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

I wrote to parents some time ago with the happy news that we didn’t have a plan B for social distancing, keeping year groups apart and rain - except for coats and umbrellas. Today was monsoon protocol day and thankfully, children turned up in the coats, largely. We’ve got the umbrellas for staff, new, highly visible, personally labelled and carefully branded. Only 2% of them fell apart at the first gust, so that’s not too bad.

However, our senior folks are logisticians to match Heathrow, Disney or the Army and when we saw the forecast they jumped to it like good ’uns. Our devised routes and wet weather zones worked a treat. Year 7 in the canteen, Year 8 at the east end of the sports hall, Year 9 in the dojo, Year 10 at the west end of the sports hall curtained off from Year 8, Year 11 in the main hall.

We have routes. Routes to get them to the zones, out of the zones, to the toilet, to the lunch queue and back again. We have routes to detention and places for anyone who gets too excited. We have different rules for packed lunches, sandwiches and Friday fish and chips and a DMZ between Year 7 and 8 dining. We have routes to the prayer room and the library. We have more routes that you could shake a stick at. And we adjusted them all so that Year 11 could have a live assembly in the sports hall about Year 11-y things: exams, working hard and what they might do next year.

We have staff. Heads of Year who didn’t sit down all day, teachers who volunteered to manage zones even though they taught all day, support staff who hold the world together.

And we have children, who did what children do, at various heights. They sat on the floor and chatted, they leaned against the walls and read, they speculated on romance and annoyed each other quietly. They ate tidily and asked teachers how they were. They had elastic bands to confiscate and water bottles to spin, but they held it together.  They lined up indoors and waited patiently to be led away. Some of Year 8 didn’t cope so well with a whole day indoors, but they’re at an awkward age. Some will need a bit of re-setting next week, nothing new.

And as I passed thought it all, I saw how open and inclusive they are, how friendly and accepting of the foibles of others – including the bizarre rules seemingly normal adults dream up for them. ‘We have to get there how?  Really? Oh, ok then.’

I love Don Paterson’s poem Rain. He talks about looking at lives as if they were in the kind of film that starts with rain and follows its effects on the characters. The last verse moves me every time I read it:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood –
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.

The mess and the damp, the mildly frayed tempers and the setting-rights, the silly acts and the overreactions are all bearable, containable if we can rise up. None of this matters if we have hope and kindness, if we have love. It could have been the worst, but at the end of it, in an empty school, it’s been the best wet day I remember. 

Thank you Tallis.

CR
2.10.20

A creature of habit, I have a view about how long terms should be. 15 weeks is fine for Autumn, but it should be 8 followed by 7, not what we’ve just had. I’ll complain to someone about it. Anyway, we’ve got there. T.S. Eliot’s Magi knew a bit about endurance, as they reflect in old age on the journey to follow the star.
 
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
 
And how deep the winter has been so far.  All that shouting, all that messy politics, all that dislike and distrust as darkness deepens in just the worst time of year.
 
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
 
The end of the autumn term does feel like we’ve been travelling all night, coming to school in the dark and leaving in the dark. And folly is easy to find this December. Folly in the mad consumption of Christmas, folly in austerity’s punishment of children, folly in the state of the climate, folly in leadership of all kinds.  
 
However, we take our pleasures where we may. We’ve been having a great time in assemblies this week rockin’ around the (dancing) Christmas tree, Heads of Year in Santa hats, Pastoral Welfare Team in tinsel, Parris on drums and Tomlin on the old joanna. Hearing’s only part of the experience, and it takes time before it turns into listening. We heard an enthusiastic rendering of an old hit: we listened to a slightly raucous gift of love from people whose working life is devoted to the children’s welfare. 
 
The penny doesn’t always drop quickly. I was directing traffic indoors at the crossroads of block 5 and 6 when two girls waltzed past, one saying ‘but I hate my name, I’d rather be called Val or Tina’. No disrespect to any so-called readers but I thought these were old-fashioned sort of names. It was a day before I realised she’d said ‘Valentina’. 
 
Governors visited a couple of weeks ago to give us the once-over. They talked to some BTEC students in the sixth form about their work, their endeavours and their plans. Students said ‘we love it, but there is a stigma attached to BTECs that is completely unfair’. We can’t do anything about the ridiculous way qualifications are turned into a snobbish calibration of worth but we can do something about hearing their anger, listening to their complaint and advocating for them.
 
We should understand this at Tallis. Our lives are enhanced by our deaf students and their skilled signers, teachers and advocates. It adds a dimension to our experience that some communities never know. Likewise our students for whom language itself poses a problem and for whom the world is full of discordances and jarringly inexplicable noise. People who can’t hear can still listen: people who hate noise can teach us to long for calm.
 
Not that adolescence lends itself to quietude. I joined a science class who chunter on so much they can’t hear themselves think, the concept of an unexpressed thought alien to them. They were all wittering about work but there’s only so much ‘I need a pen, have you got one, does the stapler work, why not, where’s the pencil sharpener, what did you get for number 4, why is number 10 wrong I thought it was right, what’s wrong with my formula, what’s the pass mark, I’ve stapled the wrong bits together, Miss! what does this say, what did you ask us to do?’ one can take. After a bit I called a halt and blessed silence engulfed us so we had the chance to organise a thought, to listen to our learning.
 
The advantage of the election being over, and it being nearly Christmas is that we all might get a similar break from each other in national life. Having been a Radio 4 addict since I first encountered it at 19 I’ve found news so difficult in the Trump-Brexit era that I’ve avoided it. I know a whole lot more about Radio 3 than I used to, which really does require listening. However, this ostrichy approach must end with the old year. I must return to the fray in 2020.  
 
The three kings in the poem reach their destination and don’t quite know where they’ve arrived they’ve got to
 
Finding the place it was, you may say, satisfactory.
 
But that’s not how it ends. Children are a gift and a life, exuberant, reflective or both at once is never satisfactory but wonderful, terrifying, joyful or desperate. We can’t be indifferent to children, and we can’t ignore them. We have to hear them, listen to them, travel with them and resist folly as we serve them with integrity, courage and kindness. Here’s to Christmas, and a better New Year.
 
CR
19.12.9   

I return to the Tallis Hug. For new readers, this quite a feature. Students here hug each other desperately as if waving goodbye to an émigré, when they part for a lesson. They hug when they reconvene in sheer relief that the loved one is safely returned to whichever draughty part of concourse or canteen is home. This is inexplicable to the northerner for whom a raised eyebrow is an embarrassingly gushing show of affection. And they come pre-programmed. 

Directing canteen traffic in the early hours of the term small child rushed up to me with a story of lost bag, shoes and bus before leaving home, followed by confusion and excitement in school. ‘Now I’m FINE!’ she squeaked. ‘Can I get a hug?’ ‘No!’ I squawked, rearranging her outstretched arms and backing into a dinner lady. ’We don’t do that here!’  Which, as explained above, is patently untrue. What I meant was - you’ll find plenty people to hug here, but not adults and certainly not me. The exuberance of youth. 

In telling this rocket-propelled putative hugger something about the Tallis way I was – rather magnificently – following my own instructions. My theme for the year is Tallis as usual. We don’t want to invent any new ways of doing things this year, just to do everything we already do better, and more consistently. That’s not to say that we won’t have some creatively eccentric new ways of teaching, but we want our running procedures to be reliable, predictable and better.

Which subtle segue leads me into the general state of our education system. Not enough money, 40 000 fewer teachers that we need, exam system that can’t bear the weight put on it, financial scandals etc etc. My solution to most worries is reading so I’ve just finished Melissa Benn’s Life Lessons. Benn is a tireless campaigner for community comprehensive schools but in this little piece she also turns her attention to the state of adult education and the universities, as well as schools, proposing a National Education Service. (Before you reach for the pen to report me to the Secretary of State for contravention of Staffing and Advice for Schools September 2018 para 5:33 (expressing political views) this is not quite the same as the one that Labour talked about a bit at some point.)  It’s well worth reading, not least for this.

One of the things we often say at Tallis is that the comprehensive dream is a vision every bit as precious as the NHS, and every bit as complicated. Model communities of local young people taught with expertise and equity is a blueprint for a better society. There are other barriers, mind, and I’ll talk about my next reading book, Robert Verkiak’s Posh Boys next time. 

Reading was on the agenda in year 7 assembly too. ‘Reading makes you kinder’ said Ms R. ‘You all need to read more’.  Perhaps the year 11 boy who bizarrely told Sir in English that he wouldn’t need English after leaving school could be persuaded that he might need kindness? Not that the conversation I had with Sir didn’t have its odd turns.  It was in discussing the choice of poetry for GCSE that he gave me the title of this piece. Which poems would you rather read?

We are committed to love at Tallis in that we are committed to kindness and service. Part of that is to be reliable, predictable and better. War and love, love and service, expertise and equity, creativity and eccentricity: Tallis as usual, hold us to our promises.
 
CR
13.9.18

I was heading for the big room outside at break but had to wait for a semi-feckless youth to tell me how hard he’s working. The fecklessness translated into not-turning-up-at-all but that was just as well as there wouldn’t have been room. In the end I had School Improvement partner dropping by mid-visit, Sir receiving feedback, Miss who was next, a maths man to be introduced, four year 11 ladies talking Prom and a phone call from the union. One of the office staff wanted to give me some papers but she couldn’t physically get through the door.

A shame, because today is coat exchange day. A duty colleague nearly as old as me, steeped in age and treachery, borrows a coat each week for duty and he doesn’t much care what it looks like. I twigged this the day he was wearing a pink sprigged affair which even in these gender-fluid days could only be described as a ladies’ mac.          
My year 10 political correspondent caught up when I managed to get out yesterday. Turning our attention temporarily away from the parlous state of the nation, I put her onto the Philippines and she’s not at all happy with what she’s found. ‘Peoples’ rights are being trodden on’.

Not just in the Philippines. I’m heartened by Emma Hardy, a Hull MP who in her maiden speech in the summer said,

The commissioner agreed. She pointed out that some schools – the neo-trad uber-schools and their copies – have policies that violate those rights. I’ve been saying this for years. Zero tolerance and all that malarkey is superficially attractive, as are all easy answers, but children aren’t adults and the most difficult children to manage are usually the ones whom adults have messed up so much that they need subtlety in the protective boundaries that will help them. I fervently hope this line of argument goes somewhere. Perhaps I’ll prod it a bit.
 
Don’t misunderstand me. Behaviour in school needs to be good, systematised and consistently enforced. It’s not easy. Behaviour Policies are a very particular kind of document, statutorily on the website but really a document of last resort. Ours is immensely long and tries to cover almost any eventuality upon which the Policy might be brought to bear. Actual behaviour on the ground is simpler, modelled by teachers and supported by praise and sanctions where needed.   
 
Our problem as ever is that we mistake our proxies for our goals. Schools bear many of the nation’s proxies: examination results are a proxy for learning, super-strict behaviour policies a proxy for developing good character. Both try to measure something that’s very hard to measure. Exams help us tell if a person is able to remember and process information in such a way that will make us be able to trust him or her as an adult ; you wouldn’t want an innumerate accountant or a doctor who was clueless about chemistry. Behaviour tells us if people can regulate themselves and be kind to others because we don’t want selfish and vindictive adults. But what if our exam accountability measures actually don’t measure learning, and our behaviour management just generates compliance or anger?
 
Accountability is really important but really hard. Every change in the GCSEs is part of our national attempt to get the examinations to prove something and we’re still way adrift. There aren’t any easy metrics for character development because we don’t really know what virtues we value as a nation.  Is it quiet kindness and reserve, our bottomless creativity or the shouty skills of the marketplace?  If we could just take the time to set out what we value, what we hope our young people will be, then perhaps we could set about generating schools that actually produced them. Monitoring and accounting for that would be very expensive to generate, but what a difference they’d make to all of us.  
 
It’s not that our young can’t show us the way. When the Salvation Army food bank in Catford ran out of food and clothes two weeks ago, RE set sorting that out as year 8 homework. They staggered under the weight of generosity and kindness as our families gave them good measure, pressed down and running over. There’s no policy for that.   
 
CR
17.11.17
​

Roll your eyes if I’ve told you before that I'm a third-generation teacher. Therefore, I wear around my aged neck an ancestral whistle. Despite straitened finances Sir begged leave to buy whistles for mute duty teamsters. For prudence's sake he proposed an economy plastic version which offended my DNA, so I authorised a batch of genuine Acme Thunderers, literally old-school. A charming colleague earwigged this esoteric exchange. ‘Can I have one of those please, the name sounds pretty cool?’ Some days it's easy to oblige.

Some days it's easy to get along. I followed two smaller learners as they trotted along the green upstairs corridor between blocks 5 and 4. 'How do you know we'll get to Drama this way?' 'I'm following my gut'. ‘OK then.’

We entertained a journalist on the day of writing. She wanted to hear from the youth so we plucked a few out and let them loose on her: 'Why do you like it here?' 'People help you. They hold your hand through stuff'. Then they took pains to explain that the handholding was of the metaphorical supportive type, that it wasn't babyish or a soft option, but a way of enabling them to learn really hard stuff in a kind and supportive atmosphere.

I wandered out and Crocus was lying in wait for me again. She's taken against her options and appears to want to try them all out to find a set that suits. She's come to me because her Head of Year's told her that the trial period's over and she needs to love the ones she's got. She wanted to put her case before another judge, but really once it gets to me there's nowhere else to go, and I'd said no before half-term. There are things to battle for in life, and changing options for the third time isn't one of them. I threatened to blow time on my Thunderer if she lurked around me again on the matter.

After that I nearly tripped over some sixth form who were waiting tidily on the floor. I put it to them that, despite the hi-vis attributes of red tights, their proximity to the door constituted a trip hazard. They happily entertained themselves shuffling along until they were fully visible. Another visitor remarked: it's very calm here.

Boundaries, gut feeling, calm and a bit of support and kindness go a long way in a human institution. Children push their luck because they're full of hope that the world will bend itself to their personal needs. We can love their importuning while teaching them that persistence and discipline really requires them to get stuck in, that a best fit might be the best fit and that if something's hard, well, perhaps it'll get easier. Good habits are the basis of the good life and perhaps, a better world.

Which is why the news from Westminster is so grim this week. Not because it’s a surprise that things go wrong but because such wrongs have lasted into the modern world. When I was growing up the owner of the ancestral whistle was pretty clear that gender relations were apt to go awry and that women should have their wits about them. Over years as a Head I've packed brilliant and lucky young women off to be interns in MPs' offices and have never heard a word against the members for whom they worked, but plenty about unreconstructed attitudes in the febrile air of the crumbling Palace. Who says that the prize of survival in a political party is so great that a young person has to allow frankly stomach-turning, outrageous, not to mention illegal, assaults upon her dignity and person? We’re not talking about louche and left-over Edwardians who don’t know any better, but men of my own generation who very certainly do. 

Where's the common-sense politeness, respect and good behaviour? Where's the kindness and support. Where's the example to the young, for goodness' sake? For shame.

Which brings me back to the young chaps in the corridor helping each other through the day, Crocus wanting to shape her own destiny, and the year 11 physicists I saw on Thursday morning. They were all smiles and kindness to each other and their teacher. They smiled when they found out they didn't have to learn THIS equation. They smiled when they commented on each other's graphs and they chuckled quietly in appreciation of Sir's liquid pressure demo with three holes in a tube. It could not have been more cordial, pleasant and respectful. 
    
Some of the rich and powerful could learn from this, as they're finding out. Who'd have thought the ship of state would be so storm-toss'd by these young people? Bring it on, ladies. Acme Thunderers all round. Blow those whistles until we find a better way to be.
 
CR
3.11.17

My brooding on the freedom of the press was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of 12-year-olds legging it down the corridor. By the time I’d leapt from my reverie, found my shoes and set off in pursuit, my admonitions went unheard above shrieks of joy. What I lack in speed I make up for in determination and tracked them down to block 3 where I found previously blameless children excited beyond containment by water squirting ‘outside the library Miss that corner near drama’ as if I needed a 6-figure map reference. That made it worse (Books! Water!) so they got some thoughts at old-fashioned volume about the dangers of running in the corridors. 20 minutes later, letters of apology appeared, nicely written and heartfelt.
 
I was out the next morning learning about empathy (really, you couldn’t make this up) and felt rather ashamed of myself. I trotted off at moderate pace to apologise at afternoon tutor. I shared my nightmare vision of a tripped-up child’s head trodden on accidentally and we nodded sagely to each other and looked sad. Then we perked up again. The squirtee grinned happily at me at parents’ evening and I kept my counsel when other parents hoved to.  
 
There’s a covenant between teacher and child which shouldn’t be overlooked no matter how closely school and home work together. You make mistakes at school and sometimes the sheer joie de vivre of being young takes over. As long as you’re not doing it all the time, we deal briskly with a first minor offence. Forgetting homework, being late once, running in the corridor, wearing the wrong jumper, not having your kit, trying to subvert the dinner queue – all can be quietly nipped in the bud.
 
Parents might hear from us for a first offence if it’s cruel or anti-community: oppressive language, spreading rumours, fighting, undermining teachers. Whether you hear from us or not, we’ve made a judgement about the severity of the incident and we’re either just raising an institutional eyebrow with a bit of a glare or we’re pressing a reset button and we’d like it pressed at home too, please. 
 
I think most parents are happy with that – it’s a matter of us using our judgement. Sometimes we’re challenged for not reporting every infringement, and allowing things to stack up before parents know about it, so the first conversation between school and home is more difficult than it might have been. Hard to know what to do.
 
Some schools are really big on sweating the small stuff (not that I really know what that means) and believe it makes all the difference to children’s self-regulation. Like uniform, it’s a matter of school ethos. I was out and about at an unusual hour today and passing through communities at school’s out time. Young people everywhere, happily drifting around the pavements, walking backwards, shoving each other a bit, grasping each other doubled up with laughter. And if I was to go into any of those schools in the morning I’d get a feel for the way it is and how it holds together – and if that’s missing, you miss it straight away. I can’t explain that either, but a safe and happy school makes you smile when you walk into it, and the opposite makes you look for the door.
 
Upstairs, year 10 are practising exams-in-the-hall while we all practice what-will-the-marks-mean? I take a guest to lunch and we chuckle at year 9 alone, vaguely wondering where everyone else is, as if year 10 and 11 might be hidden behind a pillar. They’re growing up, my dears, examined and gone, or under invigilation. Yes, even at lunchtime. The guest is blown away by the articulacy of the chat and the quality of the sausages. We’ve Jamie Oliver to thank for the sausages, but we do the chat ourselves.
 
A tall colleague comes and takes me surreptitiously by the elbow. ‘Press photographer outside’. But it isn’t and after a pleasant chat I wander back through reception. The sun shines through the back windows as if we could disembark onto the happy lands and I pass some drama rehearsing in the corridor. ‘Come and see our piece, Miss, we all die’. Later, we look out of the window and see children dancing wearing cloth and bamboo structures, being photographed by their peers. Very Tallisy, all’s well.
 
Learning and kindness are important, happy schools are important, freedom of expression’s important, space to make a mistake’s important and the freedom of the press is important. With children, every day’s a new one.
 
CR
28.6.17 

Pardon me for mentioning it but I was in the loo of the Wig and Mitre in Lincoln on All Saints Day when I saw the Ask for Angela poster and thought that’s a damn good idea. If you've missed this – and I’m not often up with the zeitgeist – this is a dating safety genius from Lincolnshire County Council. The little posters say something like if your date’s not going well and you're worried about your safety, if you think there’s something a bit weird, go to bar and ask for Angela. The staff will know what you mean and will quietly get you out and whisked off to a safe place of your choosing. Angela the guardian angel, obviously.

Angela replicates for adults the safety nets we know are vital for children. From Childline to the NSPCC, from the trusted Form Tutor to the kindly dinner lady, we expect a worried child to be comforted and protected. We do it all the time. I was on the gate this week and a small person presented himself. It was Tuesday, moved house on Monday and he couldn't remember how to get home. That's a pretty panicky place to be for an 11 year old so we rushed to Reception where Miss even extracted a smile from the sobbing lost soul as she made the necessary calls. Everyone needs an angel when they're in trouble, someone who'll reach out into the hostile world and map you to safety.

We've entertained another Civil Servant from the DfE this week as part of our mission to change the world for the better. He did three days, glued first to a friendly child and then a range of impossible jobs so he could see what we do to protect our communities from political whim. He admitted on arrival (it was a good job l warmed to him) to expecting a big city comprehensive to be a bit chaotic but was bowled over by our calm and happy vibe. He saw English, maths, art, geography, break and lunch duty, staff room life,timetable, data, inclusion, deaf support, the dreaded IER and even did some speed networking for the Year 10 careers gig. He liked the warmth and safety that he felt, and the care he saw in action. He also saw the budget. And what the future looks like.

But we talked about teacher retention and what to do to restock the classroom for the longer term, and stop teachers bailing out. I went off on one as per about intelligent accountability, assessment expectations and unscrupulous school leaders wringing the life out of young teachers but we also talked about the effect of the myriad routes into teaching and the ethical underpinnings of the profession. Except I called it a service, because I think that helps. Decentralised recruitment and training needs really tight principles and explicit expectations if we're to preserve something that was once taken for granted. Kindness, optimism, scholarship (let alone tea and queuing) don’t survive accidentally. Old git, moi?

Which seamlessly segues into part one of a limited series entitled Reasons We Might Miss Michael Willshaw. Himself talked eloquently this week about schools being the glue of a cohesive society which any selection interference will wreck. Go to it, Sir! All power to your irritating elbow! Unfortunately he also blamed local colleagues for not preventing a nasty fight out of hours recently. A tad unjust: these things are the devil to manage and he just wasn't there. Still, one out of two ain’t bad.

We had Year 11 maths and English night on this week and Year 10 careers speed networking with 40 volunteers. Wednesday night was the wonderful Shakespeare Schools Festival at the Greenwich Theatre, complete with an authentically Shakespearean audience, where our young people were slick and witty, Puck on a skateboard, top marks for Bottom. The Dream lives on.

Life should be better than it is for a lot of people. Women ought not to fear for their safety when they're on a date. Everyone should look out for one another and any of us should feel able to ask for help. Our Tallis community isn't perfect, but it’s characterised by genuine warmth not based on a spurious grit ‘n' resilience tick list. Our children have the right to expect kindness and a helping hand when they leave us, and throughout their lives. I'd be proud to think one of them thought up Ask for Angela. #NO MORE.

CR
4.11.16

My session is on Ethical Leadership, wittily entitled The Real Teacher Standards.  I encourage these dedicated youngish folk to consider the principles that inform their every action. I pose them a few questions. 

​Do you know the Principles for Public Life? What matters to you? Can you recognise malpractice and irregularity? Has anyone tried to make you do something professionally you know to be wrong? On what grounds do you make decisions?
 
We look at the Aristotelean virtues of courage, temperance, greatness of soul, magnificence, friendliness, justice, wit, friendship, generosity, even temper and truthfulness. We think about what kind of role models we are to the young. We consider old Kant who said that our duty to make children's lives bearable is a consequence of the act of procreation. We reflect on justice and I tell them that equal opportunities lip-service just gets you meritocracy, a cabinet full of old Etonians and a list of top 20 universities with shameful numbers of undergraduates educated at state schools. 
 
We move on to the great American jurist Rawls and his Veil of Ignorance : if you knew nothing at all about this child, would this education you offer be right, be just? We consider the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the failure of schools under murderous regimes to protect their young. I suggest (tediously, year after endless year) that we need a code of ethics, like the medical Royal Colleges. After that, good old English case law can do its stuff and build up our understanding and our practice. I make them think about how their teams and their future schools should run on ethical principles. About how to translate all of this into talking to actual teachers about their actual behaviour and practice and making children's lives better.
 
So aren't I Mrs Perfect with all this theory? Never an error, never a duff decision, philosophical purity perpetually oiling the Tallis wheels? One of the exercises in the sessions is to plan a meeting to set out the way a staff team should behave. I'm not talking about inspirational visionary speeches to launch a new role: any old fool can use fine words with people you don't know. I get them to think about what they'll say to people with whom they have some history, where emotion and embarrassment might blister fine words a bit. About trying to make the right decisions in circumstances of unavoidable ambiguity, about marrying fundamental principles and democratic demands, about the pitch and roll of school life. About doing the best you can.
 
Madam can be manipulative and witty, furious and foul, but this week she made a split-second decision that required getting over herself. She came up against someone else’s pain and put herself second. She had faith she'd find help because she trusted her teachers to be unyielding walls of security against which to batter herself in safety. In an optimistic moment, before she drives me barmy again I dream that one day she'll remember that kindness, integrity and learning go hand in hand, and that might help her into the future. It heartens me, when times are out of joint.
 
Unlike the Irritating Pronouncement From An Academy Chain Leader #400 this month. Say it in an outrageous Yorkshire accent: 'You can turn a school round in 7 weeks' [whatever that means]. No you can't. You can make self-satisfyingly macho decisions in 7 weeks, and change some stuff that's egregiously wrong. Building a community on right principles takes years, and it involves, maddeningly, keeping faith with Madam.
 
I finally read Harper Lee on the train last week and her magnificent musing on morality, principle and relationships. Bringing up Madam takes time. Don’t cut corners. Look to your ethics. Go set a watchman.
 
CR 8.2.16

She gave me to understand that this advice was of doubtful utility and proceeded to demonstrate how it should be done, but she couldn’t help me further as we were distracted by a large youth tripping over a doorstop.  He wished to replay the scene so I could explain to him the purpose of doorstops general and particular. I was glad to oblige, but he too was unconvinced by what I felt was a pretty clear explanation.

Young people receiving advice coolly is an occupational hazard. I once took part in an inspection. It was going well and the year 10 class was absorbed in geography until a child’s plaintive request diverted the silence. ‘Sir, is it normal to have the same weird dream night after endless night?’ Sir, as I recall, said it probably was OK unless it was really upsetting him. But ‘How weird is weird?’ was harder to answer using geographical terms accurately with two inspectors in the room. I used to teach The Parts of a Church. I was talking about lecterns (how we do live) when a child who had previously shown little aptitude for metaphor helpfully told me ‘I know all about lecterns. Up and down the street at all hours of the day and night, banging on people’s doors and windows.’ I felt compelled to point out that on the contrary, a lectern was a large reading stand, sometimes in the shape of a large eagle, often made of brass, invariably stationary. He said that I was mistaken, and warned me to be on my guard. 

None of this accidentally substandard advice really matters, until it does. Monday was Holocaust Memorial Day and assemblies have also been plain and clear. We’ve heard haunting music and seen terrible images, reflected in silence and listened carefully.  Young people of this generation cannot be expected to respond with the same shock and horror that was expected of older generations. The events are known facts, and the images and stories endlessly terrible. They are almost familiar, certainly to those who study history to GCSE and beyond. That’s’ not to say that young people aren’t moved by them, but what do we expect them to think?  Or do?  How may we advise them sensibly? Do we say – be careful?  Do we say - don’t collude with genocide? Do we say – this is why we work endlessly to stamp out all kinds of hate and cruelty in school?  Or do we say that human beings are capable of terrible acts and we should never underestimate our capacity for wickedness? Our advice – be kind and thoughtful, make your own decisions, work hard, learn how to read and measure the world, find comfort in art and literature, keep fit, learn from the past -  seems unequal to the subject.  How can we prevent them from making catastrophic errors or believing bad things? What do we advise, to save the world?

The best we do is to teach them to value one another and build up the common good. Not to categorise fellow humans or set themselves against each other. Not to measure a person’s worth by a single unchangeable feature, not to rank people’s value.  Perhaps next time I’ll write about performance tables and what they do to children. 

CR

30.1.14