Enthusiastic in July, I made a note in my new diary about how I should entertain you in September. Sadly, teachers’ mental hard drives are semi-wiped clean over the six weeks and the clearest reminder might as well be in Sanskrit.  I think it was something about cricket, of which I know almost nothing despite living within earshot of the Surrey ground. What to do?

Step forward the Secretary of State and the concrete issue. Our concrete, being of a relatively up-to-date kind, is fine, but I’ve done my time in crumbling buildings and I sympathise most energetically with Heads who suddenly had to close. I taught in a room with a hole in a broken window for the whole of my first year, and in a school which had outside toilets until 1998 and sixteen rotting demountables until 2009.  I once lost 13 classrooms to an arson attack. This stuff happens, but its wearing.

One might ask why? Surely we should educate our young in buildings suited to the value we place upon them as our jewels, the holders of our dreams, our single hope for a better future? Schools should be palaces – or at least as nice as Tallis’s lovely building. The problem is that our school buildings are indeed matched to the value we place upon children, nationally. Children are messy and a bit unpredictable. They’re not much economic use until they’re grown and though they complain with every breath they also take everything in their stride so everyone can ignore them. Schooling is compulsory, so its not as if we have to lure them there.

I don’t know of a nation that spends the right amount on schools, but the Children Village in Brazil was declared the world’s best building in 2018. The three Building Schools for the Future-era buildings I’ve been lucky enough to head are each lovely in their way, built when much more money was spent on design as well as building (though I did have to skill myself up on post-torsioned concrete and nickel sulphide inclusion very temporarily). It's been sad to hear lazy glib talk of ‘wacky warehouses’, as if we’ve never known what we’re doing. I wonder how many fee-paying schools were built with holey concrete?

The Secretary of State gives the impression of being a practical woman. It is annoying to find yourself at the top of a heap that appears to have let something (literally) fall. It's embarrassing to be caught out venting on a matter that would best be kept between you and the dog. It happened to me – ahem – recently. But honestly? Getting a 95% return on a questionnaire should give you enough to go on. The other 5% might have been places like us, Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schools where you have to escalate any inquiry through Dante’s nine circles of hell before you can fill a form in. Cursing won’t alter the fact that everything in education needs more money and every chicken comes home to roost in the end. They’d better be careful which roof they land on.

Filling further inches with the lucky appearance of the new Chief Inspector of Schools designate, Martyn Oliver: I met him at a dinner last year and he seems a nice chap. He’s going to try to keep his own roost in the north, which is good too. I hope he values the considerable work Ofsted have done on curriculum and doesn’t revert to the easy but damaging single focus on outcomes. Despite considerable experience, I hope he isn’t dogmatic about the way to run a school, a real problem with the last ex-head who held the golden clipboard. No, my problem with Sir Martyn is purely linguistic. It is his claim, at the Select Committee, that he would ‘walk the walk’.

This stuff has been getting on my nerves for a bit.  Leaders are prone to say they ‘walk the talk’, demonstrating that they practice what they preach. Fair enough, but now its amped up to ‘walking the walk’ which doesn’t shed any light. What walk? How far? To where? Why? Does it mean that people have actually done the job that they’re supervising? But leadership isn’t just about solving practical problems. It needs vision, and articulacy.  If you spend your life with your sleeves rolled up, when do you think?

Am I worried or just irascible? Time will tell.

No more time for that as the cricket thing’s re-emerged as a tea-stained press cutting under last year’s School Plan. It seems I was gripped by an article about Bazball which told me about playing test cricket as though losing doesn’t matter much. Cricketers have apparently been encouraged to play as if they enjoyed it, without the fear of failure, remembering that it’s a game and that it ought to be fun. Instigators Stokes and McCullum (whom I wouldn’t know if they presented me with The Ashes) asked players ‘what if you don’t mind about losing, so long as you are playing your own style’. 

I’m not going to make an obvious and worthless point about Ofsted here. Children are too important to allow every school and teacher to do as they please, cheerfully failing them but having a great time.  We have to have a shared and clear vision and some assessment of success against it. But we need to get out from under the fear of failure, and allow everyone in schools to think and to enjoy it a bit more. Is Mazball at Ofsted Towers too much to hope?  

Happily seaworthy, we’ve launched the good ship Tallis cheerily this week. I hope we’ll enjoy the voyage for the next 38. I’ll keep you informed.
 
CR
8.9.23

In the spirit of asperity I’ve adopted so far, I object to showing people something that can only be demonstrated by doing. Our sixth form would call that performatism.
 
Protecting the wellbeing and mental health of staff is:

1. essential for improving morale and productivity
2. critical to recruiting and retaining good staff
3. a legal duty: employers are required by law to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees
4. taken account of as part of Ofsted inspection   

 
How’s that going? Is morale improving? What, precisely, in education is productivity? Student progress? Attendance? None of these are improving, and recruitment and retention is catastrophic. Of course we have to do what the law requires to look after our people, but OFSTED? Here I skid to a halt. That’s why people have signed up to it. It’s certainly why we have.
 
Here’s the wording from OFSTED’s ‘evaluation of leadership and management’. Inspectors will look at the extent to which leaders take into account the workload and well-being of their staff, while also developing and strengthening the quality of the workforce. (para 313)
 
Which might get you the ‘outstanding’ grade descriptor where leaders ensure that highly effective and meaningful engagement takes place with staff at all levels and that issues are identified. When issues are identified, in particular about workload, they are consistently dealt with appropriately and quickly. Staff consistently report high levels of support for well-being issues. (para 416)  
 
I’m not decrying schools’ attempts to make the difficult bearable or even enjoyable. Lord knows we try. But what does it mean? Proper HR, of course, a bit of flexibility when family life bangs on the door, respect in the workplace, evidence that discussion is welcomed, free tea, umbrellas and a decent behaviour policy, a dress code that doesn’t require you to look like an idiot, plans, policies and leadership that explain themselves. Email curfews. Kindness. Wisdom.
 
But all of these should be normal. The only reason they wouldn’t be is if a school was being run madly and badly, by people hooked on robust leadership tropes. It would be good if Ofsted could uncover some of that, as opposed to lauding it, which they used to.         
 
What teachers really need, as well as decent pay that respects their training and professionalism, and their value to society, is time. Time to think, collaborate, learn, plan, keep up with their subject. Time to care. Time to have fun in the classroom. All of that costs money. What I need is funding that allows me to put at least an extra hour of professional thinking time back into teachers’ weeks.  And, if there are really going to be no other services available to children and their families, another hour on top of that to listen and talk to children about their lives.

I need that money now, and I need it on top of the budget I already have. An uplift of about 5% would do it. The last budget settlement just postponed disaster: it didn’t allow any of this.

What really drives teachers, social workers and medics out is moral injury. That’s when the workplace doesn’t match the vocation and good people have to make bad decisions either because they’re told to or because there isn’t the money to do better. When learning is secondary to outcomes, when compliance is substituted for character, when recruitment and training is bungled and cheapened again and again and again: it’s no wonder people leave. 

Don’t ask us how we are. Don’t lodge the system’s failures in the hearts of teachers. Don’t pretend there are cheap alternatives. As far as I’m concerned, teacher wellbeing is all about the money. 
 
CR
23.2.22

If you’ve ever corresponded with me you’ll see I have a long sign-off. This is v fashionable among Heads so I have to keep up. Among other things it tells you what I’m reading, that we are an Arts Mark Platinum school (huzzah!), that I’m a Fellow of the Chartered College and that we try to be ethical in all our dealings. It also says that I’m Co-Director of an outfit called the PTI, which stands for Professional Teaching Institute. You’re bored already, but bear with.

This PTI was set up by the former Prince of Wales twenty years ago and used to be called the Prince’s Teaching Institute. It was a school-led response to an increasing centralisation and prescription of what teachers taught and how, a reaction to concerns that children were only being drilled to pass exams and not being offered real, deep, interesting learning. It's never been a pressure group, but an organisation where teachers work with academics, public thinkers and other teachers to share their love of their subjects and find interesting ways of teaching them.  It's independent of government and funded by charitable donation, by philanthropists. The former Prince of Wales was enthusiastic to play a central part.

I got involved about 15 years ago and my last school was an enthusiastic consumer of the PTI’s courses. Tallis is too and we have a PTI Mark for four subject departments and for Leadership. Some of our subject leaders run sessions for other PTI teachers, and we get all of this, residential weekend conferences too in nice venues, for a very small contribution.  

PTI has a full-time Director and I was asked to become Co-Director in 2019: I’m just starting my fourth year. It means that PTI buy a bit under a day a week of my time from Tallis, for which they refund the school at the right rate. I advise them on what’s afoot in schools, and I can talk with donors and such. And that’s how I met the King, our Royal Patron.

When I say ‘met the King’, I mean I’ve met him four times. We’ve talked and he has expressed his concerns and views. He’s interested in schools and young people – as the long-term success of the excellent Prince’s Trust shows – and in what they can learn. The photo is of me being introduced to for the first time at a dinner (hence my extraordinary outfit).
​
So when the papers say that the King has a real interest in the education and wellbeing of all young people, I can tell you that’s true. I’ve heard it from the man himself. I think that’s a good thing. I’ll invite him to visit!
 
CR
14.9.22

Monday I was talking to a group of arts educators at the Royal Opera House. I told them a few war stories and talked about the need for courage in school leadership, not to be blown about by conformity, government or exam board whims and exigencies, but to be principled and take the long view.

Actually, it was a wonder I spoke at all. While I was waiting to perform I took the radical step of checking my notes, a single page printout of nine slides. Upon reading, I was seized with panic that this was the day when I was finally exposed as having comprehensively lost it. Excellent individual points but joined up randomly, conveying no sense even to me. Struth, what to do? It was a 20-minute ‘provocation’ slot so I could potentially do it slide-less, but incoherent ramblings seemed unnecessarily provoking for an outfit paying Tallis for my services. Taking a last despairing breath I shook myself and looked again, just to discover that the printout was vertical but I’d been reading it horizontally like an idiot. It now made perfect sense. Revival of stout party.

I tell you this as it took me right back to being in exams at school, reading something that I thought I knew but actually didn’t recognise at all. It is absolutely terrifying, and I was filled with admiration for the fortitude of our young people walking calmly into so many exam rooms this last six long weeks rather than screaming in terror and fastening themselves to the banisters, which I very nearly did.

It was a joy, therefore, next morning at Tallis, to chance upon 5 questing chaps who introduced themselves as four astronomers and a Russian speaker in search of exams. I found the room, they thanked me gravely and unflappably and went to face their foe.

Back at the Opera House, I told them about visiting the RA Summer Exhibition last Saturday where himself and I engaged in pointless bickering in the shop afterwards. He concluded with a flourish, declaring ‘your trouble, Carolyn, is that you’re a conformist’. This stung, and despite many witty ripostes in the following week it repeats.

Thursday I found myself gladly introducing and welcoming five visiting academics to the inaugural Tallis Philosophy conference in partnership with the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I said that it was often frustrating to children to discover that what we teach them, especially in exam years, is partial and not the totality of human knowledge on a subject. What about all the other stuff they might be interested in? I found myself saying that schools are essentially conservative institutions and that’s why we need close links with the academy, to keep in touch with what’s new, to keep in touch with professional thinkers.

It's odd to be conservative, liberal and radical at the same time, but that’s what we try to be at Tallis. We fulfil the role of a school (a bit conservative) but we allow a lot of freedoms within that boundary (liberal) and we challenge outdated views as we try to change the world for the better (radical). You need your wits about you to manage all three. Getting your slides in order would be a start.

People are therefore kind enough to give me leadership books from time to time and I’ve been amusing myself by opening a volume on the transferable lessons of commanding a submarine, when I write the staff bulletin every week. This week was about ‘maintaining the tickler’. If you don’t mind me asking, how’s yours?

Returning to the arts, last year someone gave me a beautiful edition of Philip Larkin’s poems. Larkin has been quite in the news, having been excised from exam board OCR’s GCSE Eng Lit specification, so that the assigned poets might be more representative of global writing. The Secretary of State, among others, is furious about this, saying that Larkin was his gateway to poetry and that all children should read him, that to deny him was denying great art to students who might never get it otherwise.  
 
Hmmm. It is the gateway that’s the thing. Teachers always ask themselves: what do we want children to learn and to know? What do we want alongside them as they leave the room? All other arguments notwithstanding, what I want is for children to love poetry and to want to read it, to find within it an expression of their unspoken feelings, fears and worries, hopes and dreams. Therefore, it has to make sense to them at the time. It has to be readable and speak to their condition.

Larkin’s poetry will survive whether or not every sixteen-year-old is forced to read it and, crucially, more of them might seek him out as adults if they’ve been introduced to other poetry that seizes their souls when they’re in school. Teaching poetry at all might be seen as a conservative or radical act by some, but engaging with art in any form should never be about conformity.  We don’t all have to read the same verses, but the verses that open the doors to the child, at that time.  Enabling children to see something of themselves in the curriculum choices we make should help them, to make interesting choices for themselves as adults. We are laying the foundation to build a better world. Or, as the man says, in his first published poem, a different ship:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours ever, CR   

27.3.20    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: 
   

It’s a wet day and a small child is tangled in his mum’s folding umbrella in block 5. I assist and we proceed companionably upstairs, gradually uncovering destination cluelessness. He needs repeater stations to get him from place to place so we set one up with Miss in my office to complement the nice ladies on reception. Miss provides him with a post-it – his second of the day - to help. He sticks this on his jumper to keep it dry while repeating the umbrella experience with a sausage sandwich. 
 
Outside, we are buffeted by elements. A year 9 eccentric advises ‘we should put these clouds in the IER for throwing wet at people’ so we discuss if that would be foggy in a room. ‘No, but there’d be a lot of banging’. What? 

We’ve had trouble with water all week. First we didn’t have enough, then it went a bit cloudy, now it’s falling from the sky. At least the roofs don’t leak. If they did, though, we’d have £50k to spend on it, thanks to the Budget. Tallis is lucky to be watertight, though we pay for the PFI privilege. 
 
As the National Audit Office reckons schools need over £6.5bn just to bring buildings up to standard. The budget announcement was not warmly welcomed by school leaders. Tin-eared was used, also patronising. Demeaning was accurately applied by one Head who wrote:

Ahoy there from the good ship Tallis. The crew are aboard and ready to sail tomorrow: I thought you’d be interested to know which flags we’re hoisting for the 2018-19 voyage?

I can’t actually go any further with this image. I like a nautical vision, but lack the knowledge to back it up. I know there’s a flag combination that says ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instructions immediately’ which is just the kind of thing that Headteachers like. I might have it made into a hat.

How were the results? Sixth form first. We’re pleased with them, and have got a bumper crop into university, art college and onto apprenticeships. Seven into Oxford and Cambridge and 2 into Central St Martins, lots of others on really competitive courses, into sought-after universities and where they wanted to go. We enrolled nearly 280-ish into year 12, which is jolly nice.

GCSE is hard to tell until we get our nationally-determined progress score in September. We hope to improve on last year’s. Some areas did super-well, some improved, some still need to improve, some were hit by misfortune.    We have a plan for all of it. Jane Austen wisely warns that Pride and Prejudice doesn’t give a description of the geography of Derbyshire and similarly this blog doesn’t go into detail about results. Look on our website for more. 

We have 18 new teachers (our total teaching force is about 120) and 22 new support staff and we all know each other now. Some works needed doing over the holidays which were done and some which weren’t done. We hit a PFI-related contractual problem with getting some ICT upgrades to classrooms and we’re sorry about that. I’ll keep you informed. There’s lots of shiny new paint about, some of it on me.

Yesterday we met as a staff and looked at the things we stand for, what we believe and how we try to do them.  Our Leadership Group is one smaller so we explained how the roles are shared out. We remembered that we want our young people to use our habits and be inquisitive, collaborative, persistent, disciplined and imaginative.  We committed ourselves again to our characteristics of being kind, fair, honest, respectful and optimistic. I talked about the work I’ve been doing on ethical leadership and the public service values of selflessness, honesty, openness, objectivity, integrity, accountability and leadership. I committed us to the ethical leadership virtues of trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. And we remembered how to use the data-collection system and met some of the PTFA. Curriculum teams spent time together planning and sorting.

Today we’ve done nuts-and-bolts stuff on classroom practice and expectations and systems, met as year teams, renewed our safeguarding training and looked again at GPDR. We are martyrs to excitement. New staff have tried to work out our frankly peculiar room numbering system and who everyone is. Planner, postcards, posters and lots of other things beginning with other letters have been gathered and squirreled away. Timetables have been printed and reprinted and all the lunchtime staff had first aid training.

Outside, education storms still buffet us all. We don’t have enough money. I did a phone interview for the Jeremy Vine show about mobile phones. Again. There’s a panic in the press about high rates of exclusion and schools’ internal exclusion methods. There’s panic about off-rolling year 11s, high rates of self-harm and London knife crime. Couldn’t we link those things? Schools without money can’t afford support services to help young people cope with themselves. That’s harder for them because all anyone talks about is results, as if that’s all childhood is for.  Shrinking police numbers and disappearing youth and outreach services leave struggling young people to chance and the market forces of the streets. As a nation we don’t care enough about them to spend enough money on them. But we care enough about Brexit, it seems, to spend our all on it.

And meanwhile the biggest injustice goes unaddressed. What do 22% of shadow cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs and Russell Group university Vice-Chancellors, 43% of newspaper columnists, 44% of the Rich List, 50% of the cabinet and the House of Lords, 55% of Whitehall Permanent Secretaries, 67% of Oscar winners, 71% of senior officers in the armed forces and 74% of senior judges have in common? All privately educated. The 7% keeping its stranglehold on the 93%. How do we fix this?

Storm cones hoisted. Time to understand the world, and change it for the better.
 
CR
4.9.18  

A year 9 said to me exasperatedly on Wednesday: what exactly are schools for? It nudged me to presume upon your good will to ask a question about some work I’ve been doing. Would you mind?
 
I’ve spent a bit of time this year chairing a national group called the Ethical Leadership Commission. It’s a set of people from all sorts of groupings in education, including Ofsted. We’ve ben thinking about the fundamentals of school leadership, to see if we could help hard pressed folks to see beyond the daily things-to-do, things-to-worry-about and things-to-try-to-forget-about-for-now lists. We wanted school leaders to think about what schools are for and how they should act. Governors, as well as Heads.   
 
This seemed important not just because I like to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s important because the world has changed quickly in education. Now that different people and different organisations run schools, who is keeping an eye on the purpose of schooling, as well as its outcomes? Tallis is a straightforward case, still a community school run by the local authority. Other schools run themselves, are a part of an academy trust or a larger chain, some are church schools, some ‘Free’. I wonder if this confuses taxpaying citizens?
 
Despite differences in the system, we all have a one crucial thing in common: children. Tiny children, large children, noisy children, silent children, children who love school, aren’t so fussed, like big crowds, prefer to be alone, arty, music-y, scienc-y, mathematic-y, sporty, happy, thoughtful, angry and sanguine children. Parents send children to our schools – all sorts of schools – and trust teachers to do a good job with them. Largely we do. Sometimes there are blips.
 
Parents and society therefore trust us to do two things. First, to be diligent and trustworthy public servants.  Second, to model the behaviour of a good society to children: to show them how to be good citizens. Both of those are huge responsibilities. The first is carried out at work: doing a good job with teaching and results, for example. The second is harder to pin down. We teach character and values, but do parents see that in the way our schools run?   
 
The Ethical Leadership Commission has been working on three things. First, agreeing some key language that school leaders and teachers might use to talk about this. Second, to provide some training materials so that we can all think about this responsibility together. Third, to set up a structure so that there is a space to think about ethics and the pressures that sometimes constrain our decision-making. It’s interesting work, as you can imagine.
 
I’d be interested to know what you think of the draft words. The first seven are based very closely on the Seven Principles for Public Life. If you work in the public sector, you may know them.
 
The Framework for Ethical Educational Leadership
Ethical educational leadership is based upon the Seven Principles for Public Life.

1. Selflessness
Leaders should act solely in the interest of children and young people.

2. Integrity
Leaders must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. Before acting or taking decisions they must declare and resolve openly any perceived conflict of interest and relationships.

3. Objectivity
Leaders must act and take decisions impartially and fairly, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias. Leaders should be dispassionate, exercising judgement and analysis for the good of children and young people.

4. Accountability
Leaders are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.

5. Openness
Leaders should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from scrutiny unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.

6. Honesty
Leaders should be truthful.

7. Leadership
Leaders should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs. Leaders include both those who are paid to lead schools and those who volunteer to govern them.
 
The second set of words try to explain what we think makes up good leadership.
 
Schools and colleges serve children and young people and help them grow into fulfilled and valued citizens. As role models for the young, how we behave as leaders is as important as what we do. Leaders should show leadership through the following personal characteristics or virtues.
 
a. Trust:
Leaders should be trustworthy and reliable. They hold trust on behalf of children and should be beyond reproach. They are honest about their motivations.

b. Wisdom: 
Leaders should use experience, knowledge, insight understanding and good sense to make sound judgements. They should demonstrate restraint and self-awareness, act calmly and rationally, exercising moderation and propriety as they serve their schools wisely.

c. Kindness:
Leaders should demonstrate respect generosity of spirit and good temper. Where unavoidable conflict occurs, difficult messages should be given humanely.

d. Justice:
Leaders should be fair and work for the good of all children from all backgrounds. They should seek to enable all young people to lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives.

e. Service:
Leaders should be conscientious and dutiful. They should demonstrate humility and self-control, supporting the structures and rules which safeguard quality. Their actions should protect high-quality education. 

f. Courage:
Leaders should work courageously in the best interests of children and young people. They protect their safety and their right to a broad, effective and creative education. They hold one another to account courageously. 

g. Optimism:
Leaders should be positive and encouraging. Despite difficulties and pressures they are developing excellent education to change the world for the better.
 
None of us is claiming that we are perfect. All of us know that the responsibility is huge.
 
Are these the right principles? What do you think?
 
headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
 
CR
22.6.18

​There’s a wonderful moment on a sunny June afternoon at about quarter past two. Lunchtimes are over, exams are settled and everyone is posted into their allotted slot. Overheard on the way up to an exam, four boys not previously noted for devotion to study ‘We’re doing all these exams but this place is full of little kids just running about in the sun. They don’t know our stresses, man.’ Anyway, teachers are teaching, students are learning, people are meeting, children are thinking, candidates are writing, technical staff are pottering about and pigeons are doing their pigeon thing.
 
My thing is Radio 4 so it was fun to open the day with a visit from a journalist from The Westminster Hour. He was interested in the way we’ve responded to the London knife crime issue and was recording a piece on our wanding of tutor groups after assembly to check for weapons. As parents know, we decided this was the better way of doing it. Rather than having a big set-piece with knife arches and lots of police outside school we have Mr Brown and Mr Sheedy with a wand each giving a randomly selected tutor group the once over, one at a time. He talked to some of the children and then to the three of us. It was intended to take 15 minutes, but he was with us for another hour once we got started.

We talked, as ever, about safety and keeping everyone calm and happy. We talked about security and the different ways we find out Stuff We Need to Know. We talked about the kind of public spending cuts that means that youth work is disappearing and the Police struggle to respond. We talked about the effect of highly academic curricula on students who need another route into lifelong learning. We talked about the pressures on schools and the cost of student support services and the other things that parents now expect us to do that we don’t get any money for. We talked about schools as model communities and our responsibilities to demonstrate the actions and calm responses of a good citizen.

We also talked about old fashioned teachering. The way that schools build up good relationships with students and families so that everything is do-able and nothing ends up as a big fuss or a stand-off between the fearful and anxious on both sides. He’d seen 300 students walk quietly into the Dojo, half of them with their shoes in their hands and sit listening to a range of announcements followed by a poem. He’d seen us chatting to the chosen form group about the wanding and the sensible discussion we had.

If he’d been in earlier in the week he’d also have seen Sir and Sir so absorbed in the experience that they then set off purposefully through school in just their socks. A third Sir suggested to them that they’d need shoes at some point in the day. Especially as they were wearing four different socks between them.

Cogitating on the days, I’m brooding not so much on all of the above, but another conversation with a visitor. She was with us from A Notable Teacher Training Organisation and had some questions for me. She was bright, keen, open and honest, excited and apprehensive about what she’s taking on. Good for her. But the questions annoyed me and we had to laugh about that: it wasn’t her fault.

For a start, teacher training is teacher training. It’s a worthy and honourable undertaking: why does it have to be called ‘leadership development?’ Doesn’t that undervalue the older folks who’ve been at it for a bit, learned the craft skills and are now actually doing leadership development, rather than the most difficult initial learning of all, how to survive the classroom?

Another question was ‘What are the barriers to raising aspiration’ which almost begs the answer‘My own mediocre leadership and determination to do a bad job’. Yes, we can all do better, but aspiration is a social issue. Poor children, unhappy children, stressed and sad children, hungry children and those whose parents have to work zero-contract, gig-economy jobs to make ends meet and can’t spend any time supporting their school work may find that aspiration comes second to surviving. Poverty and a massive teacher shortage don’t help. Can I reiterate that: a massive teacher shortage? 

Combined with no youth workers and fewer police, what picture does that paint of the way we care for our young in this so-called advanced society? Why are serious, aspirant young professionals being sent out with loaded questions before their bewilderingly quick training? They need an understanding of detailed, thoughtful, long-term solutions, not blame-laden soundbites.
 
I’m a third generation teacher and I’ve been at it for a bit. I’ve seen things change and develop. None of us in the past set out to do a bad job. It’s not just the bright and shiny new intake who’ll want to change children’s lives, it’s all of us. And it has to be government too.  

That’s an old-fashioned teacherly view. It doesn’t mean we’re wrong.   
 
CR 6.6.18

A year 11 solicits my opinion on his burgundy fleece gloves, ridiculed as effeminate by his chums. I agreed this was unjust. Another inquires politely after my health and asks for advice on cough remedies. I’m available for comment on most things, but I generally try to specialise in two areas. For the record, those are knowledge and the curriculum, and ethical leadership. However, if you’d like my opinion on any other aspect of education, literature, life, politics, fashion or domestic poultry I’ll happily give it. I may not be well-informed, but I’m articulate.

I’d been asked for a piece on knowledge for an outfit of whom I was suspicious. I arranged to get up close to the commissioner one dark afternoon before agreeing. I went easy on him as he was so baby-faced he could have passed unnoticed among year 10 without the tweed jacket. He reassured me he was old enough to be out buying coffee for women so we agreed on the article and then he asked me about centralised detention.

My hearing isn’t great in a crowded room. What? I said: do you mean where an Assistant Head gathers all the sluggards who’ve been late for lessons into the canteen at the end of the day and annoys them? Like when a Deputy, steeped in treachery and low cunning, sits with egregious offenders until 16:30 on a Friday? Or a Head of Department gathers homework defaulters on a Tuesday?  Or a Head of Year gets irritants together on Thursday and badgers them for an hour? Yes. It was a bit like being asked how I feel about GCSEs, or assemblies, or lining up for a fire practice. As kindly as I could, I said: I don’t think it’s new. He said, everyone’s talking about it on the blogosphere. I made a cross-eyed face: is that a fact?    

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later the uber-school of the new rigidity advertised for a Director of Detention. Is that all they’re going to do? Someone described it as recruiting an official school bully, but that’s unfair. We all do detentions. Our own good Sheedy could be called Director of Detention, but its only part of his work on engagement and good behaviour. I’m amused by this oldest and unsubtlest of sanctions being gussied up by new schools who are very keen on saying what they DON’T do: they don’t mark books, they don’t do wall displays, they don’t let children talk, but they’re very keen on detention. Surprised they need it. Funny old world.

New schools in a deregulated landscape are on my mind. We’ve been talking to anyone who’ll listen about an aspect of the Progress 8 measure. P8 is a good measure in that it doesn’t present perverse incentives at the C/D borderline which skews schools’ approach to teaching. All grades count equally and the school is judged on its average deviation from the national norm, each year a different dataset. (Actually, all grades don’t count equally until next year, therefore favouring the grammar schools, but that’s a rant for another day). The problem is the disproportionate effect a non-achieving child has on the whole outcome. So, our final grade for 2016 is -0.05 against a national average of -0.03. That includes 8 young people (of a year group of 270) who, for a range of sad reasons, weren’t with us daily by the end of year 11. Without them, it would have been 0.1, quite a different outcome. But we weren’t without them.

So, this year there’ll be consequences of compassion again. We have young people not in school. Some did things that mean that they can’t be in the Tallis community, some are ill, others the victims of atrocious circumstance. All are being educated otherwise, but they remain on our roll until the end because we chose to find them a positive alternative to the oblivion-risk of a permanent exclusion in KS4, or keep trying. Local Authorities do the same.  However, the protocols that bind all schools together where we share the most challenging young people appropriately and fairly are stretched by the proliferation of schools sailing under different flags. Some partner with us closely, others are more distant. They can’t be compelled to take children who’ll endanger their results.
Harbingers of doom said that the academy programme would lead to the abandonment of the vulnerable. As always, the regulator steps in to prevent sharp practice, so the last school the child went to gets his results. We’re proud to be one of those schools, proud to be inclusive and give everyone another chance and we’ve a lot of colleagues whose expertise makes that possible.

The future is troubling. The planned funding formula endangers support services and therefore further endangers children to whom life has already dealt a duff hand. Who’ll care for the children who are harder to love? Who’ll go the extra mile for children who can’t offer much in return? I’ve an opinion on that too.
 
CR
9.2.17

​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

​2. Great teachers – everywhere they’re needed: teacher recruitment is becoming more difficult as the economy grows stronger (see what they did there?) but no mention of the confusion of deregulated routes into teaching. Teachers won’t qualify at the end of the NQT year, but be readied for assessment in their second year. Inspection reform giveth and taketh away in one sentence: OFSTED commit to not changing the handbook or schedule in-year, except when they do.

3. Great leaders running our schools and at the heart of the system: in an academised system where schools will be more locally accountable to academy trusts with whom parents have a direct relationship is followed by it is even more important that parents and governing boards should be able to challenge schools and hold them to account. Parent governors, however, are not necessary to achieve this.

4. A school-led system with every school an academy, empowered pupils, parents and communities and a clearly-defined role for local government: the biggest change for us is spreading excellent practice and ending the two-tier system where all schools will have to be academies by 2022 by which point local authorities will no longer maintain any schools. There it is.

5. Preventing underperformance and helping schools go from good to great: school-led improvement with scaffolding and support where it’s needed. Sounds OK.

6. High expectations and a world-leading curriculum for all: the EBacc is something the vast majority of pupils should study, the core academic curriculum for 90%.  The definition of mastery is helpful: designed to ensure that no pupil’s understanding is left to chance and each step of a lesson is deliberate, purposeful and precise.  

7. Fair, stretching accountability, ambitions for every child: accountability is still a little mealy-mouthed, but progress is the key. The scope of the statutory roles of Director of Children’s Services and Lead Member for Children will be reviewed. There is a description of the role of the Regional Schools Commissioners, appointed by central government.

8. The right resources in the right hands: investing every penny where it can do the most good. The Pupil Premium remains alongside a national funding formula for schools and on top of funding for disadvantaged schools and disadvantaged areas.  There’s a clearish explanation of the proposed system. LA funding methods stay as they are for two years, after that we will shift to a single national formula determining each school’s funding. 

Quick enough? Or this?

"We decided what to do and stripped away funding from any other structure.  We need the market to run the system so we can’t have democratic hindrances.  We don’t care enough about teaching to ensure regulated highly competitive entry to a well-paid profession. We’d like to tell you to teach what we got in our public schools, but Gove ended up an embarrassment so we backed off. We prefer tax cuts to investment, so we hope that you don’t realise that the same amount of money to educate loads more children is actually a reduction.  We’ll happily centralise everything that undermines local involvement, because we don’t trust the people to agree with us."

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

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

I picked up two from a conference in March. You should read Steve Peters’ ‘The Chimp Paradox’ about human behaviour and self-control: it’s an engaging and interesting book from a witty and brilliant man. Or you could read Michael Barber’s ‘How To Run a Government So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy’. I was at the conference with an old friend, a considerable thinker, who wouldn't even stay for the lunch in case he accidentally heard Barber speak. I thought he was so interesting that I bought the book. Call me dim, but I don’t think I'd twigged that it would be all about deliverance, and not in the theological sense.

Barber was Blair’s deliverer. He set and monitored targets so that public services could be improved in a principled, systematic way based on serious and sensible aims to improve everyone's lot. I'm entirely in favour of accountability, targets and planning. You'd imagine I'd enjoy the book.

Barber’s a brilliant man by his own admission, and I don't necessarily object to that. He often has exactly the right question to unblock a problem and the leadership to solve it. He recognises brilliance in others. His examples from world public service and history are diverting. He quotes Ontario and Adonis on making changes for the long run and seeing things through, on irreversibility, so that good change stays put and can't be unpicked. But I read his chapter on leadership with one eye while looking at another announcement about coasting schools with another (and poking myself in both in preference to either).

Deliverology (yes!) should build up our public services and reassure the taxpayer. However, I searched in vain for an analysis of Campbell's Law (the target is skewed by the pressure exerted on it). There was little on perverse incentives. Barber reflects on the success of the literacy strategy but doesn't consider the longer supply-side issue of de-professionalising teachers when they became regurgitators of processed materials. He doesn’t address and didn’t predict the current chaos over the mysterious number of teachers in training (we don't really know how many there are) and the huge issue with headteacher recruitment as football manager syndrome decimates our numbers.

Barber tells the bible story of Joseph to illustrate proper financial planning but the dichotomy between determining to achieve a thing and giving it time to happen remains. And don't tell me that children only have one chance at education. Do you think we don't know that? The Joseph story takes at least 14 years: it’s about violence, loss, reconciliation, faithfulness and joy in the beauty and gifts of a child. It might be about deliverance in the older sense and it’s just not that easy.

I stood in the drama studio on Friday morning and looked at 18-year-old Charlotte personally painted in gold leaf. She took my breath away.  The installation - for A level art, about purity and decay - is as good a piece as you'd see in the galleries of the world, as I told year 9 waiting to go in. Celia, giving out the information, is a writer of similar brilliance. Together they'll change the world. But it is their own determination and the depth of care their teachers have taken, over the years spent with these children and thousands of others that brought this wonderful moment. Deliverology stops you squandering public money, but it doesn't bring you a golden girl.

What am I reading? Barber and the Old Testament, Charlotte and Celia.

CR 20.5.15

Hippocrates goes on to swear fidelity to his master, his master’s children, his pupils and their claim on his skills and knowledge. He wants medical knowledge protected, which is wise (we wouldn‘t want anyone having a go at removing gallstones, or diagnosing chickenpox). He talks about healing the sick, the importance of diet, not causing hurt or damage, not poisoning anyone and behaving well.  He’ll leave surgery to the surgeons, make himself useful in any house, tell the truth, refrain ‘from acts of an amorous nature’ and keep secrets.

We could easily swear something similar.  We’d remember our own teachers, from the inspirational to the inept. We’d swear to keep up the tricks of our trade: how to teach trigonometry to the reluctant and science to children who we’d hardly trust with a spoon. We’d value how to learn and remember things, the importance of eating well, not teaching children lies, or hitting them, and trying to keep calm. We’ll leave surgery to the surgeons (I think that’s probably a universal principle), make ourselves useful in any classroom and yard, report accurately, refrain from any untoward behaviour and only keep the secrets that need to be kept.

The importance of the oath emerges slowly, like sixth formers loping to lunch. For all its antiquity, it is familiar to us. It forms the basis of what we expect from doctors. It makes us feel that they are people of honourable and righteous purpose, that we are safe in their hands. It echoes some current principles: safeguarding, accountability, healthy eating and the end of corporal punishment. It’s helped us form the modern world. 

So I try to poke fun but I’m not opposed to Hunt’s hope. In fact, I’d like to have a go at drafting it.  I think that there’s work to be done on explaining the purpose of education, schools and teachers to the taxpayer. I wrote last year about the principles that I think underlie public education, of powerful knowledge and exciting teaching, social justice and fair opportunities. In a post-Hippocratic world where we can’t swear to serve the families of our masters we need principles and ethics to liberate trust and effectiveness. Children need that too. They need to know that shoving each other in the corridor will attract the same opprobrium no matter who stops it, and that we will all do our best to teach them to become non-shovers. Even if we don’t know each other well, we can rely on each other’s motives.

Let me share something. We have codes for staff too at Tallis, beginning with the senior team. Part of our code is this school-ish version of the Nolan Principles for Public Life. So, we value 

• Selflessness – acting for the greater good, not for our own power or status
• Honesty – reflecting issues as they are and being honest with each other
• Openness – explaining our actions and responding to criticism, not just demanding compliance
• Integrity – doing what is right to build up a solid and reliable education system
• Objectivity – making decisions on merit, not because they make life easier
• Accountability – taking responsibility for our actions, as public servants
• Leadership – acting according to these principles and enabling others to do so too

We hope that we keep this promise to the children we serve, to the utmost of our power and judgment. As Hippocrates said,  

If I faithfully observe this oath, may I thrive and prosper in my fortune and profession, and live in the estimation of posterity; or on breach thereof, may the reverse be my fate. 

Quite so, and if we can’t do it then the children can’t trust us and they don’t prosper either. I think it’s an oath worth commissioning.

CR 23.10.14