Mrs Roberts Writes

Open Night Again

30/9/2017

I'd been in town pestering the great and the good and pottered back from the station at break time. Children often imagine that the road elevation of the grassy knoll to the east of the site is invisible, despite the see-through fence, and can be startled by a known person apparating in front of them.

Not so the cheery year 7 boys I chanced upon, sitting in a row, phones in hand, chortling and shoving each other hilariously. I asked if they were spying on the road and they leapt up and gestured through the bars at me, explaining enthusiastically that they were 'playing a very intense game'. Parents fear that phones mean the loss of all social skills but not with these chaps. While it did involve phones, the intense game also seemed to require raucous laughter, throwing themselves about on the grass in the way of 11-year-olds, and much rolling around. The old and the new.

Last night was Open Night and we had upwards of 1500 visitors through the doors. Head of Year 7 and I did 6 hall-fulls (with extra chairs). We also combine the old and the new as she's a lot younger than me. Our hall is pretty nice, being newish, and with a film of year 7 at work running on the back wall, flowers on the Tallis turquoise cloths, the stage lights and Freddie on the old Joanna, it's a stylish venue. We don't do the PowerPoint thing, so we talk about what parents worry about: transition to a big school, pastoral care, curriculum choice, break and lunch, form groups. Of course we cover the other things, but we talk about the whole child before we break him into constituent parts.  We'll take care of your little one and try to give her a memorable, happy education.

This neatly leads me to tell the people about our new school plan's 3 parts: curriculum, inclusion and community. Curriculum: we want to preserve the broadest offer, it's a struggle predicting the future, this is what we do at KS3. Teaching's good, staff are stable (no reflection on their mental state, I mean that we don't have a high turnover). A level and BTEC results are very good, young people come from miles around to study with us in the sixth form. GCSEs need to improve but who knows what this year's results actually mean. So many re-marks, so much alteration. Inclusion's nex, in four parts: provision for learning for everyone and the wonderful work of our Deaf Support and Speech and Language centres. Wellbeing and our concern for mental health. Safeguarding and the time we put into it, and behaviour. We're relaxed but not sloppy. We're fussy about relationships and their development and maintenance. Finally, Community: we want to serve. Join in with us, please.

I don't know if that's what parents expect to hear but it seemed to go down well. Behind the scenes, we're tussling this week with the progress accountability score. Context is everything here: we have room to improve but we took a principled stand with the year group when the new measures came in and didn't force them to change options so the school would score better. Oh for a national accountability system that's risk-assessed for its impact on children's experience of school.

(The adults' experience can be mixed, mind you. There was huge excitement - everything's relative - about the Tidy Staff Room competition. You may be interested to know that Visual and Media Arts won the silver Desk Tidy for Most Improved, but Design Technology took gold for Best in Show.

But reflecting on the week, it's the tensions that stick. We'd been waiting for the progress information so that we could get stuck into the metrics. We're committed to our support services but there's no money to fund them. We'd like to represent our community better.

When parents come to see us, what do they want to see? How much information helps them choose? We talk a good game, but we're not complacent. We don't stop picking over results in good years or bad until October. We plan for the short and the long term. Do they want to look under the bonnet?

A young inmate with an eccentric gait came to see me because his trousers had split 'picking up a pen in Geography'. Keeping him at a distance I said it wasn't obvious and he should carry on regardless. He thanked me kindly and rushed off. I think parents expect much the same: they need to trust us to make sensible judgements and carry on. The old and the new combine here too I suppose: we worry about our service to children not less than all of the time, and we deal with each new challenge as it comes along. It's an intense game, and we laugh when we can, but only the young ones roll on the grass.

CR 28.9.17

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All year, it seems, we have been out at sea

15/7/2017

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Just for excitement as we swim for shore, a fire drill. We hadn’t had one for a bit so it was beyond exciting for the hordes. Consequently, squealing at the start. Subsequently, a repeat next week, quietly.

On my way to my appointed perch I was introduced to a famous photographer, a distinguished-looking chap. On my way back, I reprimanded a small child for practicing leaping right over benches while 1600 people were moving around. I may need to return to him, but he won’t be hard to find.

Last week was busy busy: a super-cool concert for the Greenwich Music Trust, a day out at Tate Exchange for Curriculum Leaders to think, sixth form taster days, Headstart Day for year 6, a visiting author, a Holocaust survivor, the Visual and Media Arts Exhibition, Sixth form Party, Year 11 Prom (including pink and white carriage and horses), a community day on food, year 11 and 13 leaving ceremonies and the early close that went with them and a new curfew at the shops to enforce.

This week so far: new staff induction day, a piano and singing concert, governors, a tea party for older folks, more camping (further afield, wetter), university visits, UCAS clinics, teachers’ research projects deadline, year 10 careers events, non-uniform day for the Red Cross, a controversy about gazebos, as I write, the Piano Recital. Tomorrow the last internal interview of the year and a governor visit about student anxiety. Next week: an international food fair, the year 7 disco, a farewell barbecue, the Curious Incident, a visit from another school’s sixth form team, four awards assemblies and finally, the big gathering that marks close of play.

All this, you understand, on top of the teacher’s day job, teaching and learning, timetabling and planning, rewriting schemes, tidying round, assessment and testing, sharing skills, worrying, supporting, negotiating with the world and more trips and visits. Next year’s plans not just to write but set up. Building maintenance, and wondering what to do now so many budget headings are empty four twelfths of the way through the year. It’s no wonder when the dog visited again before camping in Kent we fell on her as if she was a therapy animal.

So you can imagine I’ve had a few thoughts about the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendation that the 1% cap on teacher pay stays firmly pulled down over the ears of the profession. No money, they said, but we’re ‘deeply concerned about the cumulative effect’ of five body blows teaching’s sustained:

35,000 teachers left in 2015, and it’s a bigger number every year
Retention rates are plummeting (and there are more children every year)
Teacher pay’s fallen behind other graduate sectors
Recruitment targets for teachers have been missed for four years
There’s no money in the system. Even the 1% is unfunded.

Schools therefore are ‘expected to make choices’ about who gets a pay rise and who doesn’t, based on performance. This makes perfect sense except that in the best schools all the teachers will be performing well, and there’s not an education system in the world where performance related pay’s changed anything. The raw materials teachers work with are too unpredictable, the outputs notoriously tricky to measure: put pressure on one part of the system and other parts suffer. The STRB opined that falling teacher retention rates and missed recruitment targets present ‘a substantial risk to the functioning of an effective education system’. Isn’t anyone worried about that outside teaching? We’re the lucky ones. Few new posts, few leavers.

Here are some other things we’ve done this week. Engaged with the process of enabling young people from other schools to have a fresh start, from both ends. Waited for the phone to ring from the clipboard brigade. Tried to do our best for angry, unwell, distraught children and their parents. Tried to plan for examination courses where the specifications are barely approved. Taken part in the inspection of the local authority’s special needs work. Followed instructions from Operation Sceptre to tackle knife crime, in a context of no funding for youth work. Thought about money not less than all of the time.

I quoted Causley’s great poem about the end of the school day being like a ship re-entering harbour in July 2014, after our first Piano Recital. After this, our third, it feels as though we’ve been out at sea all year on government storms. Do we long for doldrums?

Saxophone music drifted across the concourse as performers rush to hug one another before the concert and the young chefs prepare nibbles. Pianists gather in shirts and ties, unusual for Tallis, and discuss formal wear. I don’t mean to sound as if it’s just perseverance or endurance at this time of year or that misery dogs our days, far from it.

It’s a joy. Thank you for sharing your children with us.

CR 14.7.17

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Open Night

26/9/2015

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I put on the velvet jacket because it smartens up the shirt and trousers and not because I can fill the pockets with pencils, keys, phone, notes to self until I look like a walking barrel. Adding only crippling shoes and a new Director of Key Stage Three, I took to the stage at 1700 for this week’s biggest hit: Come to Tallis! It's Open Night! Embellished by 5 shiny year 7s, a cool year 10 pianist, subtle lighting and a flower arrangement half as big as me we talked to about 1200 people in five sittings. Then we gave them a map (KS3 is a geographer) set them free to wander and admire the lovely spaces and the friendly people and collect stickers, bits of clay, photos, pencils and what not. It all went very well.

I like to think that my innovative intervention early in last year’s open evening, which deftly reduced weeks of careful planning to chaos, was a useful learning experience for everyone. It certainly meant that this year’s planning was done secretly by the crack KS3 logistics team and I was kept locked in a cupboard until it was time to brush me down and stand me up. Hats off to them, though: it was a cracking evening, as far as I could see from my position chained to the piano.

I’d thought about what I was going to say and even went so far as to prepare a few slides. I talked about our 4 values (creativity, community, engagement and excellence), our Habits ( inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline, imagination), our character (fairness, kindness, honesty, optimism and respect), our beliefs (education to understand the world and change it for the better) and the great mantra of Coe of Durham (whom I didn’t acknowledge) that children learn when they have to think really hard. I described us as a ‘blue-plaque comprehensive school’, faithful to those visionary values.

I trumpeted our sixth form results. Top 10% of all sixth forms for progress, 160 into top universities, 40 to art college, 3 into Cambridge, our 7 year education and our three year plan. And I agonised over our GCSE results, below national average last year and this, particularly in maths (a well-staffed and stable department who do well at A level). Should I talk about GCSE or flannel? Should I go into the whole thing about tiers of entry and the inflationary legacy of the past? Should I talk about what happens when you recalibrate behaviour and set a school on a long-term journey to reconsider the whole curriculum? Or should we go smartly into KS3’s pictures of children on mountain tops and teachers in fields?

We chose our character traits together last year, and honesty is one of them. I talked about GCSE as a changing picture and was clear that we need to improve. I didn’t compare us with other schools, but with our own aspirations and hoped that parents would respect our determination and optimism. I tried to be fair. A few parents wanted to talk more, afterwards, and I was frank and open. (I could hardly be anything else, handcuffed to the flower stand.)

Afterwards, I reflected on 3 comments. One was ‘you glossed over GCSE’. I didn’t, and I’ll talk to anyone about it at any length, but it’s not really what year 6 come to Open Night for. Parent Forum is the grilling arena. One was ‘do you ban mobile phones?’ No, but we confiscate them if they get annoying. A third was: ‘you’re very liberal here, aren’t you’, caused mainly by our relaxed uniform and chatty manner. In that regard, we are. Do liberal values preclude quality education? When five sittings were done and I was freed into the foyer to talk to departing folks (logistics determining that there was nothing left for me to damage) only one person wanted to talk about GCSE.

So what is the truth? Should our GCSE results (50% 5+A*-CEM) have been better? Yes. Do we know what went wrong? Yes. Can we fix it? Yes. And there is another truth, which I found myself saying, unplanned, in sittings 3, 4 and 5. It was that I’ve seen too many young people over the years with exam results driven by the perverse and shallow incentives of the performance tables, and that I want our Tallis future to be of deep learning and lifelong understanding. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, but it happens to be true.

Education to understand the world and change it for the better: there are no easy options.

CR

25.9.15

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Navigating Events

16/11/2014

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Joseph Mallord William Turner Ship in a Storm c.1823–6

Events, dear things, events. What to make of them? Last Friday we had a day in which three of our governors talked for five hours with some young people who find school behaviour norms unbearably irksome, counselling them to do better. Monday we had the Smoothie Bike chefs creating nutritious snacks by the sheer power of the bicycle. They’re back next Monday.

Tuesday was Remembrance. Regular readers remember the digger man who joined our silence last year. Emboldened by success and in the name of preparing young Tallis for adult life, we decided this year’s silence should be in the heart of our community on the concourse, more usually a venue for hugging, arguing and standing about. An energetic colleague hatched a plan involving miles of red ribbon. Several plans later taking mud, bins, benches, trees and the weather forecast (he’s a geographer) into consideration we decided trust and freedom were the answer. So we stopped organising, hired a trumpeter, talked about it in assemblies and blew a whistle just before 11. Silence fell on a busy yard and canteen, everything stopped. The Last Post played for a sublime and serious silence in the heart of SE3.

When Reveille sounded we were so pleased with ourselves we had a good old clap as the pips went for lesson 3. The red ribbon, which we eventually wound round the bridge over the yard looked a bit bedraggled later so some younger members were detailed to remove it. They were so beset with helpful advice that time ran out and small girl tidied it up alone as dusk fell.

Immediately after the Armistice Lindsey Hilsum from Channel 4 News talked to the sixth form about reportage and foreign affairs. Her experiences were terrifyingly impressive: our questioning deeply incisive. Maybe we do learn from wars?

That night we had Tallis Strings with Michael Bochmann of Trinity Laban. He’s been with us courtesy of Clifford Chance to give some of year 7s a taste of the violin so that, playing alongside teachers and world-class Michael they experienced the joys of music and the ensemble. At a wonderful concert for family and friends one new player said to me "It is quite hard. The strings are really close together."

Wednesday we had workshops with a Danish colleague from the Kaospilots organisation. Their aim is to equip people to navigate through life’s chaos, and who wouldn’t want help with that? We’re using them to help think about Tallis Character to complement our Habits so that our young people may navigate whatever choppy waters are ahead for them.

We met in the evening to set up a new PTA-type organisation. 20 parent volunteers and a plate of school cakes, high hopes for partnership and a bit of fun. I heard the call of the first mince pie of the season. Thursday was post-16 Open Evening with hundreds coming to find out about how to get a hot ticket to adult life. Much praise for our vibrancy but also the precision of our advice. Young people are rightly much more demanding and together about what they want from the future. Those of us who lurched from one thing to another in the 70s are from another era altogether.

I’m reminded of a chance overhearing at the final celebrations of Black History Month in October. We had a lovely day and replaced the lesson change signal with startling music, generating a little dancing in the corridors. I heard a chap ask his chum ‘Is that coming through the pips machine?’ as if we have an Orwellian squirting device to move us in Pavlovian fashion or direct our every thought.

Would it help them steer through events if we did? It’s easy to write rules but hard to keep them, as the young people in front of the governors admit. It’s easy to watch a foreign correspondent but hard to contemplate being one. It’s lovely to hear a virtuoso but hard to be one, what with the strings being so close together and all. It’s good to drink a smoothie but hard to produce one by cycling.

Our daily life is a mixture of planned and unplanned events, challenges and opportunities. It is really hard to measure what schools do in any but the most obvious ways. We aim for education to change the world, but the world can be unpredictable, hostile and dangerous as well as exciting and interesting. That’s why we take character and habits so seriously. We want to know what best will help our young people navigate through the choppy waters of freedom and trust so they know when to be still for remembrance and when to dance to the pips.

CR 15.11.14

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Open Night Again

All year, it seems, we have been out at sea

Open Night

Navigating Events