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

Two year sevens career towards me lugging a bag big enough for two more. ‘This is too heavy, Miss, can we use the lift?’ ‘No’. They whoop as they lurch off up the stairs. I’m not worried about the bag.  Its OAA time (Outdoor and Adventurous Activities) so they’ve got their survival gear in it: camping, skinning rabbits and suchlike. I encounter more near the block five loos where a young chap who obviously knows a thing or two makes a point:‘That’s not a camping mat’. The girl flounces a bit ‘I know! It’s a yoga mat! It’s all I’ve got! Don’t judge me’. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Tallis life. Let’s see how the double French plaits survive the night.

Thursday brought a visit from Anthony Horowitz. He held a crowd of 300 sitting on the sports hall floor for 2 hours, not an easy gig, captive. He talked about his awful boarding school experience and how villainous versions of his teachers die gruesomely in his novels. He said: what if the ghosts of the RAF pilots and the cold war spies once based here appeared in school?

I’d like to see them. I think they’d wonder what the hell was going on.  I wrote the last blog after London Bridge and before the election. Since then, the election, Grenfell Tower and Finsbury Park mosque. I’ve never known what to do about angry men loving violence except to try to educate them out of it and encourage girls to walk away.  I do know a bit about public services, though, and I’m up to my neck in compliance. Throw me a rope, would you?
Housing is difficult because no-one’s making any more land and the public’s assets were stripped a generation-and-a-half ago. It’s expensive to build, takes skill to manage and relies on assumptions about the common good that appear to be fading into the past. When Beveridge fought the Five Giants of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease housing was a key solution. We decided that people should have safe homes to live in and that the state would provide them. After that, we sold off loads of the stock, stripped councils of the money and the powers they needed to keep it safe and available and lauded those who reduce council tax so that the stock and the staff crumble.  
   
And piling Pelion upon Ossa, compliance. That cladding might have been cheaper, but it was OK because it ticked a box, and another box marked ‘value engineering’, no doubt. And the response: it looked like chaos but it probably ticked its boxes.  And the fire escape plan? Well, there was one. And the PM’s visit? Best described as a box left unticked. Good job the Queen knew what to say. On which part of planet Conservative and Unionist does that make sense? 

Public services can’t be replaced by box-ticking. Targets are important, perhaps even necessary, but never sufficient. When you strip away all professionalism, all respect for the job and most of the money, and leave civic institutions with compliance matrices rather than public values then we’re all, literally and terrifyingly, at risk. Literally in schools where the cheapest and easiest exams became the system’s calibrations, terrifyingly in tower blocks where no one’s job was to worry about the welfare of the people. The strongest survive such blinkered negligence but the vulnerable suffer. Children always suffer. 

Schools are model communities where we look after society’s young until they’re old enough and clever enough to fend for themselves. We have to chug along regardless while the world outside falls apart, so we’ve been entertaining ourselves in the mornings. One of the problems in exam season is that the big spaces are full of desks and anxious young people with see-through pencil cases and you can’t assemble for weeks. Assembly is the glue of a big school and things fall apart without them. So, brainwavingly, assembly in the dojo. Notwithstanding the awkward access, potential bottlenecks and the matter of the shoes, we’re loving it. Half a year squash up on the seats and the others sit barefoot and bootless on the mat.  All facets of assemblies (uplifting thoughts, Byzantine instructions, the Reading of Lists, expressions of grave disappointment) are delivered in socks. Normal, even with year 9. We stand together and think about the lives of others. We did it on Thursday last, in assembly, because that’s what’s best to do. We didn’t need to be told.

Beveridge’s last words were ‘I have a thousand things to do’ but I worry that we’ve replaced symbolism with action. I worry that declaring a minute’s silence is intended to hide a tragedy of negligence in the clothing of a natural disaster. I worry that crowdfunding and selfless volunteering are expected to fill a vacuum left by an austere and individualist state. I worry that we value economy over responsibility and I worry all the time about the example set our children. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pilots and the spies decide to haunt us all.
 
CR 21.6.17 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our examinees at 16, 17 and 18 are showing signs of wear and tear. They’re both ready and in denial, working and feckless, stressed and oblivious. It’s hard to treat them all alike and we have a range of ways of getting them to the finishing line: carrots, sticks, hooks, crooks and the satisfaction of a job well done with a flounce out of the room. At the other end, year 7 parents evening, we explain the progress these little ones have made since being examined in year 6. Thinking on this has shifted dramatically recently. For many years almost every school was criticised for slow progress in key stage three and an achievement dip between years 7 and 9. Faster! they cried. Make a Flying Start! Speed replaced sense and young people were left breathless without actually knowing much while simultaneously making the huge transition to the big school and adolescence. Speedy progress crashes and burns in a new KS4 without modular exams.

So, what’s to do? We talk of depth, consolidation, foundation programmes of study that re-embed year 6 learning and check that every child understands the basic knowledge upon which higher learning is based. The unusable term for this is mastery, so we need a new word. That’s why our work for the next two years is on curriculum content and design for 5 and 7 years, making our young people into independent learners and long-term, confident thinkers. We would have done this in any case: great teachers going not too fast, not too slow. Continuous Goldilocks (as we say). 

Young persons rushing across the yard from PE to Music last week didn’t manage that.  An entire class skidded to a cartoon halt distracted by the tiniest of mice, under a birch tree in the yard. They shrieked and cooed as I sheepdogged them away: ‘A mouse! Can we have it as a school pet?’ and all the warmth and wonder of childhood flooded around us. One big family, one exceptionally small and unperturbed pet.  

Last week we had the US Ambassador in school (home and foreign policy, stars and stripes).  This week it’s Deaf Awareness (t-shirts, badges, cakes, videos, guess the sweets in the jar). We’re fundraising for our families in Nepal. The Rubik’s Cube man came to maths, but I missed it (he can do it in seconds). Our year 11 footie boys won the London Cup. Governors thought about the future shape of the curriculum. We had a mock election: a Labour landslide in our PE classroom Polling Station.   

My grandfather used to say that a young conservative was a sad-looking thing. Why would the young be conservative? Young people should be filled with hope and argument, ready and willing to chain themselves to anything in the hope of a better deal for all. They need to keep hold of that as adults and not have it flattened out of them by teachers or the press. They need to understand the world so that they can change it for the better. To do that we need properly-funded schools, planned teacher supply, sensible curriculum agreements, benefits that keep food in the stomachs of the poorest and the heating on in the winter. Schools and teacher have been spending millions feeding and clothing children: I don’t know where that’ll come from with 10% cuts. 

We’ve been interviewing English teachers here this morning so Gatsby comes to mind as we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. You heard it here first.

CR 8.5.15

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

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

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

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

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

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

CR 22.4.15