Dear Mr Williamson,
 
I hope you’re bearing up under the workload I suggested a fortnight ago. I imagine your action plan is coming along beautifully. And me? Inspired by a Norwegian visitor, I’ve been thinking about free school meals. How the Vikings have changed over the centuries.
 
A long time ago in a school far away I was in charge of the free meals queue. This was a Friday lunch duty where children eligible for free meals queued up to get dinner tickets for the following week. In that school, in the 90s, children who paid for meals paid with cash, but free meals children had tickets. (In another school everyone had tickets but free meals were a different colour). Anyway, the free tickets queue seems a brutal way of doing it, to modern eyes. We might as well have put a sign up saying ‘Poor kids, line up here’. I used to try to make it The Line to Be In with song-and-dance routines and jokes as well as top-notch training in the conventions of queuing.  
 
Technology freed us from this and changed the world for the better. Cashless catering preloads free meals money.  Everyone pays the same, rich and poor fingers alike, no one needs to know who’s free. 
 
Free school meals are of course our major proxy for deprivation, for the children who have the biggest struggle in life and who, nationally speaking, tend to do less well at school. Some of your predecessors in Sanctuary Buildings haven’t liked to speak of such things. Your dear old predecessor Gove was prone to call any reference to differences in achievement mapped against poverty as ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, blaming teachers for self-fulfilling unequal expectations. I haven’t heard you on the matter but doubtless you concur.
 
The self-fulfilling thing is insidious the other way though. A report by the redoubtable Sutton Trust into why normal people can’t afford to live in London makes some interesting comments about how rich people picture themselves in contradistinction to the poor.
 
Top earners do not see themselves as "especially fortunate" because they are "surrounded by numerous other people like themselves", says the study. The report warns of a social and geographical separation, with very affluent people in London having infrequent contact with those facing much tougher circumstances. They are likely to espouse values of meritocracy, while being part of a process that has seen social mobility becoming less likely.
 
In plain English, sir, if you will, that means that rich people never mix with poor people. They don’t understand that security of wealth also secures educational advantage. They assume they do well because of their own efforts, because they were naturally born cleverer, harder-working, more insightful, go-getting, resilient, plucky rather than lucky. That chap who plays Lewis’s cross oppo thinks along these lines.
 
However, policies made exclusively by those who have never had a moment’s anxiety about paying the rent or putting food on the table have a tendency to blame the vulnerable for their lack of gumption and devise direr punishments for poverty. It leads to universal credit inflexibility, drains schools and hospitals of money, closes libraries, sports centres and youth clubs, derides the public service and blames the poor for not being richer. It makes it unacceptable to draw a line between poverty and the experiences that lead to educational success, despite the education system being designed to reflect, support and reproduce the experiences of the rich, in the wake of cultural capital. Why would you want to face a terrible human problem when you can just tell people its unseemly to mention it?
 
We’ve had a community day at Tallis today on celebrating diversity, though we tend not to include divisions between rich and poor in such events. At first lunch I struck out with my warmed-up stew and berthed alongside a shipmate who was about to launch a sonnet with year 8, namely, Robert Hayden’s beautiful tribute to the remarkable slave and liberator Frederick Douglass:  
 
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,  
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,  
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,  
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:  
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro  
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world  
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,  
this man, superb in love and logic, this man  
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,  
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives  
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
 
Mr Williamson, your people of the comprehensive schools have a dream like this of education as a beautiful and terrible thing, necessary as air, and useful as earth. We want a world where none is ignorant, none excluded or alienated. Yes, we aim to teach the rhetoric, legends, poems and wreaths of bronze.  But we do it focusing on the flesh-and-blood lives that we try to grow. We do it despite struggle, injustice, poverty and the wilful misunderstandings of those who have everything to lose by flinging open the gates of opportunity, of London and saying – take your place, you’re welcome.
 
Mr Williamson, seize the day. Abolishing child poverty is the beautiful, needful thing that would garland you with sonnets. Wouldn’t that be worth trying?
 
As ever,
 
Carolyn Roberts

CR
​24.1.20

Readers will be dismayed to know that I plan more blogs for 2020, but potentially delighted that I will address the Secretary of State for Education directly. I think he needs help, and I intend to offer it.
 
Dear Mr Williamson
I hope you’re familiar with Eddie and the Hot Rods’ magnificent 1977 hit ‘Do anything you wanna do’. I heard it again last week and thought of you. Though you were only one when it bounced up the charts I expect your parents took the trouble to introduce you to its lively beat and compelling chorus. I know Scarborough a bit and I can well imagine that later, you’d be keen to leave it all behind and search for adventure, that you must then have got tired of doing day jobs with no thanks for what you do and other sentiments so briskly expressed by Mr Rods. 
Now you’re grown up and in your quest to become someone I note (from your twitting) that you’re looking forward to working hard, so I investigated your areas of responsibility to find out what on. You’re in charge of early years, children’s social care, teachers’ pay, the school curriculum, school improvement, academies and free schools, further education, apprenticeships and skills and higher education. Dearie me, what an exhausting list.

Even on first glance this landscape is littered with potholes: troubled families, the death of nursery schools, austerity’s child poverty, catastrophic teacher recruitment failures, Ofsted’s key stage saga, improving a zero-sum performance system where half of schools and a third of children have to fail, sorting out school place planning without any place planning, unconditional university offers and that’s just the stuff I know about.  It’s a good job you’re an up-beat, can-do sort.

However, I bring tidings of great joy. All of these areas of work are overrun with highly trained people who are obsessed with making them better. They’ve committed their lives to this, regardless of pay, working conditions, public recognition etc. They like children and are brim full of resilience, optimism, pluck, determination and all the other attributes that people like you like. They can easily help you with the challenges you face.

Exempli gratia, a few thoughts from me. Reinstate Sure Start, reinforce nursery schools and the fabulous pedagogical skills of early years teachers. Work with colleagues to sort out low wages and benefits so that families can eat without relying on foodbanks. Build social housing so that families can set up home with stability and dignity. Make good on the jolly recruitment advert with the science teacher and sort out entry into teaching, pay and working conditions (#everylessonshapesalife). Make the National Curriculum binding on all schools and decide openly on what you want, without using Ofsted as underground shock troops. Fund inspection properly so they can do a thorough professional job. Remove the language of pass and fail at GCCSE: the grades speak for themselves. Give school place planning back to the local authorities so we don’t waste money and trap children in schools that are failing or will never get off the ground. Tackle university entrance with a proper, lengthy, serious commission of inquiry. That should get you started.   
  
I expect you think of yourself as an alpha male and having been a Chief Whip, I’m sure you know how to get the best out of people. Anyway, you might like this exchange overheard at the end of the day:

Year 11 tutor: In you come chaps, coats off.
Year 11 boy: But I’m an alpha male, sir.
Year 11 tutor: Then you won’t need any help with the buttons.  
 
Sometimes even the best of us needs help and it would be a wonderful novelty to work together. So as the man says, why don't you ask them what they expect from you? Why don't you tell them what you are gonna do? And, a radical thought for a new decade, why don’t you do it in that order?

Yours,
CR

​8.1.20

May I recommend some musical chaps? There’s a folky outfit called The Young ‘Uns who have a great line in singing the zeitgeist. I first encountered their song ‘Benefits Street’ and am pretty au fait with the whole catalogue now.  As I write this in the aftermath of Fishmongers’ Hall I’m particularly thinking about ‘Carriage 12’ about the 2015 attack on the Thalys Train 9364 to Paris. One of the main reasons I like them, though, is that they are Teessiders so they sing with my accent. A bit like Steph McGovern crossed with Reeves and Mortimer.

I’m not blessed with the clearest of speech. I stutter when I’m not speaking at volume and it seems that people (by which I mean southerners) find the accent initially hard to assimilate. It’s like flat Geordie or Yorkshire spoken by a Liverpudlian. My grandmother, late of Tyneside, moved to Teesside in 1930 and would accept none of it. She suppressed her native Geordie and sent my mother to elocution lessons to inflate her vowels. Cash which could, frankly, have been put to better use.

My childhood didn’t require me to learn Received Pronunciation and I met few who spoke it. I didn’t have to reflect much on the matter until I went to London and mixed with some posh types. One of those, ironically set to welcome new undergraduates, looked over my head at another second-year and said ‘You know, I can’t understand a word this girl says’. I’d won trophies for debating and reading aloud and have never been backward in coming forward but I didn’t say what was clearly required: ‘I beg your pardon? How rude.’ Still today, I see blank incomprehension wash across the faces of people who expect that someone like me will speak something like them and have to resign themselves to actually listening.

I can place a northeastern accent pretty accurately, for what it’s worth, from beautifully-moderated Northumbrian and exuberant Geordie through light Wearside to the guttural tones of the Boro. Educated, grammatical, precise, accented: clearly comprehensible, music to my ears. I overheard some experienced gents in the staff briefing discussing a common heritage in the dialects of Staffordshire, placing different tones in different towns. 

These both are of limited utility in south-east London, which is probably a good thing. While adult accents here are rich and varied, the melting-pot tones of the young when talking to each other are joyously similar. Far from decrying the common estuarine-isation of future generations it rather fills me with hope. Perhaps if we all spoke alike we’d find common cause more easily, another barrier broken down. We couldn’t make crass judgments about class, wealth or character, as if they’re linked, as soon as someone opens their mouth.

Why is this on my mind? The tragedy of Fishmongers’ Hall has been painful in so many ways. People killed while serving others. Political capital being made against the explicit will of a family. Shallow reactions in ludicrous lurid headlines blaming impossible causes. Such events are reported in the way these things are, but I’m also troubled by what might seem an insignificant detail. Both of the principled young people killed have been endlessly described as ‘Cambridge graduates’. So they were, both having done an excellent further degree which helped them in their dream of saving the lost. They were, however, also a Manchester graduate and an Anglia Ruskin graduate - so why the emphasis on Cambridge? Outrage that even people from ancient universities aren’t safe from wickedness? Surprise that such people might find themselves in danger? An attempt unhelpfully to tribalise? Is a Cambridge graduate assumed to be worth more in memory than another? I’m pretty sure Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt didn’t think that.

The new PISA report tells us that ‘life satisfaction’ of 15-year-olds across the UK has fallen faster than in any other country with comparable data over the last three years. Students in the UK were also much less likely to report a ‘sense of meaning in life’ than their peers. The report notes a correlation between life satisfaction and 15-year-olds’ fear of failing is stronger for the UK than the OECD average. In fact, its stronger than almost every other country.  One proffered explanation is that UK young people take PISA tests in the build-up to high-stakes GCSE exams.  When else could they take them? Almost any point in schooling is now part of a run-up to high-stakes exams.
And so our commodification of the young obliterates their innate value. They worry, they lose hope, they feel their life has little meaning and even in tragic death are described by the educational brand still stamped on them. Jack and Saskia had a vision for a better society, in which a person’s quality might be judged by their ability to change, to learn, to start again and to endure. Anything we put in the way of that, any crass, shallow, populist, elitist, cheap or divisive measurement makes our children miserable and undermines our collective future. Let our national memorial to these two principled people be society based on equality, understanding and hope.    
 
CR 6.12.19

I often tell you that I’m looking out of the window. I wouldn’t want you to think that’s all I did, but my window – as is befitting – is a particularly interesting one with much to see. It’s sometimes so interesting that I have to intervene. On Wednesday I looked up and saw a small person sitting on a bench at A Time Not Authorised for Sitting Outside. Fortunately a teacher much more experienced with the older sort skidded to a halt and parked himself. I watched their deep conversation during which it transpired that she’d taken being ‘sent out’ literally.  Children in the northeast used always to describe being sent out as being ‘flung out’, conjuring an image of centrifugal force, but even that didn’t extend to leaving the building. 

You never know what they don’t know. We discovered some 16-year-olds yesterday who’d never played a board game, had no idea of the conventions, didn’t know any card games. They were offered this chance as part of the Tallis Choices Community Day. Younger year groups had time on sustainability, relationships, violence, drugs and careers, but year 11 get a bit of support in how to make the right choices in a year full of exams. This included what to do to relax, on the grounds that many of them are a bit anxious, and mocks start in a fortnight. Yoga, team games, board games, relaxation, meditation and a bit of optional crochet. 

But you never know how they see themselves. One chap who’d opted for the crochet fetched up in XFN Study Hall (expectations, effort, engagement) with it later and calmly sat down to while away an hour with the wool. XFN isn’t optional and it’s only for those who’re strangers to the flashcard. You don’t have time to crochet quotations from An Inspector Calls even in 1 hour 45 exam, so that little bit of creativity had to be suppressed.  Kindly. There are places to relax and there are places to work.

And places where sitting zipped into your puffa with your bag on your back ready to spring is a little unnerving.  Year 12 were debating all day and I muscled in to judge the final. The chair was inexperienced and keen to learn, but didn’t look very relaxed and also had to be warned about applauding one side more than the other. Be more Bercow, I advised. On the way in I followed some people so tall I couldn’t see their heads, boys whom the gutter press would characterise as arrogant yobboes, clinging to one another in case they have to articulate an unprepared thought. ‘I’m going to sit next to you. I can’t speak out loud even if I’m asked’. Mind, off-the cuff may make more sense than another who confidently told me ‘you can catch death from meningitis’.

Either of which were preferable to year 11 on healthy eating. How was it? ‘It’s all about the poo, Miss. You’ve got to get it just right.’  Thank you, indeed it is. Oh look, there’s someone I can talk to about the weather.

Or politics! Which brings me neatly to heads’ priorities for school funding which I’d like to share with you in the necessary purdah-imperative spirit of impartiality, having taken my puffa off.

• An adequately-funded National Funding Formula for all schools
• Proper funding for SEND and High Needs provision which is in crisis
• Adequate post-16 per pupil funding rising from £4000 to £4760, not £4188 as planned
• Funding for social care, policing, counselling, behaviour support and all the other unfunded extras now expected and required of schools

• A published 10 Year funding plan as recommended by the Education Select Committee
• Clarity about future costs and future revenue streams
• Salary increases fully funded by new money.
• An independently verified benchmarking tool for school funding
• Independent statistical analysis so the system doesn’t have to rely on the IFS and EPI for accurate and unvarnished funding analysis. (On this last, government have referred to a headline investment of £14 billion into schools and the UK Statistics Agency riposted  “There is, however, a risk that the figures could mislead: for example, people who read no further might expect that the headline figure of £14 billion refers to an annual increase.  We therefore encourage the Department and Ministers to continue to provide appropriate context when making statements on school funding.” 

 
Does this sound unreasonable? I don’t think so. If we really cared about children we’d have 10-year funding plans which couldn’t be unpicked by governments. Children’s futures are too important to leave to politicians.
 
I discovered a brilliant poem two weeks ago, Anne Carson on Troy.  It ends

‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’

Available in more than 360 languages, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is the most translated document in the world. It provides a foundation for a just and decent future for everyone, and gives people everywhere a powerful tool in the fight against oppression and affronts to human dignity.

The declaration is 70 years old this year and Ai Weiwei has designed a flag to celebrate it, which we’ve got three of.  Some of our children went to meet him and all of our children have looked closely at the declaration on our very successful community day on 19 June. We had a wonderful display of pennants of rights all around the concourse, but weather intervened and they had to go.
 
You could stop reading at this point and watch the film, but just in case I’m invited to become PM in the absence of any other reasonable candidate, I thought you should be reassured about our stance on Human Rights at Tallis. 
It is very important that we all know and support these hard-won rights which protect and support us all. Here they are, very briefly paraphrased by me:
​

1. Human beings are born free and equal
2. Everyone in the world is entitled to these rights and freedoms
3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person
4. Slavery must be outlawed
5. Torture or inhuman punishment is outlawed
6. Everyone must be recognised before the law
7. Everyone has an equal right to the law
8. Every country should uphold these rights
9. No one should be arbitrarily arrested, detained or exiled
10. Rights should be upheld fairly and publicly
11. People are innocent until proved guilty
12. Private and family life, honour and reputation must be protected
13. People may freely move around the world
14. Asylum from persecution should be provided internationally
15. Everyone has the right to a nationality
16. Marriage should be freely and equally entered into and dissolved
17. Everyone has the right to own property and not have it taken off them arbitrarily
18. People must have freedom of thought, conscience and religion
19. People must have freedom of opinion and expression
20. People must be free to assemble and associate peacefully
21. People need free elections, democracy and public services
22. Social security and cultural rights are needed to safeguard the dignity of the person
23. Everyone has a right to work, equal pay, trade unions and protection against unemployment
24. Everyone has a right to leisure, limited working hours and holidays with pay
25. Everyone has a right to basic healthcare, especially children and mothers
26. Education must be free, accessible and allow for full personal development
27. Everyone has a right to culture, arts, science and the fruits of their own production
28. Everyone has a right to a social order which protects all of these
29. Everyone has duties to the community
30. No one may try to destroy any of these rights and freedoms.

Here, in this advanced democracy, now, I’m worried about 17 of these. I’m worried about the Hostile Environment policy, internet trolling that destroys lives, vanishing public services, removal of legal aid for the poorest, zero-hours contracts and the functionalism of education. I could go on.

One of those rights, of course, is to an education. Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre includes a wonderful sculptured layout of 90 tonnes of straightened steel reinforcing bars from substandard regional government buildings that didn’t survive the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. So many of them were schools which collapsed on top of the children and teachers. When I saw it in the Royal Academy a couple of years ago it was like seeing the timbers of Aberfan laid out before you, and hearing the cries of crushed children.

But young people are defined by optimism and they love to learn something new. Our film explains their ‘favourite’ human rights and gives a flavour of the deep learning that happened on that day. And one of the groups came up with this. The future’s in safe hands.

I was minding my own business on the jolly old Southeastern into London Bridge when my attention was arrested by a poster advertising a grammar school served by the same locomotive. It asked rather loudly, ‘HAVE YOU JUST BEEN DEEMED SELECTIVE BY BEXLEY’S 11+ TEST?’

Immune to the concerns of other passengers I approached and photographed this shameless assault on language and then asked everyone on the mothership what it meant. I don’t allow that kind of talk at Tallis so no one knew.  Consulting the ether, apparently, ‘deemed selective’ is the status a child attains who has passed the 11+. Charming.   
I’m trying to keep up with the reading so I’ve already told you about Robert Verkaik and Melissa Benn this year. Now I’m going to tell you about another bonza tome, Miseducation : inequality, education and the working classes by Cambridge and LSE Emeritus Professor Diane Reay. Brought up on the Derbyshire coalfield, she taught in London primary schools for 20 years, so she knows a thing or two. It’s very readable.

Her first chapter, Why can’t education compensate for society? sets out her thesis. Both class and poverty have always distanced working class children from education, but recent fads and interventions have made this worse, not better.   

Focusing on test scores as a measure of school quality has a particularly dangerous effect on schools which serve largely poor communities. Those pressures – and their leaders’ choices - lead to narrowed curriculums and obsessive teaching-to-the-test largely unknown by more advantaged children whose teachers are more confident about results.   

Schools serving poorer communities have a majority of young and inexperienced teachers, committed and determined but rarely from similar backgrounds to the children. They may have been skimpily trained on programmes which stress the adoption of particular practices (fancy uniform, zero tolerance) said to be modelled on the public schools, but which rarely exist there.

Schools justify these hideous proxies because they say they need to re-shape children’s character and outlook in order for them to succeed. Some go further, saying that children from ‘chaotic’ homes need order and structure in school to be able to free themselves from the lives their parents lead. Some – fee-paying as well as and normal schools – equate parental worth with cars and holidays, a ‘nice house’.    
   
In this way, loose talk about social mobility becomes a frontal assault on the parenting of those trapped in poverty. ‘This education will give you a good life, better than your parents’. Ergo, your parents are deficient, shameful, they have let you down. Reay uses a clear phrase here, describing ‘shame as the darker side of optimism’. Optimism is expected in school, or at least its functional twin, aspiration. Optimism is natural to young people despite teenage gloom. Aspiration is more specific, always linked to hard work, good exam results and university entry. In this way, social mobility is outsourced to the child: if he isn’t sufficiently aspirational he throws away his chance of escaping poverty. It’s his fault.  

In a chapter called Class Feeling: troubling the soul and preying on the psyche’ Reay quotes from extensive interviews with children in primary schools where they define themselves by their grades, where they ‘know’ that they’ll have a ‘bad life’ if they get a ‘bad score’. This focus on grades above all, she says, has ‘shifted children’s self-identification as learners’. They are their grades, not their efforts and their insights. If grades are bad, they must be bad, and unworthy of escaping poverty.

While advantaged children also suffer from soul-destroying commodification by potential exam results, they do not have to engage in ‘rational computation’ in order to meet the goals that best suit their interests. If you ‘know’ that you will go to Oxford (Cambridge, St Andrew’s, Durham, Imperial or wherever) because that’s where people like you always go, you don’t have to think much about it. Everything about your life has readied you to get in. You are fine being yourself, you don’t have to learn to become someone else. Oh, and personal private tutoring is built into the family budget. 

So, not only do many poor children go to schools where the teacher shortage really bites, but some of the newly-popular ways of running schools are deliberately framed as places where children have to disown their parents.  From a position of poverty (30% of all children now), they are expected to value material success as an output of education which, if they fail, is their fault for not aiming high enough. While current policy claims to try to raise working-class achievement, by its approach and funding it actually ensures that failure is firmly located in the working class.  If you remain working class like your parents, you are a failure.  What kind of madness is this?
Uninformed madness. 'A plethora of spectacular educational irrelevancies such as standards, testing regimes, raising attainment and achievement levels, league tables, school choice, academies and charter schools, performativities and managerialism, image and impression management, academic/vocational streaming, punitive naming and shaming strategies and the rhetoric of school improvement and school effectiveness have obscured the crucial importance of social class to educational success.’

What does work? Reay says: collaboration rather than setting and streaming. Intense personal learning relationships between teacher and child that empower students as ‘knowers’. Passionate engagement, original thought. And perhaps working towards an answer to the question ‘why English education has never embraced approaches that work and adopts those that don’t?’ Grammar schools, anyone?  Why bother with the 11+ test? The evidence shows that the ‘deemed selective’ child was actually selected much earlier.

Anyway, the reason I was on the train to start with was to go on the Worth Less? school funding march. We were, as the organisers said, ‘relentlessly reasonable’ and have carried on being so this week as the sheer effrontery of the DFE claim about funding has been systematically unpicked and exposed as shameless falsehood. The UK Statistics Authority is calling it in for investigation, so all power to their spreadsheets and swivel chairs (which is how I picture them).  

I was directing traffic and some year 8 boys passed me. One said to the other ‘I’m praying for something good to come out of it’.  Who knows what that problem was, but Amen to that.
 
CR
4.10.18

Welcome to new readers. I write a blog at least once a fortnight and more often if I feel particularly opinionated about something. Some blogs contain useful information, but there’s a lot of that elsewhere on the website, so these pieces are reflections on the state of education as seen, 39 weeks a yea,r on Kidbrooke Park Road.
This week’s piece is in two parts. Part 1 is before our children come back to us, part 2 after. I’ll tell you how the day went!
 
September 6th 2017 part 1

We’ve talked and tidied and ourselves for two days since the holidays ended and now we’re ready to welcome our young people back. We think we’re ready now, so we’ll fling wide the gates and get the show on the road for another year. Term begins with welcomes to new starters – largely year 7 and year 12 – lots of assemblies, raucous and refined reunions, some tears (from anxious parents) and a lot of hugging. Day 1 is peak hug, which is saying something.

Saying goodbye in the summer term is a really strange experience. We have a lovely last morning, a bit of a celebration and then everyone walks away and disappears back into the undergrowth. People joke about schools being very peaceful without children but actually, they’re not schools at all without children, just big public buildings filled with emptiness and unanswered questions. Two odd ones today. What’s the difference between a noticeboard and a sound baffle? and Have we enough desks?  I’ve never given the former a moment’s thought or thought to worry about the latter. I expect it’ll all be fine. What if I’m wrong?  No-one’ll be able to hear anything and everyone’ll have to squash up for a day or so. Of all the things I lost sleep over in August, they didn’t remotely feature. Cripes.

September is simultaneously the best and worst time to do new things in school. It’s the obvious time because it’s good to make improvements with a fresh start, and the worst because the holidays wipe your memory and you can’t remember the motivation for arcane changes. How did we say we’d avoid that bottleneck? No, really? Cor blimey. A new rota, please, pronto.

I’m not so cavalier about the other questions we think about before the year begins. Why are we teachers? What are we doing it for? What do we really want for our nations’ young people? Do we have any way at all of measuring it? I’ve not written yet about this year’s exam results, apart from the information on the website here. In a nutshell? Sixth form results were jolly good again, with lots of young people getting a great boost into next thing. Year 11 results are a bit impenetrable this year, as Mr Tomlin’s Q and A document explains here: everything’s changed again and will change again again next year. In both sets of results some amazing achievements at all levels, some triumphs against adversity, some just deserts, some inexplicables, some wild inaccuracy, some re-marks. Is it too soon to hope for a new emphasis on our children as children, not examination yields?

If only other education stories in the news had been so equivocal. In what seemed like three ghastly days we had scandals about pay, exams and sixth form admissions. I expect that parents are at a loss as to what Heads think they’re doing?  May I offer a thought?  If, nationally, we can’t agree whether it’s important to hitch up our international PISA scores or worry about children’s mental health, in a system so deregulated that no one can speak for anyone else, we shouldn’t be surprised if people make odd decisions. Confused? Who isn’t? Let me get back to my sound baffles.

We’ve committed ourselves at Tallis this week to keeping our eyes firmly on our children as children, on what they need to fulfil themselves today and this year. We’re thinking about our broad curriculum, our commitment to inclusion and our diverse community. We’re thinking about persistence, discipline, imagination, collaboration and inquisitiveness. We’re concentrating on kindness, fairness, respect, honesty and cheerfulness. We’ll do that all year, every year, and we’ll teach our young people everything we know. At a time of nuclear threat and wickedness the world over, we’ll strengthen their hands through education so they understand the world and can change it for the better. 

CR 5.9.17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not many jokes this week, apols. I thought I'd try to explain something about school funding cuts so that, as we go into the darkness, everyone understands just why an anodyne lie from government leads to heads having to switch the lights off.
 
There’s a great campaign called #whatwouldyoucut but because I don’t really know how to tweet I haven’t contributed much. Nonetheless, the question is the right one. And, because we’re like that at Tallis, we have a list. Hold that outrage, it's not a list of what we would cut, but the things that a conservative government with a functionalist view of education informed by nostalgia, class constructs, elitism, obsession with the markets and sheer not-knowing-what-we-do-all-day-ness think we should do without. The list is about the extra things about which we shouldn't forget to tell an inspector calling. Mr Tomlin and Mr Nicholls are list-keepers-general for this purpose, thank you Sirs. It includes (fanfare drumroll deep breath)
 
Workshops, visiting authors, dance and drama companies. Trips and visits (about 150 a year) near and far,  the mosque, the Wallace Collection, Norway. Performances and exhibitions. Competitions: debating, football, anything. Prince's Teaching Institute work (school of the week twice). Creative studying group workshops for year 10. Maths Day rock competition (and the concert tickets we won). GCSE Pod, the revision app (top 7% of users in country). Artsmark (hoping to get the platinum award). Thomas Tallis Centre for Contemporary Art, our Tate Exchange project (we're the only Associate school). The Shakespeare Schools Festival. The Wandering Bears photographic collective for year 9 & 10. Mentoring between years 12 and 11/7. A reduced curriculum in year 11 for those struggling (with additional maths and English support provided). PET Xi intensive specialist revision, weekend and holiday support sessions. Year 8 boys visiting primaries to read with their students. Primary school science workshops. 36 clubs (from ukulele & astronomy to ninja school). World Challenge To Ecuador. Charlton Athletic Academy. Tech Club and the go- bat-cart, Productions, (We Will Rock You in 2016). Year 7 and 8 outdoor events in June 2016, the jolly old Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, counselling, internal elections (mayoral, general elections, Brexit, school council). Teens and Toddlers Programme, attendance reward trips. International links with Taiwan. Free tea for staff at break time, Parent Coffee Mornings every week, a weekly newsletter with 1700+ subscribers. Psychologists, family support, on-call behaviour support. 
 
We’ve  got them on our list and they'd all of 'em be missed. Not that they're about to disappear at Tallis, I'm just showing the working needed to balance a budget.
 
I bet some readers are thinking 'some of those sound pretty cheap, so why the panic. Won't they carry on with less money, or are teachers doing that goodwill thing they did years ago?'. May I explain a bit about this?
 
Our money comes to us in age-weighted pupil units. We spend it on employing the teachers we need to teach the number of children we have, and ancillary services. Saying that money to schools is increasing doesn't prove anything other than that there are more children. More children need more teachers. (They're hard to find, so they're getting more expensive, but that's another story). If the amount of funding per pupil isn't enough to pay the teachers we need, then we have to cut.
 
Schools look at making other savings before they look at cutting teaching. That means less money for books, equipment and suchlike. Exams are expensive: up to £200k a year in a big school and we can't reduce that - though why the examination boards have to be profit-making and not free to schools is a mystery to me. If like us you have a  PFI building with an annual charge to the school budget you can't save money on building maintenance, costs or heating, which is what schools traditionally do in hard times. We can't let it out and make money, because it's not ours. 
 
So, heads finally look at how to take money from the teaching budget, by reducing the number of teachers or by having cheaper ones. If you reduce the number then you have to increase class sizes or increase the hours a week that a teacher teaches, or both.
 
Once either of the above happens, then, with the best will in the world, teachers have to reserve their energies for the day job. If you don't get a free period until Wednesday your capacity to run a club or a team, or a revision session is limited. If lunchtime's shortened so that supervision is safer with the same expenditure, then your day's more pressured. 
 
School trips take a bit of planning so the time for that might be hard to find. Trips require teachers to be covered, which costs either extra school staffing or supply teachers.
 
And don't get me started on schools that only employ young teachers because they're cheap. Young is buzzy but older is important and young people need to know that wise people dedicate their lives to their service. I was a young teacher once. 
 
Oh, and all those insights about how our children need pastoral care and help with the worries and anxieties that the twin pressures of cool and school bring? Forget them. Skilled support staff are expensive too, and there's no separate budget for them.
 
Does that help understand the debate? Does Philip Hammond understand why Band Night with 20 acts is important? Will Justine Greening calm an angry child? Can George Osborne give us a bit of his retainer to keep the visits going? Hands up at the back there, if the teacher can see that far. 
 
I'd found a hat on the floor and recognised it as one I'd confiscated and returned a while ago. After a week I sought its owner and there was an emotional reunion. The hat-wearer in question is new to the UK and thought it perfectly  reasonable to  hug me in thanks, so we had a chat about that. I should have said: here are some more UK traditions. Slashing public spending and blaming the public servants. Not caring about children unless they’re like you. Grammar schools, and all they stand for.
 
CR 10.3.17

Visiting a friendly primary yesterday I was so distracted arranging my hair for their fancy entry photo system that I typed myself in as Thomas Tallis. I am not actually tallis, nor shorts: I am the average height for a UK woman, no matter what my own giant offspring say as they stoop to reason with me as if I were a more than usually stupid dachshund.

Nonetheless, I’m recognisable among the Tallis horde. On the bridge yesterday we inquired civilly after each other’s half-terms. The bridge flows best with minimal supervision and the occasional left-right reminder, but all was nearly brought to confusion by a pair of small girls with pointy eared hairbands who rushed across the path of year 11 boys three times their size. Popular imagination would expect them to be unpleasant, but they just muttered (woah!) and tutted about The Youth of Today needing to learn how to cross traffic.

We keep things going like this most of the time. A pleasant word, a bit of oversight, some minor hassling and not much shouting. The adult-child ratio, not over-generous, enables this, as does the number of teachers who’ve been at it for years and who can sort out a queue with a raised eyebrow and a click of the fingers. Not quite an idyll, an inner-London comprehensive, but it works for us.

Imagine such a school however, with fewer adults, with less experience, with more children. Imagine that lots of the teachers are inexperienced, unqualified, on short-term contracts. Imagine that the classrooms are a mess because no-one’s there long enough to claim them and the children, whose attendance starts to slide, don’t know who they’ll have for maths, or French because they’re in year 8 and they’ve been re-timetabled four times this year so the permanent teachers get the exam classes. Imagine not having your own form tutor. Imagine that inner-city school with no pastoral staff, no one with time to comfort a desperate child, no one to go to the meeting with social services (who haven’t got any long-term staff either). Imagine thresholds so high for mental health support that only a child in hospital (if there’s a bed) gets an appointment with a medic. Imagine no bands and teams, trips and visits. Imagine no visitors because we can’t pay them and don’t have enough staff to manage behaviour in front of strangers. Imagine no time for International Day or Black History Month or the Big Draw, no Christmas tree, no rewards. Imagine day after day only of subjects that count for the latest version of the accountability measures, in big classes in cold rooms with broken computers and no text books. That’s what the funding future looks like.

The two biggest problems facing schools aren’t anything to do with structures or super-selective grammar schools – though they’re stupid enough diversions – but funding and the teacher shortage. Funding is too low, but now the comparatively better-funded are being reduced to the level of the poorest-funded in the name of fairness.  It takes a special skill to generate a teacher shortage in a recession when there are more graduates then ever, but that’s what’s happened. And so we face the ghastly consequences of political ideology versus the public sector (‘safe in our hands’). The facts are denied: no, there are not more children, and no, more of them don’t have special needs. Dogmatic posturing interfering with professional leadership means no-one wants the jobs: accountability pressures make it foolish to stake your mortgage or your children’s futures on an unstable career ladder. No central planning of teacher supply mean there’s no one to help anyone’s children’s future, but still the government says it’ll be alright in the end. Does anyone in government actually care about children?

No funding and no teachers means that the teachers who are left can’t cope and can’t afford to do it: as the Education Select Committee’s report said on Tuesday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New teachers are the same. If you’re newly qualified then you expect to not know which way you’re up for a year and asking about everything is required.  If you have arrived with – ahem – a position of responsibility then you worry that people expect you to be abreast of the arcane. You may know the lot about all possible A level specifications, the latest Statutory Instrument or recite pi to 4000 places but what do you if your computer’s in a huff?  Where do you take a child who’s poked himself in the eye? Where exactly is the door to the library? We like to keep people on their toes at Tallis with a byzantine room numbering system. Now in my third year, I direct people with confidence. Floor, block, room number, unless you’re talking to premises staff who need you to convert your answer into algebra where x = 5.

The start of the year is curtain-up on the preceding 6 months’ planning and rehearsal: recruitment, staffing, exams, cleaning and tidying, bright ideas and missives from the government. This summer, precious little on the exam results in the press (hooray hooray) but lots about academies and free schools, again. A rallying-call from the Secretary of State arrives simultaneously with Ofsted’s report on KS3, neutrally entitled ‘KS3: The Wasted Years?’ Why, thank you, Sir.

I talk to a highly effective and perpetually cheerful colleague who reflects on the pace of activity as we start the year, how it takes a few days to get to peak speed, even for the best of us. Another says: we get it, we really get it, but the pace is daunting. I stop a year 8 youth who appears to have doubled in height over the summer. Perhaps his parents stand him in compost every night. He’s proud to be taller than me, but we agree that he could literally aim higher. His little mate is downcast, but it’ll come.

Like growing a teenager, some things take time and can’t be forced. Schools have focused on KS4 because that’s where the national focus is.  Loopholes allowed some to adapt procedures to influence outcomes without putting the leg work into learning. Now, the pressure is in a better place, but it’s still oddly expressed. If I was HMCI or the SoS – an outcome as likely as growing 6 inches over the summer, curses – this is what I’d say.

Finding out what parents think is a holy grail for secondary schools and we try to bridge the obstacles of adolescence, scale and distance in different ways. I’m terrifically grateful to the parents of Tallis PTA and I’m indebted to the 84% who turned out for year 8 Parents’ Evening. I do like seeing parents with their youths. Spotting family relationships is interesting for the nosey, and seeing resemblances is fascinating. Year 8 are particularly funny. They’re way too old to sit on Mum’s knee so they usually lean in a sort-of chummy manner, while things are going well.  When they’re not they can be as huffy and flouncy as a year 12, or resort to comically guilty despondent expressions, like a Boxer dog with a mouthful of Christmas cake.

We’re pretty pleased with our new reports this term so year 8 were experimented on. That happens a lot to year 8, just as well no-one’s stuck there permanently. Parents could see at a glance where offspring were doing well by the jolly shades of green: yellow and red not such happy news. Wily parents grasped this instantaneously and couldn’t be thrown off course by flimsy excuses. ‘Very useful’ one grimaced at me as she dragged the Boxer off to account for himself in Science.

He’ll recover. I stood on the bridge today and watched Break. Children swarm and mooch, muttering and shouting. I watched a new starter rush to hug her new friend (she’s got that Tallis habit quickly) and some older boys trying to eat crisps and chase each other at the same time. A laughing year 10 was having her hair re-done. Footballs were being simultaneously confiscated and encouraged depending on the zone. At the end we did our outrageous whistling, clapping, shooing and shouting routine to hassle the hordes back into class. I explained for the fiftieth time why we’ve put part of the bridge out of bounds and thought for the sixtieth time about whether there’s a better way of doing it.  

We’ve invited consultants amongst us recently to give a couple of areas the onceover. They’ve been worth every penny, encouraging us to think in a slightly different way about the future. How do you get the Boxer dog to a state where he can’t stop himself explaining tort law at the bus stop? How do you get the reluctant 12 year old scientist onto a space shuttle?

We start with the end in mind while seizing the present reality of a child. It’s quite a balancing act: we value the person she is now while we hope to help her become someone we won’t know and may not even recognise. We do it in partnership with parents and the people at the bus stop. We let them be children while we form then into adults that might make a better go of changing the world. And the richness of our community gives them something extra so they can hope to breach the fortresses of privileges. They have to smoke and play poker in their own time.

CR

10.3.15

 

So much of what we believe now about human rights is rooted in the soil of Auschwitz. Children’s rights pre-date that. The plight of small blockaded children after the First War compelled Eglantine Jebb to start Save the Children, but nothing saved them from Hitler. French primary schools commemorate exactly this. Since 1997 plaques have appeared in Paris and beyond explaining exactly what happened. From this school, this arondissement, such-and-such number of pupils were deported as a result of Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the Vichy government.  Those headteachers of the little ecoles maternelle and splendid lycees: what did they think they were doing? Did they believe the rhetoric? Were they just following orders? Were they protecting their own income and fragile safety under the jackboot of tyranny? What would you do?        

Children are easy to miss. Many of them are small and all of them are powerless. They are either weak and easy to neglect or adolescently strong and easy to corrupt. They like certainty and are poor judges of what is good for them. They get hungry and tired quickly. They can’t vote and don’t pay taxes. They are easy to kill.     

Schools keep children alive because schools are where this society looks after its young. School attendance is a human good. If we see them every day we know they are fit and well while we try to push a bit of Spanish or algebra into them. School is about regularity, routine, walls of safety to batter against until you can look after yourself. Chasing persistent non-attenders is depressingly hard and helping children escape from that chaos unbelievably difficult. It can’t all be done by a workforce occupied in the parts of a volcano or the uses of copper sulphate. An old head once described the perfect Education Welfare Officer as having the personality of a Sergeant-Major and the speed of Linford Christie (it was a while ago), but they are disappearing with the fading of public services. How does a school, or a council, choose between keeping children warm or paying the people who’ll check that they’re still alive?    

Free schooling up to adulthood is a great achievement of civilisation and education makes people live longer. We have a duty in school to make sure that adults don’t mess up children’s lives by withholding or denigrating education. Here’s to the schools that know where all their children are, every day, and here’s to the workforce who make that possible. Here’s to the attendance officers, social workers, youth workers and police officers who support us and the parents who persevere. Here’s to the whining school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school and here’s to the teachers who make sure he knows that Shakespeare said it. 

It takes a village to raise a child and some of our villagers have council identity tags and unreasonable workloads. We are partners in protecting ourselves from error and our children from harm. Who’s campaigning on that manifesto?

CR 12.2.15

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    

And as the outside world turns, Mr Gove falls off. A remarkably long-lived post holder, did we lose him because he picked too many fights, or because 1 in 10 women work in education and there’s a women issue? Have we got Ms Morgan because she’s calmer or because she’s female? When will we next have a Secretary of State of any party who went to a state school? Where are the 93% in politics? Why are the 7% in charge even in Sanctuary Buildings? Is there no one who understands how we live, to direct what we become?

In the week when the Trojan Horse inquiry reports, perhaps we should muse on our sun-loungers on where the manipulation of schooling structures has brought us. Autonomy is not an educational good of itself and neither is freedom. What joins us together is worth more than what sets us apart.  We need the Nolan values of selflessness, honesty, objectivity, leadership, openness, integrity and accountability. We need the principles of public education to be publicly understood and agreed. 

However, it is week 39 and I won’t solve that this term. I’m a fan of the Cornish poet Charles Causley, a former primary school teacher. He wrote a wonderful poem about the end of a school day whose opening words fit the end of term too:

                  At 4 o’clock the building enters harbour
                  All day it seems that we have been at sea
                  Now having lurched through the last of the water
                  We lie stone-safe beside the jumping quay.   

The good ship Tallis has reached safe harbour for 2013-4 and now we’ll take a little shore leave. We’ll see what August brings and chart our next course from September. Wherever your dinghy takes you over the summer, I hope the weather is set fair for you and yours. 

CR 22.7.14  

She qualified at about the same time that women teachers started to be paid the same as men. When I was born in 1961 my retired grandfather sent her back to work with the words ‘it doesn’t take three people to look after this baby’. He taught me the parts of a car engine and the church boiler and took me to meetings. My mother worked as a primary school teacher for 40-odd years in Teesside. She did everything: lots of plays, singing and dressing up as well as a furious insistence on the primacy of times tables by heart over all things. My friends’ mothers in the 70s didn’t work and I was proud of her career, which started when teachers were also Civil Defence Volunteers and ended with computers in the classroom. Married twice, she wasn’t told to stop until she was 65.

I did go to university, though my grandfather didn’t live to see it. I came to London and then did a PCGE at Birmingham. I’ve taught all over the place and picked up qualifications at two more universities. I chose not to work when my children were tiny and was a Head by 40. No-one has ever shown the slightest interest in whether I was married or not, though colleagues did buy me a nice set of pans when I did.

My own daughter shows no signs of going into the family business. Educated to within an inch of her life at an excellent comprehensive school, she took university in her stride. Like her grandmother and great-grandmother she knows a thing or two about life and is not a woman to tangle with. Prosperity or austerity – what could get in her way?

Having an educated mother is a pretty good start in life for any child. UNESCO knows that having a mother with secondary or higher education halves child mortality. The World Bank recognises that educating girls to secondary level is a clear indicator of prosperity and stability. Yet simple things prevent it. While Malala’s story is a crystal-clear shocker of bigotry and brutality education remains impossible for millions of girls for cruder reasons. Even in places where governments have strained every sinew to provide education, girls stop going to school once they start menstruating because there are no toilets, no privacy and no running water. Some girls don’t get educated because their world is against them, but some don’t get educated because there are no sanitary towels and no doors on the loos.  Half of the girls who drop out of school in Africa do so because there are no proper toilets.

So have a look at the Toilet Twinning website, and if you haven’t bought your Mum anything for Mothers’ Day, put a toilet in your basket.  My mother and grandmother had some things to overcome in their time, but nothing as outrageously basic as this.  Let’s spend a penny or two and give other women the chances our mothers fought for.

CR

26.3.14