Trigger warning: another rant about the misuse of Victorian poetry follows. Stop after para 6 if you just can’t stomach it. ​

Once upon a time Headteachers had to be trained for the job. During my second Headship I did the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH).  Stop fidgeting, this will get more interesting. Winter 2006, York, as cold as it gets. I bought extra tights to put on under the several pairs I was already wearing.

It left two very clear memories. First, of an ice-breaker task on the first residential. If you’ve been on leadership training you’ll recognise the type of thing, build the tallest free-standing structure you can with newspaper, string, straws and suchlike. I thrust myself into a leadership space pronto and we set about winning the session.  

Not only did we lose but collapsed without a useful tower of any height because I’d put myself into a position for which I didn’t have the skills. I’m spatially poor and struggle to imagine or manipulate shapes in my head, the last person you want engineering any kind of tower. I had no idea how to do the task and failed, taking others with me. In the collective debrief, I became angrily defensive and quite upset. Too few educators have those experiences, so common to children, yet still they bone on about resilience. Hold that thought.

The other memory is of my group of three for the year-long programme. A colleague served at the school in Middlesbrough where a child was stabbed to death by an intruder in 1994. Wisely, he wouldn’t be drawn on how the school was recovering, always answering ‘too early to tell’. 

We’ve had quite an exciting time since I last wrote, but it’s too early to tell how it’s all going to go. We won’t really know for at least 10 years, actually. An unexciting half-term break was followed by announcements about the return and the not-exams. Tallis logisticians and the blessed LA have leapt into action and we’ll manage the return just fine, looking forward to it. The not-exams are more complicated and we are slowly gathering guidance from exam boards, to whom we are still paying huge amounts this year. Which seems peculiar, but there you are. Old rope, anyone?

Playing alongside, the relentless refrain about lost learning, catch-up and recovery, about potential lost earnings and disadvantage all as a result of lockdown. We use no such language on HMS Tallis. The children have had an extraordinary experience and they know less stuff, but they’re still adolescents with expanding and developing brains, which will get back to feeding properly very soon. Politicians, be quiet.

Which led to a discussion about the budget. I say discussion, but actually I was arrested by my interlocutor’s opening gambit: why are very rich people allowed to make decisions about money for poor people? She got the benefit of Roberts’ maxim 427 which is that no one who’s never stood in a supermarket queue worrying that their card will be declined should serve in Parliament. Young Sunak not being short of a bob.

Following it up in the paper yesterday morning, I discover that Sunak quoted old Tennyson’s wondrous Ulysses.  Well, he said ‘that which we are, we are’.  

Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Part 1: Thursday 25 June
You were spotted in SW1 earlier this week and the fieldman’s report (I’m reading Le Carré) classified you as ‘preoccupied’. I’m not surprised. I feared for your state of mind before the current shenanigans began and I can’t imagine what it’s like navigating the corridors of power with your colleagues. Seeing them on the telly requires nerves of steel.

Unlike watching us! Tallis was on the box on Monday. BBC London came and filmed a newly-regathered half A-level Psychology class, interviewed Mr Smith, four thoughtful youths and me. They said that being back helped focus their minds: I said that having no children was scrambling mine but that the 2m rule would need to be gone – and all the bubble talk – before we could reassemble.

So we plugged the gogglebox in the dining room in on Tuesday lunchtime to watch the PM forecast the future. Social distancing meant those at the reception end needed binoculars, but never mind, I had a front seat. Good news: everyone back to school in September! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear and I tried to encourage moderate cheering. Some HTs are worried about the detail, but I’m sure you have it all under control. In fact, my pavement artist (Le Carré again) said it looked as though it was all in your bag.   
 
Perhaps one of those bright young things who nip around ministers fore and aft could sort it out a bit for you, though? Headteachers are fussy and we like things to be clear. It would be great to see which rules we have to follow in school, which are optional, which just occurred to a front-bencher while they were cleaning their teeth, which have been abandoned, which denied and which are ideas being road-tested before becoming policy which may never be heard of again. My primary colleagues, blessings on their tiny furniture, were certainly shocked this week to be told that 2m in school had never been a rule for them. Are you sure? 

And what about this rumour afloat that the exams might be pushed back a few weeks next year to maximise teaching time. That’s partially a good idea – but oh my, wouldn’t it have been better to test it out below decks before musing from the bridge? Now everyone’s asking about it and no one has the foggiest.

And without wishing to reopen a wound, since The Drive To Barnard Castle the whole cabinet’s seaworthiness is questionable, like a teacher who lost control of a class in October but has to survive until July. Was he worth it?    

Mr Williamson, I’ve been thinking about exams too, nursing a fond hope that the experience of this year might usher in a better future. Why have GCSEs at all?  Why not base the 16-year-olds’ passport on teacher assessment, moderated in the way this year’s will be, properly evaluated and monitored by nerdy subject-based inspectors who really know their stuff? That’s who Her Majesty’s Inspectors were before Ofsted was invented. Wouldn’t it be great to liberate learning by dispensing with GCSE? Wouldn’t it be great if year 11 marked their transition without the examination hall as the rite of passage? Remember, it only remotely works for two thirds of them.

Like the hapless October teacher we’re not very good at some kinds of learning so we end up having to keep promising the same changes time and again. I took two years out of teaching before I had my children and worked as a Community Relations Officer in the midlands. The 80s were a time of disturbance in Birmingham and London which resulted in a significant amount of Home Office funding for projects to tackle the racism and social exclusion. Most of the focus was on anti-racism training for individuals, but we understood about institutionalised racism and encouraged institutions to scrutinise their processes to combat it. Fifteen years later there was the McPherson Report. Now, twenty years after that, ten years after the Public Sector Equality Duty, where are we, exactly? And how can any government mired in the Windrush depatriations and the Hostile Environment be believed?

I saw a photo in the paper of a novel idea in a Chinese school to keep small-ish children apart. They had very serious expressions for persons in purple paper wings but it just goes to show that children will accept anything as normal if an adult tells them so. Children will believe a lie if someone they trust tells it. That’s why we have to tell them the truth and that’s why we can’t keep fobbing them off with change tomorrow.

Education, equality and justice are really hard to get right. Your Shadow has fallen today. You’re picking your way, Mr Williamson, through very difficult circumstances and you don’t look very steady on your own feet. Tell us the truth, talk to us and trust us and we can rebuild something righteous and grand, together.

Yours, at some distance.
 
Carolyn Roberts
26.6.20 

Dear Mr Williamson,
​
It was the staircase that did for me on Thursday the 12th, the morning after the announcement that schools would close and the exams were cancelled. We had a mock GCSE Physics exam and proceeded as usual, corralled the youth into the dining room, instructed them about examiners’ wheezes and checked them for pens. Then we send them up to the sports hall in batches, a trip involving four sets of double doors, six sharp turns and two flights of stairs. Old folks position themselves on the stairs encouraging the youth to approach the exam hall in the zone, silently, thinking about physics or whatever tasty dish is on the menu.  

I was on the half landing and frankly, unimpressed. I said to myself ‘This’ll have to improve before the real exams start’ until, as they say in the six counties, I caught myself on. This was it. There weren’t going to be any real exams. It was a miracle of muscle memory and instilled habits that they were walking quietly up the stairs at all. They’d never take Physics GCSE again. Or any other. What? How could that be? What vacuum were we about to enter (as the physicists say)?

For the record, I think the closing of schools and the necessary cancelling of exams was done well and briskly. It gave us just enough time to organise and to talk to year 11 and 13 in particular about their futures. It gave them the chance to see how adults have to mobilise rapidly and change quickly when crisis headbutts the door. At least, I hope that’s what they saw. We’d been doing Virus Q&A in assemblies and had y11 on Wednesday afternoon, two hours before the announcement. The first Q to Roberts was ‘What will happen about the exams?’. ‘Keep working!’ quoth I – ‘Exams will happen no matter what’. When I climbed onto a bench to address y11 the next day had to begin with ‘so you remember the question about the exams?’. They were kind enough to laugh.

Trusting in your skills, sir, to make sure the solution this year is fair and good, this break in the cycle could be a great opportunity to improve education. You’d probably welcome my advice. Are you sitting comfortably?

There are many things wrong with GCSE but the biggest is that it’s completely unnecessary. Until 1951 children who stayed at school past 14 got a School Certificate. That was replaced by GCEs in 1951 for those who stayed on until they were 16. The GCE pointed towards ‘matriculation’ or university entry. Indeed, the exam board AQA was, in my time, the Joint Matriculation Board of the northern redbrick universities. OCR was Oxford and Cambridge, Pearson the London Board. The blessed GCSE was born in 1988 of GCE O-levels and the CSE. They were both qualifications for further study or the job market at 16. A-levels remaining unchanged for nearly 70 years were designed to assess whether a tiny minority of young people were university-ready. We scaled them up but didn’t change their purpose.   
May I pose three questions? The first is: why does everyone have to take an exam that is essentially a filter for university entry two years later, for a minority of students? The second is: If no one can leave school until they’re 18 why does everyone have to take an exam at 16? The third is about the forgotten third. What possible justification is there for an examination that a third of students have to fail?    

You’ll be desperate to hear my solutions so here they are. First, we need to rethink what we want for young people and the nation. University is only one pathway and many, many (most?) jobs are better served by apprenticeships or on-the-job learning at 18. Not everything is examinable by examination. If we finally, formally decoupled most of our assessment system from its elitist past we might also put ourselves in a better position to seek the holy grail for English education, proper parity between academic and vocational strands. Second, we’d still need some kind of assessment because we swap a lot of students around at 16. This remains sensible because they’re old enough to make choices about their aims in life. They need a passport to the next stage. That should be a reliable, trustworthy and standardised set of grades with a particular focus on proficiency in English and maths. Third, that passport needs to be fair and to assess endeavour, not advantage. A child who works very hard but achieves proficiency slowly needs a qualification which tells the receiver what she can do, not what she can’t do. 

The current system which officially uses the word ‘fail’ to describe the school careers of a third of children is not only wrong, but wicked. But my solution is rooted in something much, much bigger.

My passport at 16 would be assessed by teachers, the same teachers that taught the children. Why? Because they’re already there, thousands of skilled education assessors. How? Through assessment based on our current expertise, standardised through the National Reference Tests. These are maths and English tests that a selected sample of children take each year – Tallis did them in 2019. Teachers don’t see those tests or find out the results, but they’re designed to estimate the range of abilities present in a national year group. We have the data we need to do something completely different and much better.

It will require a leap of faith from some earthbound factions. Politicians and policy-makers will have to trust teachers. School leaders will have to trust teachers. Parents and students will have to trust teachers. All of them will have to understand that teachers have a particular skill in assessment that only fails when too much weight is put on it. That skill can easily bear the weight of a single child and it can stand firm under scrutiny, but it can’t be used to measure the success of a school. That needs to be done another way, by a properly funded expert inspectorate using serious longitudinal studies into what helps children learn and what doesn’t. 

Teachers will be honest about assessment if school leaders let them, and if we all agree to lay down the petty rivalries that brought our system to its knees. We can hold each other to account using a nifty little tool that’s live in the system already, the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education. That requires school leaders to show selflessness, integrity, optimism, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. It demands that we do it showing trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We could build a better system on a new level of professional trust.

Out of this terrible experience a better world might be born for our children. Future years might not equate education with exams and exams with failure. They might enjoy school a bit more and love learning for its own sake.  We might train and keep more teachers. Keep an eye on this year, Mr Williamson and have the courage to think big. Sure, we’ll still need some exams at 18, but they’re big enough to walk up the stairs on their own then.

Yours ever, CR   

27.3.20    

Well, Mr Williamson, I’m disappointed. Months of waiting and what do we get? Silent corridors and phone bans?  Really? When I wrote two weeks ago that I’d recognise what you were going to be like by the first things you said I didn’t expect them to be quite so, what shall I say, dog-whistly. Oh dear me no. When we think of the virus and the curriculum, the scrap with Ofsted, the funding, the reappearance of teaching-as-a-career adverts, the recruitment crisis and the sad state of our zero-sum, zero-tolerated young I had hoped for something a bit more hopeful.

Phones are still an open debate in my head but not the corridors. Let me dispense with this. Children talk. They have a range of volumes available to them and a plethora of topics. Some of the foregoing are more acceptable to the genteel adult ear than others. If they’re too loud this can easily be fixed by saying ‘shush’ while applying the finger to the lips. If their discussion lacks civility that can be dealt with by removing them into a corner to offer counsel and issue instruction. However, most of the time they’re talking at a reasonable volume about music, love, books, lessons, teachers, sport, gossip, animals, wars, food and Playstations. You might not tackle to their taste, but civil conversation is good for them and offsets all kinds of problems, from inarticulacy to isolation. Since I last ranted about this I’ve visited Roedean which I’m sure you’ll think is a model to us all. Their corridors sound like ours, full of children talking. What does silence bring? Control, is all. 

Enough of this. I heard the wonderful Will Gompertz talk last week and he told a great story about children describing their GCSE results to each other. One told of a string of A*s and As, another chirpily claimed to be able to beat that because ‘I can spell BEEF DUDE with mine’. How I know that child and how I can picture them falling about with laughter and tears, clutching each other for support. What a racket, what a memory, what a lesson. Both men are successful now, the dude richer than the A, if that’s what matters.

But he also talked about the twin pillars of teen life: social media and exams. Both are solitary, isolating and largely uncontrollable, especially under comparable outcomes and the requirement of a third to fail GCSE. What are we doing to our children?

Anyway, back at Tallis, I was summoned into action by Head of Year 7. ‘I need you to finish off assembly. I have to go and teach and it’ll overrun because of the bees.’ Happy to oblige and make myself unusually useful, I started it off too. Depositing year 7 neatly in rows on the Sports Hall floor we started with coronavirus and the handwashing-Happy Birthday thing. One of the great things about year 7 is that they are young enough to be openly curious and uninhibited enough to prefer an answer to anonymity. A hand shot up. ‘How long it lasts depends on the person’s name, doesn’t it?’ Yes indeed. Let’s call her Eglantyne and practise that.

However, the bee man was unpacking his affairs by then and attention was elsewhere. He had bees, he had hives, he had boxes and he had honey. At some point I ended up holding bees while the younger element asked questions. Some got to hold bees too and some were rewarded with honey. Loads of previously bee-indifferent city dwellers asked detailed and imaginative questions. We frequently had to pause while they discussed bee-related issues with one another and when I finally handed my green parcels back and shooed them off to class the bee-debate was stretching from block 5 to the furthest reach of period 1. (Oh, the green parcels were the bees.  Hibernating – do you think I’m mad?) As I remarked to the meeting I was 20 minutes late for and the phone call I forgot altogether until break – never work with children or bees. All your best lines are lost.

Mr Williamson, wouldn’t it have been a waste if the children had had to be quiet all the way to Art? They were so excited, astounded, bemused about what they’d seen they wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves talking. We’d have had to shush them and tell them off, some might have needed punishing, for talking, about an endangered wonder of creation. Who would have benefited? The bees lived again in the retelling as well as in the buzzing and flapping and the silly laughter as 270 11 and 12-year olds swarmed across the yard. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Well, I suppose that if you’re frightened of children, or if you’re not confident in your relationships with them, or if you think they have nothing to say or nothing to share, or if being in control is more important than teaching children a good way to live you might want it, but it still wouldn’t make sense.

And I suppose that when your corridors are silent you’ll never here the quiet admissions, friend to friend. I’m frightened to go home. I’m hungry again. I don’t want to stay alive. I know something dangerous. I don’t know who to tell. And you don’t get the friend’s advice: tell Miss, tell Sir, come with me and I’ll help. 

It’s not just bees who hold us together. Children’s voices frame the world for some of us, and we count ourselves lucky.
 
CR
12.3.20

For the greater good, I stay at arm’s length from social media. Other Heads are all over it, dispensing wisdoms and being useful but, like chip shops, I stay away from temptation. I’m way too fond of a smart remark and a brisk retort to resist putting people right about stuff that’s none of my business. I’d have to spend my life apologising.  Also, my phone is fully occupied with answering emails, reading novels and looking at pictures of my granddaughter so I don’t really have time for other hobbies.

If I did follow the twitts, I’d apparently be in a proper state about OFSTED and the application of their spiffy new framework. After not being interested in it for years, the clipboard brigade are very keen to uncover the intent, implementation and impact of a school’s curriculum and the first reports are piling up now. Schools have prepared, even retooled, to demonstrate their knowledge-rich curricula and their plans for a future liberated from the short-termism and exam fixes which OFSTED used to like under its previous pugilistic proprietor.  Good news.  What could possibly go wrong?

Thirty-odd years ago I used occasionally betake myself to Sheffield to hear a radical Methodist theologian of advanced years. He once said, woundingly, that there was nothing good that the CofE couldn’t get wrong and I sometimes, sorrowfully, feel this about OFSTED. These tweeted early reports have commented not so much on the curriculum, but on whether schools have a 2- or 3- year key stage 3 and what % are doing the EBacc. Hmmm. Key stage length is a school choice and the EBacc is the Department’s political ambition, not OFSTED’s. Righteous indignation enters stage right, to be met by obfuscation from the left. What exactly are OFSTED looking at? On whose behalf? Curriculum, or cheap-to-measure markers? Children’s learning or White Paper lunacy?  

Our own visiting clipboards, you will recall, popped a similar question. Observing that we talked a good game about a broad curriculum entitlement but that we let too many drop arts, DT or languages at the end of year 8, they suggested that we might consider the impact of the 2-year KS3 on our claim of a broad curriculum until year 11.   Fair point, but our lead inspector was a subtle and thoughtful man who took time over his words. Other reports have been rather more direct: change your key stages.

Ofsted are right to be worried about curriculum breadth and integrity and to look at it closely. They are responding to the madness caused by over-simplified high-stakes inspection measures which drove Heads mad and made some narrow the curriculum and dilute knowledge in order to meet performance metrics. Originally, lengthening KS4 to three years was a way of doing this.  Hothouse the GCSEs for longer, get better results. About half of secondary schools did it. 

Undoing it will be troublesome because GCSEs are now much heavier in content and harder in assessment. Doing them in two years rather than three is fine for those who are fully attuned to education and assimilate book-learning easily.  It’ll require wall-to-wall didacticism, and I’m not sure that the research on how children learn values that so highly. Doing them over three years gives a bit of space for unpacking the context of particular learning and for imagination and discovery – and other things that the current captains and the kings particularly don’t like. We’ve been thinking about this here since January. We’re not stupid: if there was a simple answer, we’d have found it.

But is this thoughtful uncertainty a luxury? It’s not as if our GCSE results couldn’t be improved. Shouldn’t we just do as we’re told and follow the instructions of the regulator and the DfE?    

The confusion in the system, from which OFSTED suffer, is deeply rooted. We have a system that bizarrely prizes autonomy above almost everything else. Making the right curriculum decision is a matter therefore for the school, not the state.  Only LA schools are actually still bound by the National Curriculum (wrongly, mistakenly). School curriculum decisions are a matter for schools, except when there’s a political panic. Then the independent regulator – OFSTED – is put to the service of the manifesto promises and the whole structure is revealed, shaky as a weak jelly.

If we knew what schools were for, then we’d make better decisions. If we could agree about what children should learn, then we could have a real, proper, broad National Curriculum that schools could adapt to their circumstances. If we trained and supported Heads properly rather than measuring them cheaply we’d have a system second to none. But that takes time and money, cool longitudinal research and a realisation that twitter-feeding isn’t the same as educational leadership.

We are the advocates for the nation’s young. Ethical leadership demands that we hold trust on their behalf and should use our wisdom, knowledge and insight wisely and kindly.  We should seek to serve justly, courageously and optimistically and continue to argue calmly and in detail for the best curriculum for our schools.

I looked out of the window and couldn’t work out why flags-of-the-nations bunting was being put up inexpertly by some sixth form, helped by every passing advisor. Then I remembered today was our Black History Month festival at lunchtime, the nearly-end of three weeks of activity.  First lunch was sunny and dancy, second lunch wet and huddly, but never mind, we’ve had a lovely time; informative, challenging and interesting. Just like a good curriculum...

A teacher comes to visit and tells me she’s wearing her geek trousers. I think we should all put some on, take a breath and think calmly and professionally - preferably behind closed doors for a while. OFSTED evaluation frameworks usually take a while to bed in and there’s no need to panic. We’re way off getting this right, but the system is thinking better and about the things that matter. As we say in every room here: we know we are learning when we are thinking very hard.      
 
CR 17.10.19                       

Thomas Tallis starts the year with Thomas Tallis. I play a little bit of the great man’s polyphony Spem in Alium at all the assemblies and this year I’ve used this Charles Causley poem too:

It’s a lovely image of the daily church service of choral evensong and Tallis’s matchless music summoning the ghosts of the Tudor monarchs under which he lived and prospered. Tallis lived and prospered at court despite their bloodthirstiness and was both successful and happy.

I usually go on to tell my captive audience about particular challenges the world has thrown up that they will need to face as they prepare to be adult citizens, and what they can do in school to prepare.

I’d decided that I needed to explain what proroguing parliament meant, but ‘twixt writing the slides on Friday and doing the deed on Wednesday I was properly out of date and had to add deselection and the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. However, the message about being kind, polite and respectful didn’t need any adjustment, and I only had to ask one 13-year old to sit up. Who apologised, unlike some.

After that, off to class. Life’s full-on at Tallis so by break they’d already had one lesson and the littlest set off at the charge to get to our inexplicably-numbered rooms. I say ‘floor, block, room’ 20 times. It is a bit of a test.

Everyone seems pleased to see each other apart from a few international-standard grudge-bearers who are taken away to be reset. There is much jumping up and down and hugging, squeaky or semi-manly. It would be unfair to say that it was the same when the staff assembled on Monday. We are generally calmer and cooler and we thought about our future carefully and busily, looking at this year’s plan and working out where the priorities lie (simple enough – maintain post-16 excellence, improve GCSE progress). Expectations, effort, engagement. 

Speaking of GCSEs there was an interesting press piece in the holidays about the fee-paying sector’s use of iGCSEs. The ‘i’ stands for ‘international’. This is nothing new, they’ve used them for years. Many state schools used to use them too, if the course suited children better: more coursework, for example, which helps some. I wasn’t too keen, not just because I’m a simple soul but because I think a nation’s children should be educated as one. If we say we’re doing GCSEs then that’s what people expect, not some fancy alternative.

So we’re now in a position where the children of the 7% use different qualifications from the 93% which is troubling. If schools share and transmit knowledge on behalf of society and if shared knowledge is fundamental to democracy and allows children to become useful citizens, shouldn’t they all have the same learning at school? Might that help breach the unbearable divides in our public life?

Directing zippy 11-year olds to their next berth is one thing, but teaching and modelling the values of good citizenship is another. We try very hard to tell children that the key to a successful life is hard work and kindness, but it doesn’t help when political leadership on both sides of the pond is characterised by inherited privilege, bluster and bullying.

I’m re-reading and re-watching Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, a real treat. In the first book he describes the British in India after the fall of Singapore hoping for ‘time, stability and loyalty, which are not things usually to be reaped without first being sown’. Perhaps that’s the government’s problem.
​
Tallis succeeded through creativity, endeavour and endurance despite the mixed behaviour of the kings and queens he served. As we prepare our children to understand the world and change it for the better let’s hope that we can also give them the skills to recognise the good and reject the rest.     
 
CR 4.9.19
 ​

I arrived late for a workshop session at a conference – not one I was leading, you understand – and was handed a piece of Winnie-the-Pooh to read out. I love this stuff and the Bear has been my companion these 57 years. 

​“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.”

The quotation introduces the interim report of ASCL’s new Commission called The Forgotten Third. It is apposite.
Each year in England over half a million 16-year-olds take their GCSEs. A third of these students do not achieve at least a standard pass (grade 4) in English and mathematics.

The commission is asking some pointed questions, common to all subjects:

1. Why is it that a third of 16-year-olds, after twelve years of compulsory schooling, cannot reach what the Department for Education (DfE) describes as ‘standard pass’ level?
2. Why is there not proper recognition of the progress these young people have made as they move on to further education and employment?
3. At age 11, as they leave primary school, a similar third of children fail to reach expected national standards in reading, writing and mathematics. What is happening in homes and schools that means too many children and young people are judged not to be competent at a basic level?
4. Does the answer lie with: a. the students; b. their parents; c. teachers; d. the content of the GCSEs e. the design of the examination system; f. the national accountability measures?
5. As one 17-year-old student, with a grade 3 in English Language, asked the Commission: “Do a third of us always have to fail so that two-thirds pass?”

​A thinking nation should be asking all of these questions. Might I suggest some answers?

A very small number of children will underachieve because they haven’t worked hard enough. Adolescence is distracting. I’m leaving them on one side.  

Some children may appear to be underachieving, but actually they’re doing pretty well, because their KS2 grade may not reflect their true ability in year 6. This is for two reasons. First, published performance tables do terrible things to education: watch Monday 25 March 2019’s Panorama for more on this. Second, national progression data works well in big datasets but is hopeless at individual progress level.  

The very concept of a GCSE ‘pass’ at grade 4 standard or grade 5 higher is troubling. We have a single examination to assess every child at all levels of aptitude for testing. So why do some grades have more intrinsic worth than others? Again, two reasons. There are levels of skill that are obviously important for adult life. If you’re secure at that level, you may find adult life easier. Employers expect a level of competence, fair enough. Not all jobs, however, require this level and not all children progress at the same speed. 

The real reason for the ‘pass’ nomenclature is a combination of elitism and international comparison. Singapore or Ontario or Finland or Shanghai have a certain proportion of children able to do certain things by the age of 16, so the UK will only be globally competitive if we do too. That’s a superficially attractive argument, but it wobbles in the slightest breeze, like Winnie-the-Pooh’s spelling. Other jurisdictions aren’t committed to inclusive schooling where every child is included in the common school system and its measured outcomes. Other jurisdictions are not beset by a zombie obsession with selection at 11 which serves no educational purpose and depresses the achievement of children in selective areas. Other jurisdictions are not beset by class obsession with private education which undermines national pride in our common schools. 

And finally, the very slightly improved accountability measure of P8 itself remains shamefully dismissive of children’s endeavour. ‘Comparable outcomes’ require some children to fail so that others may succeed. It has to produces a failed bottom third if it has willed that the top two-thirds pass.

We value what we measure. In England we appear to value ranking and blame, and their brothers elitism and failure.  It’s no way to model human value. We could make a very small step in the right direction by refusing to use the word ‘pass’ altogether. We could make a bigger step by finally, permanently rejecting any threshold measure in school performance. We could change the world by valuing perseverance and effort over accidents of birth and social standing.   
    
I’m happy that people should have to pass a driving test.  I’m happy that children should learn how to work hard and stick at it.  I’m furious that only the two-thirds who are good at tests are allowed to value their effort and experience after 12 years of compulsory schooling. This can’t be what we intended. As Winnie says:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little brain, and you Think Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

This is one of them. 

My title is the incomparable Beachcomber’s parody of one of A A Milne’s more sugary poems, but it captures the DfE’s view of 170 000 of our young people, every year. Look again, Secretary of State.
 
CR
5.4.19

Last night was options evening, a reasonably jolly occasion. It’s the first time that children really get a choice about what they study and it’s always interesting to see how they respond. Options had an added soupçon of excitement for us this year as our advent visitors from Ofsted Towers gave us a Paddington stare on the matter. Pray tell us why, they said, you have a three-year key stage four when you know we disapprove? Enlighten us, would you, as to its purpose? And what, for the love of Mike, are you doing with year 9? As I’ve said before, we had ready answers. As I’ve said before, they raised their eyebrows and narrowed their eyes a little. Then it appeared in the Things To Do list they kindly left us.  

After Ms Dedman, Tyla and Engen had spoken (admirably plainly and passionately) I addressed the assembled families in the hall. Reporting on the Lead Inspector’s thousand-yard stare I asked parents to tell me what they thought. Half a dozen sought me out, all of who approved of what we did and liked the early choice. They talked about motivation and freedom and taking on adult responsibility. Their children nodded sagely – but they don’t know anything else.

Some parents rested their weary elbows on the canteen pundit benches and probed gently. Why did we introduce a three-year key stage four, then? Well, it was before my time, but in an era when it was not only common practice in schools, but admired good practice. It gave children the chance to study for (sometimes modular) GCSEs in a flexible way, perhaps resitting where necessary, or even passing something in year 10 and doing new courses in year 11. It helped maximise results.

Most of those conditions have gone now. GCSEs have much more content, the modules are gone, and the chance of assimilating enough content and knowledge before the end of year 11 is frankly unlikely. Schools don’t do so many GCSEs and it’s not possible to hoist up results that way in any case anymore. Not that that was ever a justification.

Tallis has found itself in an interesting position. When I arrived in 2013, the first year of year 8 options, many staff begged me to return to options in year 9. I prefer to take a long view and had no experience of a three year key stage four, so I didn’t act precipitously.  By the time we got to a second year, and certainly by the time the revised specifications for GCSE appeared, Tallis teachers had grown fond of the new division and much preferred it. Three years at key stage four gives you time to take the higher levels of content more slowly. It means that year 9 can be a foundation year, where children are spared exam questions and can really immerse themselves in the subject and what it means.

However, the visitors didn’t quite experience it like that. They were left with the impression that too many children are doing exam practice for too long. We shouldn’t be doing that. Fair point.

There’s another matter too. Three years is a long time to study one thing. It’s as long as a degree, but with much less lounging about. A thirteen-year-old is a different beast to a sixteen-year-old and there’s a risk of them forgetting by year 11 everything that they knew in year 9 (as well as their name, address, PE kit, timetable, friends, enemies and sandwiches). The year 9 introduction year works really well if it’s a foundation year, but the exam prep really should be left to year 11.

Why don’t we just stop it and go back to three-year key stage three?  Well, three years is as long as a degree and they’re too young for all that coffee. Year 9 in a subject you can’t wait to drop is a long year, at just the wrong developmental age, when you find it really hard to concentrate on anything except yourself and are just getting into your stride as Outraged of Greenwich. Perhaps we should do something else with year 9 altogether?
So we’ve got a working group together and we’re thinking of both obvious and creative solutions. Everything is on the table and we’ll decide what to do by October, ready for next year. We’ll invite parents’ views too: watch this space.     

But the really nice thing about options evening, like any parents’ evening is seeing our inmates with their elders, the way they talk to one another, lean on each other, tut and roll their eyes at each other, gasp in blank incomprehension at each other then leave arm-in-arm. Love takes so many forms, some of which are also confusion and worry. We need families to have patience, and keep talking , and make their good choices together, no matter how old they are.

I’m glad to be part of the same human family as New Zealand. When their PM’s ready, would she like to come and sort us out?  
 
CR
21.3.19

A practical lesson today as I thought you’d like to know what we do at GCSE time. We teach them, obviously, for years on end and practice exams, you know all that. We nag away at them and warn them about deadlines and tell them how to revise. But how is it actually done, in the Sports Hall, on the day, child v examiner?

A big school has a well-staffed Exams Office so they do the legwork with the boards: Pearson, AQA and OCR.  They’re huge businesses. We spend towards £200k a year on exams alone. If you were starting from scratch, is that how you’d do it? Private companies, who also write the textbooks? Isn’t examining compulsory education part of the state’s responsibilities so shouldn’t exams come down with the rations? If they did, would it be more flexible? Could we make educational choices that weren’t affected by business interests and competition? Do we actually need GCSEs now that everyone stays on? 
    
Sorry, anyway, exam boards have rules and we comply with all of them. The Exams team has an army of hourly-paid invigilators trained up and ready to be set loose in the exam rooms. Teachers used to do this, but workforce reforms of the early 2000s decided it wasn’t a very good use of their time. (Despite many of us fearing that unfamiliar faces would lead to mayhem in exam rooms, it didn’t. Mind, it’s an extra unfunded expense.)
​
Timetables are devised once we have national timings and rooms allocated. We have a lot of children who need extra time or special provision. Some need scribes to write down what they know, some need readers and writers.  Some need amanuenses to help them or nudge them to complete. The basic extra-time children are in the main exam hall with the others: the special provisions are spread out around the school.  We’re very full with a high room-use ratio so every room used for an exam displaces a class. Is Spanish in English? is an entirely sensible question in May. 
  
Every exam room needs equipping. The desks so far apart, wall displays covered or removed, exam warning notices put up, corridors outside festooned with QUIET PLEASE, shushers activated.

Immediately before the exam candidates gather in the dining room for counting, sorting, and calming. The subject leader reminds them of the dastardly tricks examiners play, and which questions they should answer. Odd but important - we don’t want a child to take a sudden notion to answer on Buddhism instead of Christianity, or Richard the Third instead of Romeo and Juliet. This morning Madam French said remember the van and while I was in a retro Citroen bucketing around the Peripherique in my head, the youth were nodding sagely and thinking verb, adjective, noun agreements.

We walk them up the stairs in silence and they dispose of phones, bags, watches, waterbottle labels, opaque pencil cases. There’s a photo on each, and berth-finding takes a while. We allow time for the checking of pens, calculators or not, extraneous items on the floor, right papers in the right places. Head of Year is despatched to find latecomers (30 minutes or no exam). Finally, final instructions: don’t sniff, don’t gaze about, don’t ask to go to the toilet, Good Luck and the big number for the finish goes on the board.

Even exam time passes, the standard-time finishers tiptoe out and all flop about a bit on the yard before going to class, a revision session or home. Phew. 
   
Teachers aren’t allowed in exam rooms anymore, so often the first they hear of what was on the paper is when children debrief each other. This can cause palpitations. Is it worse to hear that the paper was easy or hard? Is it helpful to spot a child banging his forehead with a cry of energy, not glucose, aargh?

Last week’s Guardian had a piece about GCSEs and the effect of the exams on the young. It included all sorts of worrying things about stress and the physical effects of exam terror. It cited schools where character education is all about resilience so that children cope with harder, linear exams, and I don’t like the sound of that at all. It talked about the pressures schools pile on and how ticking countdown clocks turn stout young souls to jelly.

I can be smug and say that we try not to be too, well, extra about it. We don’t have pictures up of children who do the best and we don’t spread terror stories about what happens if you don’t get a 4. Life doesn’t actually end at 16 and some of that stuff is just disrespectful to people who aren’t doctors or high court judges, which is most of us.
It’s a really hard circle to square. Post-16 life requires results so GCSEs are a gateway, for good or ill. Has the pressure got worse? Undoubtedly. Does it cause mental illness? Yes. Can we do anything about it?  I’m not sure, if we insist, as a nation, on judging children by educational achievement. For every school panicking about its results there are parents who also have their hearts set on particular grades. For every stressed child there’s an indolent one who needs to be coaxed and hassled to work.

When does raising aspirations turn into unreasonable pressure? When does a reminder of how long there is to go turn from a countdown to a time bomb? How do you deliver different messages in classes of 30 and assemblies of 300? How do we balance the cost of student support services against the price of maths teachers? One hour 45 to answer, use both sides of the paper, show your working.  
 
CR
18.5.18
 
 
 
 
Who’d put children through this?

I like a bit of punctuation and envy the sticky apostrophe first aid kits carried by obsessives. Similarly (to use a recognised connective) I challenged the overeducated amongst whom I spent the Bank Hol to define a fronted adverbial. Year 5 can, and these guys were way older than that. All night long, we bickered. Grammar matters too.  A well-turned sentence is a creative act in itself and we need to keep our standards up as darkness falls: Churchillian in the blitz.

There’s anger about the approach to writing represented by the fronted adverbial thing, and you should tread warily near a primary school teacher as it really isn’t a joke. I’m part of the generation who weren’t taught any English grammar at primary in the late sixties and secondary in the seventies. We were taught to spell and to write with structure, clarity and creativity, but not how to take the stuff apart and analyse it. I took German O level and was properly bamboozled by the sheer tonnage of grammar required accurately to describe a Danube steamer. (I cannot tell you how useful that’s been). In the mother tongue we were expected to write well because we read widely. It was a bit of a devil-take-the-hindmost approach and those whose lives weren’t full of books by background or inclination fended for themselves. That’s not fair education.

This month we approach the new GCSEs in English and maths. They’ve been attractively described as big and fat, meaning that a huge amount of knowledge and understanding is required and young people have to be able to manipulate their learning to perform well. Government, Ofsted and the exam boards are putting on a show of being reasonable about expectations. Everyone hopes they’re working hard to create a system in which children’s learning can be sensibly structured and assessed and, so far, tarantara, no-one’s said that everyone has to be above average.

A visitor came to see me about knowledge and we chewed the fat for a bit. We talked about the journey of the last seven years and the importance of putting knowledge and learning, rather than assessment and school performance, front and centre of the curriculum. We walked around school and I felt a bit of a fraud because everyone was doing exams and testing, but it is May. The artists and dancers were actually being examined, but all exuded a zen-like calm.

We wondered what will the new government do about the Ebacc? I formulated a view. When the curriculum was being weakened by performance incentives there had to be a way of stopping it. That turned out to be a debate about what’s important to learn and how we should assess it. It’s still a work in progress but the structural impediments have been adjusted: therefore, does the Ebacc need to be pushed all the way? Can the nation not devise a way to work together with trusted school leaders to judge if a school has a solid and sensible curriculum without a binary judgement? Ebacc good, Nobacc bad?

I understand entirely the notion of entitlement. A child should get, at any school, a curriculum that enables him to compete with the unreasonably privileged. But the Ebacc raises so many insurmountables: no teachers, no money, skewed calibration of GCSE languages which make them exceptionally daunting to slower acquirers, brexitty populism, overloading of English and maths, preservation of the arts and not enough time. I worry that the big fat specifications will be unmanageable for human students of all abilities unless we can really learn some new language about what constitutes progress.

However, young people have their own imperatives. Two year seven girls wielded a clipboard of their own devising at me, action researching into that great mystery, the pronunciation of Primark. I supported the majority view. The Guitar Night ended with some blues and an arrangement of the Game of Thrones theme beautifully played by young peoples 11-18 of all shapes and sizes. Our own politics is marginally less blood-sodden, I suppose.
Thursday’s Evening Standard headline was a marvel of punctuation: