Week three and some small girls accost me with a legitimate grievance. They offer documentation in support. ‘Miss, it says in the uniform list in the planner that you can’t wear false eyelashes or nails, but we’ve seen loads of people wearing them.’ They’re right on all counts. I tell them I’ll do better in future. Revision required. Truth to power, bang to rights.

Truth matters. HM Government has been reprimanded in the past by the Office of National Statistics for telling untruths about school funding. Because of this track record of mendacity the recent funding undertakings have been met with moderate enthusiasm by Heads. So, today, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a second annual report on education spending in England, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. I only quote the bits that affect children in our age group, but it is worth a read.

Spending by local authorities on services for children and young people is increasingly focused on mandatory elements and responses to crises. Spending on children looked after by the state is up nearly 20% since 2010 and spending on children’s social care is up 9%. However, spending on preventative services has been cut significantly. Spending on Sure Start is down 62% and spending on services for young people is down 65%.

Extra funding announced in the spending round effectively reverses past cuts to school spending per pupil [but that’s all it does].

• Total per-pupil spending on schools in England has fallen by about 8% in real terms since 2009–10. This is largely driven by a 57% cut in spending per pupil on services provided by local authorities and a cut of more than 20% in sixth-form funding per pupil.
• Funding per pupil in primary and secondary schools fell by 5% in real terms between 2015–16 and 2019–20.
• The government proposes teacher starting salaries of £30,000 for 2022, an increase of about £6,000 or 23% on current levels. Few details are available on how this will be delivered, but such details will be very important in determining likely pressures on school budgets.
• Despite the increase announced for 2020, funding per student aged 16–18 has seen the biggest squeeze of all stages of education in recent years. School sixth forms have faced budget cuts of 23% per student since their peak in 2010–11. The 2019 Spending Round allocated a further £300 million for 2020–21. This represents a 4% real-terms increase in spending per student, but will still leave spending per student in further education over 7% down on 2010.
• Student numbers are growing, so an additional £300 million on top of current plans would be required by 2022–23 just to avoid further cuts in per-student funding. Fully reversing cuts since 2010–11 would cost £1.1 billion on top of current plans by 2022–23.

It may be better than nothing. It may look really encouraging, but school funding isn’t index linked, it doesn’t go up with inflation. This proposed increase, however welcome, is less than the rate at which costs are rising. Will the promise mean additional teachers, resources or extra staff? Will it cut down Tallis sixth form class sizes or reduce our teacher workload? I shouldn’t think so.  

The little ones have got more confident and are picking up speed. Long shiny corridors are irresistible to an 11-year old in new trainers and our day is punctuated by cries of ‘Walk!’ I direct some to Drama every day: ‘Go through all the double doors until you hit the wall then look for your class on the left.’ One looks impatiently at me, as to an eccentric who’s gone too far. ‘I don’t really think we need to hit the wall, Miss.’

Year 11 are facing up to a misspent year 10. Some are being given extra support in Study Hall after school every day, not entirely voluntarily. Some have sought to elude this, outraged by the sheer persistence of adults in league against their frittering away the year. We bring them a motivational speaker of unashamed cheesiness: he’s captivating, and they love it. I sit in on a debate about sex and religion in RE which is loud and beautifully respectful, though distracted by gay penguins. ‘Really?’

I talk to the sixth form about the Supreme Court, and Fuller’s 17th Century dictum be ye never so high, the law is above you. I tell them we live in extraordinary times but they assume that all times are like this and can’t imagine a calmer way to regulate national life, can’t imagine a world in which truth is reliable, systematic, embedded, irrepressible.

We claim of ourselves at Tallis that we mean what we say. The small girls are asking me if it’s true, or if we’re just some more adults who promise one thing but mean something else. They’d really like an answer. I have high hopes for them. 
 
CR
19.1.19

One of Jane Austen’s nastier creations is the ghastly Sir Walter Elliott in Persuasion. Vain, vapid, disregarding, flimsy and partial, he wafts about in a cloud of debt preferring his horrible daughter to his good one. At one point early in the book he’s told by his agent that he must retrench and move to Bath because a gentlemen may live cheaply there. Off he goes and devotes his time to his rich relations. Long story. 

Retrenchment aptly describes schools and their budgets since 2010. Beginning with austerity (formerly known as public sector cuts) funding has plummeted. Governments since 2010 have tried doggedly to avoid solving the problem. 

First, they said there wasn‘t a problem and school leaders should stop going on about it and do their jobs properly.
Second, they said that there well may be a problem, but that because the money was hiding in clumps and not fairly distributed. The National Fair Funding Formula would sort this out so everyone would be happy. Then the NFFF lost it’s Fair and set about redistributing only the money that was already in the system. 

Third, they said that there was, actually, literally loads more money in the system so, like, what is the problem, really? The UK Statistics Agency took a dim view of this. In the interest of balance, they were critical of a union counter-narrative called School Cuts which gave crude and scary headline figures slightly detached from the context. They then issued four rebukes to the DfE along the lines of ‘I am sure you share my concerns that instances such as these do not help to promote trust and confidence in official data, and indeed risk undermining them’. Do the sums properly, would you? 

Fourth, Lord Agnew put some embarrassed civil servants on the road to go over our budgets with a bottle of champagne promised to any head where they couldn’t find savings. Churchill Pol Roger at £150 or Co-op Les Pionniers at £19.99? I don’t think anybody knows.

As a top-notch strategy for a major public service, guaranteed to bring about the world-class system which politicians apparently desire this is flaky. Schools have had to devote a disproportionate amount of time – and therefore cost – to dealing with the terrible effects of the 8% drop in funding and trying to gather counter-arguments. ASCL cost it at an extra £5.7 billion to deliver basic expectations: £40.2 billion compared to the allocation of £34.5 billion. The Worth Less? campaign has mobilised the reasonable, the parents and the Tory shires. 
 
It is perhaps hopeful therefore, that the next PM will allegedly make school funding a Thing? None of them have looked closely at what heads are saying but all of them are frightened that the ballot box will be impeded by the begging bowls of headteachers. None of them will say: ‘we didn’t care so much about schools, we don’t really care now but I’ll say anything if you PLEASE elect me. And by the way? We’ve spent the money on Brexit, on nothing.’
Notwithstanding, Gove has said he will spend an extra one billion on schools. Javid promises “billions more for education”. Johnson will spend at least £5,000 on every secondary pupil (which wouldn’t help us in London). Even the hapless May is reportedly setting a £27 billion education “spending trap” for whoever follows her. What should they spend it on?
 
As part of the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), teachers in England (and elsewhere) were asked precisely this: 'thinking about education as a whole, if the budget were to be increased by 5%, how would you rate the importance of the following spending priorities?’

The answers are clear.

1. Recruit more support staff to reduce teachers’ administrative loads
2. Recruit more teachers to reduce class sizes

Teachers in England want these more than they want a pay rise. Politicians, it seems, will say anything to get a clap. I’m not hopeful but always ready to unlock the coffers and await the coinage.

I’m surrounded by adolescents all of whose brains are being rewired as they go about.  It means that they take risks, push boundaries and – some of them – like the PM contenders, will say anything to get out of trouble. I was showing a Dignitary around this week when we chanced upon an altercation in which intemperate language was used by a youth. I was the net winner in this tussle, one phone the richer as I whisked off to a calmer spot.  The youth had to be confined to (our in-house) barracks and as part of the punishment, apologise honestly to me. This he did. It might not stick, but it was properly done.

Adults can do it too. A parent was agitated and spoke with asperity. Time elapsed and an apology appeared: time to think, heat of the moment, sorry.  Can we pick up where we were before I lost it?

A group of 18-year-olds, in sight of the final A levels, gather to chat on the yard.  Eight years of their education has been sacrificed to shallow, doctrinaire, fearful and punitive spending cuts. Above them a small child pelts along the empty bridge at full throttle, full of energy and on a mission. Perhaps he’ll be luckier.

Sir Walter was a foolish spendthrift and the capable Anne was rescued from his stupidity by the Austen’s best hero, Captain Wentworth. He’s described as having ‘spirit and brilliance but no fine friends to recommend him’ much like the state schools of the nation. We don’t need a hero to rescue us, but we need honesty, openness, truth, trust, justice, wisdom, service and an apology. How dare they use the children as a bargaining token in their vain and vapid competition?    
 
CR
19.6.19

I suppose that fury kick-starts the week as well as anything. A journalist asked me for a comment on Sajid Javid’s ‘consultation to assess whether there is a public health duty to report concerns over children at risk of involvement in violent crime’. I told her it was shameful. Why?
 
Objection 1, m’lud
WE ALREADY DO IT. Schools collect evidence, act on hunches, assess the weather and ring anyone, everyone who we think might help our children. There’s no-one with the capacity to do it. The police, the hospitals and social services have financial problems as bad as ours. We already report it but they can’t resolve it.
 
Objection 2
Reporting knife crime as a public health duty is based on Scotland’s success with inter-agency work. They invest heavily in their public services in the land of the haggis and the reporting duty rests on the secure foundations of well-funded public service. Yes, teachers and nurses have a duty to report, but the reporting is then picked up by dedicated specialist teams in the police, the hospitals and the local authorities. If you ring it in, they pick it up.  Here, if we pick up the phone no one picks up the case. There’s no one left to do it.
 
Objection 3
Consequently, far from being early identification for early help, our thresholds in England have risen to make intervention manageable for the few staff left to do it. A child has to be well-steeped in violence, danger and risk before anyone outside school will pick it up. Police and social care just don’t have the capacity. You’ve got a reasonable hunch and a bit of evidence that a child is in danger? Sort it out in school.  
 
Objection 4
“It is hard to see how it would be either workable or reasonable to make teachers accountable for preventing knife crime. What sort of behaviour would they be expected to report and who would they report to? How would they be held accountable, for what, and what would the consequences be? How would the government prevent the likelihood of over-reporting caused by the fear of these consequences? Aside from the practical considerations, we have to ask whether it is fair to put the onus on teachers for what is essentially a government failure to put enough police on the streets.”

Thank you Mr Barton of ASCL. Other teaching unions are available. They all say the same.  
 
Objection 5
We have a large and expensive pastoral and inclusion set-up at Tallis. We include everyone we can without endangering others. We manage a curfew at 1600 way out of sight of our school and last week – not unusually – we worked with the police to clear hundreds of people gathering for blood at a local green space. We haven’t had a permanent Safer Schools Officer for two years because of staffing problems in the Met. All the good work we once did to build bridges between the police and these 2000 young people has been wasted away by austerity. 

Partnership needs funding.
 
Objection 6
Knife crime is an adult problem. The deaths in London last weekend were adults, killed by adults. Its adults who run the gangs and the drugs, and its adults who send out children to die for them on the streets. Our young are a human shield for the drugs gangs, and they can only be saved by policing. Teachers are irrelevant to adult criminals.
 
Objection 7
The PM said ‘We can’t arrest our way out of this problem’. Who says? How does she know?  Has anyone tried? Durham County Council transformed itself into a model of effective policing by focusing relentlessly and remorselessly on 400 criminals. Has anyone tried that in London? No, because it would cost. How does arresting teachers and nurses for not-reporting make any sense at all?
 
Objection 8
If we cared about children, we’d spend money on this. If we cared about children, we’d spend money on schools. If we cared. The best thing we can say about Brexit at this point is that we’ve wasted a billion pounds on nothing. That would have made a start on responsive policing and social care. ASCL knows that it’ll take another 4.5 billion to offer an acceptable standard of education. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
 
At the end of the day I was on College Green being interviewed by Ben Brown for the BBC. I made my point, but here’s what I didn’t say.

The Home Secretary’s remark was shamefully misinformed. The Prime Minister’s soundbite was disingenuous. Politicians thrash around for someone to blame while children die in the streets at the hand of the unscrupulous.    They’ve lost control of the government but we haven’t lost control of our schools. Stop wasting money and listen to us
 
CR
1.4.19

It’s a wet day and a small child is tangled in his mum’s folding umbrella in block 5. I assist and we proceed companionably upstairs, gradually uncovering destination cluelessness. He needs repeater stations to get him from place to place so we set one up with Miss in my office to complement the nice ladies on reception. Miss provides him with a post-it – his second of the day - to help. He sticks this on his jumper to keep it dry while repeating the umbrella experience with a sausage sandwich. 
 
Outside, we are buffeted by elements. A year 9 eccentric advises ‘we should put these clouds in the IER for throwing wet at people’ so we discuss if that would be foggy in a room. ‘No, but there’d be a lot of banging’. What? 

We’ve had trouble with water all week. First we didn’t have enough, then it went a bit cloudy, now it’s falling from the sky. At least the roofs don’t leak. If they did, though, we’d have £50k to spend on it, thanks to the Budget. Tallis is lucky to be watertight, though we pay for the PFI privilege. 
 
As the National Audit Office reckons schools need over £6.5bn just to bring buildings up to standard. The budget announcement was not warmly welcomed by school leaders. Tin-eared was used, also patronising. Demeaning was accurately applied by one Head who wrote:

While I’m very glad for the NHS that extra funding has been agreed, you can imagine me waiting for the second shoe to fall in the public sector. I was at the annual school leaders’ association conference last week where a wise person described schools as being in gridlock. I think our problems are difficult to make simple, but it was an apposite image and I’m going to have a go at explaining it. Yawn if you’ve heard me before.

Schools’ biggest problems are funding and the teacher supply. Our funding problems are a result of national austerity measures, a much-postponed decision to move to a national funding formula, and the London issue.  
National austerity means that funding has been stagnant for some time, the increased spending that the government claims being because of more children in the system (schools are funded per child). The national funding formula combined with austerity means that the total existing money is to be shared out more fairly. 

That’s good, but there are as many losers as winners. We would be losers. This combines with the London issue.  London schools were funded more highly because of higher costs, of course, but also through the London Challenge, the initiative which improved the achievement of London schools so radically this century. On top of that, there were pension and NI changes which were unfunded, costing school budgets more.

The teacher supply issue is a real nightmare. Routes into teaching are very complicated and have been decentralised. This combined with static pay and publicity about unmanageable workloads to deter applications, so its many years since government teacher recruitment targets were met. In London, teachers leave to move to areas where they can afford housing.  

The link between funding and workload is harder to explain. Schools spend most of their money on teachers so when budgets have to be reduced, we employ fewer teachers. That means three things. Each teacher teaches more of the week, each class is bigger, and schools discontinue particular courses. Or all three. All those add to the work of remaining teachers. Recruitment does the same thing: an unfillable science post after Christmas led to existing teachers getting more classes and some classes welcoming more students. 

All those affect the service parents expect from teachers. More and larger classes mean less non-contact time and more marking. More marking leads to less frequency, and parents worry about that. I worry about everything.  Hence the gridlock. We sit in our schools hooting wildly, but no one opens the flow in any direction. The answer is more money, but will that ever be the message?

I look out of the window and espy a child, teacher and standard lamp combo. It looks like a nice DT product, so I can only speculate on why it’s been taken for a walk. An inveterate shorts-wearer skips past, obviously feeling the equinox to be satisfactory. Two sirs seek a child who left me in the regular manner but is now elsewhere from where he should be. Year 10 are doing mock exams and so we are still in shushing mode. In fact, next year I might instigate a rule where everyone may only say shush on the first floor of block 4 between December and June. Beat that with a stick, silent-corridor schools.

I tangle with some year 10s who let us down badly earlier in the week, and I’m reading a journal about all the things we ask of the adolescent brain while it’s still rewiring itself. However, it doesn’t excuse these malefactors. I’m daunted by the papers’ erudition but that may be faulty wiring affected by my own adolescence downwind of a chemical works. There’s a whole chapter on myths, and I know a bit about those. Especially the ones about running schools without teachers or money.

Unexpectedly, a second pair of shorts crosses my vision while I have a cordial and witty row with a trusted colleague. His parting shot is that it’s not worth carrying on a fight he’s not going to win. That’s just defeatism. Many human myths are about battles of endurance and he might yet win, unlike the children of austerity with no teachers. That’s a battle against the odds and it’s just not fair. 
  
A youth renowned for Irish dancing scissors across the bridge in the between-lunch quiet, thinking no one’s looking. He’s a fine sight. You’ve got to love it.
 
CR
22.3.18  
 
  

Funny how the world turns when you’re not looking. Distracted by turquoised youths and unable to use technological social megaphones I have a limited world-view. For example, I try not to think about academies but that doesn’t alter the fact that 70% of secondary schools are academies or Free Schools now, and that those of us who stood still are in a minority. 36% of schools are part of MATs (multi-academy trusts), many of them big ‘uns. This is interesting (really, bear with me) because the larger MATs are developing their management and their economies of scale. The most successful in terms of GCSE outcomes - because that’s the only way success is measured – have developed very safe ways of getting results. As you’d hope.

First among those methods is standardisation of processes across schools. So, a large MAT will employ a Director of Curriculum and subject specialists. They design and write the curriculum for, say, History, or Science, and how it is to be taught in the MATs schools.

In the old days, Local Education Authorities kept a stable of such folks, and schools used or adapted the materials according to need, inclination or diktat. When the funding went, the Advisors and Inspectors disappeared from County Hall. Once performance tables became the only measure of the system, curriculum design merged with the GCSE syllabus.
  
This didn’t do anyone any good because exams measure knowledge, they don’t define it. That’s a different rant, however, and my point is that we are now in interesting times If by interesting you mean ‘things that make me chew off my fingerends’. The big MATS (I said MATs, not Macs, do pay attention) don’t just appoint the expert and issue the curriculum, but they also give teachers scripts. Scripts, like in a play.

What kind of news is this? It might help the workload crisis that we face: teachers don’t have to prepare the teaching materials or write or adapt the curriculum. They just have a script and then can concentrate on making sure that children are progressing, intervening when they need to. Given that for the third successive year we’ve nationally failed to meet teacher training recruitment targets by a mile, we could perhaps do with some scripts. And someone to read them out.

Or it might be terrible. Pundits luurrve to say ‘we don’t want teachers reinventing the wheel’ which is head-bangingly obvious, but it doesn’t cover it. The best teachers burn with a love of their subject and take intense satisfaction in devising new and interesting ways to teach it. They create, experiment and refine. They recycle stuff that works and ditch stuff that doesn’t. They tinker and tune, and get the results. They use their learning and their own habits to lead and support the little learner in front of them. They share and steal, they revel in the stuff.  Some of them take over the department and write their own curricula and give it away to others. Some take over schools, and put knowledge and creative learning at their heart

All of that takes time, which, in a horrifically underfunded system, is beyond rubies. So the big MATs with their Curriculum Directors work one way, and we try to do it the old way: good schemes of work, good shared resources and planning, freedom in the classroom to adapt and adopt, as long as it works. Would workload be reduced if we handed everyone a script? I don’t know. What would that cost? What kind of people would we become?

Which takes me back to last Wednesday when I went to a gig for my dear chum Prof Michael Young, to celebrate his 50 years at the Institute of Education. He’s see a lot, and he’s worried about the future for schools when teachers don’t have to think it through for themselves from first principles. Worried about the scripts.      

Another Prof, our school chum Bill Lucas, has been namechecking us this month, thank you kindly. He’s worked with us for years on our habits and dispositions, on our creativity and love of learning. Now he’s working with PISA to get that into the international measures. I’m pretty sure there won’t be a script for it. 

Anyway, we had Community Day this week, thinking about our futures with lots of career-friendly activities: planning, debating, collaborating, thinking. Year 11 did yoga and spacehoppers as well as thinking about their Tallis legacy and revision timetables. Everyone branched out a bit, and thought expansively.

I walk out into a snow flurry at break and everyone was ridiculously squealing and shrieking. Teachers who get them into class afterwards need to use all their skills to dial down the excitement and turn their minds to thinking hard. Would you have a special script, for a snowy day in London?

I don’t know where this curriculum path will lead us all and I might be worrying about nothing. The MATs are dominant, though, and big enough to sit an elephant on. And you know what happens when they get into the room.
 
CR
31.11.17   

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:

A year 11 solicits my opinion on his burgundy fleece gloves, ridiculed as effeminate by his chums. I agreed this was unjust. Another inquires politely after my health and asks for advice on cough remedies. I’m available for comment on most things, but I generally try to specialise in two areas. For the record, those are knowledge and the curriculum, and ethical leadership. However, if you’d like my opinion on any other aspect of education, literature, life, politics, fashion or domestic poultry I’ll happily give it. I may not be well-informed, but I’m articulate.

I’d been asked for a piece on knowledge for an outfit of whom I was suspicious. I arranged to get up close to the commissioner one dark afternoon before agreeing. I went easy on him as he was so baby-faced he could have passed unnoticed among year 10 without the tweed jacket. He reassured me he was old enough to be out buying coffee for women so we agreed on the article and then he asked me about centralised detention.

My hearing isn’t great in a crowded room. What? I said: do you mean where an Assistant Head gathers all the sluggards who’ve been late for lessons into the canteen at the end of the day and annoys them? Like when a Deputy, steeped in treachery and low cunning, sits with egregious offenders until 16:30 on a Friday? Or a Head of Department gathers homework defaulters on a Tuesday?  Or a Head of Year gets irritants together on Thursday and badgers them for an hour? Yes. It was a bit like being asked how I feel about GCSEs, or assemblies, or lining up for a fire practice. As kindly as I could, I said: I don’t think it’s new. He said, everyone’s talking about it on the blogosphere. I made a cross-eyed face: is that a fact?    

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later the uber-school of the new rigidity advertised for a Director of Detention. Is that all they’re going to do? Someone described it as recruiting an official school bully, but that’s unfair. We all do detentions. Our own good Sheedy could be called Director of Detention, but its only part of his work on engagement and good behaviour. I’m amused by this oldest and unsubtlest of sanctions being gussied up by new schools who are very keen on saying what they DON’T do: they don’t mark books, they don’t do wall displays, they don’t let children talk, but they’re very keen on detention. Surprised they need it. Funny old world.

New schools in a deregulated landscape are on my mind. We’ve been talking to anyone who’ll listen about an aspect of the Progress 8 measure. P8 is a good measure in that it doesn’t present perverse incentives at the C/D borderline which skews schools’ approach to teaching. All grades count equally and the school is judged on its average deviation from the national norm, each year a different dataset. (Actually, all grades don’t count equally until next year, therefore favouring the grammar schools, but that’s a rant for another day). The problem is the disproportionate effect a non-achieving child has on the whole outcome. So, our final grade for 2016 is -0.05 against a national average of -0.03. That includes 8 young people (of a year group of 270) who, for a range of sad reasons, weren’t with us daily by the end of year 11. Without them, it would have been 0.1, quite a different outcome. But we weren’t without them.

So, this year there’ll be consequences of compassion again. We have young people not in school. Some did things that mean that they can’t be in the Tallis community, some are ill, others the victims of atrocious circumstance. All are being educated otherwise, but they remain on our roll until the end because we chose to find them a positive alternative to the oblivion-risk of a permanent exclusion in KS4, or keep trying. Local Authorities do the same.  However, the protocols that bind all schools together where we share the most challenging young people appropriately and fairly are stretched by the proliferation of schools sailing under different flags. Some partner with us closely, others are more distant. They can’t be compelled to take children who’ll endanger their results.
Harbingers of doom said that the academy programme would lead to the abandonment of the vulnerable. As always, the regulator steps in to prevent sharp practice, so the last school the child went to gets his results. We’re proud to be one of those schools, proud to be inclusive and give everyone another chance and we’ve a lot of colleagues whose expertise makes that possible.

The future is troubling. The planned funding formula endangers support services and therefore further endangers children to whom life has already dealt a duff hand. Who’ll care for the children who are harder to love? Who’ll go the extra mile for children who can’t offer much in return? I’ve an opinion on that too.
 
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9.2.17

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.
 
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7.10.16