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:

October blows towards half term and I take a turn outside to check the elephants and the miasmas and the general views (as Stevie Smith once said). The view from the bridge is diverting, watching the Brownian motion of folks as they rush about carrying news or just chasing each other. Heading back to another meeting I’m surrounded by a group at scuttling height, half a dozen shepherded by a smiley adult. I investigate their purpose. ‘We’re in transition’ they tell me and I have to laugh. ‘What?’ ‘We’re going to Transition, it’s our last Transition Group’. I suggest that they’re in transit to Transition which amuses at least one of them as they rush past. Transition’s what we do for the little ones who might need a hand settling into our big community: looks like it’s worked with this bunch.

I muse about this as we do our second big set-piece of the season, Sixth Form Open Night. We’re a huge sixth form and a big importer, so it’s important to give local and distant sixteen-year-olds a gander at what we offer. Head of Sixth (by his own admission dressed like an accountant for the gig) and I (dressed to match the tablecloths) give it our rhetorical best.  He’s inclined to the expansive but assures me he’s timed himself and so he has, 20 minutes delivered four times faultlessly, graphs, charts, the lot. The stars, however, are the extant sixth formers who charm the crowd. Ellen’s been with us since she was a rusher and chaser, subtle and stylish in black and applying to Oxford, couldn’t do it without Ms McG and the History department. Grace is newer, in a sort of transition too, been here seven weeks and already running the show. She’s got a lab coat over her Tallis Habits tee shirt and dashes off between speeches to check up on science.  

As we manage this year 11 to 12 transition we try make sure that young people don’t make the wrong choices for the wrong reasons. We don’t keep everyone here: our sixth form is largely A levels and solely level 3 courses, so some of our own go elsewhere to get the courses they need. Some want to spread their wings. A few, however, are persuaded by parents to move on when they’d rather stay and this worries us. One or two leave us every year to go to grammar school sixths over the border, which really doesn’t make sense. Our results are excellent and our value-added is outstanding – top 15% of sixth forms anywhere. Stay with us and you get a grade higher than you might expect, including in the grammar schools. Do well in a comprehensive school sixth form and admissions tutors at competitive universities love you. Our people make better undergraduates than those from independent and selective schools because they have their work habits embedded for themselves, in their own habits and minds. However, it’s hard for some parents to see beyond the brand hype of grammar schools and they worry that their beloveds might lose the chance to get ahead of the game. We find new ways of explaining it, so we’ve two enormous banners showing where last year’s year 13s went to university. It’s pretty impressive but a pity that the architecture of the foyer gives you a crick in your neck if you try to read them. 

Chair of Governors wanders around talking to staff between presentations and demos. He wants to hear their thoughts on workload and how the new day feels. We’ve changed the transitional parts of the day; added time to registration and separated the rushers from the moochers in two shorter lunchtimes. Governors worry when staff say it feels exhausting: I worry too. It works for the children but it’s harder on the adults, so we’ll need to keep an eye on it.

Friday is Black History Month Own Clothes Day. The year 10 girls who’ve organised it are clear, committed and very organised and their doughnuts sell out in minutes. A group of boys come to talk about some work they’re doing with Barclays and ask if they can hold a talent show. They all impress me: confident, articulate, brave. But I’ve stuff to worry about: money largely, and the pressures of cyberspace, body image and street life. How we sustain what we do and ease transitions for all our children. How we offer education for the hand and the heart as well as the head. How we change the world for the better.
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Good job its half term, a transitional point to clear the mind. And new drains to come back to!
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21.10.16

The best is the existential demand repeated a thousand times a day: where should you be? Let me set the scene. A child is found in an unauthorised place (in our world where authorisation and unauthorisation change according to time). ​

​He may be at a watering hole or moseying along a corridor.  She may be lurking outside an office or emerging from the loo. Sensible forensics would require a thorough investigation: where he or she has been, why, how long and on whose say-so. It’s much quicker to invoke the future. Where should you be?

Again, a range of answers: maths, reception, the Library, my Head of Year, art. Those enable a youth to pass on, with just a quickly then, shooing motion or chop chop.  Actual dreams are discouraged:  somewhere warmer than this, in my bed, on holiday, at the chicken shop, with my luurrve would be rewarded with a personal escort to a destination of the escort’s choice and an unceremonious posting through a classroom door with another question: ‘This one of yours, Miss?’

But where should they be? Somewhere happy, somewhere safe. Somewhere people know them and love them. Somewhere the people are reliable and human.  Somewhere you can look out of the window when you’re 11 and watch the 16-year-old gods pass by. Somewhere where they listen, somewhere where they care.  Somewhere taxpayer’s money is spent wisely and effectively. Somewhere you can learn how to measure things in the sun with your LSA. Somewhere you can learn things, somewhere you can discover things. Somewhere your geography teacher will show you what’s under the drain cover. Somewhere where they’ll smile at you. Somewhere where they’ll teach you how to live, how to behave, how to create a somewhere that’s better for the next generation. Somewhere they don’t treat you like a fool, or a criminal. Somewhere they won’t judge by externals.
Questioning lasts all day. Sir appears in my room with a flourish and a bright idea about a marquee: what do they cost? He’s joined by another who claims to have solved two problems: is this ok? A third poses a conundrum: am I right? A fourth, however, issues a communique: news of a Pride Drive at OFSTED from a conference in town. Inspectors don’t like lippy children, untidy classrooms, scruffy (tie-less) uniforms.  Who does? Children should learn how to be friendly and confident. Classrooms should be physically and emotionally orderly. Uniforms, duh, should be worn as designed. But having a joke with a teacher isn’t lip, having a lot of stuff out at once in a lesson isn’t untidiness and wearing a polo shirt isn’t a personal affront to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector. I spoke at a Policy Exchange gig this week and there was barely a tie in the room. Where’s the research behind these time wasting-personal prejudices? 

Education policy is littered with these non sequiturs: a range of rhetorical questions present themselves. Who are they kidding? What are they on? Why don’t they understand? We’d do well to stick to ours: where should you be, child?  Somewhere better than this.
 
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11.5.16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick enough? Or this?

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

Those who have violence at their fingertips have a tendency to use it: the armed against the unarmed, the strong against the weak. They listened carefully and thought hard. We remembered 7/7 – and the bombing campaigns of the 70s. We are not afraid.

​Regular readers know that my year 7 groups act as a touchstone for the zeitgeist. We pondered Paley’s metaphor of the watchmaker and started to wonder in a more systematic way than in September if there was a God. Putting that on hold, we returned to our regular current affairs slot. I told them that I didn’t think Instagram was a reliable news source (World War 3 starting next Tuesday, targeting schools – God, I hope I’m right) and we thought a bit about the best response to terrorism. I don’t usually allow football as a news story, but the Wembley match was ripe for discussion. As was the breaking news from Paris: why do terrorists use bits from the Qur’an?  It’s really embarrassing, said one.  Why indeed?

These little ones are getting their feet under the table now. They’re relaxing and thinking, starting to see the seven-year path to adulthood unrolling in the wide corridors and high level walkways of this place. Every so often you get a glimpse of the adult within: a doer, a joker, a worrier. Some will take on the world, some may wish to abdicate responsibility for others. Some who’ll come to love money above all things and some who’ll be fired with righteous fury to change the world for the better. Their faces illuminate the future. Seeing a hall full of them is a wonderful thing.

Lots of adults who drop by under different guises also have children here in school. Sometimes the fates combine to give them a glimpse of the beloved child in a corridor or over my Juliet balcony (oh yes). There’s not a parent in the world who doesn’t grin from ear to ear when the young one flits by, so assured, so capable. Teachers do a lot of that. We seek out the faces in the crowd of the child we want to see, we can scan a thousand faces to find the one who needs a particular word, a helping hand, a reminder or reprimand, a nibble round the edges until the work is done.

I’m always worried that I won’t see the face I’m looking for in a crowd. That there’ll be someone close by who needs something I can offer and I’ll miss it through doziness or preoccupation. I have no idea how you go about blowing up a crowd.  Looking at ours on Wednesday and Monday, how could you lay waste to people? I’m pretty sure that some people just love violence for its own sake and then have to find a way to justify it. Their arguments are vapid and cynical, looking for easy answers in a world of compromise. It’s not new, but it is newly awful.

I often quote the great Rob Coe of Durham University, a neighbour of mine in former days. After years of world-leading research, he’ll only say that children learn when they have to think really hard. The most important thing we can do in our schools is to teach them to think really hard so that when the inexplicable happens they have the wherewithal to reflect sensibly and find ways to resist and survive. To identify a good argument and reject a rubbish one. To care and serve, no matter how annoying, rather than seethe and hate. That’s why our happy communities, noisy with discussion and lit up by faces we love in the crowd might help to save the world. There’s a time for talking and a time for silence, but I don’t want to blow that whistle again for another year.
 
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18.11.15

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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10.3.15

 

Cicero said: ‘What greater and better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and to instruct our young?’

 I kid myself that we make recruitment reasonably humane.  If candidates can only persuade us that they have a glittering eye and a brilliant mind, combine the gutsiness of Julie Walters and the steel of Daniel Craig, that they won’t vanish without trace in the first term or deflate under pressure in the first year, the job’s theirs.  Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

If you’ve got a good degree and you want to be a maths or science teacher there are bursaries up to £25k.  Our schools are good and the work rewarding  - but there were 81 September science posts advertised in a single week for schools in London alone. The people I work with are a pleasant and urbane bunch, educated, effective and Oscar-quality actors every one. They can hold a crowd in the palm of the hand and make it look effortless.  Our science department are particularly chirpy. So why are science teachers hard to find?  Is it that scientists (unlike historians or artists?) all get better paid work elsewhere?  Or that no-one short of a hedge fund can live in London?    Or does a combination of Educating Essex, Yorkshire or Waterloo Road by Tough Young Teachers just make the job look too damn scary?  Who’d want to be that teacher?

It’s not too much to say that we have a national crisis of understanding about teaching.  Teachers are too diffident about why we do what we do, and politicians use us shamelessly. Nationally, we don’t care enough about young people to be idealistic and articulate about the formation of our young.  The best education systems in the world really value education and teaching. Training posts are extremely competitive and involve postgraduate theoretical pedagogy as an essential adjunct to excellent subject knowledge.  PISA winners don’t scorn education’s thinkers as The Enemy Within and they keep politics out of our children’s futures.  Most of all, they don’t denigrate teachers in public discourse with fatuous misquotings: ‘those who can, do…’ 

So this recruitment season let’s talk up Cicero’s gift, starting with these 10 things.

1. Children and young people deserve the best a nation can give them
2. Knowledge is worthwhile in itself and teachers share it on behalf of society
3. Children need teachers so they may understand and change the world
4. Powerful knowledge liberates children from their daily experience
5. Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens 
6. Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy
7. It is fair and just that all children should have access to transforming education
8. The teacher’s authority to do this is given and valued by society
9. Society trusts teachers to model our shared values
10. We need the best possible teachers to achieve all this for all our children.

If you’re not already a teacher, why not think about becoming one?  Look at the Department for Education’s website and the range of routes you can take, not all of which involve penury. Ask if you can shadow a teacher in a school you know, or come to us.  Come and talk to some young people.  They’ll blow your socks off. 

If you like the sound of any of this you know where to find me. We’ll have very few vacancies this year, but we can help you look.  Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

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26.2.14

Having inserted the lost form we started the music and singing. I hadn’t seen the massed Tallis before and the sea of well-behaved cheery turquoise and sophisticated sixth form lifted my spirits. I told them that they were a gift to the future, we congratulated the hamper winners and the bands played. We sang, we clapped, we wished each other Merry Christmas and went home. 

This week we regroup and continue our journey into the future from Twelfth Night. Christmas and New Year can distract even the most assiduous teacher from his or her planning and marking so people usually come back in cheery spirits, occasionally accompanied by a diverting garment to add to their school repertoire.

One of the odder things I was asked by Tallis men when I arrived was if I felt strongly about flowery shirts as if my own paisley trousers weren’t enough of a hint.  Brilliant teaching is a matter of hard work, determination, scholarship and communication. As long as a chap is pressed and freshly laundered I don’t need to choose his clothes. I’d baulk at tee shirts and jeans, but really, let a thousand flowers bloom.  What’s wrong with showing young people that you can be a learned public servant and trusted with your own eccentricities? Teachers need to be clever, well trained, decently paid and expert in developing hardworking relationships with young people. They need to be fully professional, that is, able to make the right decisions when faced with unavoidable ambiguity. Shirt design is neither here nor there. 

It’s not surprising, however. The kind of command structure common in schools that can make the proscribing of flowery shirts seem like a reasonable act has its roots in a fear of the human spirit and the difficult journey. Even allowing children to chat in corridors is banned in some lauded schools. Our combination of teachers in flowery shirts encouraging civilised small talk while one group made a longer journey to join the community is far from the prevailing orthodoxy about behaviour management.      

The finale at our Christmas assembly was a huge performance of One Day Like This by a hundred young musicians. If you don’t know the song, let me recommend it to you. As they sang about throwing the curtains wide and the samba drummers raised the temperature I hoped that 2014 might bring an outbreak of understanding of the human spirit and the human journey. That maybe one day the sheer joy and exuberance found in communities of growing human beings led by devoted adults might be trusted and valued as part of our national life.  That one day the comprehensive ideal which encapsulates all our hopes might be recognised as a vision every bit as great as the foundation of the NHS. As the song says: one day like this a year would see me right.

Happy 2014!      

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