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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

On the need to dig deeper

12/6/2021

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Three small boys rushed me with a request. ‘Can we start our own club?’ I said it depended on the topic. ‘Japanese Culture’. ‘Manga?’, ‘No, Japanese Culture generally’. I declared in favour with the all-purpose answer ‘Talk to your Head of Year’. Their leader commanded ‘All eyes on Rawlings’ as they charged off. Arigato gozaimasou.

Boys are in the news with the ghastly OFSTED report (as in, a report on a ghastly matter rather than the other thing) into sexual harassment in schools. HMCI was pursued by the Today programme this week on the lines of ‘why haven’t you tackled this before?’ but to be fair to the clipboards, they are at the mercy of Sanctuary Buildings, whom we know to be a bit slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, my Westminster correspondent saw the Secretary of State in the street again at the end of May, customarily laden with bags, describing him as looking like a man about to take the last ferry out. As you would be if your catch-up plan lay in ridicule and tatters and your Tsar had abdicated.

The problem with tackling sexual harassment in schools isn’t having rules and issuing punishments but hearing about the problems to start with. Young women expect that the world will treat them shabbily and therefore put up with outrageous impositions on their persons and emotions. They look upon it as normal to be prodded and put upon, they think they should accept that physical and mental assaults are normal. The report talks about girls being sent dozens of requests for nude pictures and getting dozens of foul nude pictures from boys and men every day. Yet young women are more empowered, more up-front, more determined to stamp out inequity then ever before.  How did we arrive at a position where these irreconcilables co-exist?

Ofsted’s report has recommendations for schools, partners and government:

Schools should create a culture where sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are not tolerated, and where they identify issues and intervene early to better protect children and young people.  They should assume that sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are happening in their setting, even when there are no specific reports, and put in place a whole-school approach to address them.
This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

All of this is important and true and we’ll try to do all of it, but schools can’t turn the tide alone. Violent coercive behaviour towards women is not new, and I wrote last time about the tsunami of pornography that overwhelms our young. Whom does that serve?

And yet, I read in the news today about another school that’s banned skirts. I’m interested in this kind of thing, as long-term readers know to their cost. Banning skirts, on the face of it, could be a liberating act to remove oppressive gender norms from a community. Tell me more, I thought.

Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, the school has banned skirts because ‘members of the public’ have contacted them to complain. Staff are included in complaints, apparently. The usual sorts of words are used: the need for appropriate schoolwear, of appropriate length adding up to appropriate workplace attire. What?

I was reading Hilary Mantel’s essays in the Lake District sun last week. In one, she takes issue with a writer, saying,
"You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares."

I think that about ‘appropriate’. Appropriate schoolwear is clothes that don’t prevent children from learning and rushing about in the sun, that wash easily, dry quickly and don’t break the bank. Appropriate length, is a skirt that’s not going to trip you up on the stairs. Appropriate workplace attire is – well, who knows? It depends on the workplace: what’s appropriate in a blast furnace might be odd in a tea shop. But what business is what children wear to the man in the street?

We are obsessed with surface solutions. Do girls in schools feel sexually oppressed? Send OFSTED to inspect it. Some witchfinder general thinks that skirts are too short – ban skirts. Really? When will we start a discussion about freedom to co-exist peacefully, without prejudice, fear and oppression?

A young woman dropped by to read me a poem. It was about her struggles and triumph and about her determination to make a mark on the world and change it for the better. Perhaps she’ll start the serious global conversation about the mindset change needed to set girls free. I wouldn’t put it past her. I hope we’ve prepared her.
 
CR
11.6.21
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Ofsted and the movies

8/6/2019

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I wandered onto the concourse in a sort of drizzle and was approached for pleasantries by a young person with her sweatshirt tied over her head and under her chin, like the Queen’s headscarf. We’ve been talking about uniform this week, but I hadn’t thought to explain which parts of the body each bit goes on. My son used to do this when he was being a centurion and my daughter put tomato ketchup on her hair to keep it blonde so I was open to a range of explanations. However, after agreeing that we were both well, I discovered she was just keeping her do dry in case it shrank. 

Which reminded me of a conversation with a Head of Year a long time ago, watching some boys playing padder tennis without bats and in the oddest PE kit they could exhume from the spare kit box. ‘Children are mad’ I offered. ‘Yes’ she said ‘and they make no attempt to hide it’. And of another experience in a coastal school where a year 9 history group appeared with stiff PE shorts on their heads with cries of ‘we’re chefs, Miss’. Ah, the charm of the fourteen-year-old.

Speaking of charm, I turn now to Sean Harford, National Director for Education at Ofsted. This Harford is an avuncular chap whom I’ve heard pronounce on this and that, here and there. He’s reasonable and usually makes sense and I’ve always assumed he was behind the clarifications and mythbusters that Ofsted put out from time to time. He was in the trade press last week allegedly saying three things that made me long for something to put over my head.
  1. While Ofsted’s reports show behaviour as good or better in 90% of schools, he doesn’t believe it. There are ‘real issues’ with inspecting behaviour and Ofsted can do ‘a whole bunch of things’ better, like talking to new or lunchtime staff who might see the worst of it. Yes indeedy.
  2. The curriculum ‘started to suffer’ when schools became academies. Ofsted ‘missed a trick’ because it was slow to respond to schools having ‘freedoms to do different stuff’. They assumed that everyone would preserve the well-established national curriculum and not narrow choices unreasonably. This took how long to spot?
  3. Ofsted don’t have enough cash to inspect properly and were therefore over-dependent on performance data, so that made everything worse. Mighty thinking, Maestro.
I itinerate around the building to calm myself and potter past an intense exchange in block 1 on the films of Quentin Tarantino. On this, I have wisdom to share. Inglourious Basterds is a work of art, the rest, not so much.   The year 12 critics may or may not have been interested, but it has relevance in my junkyard brain.
  
At the end of the film quite a lot of things have gone badly, so much so that someone tells the sort-of hero, Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine he’ll be shot. ‘Nah’ he says sanguinely. ‘More like chewed out. I been chewed out before’. 
Mr Director’s been on the electronic loudhailer to say he’s been misquoted. I hope that’s true because the alternative is that he’s just twigged onto something so blindingly obvious that I assumed we took it for granted. Obviously a day in school doesn’t show you what behaviour is like. Obviously autonomy combined with punitive accountability leads to fearful decision-making. Obviously inspection on the cheap is faulty.

Being honest is good. Thinking out loud is refreshing, but Harford isn’t Brad Pitt and breezy won’t do. Children’s education suffered, good people lost their jobs and teacher recruitment has fallen through the floor during this madness. As the damage is huge, so repentance has to be proportionate and lead to real change.

Forgive me, there’s more. Aldo Raine helpfully points out during the film that fighting in a basement offers a lot of difficulties, number one being that you’re fighting in a basement. I wonder if Sean Harford meant to say something like that: lack of money offers a lot of difficulties, number one being we didn’t have any money - so we had to do a cheap job. That raises more questions: if the money isn’t going to be put back, what kind of inspection can we expect? What scheme will overcome the difficulties?

Many head teachers might bring other Tarantinos to mind when contemplating Ofsted, but I prefer his smart remarks to the bloodbath movies and I don’t want to annihilate other public servants. Inspecting schools is a democratic duty, but we do it with at least one hand tied behind our backs. It’s not just the money, it’s the vision. Because we don’t know what our schools are for we don’t know what to inspect them for. We don’t care enough about children or state education to fund any of it properly so we make blindingly obvious mistakes. After decades of inspection, our data is corrupted, its use is shallow and we’re no wiser about trends or effectiveness because the goalposts move so often they must be on castors. 

As Aldo Raine says ‘it behooves oneself to keep his wits’. The Director and HMCI are smart and honest folks: I hope something better comes out of this garbled messaging. 
 
CR
6.6.19

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Fairness on the Earth's crust

15/10/2017

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Due to my advanced age and objection to any kind of cold weather I’m offered a lunch duty slot in the year 11 study hall. We say hall, but it’s actually 0311, a geography room of average size. 20 young comrades join me for 45 minutes of absolute, blessed silence. ‘It’s like a rest cure’ I remark to Sir as he barrels in at the front of a tidy line of 30 year 9s. We pause to retrieve a football appearing in entirely the wrong place. The ball’s owner is aggrieved: they took it off me, not my fault, not fair. He eventually agrees that all concerned should participate in brisk questioning after school and the resultant culprit issued with the appropriate sanction for the activation of a football indoors.
 
Fairness is one of our Tallis Character traits and particularly valued among the young, understandably as powerlessness attracts injustice in our flawed world and who has less power than a child? Football manager above didn’t want the indignity – or the football-affecting inconvenience? – of a conversation to establish how he got into trouble. Or perhaps he was wary of those whom he’d dropped in it. Perhaps dear readers are gnashing their teeth now. What a performance about a football  Haven’t they got something else to do? What about Sir’s lesson?
 
Don’t fret. While this 30-second legal wrangle was going on outside the door I was inside the door purring over the geographers, many of whom I’d known as puppies. I admired their height and wisdom and what a pleasant combination the gods of the option blocks had thrown together. I reminded a huge specimen that he’d been foolish in assembly and he had the grace to look sheepish. Books were given out, everyone settled. I didn’t even have time to ask what Zoe was reading before Sir, with a parting shot of ‘This is me being reasonable’ returned to the earth’s crust.
 
We’d had a furious complaint from a parent the previous night about our method of dispensing justice. Why must the innocent be questioned? Outrageous infringement of human rights. Well, we take rights seriously and the innocent must be questioned so that justice is dispensed fairly.  Innocence and justice must be protected and supported so that the community is safe and happy. We actually staff this. We spend money on it so there’s always someone to hear a story, take a statement, and, where possible and reasonable, broker restoration. When a youth comes blundering back into class late with the excuse ‘I had to have an RJ’ that’s what she means. Restorative Justice: a bit of a trade name, but useful none the less.
 
On Tuesday Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector offered reflections on the difference between education and examinations. She talked about the need to offer children real learning and the value of all the grades at GCSE. I’ve been arguing this point for years so I can’t disagree. What she says, however, feels different at the sharper end: fine words are bowdlerised into tick-lists for inspectors. Ofsted have tried to deal with that too. But HMCI can’t address the high-stakes accountability in which a confused system is mired and someone needs to be honest about that. But we can’t until we have a clear view of what education is and isn’t for, and what a civilised and developed democracy actually wants for its young and sets about doing it as fairly as possible. There needs to be a restorative process between the regulator, the department and the profession, which will take time and good will. At least she’s not calling us enemies of promise.
 
(I’ll return to the Ebacc argument in the piece when I can summon the strength. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.)
 
I’m a fan of the American philosopher and jurist John Rawls, insofar as I understand him and in particular, his fundamental principle of justice as fairness. Justice must not only be done, but must have a fair effect. Rawls underpins this with his concept of the veil of ignorance (I’ve have written about this before, sorry dear readers).  Imagine that you were setting up a system in which you have no idea about the characteristics of the people it serves, or your own characteristics. Will it work as well for rich and poor, for all genders, ethnicities, aptitudes? If it won’t, then its not fair. Try again. Try again DfE.
 
There’s a marvellous scene in that film of high art, Nuns on the Run. A hapless policeman lurches into a convent looking for the villains who are having jolly adventures disguised as nuns. After being unable to tell the Superior who or what he’s looking for, or why, she says ‘We’re all very busy here. When you know what you’re looking for, come back, and we’ll tell you if we’ve found it’.
 
It’s like that in education at the moment and all we can do in schools is to get on with the day job and account for ourselves as best we can. I’m trying very hard to persuade educators to think about the purpose of schools and our social role in loco parentis before we think about examinations and assessments. In the meantime, we’ll work hard like year 11 and try to be fair, like Sir and the indoor football.
 
CR
12.10.17
 
 
 
 

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Re-introducing Secondary Modern Schools

10/9/2016

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I don’t need to tell you the facts, you can read them anywhere. Grammar schools do not help social mobility, they restrict it. Grammar schools do not spread advantage, they entrench disadvantage. Progress for clever children is not better in grammar schools. Very few children from disadvantaged households go to grammar schools.

​Grammar school places are won by children whose upbringing predisposes them to pass the 11+ or whose parents have paid for tutoring. Grammar schools existed when we needed a blue-collar/white collar work force. Passing the 11+ and keeping that achievement level going is exceptionally stressful for children who know that their parents have their hearts set on it. 


I’m writing carefully for a particular audience. If you live in a selective area, you’ve got to make the best of it. I’m not getting at you, but the state should protect children from harm, and selection harms children. School places should be planned, not established on a whim. Free School sponsors should be able to demonstrate that any educational provision for which they clamour, to which a Free School is apparently the answer, serves the needs of the democracy, the common good. Greening’s bizarre assertion that selection can be casualty-free is from someone who hasn’t thought through what that means to the child who is not selected.Intelligence is not fixed at 11. The 11+ is a poor indicator of anything but family income. A child may be good at tests or too distracted for tests at 10 or 11 but that means precisely nothing about his or her chances in the future.  Intelligence isn’t about to run out and challenging academic education does not have to be rationed. It’s not a zero-sum game unless the structures make it so.

This school is in Greenwich. We are fabulously comprehensive, educators for the world city. Over our southern borders lies selection. Sometimes our year 11s go to look at the grammar schools when they’re deciding about whether to stay on with us. Sometimes a child likely to get a hatful of top grades at GCSE tells us that they have definitely decided to go to one of the grammars. We tell them the facts: that they’ll do as well as or better here and that others in their position have come back, sharpish. They look embarrassed and tell us that their parents have their hearts set on it or ‘My community think this is best’. What would you say?  

Grammar schools are a proxy for parental fear: so here’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about grammar schools.  ‘I don’t want my child’s education to be dragged down by slow, naughty or disrespectful children.  I don’t want her to learn bad habits or fall in with the wrong crowd. I want him to make his choices within a limited range of options so he can’t make a mistake and end up on drugs and die young.  I want him to get the kind of job that posh kids get. I want him to be happy.’  Of course you do, but hoping that your little one is a quick acquirer by the age of 10 and therefore insulated for life doesn’t make sense. It certainly doesn’t make for a stable, just and excellent education system for everyone’s little one. 

Parents’ fear is rooted in another zero-sum myth: comprehensive schools are all terrible so we need to replace them with grammar schools for 20% of children because there isn’t enough good education to go around. But comprehensive schools are not all terrible.  Very few of them are terrible. Some grammar schools are terrible. Most comprehensive schools are very good and loads of them are absolutely fantastic. The postcode selection trope  trotted out by the PM - that good comprehensives only exist in rich areas – is just not true.  London proves that, as HMCI (a man incapable of telling it other than it is) has trenchantly said. Tosh and nonsense indeed. 

This isn’t policy, but education as nostalgia, a dog-whistle to a bygone era of class distinction and limited mobility.  Even David Cameron called it ‘splashing around in the shallow end of educational debate’. It’s part of the anti-intellectualism of the Conservative government, where anyone on top of the facts, from sugar to Europe, is disregarded as an expert. It is the stuff of despair. 

When our sixth form leave us we tell them to be kind to people at university who haven’t had their advantages, whose parental choice of school for them has made them uncertain about people from different backgrounds. We tell our young people to share their ease and confidence so that the gifts of a comprehensive education are shared with those whom privilege has restricted.

We do this because comprehensive education is an honourable and visionary undertaking every bit as important as the NHS. It preserves the fabric of our democracy and gives us all the chance to lay the foundations for a model society. These great schools work brilliantly for all our children. Parents love them and communities thrive. We have everything to lose as a nation if they are destroyed. We should rise up as one against this shallow, cynical, divisive, wicked and ignorant project.
 
CR
7.9.16
 
 
 
Distant star:
We should never judge children by their qualifications.  We need to get out of this mess.

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I have forgotten

3/7/2016

1 Comment

 
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​One of the poems at the annual creative writing evening at Tallis was I Have Forgotten. In it the poet lists the things from her life so far that she’d put in her rucksack perhaps in the hope of being surprised by it all when she found it again in later life. It reminded me of a boy a long way away and hopefully quite old now who, in his childhood, moved from carer to carer with his things in a carrier bag. Though he had a good long-term placement by the time we met, the damage was deep and he was hard to educate.
​
The evening under advisement is the product of a week at the Arvon Centre in Shropshire for our young people who are keen to write and willing to have it scrutinised and criticised by peers, teachers and a poet in residence. It’s a wonderful thing and we try to make it affordable for all who qualify, but each place works out a bit pricey and cake sales don’t quite bring home the bacon. We subsidise some through the School Fund, but that’s not exactly brimming with moolah in these straitened times. Anyway, the poetry was wonderful and the confidence of the young writers (and teachers who submit to the same discipline) impressive. What a memory.

​
So I mused on school and memory as I trotted from place to place this week. A colleague asked : ‘what should we do about the EU vote?’ and I had to think. Not too much. Help the children to understand the enormity of what’s happened, and what the future might hold, but keep everything else normal so that there’s a backdrop for their interest and fears. London voted pretty solidly, so there’s no need to frighten them with the idea that all of a sudden people are less keen on diversity than they were a week ago. That being said, they should be able to look back and say ‘I remember when the vote happened.  We did such-and-such and Mr X explained what had happened. He was so right/wrong.’ That’s about as far as I get with a Brexit comment. The rest is silence.

So back to the memories. I was watching year 10 being summoned, corralled and sorted for exams. Girls cling to one another, boys thump each other companionably or mumble to themselves until they’re up against the piece of paper alone. We make them practice in year 10 in the hope that they remember it in year 11 and don’t waste time gazing about themselves. Everything’s easier in school if you have a fixed routine and the young people have something simultaneously to batter and shelter against. Then when they meet up in later life, or meet another former inmate, they can reminisce about how utterly wonderful and unreasonable school was and how it set them up for life.

HMCI’s been at it again: still people left to annoy but so little time. Children’s Social Care departments are useless: weak leadership and high caseloads.  Weak leadership is a shame, though with the constant carping it’s a blessed miracle there are any at all. High caseloads? It’s like complaining about big classes in schools and I’m lost for another way to explain it: if there isn’t a sensible high-profile training route to respected and reasonably paid jobs in local authorities with the money to support a decent staffing establishment then exactly how is the service to improve and the caseloads to reduce? Shall we just shout at people until they give up? Is that going well so far?

Which takes me back to the little chap and his carrier bag. His life was better because of a social worker who stayed long enough to see him into a better place. She was an unusual woman, determined and exacting. She kept structures tight and reliable enough so that he had a ghost of a chance at life. And it takes me on to a whole new annoyance about inequality and our current leaders who change their minds about how schools should run and what they’re for almost monthly so we don’t know how to safeguard our ethos and traditions. I assume that if you’re educated expensively and privately you go to schools with long histories and very clear routines. They’re exceptionally secure institutions, so if your life is a bit ropey you’ll be protected by them. If you’re not expected to live for most of the year with people who don’t want you,  perhaps the pain is lessened and the school experience gives you happyish memories where otherwise there might be nothing but sadness. Call it resilience if you like, but its really just luck and money.
 
CR
30.6.16
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News, with knobs on

13/3/2016

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"Sir Brian had a battleaxe with great big knobs on"  A. A. Milne
​I like to keep abreast of the eduzeitgeist so I put myself about a bit to see what's what. Herewith an update on some obsessions, courtesy of the Annual Conference of the Association of School and College Leaders held in the marble halls of the Birmingham International  Metropole. Regular readers recall that I don't dance, but I do chat and occasionally take a drink in order to gather news.  
 
The Secretary of State was booked for 45 mins but didn’t speak for long. She answered questions pleasantly enough, but had nothing of substance to say. Perhaps she will soon. She wouldn't be drawn on the Ebacc, and hasn’t got a plan to find any more teachers for us except to perhaps make it cheaper to advertise for the ones who aren’t there. 
The good ship Royal College of Teachers seems to have run aground.  Their speaker also didn’t have much to say, so no news there either. Disappointing: I’d high hopes for it. Bennett the Behaviour Tsar recommended a fundamental text, Michael Marland's Craft of the Classroom (1975) so he's edging into my good books. Doubtless he’ll be relieved.

​
We talked about curriculum and assessment change. When Balls steamrollered the impenetrable Diploma programme over us 10 years ago, it was fuelled by cash. Now that we're changing every grade every year for five years there's not a penny piece of publicity to help parents understand what's happening to their children. Why? Maybe the department don't understand it, or back it, or think democracy involves effort.
 
Her Majesty's Chief Inspector, on the other hand, was demob happy. He was semi-affable, alarming in itself. He warned schools against taking part in trash television or wasting money on charlatan consultants and mocksteds (huzzah!). He wouldn't be drawn on the Ebacc either, not even his own previous criticisms (boo!).
 
HMCI’s had quite the week. Wednesday was retro rant day: Heads are appeasers but should be Lone Warriors ‘fighting for righteousness’. Schools should be run by Teach Firsters full of vigour, not these lily-livered child-centred loons.  We need ‘bruisers and battleaxes’. (I refer you to AA Milne’s matchless Bad Sir Brian Botany) Thursday he was berating academy chains whose CEOs earn public money beyond the dreams of avarice.
 
He knows how to get into print. Unfortunately, the truth is out there. There aren't enough people to fill posts at any level, including headship. The pipeline of vigorous young leaders provides cannon fodder for academy chains to swap Heads every two or three years so nothing gets built up, only brought down. Teach Firsters quit in droves when the rhetoric of the meteoric rise crashes into the long game of quotidian relationships and real school leadership. While quality people might be attracted to a considered, responsible, vital and challenging public sector role, what kind of people aspire to be bruisers and battleaxes, exactly? And do we want them looking after the nation’s young? Why don't parents rise up as one against this stuff?  Then he started in on the private schools, so huzzah! again. Really, this is bad for my blood pressure. He is a bit right and very wrong, self-obsessed but fiercely independent. And yet, and yet – a Department yes-man to take over, or an elderly imported American?  It could actually be worse.
 
Not that schools will notice. We really won't know what day it is until 2018, when it might be safe to emerge from the stock cupboards into which we've locked ourselves and the children until the grading settles down.
 
Year 10 aren't bothered by this kind of stuff. They're being trained to sort themselves for exams.  We gather them in teaching groups, then they have to transform themselves into maths groups, then tutor groups. We did it in the dining room, using that comedy implement, the megaphone. Who's to say that its ear-splitting squawking was the Head of Year amusing herself at their expense?
 
We've got a theatre group and the Anne Frank exhibition. We had World Book Day, a brilliant transgender speaker and Severus Snape shouting ‘Hold My Wand’ to Tinkerbell as he broke up a skirmish. We had heats of the pi competition rewarded with pies. We're wrestling with the budget and the strangely short half term that the Archbishop's distraction-offer of sorting the date of Easter could really help. We're trying to balance every department's needs and probably failing.  We're still a bit cold and the new bins haven't arrived yet. Year 12 are on Science boot camp and we’ve the MultiMedia Show to look forward to soon!
 
So that’s me. I went out into the world but came back gratefully. We're working towards summer, and the light, and changing the world for the better.
 
CR
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What do we stand for?

19/7/2015

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Headward Headington-Hail, the headmaster of Bash Street School, who loves his tea and biscuits.
It’s tweaking the community week at Tallis as we get ready for September’s reboot. We’ve gone pipless to see if removing squawking 10 times a day makes for calm, or just discombobulation and reduces the jamming of hordes in doorways. We quite like it so far, but it’s only day 4 and we’re spacious with 2 year groups down. As we might say about everything concerning adolescents – it’s too early to tell.

Fire drill has a new muster station on the basketball courts but retains the comedy implement useless megaphone. Quickest ever evacuation but a bit noisy in the early stages. What else is new? Picnic benches which we spread around experimentally. Enterprising young souls carried them to inconvenient parts of the landscape so we’ve removed them again and will accompany their reappearance with a short lecture on the uses of public furniture. And concrete them in. 

An email arrives about a young chap who helped an elderly person who’d collapsed in the street. ‘He saved her life’. I look out of the window after a pipless changeover and spot a year 10 peacock practising a new strut. Above him, furtiveness defined, an art teacher rushes out of Science with a body. Admittedly it’s a skeleton, but it has a bag over its head to disguise it. The Festival (Summer Fair) of art, dance, music, face paints and assorted stalls ends with excitable free sausages. Time for a lie down before we start again, I remark to a seagull. 

Speaking of which, earlier this year I conveyed a Personage along the byzantine route from the front door to my room. It was break and we chanced upon some small girls sitting on the floor in a corner of a wide stairwell. ‘Wouldn’t you be comfortable somewhere else?’ she inquired. ‘Not really, thank you’. They explained that they were ‘practising French before the lesson’. They’d chosen a spot where there was a bon chance of regarding a sixth former of the très jolie variety, but French is French and it needs practising, and it was cold outside. 
Imagine my concern, then, when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools started in about the crisps. Apparently an inspector was out inspecting and was going about with the Head. Students were eating crisps on the floor blocking the corridor and they didn’t move, so the pair of them had to step over ‘prone’ bodies. Ofsted are going to inspect for that kind of thing from September and woe betide any school with supine crisp-eating barbarians. 

I’m a bit of a behaviour nerd and I like things to be orderly and pleasant with only as many rules as are needed to discourage foolishness. Calm is generally good, but young people need memorable experiences so we sometimes generate a bit of noise and excitement. (Street dance flashmob last week, Tallis Festival today). Children should be polite and well-mannered and the crisps incident sounds pretty shabby. But this was all rolled up with children having to stand when teachers enter a room and a quarter of headteachers not knowing what day it was. I’ve been thinking about this on my bicycle and unpicking my disquiet. For what it’s worth, here’s where I am.

Schools are where society looks after its young. We educate them to understand the world and change it for the better, and develop the lifelong skills of inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline and imagination. We enable them to make a relationship with the ideas that define and unite us. That’s brokered by strong relationships between teachers and students, the heart and root of education. It happens in school communities which are safe and happy and where progress is good.

Beyond that, what? If I go into a classroom I expect everyone to be engaged in learning. If I go into an assembly I expect silence. If I go into the yard I expect rushing about. If I go along a corridor I expect pointless chat. We don’t call students ‘mate’ but I call everyone ‘dear’. We also don’t have HMCI’s favourite standing-up rule, silent corridor rule, tie-up-to-the-neck rule (we don’t have ties). We do have stringent rules about oppressive language and violence, and we’ve decided, all 1800 of us, that we value honesty, respect, fairness, optimism and kindness. We work damn hard to create a place where young people learn to live well in community. We enjoy ourselves together.

Sir Michael, I think I saw you on London Bridge station a couple of weeks ago and you looked pretty tired. I’m pretty tired myself. If we make all the above work, will that do? Do we have to stand up as well?         

CR 16.7.15

   

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