Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Part 1: Thursday 25 June
You were spotted in SW1 earlier this week and the fieldman’s report (I’m reading Le Carré) classified you as ‘preoccupied’. I’m not surprised. I feared for your state of mind before the current shenanigans began and I can’t imagine what it’s like navigating the corridors of power with your colleagues. Seeing them on the telly requires nerves of steel.

Unlike watching us! Tallis was on the box on Monday. BBC London came and filmed a newly-regathered half A-level Psychology class, interviewed Mr Smith, four thoughtful youths and me. They said that being back helped focus their minds: I said that having no children was scrambling mine but that the 2m rule would need to be gone – and all the bubble talk – before we could reassemble.

So we plugged the gogglebox in the dining room in on Tuesday lunchtime to watch the PM forecast the future. Social distancing meant those at the reception end needed binoculars, but never mind, I had a front seat. Good news: everyone back to school in September! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear and I tried to encourage moderate cheering. Some HTs are worried about the detail, but I’m sure you have it all under control. In fact, my pavement artist (Le Carré again) said it looked as though it was all in your bag.   
 
Perhaps one of those bright young things who nip around ministers fore and aft could sort it out a bit for you, though? Headteachers are fussy and we like things to be clear. It would be great to see which rules we have to follow in school, which are optional, which just occurred to a front-bencher while they were cleaning their teeth, which have been abandoned, which denied and which are ideas being road-tested before becoming policy which may never be heard of again. My primary colleagues, blessings on their tiny furniture, were certainly shocked this week to be told that 2m in school had never been a rule for them. Are you sure? 

And what about this rumour afloat that the exams might be pushed back a few weeks next year to maximise teaching time. That’s partially a good idea – but oh my, wouldn’t it have been better to test it out below decks before musing from the bridge? Now everyone’s asking about it and no one has the foggiest.

And without wishing to reopen a wound, since The Drive To Barnard Castle the whole cabinet’s seaworthiness is questionable, like a teacher who lost control of a class in October but has to survive until July. Was he worth it?    

Mr Williamson, I’ve been thinking about exams too, nursing a fond hope that the experience of this year might usher in a better future. Why have GCSEs at all?  Why not base the 16-year-olds’ passport on teacher assessment, moderated in the way this year’s will be, properly evaluated and monitored by nerdy subject-based inspectors who really know their stuff? That’s who Her Majesty’s Inspectors were before Ofsted was invented. Wouldn’t it be great to liberate learning by dispensing with GCSE? Wouldn’t it be great if year 11 marked their transition without the examination hall as the rite of passage? Remember, it only remotely works for two thirds of them.

Like the hapless October teacher we’re not very good at some kinds of learning so we end up having to keep promising the same changes time and again. I took two years out of teaching before I had my children and worked as a Community Relations Officer in the midlands. The 80s were a time of disturbance in Birmingham and London which resulted in a significant amount of Home Office funding for projects to tackle the racism and social exclusion. Most of the focus was on anti-racism training for individuals, but we understood about institutionalised racism and encouraged institutions to scrutinise their processes to combat it. Fifteen years later there was the McPherson Report. Now, twenty years after that, ten years after the Public Sector Equality Duty, where are we, exactly? And how can any government mired in the Windrush depatriations and the Hostile Environment be believed?

I saw a photo in the paper of a novel idea in a Chinese school to keep small-ish children apart. They had very serious expressions for persons in purple paper wings but it just goes to show that children will accept anything as normal if an adult tells them so. Children will believe a lie if someone they trust tells it. That’s why we have to tell them the truth and that’s why we can’t keep fobbing them off with change tomorrow.

Education, equality and justice are really hard to get right. Your Shadow has fallen today. You’re picking your way, Mr Williamson, through very difficult circumstances and you don’t look very steady on your own feet. Tell us the truth, talk to us and trust us and we can rebuild something righteous and grand, together.

Yours, at some distance.
 
Carolyn Roberts
26.6.20 

​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

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 

Mrs Morgan is underwhelmed: ‘what our children learn in school should be determined by our democratically elected representatives’.  

I used to agree with this because I’m all for democracy, but I’m done with it now. Politicians have an eye on the electorate, the press and their legacies (3 eyes in total). They know precious little about children and less of pedagogy or epistemology. Few of the current cabinet went to state schools and the current enthusiasm for the excellent Greycoat Hospital does not make them curriculum thinkers. Even the CBI despairs, begging for schools to be allowed to offer the rounded and grounded curriculum that their members crave. I strive to be apolitical but here’s what Roberts thinks: stack the commission if you will, fill every position from Chair to tea-boy with political placemen but give us a break.  One mega idea (diplomas, EBacc, grit, phonics, Mockingbird) every five years will still get you into the history books but it might mean that a child has only two major upheavals in his school life, three if she’s unlucky. Leave us alone, to think, to plan, to teach. Struth. Commission the thing, would you?

A smaller national conference happened in terrific Tallis last week. We shared a love of expansive education, helping young people think and make links with the world. Two delegates nearly didn’t make it at all because their train went the wrong way out of London Bridge and, in the manner of a Secretary of State, without planning, warning, apology or support, deposited them in Hither Green. Isn’t it the whole point of trains that they don’t get lost? However, our people are teachers and despite all provocation got back on track and arrived on time.

As did the hundreds of young people from other schools we interviewed for our sixth form, the parents who came to find out about revision and the friends who joined the PTA’s Wine and Chocolate evening. We did it wearing lurid socks for Down Syndrome, eating cakes for Ecuador, setting off to Zaragoza or Santander or the history trip or Snowdon or the Maths Feast. We did it winning the year 8 London Sportshall Athletics finals or at the Fashion Show Abstract Couture. We did it because you can trust us to teach our hearts out, if you just let us.

I told them all this in a recent speaking tour of Germany. I describe it thus because saying ‘some nice German English teachers were kind to me in Leipzig and Duisburg’ doesn’t sound quite so grand. I talked to teachers brought together by Klett publishers who use Tallis and Greenwich as a way to learn English. They were interested in our pastoral work and outraged by interference in the guise of accountability. The teachers wanted to know about the triumphs of multiculturalism and goggled at photos of our building and laughed with our Good Morning video. 100 German 12 year olds shared their excitement with us this week: we love this link.  

The Germans know a thing or two about politics and the curriculum. Perhaps that Commission isn’t such a bad idea.            

CR

23.3.15

We can’t have a quick look at the exam paper and then wander off any more, nor are we trapped in there counting bricks and trying to stay awake. We have to lurk outside at the end, interrogate survivors as they gasp for breath, then have a gander once it’s over. Is it better that the class you’ve nurtured thought the paper really easy or really quite hard? Do you want to know how they answered that question? You shudder as one says ‘Oh is that what it meant?’ You think the paper’s fair, and you know a bit about these things, but it’s an early exam and they might not have got into the hang of it. It’s only May.

The door opens and it’s another inspector, this time from the exam boards. He checks the rooms, the distance between the tables, the notices, the children who qualify for help, the safe, the locks, the rooms and for all I know the average height, weight and age of the invigilators. Lists are checked, boxes ticked, verdicts given. All’s well. They always come early, in May.               

So some of our number are in exams, some on study leave, some not being given study leave because they can’t be trusted not to spend it staring into space, some in revision classes and most still chugging through week 31 or so of the year. How much more information can be stuffed into each ear? Not much, it’s already MAY. 

If that was it, we’d just about cope. Two year groups will soon go and we’ll have time to reflect and plan. Except we can’t: the transfer window is about to close, because it’s May.

Teachers have to resign by set dates in the school year. If you’re intending to change school in September you need to resign by 31st May, but that’s usually in half term, so the real resignation date is nearer the middle. That means that if a school has a vacancy now, and wants to fill it with a serving teacher, the clock’s ticking, my friend. The advert goes in the TES, you cut the usual two weeks down to 10 days for applications, you plan the interview day, gather a panel, shortlist, re-shortlist because one of them’s got a job somewhere else, speed up everything so you don’t lose any more, interview, check references, appoint and then tell the timetabler what he’s got to work with for September. Being a mathematician he’s pretty phlegmatic and much too kind to mutter: ‘Couldn’t you have got your act together sooner?  Didn’t you realise it was May’.

There is a land of lost content on the other side of half term as we enter the long final half term of the year. That’s when we get a good long stretch of teaching, meet our new little ones, start year 12 into year 13 with visits to university open days, reflect and plan. The pace doesn’t slow down, but the exam die is well and truly cast.  We’ll get to the middle of July, take a deep breath until the results in August and then start it all again. In school there’s no time at all from May to September.

CR

14.5.14

Anyway, I have had cause to consider the measuring of what we do. Is it reasonable to measure the progress of children and schools?  Yes. Is it reasonable to investigate whether that achievement, behaviour, teaching and leadership are up to scratch? Yes. Does this damage schools?  Probably not: the new schedule, as we winsomely call it, is much more sensible than it has ever been before. Does it give a full picture? Maybe not. As Dougal once said to Father Ted about bishops ‘Ah Ted, they just come in, fumigate the place and then they’re gone.’

Children are both oblivious to and troubled by OFSTED. Generally speaking, adult concerns are tedious and while they are nosey about what’s going on, they get back to the dramas of their own existence sharpish. Suits and clipboards are not crowd-pullers. They’re more likely to be outraged by the sheer impertinence of inspection – who are these people?  What do you mean, they’re seeing if the school’s alright? Of course it is. Young people see themselves as arbiters of quality: who are these amateurs?

One inspector had had a conversation with a couple of young people over a bin. The responses were thoughtful and interesting, one pictures chin-stroking. I think that’s a good way to find out about a school, but the child was unimpressed ‘He talked to me over a bin.  Seriously?’ Another small member was perturbed by the whole experience. Tuesday break he asked me if they’d arrived, and at lunchtime how long they were staying.  When we reconvened Wednesday break he shook his head in disbelief that they were still among us. ‘How long can this go on?’ he despaired. He’d have hated it when they stayed for a week.

But after it was over school life picked up again as if the previous 54 hours hadn’t happened. Last week’s dance showcase had fully 29 acts and the time flew, like the dancers. Despite the suits we had a street hockey launch day with remarkably few bruises. 30 Norwegians came to maths. New teachers have been interviewed and appointed for this expanding school: 4 this week, despite OFSTED. Outdoor ping pong proves popular. Photography and art exams happen.  

Last night, immediately post inspection, our A level creative writing students performed work from their residential week, to a packed studio audience. Their poetry and prose was witty, poised, serious and a balm to the soul. The anthology is called Everything In between, an apt title for the week. We’ve been scrutinised and picked over, our practice laid bare under 4 inspection headings but it’s everything in between that makes us what we are and who we are: Tallis happy, Tallis proud.

CR 2.5.14    

Cicero said: ‘What greater and better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and to instruct our young?’

 I kid myself that we make recruitment reasonably humane.  If candidates can only persuade us that they have a glittering eye and a brilliant mind, combine the gutsiness of Julie Walters and the steel of Daniel Craig, that they won’t vanish without trace in the first term or deflate under pressure in the first year, the job’s theirs.  Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

If you’ve got a good degree and you want to be a maths or science teacher there are bursaries up to £25k.  Our schools are good and the work rewarding  - but there were 81 September science posts advertised in a single week for schools in London alone. The people I work with are a pleasant and urbane bunch, educated, effective and Oscar-quality actors every one. They can hold a crowd in the palm of the hand and make it look effortless.  Our science department are particularly chirpy. So why are science teachers hard to find?  Is it that scientists (unlike historians or artists?) all get better paid work elsewhere?  Or that no-one short of a hedge fund can live in London?    Or does a combination of Educating Essex, Yorkshire or Waterloo Road by Tough Young Teachers just make the job look too damn scary?  Who’d want to be that teacher?

It’s not too much to say that we have a national crisis of understanding about teaching.  Teachers are too diffident about why we do what we do, and politicians use us shamelessly. Nationally, we don’t care enough about young people to be idealistic and articulate about the formation of our young.  The best education systems in the world really value education and teaching. Training posts are extremely competitive and involve postgraduate theoretical pedagogy as an essential adjunct to excellent subject knowledge.  PISA winners don’t scorn education’s thinkers as The Enemy Within and they keep politics out of our children’s futures.  Most of all, they don’t denigrate teachers in public discourse with fatuous misquotings: ‘those who can, do…’ 

So this recruitment season let’s talk up Cicero’s gift, starting with these 10 things.

1. Children and young people deserve the best a nation can give them
2. Knowledge is worthwhile in itself and teachers share it on behalf of society
3. Children need teachers so they may understand and change the world
4. Powerful knowledge liberates children from their daily experience
5. Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens 
6. Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy
7. It is fair and just that all children should have access to transforming education
8. The teacher’s authority to do this is given and valued by society
9. Society trusts teachers to model our shared values
10. We need the best possible teachers to achieve all this for all our children.

If you’re not already a teacher, why not think about becoming one?  Look at the Department for Education’s website and the range of routes you can take, not all of which involve penury. Ask if you can shadow a teacher in a school you know, or come to us.  Come and talk to some young people.  They’ll blow your socks off. 

If you like the sound of any of this you know where to find me. We’ll have very few vacancies this year, but we can help you look.  Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

CR

26.2.14