Category: Justice

One Hand for the Ship

8/10/2022

Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon reported from a North Sea trawler to which he was poorly suited, being too tall and argumentative, and sick all the time. He described ‘six degrees of freedom’ at sea as pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I found that helpful when I was a young Head in stormy waters but I think we’re all feeling it nationally at the moment. Yaw now?

Heavy weather requires something to cling to so I’m returning to my moutons in the woolly shape of some principles I wrote 11 years ago. These have developed a edu-zeitgeist half-life as well as being inflicted on every group of people I’ve ever met. They are a sort-of answer to the perennial question of ‘what are schools for?’ and I wrote them at the time of the coalition government and to help make sense of Gove’s curriculum reforms. Here they are:

Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society.We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities.We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world.Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission.The teacher’s authority to transmit or broker knowledge is given and valued by society
Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

At the time I was collaborating with Prof Michael Young of the Institute on a book that was published in 2014 and is still being read, called Knowledge and the Future School. Michael and I are chums, so he won’t mind me observing that he’s roughly 200 years old but nonetheless keeps thoughtful tabs on what schools are doing, and why. He’s concerned that schools leap from one two-dimensional solution to another without sufficient mental scrutiny, without thought and without reflection.

In 2011 it was important to conceptualise and reassert the primacy of knowledge in learning – but now we’re in danger again. Post-Covid, people are lurching towards off-the-peg curricula, like the Oak National Academy that sprang up to assist in desperate times but is now set to take over the thinking of a generation of teachers, a Japanese Knotweed of curriculum development. And perhaps schools can’t find space to see that or worry about it in the context of the unfunded pay award, the energy crisis, the fact that families can’t afford to eat and the missing of teacher recruitment targets in eight of the last nine years. By a mile. (Not that we’ll be able to measure anything in a future without maths or geography teachers.)

So what principles might we cling to in this particularly prolonged storm, with buckets of hail being thrown from each side and the siren call of off-the-peg answers sounding through the surge? Here’s my thinking so far:

Knowledge is powerful: it can change the world, person by person.
Children need knowledge to interpret the world and broaden their possibilities.
Knowledge and understanding bring freedom and requires us to choose how to live
Knowledge is real but provisional: it endures and changes.
Knowledge gives people the power to think and act in new and better ways
Knowledge is social, produced in history: good communities are built on shared knowledge
Inequitable distribution of shared and powerful knowledge undermines democracy
Schools give unique access to knowledge, skilfully tailored to the growing human
Learners volunteer to acquire knowledge when enabled by skilled teachers
Good education is not inevitable. It must not be withheld, misused or devalued.

Comments welcome, of course.

I was watching a staircase last week and found a youth walking up it backwards, with one hand for the ship, the better to lecture his comrades. This caused significant embouteillage upstream so I issued a cease and desist. He apologised nicely, but I couldn’t tell if it was incipient demagoguery or a concern for safety that inspired him.

When I visited the Capitol in 1999 the guides walked backward in front of us to prevent anyone slipping off to install Communism. It does feel as though we’re being led backwards at the moment, without reason or rationale.
Pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw are only good to look back on if you didn’t go under. Here’s hoping, for us all.

CR
31.9.22

1 Comment

Befogged

28/11/2020

1 Comment

It was foggy when I set off this morning but the streetlights were pretty and the great illuminated buses big enough to see. By the time me and my bicycle got onto to Blackheath it was pitch black. I said ooh-er out loud a few times and hoped that the cross guy who mutters wouldn’t appear for me to run over.

Fog and early darkness always remind me of a conversation in a Head’s office on the edge of Sunderland at the end of a day, when the dark sky was all-enveloping. We talked about what it must have been like in mediaeval times, with the same sky, no lights, just the cold and the hills, and eventually, to the west, Durham Cathedral appearing looming above the city as if it had descended directly from heaven.

Safely indoors, the clock ticked round to year 11 assembly: Instructions for Mock Exams. These will be important but we don’t know how important. I noted with interest that the Queen of the Mocks referred to the pre-exam gathering place as the Green Canteen. This is catching on, though I call it the Dining Room and one of the chaps on the top floor calls it the Bistro. It doesn’t matter.

The curriculum we offer does matter, which may lie behind the continually condescending tone of this week’s post-lockdown briefing from the DfE. While announcing a pay freeze for teachers and public spending cuts that will make learning re-stabilisation harder, they remind us of the blindingly obvious: I condense

the curriculum must remain broad and ambitious
remote education must be high-quality and safe,
schools should plan on the basis of the educational needs of pupils.

Duh. They wrote this in July and trot it out every time. It was annoying then and gets more annoying the harder it is to keep schools going and offer a curriculum that is the same for everyone, the necessary condition for an exam-based system. The tone lacks respect, treating us as idiots.

Which appears to be the Home Secretary’s preferred register, manifesting itself ‘in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing. This may not be done intentionally to cause upset, but that has been the effect on some individuals’.

And later in Alex Allen’s belatedly published independent advice ‘Her approach on occasions has amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals.’

And then! ‘There is no evidence that she was aware of the impact of her behaviour and no feedback was given to her at the time………I note the finding of different and more positive behaviour since these issues were raised with her.’

Yet she remains, as the PM has insisted that the wagons circle around ‘the Pritster’.

I am in a Blackheath cycling fog about this and mediaeval darkness has descended on my comprehension. How can someone of such eminence, the Home Secretary, have to have bullying pointed out to her? How can it ever be right to shout and swear at colleagues, especially those whom one is expected to lead? How can she command any respect?

I have long clung to the existence of the Committee for Standards in Public Life as a guarantor of standards of conduct for public officials, from the PM down to lowly ole me. The ‘Nolan Principles’ of accountability, selflessness, honesty, objectivity, openness, integrity and leadership have bound us all since 1994. The current Chair spoke on 12 November and said:

‘The bullying allegations made against the Home Secretary were investigated by the Cabinet Office but the outcome of that investigation has not been published though completed some months ago…..this does not build confidence in the accountability of government.’

He goes on, further, to talk about cronyism in appointments and the awarding of public contracts, the firing of civil servants when the resignation of a minister would have been correct, the avoiding of parliamentary scrutiny by media announcements and the use of ‘just vote us out if you don’t like us’ as a way of brass-necking wrong behaviour.

The system depends on everyone choosing to do right, Evans says. High public standards rely on the individual. ‘It remains that case that in politics, public service and business, that ethical standards are first and foremost a matter of personal responsibility.’ because 'few systems are sufficiently robust to constrain those who would deliberately undermine them’.

This is a dense area and the argument is nuanced. We are not living in a post-Nolan world nor should any of us wish to. We want high standards of conduct in our politicians because we want them to be good people determined to do the best for their constituents. We don’t want to be saddled with people who, as educated adults, have to be told how to behave. We want government to be built on a foundation of goodness and altruism, not self-interest and showing-off. We expect it of children and ourselves and we have a civic right to expect it of our government.

When we devised the national Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2016-18 we realised that Nolan wasn’t enough, but we needed clear personal virtues to underpin all of our actions. We therefore also committed ourselves to trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We check our own behaviour to make sure it sets the right example to children, and to other adults. This enlightenment didn’t descend from a mediaeval heave, we worked at it.

The PM is lost in a fog of his own obfuscation. He has made too many personal mistakes to want to shine the Nolan spotlight on colleagues. He looks as though he can’t tell right from wrong and worse, that he doesn’t care. Our children deserve better than this.

CR 27.11.20

1 Comment

St Kilda’s Parliament

8/10/2019

4 Comments

Crossing the yard I encounter a group of year 11 boys, usually of the laid-back sort, hopping about in an agitated manner emitting squaws. ‘It’s the bees, Miss’. I can’t see any bees, so I issue a sympathetic tut and counsel them to have a care for easily crushable smaller children.

These smaller members are more confident now and generally navigating themselves accurately. Just as well, as the only bottleneck I’ve seen this term was caused by a kind year 10 stopping to explain and direct. At lesson change. On the bridge. He hadn’t done the mental risk assessment: the child could have fended for himself until he got inside a building rather than bringing a third of the school to a standstill. Still, everyone was patient and it’s the thought that counts. The same small scholar was being towed about by a teacher next I saw him. Perhaps he’s not good with maps, timetables, diagrams: it takes all sorts.

I met with the new teachers – those just starting out on their careers - and we talked about ethics and the values behind their work. We tried to root the language of ethics in daily experience. Selflessness in helping a child at break or taking a job off a burdened colleague. Integrity in the rock-like consistency of the everyday. Objectivity in marking and assessment and how hard it is, in dealing with facts and not opinions. Accountability in handing over the test scores to your head of department no matter how ropey they are. Openness in asking for help. Leadership in being a tutor, a role model, always the adult in the room.

And the personal virtues: trust that fairness will prevail. Wisdom in planning for student misunderstandings and knowing what to worry about. Kindness in every interaction. Justice in handling disputes. Service in seeing the task through. Courage in apologising when you’ve made a mistake, or being brave enough to speak out in a meeting, or dealing with angry parents. Optimism after watching an expert at work in the classroom and believing that you’ll get there, believing things will go well even on an overwhelming day.

I’ve devoted years to making sure that that first list – the Principles of Public Life – are better known in schools. They bind us all and we should use the language as we go about the formation of children in loco parentis. The second list are the personal virtues that make us worthy to be in charge of the nation’s young, that means parents can trust us. What we do is important, but so is how we do it. Remembering that every day is a true mark of our profession.

Someone sends me a poem he thinks I’ll like for Poetry Day, St Kilda’s Parliament by Douglas Dunn. I do. I’m trying very hard not to think about parliaments at the moment but this moving piece is based on a photograph taken in 1879 by Washington Wilson, fifty years before the islands were abandoned and the people chose to move to the mainland.

The parliament of the island’s adult males met daily every weekday morning in the village street. Women had their own meeting. Without rules or a single leader it considered the work to be done that day according to each family's abilities and divided up the resources according to their needs. Everything was done for the common good. Wilson wrote ‘by a majority the order of the day is fixed, and no single individual takes it upon himself to arrange his own business until after they unitedly decide what is best’.

In the picture the men stand in two rows looking at the camera and the poet, in the photographer’s voice, talks of the community’s life on the poor land, and how he imagines they see themselves. The final lines are calming and unnerving all at once.

Outside a parliament, looking at them,
As they, too, must always look at me
Looking through my apparatus at them
Looking. Benevolent, or malign? But who,
At this late stage, could tell, or think it worth it?
For I was there, and am, and I forget.

Perhaps the best we can hope at the end of this particularly agitated and unpleasant phase of our national life, outside a parliament, looking at them, is that we forget and look back with equanimity and wonder if it was worth it. But benevolent or malign? Who will make that judgement?

I’m saddened that the Principles of Public Life haven’t been invoked in parliament this autumn. The standard of national debate would have been improved by them and our community spirit less coarsened. I’m saddened that we are so divided. I’m saddened so many of our leaders are cynical rather than principled, insulated when they should be embedded, reckless where they should be careful, flippant where they should be serious and sloppy where they should be diligent.

I discover that the people of St Kilda had never seen a bee, unlike my jumpy boys. I wish that was the biggest trouble that lay in store for them as they grow up. Most of all, I wish for a recommitment to the common good.

CR
4.10.19

4 Comments

One Yorkshireman

16/2/2019

1 Comment

Our dining room’s a funny shape. I said this to a visiting Head and he got a bit shirty, giving me the full Four Yorkshiremen (he was from Harrogate). At least you’ve got a dining room, at least it’s a decent size, at least it’s joined on to the school, at least it’s on planet earth, not full of dung and so on, luxury. All true, but it’s still longways on with no thought given to the need to queue.

In cold weather this glorious green space – which only one person ever calls the Tallis Bistro – is quite the place to be. As someone who turned never-going-outside-in-cold-weather into an art form in my own schooldays way north of Harrogate I have every sympathy with the inmates. That doesn’t extend to sympathy with shoving and other uncivilised behaviour when there are a hundred or so more souls than usual indoors who may not be entirely occupied with nutritious eating. In order to prevent annoying clumping we’ve therefore removed most of the pundit chairs at the high benches. This caused a wave of concern among little chaps who like to keep an eye on the scraps for Sir’s dog and the ganneting teachers around the plates trolley, so we saved a couple for them.

Children are creatures of habit, and those habits, good or bad, are largely formed by the adults around them. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to assume the mantle of adult citizenship and everything the adults in schools do is scrutinised by young people, both the what and the how. Those teachers aren’t just modelling eating standing up while using a knife and fork properly, but food choices, friendly conversation and eyes in the back of their heads.

And so much more. We had a governor visit to scrutinise how we spend our Pupil Premium funding and whether it is having any impact. PP money is meant to improve the educational experience and therefore outcomes of children who meet one of a series of disadvantage indicators. We get about £400k a year, so it’s important to our (£13m pa) budget. We have to account for what we spend it on and the statutory document is available on the website here. (Just before you get too excited about it, PP was a Coalition hat put on money already in the system, so the idea that schools had the leisure to spend it on anything new and innovative was always a bit of a stretch.)

We spend a lot of our PP money on our ‘first class’ Pastoral Welfare Team, who wear out their sturdy shoes supporting behaviour management. Governors asked some PP-attracting children about this: did they think this was a good thing? Oh yes, yes indeed.

This is interesting, money spent on adults who spend all their time talking to children about how to behave is seen as an obvious good by the children. They’re not just modelling Tallis Character but the values and virtues of the good life, how to be honest, fair, respectful, kind and optimistic. The children see that in adults other than teachers (who are a breed apart and tend to go on about this kind of stuff) personal virtue, taking responsibility for your actions, is important.

I’m thinking about this on a national scale. The Ethical Leadership Commission I wrote about in June launched its report in January and since them we’ve had quite a bit of publicity. Our thoughts aren’t revolutionary, but fundamental. Children will only learn how to behave well if adults behave well. Adults running schools have to put this above all other structural considerations. Fancy outcomes or badges can’t be got at the price of poor behaviour. We have to do right, or do another job.

The Ethical Leadership Commission now has a Framework set of words, a pathfinder programme which 200 schools have already signed up to, some developing work in teacher and leader training and a new Ethics Committee and open forum at the Chartered College of Teaching. Tallis’s governors are pathfinders. It's slightly terrifying work: there’s a real risk in sticking your dishevelled head above the parapet and saying ‘we should behave as good role models for children’. Everyone’s made mistakes, but the real human skill is reflection and change, in a spirit of humility. I’ve written a book concurrently too, but that’s me ranting, not the measured tones of the great and good commissioners.

Reflecting on our own behaviour doesn’t mean introversion or compliance with injustice. So much school policy in the last 20 years has danced around the elephant of privilege guarding the powerful. Ring-fencing money to support disadvantaged children is good, but it’s an Elastoplast on inequality. Our responsibility as good adults isn’t just as models of good character. Society should be fair and children’s lives not blighted by poverty and struggle. Those who have never needed any funding to give them a leg-up, or who have never known want, or who exist only within a bubble of other privileged people undermine the fair chances of the many by passing power around among themselves. Good people should be outraged abut this.

I’m reading (myself obvs, matchless prose, but also) Friedman and Laurison’s The Class Ceiling. They observe:

...when the following wind of privilege is misread as merit, the inequalities that result are legitimised. This leads those who have been fortunate to believe that they earned it on their own, and those who have been less fortunate to blame themselves.

Dr King dreamed that one day all children would be judged not on the colour of their skin but the content of their character. While we use our disadvantage funding to give love and lasting life-lessons, we mustn’t forget three of the virtues of ethical leadership. Our children need justice so they all may lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives. Adults need courage to speak out in the interests of all children. We all need optimism, to understand the injustices we face and to change the world for the better.

CR
St Valentine’s Day 2019

1 Comment

Spend a penny to save the world

30/3/2014

0 Comments

Phyllis Galembo, Mami Wata Mask, Cross River, Nigeria, 2004

It’s Mothers’ Day so put the daffodils down and bear with me.

I’m a third generation teacher. My grandmother was born in 1901in a shipbuilding settlement called Bill Quay on the south bank of the Tyne. Her father was a foreman in the shipyard and her mother a domestic servant. She was a clever child and passed the test for the Grammar School in Jarrow. She went by train for the interview to clinch the place and the headmaster asked her its number. She knew he wouldn’t know, so she made it up. Whether that got her the place, she never said. She became a pupil teacher and then a certified one, earning her own living up to the end of the 1920s. Married women couldn’t teach so, despite her husband being in the Merchant Navy she had to stop, describing herself in later years as ‘vexed’. When the second war came, and teachers were in short supply, she was implored to return to the classroom. She refused. Not a woman to be toyed with.

My own mother was well educated and her father hoped that she’d go to university in 1951. She chose to go south to the City of Leeds Training College and did a two-year teaching certificate.

She qualified at about the same time that women teachers started to be paid the same as men. When I was born in 1961 my retired grandfather sent her back to work with the words ‘it doesn’t take three people to look after this baby’. He taught me the parts of a car engine and the church boiler and took me to meetings. My mother worked as a primary school teacher for 40-odd years in Teesside. She did everything: lots of plays, singing and dressing up as well as a furious insistence on the primacy of times tables by heart over all things. My friends’ mothers in the 70s didn’t work and I was proud of her career, which started when teachers were also Civil Defence Volunteers and ended with computers in the classroom. Married twice, she wasn’t told to stop until she was 65.

I did go to university, though my grandfather didn’t live to see it. I came to London and then did a PCGE at Birmingham. I’ve taught all over the place and picked up qualifications at two more universities. I chose not to work when my children were tiny and was a Head by 40. No-one has ever shown the slightest interest in whether I was married or not, though colleagues did buy me a nice set of pans when I did.

My own daughter shows no signs of going into the family business. Educated to within an inch of her life at an excellent comprehensive school, she took university in her stride. Like her grandmother and great-grandmother she knows a thing or two about life and is not a woman to tangle with. Prosperity or austerity – what could get in her way?

Having an educated mother is a pretty good start in life for any child. UNESCO knows that having a mother with secondary or higher education halves child mortality. The World Bank recognises that educating girls to secondary level is a clear indicator of prosperity and stability. Yet simple things prevent it. While Malala’s story is a crystal-clear shocker of bigotry and brutality education remains impossible for millions of girls for cruder reasons. Even in places where governments have strained every sinew to provide education, girls stop going to school once they start menstruating because there are no toilets, no privacy and no running water. Some girls don’t get educated because their world is against them, but some don’t get educated because there are no sanitary towels and no doors on the loos. Half of the girls who drop out of school in Africa do so because there are no proper toilets.

So have a look at the Toilet Twinning website, and if you haven’t bought your Mum anything for Mothers’ Day, put a toilet in your basket. My mother and grandmother had some things to overcome in their time, but nothing as outrageously basic as this. Let’s spend a penny or two and give other women the chances our mothers fought for.

CR

26.3.14

0 Comments

Banding Together

16/3/2014

0 Comments

Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square, 1964

I love the list we get in March of our next year sevens. I see the names and picture keen bright eleven-year-olds grinning as they find their way around the big school. I love it that our admissions are handled calmly, fairly and by the Local Authority.

I once worked in a school where admissions resembled the Schleswig-Holstein question. You needed a map, a compass and a Bismarck’s understanding of county bus routes to get a toe-hold in the discussion. There were years when revised admissions criteria might as well have been in Babylonian Cuneiform. Two years running we had public meetings with that Great Panjandrum, The Schools Adjudicator: beat that for complexity.

It was just an oversubscribed LA school in a city where a vengeful providence had put all the schools in one corner. We didn’t go in for aptitude tests, priest’s references, pricy uniforms or parental interviews. We had no choice about and no view on which 11-year olds joined us in September. Admissions were County Hall’s problem. If the LA had sent us 240 penguins to educate, we’d have got with the fish and the ice skating.

As it was, we tried to work out which friends our new children and their parents could agree on liking, which classes to group them in and how to get that perfect mix of background, test scores and gender in every single form group. We hoped for a balanced intake, but had no means of promoting it.

In London admissions are different. Children take a test in year 5 and are allocated one of 4 ability bands: this combines with parental preference to give schools a balanced basketful of children. This wise process is reinforced by the Sutton Trust’s latest characteristically sensible publication. Last month’s report on Banding and Ballots recommends banding to achieve a comprehensive intake, especially in urban areas. It meets the Trust’s laudable aim of improving social mobility through education.

Why is this important? Why is it right to divide children up and then spread them out? Is this not social engineering of the worst sort? Why not make every child go to its local school and let the devil take the hindmost? Why not leave year 7 to the market and the pointy elbows of the argumentative classes?

A good comprehensive school like Tallis is a work of art and a force of nature. It contains within its warm and cheerful walls the raw materials of the good society. Children of all kinds thrown together make friends across the divides and learn something about how to bear one another’s foibles and burdens and how to respect one another. They reject snobbery and develop an immense pride in diversity, community, fairness and justice.

A Head I worked with had a leaving speech for his upper sixth which I’ve plagiarised shamelessly ever since. He would warn those heading off to university to be understanding towards people who had not enjoyed their advantages. He spoke pityingly of young people from dull schools where everyone was alike, who then might find it hard to get along in real life. He said that being an alumnus of a comprehensive school was the best possible preparation for life, and that such young people had a responsibility to keep to the values that formed them, to make the world a better place.

We have to be organised about what we believe is right for our society and our young people. Parents are individually and collectively wonderful, but they need a structure to relax against, where what is right for their children is also right for other peoples. A proper, balanced comprehensive school gives us a glimpse of a just society in which no-one is disadvantaged by money.

It’s not easy to balance all schools and is almost impossible in rural and post-industrial places. Children in some areas would have to spend hours on buses to be part of banded intakes, and that wouldn’t be right either. School buses are at the mercy of the Lord of the Flies at the best of times. Heads in London have little idea of the time it can take to resolve a bus disagreement including soup and chewing gum. But a good is a good, and just because something’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it. If we thought that, who would understand A level Economics, surds or the offside rule? We need banded and balanced intakes in all our schools for the common good. Time to try harder.

CR 12.3.14

0 Comments

EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

One Hand for the Ship

Befogged

St Kilda’s Parliament

One Yorkshireman

Spend a penny to save the world

Banding Together

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

Archive

Categories