Category: Optimism

96 Facts in History Paper 2

8/6/2023

Carrying parsnip soup through the canteen door I became tangled in historians seeking last-minute verification. What was the Marshall Plan? When was the raid on Cadiz? Thankfully Ms History was at the ready with perfect short answers, which is how I know about the 96 facts. The human brain’s a mysterious thing so while most of the youths will have forgotten 90 of them by now, Ms knows ‘em all. ‘She’s like a machine’.

Hmm. Remaining stoical and optimistic means I avoid thinking about some stuff, from US politics to an unnerving dream about a giant thistle in a car. I’ve tried to ignore Artificial Intelligence thus: too technical, potentially boring and located somewhere in the future. But on a train down France last week I read a leader in the FT and, crikey, I’m thinking of little else. In fact, I apologise for not bothering you about this before.

While the Internet, mobile phones and social media bemused schools in their time, generative artificial intelligence knocks them into a cocked hat. Humanity’s response will shape the future and struth, schools should be steadily panicking about this without delay.

Forgive me if you’re already expert on this generative AI growing like Japanese knotweed. Building on published data, information, books, journals, wikis and social media it literally predicts the next word on any subject. This has mega-implications not just for learning, but the development of thinking citizens. And while folks are happily speculating on the drudge-work it’ll take off us, I’m captivated by two serious problems.

AI can fabricate facts and make up links and references. These ‘hallucinations’ or ‘confabulations’ give plausible-sounding falsehoods which are then repeated and become part of what people think is true.

Second, AI builds on what we already know, so stuff we’re trying to eradicate – the colonial past, misogyny, whether Joe Biden won the election or not – repeat endlessly. It’s not a tool designed to change the world for the better.

A relief, then, that the doughty Department for Education has produced a position statement. A bit bland, maybe, but usefully covering stuff about AI opportunities and challenges, exam malpractice, data protection, cyber security, protecting students from harmful content and potentially freeing up teacher time.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. I like a nicely-turned phrase in a formal document and the following gripped my by the throat. The DfE note that AI

content they produce is not always accurate or appropriate as it has limited regard for truth and can output biased information.
is not a substitute for having knowledge in long-term memory
can make written tasks quicker and easier but cannot replace the judgement and deep subject knowledge of a human expert. It is more important than ever that our education system ensures pupils acquire knowledge, expertise and intellectual capability.
can produce fluent and convincing responses to user prompts [but] the content produced can be factually inaccurate. Students need foundational knowledge and skills to discern and judge the accuracy and appropriateness of information, so a knowledge-rich curriculum, is therefore all the more important.
can create believable content of all kinds
content may seem more authoritative and believable

And there’s an Office for AI squirreling away within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. You’ve got to ask – who’s feeding it? Do they know it’s there?

Thank you, Secretary of State. Here are what’s on my mind, though.

Schools have to be committed to the highest standards of knowledge, quality scholarship and truth as AI develops, to avoid misinformation taking root in teaching and learning.
This is particularly important when a crippling teacher shortage leaves isolated, young or unsupported teachers creating lessons content alone (not at Tallis). Especially those misled by DfE trends such as the sponsoring of online lessons through Oak National Academy. If you get used to downloading off-the-peg lessons, you’ll need to check the facts.
Students of course need to learn about and work with AI, but they also need to understand its dangers and the debilitatingly skewing effect that sustained falsehood has on human society. We’re already seeing this.
The ridiculously named ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ (what other sort is there?) is insufficient protection. As long as schools are cheaply assessed by exam results and snapshot inspections, some schools still face a perverse incentive to cover large amounts of knowledge superficially. Combined with a serious teacher shortage, the temptations of AI pose a real risk to the integrity of what children are being taught.
Young people devote HUGE portions of their waking hours to AI-generated content. Adults, teachers and policy-makers need to understand and work very hard to bridge significant generational differences.
Exams may be OK while they remain as memory tests fulfilled in handwriting in an exam room. Unconsidered absorption of AI information, though, is a risk to independent student learning. Coursework becomes a nightmare and mechanised marking – cheaper for the commercial exam boards - could install hallucinations at the heart of knowledge. However, our examination system’s glued to university entrance, so the academy needs to think about this. Which it is.

So, what to do? At Tallis we’re writing a developing policy and thinking about the big issues. As the leader in the Financial Times 27.5.23 said:

Every technology opens exciting new frontiers that must be responsibly explored. But as recent history has shown, the excitement must be accompanied by caution over the risk of misinformation and the corruption of the truth.

Blimey. Anything but dull, then. Do tell me what you think.

CR
7.6.23

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The Shock of the New

7/9/2022

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Today’s the day when we get year 7 and year 12 into school. They’ve made a good start – quiet, cheerful and as efficient as young people get. Year 7’s bags are gleamingly clean, their turquoise polos shine in the sun and new shoes of all stiffnesses doing well so far.

We have over 400 year 12s and every one of them has agonised over their outfit so they’re a good-looking bunch. Why so many? Well, London results stayed high so lots of children met the entry requirements and we try to offer them places. Enrolment took all day and – first come, first served – caused some upset. We’ll think about another way of doing it but it's hard to see what’s fairest.

They can at least eat quickly. Year 7 do take their time with lunch: what with the choice, the explaining, the thumbprints and account top-ups. That’s OK today, but from tomorrow there’ll be 540 others in the same space for lunch desperate for food and familiar with the system. We’ll start year 7 early for a while so that they get fed while being gradually speeded up. One young chap in the queue today spotted a fire alarm point’s protective cover saying ‘LIFT HERE’. Being an orderly soul, he did and was promptly swooped upon in a neat pincher by two chaps offering advice. He may not do it again. A life lesson learned: not all instructions are for you.

As I write, footballs and skipping ropes are being offered in a non-gendered manner and a request for a couple of big chess sets made. How big? Bring-your-own-horse big? Everyone’s telling me that year 7 look older and bigger than usual but I hadn’t spotted it. I start from a pretty low level in any case. Height-wise. It’s not that I have low standards about how tall eleven-year olds should be.

Oh, all right then, the new PM. Well – she’s worked up through local democracy, she was on Greenwich council, she lives locally and she went to a comprehensive school in Leeds. All these are positive. She’s not a public schoolboy and that certainly is. She went to Oxford from Roundhay School and yet said that it had low expectations? Hmm. I once had a conversation with a Deputy Head Girl in another school. She’d got top grades and one of the university hot tickets, but gave the school satisfactory grades for how they’d supported her. Frankly, they’d bent over backwards but I wasn’t worried: young people are naturally solipsistic. You just hope that hindsight develops a clearer picture over the years. Perhaps the new PM can’t unsay things. Is that a good thing?

Today’s speech did, however, stick a couple of things in my itchy old ears. Boris Johnson, she said, was admired from Kyiv to Carlisle. Rapturous applause was slightly delayed, perhaps because it had to be relayed from Kyiv at a time when they’ve other things to think about. Then she asserted that the Conservative Party is the greatest political party on earth, which they applauded more sharply. Really? Were they breathlessly awaiting the 1922 committee verdict across the continents and oceans of the planet? And even if it were, pulling back on climate crisis measures should dent that claim a little? Or is there greatness yet to unleash, unseen in my lifetime so far? Excellent news if so.

Ms Truss is my 13th PM, but that’s not her fault. Democracy is rooted in optimism so we always hope for the best. That’s what I’ll tell the young when I’m let loose on assemblies next week: we do the best of things in the worst of times and hope in the face of adversity. That’ll be after I’ve told the staff to keep their fears about heating and food bills to themselves. Tallis will be warm enough, and the children fed every day. The safe boundary around school will be maintained and we will proceed calmly and reliably as the year goes by and the outside world buffets itself to bits.

Year 12 will be set loose upon the world in 2024, old enough to vote. The eleven-year olds in year 7 have only lived under one kind of government. The Financial Times predicts a change for the better coming soon. I hope they’re right.

But back to now. Our results were good this summer and we’ve been re-awarded our Artsmark Platinum status. Sometimes being at Tallis is like being at the greatest party in the world. Happy New Year!

CR
5.9.22

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Best laid plans

23/1/2021

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Mr Williamson, please listen to me.

I’ve been worried about your health for a year now and dear me, you’ve had a bad week. Allow me to help your reflections.

Let me deal with the elephant not so much in the room as in your face yesterday, Mr P Morgan of the telly. I wasn’t allowed to watch ITV as a child and old habits die hard, and the man represents the kind of newspapers I don’t allow in the house. Having properly established myself as a snob of the worst kind, I might add that Morgan, P. supported and sympathetically interviewed the former President of the USA several times, only at the very end referring to him in terms both appropriate and unrepeatable. Being interviewed by such a one must be an unpleasant experience. Shudder.

But what were you thinking? You can’t be oblivious to the furore surrounding your continuing as top dog at Sanctuary Buildings. You must know that there is general assent to the proposition that a dishwasher or astute turnip would be a better Secretary of State. You must have expected the question? You surely had an answer prepared? ‘No, the PM has not asked for my resignation and loves me with all his generous heart’ or ‘Yes, the PM has asked for my resignation but I’ve barricaded Great Smith Street at both ends’ or ‘Yes, I’m keen to resign as soon as a I can find a pen’ or ‘No, as the Kingpin in a palace coup I expect to be PM by Candlemas and you’ll be first against the wall’. Surely any of the above would have been better than obliviously droning about what’s been allegedly achieved. At the very least, you could have said ‘I’ve been precious little use to child nor beast so far but look at the size of my consultation document’.

Piers Morgan, sadly, may not have read it. Had he done so he might have scoffed at the 64 questions. He might even have raised a sclerotic eyebrow at the sentence (p9) ‘That would put [teachers] in an impossible position, as they would be required to imagine a situation that had not happened’. If either of you had ever taught year 9 on a wet Wednesday in November you’d know that imagining things that hadn’t happened is a pre-requisite for good behaviour management.

He might even have suspected that you were about to implode after a sudden change of mindset to one which includes trusting teachers’ judgments. Upon which matter, do you take us for fools?

‘Centre Assessed Grades’ worked pretty well eventually last year. It gave the correct impression that there was a standard centrally-directed process which schools followed. ‘Teacher Assessed Grades’ knowingly shifts the emphasis. It's reasonable to assume that you hope that all the doodah that descended on you last year when you ploughed on with an algorithm you’d been told wouldn’t work might this year be spread upon the teachers of the nation.

Why do I think this? Because I’m ancient and recognise treachery when it bares its teeth at me. It is quite a theme of the document. Let’s look at the proposal for mini-exams. First, it is optimistic to assert that all young people are disappointed by not being able to take exams. Some of them will but many of them won’t. Me, I’d have loved not having to take exams. Second, the proposal of exam-board-issued tests which teachers mark, have standardised by the board and include in the final grade by early July is boggling. Children in different places have missed different amounts of work taught in different orders, so how many papers will be available? How many exam board moderators are there? Are Ofsted inspectors going to be repurposed? What are you thinking?

Ah, but the penny drops, Mr Williamson, again and again. Here’s a fact not in the document: exam boards are not only going to charge for whatever they do this year but they’re going to put their prices up while reducing their service as we mark the things ourselves. For the big businesses that, shockingly, run our formerly independent examination system this is a scheme to print money. Reduce output and accountability while increasing profit. Kerching and thank you, Secretary of State.

However, some Headteachers whom I respect are convinced that exams are the only fair way to judge children, and that teacher assessment does a disservice to disadvantaged children because teachers are prejudiced in some way against them. I think they are wrong. Disadvantaged children are disadvantaged by poverty. If they had space to work at home, parents with secure jobs, good food on the table and a realistic hope of modest security in adult life they would do better. It is fallacious to assert that exams can mitigate disadvantage. This, too, is not teachers’ fault.

Mr Williamson, I was myself grilled on both sides at quite a temperature this week. I do try to sympathise. Although, on reflection, perhaps I could spend my time better.

It's nearly Burns’ Night and I do love auld Rabbie. I’ve procured haggis and tartan napkins, other ingredients being part of daily rations chez Roberts. One of Burns’s biographers observed that he appeared to live his rackety life in the confident expectation of posterity’s attention. You could learn from that. You could certainly learn that the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley and perhaps decide to lay them in collaboration with people who know the terrain.

I think you should think hard before appearing on any more telly. Actually, I just think you should think hard. As Burns remarks

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
Yours, at the end of my tether,

CR
22.1.21

PS A correspondent has asked me to make good on my promise to comment on the National Tutoring Programme. Next week, dear readers.

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Befogged

28/11/2020

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It was foggy when I set off this morning but the streetlights were pretty and the great illuminated buses big enough to see. By the time me and my bicycle got onto to Blackheath it was pitch black. I said ooh-er out loud a few times and hoped that the cross guy who mutters wouldn’t appear for me to run over.

Fog and early darkness always remind me of a conversation in a Head’s office on the edge of Sunderland at the end of a day, when the dark sky was all-enveloping. We talked about what it must have been like in mediaeval times, with the same sky, no lights, just the cold and the hills, and eventually, to the west, Durham Cathedral appearing looming above the city as if it had descended directly from heaven.

Safely indoors, the clock ticked round to year 11 assembly: Instructions for Mock Exams. These will be important but we don’t know how important. I noted with interest that the Queen of the Mocks referred to the pre-exam gathering place as the Green Canteen. This is catching on, though I call it the Dining Room and one of the chaps on the top floor calls it the Bistro. It doesn’t matter.

The curriculum we offer does matter, which may lie behind the continually condescending tone of this week’s post-lockdown briefing from the DfE. While announcing a pay freeze for teachers and public spending cuts that will make learning re-stabilisation harder, they remind us of the blindingly obvious: I condense

the curriculum must remain broad and ambitious
remote education must be high-quality and safe,
schools should plan on the basis of the educational needs of pupils.

Duh. They wrote this in July and trot it out every time. It was annoying then and gets more annoying the harder it is to keep schools going and offer a curriculum that is the same for everyone, the necessary condition for an exam-based system. The tone lacks respect, treating us as idiots.

Which appears to be the Home Secretary’s preferred register, manifesting itself ‘in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing. This may not be done intentionally to cause upset, but that has been the effect on some individuals’.

And later in Alex Allen’s belatedly published independent advice ‘Her approach on occasions has amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals.’

And then! ‘There is no evidence that she was aware of the impact of her behaviour and no feedback was given to her at the time………I note the finding of different and more positive behaviour since these issues were raised with her.’

Yet she remains, as the PM has insisted that the wagons circle around ‘the Pritster’.

I am in a Blackheath cycling fog about this and mediaeval darkness has descended on my comprehension. How can someone of such eminence, the Home Secretary, have to have bullying pointed out to her? How can it ever be right to shout and swear at colleagues, especially those whom one is expected to lead? How can she command any respect?

I have long clung to the existence of the Committee for Standards in Public Life as a guarantor of standards of conduct for public officials, from the PM down to lowly ole me. The ‘Nolan Principles’ of accountability, selflessness, honesty, objectivity, openness, integrity and leadership have bound us all since 1994. The current Chair spoke on 12 November and said:

‘The bullying allegations made against the Home Secretary were investigated by the Cabinet Office but the outcome of that investigation has not been published though completed some months ago…..this does not build confidence in the accountability of government.’

He goes on, further, to talk about cronyism in appointments and the awarding of public contracts, the firing of civil servants when the resignation of a minister would have been correct, the avoiding of parliamentary scrutiny by media announcements and the use of ‘just vote us out if you don’t like us’ as a way of brass-necking wrong behaviour.

The system depends on everyone choosing to do right, Evans says. High public standards rely on the individual. ‘It remains that case that in politics, public service and business, that ethical standards are first and foremost a matter of personal responsibility.’ because 'few systems are sufficiently robust to constrain those who would deliberately undermine them’.

This is a dense area and the argument is nuanced. We are not living in a post-Nolan world nor should any of us wish to. We want high standards of conduct in our politicians because we want them to be good people determined to do the best for their constituents. We don’t want to be saddled with people who, as educated adults, have to be told how to behave. We want government to be built on a foundation of goodness and altruism, not self-interest and showing-off. We expect it of children and ourselves and we have a civic right to expect it of our government.

When we devised the national Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2016-18 we realised that Nolan wasn’t enough, but we needed clear personal virtues to underpin all of our actions. We therefore also committed ourselves to trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We check our own behaviour to make sure it sets the right example to children, and to other adults. This enlightenment didn’t descend from a mediaeval heave, we worked at it.

The PM is lost in a fog of his own obfuscation. He has made too many personal mistakes to want to shine the Nolan spotlight on colleagues. He looks as though he can’t tell right from wrong and worse, that he doesn’t care. Our children deserve better than this.

CR 27.11.20

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One Yorkshireman

16/2/2019

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Our dining room’s a funny shape. I said this to a visiting Head and he got a bit shirty, giving me the full Four Yorkshiremen (he was from Harrogate). At least you’ve got a dining room, at least it’s a decent size, at least it’s joined on to the school, at least it’s on planet earth, not full of dung and so on, luxury. All true, but it’s still longways on with no thought given to the need to queue.

In cold weather this glorious green space – which only one person ever calls the Tallis Bistro – is quite the place to be. As someone who turned never-going-outside-in-cold-weather into an art form in my own schooldays way north of Harrogate I have every sympathy with the inmates. That doesn’t extend to sympathy with shoving and other uncivilised behaviour when there are a hundred or so more souls than usual indoors who may not be entirely occupied with nutritious eating. In order to prevent annoying clumping we’ve therefore removed most of the pundit chairs at the high benches. This caused a wave of concern among little chaps who like to keep an eye on the scraps for Sir’s dog and the ganneting teachers around the plates trolley, so we saved a couple for them.

Children are creatures of habit, and those habits, good or bad, are largely formed by the adults around them. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to assume the mantle of adult citizenship and everything the adults in schools do is scrutinised by young people, both the what and the how. Those teachers aren’t just modelling eating standing up while using a knife and fork properly, but food choices, friendly conversation and eyes in the back of their heads.

And so much more. We had a governor visit to scrutinise how we spend our Pupil Premium funding and whether it is having any impact. PP money is meant to improve the educational experience and therefore outcomes of children who meet one of a series of disadvantage indicators. We get about £400k a year, so it’s important to our (£13m pa) budget. We have to account for what we spend it on and the statutory document is available on the website here. (Just before you get too excited about it, PP was a Coalition hat put on money already in the system, so the idea that schools had the leisure to spend it on anything new and innovative was always a bit of a stretch.)

We spend a lot of our PP money on our ‘first class’ Pastoral Welfare Team, who wear out their sturdy shoes supporting behaviour management. Governors asked some PP-attracting children about this: did they think this was a good thing? Oh yes, yes indeed.

This is interesting, money spent on adults who spend all their time talking to children about how to behave is seen as an obvious good by the children. They’re not just modelling Tallis Character but the values and virtues of the good life, how to be honest, fair, respectful, kind and optimistic. The children see that in adults other than teachers (who are a breed apart and tend to go on about this kind of stuff) personal virtue, taking responsibility for your actions, is important.

I’m thinking about this on a national scale. The Ethical Leadership Commission I wrote about in June launched its report in January and since them we’ve had quite a bit of publicity. Our thoughts aren’t revolutionary, but fundamental. Children will only learn how to behave well if adults behave well. Adults running schools have to put this above all other structural considerations. Fancy outcomes or badges can’t be got at the price of poor behaviour. We have to do right, or do another job.

The Ethical Leadership Commission now has a Framework set of words, a pathfinder programme which 200 schools have already signed up to, some developing work in teacher and leader training and a new Ethics Committee and open forum at the Chartered College of Teaching. Tallis’s governors are pathfinders. It's slightly terrifying work: there’s a real risk in sticking your dishevelled head above the parapet and saying ‘we should behave as good role models for children’. Everyone’s made mistakes, but the real human skill is reflection and change, in a spirit of humility. I’ve written a book concurrently too, but that’s me ranting, not the measured tones of the great and good commissioners.

Reflecting on our own behaviour doesn’t mean introversion or compliance with injustice. So much school policy in the last 20 years has danced around the elephant of privilege guarding the powerful. Ring-fencing money to support disadvantaged children is good, but it’s an Elastoplast on inequality. Our responsibility as good adults isn’t just as models of good character. Society should be fair and children’s lives not blighted by poverty and struggle. Those who have never needed any funding to give them a leg-up, or who have never known want, or who exist only within a bubble of other privileged people undermine the fair chances of the many by passing power around among themselves. Good people should be outraged abut this.

I’m reading (myself obvs, matchless prose, but also) Friedman and Laurison’s The Class Ceiling. They observe:

...when the following wind of privilege is misread as merit, the inequalities that result are legitimised. This leads those who have been fortunate to believe that they earned it on their own, and those who have been less fortunate to blame themselves.

Dr King dreamed that one day all children would be judged not on the colour of their skin but the content of their character. While we use our disadvantage funding to give love and lasting life-lessons, we mustn’t forget three of the virtues of ethical leadership. Our children need justice so they all may lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives. Adults need courage to speak out in the interests of all children. We all need optimism, to understand the injustices we face and to change the world for the better.

CR
St Valentine’s Day 2019

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Arrested on a train

5/10/2018

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I was minding my own business on the jolly old Southeastern into London Bridge when my attention was arrested by a poster advertising a grammar school served by the same locomotive. It asked rather loudly, ‘HAVE YOU JUST BEEN DEEMED SELECTIVE BY BEXLEY’S 11+ TEST?’

Immune to the concerns of other passengers I approached and photographed this shameless assault on language and then asked everyone on the mothership what it meant. I don’t allow that kind of talk at Tallis so no one knew. Consulting the ether, apparently, ‘deemed selective’ is the status a child attains who has passed the 11+. Charming.
I’m trying to keep up with the reading so I’ve already told you about Robert Verkaik and Melissa Benn this year. Now I’m going to tell you about another bonza tome, Miseducation : inequality, education and the working classes by Cambridge and LSE Emeritus Professor Diane Reay. Brought up on the Derbyshire coalfield, she taught in London primary schools for 20 years, so she knows a thing or two. It’s very readable.

Her first chapter, Why can’t education compensate for society? sets out her thesis. Both class and poverty have always distanced working class children from education, but recent fads and interventions have made this worse, not better.

Focusing on test scores as a measure of school quality has a particularly dangerous effect on schools which serve largely poor communities. Those pressures – and their leaders’ choices - lead to narrowed curriculums and obsessive teaching-to-the-test largely unknown by more advantaged children whose teachers are more confident about results.

Schools serving poorer communities have a majority of young and inexperienced teachers, committed and determined but rarely from similar backgrounds to the children. They may have been skimpily trained on programmes which stress the adoption of particular practices (fancy uniform, zero tolerance) said to be modelled on the public schools, but which rarely exist there.

Schools justify these hideous proxies because they say they need to re-shape children’s character and outlook in order for them to succeed. Some go further, saying that children from ‘chaotic’ homes need order and structure in school to be able to free themselves from the lives their parents lead. Some – fee-paying as well as and normal schools – equate parental worth with cars and holidays, a ‘nice house’.

In this way, loose talk about social mobility becomes a frontal assault on the parenting of those trapped in poverty. ‘This education will give you a good life, better than your parents’. Ergo, your parents are deficient, shameful, they have let you down. Reay uses a clear phrase here, describing ‘shame as the darker side of optimism’. Optimism is expected in school, or at least its functional twin, aspiration. Optimism is natural to young people despite teenage gloom. Aspiration is more specific, always linked to hard work, good exam results and university entry. In this way, social mobility is outsourced to the child: if he isn’t sufficiently aspirational he throws away his chance of escaping poverty. It’s his fault.

In a chapter called Class Feeling: troubling the soul and preying on the psyche’ Reay quotes from extensive interviews with children in primary schools where they define themselves by their grades, where they ‘know’ that they’ll have a ‘bad life’ if they get a ‘bad score’. This focus on grades above all, she says, has ‘shifted children’s self-identification as learners’. They are their grades, not their efforts and their insights. If grades are bad, they must be bad, and unworthy of escaping poverty.

While advantaged children also suffer from soul-destroying commodification by potential exam results, they do not have to engage in ‘rational computation’ in order to meet the goals that best suit their interests. If you ‘know’ that you will go to Oxford (Cambridge, St Andrew’s, Durham, Imperial or wherever) because that’s where people like you always go, you don’t have to think much about it. Everything about your life has readied you to get in. You are fine being yourself, you don’t have to learn to become someone else. Oh, and personal private tutoring is built into the family budget.

So, not only do many poor children go to schools where the teacher shortage really bites, but some of the newly-popular ways of running schools are deliberately framed as places where children have to disown their parents. From a position of poverty (30% of all children now), they are expected to value material success as an output of education which, if they fail, is their fault for not aiming high enough. While current policy claims to try to raise working-class achievement, by its approach and funding it actually ensures that failure is firmly located in the working class. If you remain working class like your parents, you are a failure. What kind of madness is this?
Uninformed madness. 'A plethora of spectacular educational irrelevancies such as standards, testing regimes, raising attainment and achievement levels, league tables, school choice, academies and charter schools, performativities and managerialism, image and impression management, academic/vocational streaming, punitive naming and shaming strategies and the rhetoric of school improvement and school effectiveness have obscured the crucial importance of social class to educational success.’

What does work? Reay says: collaboration rather than setting and streaming. Intense personal learning relationships between teacher and child that empower students as ‘knowers’. Passionate engagement, original thought. And perhaps working towards an answer to the question ‘why English education has never embraced approaches that work and adopts those that don’t?’ Grammar schools, anyone? Why bother with the 11+ test? The evidence shows that the ‘deemed selective’ child was actually selected much earlier.

Anyway, the reason I was on the train to start with was to go on the Worth Less? school funding march. We were, as the organisers said, ‘relentlessly reasonable’ and have carried on being so this week as the sheer effrontery of the DFE claim about funding has been systematically unpicked and exposed as shameless falsehood. The UK Statistics Authority is calling it in for investigation, so all power to their spreadsheets and swivel chairs (which is how I picture them).

I was directing traffic and some year 8 boys passed me. One said to the other ‘I’m praying for something good to come out of it’. Who knows what that problem was, but Amen to that.

CR
4.10.18

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The long night and icy dew

3/12/2016

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My year 9 philosopher berthed alongside near the memorial garden. Regular readers will recall her specialism is calibrating bleakness. Everyone’s terrible, she declared, but all I could see was some bottle-flipping, irritating in itself, but possibly permissible at lunchtime in this far corner of planet Tallis. It’ll end in insults and chasing, she foretold, as two shrieked past. I thanked her kindly and went to stick my nose into a group of year 11 boys who were randomly cheering, just to annoy. Second lunchtime, Thursday, December, week 13 of 39.

We travel in darkness at this time of year so the short days take on a sort of flicker-book illuminated urgency. We rush about doing and talking constantly, then it goes dark again and we wait for reanimation in the morning light. Time telescopes once you get to December and the pull of the exams gets stronger. Nothing’s new anymore and we’re starting to feel tired, especially year 7s unused to the distances and the sheer physical demand of secondary. Diversion is welcome.

Oblivious in my lair two weeks ago I was surprised to hear and feel a bang like the trump of doom. I rushed to the window and saw the smaller lunchers jump a bit, look around for entertainment, not find it and resume annoying each other. I put my whistle on for protection, just in case the end of the world needed whistling in, jammed hands in pockets and strolled (never run towards potential disaster in school for fear of gathering a crowd) downstairs to find - nothing. Business Director, usually clued up, was also missing, presumably vaporised in the boom. It took some time for her and I to stop calmly chasing each other and eventually coincide in block 5. The bang was, of course, that chemical, the one that caused all the trouble somewhere else (I’m not a chemist). Anyway, Science found it, told Business, who rang 999. By the time she got from her office to reception – admittedly a bit of a trek through a lot of doors – to warn of imminent constabulary, the Bomb Squad, good grief, had arrived. Minutes later a hole was dug on the back field, the offending stuff carried carefully to it and then exploded safely at a distance. 15 minutes from call to bang.

Musing over the sequence of events on the stairs we happened upon some year 10s, fresh from a triumphant Talent Show production with Barclays mentors the previous night, and deranged with curiosity. They questioned me closely and found me wanting. One tossed his curls: I’m going to ask Sir about this. Thank the lord for Sir, who could explain the bang without using a frankly unsatisfactory phrase to hear from a headteacher ‘it was stuff that might explode’. What isn’t?

Children need the world interpreting for them. Not everyone heard the bang, so we could have ignored it, but we didn’t. Science explained it on Monday and there was general discussion and wry amusement.

Later that week, another explanation, another explosive issue. This time it was sexual and relationship danger with a fabulous theatre company doing Chelsea’s Choice. Four actors slipping in and out of two or three roles each telling of a terrifying slide into abuse and desperation. When each scene ended with review by the actors of the play within the play the audience visibly relaxed. Some apprehensively chewed their jumpers, or their neighbours’ jumpers. Girls held hands. Rapturous applause and a great q and a at the end. Fifteen-year-olds think they’ll never make mistakes, but I’m old and I know that they will, and their optimism is heartbreaking.

Year 9 saw it before lunch, brilliantly, year 10 after lunch. Well. Let me just say that they certainly benefited from the show but also from the bonus opportunity of 20 minutes lining-up-and-entering-the-hall-in-silence practice while we reinstalled a piece of operational software that must have been dislodged by the bang.

This darkness takes me back to an Advent 37 years ago, on the Strand when I first heard Geoffrey Hill’s poem that begins:

What is there in my heart that you should sue
so fiercely for its love? What kind of care
brings you as though a stranger to my door
through the long night and in the icy dew
seeking the heart that will not harbour you..?

We throw ourselves at the education of the young in the hope that some of it sticks. There’s so much to tell them and we have to get it through the noisy clamour of living, the insults and chasing, the cheering as well as the darkness, just to make them safe for life. What is there in their hearts for which we sue so urgently? The flickering urgency that illuminates our days, the best hope for a better world.

CR
1.12.16

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Ask for Angela

4/11/2016

1 Comment

Pardon me for mentioning it but I was in the loo of the Wig and Mitre in Lincoln on All Saints Day when I saw the Ask for Angela poster and thought that’s a damn good idea. If you've missed this – and I’m not often up with the zeitgeist – this is a dating safety genius from Lincolnshire County Council. The little posters say something like if your date’s not going well and you're worried about your safety, if you think there’s something a bit weird, go to bar and ask for Angela. The staff will know what you mean and will quietly get you out and whisked off to a safe place of your choosing. Angela the guardian angel, obviously.

Angela replicates for adults the safety nets we know are vital for children. From Childline to the NSPCC, from the trusted Form Tutor to the kindly dinner lady, we expect a worried child to be comforted and protected. We do it all the time. I was on the gate this week and a small person presented himself. It was Tuesday, moved house on Monday and he couldn't remember how to get home. That's a pretty panicky place to be for an 11 year old so we rushed to Reception where Miss even extracted a smile from the sobbing lost soul as she made the necessary calls. Everyone needs an angel when they're in trouble, someone who'll reach out into the hostile world and map you to safety.

We've entertained another Civil Servant from the DfE this week as part of our mission to change the world for the better. He did three days, glued first to a friendly child and then a range of impossible jobs so he could see what we do to protect our communities from political whim. He admitted on arrival (it was a good job l warmed to him) to expecting a big city comprehensive to be a bit chaotic but was bowled over by our calm and happy vibe. He saw English, maths, art, geography, break and lunch duty, staff room life,timetable, data, inclusion, deaf support, the dreaded IER and even did some speed networking for the Year 10 careers gig. He liked the warmth and safety that he felt, and the care he saw in action. He also saw the budget. And what the future looks like.

But we talked about teacher retention and what to do to restock the classroom for the longer term, and stop teachers bailing out. I went off on one as per about intelligent accountability, assessment expectations and unscrupulous school leaders wringing the life out of young teachers but we also talked about the effect of the myriad routes into teaching and the ethical underpinnings of the profession. Except I called it a service, because I think that helps. Decentralised recruitment and training needs really tight principles and explicit expectations if we're to preserve something that was once taken for granted. Kindness, optimism, scholarship (let alone tea and queuing) don’t survive accidentally. Old git, moi?

Which seamlessly segues into part one of a limited series entitled Reasons We Might Miss Michael Willshaw. Himself talked eloquently this week about schools being the glue of a cohesive society which any selection interference will wreck. Go to it, Sir! All power to your irritating elbow! Unfortunately he also blamed local colleagues for not preventing a nasty fight out of hours recently. A tad unjust: these things are the devil to manage and he just wasn't there. Still, one out of two ain’t bad.

We had Year 11 maths and English night on this week and Year 10 careers speed networking with 40 volunteers. Wednesday night was the wonderful Shakespeare Schools Festival at the Greenwich Theatre, complete with an authentically Shakespearean audience, where our young people were slick and witty, Puck on a skateboard, top marks for Bottom. The Dream lives on.

Life should be better than it is for a lot of people. Women ought not to fear for their safety when they're on a date. Everyone should look out for one another and any of us should feel able to ask for help. Our Tallis community isn't perfect, but it’s characterised by genuine warmth not based on a spurious grit ‘n' resilience tick list. Our children have the right to expect kindness and a helping hand when they leave us, and throughout their lives. I'd be proud to think one of them thought up Ask for Angela. #NO MORE.

CR
4.11.16

1 Comment

EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

96 Facts in History Paper 2

The Shock of the New

Best laid plans

Befogged

One Yorkshireman

Arrested on a train

The long night and icy dew

Ask for Angela

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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