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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Shaping the World

6/5/2023

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It is impossible to know what young people are thinking. While popular convention imagines they think only subversion and mayhem, the evidence is different. What with food, love, football, hair and a bit of learning, teenage brain space is disputed territory. I’ve just overheard one talking to three captive mates about gravitational fields. Another passed me on the stairs deep in a conversation about betrayal. One asked me what day it was. Best of all, I was sitting at the bus stop two weeks ago, seeking Penge, when three chaps in year 10 or 11 walked past.  Their topic was unexpected for 1710: ‘the Irish economy’s a different matter. You have to understand what’s going on there, regarding growth.’

I’m thinking about this because as well as anger over Ofsted and despair about funding there’s a worry about behaviour in schools. Hold onto your hats: that’s not to say that there’s general mayhem in the corridors and classrooms of Tallis or the nation: 95-odd percent of children still behave well at school and largely enjoy it, whether they admit it or not. But all institutions are feeling the pressure post-lockdown. Some are anxious, many are absent and a minority have got the idea that aspects of school are negotiable. Its happening everywhere: we’re all having to dig in extra-deep and re-establish boundaries. One of the Heads’ unions has gathered information nationally about behaviour this week, and the picture is – unnerving.

So I find myself asking: was it right to close schools during the plague? It seemed unavoidable at the time. But looking back? How can we balance the damage done to individuals’ learning and institutional integrity with the risk as it turned out? This isn’t a rhetorical question. There’s a 15 year research programme needed to assess the impact on learning, life-chances and social cohesion. If 5-10% of young people and their families have decided that schooling is optional, how will that play out in the next generation? 

The context is further complicated by two boggy factors. One inevitably is funding, more below. The other is the way we see things now. Hard to express, here goes, sorry if I get it wrong.

The nation expects schools to be stable, bulwarks against the exigencies of life. The fundamental truth of safeguarding practice is that children are safest in school. So we have to get them all there, not 91% of them.
Schools are bulk institutions with baked-in economies of scale. We have classrooms of a standard 30-seat size, teachers trained and skilled in working with large groups, standard operating procedures that rely on consent and compliance, backed up by parents and society. A liberal outfit like Tallis is like all other schools in these respects. 

We all need children to follow instructions: the difference between schools is how the instructions are given.
That means, necessarily, that the amount of individual negotiation any school can manage with a child is limited. A child with a severe, diagnosed need might be excused Spanish. A child who just doesn’t fancy it and would prefer to wander about …. hard luck, in you go. However, as a society we are much more likely now to take account of individuals’ needs and choices, and we are more likely to give some of those needs or desires a name. That means that some children and families wish for special treatment that schools will not and cannot give. It's not that we don’t care, and it's not that we see children as cogs in a machine. We’re literally built to function in a particular way, in communities where everyone has to play their part and children’s singular wishes usually have to be subsumed to the common good. we don’t just do it because of economics, conservatism or cussedness. We do it because that’s how the world works.   
 
This is particularly difficult in secondary schools because between 10 and 19, those parts of the brain involved in planning and social interactions are still maturing. As the scientists say, this lengthy period of our lives is unusually challenging. Challenging for the adolescent, and challenging for everyone who cares for them.
 
You know that I believe that schools should be model communities of learning and social good, and that comprehensive schools in particular should demonstrate the best kind of equal and equitable society. It only works if everyone’s there, and we all work together. Some of our young people have suffered from the disruption of the plague in a particular way and perhaps do have a time-constrained special need that needs a particular kind of response. There was much money spent on the architecture of disease – testing, vaccinating and the economic support that sort-of followed – but now we need similar spending for the follow-on. We need attendance officers, behaviour staff, welfare teams, family liaison workers, counsellors, mental health specialists and educational psychologists. And we need teachers who have time to think, and plan. Currently – well, you’ve heard me on this before. We don’t have them and soon we won’t be able to afford anyone. And there’s hardly anyone to appoint even if we had the money.

I have a mixed relationship with The Guardian these days, but Zoe Williams wrote an interesting piece a couple of weeks ago about how the public schools reshape themselves every generation to produce what  society wants from them: colonists, soldiers, politicians of a particular kind. I don’t think our public-school-dominated government is deliberately running state education into the ground, but I know plenty people who do think that. I just think they don’t know what we do, or what will happen when we can’t.

Many young people are still reeling from the brutal withdrawal of the major structure in their lives during the massive brain re-ordering of adolescence. They need enough good adults to support and manage them.  Government, for the love of God, turn your thoughts to us, the universal service for children. If you destroy us, you destroy the future.
 
CR
5.5.23
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They May Cast the Lot Against You

24/3/2023

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I want to write about the terribly sad story of Ruth Perry, the Headteacher who killed herself after an Ofsted inspection, but I don’t know how. I’ll start with Tallis life this week and see where it takes me.

Well. Last week’s top news was the Geography Department winning a national award from the PTI, the curriculum training charity from where we get the bulk of our external training. The judges were blown away by the vision, the enthusiasm of teachers and students and the vast range of extra-curricular activities. Top sausage!

We had a wonderful music concert on Monday last with superb performances. I wrote my report to Governors for the spring term and had a phone call from the Chair. We had a grilling from the people who look over our results. I talked to a former colleague who’s now a Head. I went to a few meetings and advertised some posts for September. We’ve dealt with staff absences and crises. We had a visit from the Leader of the Council, to find out about the pressures in schools and how we’re doing. There was a Governors’ Achievement Committee meeting and a touring dance performance form our friends at Trinity Laban. Year 8 have been weighed and measured. I’ve had countless cheerful conversations with staff and a couple of trickier ones. We had a virtual meeting with a school who can help us improve our TOFFS project. We’ve absorbed the fallout from some nasty incidents in the streets after school and tried to balance next year’s budget. We’ve put a few children right on some misapprehensions.  We’ve taught, marked, planned, monitored, worried and celebrated. We’ve sorted out scuffles and rumours and home lives breaking up. I’ve responded formally to a long complaint.

On one of the teachers strike days I looked out of the window on the glorious sight of a year 11s progressing coolly from one thing to another whirling his jumper around his head like a toddler pretending to be a helicopter. He may have mastered the vertical take-off by the time the examiners call.

And  throughout all this, every time the blessed phone rings in the morning I leap from my moorings. Why? Because mornings, Monday to Wednesday are when Ofsted ring telling us they’ll be in tomorrow, and we’re sort-of due. That’s worrying in itself but nothing compared to sitting in the daily meeting with the assembled clipboarders while they attend to their idiosyncratic knitting and assemble a judgement in one word or two.

And so to Ruth Perry, a victim of the system: not the only one. What are we to make of this? No-one knows what’s in the mind of a person who makes this decision, but there’s context that’s now becoming more widely known and, unsurprisingly, I’d like to offer my two penn’orth.

It’s perfectly reasonable for the state to inspect its schools, but they need to do it properly. Inspection can’t be done properly on the cheap. It should take time and combine critical analysis with expertise and support. Large expert teams should visit for longer. Areas that need improving should be explained and the school given a chance to work with inspectors on the headlines of a plan. The final report should assess all aspects of the school and be expressed clearly in a balanced, detailed and rational manner. Parents are perfectly capable of reading.         
Inspectors perform a public service and they should be valued. I understand the argument that values school leaders as inspectors, but I’m no longer convinced. Inspection is a profession, with its own expertise and body of knowledge. The consistency required to inspect a whole system cannot be achieved with an army of contracted folks temporarily out of their schools, no matter how brilliant they are. The costs – standardised language and template judgments - are too high and the quality control of rogue inspectors too weak. I’d perhaps put one serving leader on a team, to give practical advice to inspectors and support to the inspected head.  
     
Obviously, urgent and dangerous issues in a school need swift restorative action. No one would argue with that.  Some schools will get bad reports for good reasons and no one would want to prevent that. The problem with the current system is that, in the name of public accountability and easy reading, a complex and critical universal service is reduced to terminology that cannot possibly convey its fullness. As the writer of the Book of Sirach (fka Ecclesiasticus) said of judges in the second century BCE:
They may cast the lot against you…..and then stand aside to see what happens to you.
Our current system was designed before social media took over and the quality of public discourse downgraded. It doesn’t serve schools, families or children well. It fuels twitter trolls, public shamers and the sensationalist newspapers who habitually hate teachers, and perhaps that’s where Ruth Perry found herself, overwhelmed with guilt, or bewilderment, with nowhere to turn. Actually, much of our accountability system looks as though it is designed precisely for this; accountability dreams of the 90s have become fuel for the frenzy. It’s no way to improve public education.  

When we wrote the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2019 we couldn’t express the ‘wisdom’ briefly. We said that leaders needed to use experience, knowledge and insight, moderation and self-awareness, and act calmly and rationally serving schools with propriety and good sense. That’s what we need from our inspectors.  It costs, but the price of the alternative is too high.

CR
24.3.23
 
 
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How are we?

24/2/2023

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I’m unreasonably irritated by people asking me how I am. I don’t mean people I know, but people with whom I have no relationship but want a piece of my day to tell me how to do my job better. My mother, concerned that I was brisk to the point of rudeness even as a child trained me to answer ‘how do you do?’ with ‘how do you do?’ which I can cope with. It’s the expected disclosure (‘fine’, ‘mustn’t grumble’, ‘chugging along’) that annoys. I’m pretty stoical in temperament, so how I am is pretty much the same all the time. That means that the answer I long to give is ‘I’m here, so assume I’m able to do a professional job. Declare your business.’ I realise this reflects badly on me.

Which leads me into wellbeing and workload, about which I was interviewed by a think tank earlier in the week. I’m a veteran of the teacher workload reforms of the early 2000s and the development of support staffing which genuinely changed our lives for the better. However, every secretary of state since 2010 has paid lip service to teacher workload while every budget since 2010 has made it materially worse. Professional wellbeing is dependent upon having a manageable workload. Workload is dependent on time. Time is money. Teachers’ hours are squeezed and class sizes inflated when schools don’t have money. Workload goes up and wellbeing takes a hit. People are exhausted and overwhelmed. Tackling teacher workload is expensive. Talking about teacher wellbeing is cheap.  Forgive me, it’s not the first time I’ve ranted about this.  

Anyway, the Department has it in hand. The DfE Education Staff Wellbeing Charter was interpolated between the pandemic and the current financial and political collapse.  Supported by unions and schools, it claims that:     
​Signing up to the charter is a public commitment to actively promote mental health and wellbeing through policy and practice. It is a way to show current and prospective staff that your school or college is dedicated to improving and protecting their wellbeing.
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
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The Year’s Midnight

15/12/2022

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We had a visitor to Geography yesterday, entirely friendly. He’d heard of the interesting things our map-and-rock folks do so he came to give them the once-over and put them in the running for an award. We rolled out a reddish carpet and he saw some lessons, talked to staff and children and even to me. We went so far as to insert mince pies into the sandwich lunch to butter him up.

The students, of course, were the star turns. Our man put them through their paces on whether or not the opening of a new coalmine in Whitehaven is a good thing or a bad thing and was much impressed at the breadth of their considered replies. Three of the students want to study Geog at university and could reflect knowledgeably on the relative merits not only of the courses under advisement, but also interesting features of their localities. One is havering between Sussex and Newcastle and I am ready to advise on that.

I know three things about Whitehaven. First, a woman once pushed her partner’s van into the harbour because she was sick of him. He obviously hadn’t worked out it was best to stay on good terms with a person who can shove Transits about. Second, it used to have a really good second-hand bookshop from which I got a nice early copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Third, it has a Weather Museum where you can do your own forecast, blue screen and all, outside of which I was once prevented from parking by an angry goose. It is to the benefit of youth that they don’t have their heads clogged up with such, or they’d never get a single A level.

Sunday and Monday’s weather was so pretty it was worthy of a gallery rather than a museum. Despite hopeful emails from students asking if we would close, we didn’t, of course, and made the best of it. Snow is nobody’s friend up close and much better looked out at from a warm indoors if you’re over 18. We were 27 teachers down at the start of the day with not a supply teacher to be had, but people got in eventually and everyone mucked in. Managing snow excitement is demanding at this end of term, but we did that too. I thought, as I picked my way gingerly across the yard, people can’t afford to heat their flats and houses or feed their children. We have to stay open, no matter what, just for that.

So how are we feeling as we trudge or slip towards the end of term? I’ve got Ofsted’s Annual Report neatly printed out waiting for me on the settee in my office, observing that SEND structures and funding are very far from working. Next to it is the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Annual Report into Education Spending. They say:
  1. In 2021–22, total spending on education in the UK stood at £116 billion or 4.6% of national income (including the cost of issuing student loans). This is about the same share of national income as in the early 2000s, mid 1980s and late 1960s, but lower than the mid 1970s and late 2000s, when it was well over 5% of national income.
  2. Between 2010–11 and 2019–20, there was a real-terms cut of 8% or £10 billion in total education spending. A £7 billion increase over the next two years reversed much of this cut, such that education spending was only 2% lower by 2021–22 than in 2010–11. About two-thirds of the rise since 2019–20 (or £4.5 billion) reflects standard increases in education spending, whilst about £2.5 billion reflects a higher and more volatile cost of issuing student loans.
  3. In the late 1970s, education spending represented 12% of total government spending, making it the equal largest area of government spending. This has since fallen to 10% of total government spending in 2021–22, which equals a historical low point. At the same time, we estimate that 20% of the UK population was in full-time education in 2021–22, equal to the highest it has been in at least 60 years. In sharp contrast, as the share of the population over 65 has risen, the share of total spending on healthcare has more than doubled from just over 9% in the late 1970s to over 20% today.
St Lucy’s Day on Tuesday and in the time I’d put aside to start on one of them Ahmed buttonholed me to say that his Spanish classroom smelled of seaweed, and what was I going to do about it? Nothing. Seaweed has many nutritional properties so he shouldn’t worry. While responding to a request elsewhere, I overheard a much larger soul telling another he was ‘frankly, heartbroken’ but I couldn’t work out if it was the state of the nation, a lover’s spurning or a disappointing Chemistry test. Arrived at my destination (the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter) I put a cover class right on the mature way to deal with a room change (replacing hysteria with industry), observing that I was a sixty-one-year-old woman with a heavy cold and they wouldn’t want a return visit.

John Donne said ‘tis the year’s midnight’ in A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day. That's how it feels, perhaps this year more than most. We’ll talk about light, hope and love in Assembly tomorrow and then give each other a break until the New Year. No matter what the problems around us, we’ll try to make 2023 the best yet. 

​Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
 
CR
14.12.22  
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Hello Possums

13/9/2021

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We nearly didn’t get away on 21st July. At about 0930 vans arrived to dig up the pavement and the zebra outside the Tallis moat. I have experience of this. I once couldn’t open a new school because the pavement needed re-laying so I had visions of us all trapped together for weeks, unable to open the gates, still attempting to tunnel out in early August. However, pickaxes were packed up by 1230 so everyone escaped as planned, as you may have noticed to the detriment of your hot water supply, fridge contents and remote controls.

Since then, exam results have been distributed, training undertaken, testing trudged through, timetables issued and now, a full week completed. All’s well.

Or is it? Holidays are meant to help you cope by forgetting the things you were worried about. At my age I genuinely forget what I was worried about and so write myself notes in July to remember them, which then, during results weeks, I transcribe from old diary to new. Some are diverting: ‘Pie chrts sort out’, some worrying ‘Ofsted?!!!!’, some deeply mysterious ‘Top slice 9th won’t you?’. Pie charts are the concern of the top floor of block 3, and the 9th passed without slicing required. As for Ofsted? Death and taxes, I say to you.

Worry was encouraged, though, last term. Apart from the virus itself, all messages were tinted with doom. Teacher grades can’t be trusted. Everyone will be unhappy with grades. Appeals will be unmanageable. Universities won’t offer enough places. There’s no money for recovery. The Department should know better. No child will know anything in September. And what about the National Tutoring Programme?

When the so-called Recovery Czar resigned because government wouldn’t stump up the cash they denied ever promising, some educators became transfixed with horror. Without money, how could the compulsory holiday provisions and the lengthening of the school day needed until the end of time to address the loss be financed?  What to do?

May I deal with these one by one? Exam grades were arrived at fairly and concerns could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Teachers are trusted – though some sectors have questions to answer. Universities offered places and what might have been a clearing-heavy year turned out to be nothing of the sort. Who expected money for recovery, really, or anything else? The department remains strangely led. Children know all sorts of things, perhaps not all of them useful. The National Tutor Programme? Pshaw.

Me, I always assume there’s no money for anything so trim my expectations accordingly. It seemed egregiously unfair to children and unreasonable to teachers to punish them for not being able to be at school last year by making them be there longer this year. That’s not how you develop a self-directed lifelong love of learning – though it is how you cram people for exams. It seemed to me that we would have to teach fewer things in greater depth and make sure that children understand the how as well as the what so they can pick up missed content as they grow.

Imagine my gratitude when Prof Oates of Cambridge threw himself into the debate. ‘Recovery’ is a ridiculous concept, he said. What we need is acceleration, in class, as usual. Find out how each child has been affected. Make sure reading, writing and number are solid. Reinforce core subject concepts and don’t panic. Use what you have wisely and don’t look for centralised support or guidance from soundbite politics. He might have added – especially from a man who can’t tell his blindside flanker from his attacking left-winger. Oh, what a message is there. More on this anon.

But on Planet Tallis we’ve been basking in the sun and getting used to one another again. That’s not always straightforward, especially for troubled children, so we try to make sure we remember the systems that protect everyone and have support at hand for the bewildered, agitated, confused, new and angry. Adolescence is tricky and, as Machiavelli said of the Romans, wisdom demands that difficult things aren’t made any harder if you want to get anything done. 

We’ve even kept a few of the odder Covid habits. We’re still lining up year 7 and 8 four times a day and I’ve noted a common addition to the repertoire of teachers’ silent instructions.  It’s a barely-perceptible twitch of the head, to left or right, that means ‘This line isn’t very straight and you, child, stick out messily. Align yourself with colleagues fore and aft so we may all depart in peace, if you’d be so good, pronto.’

We can be as cross as we like with government ministers and grade inflators but the day job returns like joy in the morning. I was trying to attach a mask without losing an ear while holding a cup of hot tea when year 13 Rose brisked past, clutching gladioli to gladden the heart of Dame Edna. She smiled pleasantly. ‘I want to give these to my tutor but she keeps changing rooms’ I’ll track her down, though’.  Its good to have you back, possums.

CR
10.9.21    
 
 
 
 
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On the need to dig deeper

12/6/2021

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Three small boys rushed me with a request. ‘Can we start our own club?’ I said it depended on the topic. ‘Japanese Culture’. ‘Manga?’, ‘No, Japanese Culture generally’. I declared in favour with the all-purpose answer ‘Talk to your Head of Year’. Their leader commanded ‘All eyes on Rawlings’ as they charged off. Arigato gozaimasou.

Boys are in the news with the ghastly OFSTED report (as in, a report on a ghastly matter rather than the other thing) into sexual harassment in schools. HMCI was pursued by the Today programme this week on the lines of ‘why haven’t you tackled this before?’ but to be fair to the clipboards, they are at the mercy of Sanctuary Buildings, whom we know to be a bit slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, my Westminster correspondent saw the Secretary of State in the street again at the end of May, customarily laden with bags, describing him as looking like a man about to take the last ferry out. As you would be if your catch-up plan lay in ridicule and tatters and your Tsar had abdicated.

The problem with tackling sexual harassment in schools isn’t having rules and issuing punishments but hearing about the problems to start with. Young women expect that the world will treat them shabbily and therefore put up with outrageous impositions on their persons and emotions. They look upon it as normal to be prodded and put upon, they think they should accept that physical and mental assaults are normal. The report talks about girls being sent dozens of requests for nude pictures and getting dozens of foul nude pictures from boys and men every day. Yet young women are more empowered, more up-front, more determined to stamp out inequity then ever before.  How did we arrive at a position where these irreconcilables co-exist?

Ofsted’s report has recommendations for schools, partners and government:

Schools should create a culture where sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are not tolerated, and where they identify issues and intervene early to better protect children and young people.  They should assume that sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are happening in their setting, even when there are no specific reports, and put in place a whole-school approach to address them.
This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

All of this is important and true and we’ll try to do all of it, but schools can’t turn the tide alone. Violent coercive behaviour towards women is not new, and I wrote last time about the tsunami of pornography that overwhelms our young. Whom does that serve?

And yet, I read in the news today about another school that’s banned skirts. I’m interested in this kind of thing, as long-term readers know to their cost. Banning skirts, on the face of it, could be a liberating act to remove oppressive gender norms from a community. Tell me more, I thought.

Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, the school has banned skirts because ‘members of the public’ have contacted them to complain. Staff are included in complaints, apparently. The usual sorts of words are used: the need for appropriate schoolwear, of appropriate length adding up to appropriate workplace attire. What?

I was reading Hilary Mantel’s essays in the Lake District sun last week. In one, she takes issue with a writer, saying,
"You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares."

I think that about ‘appropriate’. Appropriate schoolwear is clothes that don’t prevent children from learning and rushing about in the sun, that wash easily, dry quickly and don’t break the bank. Appropriate length, is a skirt that’s not going to trip you up on the stairs. Appropriate workplace attire is – well, who knows? It depends on the workplace: what’s appropriate in a blast furnace might be odd in a tea shop. But what business is what children wear to the man in the street?

We are obsessed with surface solutions. Do girls in schools feel sexually oppressed? Send OFSTED to inspect it. Some witchfinder general thinks that skirts are too short – ban skirts. Really? When will we start a discussion about freedom to co-exist peacefully, without prejudice, fear and oppression?

A young woman dropped by to read me a poem. It was about her struggles and triumph and about her determination to make a mark on the world and change it for the better. Perhaps she’ll start the serious global conversation about the mindset change needed to set girls free. I wouldn’t put it past her. I hope we’ve prepared her.
 
CR
11.6.21
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On checklists and their use

12/7/2020

1 Comment

 
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Dear Mr Williamson,
 
Thank you for the guidance which arrived last week and then, oh joy, more today. The 35 pages on full reopening is pitched well to annoy heads who want more guidance and heads who want less, so it is probably about right.  Apart from asking us to do the impossible, it is a reasonable effort. Separating year groups is a great idea – if you have a 1970s building with year bases, like the old Tallis or the old Pimlico. That was a lesson from the past that no one wanted to revisit during Building Schools for the Future, where we all had to cut down on communal space and no one has anywhere to put children when it rains at lunchtime.
 
So dining is on my mind. I get up early so there’s a long gap after breakfast. That means I go to first lunch with y7 and 8, the bonus being that I can see over the littlest ones’ heads. First lunch is a melee of 500-odd 11-13s, organising themselves pretty well, grasping food and cackling happily as they review the morning, perfectly safe and orderly while making an ear-piercing racket quite different to the rumbling of older children. Second lunch is more crowded with over 800 bigger and hungrier diners reading, tutting, strutting and preening.
 
Let me tell you, we can solve ordinary lunch with no year group mingling but wet lunch? Oh my. Several people have suggested, helpfully, that we could roof over the spaces between the blocks. Well thank you. What? How? And have you seen the cost of a PFI building adjustment? OK, they say, saddened by my mindset: what about a big gazebo? It’d have to be semi-permanent: we’re built on a swamp like Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs and an hour’s rain gives us trench foot and quacking. Umbrellas?   
 
An email enticingly titled ‘toilet amendments’ has just hopped into view. Anyone for latrine detail?
 
The School Council have been reflecting on weightier matters, reviewing our performance since March. They liked the work set and the support, they like Teams. They didn’t like timetable clashes or other students being late for lessons.  They’re doing but missing learning. They want to see their teachers and their friends. Most of all, they want to be together to do something about Black Lives Matter, to talk about it, to demonstrate, to learn about institutional racism and to hold us to account. Other things can wait: ‘all of the focus at the moment needs to be on Black Lives Matter.’  We expected no less and we’re on it. See what happens when a school focuses on understanding the world and changing it for the better?
 
Returning to the matter under advisement, Mr Williamson, I cannot tell a lie. Your other guidance has annoyed me.  Today we got 4 pages: a Checklist for school leaders to support full opening: behaviour and attendance. First, a quibble. A checklist needs boxes to tick. Scattering it with bullet-point ticks makes it instructions. Second, its really annoying. 

Simon Hoggart, may he rest in peace, invented his Law of Inverse Absurdity one Saturday morning in the Guardian for just such a document. Let me entertain you.
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(*This is new. Is it the tradecraft of Smiley’s people and picking up rumours on the street or me ringing the Head next door and asking how attendance is in their castle?)

So at the end of a long struggle since March, you decide to issue a statement of the blindingly obvious?  Is that time well spent?  Some heads are really agitated about Ofsted kindly offering to do some checking visits to see how its all going next term. I’m not that bothered, they have to earn their keep. But I’ve said it before, Mr Williamson, you’re putty in the hands of your leader. The PM’s flinging blame about. He’s started on the care homes and it’ll be social workers next. He daren’t blame the NHS but no one in any government has ever batted an eyelid at blaming schools for anything and everything. 

Austerity, poverty, elitism, the Hostile Environment, racism, Brexit and an education-as-exams policy which sacrifices a third of children are the problems that lead to disengagement, poor behaviour and truancy. Our systems work pretty well, but they cost a lot and I’m worried about what Rishi Sunak will do when he’s finished carrying plates about for the cameras. You’re all limbering up to blame schools and then you’ll turn the screw.  What will it be? Further reduced budgets or super-strict behaviour policies? Both?

Me, I’ve got to reopen a school that keeps children safe and helps them think about the state of the world. I have to be ready for rain and shine, for anger as well as relief. I’ve got to keep everyone with me while we steer this supertanker around the rocks. If you’re going to advise me, make it useful. If you can’t do that, leave me alone. The children expect a better world, and I must look to them.
 
CR
10.7.20
1 Comment

Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

29/6/2020

3 Comments

 
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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 
3 Comments

Sticky Labels

11/2/2020

0 Comments

 
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Dear Mr Williamson,

​I’ve been watching ‘The Young Pope’ on the telly because I share a sofa so I don’t always get to choose what’s on. I’ve observed the scheming top Cardinal hassling the Pope to address the people. We’re still looking forward to hearing from you so may I beg you to do the same? In case you’ve forgotten, my helpful suggestions included school funding, teachers’ pay, school improvement and renationalising the National Curriculum.

Of course, you may be doing nothing at all and waiting for the shuffle, but as you promised to work hard, that can’t be true. I expect you’re locked in a dark room with the good accountants of the Treasury working out a long-term sustainable stable funding package to transform children’s lives.  All power to your manly elbow!

However, the schools of the nation continue to assemble every day and do our bit for the common good so you’ll probably appreciate being kept abreast of same. Items on the agenda at Tallis since we last corresponded include:
  1. Getting external support to sort out the behaviour of troubled young folks
  2. Dealing with troubled young folks without any support.
  3. Telling some year 11s that closing their eyes and hoping they land somewhere in September does not constitute a careers strategy
  4. Telling other year 11s that they might want to take a break from revision from time to time.
  5. Talking to a DfE official about curriculum breadth and creativity
  6. Preparing for a Saturday governor meeting to decide the shape of key stage three and four.
  7. Drawing a line under sixth formers who haven’t done any work yet.
  8. Thinking about next year’s staffing.
  9. Hosting a visitor to look at behaviour and inclusion systems as we all struggle with the effects austerity has had on the stability of home life for the poorest families.   
  10. Going to the funeral of a much-loved colleague who died at New Year
  11. Trying to foresee all eventualities in our transgender policy
  12. Dealing with criminality out of school seeping into school

On the agenda of young people at Tallis this week may have been some of the above plus
  1. Wearing hoods indoors in contravention of local byelaws.
  2. Learning the difference between the mournful, boisterous, friendly and annoying hug
  3. Assessing the distinction between a large woolly hairband and a hat
  4. Anticipating conversation at home after parents’ evening (year 8)

Youth ought to be generally carefree and I’m glad they don’t worry about everything we worry about. Mind, sometimes they are causes of worry. I encountered a youth helpfully carrying books from hither to yon, but inexpertly, as if he’d had them tipped into his arms from a laundry basket. We have a lot of stairs at Tallis but he assured me he’d get there safely. As for the books?

I write this with a local copper sitting in my office. He’s not arresting me for offences against the language but clearing up some issues in the locality. Simultaneously I note a campaign to Pause Ofsted in a ‘quiet revolution’ in order to bring about ‘fundamental reform’ in what it does. Have you seen this, Mr Williamson?

These campaigning colleagues believe that Ofsted increases problems for the most vulnerable schools. They make several unarguable points, specifically that the current inspection system
  • Destroys the reputation of schools in deprived areas, which are doing the best work in the most difficult circumstances. These are not ‘stuck’, they have been let down by inadequate funding and support. Ofsted has consistently failed to call this out.
  • Imposes inspection frameworks which are untried and untested on schools, leading to poor inspection judgements.
  • Makes schools the scapegoat for rising child poverty which is the real enemy of learning and progress.

This has been brewing since Ofsted’s unfortunate description of schools whose inspection grades haven’t reached good for many years, or ever, as ‘stuck’. A crude and needlessly disparaging epithet, ‘stuck’ sounds as though no one’s really trying. When I led one of them, they were described as ‘schools facing challenging circumstances’ which is both accurate and respectful of the professionals and children therein. Did I mention offences against the language?

Instructed by one of my sofa-sharers I’ve been reading Machiavelli this week. He observed:
……wise Romans did not wish to add difficulties and dangers to a thing in itself difficult and dangerous, since they thought that if they added them, no one would ever work virtuously.
Do the current performance and regulatory systems add difficulties and dangers to schools already struggling against fearful odds? That’s another question for you to get stuck into, Mr Williamson.
   

So, before I sign off, let me encourage your doubtless tireless work behind the scenes to repair ten years of austerity and child poverty. Accountability is legitimate, but openness, wisdom, justice, service and courage are what children and their communities need. And much, much more money.

​Remaining your servant and trusting in your good intentions,

Yours
CR
7.2.20
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Too early to tell

21/10/2019

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For the greater good, I stay at arm’s length from social media. Other Heads are all over it, dispensing wisdoms and being useful but, like chip shops, I stay away from temptation. I’m way too fond of a smart remark and a brisk retort to resist putting people right about stuff that’s none of my business. I’d have to spend my life apologising.  Also, my phone is fully occupied with answering emails, reading novels and looking at pictures of my granddaughter so I don’t really have time for other hobbies.

If I did follow the twitts, I’d apparently be in a proper state about OFSTED and the application of their spiffy new framework. After not being interested in it for years, the clipboard brigade are very keen to uncover the intent, implementation and impact of a school’s curriculum and the first reports are piling up now. Schools have prepared, even retooled, to demonstrate their knowledge-rich curricula and their plans for a future liberated from the short-termism and exam fixes which OFSTED used to like under its previous pugilistic proprietor.  Good news.  What could possibly go wrong?

Thirty-odd years ago I used occasionally betake myself to Sheffield to hear a radical Methodist theologian of advanced years. He once said, woundingly, that there was nothing good that the CofE couldn’t get wrong and I sometimes, sorrowfully, feel this about OFSTED. These tweeted early reports have commented not so much on the curriculum, but on whether schools have a 2- or 3- year key stage 3 and what % are doing the EBacc. Hmmm. Key stage length is a school choice and the EBacc is the Department’s political ambition, not OFSTED’s. Righteous indignation enters stage right, to be met by obfuscation from the left. What exactly are OFSTED looking at? On whose behalf? Curriculum, or cheap-to-measure markers? Children’s learning or White Paper lunacy?  

Our own visiting clipboards, you will recall, popped a similar question. Observing that we talked a good game about a broad curriculum entitlement but that we let too many drop arts, DT or languages at the end of year 8, they suggested that we might consider the impact of the 2-year KS3 on our claim of a broad curriculum until year 11.   Fair point, but our lead inspector was a subtle and thoughtful man who took time over his words. Other reports have been rather more direct: change your key stages.

Ofsted are right to be worried about curriculum breadth and integrity and to look at it closely. They are responding to the madness caused by over-simplified high-stakes inspection measures which drove Heads mad and made some narrow the curriculum and dilute knowledge in order to meet performance metrics. Originally, lengthening KS4 to three years was a way of doing this.  Hothouse the GCSEs for longer, get better results. About half of secondary schools did it. 

Undoing it will be troublesome because GCSEs are now much heavier in content and harder in assessment. Doing them in two years rather than three is fine for those who are fully attuned to education and assimilate book-learning easily.  It’ll require wall-to-wall didacticism, and I’m not sure that the research on how children learn values that so highly. Doing them over three years gives a bit of space for unpacking the context of particular learning and for imagination and discovery – and other things that the current captains and the kings particularly don’t like. We’ve been thinking about this here since January. We’re not stupid: if there was a simple answer, we’d have found it.

But is this thoughtful uncertainty a luxury? It’s not as if our GCSE results couldn’t be improved. Shouldn’t we just do as we’re told and follow the instructions of the regulator and the DfE?    

The confusion in the system, from which OFSTED suffer, is deeply rooted. We have a system that bizarrely prizes autonomy above almost everything else. Making the right curriculum decision is a matter therefore for the school, not the state.  Only LA schools are actually still bound by the National Curriculum (wrongly, mistakenly). School curriculum decisions are a matter for schools, except when there’s a political panic. Then the independent regulator – OFSTED – is put to the service of the manifesto promises and the whole structure is revealed, shaky as a weak jelly.

If we knew what schools were for, then we’d make better decisions. If we could agree about what children should learn, then we could have a real, proper, broad National Curriculum that schools could adapt to their circumstances. If we trained and supported Heads properly rather than measuring them cheaply we’d have a system second to none. But that takes time and money, cool longitudinal research and a realisation that twitter-feeding isn’t the same as educational leadership.

We are the advocates for the nation’s young. Ethical leadership demands that we hold trust on their behalf and should use our wisdom, knowledge and insight wisely and kindly.  We should seek to serve justly, courageously and optimistically and continue to argue calmly and in detail for the best curriculum for our schools.

I looked out of the window and couldn’t work out why flags-of-the-nations bunting was being put up inexpertly by some sixth form, helped by every passing advisor. Then I remembered today was our Black History Month festival at lunchtime, the nearly-end of three weeks of activity.  First lunch was sunny and dancy, second lunch wet and huddly, but never mind, we’ve had a lovely time; informative, challenging and interesting. Just like a good curriculum...

A teacher comes to visit and tells me she’s wearing her geek trousers. I think we should all put some on, take a breath and think calmly and professionally - preferably behind closed doors for a while. OFSTED evaluation frameworks usually take a while to bed in and there’s no need to panic. We’re way off getting this right, but the system is thinking better and about the things that matter. As we say in every room here: we know we are learning when we are thinking very hard.      
 
CR 17.10.19                       
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Ofsted and the movies

8/6/2019

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I wandered onto the concourse in a sort of drizzle and was approached for pleasantries by a young person with her sweatshirt tied over her head and under her chin, like the Queen’s headscarf. We’ve been talking about uniform this week, but I hadn’t thought to explain which parts of the body each bit goes on. My son used to do this when he was being a centurion and my daughter put tomato ketchup on her hair to keep it blonde so I was open to a range of explanations. However, after agreeing that we were both well, I discovered she was just keeping her do dry in case it shrank. 

Which reminded me of a conversation with a Head of Year a long time ago, watching some boys playing padder tennis without bats and in the oddest PE kit they could exhume from the spare kit box. ‘Children are mad’ I offered. ‘Yes’ she said ‘and they make no attempt to hide it’. And of another experience in a coastal school where a year 9 history group appeared with stiff PE shorts on their heads with cries of ‘we’re chefs, Miss’. Ah, the charm of the fourteen-year-old.

Speaking of charm, I turn now to Sean Harford, National Director for Education at Ofsted. This Harford is an avuncular chap whom I’ve heard pronounce on this and that, here and there. He’s reasonable and usually makes sense and I’ve always assumed he was behind the clarifications and mythbusters that Ofsted put out from time to time. He was in the trade press last week allegedly saying three things that made me long for something to put over my head.
  1. While Ofsted’s reports show behaviour as good or better in 90% of schools, he doesn’t believe it. There are ‘real issues’ with inspecting behaviour and Ofsted can do ‘a whole bunch of things’ better, like talking to new or lunchtime staff who might see the worst of it. Yes indeedy.
  2. The curriculum ‘started to suffer’ when schools became academies. Ofsted ‘missed a trick’ because it was slow to respond to schools having ‘freedoms to do different stuff’. They assumed that everyone would preserve the well-established national curriculum and not narrow choices unreasonably. This took how long to spot?
  3. Ofsted don’t have enough cash to inspect properly and were therefore over-dependent on performance data, so that made everything worse. Mighty thinking, Maestro.
I itinerate around the building to calm myself and potter past an intense exchange in block 1 on the films of Quentin Tarantino. On this, I have wisdom to share. Inglourious Basterds is a work of art, the rest, not so much.   The year 12 critics may or may not have been interested, but it has relevance in my junkyard brain.
  
At the end of the film quite a lot of things have gone badly, so much so that someone tells the sort-of hero, Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine he’ll be shot. ‘Nah’ he says sanguinely. ‘More like chewed out. I been chewed out before’. 
Mr Director’s been on the electronic loudhailer to say he’s been misquoted. I hope that’s true because the alternative is that he’s just twigged onto something so blindingly obvious that I assumed we took it for granted. Obviously a day in school doesn’t show you what behaviour is like. Obviously autonomy combined with punitive accountability leads to fearful decision-making. Obviously inspection on the cheap is faulty.

Being honest is good. Thinking out loud is refreshing, but Harford isn’t Brad Pitt and breezy won’t do. Children’s education suffered, good people lost their jobs and teacher recruitment has fallen through the floor during this madness. As the damage is huge, so repentance has to be proportionate and lead to real change.

Forgive me, there’s more. Aldo Raine helpfully points out during the film that fighting in a basement offers a lot of difficulties, number one being that you’re fighting in a basement. I wonder if Sean Harford meant to say something like that: lack of money offers a lot of difficulties, number one being we didn’t have any money - so we had to do a cheap job. That raises more questions: if the money isn’t going to be put back, what kind of inspection can we expect? What scheme will overcome the difficulties?

Many head teachers might bring other Tarantinos to mind when contemplating Ofsted, but I prefer his smart remarks to the bloodbath movies and I don’t want to annihilate other public servants. Inspecting schools is a democratic duty, but we do it with at least one hand tied behind our backs. It’s not just the money, it’s the vision. Because we don’t know what our schools are for we don’t know what to inspect them for. We don’t care enough about children or state education to fund any of it properly so we make blindingly obvious mistakes. After decades of inspection, our data is corrupted, its use is shallow and we’re no wiser about trends or effectiveness because the goalposts move so often they must be on castors. 

As Aldo Raine says ‘it behooves oneself to keep his wits’. The Director and HMCI are smart and honest folks: I hope something better comes out of this garbled messaging. 
 
CR
6.6.19

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Choices

22/3/2019

3 Comments

 
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Last night was options evening, a reasonably jolly occasion. It’s the first time that children really get a choice about what they study and it’s always interesting to see how they respond. Options had an added soupçon of excitement for us this year as our advent visitors from Ofsted Towers gave us a Paddington stare on the matter. Pray tell us why, they said, you have a three-year key stage four when you know we disapprove? Enlighten us, would you, as to its purpose? And what, for the love of Mike, are you doing with year 9? As I’ve said before, we had ready answers. As I’ve said before, they raised their eyebrows and narrowed their eyes a little. Then it appeared in the Things To Do list they kindly left us.  

After Ms Dedman, Tyla and Engen had spoken (admirably plainly and passionately) I addressed the assembled families in the hall. Reporting on the Lead Inspector’s thousand-yard stare I asked parents to tell me what they thought. Half a dozen sought me out, all of who approved of what we did and liked the early choice. They talked about motivation and freedom and taking on adult responsibility. Their children nodded sagely – but they don’t know anything else.

Some parents rested their weary elbows on the canteen pundit benches and probed gently. Why did we introduce a three-year key stage four, then? Well, it was before my time, but in an era when it was not only common practice in schools, but admired good practice. It gave children the chance to study for (sometimes modular) GCSEs in a flexible way, perhaps resitting where necessary, or even passing something in year 10 and doing new courses in year 11. It helped maximise results.

Most of those conditions have gone now. GCSEs have much more content, the modules are gone, and the chance of assimilating enough content and knowledge before the end of year 11 is frankly unlikely. Schools don’t do so many GCSEs and it’s not possible to hoist up results that way in any case anymore. Not that that was ever a justification.

Tallis has found itself in an interesting position. When I arrived in 2013, the first year of year 8 options, many staff begged me to return to options in year 9. I prefer to take a long view and had no experience of a three year key stage four, so I didn’t act precipitously.  By the time we got to a second year, and certainly by the time the revised specifications for GCSE appeared, Tallis teachers had grown fond of the new division and much preferred it. Three years at key stage four gives you time to take the higher levels of content more slowly. It means that year 9 can be a foundation year, where children are spared exam questions and can really immerse themselves in the subject and what it means.

However, the visitors didn’t quite experience it like that. They were left with the impression that too many children are doing exam practice for too long. We shouldn’t be doing that. Fair point.

There’s another matter too. Three years is a long time to study one thing. It’s as long as a degree, but with much less lounging about. A thirteen-year-old is a different beast to a sixteen-year-old and there’s a risk of them forgetting by year 11 everything that they knew in year 9 (as well as their name, address, PE kit, timetable, friends, enemies and sandwiches). The year 9 introduction year works really well if it’s a foundation year, but the exam prep really should be left to year 11.

Why don’t we just stop it and go back to three-year key stage three?  Well, three years is as long as a degree and they’re too young for all that coffee. Year 9 in a subject you can’t wait to drop is a long year, at just the wrong developmental age, when you find it really hard to concentrate on anything except yourself and are just getting into your stride as Outraged of Greenwich. Perhaps we should do something else with year 9 altogether?
So we’ve got a working group together and we’re thinking of both obvious and creative solutions. Everything is on the table and we’ll decide what to do by October, ready for next year. We’ll invite parents’ views too: watch this space.     

But the really nice thing about options evening, like any parents’ evening is seeing our inmates with their elders, the way they talk to one another, lean on each other, tut and roll their eyes at each other, gasp in blank incomprehension at each other then leave arm-in-arm. Love takes so many forms, some of which are also confusion and worry. We need families to have patience, and keep talking , and make their good choices together, no matter how old they are.

I’m glad to be part of the same human family as New Zealand. When their PM’s ready, would she like to come and sort us out?  
 
CR
21.3.19
3 Comments

Good with Outstanding Features

3/2/2019

1 Comment

 
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Doubly blessed, Ofsted called on us twice last year. Let me tell you the whole story because some readers, perhaps on Mars, may not have heard this yet.

Regular readers will recall that we had a one-day inspection in January 2018. These were an Ofsted scheme for quick inspections of good schools. They’re also short of cash so it was a reasonable efficiency plan. They didn’t look at the whole school, just stuff they had a hunch about from the data. One option after a short inspection is to say – well, yes, you’re still good, but you need to sort out stuff and we’ll be back after a year. That’s what they told us: look again at maths and English, think about higher ability pupils, and carry on improving feedback to children.  We were working on all of those. We are always working on all of those. 

Perfidiously, the phone rang after 11 months, but we were ready.

In the meantime, there’d been a lot of hoo-hah about Ofsted’s new inspection plans. Realising that just looking at data skewed the way schools behaved, and that curriculum had become dangerously under-thought in many schools, Ofsted declared themselves interested in what was being taught, rather than just outcomes. They were rightly bothered that schools were being entirely turned over to producing the kind of things that inspectors like rather than educating children. They also wanted to tackle some issues in the system, such as off-rolling and three-year key stage fours. Off rolling is the underhand practice of removing underperforming children from the school’s roll so they don’t count in progress scores: three-year key stage fours are said to narrow children’s experiences.
This proved interesting for us once we got the five chaps into the building. We dealt with the off-rolling very quickly. We work very closely with the LA, we take in more strugglers than we send elsewhere and we know exactly where they’ve gone. They were impressed with our commitment but returned to the matter of the curriculum later.

Inspections are half carried out in the Head’s room. There’s a long phone call the afternoon before they come and a longer meeting when they arrive. These check that we know what we’re doing and we have a plan to do it better. After that, they investigate aspects of leadership and management: curriculum, pastoral, inclusion, safeguarding, personal development, attendance, exclusions and so on. They meet groups of staff, governors, parents and students. Simultaneously, they rush about going into lessons to see what’s being taught, or look at a theme. They collect up information and swop observations at the end of the day. Then they invite the Head into their meeting so you get the drift of their thinking.

This end-of-the-day meeting is meant to be open and inclusive, a benefit to Heads. In my experience it’s absolutely terrifying. I’d added a wild card as I was largely unable to hear anything they said. I’d been to the doctor earlier in the week, and was awaiting a return visit. That meant that Mr Tomlin had to accompany me everywhere as interpreter and I was forever asking the chaps to speak up. In these end meetings the Head is meant to be a silent observer, not bellowing what are they saying? like a comedy granny to an amanuensis trying hard not to laugh.  At the end of the second day there’s a final meeting with governors and the LA where the lead inspector reads the verdict and declares the deed done. He or she writes the report that night. After an interminable wait for the report to be quality assured, a confidential draft with a 24-hour turnaround appears. There’s no real right of reply, only for factual inaccuracies. Phew.

We’re pleased with our report. Inspectors have told us to persevere with improving progress. They have reminded us that we need to think hard about the impact of starting GCSE in year 9 and whether all children thereafter follow a broad and balanced curriculum. They encouraged governors in their governing. These are all very fair points.

Inspectors thought the sixth form was outstanding with excellent teaching, great outcomes. They had 30 minutes earmarked to talk to students but were trapped for 90 minutes until students were satisfied they’d got the point.  That’s how we do it here: if in doubt, explain again.

They liked the work we put into inclusion and the personal development of children. They thought that was outstanding too and used the un-Ofsted language of ‘first class’, which is nice. Everything else is good. We’re glad to be good with outstanding features. It is a fair judgement. We went over the whole report as a staff on Wednesday afternoon and looked hard at what we need to do. Governors and school will form this into our next strategic plan, and we’ll put this on the website later in the year.

Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to get this, and thank you to parents who told the inspectors what they thought of us. They’re not used to hearing from so many at secondary level.

Tallis life goes on. Out on the bridge, a rare sighting of Mr Post-16 Study Room at large with an older young person. They pass sedately and are replaced by two year sevens at roadrunner speed trying to hold worksheets to their chests using only forward momentum (which may be the wrong word), shrieking loudly. Below stairs, Sir Detention annoys a detainee by analysing the correct use of ‘innit’ while Ms Reception rushes to First Aid with a little wheelchair. Humanutopia pack up in the hall after a day’s work holding year 9 to account for the way they treat one another. Two visitors are blown away by dance and drama. It’s getting darker, but there’s no snow.

Tallis should be 50 when the inspectors next call. We’d like them to be even more impressed then: Tallis the brave, onwards and upwards! Plenty to be getting on with.

You can read our inspection report here.

There’s an open meeting to talk about the report and related matters on Monday 11 February at 1800 in the Hall.     
 
CR
31.1.19
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Teaching to the test

22/10/2018

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You may know that Ofsted have been thinking, which is good. It’s even better that they’ve been thinking about ‘What is the real substance of education?’ or as a normal person might put it ‘what are schools for?’

​HMCI commentary: curriculum and the new education inspection framework
​
The clipboard brigade make several points, all of which deserve a big tick. I thought you might like a digest, shamelessly condensed and filtered through my own prejudices. They say:
  1. Education is the vast, accumulated wealth of human knowledge, and what we choose to pass on to the next generation. A ‘curriculum gives a school purpose’. Hurrah!
  2. That curriculum is the heart of education. It requires the pursuit of real, deep knowledge and understanding of subjects.
  3. In too many schools, the curriculum is just a combination of the exam board specification, the timetable and the exam results. Not enough schools really think about what they want children to learn. This leads to a narrow range of subjects being taught and too much ‘teaching to the test’.
  4. Inspections have placed too much weight on exam results.
  5. The 2019 inspection framework will emphasise ‘the curriculum as the substance of education’. Inspectors will look at a school’s ‘curriculum intent’.
  6. They’d like to see schools focusing on subjects and subject vocabulary.  
  7. They’d like to be sure that ‘disadvantaged pupils are not put onto a stripped-back curriculum’.
  8. They observed that expert teachers in the schools they visited ‘lived and breathed their curriculum’ and that good subject teachers are likely to stay in schools where subjects are valued.
  9. A well-constructed, well-taught curriculum will lead to good results because those results will be a reflection of what pupils have learned. 
  10. Parents need to know the substance of what their children are learning throughout their time spent in school. 
So far so good. Tallis approves Ofsted’s new thoughts, which will doubtless be a relief to them. But hold on!  What’s this? They don’t like three-year key stage fours, like we have. Why?
 
Three-year key stage fours originated at a time of intense exam pressure. Lots of schools did it to give more time to GCSEs and therefore improve results. This is part of the reason for the current panic about schools just focusing on English, maths, science, history, geography and languages, because that’s what’s been valued in national education talk in recent years. Therefore, lots of schools just do a quick rotation of arts subjects in year 7 and 8 and then don’t offer them much at KS4 so they can tick the ‘EBacc’ box of the subjects above. 
 
Tallis doesn’t do that. We have a very broad curriculum at key stage three with six hours a week of dance, drama, music, art and DT and a very large range of options in KS4. Choosing options early means that our children – who do one more option than many other schools, in any case – have the chance over three years to get into deep subject content, absorb it and make it their own. When I arrived at Tallis six years ago, I was very sceptical about choosing options in year 8 but was quickly converted. That’s not to say that we couldn’t improve the way we do it, of course. So, when the moment comes and we have to defend ourselves, we’ll have a few thoughts to offer inspectors about the what and the why, and how our choices enable us to keep a broad curriculum for everyone. Hurrah again!
 
It’s good news for everyone that Ofsted have made this commitment to the curriculum. I’m not just saying that because it’s Ofsted, but because it’s right. Schools are where society looks after its young, and the curriculum is what society thinks they should know. A broad, common curriculum which enables young people to think and reflect also means that the democracy speaks a common language. It builds up our communal life. That’s why good comprehensive schools with a wide curriculum are every bit as important to the health of the nation as the NHS.  A nation educated together across the whole range of human experience should be well-equipped to understand and change the world for the better. Hold on a minute, that sounds familiar…..
 
Speaking of which: Black History Month. We’ve had dancing, eating, talking, films and workshops. We’ve had two mini carnivals with mass dancing and Caribbean Come Dine with Me.  It’s been a joy. During the lower school carnival I was having our performance review with our Local Authority School Improvement Partner. I had to keep making excuses to sneak looks out of the window to see the children dancing to Sir’s music. They sent me up a plateful of outrageously good food but it didn’t make up for not being outside in the sun. A new colleague said ‘some schools would worry about losing control’ but we don’t. Our systems are good, our community strong and we love to dance, sing, cook and make things. We’re confident to do it because we value it, we do it all the time, and when we go back to class we know each other well enough to settle back down.

What are schools for? Being able to celebrate diversity and inclusivity with laughter and exuberance. That’s not a test you can teach to.
 
CR
18.10.18
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Walking backwards from Christmas

9/2/2018

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How often do you walk backwards? I was accosted by a toddler last week keen to demonstrate forward and reverse gears. I thought I should tell him that reversing has limited utility, but now I’m seeing it everywhere. Teenagers walk backwards as much as forwards given half the chance because, like toddlers, they are unbelievably nosy. They can’t tolerate conversation without their input and when space is limited try to walk in a clump with a couple at the front walking backwards to maintain the circle of discussion. That’s all very well, but eyes are located at the front for a purpose and reversing in a group through a door while holding a football, arguing about love or PE and not knowing how big your feet are is positively hazardous. Face the direction of travel, I cry. Save yourselves.
 
People have been dropping by just to tut and roll their eyes and tell me how long January’s been. This is strictly unnecessary as it’s the same blessed length every year, but coming back to school before Twelfth Night makes it seem interminable. And then there’s February to contend with, which is no better except for half term. It would make perfect sense to have a moratorium on any excitement this half term and just concentrate on getting through the days and heading home before nightfall.
 
However, we are gluttons for punishment. We’ve had a pretty constant stream of visitors (apart from Them) attracted by our website and our general stuff. A much-visited colleague reasonably asked ‘Do we ever say no?’ Yes, but not very often and perhaps I should. Fine words from someone who’s arranged another Civil Service Immersion visit straight after half term.
 
Anyway, yesterday’s visitor was again impressed by the self-regulating multi-directional traffic on the bridge. Like an elderly 14-year-old I can’t leave a good thing alone so went forth to hassle the crowds today. Feeling sprightly for my age, I didn’t grab the trusty anorak. I shuddered theatrically therefore and a forward-facing youth asked if I was cold, as if being cold was an unacceptable sign of weakness. In February. In a thin jumper. Post-Ofsted. Perhaps I needed Clara’s spotty headscarf?
 
Unacceptable weakness was exactly what was being tested (I think) by an enthusiastic group throwing eggs off the bridge after close of play on Wednesday. No, not that kind of egg throwing, we don’t hold with that here, but something sciency. Eggs with parachutes, accompanied by groans, howling, derision and cheers.
 
Much like this week’s staff briefing which included gardening, birthday parties, fidget toys, slime, year 11, year 13, a knockabout double act between me and Gov & Pol, but thankfully no mention of parking. I’m pretty intolerant about fidget toys, but hypocritically so. I can’t sit still to save my life and invariably pick at my face, hair, teeth or just get up and wander about in meetings. Rank has its privileges. HMCI knits: I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
 
But this week also brought us Year 13 parents' evening, the end of the road for some long-term parents. The former Chair of Governors, for example, with child number three now in the final furlong. It’s a strange experience and I’ve said it before: we should print certificates, or strike medals.
 
Except that parents do it for love and generally don’t begrudge the time spent queueing and arguing (usually with the child, occasionally with a teacher and we try to resolve that). We do it for love too, in our own way and we try to give our time freely. A new support colleague asked if she should make an announcement to hurry parents along as time wore on, but we tend not to do that. Parents’ evenings overrun, its part of the warp and weft of school life. I can usually predict who’ll be last. Yes, Bradshaw.
 
Even when everyone’s gone, a handful will remain picking over hard cases or the unexpected upsets and wondering about how we could do it better. Then we all go home. Children and parents to happy or sad homes, filled with pride or regret. Teachers likewise. Mr Smith rewards himself with a kebab after parents’ evenings, and why not?
 
When we get back we can turn to face the second half of the year with confidence and commitment.  Our Platinum Artsmark award buoys us up that our holding onto creativity is valued, and a super conference yesterday sharing practice on transgender young people went really well. It’s getting lighter! Have a nice half term
 
CR
9.2.18
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Tell it like it is

27/1/2018

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I do love clear and specific communication. The best notice I’ve ever read was on a ferry from Orkney to Papa Westray. A large handwritten sign above a pair of laundry machines read ‘Do not tumble dry other peoples’ overalls.’ There’s human pain behind that. I was reminded of the ferry while afoot in block one during the straightforward part of the week. On the Broadcast Studio door a (typed) sign reads ‘Do not put broken chairs in this studio’.  Broken chairs are a hazard to shipping in schools. There isn’t room for them in a classroom and if you put them in the corridor people sit on them and break them further or slide them around or use them for fencing practice or just trip over them. Putting them in the studio is a bit extreme. I trust the notice worked.

Did anything more exciting happen this week? Oh yes, OFSTED. You know I can’t tell you the result until it’s gone through their knitting. I can tell you about the effect on the good ship Tallis, though.

Ofsted has a communication methodology all of its own. We’ve been due an inspection since May last year so I don’t like any phone calls immediately after 1130 because that’s when they ring.  It used to be at 12, but it’s crept forward. Perhaps by the time I retire it’ll be breakfast time, early enough to spoil the whole day. So, just as our Business Manager was starting to explain further catastrophic developments in local parking regulations, the phone rang and the dread word mouthed through the door at me. I may have cursed the blameless instrument.
Ofsted obviously employ people with calm and sepulchral voices to deliver clear but unwelcome news to scrambled Heads. They must be used to having to say everything seven times. I was so shocked I couldn’t remember how many children are currently on roll. The first phone call warns you you’ll get a second one from a Lead Inspector who’ll tell you what’s on the agenda. You sort out a base room and parking spaces and they turn up the next morning at 0800 and do their thing. I’ve called them the clipboard brigade, but actually they carry these large zippy-up A4 leatherette affairs. It’s all done on paper, which you may find mildly interesting.  

Wandering about during our time of trial I was accosted by a youth. He and I have not always seen eye-to-eye on coat-wearing in the dining room, but he was onto the matter under advisement. ‘Miss, when does the thing come out?’  I requested further particulars.‘The thing, you know.’ We’d reached an impasse when, with a sudden rush of blood to the head he rephrased: ‘When is the inspection report published on the OFSTED website?’ ‘About three weeks’. I need to keep an eye on him: he may be a plant.

He was certainly more articulate than the girl exasperating the calmest Head of Year as I passed. Attempting to justify what sounded like pretty foolish actions, she turned to extra verbiage for cloud cover and had to be restrained. 'Don’t start every sentence with ‘basically’. I’ve got to go and teach in five minutes’. She had to strip her explanation down to the bare facts without added rhetoric. Ofsted’s bit like that too. 

The long week is finally over and I gaze at the whiteboard in my office. The priorities are still the same no matter who’s visiting, but I sometimes add a line of verse to make me think. This week it was from a poem by David Harsent called Tinnitus. The first line, which I like, would have been best:
                  ‘Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will’

What I actually had written up, thinking about a likely visit, was the last line:
                 ‘Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will’.

but I rubbed it off when we got the call.  It might have seemed rude. We’re all public servants.   
  
In school you can always hear Ofsted either approaching or departing, but the day was sunny and everyone worked together beautifully. We had Danish visitors and lots of messages of support from our friends. Sorry this is rushed.  You’ll be the first to know when we get the report.
 
CR
26.1.18
1 Comment

Auld Lang Syne

12/1/2018

1 Comment

 
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The White House book sounds gripping. I picture the Wolff man sitting quietly in a corridor smiling pleasantly so that people stop for a chat. Perhaps he had cakes. Who can resist someone listening sympathetically when you’re tired and irritated?

If OFSTED had any sense, that’s what they’d do. A day spent in reception with an open smile and some fancy biscuits and you’d learn a lot. Who’s late, who’s angry, who’s ill, who’s in tears, who’s got time to talk, how many supply teachers are signing in, why are the Police there, who is that bedraggled old soul who never remembers she needs her keys to get back? Ah, that’s the Head. 

Daily sights are available to any watcher. Monday Mr Springall had trousers on. (Not that he’s usually overexposed, you understand, just that he lives in shorts and generally only wears trousers for awards ceremonies. I didn’t think he’d been issued with tracksuit bottoms.) Tuesday I admired a matching pair of hair ribbons and the wearers gave me the biggest smiles. Wednesday I took issue with a camouflaged hat. Thursday the police came to tell us something we’d told them. Friday I returned to the classroom as a rusty supply teacher.

So that means that Monday everybody was cold, Tuesday year 7 are still perky and charming 16 weeks in.  Wednesday ‘It’s been a week now. No hats indoors no matter how new.’ Thursday nearly working in partnership with external agencies. Friday another nasty case of bronchitis so Roberts had to dust off her Religious Attitudes to Crime and Punishment.

This at least demonstrates I’ve put in a whole week. We came back on Wednesday last week but I spent Thursday to Saturday at a conference in Oxford, talking with philosophers and ethicists from around the world on Civic Friendship. It was the intellectual equivalent of a Christmas Dinner and I’m still digesting it. In particular, from Berkowitz of St Louis-Missouri University’s nugget ‘Children are the only known raw material from which adults can be made.’   
 
So Tuesday wasn’t just hair ribbons. Tuesday was early close for training, on trauma, on understanding the causes and damage of early childhood trauma and looking at how this might affect young people’s approach to adults, to school, to experiences, to life. Once you’ve grasped that, some inexplicables start to make sense. Why might some children be fearful and angry all the time? Why does the slightest change to routine throw some completely off kilter? Why is it important for teachers to be predictable, consistent, reliable, calm and – to return to the White House – stable?
 
It’s important because kindness and empathy can repair some of the damage already done, and even if it couldn’t it would still be the right way to live. When I looked round Tallis one of the things that made me want to come and serve out my twilight years here was the sight and sound of teachers talking calmly, firmly and kindly to struggling souls, about a better way to be. It permeates the place. Civic friendship indeed. 

I try to show this to visitors so I make them look out of my window at lesson change. It’s a bit of a risky strategy as you never know what might emerge in human community, but as a spectacle it’s never let me down (though Toby Young didn’t quite know what to make of it when he watched in May). New governors yesterday had been on a guided tour with some exceptionally loquacious year 8s who’d even commissioned a dance performance en route, so could be forgiven for wondering why it took 55 minutes to get around the building when 1900 people could emerge and disappear in 4.

But the best uncapturable moment of the week was Thursday in the quiet of the after-school gloaming, hearing George whistling Auld Lang Syne as he crossed the yard. 
                 
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne. 
 
Don’t be anxious about willie waught. Loosely translated it means ‘take my hand in friendship and make a toast to the times we’ve known’. That’s as good for a new start as for an ending, for a reunion as for a parting. Here we are, the raw materials of civic life, holding out a hand to each other as we reboot Tallis for 2018.    
 
CR
12.1.18
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Fairness on the Earth's crust

15/10/2017

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Due to my advanced age and objection to any kind of cold weather I’m offered a lunch duty slot in the year 11 study hall. We say hall, but it’s actually 0311, a geography room of average size. 20 young comrades join me for 45 minutes of absolute, blessed silence. ‘It’s like a rest cure’ I remark to Sir as he barrels in at the front of a tidy line of 30 year 9s. We pause to retrieve a football appearing in entirely the wrong place. The ball’s owner is aggrieved: they took it off me, not my fault, not fair. He eventually agrees that all concerned should participate in brisk questioning after school and the resultant culprit issued with the appropriate sanction for the activation of a football indoors.
 
Fairness is one of our Tallis Character traits and particularly valued among the young, understandably as powerlessness attracts injustice in our flawed world and who has less power than a child? Football manager above didn’t want the indignity – or the football-affecting inconvenience? – of a conversation to establish how he got into trouble. Or perhaps he was wary of those whom he’d dropped in it. Perhaps dear readers are gnashing their teeth now. What a performance about a football  Haven’t they got something else to do? What about Sir’s lesson?
 
Don’t fret. While this 30-second legal wrangle was going on outside the door I was inside the door purring over the geographers, many of whom I’d known as puppies. I admired their height and wisdom and what a pleasant combination the gods of the option blocks had thrown together. I reminded a huge specimen that he’d been foolish in assembly and he had the grace to look sheepish. Books were given out, everyone settled. I didn’t even have time to ask what Zoe was reading before Sir, with a parting shot of ‘This is me being reasonable’ returned to the earth’s crust.
 
We’d had a furious complaint from a parent the previous night about our method of dispensing justice. Why must the innocent be questioned? Outrageous infringement of human rights. Well, we take rights seriously and the innocent must be questioned so that justice is dispensed fairly.  Innocence and justice must be protected and supported so that the community is safe and happy. We actually staff this. We spend money on it so there’s always someone to hear a story, take a statement, and, where possible and reasonable, broker restoration. When a youth comes blundering back into class late with the excuse ‘I had to have an RJ’ that’s what she means. Restorative Justice: a bit of a trade name, but useful none the less.
 
On Tuesday Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector offered reflections on the difference between education and examinations. She talked about the need to offer children real learning and the value of all the grades at GCSE. I’ve been arguing this point for years so I can’t disagree. What she says, however, feels different at the sharper end: fine words are bowdlerised into tick-lists for inspectors. Ofsted have tried to deal with that too. But HMCI can’t address the high-stakes accountability in which a confused system is mired and someone needs to be honest about that. But we can’t until we have a clear view of what education is and isn’t for, and what a civilised and developed democracy actually wants for its young and sets about doing it as fairly as possible. There needs to be a restorative process between the regulator, the department and the profession, which will take time and good will. At least she’s not calling us enemies of promise.
 
(I’ll return to the Ebacc argument in the piece when I can summon the strength. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.)
 
I’m a fan of the American philosopher and jurist John Rawls, insofar as I understand him and in particular, his fundamental principle of justice as fairness. Justice must not only be done, but must have a fair effect. Rawls underpins this with his concept of the veil of ignorance (I’ve have written about this before, sorry dear readers).  Imagine that you were setting up a system in which you have no idea about the characteristics of the people it serves, or your own characteristics. Will it work as well for rich and poor, for all genders, ethnicities, aptitudes? If it won’t, then its not fair. Try again. Try again DfE.
 
There’s a marvellous scene in that film of high art, Nuns on the Run. A hapless policeman lurches into a convent looking for the villains who are having jolly adventures disguised as nuns. After being unable to tell the Superior who or what he’s looking for, or why, she says ‘We’re all very busy here. When you know what you’re looking for, come back, and we’ll tell you if we’ve found it’.
 
It’s like that in education at the moment and all we can do in schools is to get on with the day job and account for ourselves as best we can. I’m trying very hard to persuade educators to think about the purpose of schools and our social role in loco parentis before we think about examinations and assessments. In the meantime, we’ll work hard like year 11 and try to be fair, like Sir and the indoor football.
 
CR
12.10.17
 
 
 
 

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Commentary

20/5/2017

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A dog came to visit me last week before helping on a Duke of Edinburgh trip. We’re pretty comatose at 0730 but as she set off for a lie-down in block one, children appeared from all over running to inspect such a novelty item.  How we enjoy diversion. Then we had two great events in a week, which helped. The first was the dance showcase on Friday, cast of thousands, exuberantly bursting and a real demonstration of a broad curriculum.  The second was a London Schools footie final at Crystal Palace, Tallis U15 v London Nautical (2-2, shared the trophy). Our boys were tenacious and determined, Tallis habits throughout. 

It was a while since I’d been to a football stadium. 39 years. Let me tell you Selhurst Park was considerably more fragrant than Ayresome Park in 1978 and I’d forgotten how diverting others’ commentaries are. A Dad in front of us didn’t let up with focused, specific, very loud tips for the team, each repeated 3 times, throughout the match.  I especially liked ‘get organised early’ and, when he’d yelled himself into a frenzy, ‘settle down’.

I’m much the same now its OFSTED season. Three years is up so the clipboarders could parachute in at any point.  This is how it goes: we wait in quivering panic by the phone every Monday-Thursday lesson 3.  (Anyone else ringing at that point risks castigation as an unfeeling oaf)  When I say quivering, I mean that we remind ourselves to quiver while doing something else. If they ring, they’d tell us they’d be there in the morning at 0800, for a day. In that time they’d check that senior staff know what they’re doing and everyone is competent and able to answer questions intelligently. Entry level, but we do practice. They watch lessons and behaviour and give our safeguarding processes a good going-over, then check that we took them seriously when last they visited. If that goes well, we stay ‘good’. If not, or if we’re better, they invite themselves for a second day. Some of you may have relations a bit like this. Or as Father Dougal said of bishops ‘They come in, they strip the wallpaper, they fumigate the place and then they’re gone’.

Why do Heads moan on about it so much, I hear you cry? There’s nothing wrong with being accountable. There’s nothing Ofsted do that isn’t a reasonable public service, but the conclusions drawn from it have, in recent years, been a bit outré. People lose their jobs after critical comments in reports. Sometimes that may be right, but really?  Inspection, like Radio 2, shouldn’t really be telling you anything you don’t know already. So my zen-like calm, which may just be old age, suffers a ruffle in the middle of the day. Truly, when the call comes, you’ll be among the first to know.  We’ve got the text ready.      

A chum stops me as we enter the building at crack of dawn this morning. ‘Are they coming, or should we stand down?’ Wish I knew. The talk is that they’re behind schedule, but then sometimes they’re bang on. This is literally 50% of what heads talk about when we meet, and I can’t do anything other than issue contradictory instructions: ‘Get organised early! Settle down!’ 

And year 11 had their final full day in school and assembly, shirt-signing etc. All very pleasant and cordial, a song from the Head of Year and a Purple Rain pianist who thanked his 270 peers for ‘accepting me as who I am, so I don’t have to feel ashamed’. 

We had a non-Ofsted visitor a bit ago who was very pleasant. We talked buildings and went for a wander around to see the hordes at work. I’ve picked up a bit of knowledge on this over the years and can have a superficial discussion on BB99, nickel sulphide inclusion and post-torsioned concrete with anyone. I showed him the hall and it was a sight to behold, GCSE Dance warming up with stretches, chairs, bowler hats etc. He hadn’t realised that dance was offered at GCSE or A level and had to assimilate this into his worldview.  I wondered, as I watched the cogs turning, how many others are oblivious to the arts, which may be why they’re not bothered about the cuts. If you don’t know what can be done, how can you regret its passing? The parents at the Dance Showcase knew, and some volunteered to help campaign to protect the arts.

Dance, like PE, reaches the parts other subjects can’t, and it’s physically good for you. Children need exercise and confidence: dance and football both provide it. At a time of obesity, worrying mental health problems among the young and shifting accountability through Ofsted and others, schools will have to balance their budgets by looking closely at anything that falls out of the Ebacc, but none of those involve physical exercise or self-expression. It just doesn’t make any sense. ‘Look where you’re running’ Dad shouted last night. Too right.
          
CR
16.5.17
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Where should you be?

15/5/2016

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John Baldessari - Goya Series, 1997
​I have nothing to say on the Secretary of State’s academy announcements, other than that the government must be worried about the EU referendum. I am, literally, speechless.

Readers may be interested to know that sarcasm’s largely died out in schools, along with ranting. We’ve moved on from the idea that reducing a child to tears is a sensible way of expressing authority, and shouting never really accomplished much. That being said, I don’t object to the occasional shout in the right place. Dangerous foolishness, for example, or egregious fannying-about-on-the-yard-when-there’s-a-teacher-waiting-for-you need a quick fix, and a volume shock can expedite perfection.

Rhetoric, however, is alive and well in school in its basest form, the Question Obvious. Teachers love rhetorical questions more than tea or stationery. We question like champs inside our classrooms but like chumps on yard duty or in a corridor. Why are you late?  Why are you talking?  Where is your homework? Where are the rest of the class? What do you mean by…..?  How am I supposed to…..?  Am I a mind reader? Do I look like a fool? The only answer a child can reasonably bank on is ‘sorry’, because truths would bring the world down.  Because I love my bed. Because I think I love this girl. I really don’t know. I really don’t care. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Search me. I hope not. What does a fool look like? ​

The best is the existential demand repeated a thousand times a day: where should you be? Let me set the scene. A child is found in an unauthorised place (in our world where authorisation and unauthorisation change according to time). ​

​
He may be at a watering hole or moseying along a corridor.  She may be lurking outside an office or emerging from the loo. Sensible forensics would require a thorough investigation: where he or she has been, why, how long and on whose say-so. It’s much quicker to invoke the future. Where should you be?

Again, a range of answers: maths, reception, the Library, my Head of Year, art. Those enable a youth to pass on, with just a quickly then, shooing motion or chop chop.  Actual dreams are discouraged:  somewhere warmer than this, in my bed, on holiday, at the chicken shop, with my luurrve would be rewarded with a personal escort to a destination of the escort’s choice and an unceremonious posting through a classroom door with another question: ‘This one of yours, Miss?’

But where should they be? Somewhere happy, somewhere safe. Somewhere people know them and love them. Somewhere the people are reliable and human.  Somewhere you can look out of the window when you’re 11 and watch the 16-year-old gods pass by. Somewhere where they listen, somewhere where they care.  Somewhere taxpayer’s money is spent wisely and effectively. Somewhere you can learn how to measure things in the sun with your LSA. Somewhere you can learn things, somewhere you can discover things. Somewhere your geography teacher will show you what’s under the drain cover. Somewhere where they’ll smile at you. Somewhere where they’ll teach you how to live, how to behave, how to create a somewhere that’s better for the next generation. Somewhere they don’t treat you like a fool, or a criminal. Somewhere they won’t judge by externals.
Questioning lasts all day. Sir appears in my room with a flourish and a bright idea about a marquee: what do they cost? He’s joined by another who claims to have solved two problems: is this ok? A third poses a conundrum: am I right? A fourth, however, issues a communique: news of a Pride Drive at OFSTED from a conference in town. Inspectors don’t like lippy children, untidy classrooms, scruffy (tie-less) uniforms.  Who does? Children should learn how to be friendly and confident. Classrooms should be physically and emotionally orderly. Uniforms, duh, should be worn as designed. But having a joke with a teacher isn’t lip, having a lot of stuff out at once in a lesson isn’t untidiness and wearing a polo shirt isn’t a personal affront to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector. I spoke at a Policy Exchange gig this week and there was barely a tie in the room. Where’s the research behind these time wasting-personal prejudices? 

Education policy is littered with these non sequiturs: a range of rhetorical questions present themselves. Who are they kidding? What are they on? Why don’t they understand? We’d do well to stick to ours: where should you be, child?  Somewhere better than this.
 
CR
11.5.16
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