Category: Learning

Catastrophic Equilibrium

17/11/2022

I’m starting to write this before the Autumn Statement, as we may not be able to afford to type afterwards.

A month or so ago I berthed alongside one of the movers and shakers of the pre-Coalition education world. We lamented the present and made helpful suggestions for the future. Unfortunately, none of the recent Secretaries of State for Education were within earshot, but the retro-Scandi décor very much appreciated our wisdom, I felt. At one point he asked ‘Do your teachers call each other Sir and Miss’? I knew what he was driving at.

We weren’t talking about the semi-formal way a pair of teachers might refer to one another while talking to children – as in ‘Sir told you not to reproduce the Rokeby Venus on the corridor wall, didn’t he?’ to which Sir might respond, in serious tones, ‘Indeed I did, Miss, and I checked he understood that Spanish Golden Age is next term, not this.’ I’m talking about conversations without children, but where the child-facing persona seeps into ordinary professional conversations. ‘Did you bring the year 11 predictions, Ms, and what are you going to do about them?’ ‘I did, Sir, and have many innovative plans’.

It's quicker than names, of course. School life is brisk and I can see that Mr Fotherington-Thomas talking to Ms Potter-Pirbright might take up more time than anyone has left, but they could be Clive and Gert behind closed doors without frightening the horses. What my interlocutor sought was further evidence of the creeping infantilisation of teachers. He had a hunch that leaders insist on teachers calling each other Sir and Miss as part of a focus on ‘professionalism’ which is anything but.

I wrote a piece for the trade press last week in which I discussed this in a slightly less abstruse way. I won’t rehearse it here, but it was about government support for a particular brand of online learning, whether that meant that online learning was being proposed as a solution to the crippling national teacher shortage, and whether that meant that teachers as a species of skilled scholars with a deep intellectual hinterland is further endangered. Will cheap and easy solutions lead to cheapened education planning? Autumn statement notwithstanding, the answer mustn’t be yes.

Anyway, as the gods of Blackheath Hill decreed that my driving needed attention, I found myself on a Speed Awareness Course. I must say that it was excellent, especially when the facilitator led the ten of us to a point of action-planning our new lives as safer drivers. He didn’t quite call it that, but he forced (enabled) us to tackle our habits thuswise:

This is the problem…..
It might be caused by….
I could fix it by…..
Why might that not work?.....
To help my plan I will…..

Isn’t that fabulously clear? Google offers me a 46-page guide to action planning that the NHS uses, even my own goes on a bit, but any decent plan covers the same ground. So, if we apply this to the matter in hand:

The problem is that we don’t have enough teachers
This might be caused by low salaries compared to other postgraduate professionals and an unreasonable expectation to solve all the nation’s ills all day every day
We could fix it by funding education better so that we train teachers properly and give Clive and Gertie time to think and refresh their training, as professionals do
Why might that not work? Because we hold children in little value in the UK. We refuse to fund the education system properly so everything we do, we do cheaply. This treats Sir and Miss like children or expendable units, so they leave.
To help the plan we should fund the education system in a way that treats teachers as part of the solution rather than the problem, attracts and retains high-quality teachers, supports and develops our young people and builds up the nation’s life. My shaker and I don’t think this is unreasonable.

I note as I finish that, according to the BBC, J Hunt has pledged £2.3bn, for education. I’m not sure that’s a big number and I don’t know how much of it has already been announced or promised. More on this next time.

Hunt’s done whatever he’s done as part of a government running a country in what Gramsci called a state of catastrophic equilibrium, where everything is simultaneously failing and stable, where things can’t carry on but nevertheless must, year after year. That’s where we are in schools. He needs to have done enough to tip the balance back towards equilibrium from collapse, but it needs more than that to educate a people, to save the future.

CR
17.11.22

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Thinking Allowed

2/3/2022

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Oh give me a break. Buffeted by Cornish winds, I’m warned to be politically impartial and then there’s a war. Given that all sides of the House agree that this is a result of unprecedented aggression etc, am I allowed to talk about peace? What is balance, this week? Do I just teach one side? Please don’t answer. I’m sure it’ll get us into trouble somehow.

When the western political situation took a turn for the worse with the previous inhabitant of the White House and depressing shenanigans this side of the pond, I decamped from Radio 4 to 3 avoid it all. This time, I’m taking refuge in the Thinking with Pinker podcasts, a short course in cogitational improvement. One episode is called ‘You Can’t Say That’ and it’s on ‘taboos, heresies and counterfactuals’. I’m swum in the seas of religion all my life so I know a bit about these. I like to think that makes me reasonably sharp at spotting myth, sentiment, falsehood and claims of destiny. Before you get cross, Pinker isn’t talking about the language of racism and misogyny: rudeness and oppression are always wrong. He’s talking about the ruts of acceptable thought in which we stick ourselves.

We love this in education. We’re counterintuitively keen on confining thought and easily attached to totems. Exams, for instance. Rather than looking at the current circumstance as a chance radically to reform the whole outlandish structure, we’re swimming frantically back through the shark-infested waters of memory testing and cheap proxies to replant our flag in the Land of the Forgotten Third. And we delude ourselves and yes, I have an example, a sub-heading on the BBC Family and Education page asking ‘How will my exams be different this year?’.
This makes no sense. For a start, a child wouldn’t ask it. Barely a one sitting public examination this year will have ever taken one before. Year 13 didn’t do GCSEs. They have no idea what’s different, or similar. The question actually being asked, by anxious adults, is ‘are exams children take this year worth anything to the elitist calibration mindset we’re trapped in?’. If it was a child asking, the question would be ‘What’s happening and what do I need to do? Will I need a pen?’

I’m not opposed to exams. It's reasonable to measure learning, not least to assess current aptitude for choices at 18. It’s also perfectly legitimate for the state to want to measure its system. But we could do so much better. My counterfactual would run: ‘If we already knew that exams were a flawed way of measuring children’s learning, we would have seized the opportunity of the pandemic to ……’ Why can’t we think about that? If not now, when?

Children, however, can turn their minds to other things. Wandering about to spy on the choices Deputy Head candidates made at break I chanced upon the conversion of a bench seat to a table tennis table, requiring the game to be played inelegantly at the stoop, then the peer-review of an engineering prototype. This latter was a small boy whose friend claimed he’d made a device to extract apple juice from apples. I thought it needed further development, myself. Squeezing the air out of one of those tiny soy sauce bottles and trying to jam it into the side of a Gala didn’t appear to be extracting a marketable product, and at least one of the potential investors thought it was disgusting, but a refined model may have legs? Or show signs of being remotely able to work.

Year 8 have been thinking about what they can do to help children in Ukraine. They settled on a sort-of sponsored walk (steps in tutor time) for War Child. This seems like a sensible way of expressing concern and fits with one of our repeated sayings, on every Christmas Card since 2014, Eglantyne Jebb’s ‘all wars are wars against children.'

Good for them. Meanwhile, in peace time, we were trying desperately to track down some Food Bank vouchers.
But by the time you read this we’ll have appointed a new Deputy Head and that’s always exciting. Deputies forecast, control and make the weather in school and good ones are beyond rubies. Lots of people have been involved: students, teachers, classes, year groups, support staff and governors over a two-day grilling process. I did this twenty-five years ago. I didn’t get the first one I applied for, largely because I couldn’t express a thought about the curriculum. I got the second one and it changed my family’s life. It’s a great job in the right school.

I have put some time into thinking about the curriculum since then, despite national lurching from one set of ossified prescriptions to another ever since. We think a lot at Tallis, and we try to teach the children that an unexamined life is perhaps less rewarding than one where you create informed choices. As a colleague said at the end of term, we try to link our epistemology to our ethos here, which is great if you can remember what epistemology means. As we say to the children – we know we’re learning when we’re thinking very hard – but within the bounds of kindness and respect, the blessed exam specifications and the impartiality rules, we can think what we like. Impartiality is the child of considered thought

CR
2.3.22

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Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

29/6/2020

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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

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Listen with mother

9/6/2018

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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

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Very Tallisy

1/7/2017

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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

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Better in Madrid

29/3/2015

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Warren de la Rue, Total solar eclipse of 1860 in Spain

We didn’t see the eclipse, but Tallis youth described it on Sky News and the radio. Science large and small went and stood on the MUGA and were careful with their eyes, but as the whole of SE3 was shrouded in dense cloud, all we got was a sense of teatime in the morning. A year 11 said ‘It looks better in Madrid’, but that would be so for any March day in an English yard.

The spring conference season brings light and fog to educators. First there was the Greenwich Heads’ Annual get together, then the ASCL conference last weekend (the Association of School and College Leaders, since you ask). This latter outfit’s gig is the stadium rock of our world: 1200 delegates, big name speakers, all the politicians. 9 till 6 then dinner and dancing. Your correspondent hasn’t actually done the dancing since 1998, but I believe that the younger generation still manage it: dancing deputies, a sight to be seen.

ASCL made a proposal this year alongside our usual calm campaigning on funding. In order to protect our children’s interests, what about an Independent Commission on the Curriculum made up of teachers, governors, employers, parents and politicians to review the core curriculum once every five years. That way, we put up a shield between children’s learning and the need for Secretaries of State to make their mark (not literally, though the help would be welcome) on children’s exercise books.

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

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Bring in the May

18/5/2014

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Leonid Pasternak, The Night before the Examination, 1895

How do you feel about May, generally? Bit dull, weather unpredictable? Hard to know if you should wear a vest or not? Not for schools. Once you’ve got through April with a balanced budget and you no longer need to remember when Easter’s happening you’re faced with the mother of all months in the school year. Why May?

Exams, mainly. The years of preparation skid to a halt and the hall is full of exam desks and fearsomely specific, slightly surreal exhortations. ‘Do not be in possession of a mobile phone anywhere near this notice’. ‘Do not conceal pencils in a bag you can’t see through’. ‘Have you got your own angle measurer?’ You potter down to assembly to find an empty room with 100 neatly spaced folding tables woodenly indifferent to your uplifting story. You retreat feeling that the autopilot is a bit foolish and find your way impeded by 200 irritable and panicking teenagers waiting to go into the Sports Hall. You shush them helpfully, the cacophony stops at the door and within minutes all is silent as the tomb, and not a lot warmer (to keep them alert, and because it’s May).

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

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Everything in between

4/5/2014

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Michael Kidner, Circle after Image 1959-60

Have you seen our field of jeans? Do potter along if you haven’t. The jeans on poles at the front of our building are part of a brilliant experimental programme called Catalytic Clothing. It’s the brainchild of artist designer Helen Storey and chemist Tony Ryan – people from different worlds in a highly successful art and science collaboration. They’re working with the R&D departments of big laundry brands, exploring how clothing and textiles can be used as a catalytic surface to purify air. Saving the planet while you wander about. Yet another practical use for teenagers.

So we’ve got the Field of Jeans as part of our Catalytic Learning programme. We love the idea of an artist and a scientist working together for public benefit, and we’ve had cross-curricular days, staff and students, to expand our thinking. Look at it on the website: such fun! Our last day was just before Easter, but the tragedy of contemporary education is that young people have become so focused on exams that many of them were troubled about having an off-timetable day to explore new ideas. ‘Is it on the exam?’ they demand. ‘If not, why do it?’ So we work hard to demonstrate that it’s the things in between the exam questions that matter too.

It was at this point in composition that I looked at the clock on Tuesday. It was 12:05, and I bethought myself that (a) OFSTED were due sometime after Easter, (b) they always ring immediately after 12:00 and (c) is that the phone? Time has behaved oddly since then and the last 54 hours seems like (a) weeks or (b) seconds. Thank you, but I can’t tell you how it went. Rules are rules.

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

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Cicero's Gift

2/3/2014

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

Vincenzo Foppa, The Young Cicero Reading, c.1464

The September teacher recruitment season is underway and Heads are competing in the trade papers for the prize of Most Risible Claim Made for the Greater Good. Schools are not merely outstanding but exceptional, innovative or (suddenly) traditional; scrubbed and comely children grin to order from photographs artily taken in gorgeous new buildings and tidy sixth-formers pose with dapper Head Teachers under the loveliest of trees. Inspection reports are filleted and dramatic assertions made about career progression. Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher?

I know about recruitment. I’ve been interviewed in schools where I’ve been stuffed with rich foods and allowed to wander freely, or where we got a jug of water and couldn’t go to the loo without a minder; in town halls or over the phone miles away from the school; after journeys of hundreds of miles or 50 yards from my own classroom; with panels clued up and challenging or sleepy and tetchy.

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.

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

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Catastrophic Equilibrium

Thinking Allowed

Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

Listen with mother

Very Tallisy

Better in Madrid

Bring in the May

Everything in between

Cicero's Gift

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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