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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Step Inside

20/1/2023

1 Comment

 
Picture
I was at a meeting with civilians where the teachers’ strikes announcement generated tutting and eye-rolling. Intervening would have prolonged an event form which I needed to scuttle at the end, so I kept my peace. Or I think I did. Who knows what the body language or the studious avoidance of eye contact may have conveyed? It did make me think, however, about how to explain the action, so I thought I’d experiment on you, dear readers.

Today brought another meeting where we chewed it over, a professionals’ gathering where the image of the Front Door is often conjured, so I thought I’d press this rather exhausted metaphor into service.

Schools, like other services, are sometimes called the Front Door because that’s the place you go, the one-stop-shop, if you’re lucky, to get the support and the entitlement the state has decreed, devised and funded. The GP surgery is the front door of the NHS, the desk sergeant is literally at the front door of policing and the school is the front door to education. Our Tallis front door is rather nice, approached under a canopy with brightly decorated pillars and sometime festooned with flags for whatever we’re celebrating. We hope this is a welcoming place, where our warm friends behind the desk will try to meet your every need. 

The school is the front door to the belief in and investment of the state in the future of our young. It is the place where accepted and verified knowledge is taught and the community where acceptable social norms are transmitted. With luck, it’s also a place where a good experience of growing-up may be gathered and from where a happy adult life may be approached. That’s quite a lot for one building, let alone one door, to represent.

It is reasonable, therefore, for the tax-payer to expect that, once the door is broached, the service behind it will be top-notch. In the case of a school, that should be everything that the good parent would want for the child, in loco parentis. It’s a contract made between education, the state and the population. We will take your money and your dreams and use them wisely and well. We will look after your children as well as you could possibly want, and do our very best for them. This compact is the foundation stone of our system. We fail in our duty if, once the shiny front door is opened, the education and the experience behind it is patched together, fragile and unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. It's no way to run a health service and its no way to run a school.

So teachers are striking because they have run out of other options to bring the parlous state of our service to the nation’s young to government’s attention. They are not just striking about pay, though that is a huge part of the problem. Poor pay for a highly trained and skilled graduate profession working in high-pressure settings means that fewer and fewer people want to do the job. Even a recession, historically the teacher workforce’s friend, hasn’t worked this time. The workload and remuneration are so out of kilter with other career options that no one wants to be a teacher. Under 60% of secondary recruitment targets have been met this year in most subjects, again, in a ninth out of ten years of missed targets. Only the first lockdown brought an upsurge in interest in teaching as a career, and that quickly failed.

And last year’s pay rise, announced in the last week of term without funding to pay it? It nearly broke us all.

Workload and burnout are significant pressures of the job. Each is inextricably linked to funding, and this is the root of the strike action. Because there aren’t enough teachers, the teachers we do have have to shoulder more of the burden. If, for example, and this is not the case at Tallis, a school can’t get maths teachers and so must rely on graduates in other disciplines to teach maths, that’s a triangle of problems (maths teachers love triangles). The French or PE or whatever teacher will find the teaching stressful, the Head of Maths will find the constant setting-of-work for a potentially floundering colleague exhausting and the children will inhabit the teacher’s anxiety, every single lesson. Behaviour will be scratchy, outcomes poor and enjoyment absent. The teachers’ strikes aren’t just about pay, they’re about recruitment and retention, SEND promises made that can’t be kept, unpalatable choices made to keep or scrap curriculum areas or behaviour support, no educational psychologists or speech therapists and six-month waiting lists for mental health services for desperate teenagers. 

They’re also about better funding and a way out of crisis management and the constant attrition of the things the reasonable citizen believes we have promised and expects us to do well. It’s a crisis a dozen years in the making.

But last night was Year 7 parents’ evening, the contract in motion. I perched as ever near the front door (in many jumpers and then my coat), ready to chat helpfully and absorb complaints. I heard about a child who’s lost four jumpers so far (we’ll provide a stock of pre-loved garb) and another who’s only lost his Spanish book (we have spares). But most of all, I heard compliments and thanks from parents who trusted us with their beloved, who decided that we meant what we said about a broad curriculum and an inclusive vibe and are grateful and happy for what we’re doing. They were glad they’d found our door.

Given the prevailing gloom of the foregoing, it was a lovely experience. I just hope that we can find the funding to keep it all going, and to keep our promises. Our door is always open.
 
CR
19.1.23
1 Comment

Rainbows and other symbols

7/5/2020

1 Comment

 
I don’t object to a rainbow. There’s a rainbow flag in the pen-pot on my desk that I crossed a rainbow zebra to get from Harvey Milk’s camera shop in the Castro in San Francisco. Our rainbow zebras in London remind us to be kind and fair while they brighten up the streets. Desmond Tutu gave Nelson Mandela ‘rainbow nation’, a vision of peace and hope. There are rainbow lanyards at Tallis. The current rainbows are cheerful and help us share a feeling. It’s nice to see them from my bike as I pass speedily along bus-free bus lanes. Can you feel a ‘but’ coming on?

I spent a lot of time in church in my youth and sometimes had to memorise bible texts including, as a small child, the end of the Noah story. In this the rainbow appears as the covenant between creator and people following the promise that – as I remember it - while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. This troubled me. I’d been shocked by TV pictures of Biafra and it seemed to me that seedtime and harvest were particularly unreliable in some places. The question is still indelible and unanswered in my head: what sort of promise was this?  

Well, rainbows are about hope, both in the present and the future. A rainbow says, ‘there’s a problem here which we can solve with goodwill on all sides.’ So, given the scale of the current problem, how do rainbows help? 

It's good to show solidarity with fellow public-servants working very hard to mitigate our problem. Thursday night pan-banging does the same. But forgive me for saying that neither rainbows nor pans solve the pandemic nor should they be used to distract our attention from sober analysis of its lessons. I can’t watch the news at the moment because it’s heavy on speculation and distraction and light on science, supplies and politics. Even with a pan in my paw and a rainbow shopper on my head on my doorstep, I’m still furious - if a ridiculous sight.       

Why? If you look on their website, the NHS describes its foundation thus:

‘the NHS was created out of the ideal that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth. When it was launched by the then minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, on July 5 1948, it was based on 3 core principles:
  • that it meet the needs of everyone
  • that it be free at the point of delivery
  • that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay
 
The NHS Constitution of 2017 says goes on: the NHS belongs to the people and:
‘
It is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives. It works at the limits of science – bringing the highest levels of human knowledge and skill to save lives and improve health. It touches our lives at times of basic human need, when care and compassion are what matter most.’


The NHS is founded on a common set of principles and values that bind together the communities and people it serves – patients and public – and the staff who work for it.’

Yes, that’s what rainbows and the noise celebrate, but funding’s been an issue these ten years and no amount of clapping should distract us from that. There are too few staff and not enough money in the hospitals and surgeries of the land. No wonder government love us using ‘hero’ rhetoric – treating anyone under these circumstances is heroic, but that’s not how public services should function.

My last blog mentioned the silence of Tallis-the-building while Tallis-the-school works from home. I heard Larkin’s Churchgoing on the radio last weekend, about an empty building,  and it spoke anew to me. While the opening line ‘Once I am sure there’s nothing going on’ is true for vast tracts of the Tallis estate, it’s this last verse that speaks to my rainbow fury. 

Imagine the poet speaks not of churches but schools and hospitals:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

We have full hospitals and empty-ish schools. We want to get to a position of emptier hospitals and full schools. We need so to fund and respect both of them that their founding purpose can be fully realised, day by day, in a better world, not glued together and patched up for the short term in every crisis. Our schools and hospitals are serious sites, proper to grow wise in.   

I sit quietly in London sunlight. Parents email me, teachers phone and our little band of children go by on their daily mile. I’m loosely listening to a leadership webinar and reading the Department’s daily briefing. I think we’re doing a decent job under the circumstances but if we took our public services seriously and funded them accordingly when all this is over, we’d do better than that.  We’d honour the hopeful rainbows with better hospitals, a serious memorial to the so many dead.
 
CR
7.5.20   
1 Comment

Chalk and talk

4/5/2019

0 Comments

 
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Changeable as the May weather, we waltz towards the exam room with year 11. Some are ready, some resentful, some panicky, all a bit nervous. Some show welcome signs of maturity, others not yet. Some do foolish things, but on Tuesday night we were treated to a wonderful evening of dance, and on Wednesday night, at Bromley FC and in a new strip, our boys WON! The final of the London U16 cup. Both evenings were characterise by elegance, patience, enthusiasm, dedication, collaboration and skill.

I didn’t play footy or dance at school but I did act and speak and I remember very clearly the excitement of participating and cooperating and the uncertainty of the unique performance on the night, of triumphing over the unknown. It’s completely different to the classroom experience.
 
A person who qualified in the same decade as me came calling and we reminisced. She said, rather tentatively, ‘you know, I don’t think it was all bad, in the old days’. Of course it wasn’t. Her comment transported me to a meeting room next to a canal in Sheffield four years ago where a Young Thing gave a group of us to understand that the past was such rubbish that it effectively needed to be erased from the history of education.

I had a few words in response. It wasn’t perfect, but then we’re not perfect now. Children went to school, teachers worked hard, stuff got learned, art was made, cups were won and exams were taken. What is this trope that schools are uniquely culpable for being the product of their times? Do we blame the Army for not having the right boots in the Falklands, and insist they’re sorry about it all the time? Do we say to the NHS ‘why did so many people die in the 90s, what were you thinking of?’ Not so much. So why do it to schools? Times change, things improve or get worse, we reflect the society in which we are situated, for good and ill. 

Oh, and we talked about chalk. There are fewer of us who remember that quintessential teaching skill and the challenge of looking after a beautiful diagram you’d drawn and coloured nicely (I was talking to a geographer). I told her about the old soul I worked with who hoovered up the school’s chalk stocks when the whiteboards first arrived, hoarding it against an upturn in the market. He may have been a mathematician but the gamble didn’t work and when he retired he was offered the chalk to take home. One of our own Young Things was in this conversation with us. She’d had a terrifying and entirely unexpected encounter with chalk in rural Yorkshire, this decade. Taught her a thing or two about thinking on her feet.

Which is what the young people in the exams have already started learning quickly. The language speaking tests are situated near me so I can see them sitting mouthing the phrases, going over everything they’ve learned and worrying about facing the unexpected. The value of examinations is arguable but one of the useful things they promote is the development of confident and lucid responses in uncertain circumstances. There’s value in that experience which our obsessive high-stakes culture has dissipated. 

Life is both untidy and unpredictable so schools have to prepare young people for that too. Learning to face things when you’re not ready is also a life skill. Even the young people who struggle against the exam hall tractor-beam know that. 

Mind, some embrace uncertainty early. I was emerging from a difficult conversation when two small boys accosted me politely. In a conspiratorial whisper, one with sticky-up hair asked ‘have you got the rugby ball?’ This I could answer definitively. ‘No.’ ‘Someone’s taken it off us’ ‘Who?’ ‘We don’t know’ they chorused. We looked at each other for a moment then parted company, none the wiser on either side. I await developments.

A larger boy stopped me abruptly, silently, later on the bridge. I laid some groundwork for the exchange. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m good’ (not strictly true). He investigated my habits. ‘Have you seen Endgame?’ ‘No, is it good?’ ‘I can’t tell you, it’ll spoil it’. Once again, none the wiser. He has some distance to travel before work as a film critic puts food on his table, I fear.

And a man from Australia who joined the school in 1971 wrote to us. He wants to contact his English teacher. With the benefit of many years, he recognised those whose creativity and relationships formed him and made him.  That’s what he remembered, and that’s what we try to do in every age. Knowing things and getting qualifications are important. Knowing that life takes unexpected turns is also important. Learning it in a positive community is priceless. 
 
CR
2.5.19   
0 Comments

Gridlock

23/3/2018

1 Comment

 
Picture
While I’m very glad for the NHS that extra funding has been agreed, you can imagine me waiting for the second shoe to fall in the public sector. I was at the annual school leaders’ association conference last week where a wise person described schools as being in gridlock. I think our problems are difficult to make simple, but it was an apposite image and I’m going to have a go at explaining it. Yawn if you’ve heard me before.

Schools’ biggest problems are funding and the teacher supply. Our funding problems are a result of national austerity measures, a much-postponed decision to move to a national funding formula, and the London issue.  
National austerity means that funding has been stagnant for some time, the increased spending that the government claims being because of more children in the system (schools are funded per child). The national funding formula combined with austerity means that the total existing money is to be shared out more fairly. 

That’s good, but there are as many losers as winners. We would be losers. This combines with the London issue.  London schools were funded more highly because of higher costs, of course, but also through the London Challenge, the initiative which improved the achievement of London schools so radically this century. On top of that, there were pension and NI changes which were unfunded, costing school budgets more.

The teacher supply issue is a real nightmare. Routes into teaching are very complicated and have been decentralised. This combined with static pay and publicity about unmanageable workloads to deter applications, so its many years since government teacher recruitment targets were met. In London, teachers leave to move to areas where they can afford housing.  

The link between funding and workload is harder to explain. Schools spend most of their money on teachers so when budgets have to be reduced, we employ fewer teachers. That means three things. Each teacher teaches more of the week, each class is bigger, and schools discontinue particular courses. Or all three. All those add to the work of remaining teachers. Recruitment does the same thing: an unfillable science post after Christmas led to existing teachers getting more classes and some classes welcoming more students. 

All those affect the service parents expect from teachers. More and larger classes mean less non-contact time and more marking. More marking leads to less frequency, and parents worry about that. I worry about everything.  Hence the gridlock. We sit in our schools hooting wildly, but no one opens the flow in any direction. The answer is more money, but will that ever be the message?

I look out of the window and espy a child, teacher and standard lamp combo. It looks like a nice DT product, so I can only speculate on why it’s been taken for a walk. An inveterate shorts-wearer skips past, obviously feeling the equinox to be satisfactory. Two sirs seek a child who left me in the regular manner but is now elsewhere from where he should be. Year 10 are doing mock exams and so we are still in shushing mode. In fact, next year I might instigate a rule where everyone may only say shush on the first floor of block 4 between December and June. Beat that with a stick, silent-corridor schools.

I tangle with some year 10s who let us down badly earlier in the week, and I’m reading a journal about all the things we ask of the adolescent brain while it’s still rewiring itself. However, it doesn’t excuse these malefactors. I’m daunted by the papers’ erudition but that may be faulty wiring affected by my own adolescence downwind of a chemical works. There’s a whole chapter on myths, and I know a bit about those. Especially the ones about running schools without teachers or money.

Unexpectedly, a second pair of shorts crosses my vision while I have a cordial and witty row with a trusted colleague. His parting shot is that it’s not worth carrying on a fight he’s not going to win. That’s just defeatism. Many human myths are about battles of endurance and he might yet win, unlike the children of austerity with no teachers. That’s a battle against the odds and it’s just not fair. 
  
A youth renowned for Irish dancing scissors across the bridge in the between-lunch quiet, thinking no one’s looking. He’s a fine sight. You’ve got to love it.
 
CR
22.3.18  
 
  
1 Comment

    MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115   F: +44 (0)208 331 3004   E: headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
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