as a foxy addition to our foyer, and just remove an A. It’s enough to make you yearn for a Gauloise. 

And now, ta-dah! Item 3: a school is coasting if fewer than 60 per cent of pupils get 5+GCSEs A*-C with English and Maths. Or, after 2016, if our yet-to-be-defined progress measures aren’t up to scratch. Hmm. Wouldn’t it be great if the coasting measure was ready before it was introduced. Wouldn’t it be great if the 60% figure meant anything more than adding 50% to Gove’s 40% which just doubled the number Ed Balls first thought of. Wouldn’t it be great if accountability wasn’t driven by the Regional Schools Commissioners’ academisation targets? Wouldn’t it be great if teachers had been consulted? Wouldn’t it be great if the progress measures weren’t loaded at the top end to make it easier for leafy or grammar schools? And has anyone thought about teacher supply? Even academies don’t have spare mathematicians stacked ready in cupboards. However, all will be well if you have a credible plan, hard to devise on Planet Incredible.

Item 4 to ensure that our cups runnethed over: OFSTED published a jolly new handbook.  

Our professional associations are desperately trying to help the DfE understand that you can’t simultaneously promise stability but bring upheaval if you don’t want to look like an idiot. I blame the posh schools they all went to: did their character education not include honesty or restraint (let alone foresight, common sense or an understanding of averages)?

Anyway, we continue tripping and the glorious galleries and museums of the capital are alive with Tallis turquoise. We have a brilliant photo of year 9s looking at Tracey Emin’s bed. Concentrating hard and respectfully, knowing it’s an important piece they still look slightly bamboozled, as if they can’t quite see it yet, as if they don’t quite get it. They will, because it does make sense and skilled teachers will get them to articulate a measured personal appreciation and decide if its art or not.     

I’ve seen the same expression on the faces of headteachers this week. We’re looking hard at all the policies but we don’t quite get it yet. It looks like Gove, but Nicky Morgan said she would take it steadily. It looks like playing politics with schools the same as everyone else has, but she says some Heads are complacent. I know heads who are tall or short, saints or loons, tutting or sobbing but I’ve not met a complacent one this century. This week’s policies are Tracy Emin’s Bed so bear with: I haven’t quite got it yet.  

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Gove’s Ebacc was too small. It didn’t include an arts or practical subject. I assume this was so it wouldn’t look like the National Curriculum, which enshrined an entitlement to the broad and balanced curriculum including the arts. So, this happened. The requirements of the NC were lifted, pressures to increase results every year increased, schools focused time and money on English and maths, undervalued arts withered and died.  No one banned arts, but everything else was compulsory. Labour and Coalition trussed up schools in the lunatic knitting of cash flow and the performance tables.    

Arts decline easily. Despite our pre-eminence as a creative nation, we leave culture to the same divisive market forces as everything else. We don’t prioritise access to the arts in school because Secretaries of State say things like ‘I want England to be top five PISA for English and maths by 2020’.  They don’t realise that if state schools have to increase time and funding for maths and English then other things go and the arts deficit isn’t made up by children going to the opera with their parents. 

As I remarked to the tea towels, politicians misunderstand the purpose of education and are diverted by falsehoods. Here are 7 that were comprehensively debunked by the OECD earlier this month.

1. Disadvantaged pupils always do badly in school: no, successful systems mitigate social inequalities.
   
2. Immigrants lower results: no, not anywhere. 
3. It’s all about money: no, there is no correlation.
4. Smaller class sizes raise standards: no, teacher quality and workload reduction raise standards.
5. Comprehensive systems are fair but you need academic selection for higher results: no, there is no tracking, streaming or grade repetition in top performing systems.
6. The digital world needs new subjects and a wider curriculum: no, in top systems the curriculum is rigorous, with subjects taught well and in great depth.
7. Success is about being born talented: no, all children can achieve at very high levels. Top systems  "level up" so that all students meet standards formerly expected only from elite students.

 
So if the current SoS wants to be top 5 she’s going to have to look coolly at some vote-losing issues:

1. Stop describing poor families as a drain on the system
2. Stop talking rubbish about immigration
3. Stop fiddling with school funding
4. Sort out teacher recruitment and workload
5. Value comprehensive schools
6. Stop adding things to the curriculum
7. Believe that all children can learn

A more equal society raises standards and a less equal one depresses them. Schools should enable children to build a better future and wedge the doors open to their cultural birthright, starting with the arts. Systematically open up the palaces of privilege and high culture. Dial down the exclusive rhetoric on STEM and the economic functionality of education, talk up the balance of things that help children fly.  Architects need artistry, maths and music go hand in hand, science needs philosophy, drama explains everything and what is life without poetry?

At Tallis every week is culture week but children still need persuading that this is theirs too. So this week we've hosted a world famous violinist, 100 year 8s have made a film, year 9 premiered a National Theatre competition performance, sixth form artists are in Berlin, we hosted hundreds of little dancers from primary schools yesterday and trained colleagues from a nearby PRU. We value equality and justice and culture opens doors.  Education to understand the world and change it for the better.

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26.2.15