Dear Mr Williamson,

​I’ve been watching ‘The Young Pope’ on the telly because I share a sofa so I don’t always get to choose what’s on. I’ve observed the scheming top Cardinal hassling the Pope to address the people. We’re still looking forward to hearing from you so may I beg you to do the same? In case you’ve forgotten, my helpful suggestions included school funding, teachers’ pay, school improvement and renationalising the National Curriculum.

Of course, you may be doing nothing at all and waiting for the shuffle, but as you promised to work hard, that can’t be true. I expect you’re locked in a dark room with the good accountants of the Treasury working out a long-term sustainable stable funding package to transform children’s lives.  All power to your manly elbow!

However, the schools of the nation continue to assemble every day and do our bit for the common good so you’ll probably appreciate being kept abreast of same. Items on the agenda at Tallis since we last corresponded include:

1. Getting external support to sort out the behaviour of troubled young folks
2. Dealing with troubled young folks without any support.
3. Telling some year 11s that closing their eyes and hoping they land somewhere in September does not constitute a careers strategy
4. Telling other year 11s that they might want to take a break from revision from time to time.
5. Talking to a DfE official about curriculum breadth and creativity
6. Preparing for a Saturday governor meeting to decide the shape of key stage three and four.
7. Drawing a line under sixth formers who haven’t done any work yet.
8. Thinking about next year’s staffing.
9. Hosting a visitor to look at behaviour and inclusion systems as we all struggle with the effects austerity has had on the stability of home life for the poorest families.   
10. Going to the funeral of a much-loved colleague who died at New Year
11. Trying to foresee all eventualities in our transgender policy
12. Dealing with criminality out of school seeping into school

On the agenda of young people at Tallis this week may have been some of the above plus

1. Wearing hoods indoors in contravention of local byelaws.
2. Learning the difference between the mournful, boisterous, friendly and annoying hug
3. Assessing the distinction between a large woolly hairband and a hat
4. Anticipating conversation at home after parents’ evening (year 8)

Youth ought to be generally carefree and I’m glad they don’t worry about everything we worry about. Mind, sometimes they are causes of worry. I encountered a youth helpfully carrying books from hither to yon, but inexpertly, as if he’d had them tipped into his arms from a laundry basket. We have a lot of stairs at Tallis but he assured me he’d get there safely. As for the books?

I write this with a local copper sitting in my office. He’s not arresting me for offences against the language but clearing up some issues in the locality. Simultaneously I note a campaign to Pause Ofsted in a ‘quiet revolution’ in order to bring about ‘fundamental reform’ in what it does. Have you seen this, Mr Williamson?

These campaigning colleagues believe that Ofsted increases problems for the most vulnerable schools. They make several unarguable points, specifically that the current inspection system

• Destroys the reputation of schools in deprived areas, which are doing the best work in the most difficult circumstances. These are not ‘stuck’, they have been let down by inadequate funding and support. Ofsted has consistently failed to call this out.
• Imposes inspection frameworks which are untried and untested on schools, leading to poor inspection judgements.
• Makes schools the scapegoat for rising child poverty which is the real enemy of learning and progress.

This has been brewing since Ofsted’s unfortunate description of schools whose inspection grades haven’t reached good for many years, or ever, as ‘stuck’. A crude and needlessly disparaging epithet, ‘stuck’ sounds as though no one’s really trying. When I led one of them, they were described as ‘schools facing challenging circumstances’ which is both accurate and respectful of the professionals and children therein. Did I mention offences against the language?

Instructed by one of my sofa-sharers I’ve been reading Machiavelli this week. He observed:

I’m a fan of Timpsons, the shoe-mending folks who sort you out with watch batteries and keys and all those other things you could easily plan for in advance but because you haven’t, become a sudden and urgent need. They’re a brilliant employer of ex-offenders, did you know?

Currently, there are approximately 10 million people in the UK with a criminal conviction. At Timpson we believe it is madness to throw such a large section of society on the employment scrapheap. By carefully selecting the right individuals to work in our business, we have enabled thousands of ex-offenders to have a second chance in life and go on to have rewarding careers. Often, other employers don’t realise they can be missing out on some very talented, hardworking individuals. Their loss is our gain. Currently, our retention rate for colleagues who we have recruited from prison or who have a criminal conviction is approximately 75%. This means that the vast majority of colleagues that we employ from prison do not re-offend.

They are a principled, effective and successful outfit as far as I am able to tell. Forgive me, but the same cannot be said for our current government or their political opponents. 

We’ve been reading the Timpson Report on Exclusions this week. I don’t think former Education Minister Edward Timpson is a scion of the cobbler Timpsons, but he grew up in a family which fostered almost 90 children. He was handed a difficult job which he fulfilled diligently. He made 100 visits and took 1000 submissions, completing the report at the turn of the year only for it to be sat on by the department for months while they wrangled about money and power (I’m told).
​
There are 30 recommendations, which said department has agreed ‘in principle’. I’ll spare you the detail but here are the key points:

• Schools should be made responsible for the children they exclude, no matter when they exclude them by being accountable for their GCSE results. 
• Headteachers must retain the power to exclude pupils where necessary  

• A small number of schools are off-rolling (where children are made to leave a school without the proper process being followed) for their own interests.
• Councils must be advocates for vulnerable children to make sure they are well-placed
• Funding is a problem but good practice is still possible
• Most schools take a balanced and measured approach to using exclusion but some don’t
• Boys are substantially more likely to be excluded in primary school than girls.
• Persistent disruptive behaviour accounts for around a third of all exclusions
• Alternative Provision provides education to excluded pupils but it is often not very good
• Schools face a particular challenge in recognising, understanding and meeting the needs of children in, or on the edge of, the care system.    
• Ofsted should ‘consistently recognise’ inclusive schools

 
All of this is pretty obvious so I shall make obvious points in my turn. The biggest problems in our system are these:

• It values autonomy above all things, which means that there are over 20000 individual decision-makers making decisions behind closed doors.
• It values simple outcomes such as GCSE results because they are cheap to measure. This has driven the system mad. Troubled, vulnerable and needy children do not get good exam results so schools who are in trouble or who wish to seek pre-eminence by exam results are reluctant to admit them or keep them.
• There are too few teachers in the system and all of them are working harder. This means that behaviour support is stretched.
• Schools have no money. They have to prioritise teaching so all the pastoral support has withered away.
• Political decisions have stripped the public sector to the bone. As well as too few police there are too few youth workers, psychologists, social workers. There is no one to turn to.

As the man said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We’ve spent billions of pounds on structural and management alterations in public services and Brexit. If we cared about children we’d have spent the money on them. Vulnerable children don’t care whether their school is community or academy and they certainly don’t care whether they might get blue or red passports. They can’t see the long-term, they’re very likely to end up in prison and they make terrible decisions because they’re trying desperately to protect themselves from further harm. 

Austerity has taken a terrible toll on its children.

Timpson described a system where the best hope for an excluded child might be Timpson’s. How do we live with that?
 
CR
17.5.19 

It's year 11 picking-over-the-mocks time. Teachers have a strange relationship to mocks.  They set hard papers because that’s the point of a mock, to show the children what they’re up against. Then they worry that it will upset them or depress them, then they worry that it’s not really a good indicator of what happens in the next few months. For the number crunchers upstairs, results are one thing, but predictions are another.  We work on what we’ve got.

For some year 11s, however, mock results bring an outbreak of self-justification, soul-searching and sudden insights. They tell you how little or how much work they did for the mocks, the blinding flash of light it has shone on the last four-and-a-half years and exactly how different a person they are going to be hereon in. ‘Of course the thing about the mocks……’ they begin, having taken them once and never again, and as if their teachers could do with some contextual advice.

That’s fine. We learn from experience and mistakes and it is the crowning glory of adolescence to see everything newly minted and focused on the self. January is a good time for self-examination: I used to do that, but now I do this. I used to play on my phone but now I watch GCSE pod. I used to eat chips but now I’m all veg. I used to answer back but now I grit my teeth. As one said to me yesterday, demonstrating the teeth work and the sound effect. I reserve judgement on whether the recipient will find that any less annoying. 
 
Adults too. Those who arrived in September have now got the hang of the place and are starting to offer analyses and suggestions. Old lags watch the year turn once again. Otherwise undemonstrative folks are thrilled by November GCSE resit maths and English results: a perfect example of a mistake made in the past put right at second try, for many. New starters are both perky and chipper, and you can’t ask for more than that. Some make helpful suggestions about the car park, for which I am, of course, grateful. It is our Schleswig-Holstein question.  All are bemused by the plumbing problems which best us.

There was a nice piece about Tallis in Schools Week last week. SW is an influential on-line newspaper and they came to look at how we’ve reduced exclusions, in the national context of exclusions rising again. Excludable behaviour is obviously part of the mistake-making of adolescence and, by trial and error, we think we’ve found a better way.

One of the methods we use is restorative meetings. Combatants of all sorts have to meet together to resolve differences and agree a way forward, or just make a proper, personal apology. Ms in charge says ‘twenty minutes’ awkwardness is worth it for a year without awkwardness’. It is the human way.

I had another thought about the human experience on Monday. I set off late to assembly so dived into the viewing gallery at the back, watching proceedings from a bit higher than the back row of the seats. This made for a very different assembly from the ones I usually see from front or side. From there, I get 300 faces and the performer in the stage lights: all very real, and close. From the gallery it’s more like being at the pictures. The back row is a long way from the action and when the Head of Year, Deputy Heads and whoever else has fine words to impart doesn’t stand in the stage lights, you can barely see them. You can see a lot of backs of heads, but those aren’t nearly as friendly as the fronts.  I’m thinking about what this means for our messaging, while threatening assembly-givers with a gaffer-tape cross to stand on.

I’m thinking because distance makes for glibness and detachment. Mock exams are years, then months away. That’s like another lifetime to a young person whose revision can start sometime after the next ice age. Maturity is signalled by the sudden realisation that you can SEE May from here and the weeks need a bit of attention. If you’re at the back of assembly, does it make a difference to how much a part of the community you feel?

Which brings me to the inevitable. No, not Ofsted, still no report. Brexit. One of the million problems with Brexit is that it has been approached rather like mock exams. It was once all in the future, so there was plenty time for posturing.  Now it’s here, and the revision hasn’t been done, and everyone’s flailing about blaming everyone else and some won’t meet with others. Meanwhile, the world turns and the year moves on. The people get poorer, the public services are neglected and we’re stepping over the homeless in the streets while young people murder one another. And those who caused the mess are so far from the people that they might as well be actors on a distant stage. It’s all very well saying ‘We’ll still be breathing if there isn’t a deal’ but that’s a pretty low bar to set. The good life requires more.
​
Enough with the self-justification. We need the soul-searching and restorative action, now.
 
CR 17.1.19