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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Frolics and Detours

3/5/2022

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Picture
I am indebted in this blog to Paul Muldoon’s volume of poetry of the same title, and, in particular, his 1916: the Eoghan Rua Variations. In it, he discusses the contrary nature of the longevity of English power in Ireland. Caesar and Alexander fell, so why not the English? Well worth a read.
Faber London 2019 ISBN 978-0-571-35499-8.
​
Now the world’s been brought low.  The wind’s heavy with soot.
Alexander and Caesar. All their retinue.
We’ve seen Tara buried in grass, Troy trampled underfoot.
The English? Their days are numbered too’
​

Some people are a pundit’s gift. Social Mobility Chair Katherine Birbalsingh is a worthy successor to  Lord Agnew and Gavin Williamson in these Pulitzer-worthy pieces. You’ll recall that I heard her say (to a thousand school leaders) that she didn’t know what the Social Mobility Commission was doing? This week she’s said that she has no idea how DfE White Paper GCSE targets can be met, and that fewer girls choose physics because “physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy……they don’t like it. There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do.” This she backs up fully with detailed evidence: “The research generally … just says that’s a natural thing….I don’t think there’s anything external.” Surely her days are numbered?
 
As the Grauniad said, this prompted anger from leading scientists.
 
‘Dame Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics and master of Churchill College, Cambridge, said the comments were “terrifying” and “quite damaging” and questioned to which research Birbalsingh was referring in suggesting that girls had an intrinsic lack of appetite for maths and physics.
 
Dr Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who campaigns for equality in science, said: “I honestly can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. It’s patronising, it’s infuriating, and it’s closing doors to exciting careers in physics and engineering for generations of young women. Whilst girls and boys currently choose A-level subjects differently, there is absolutely no evidence to show intrinsic differences in their abilities or preference.”
 
Rachel Youngman, the deputy chief executive of the Institute of Physics, said: “The IOP is very concerned at the continued use of outdated stereotypes as we firmly believe physics is for everyone regardless of their background or gender.”
 
Surely the inevitable will eventually take its course? Surely she’ll eventually be moving along?
 
Sadly, as with the PM, no one is surprised. KB was the Deputy Head who sank her own school at the Conservative Party Conference in 2011. Four years later she set up a Free School and now calls herself the strictest headmistress in the country, as if that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers. Invited to reflect on the scalability of her model, she says – all schools should be like mine, look at the quality of the artwork. (This echoes her 2011 claim that children in state schools didn’t read whole books, in comparison to fee-paying children who might read four or six a year). What? I saw the artwork, which was nice, but lots of us have remarkable teachers eliciting fabulous stuff. Many of our students would think four to six books a year pretty thin stuff. Her pronouncements are often met with well-raised eyebrows. Surely one day she’ll have to give up?
 
I wonder. We have a DfE which appears to be better led in the ‘I want this: Ofsted will inspect it and I’ll name and shame those who aren’t managing it’ style. Around, above and below sit all kinds of Tsars and Tsarinas, favourite MATs and pseudo-research. KB is, to the current government, a very attractive figurehead for the not-very Tory endeavour of social mobility, her media-savvy performances a wonderful distraction from the job in hand. Just like the PM.
 
And yet why say that about girls? KB’s school-based pronouncements about the need for total control and discipline are all about clearing a space for potentially disadvantaged students to not-fail. Because they aren’t given any choice, they are freed to achieve. It is an argument, certainly. So why doesn’t it work for girls doing physics? Shouldn’t the same lie in store for girls with no family history or university or science thinking about storming that citadel? As Mandela said, freedom is indivisible. You can’t raise the economically disadvantaged while oppressing those disadvantaged by gender. Why would you?
 
Part of me wonders, flying in the face of the political zeitgeist, if this latest set of gaffes might dislodge her from favour. Perhaps the cup might pass to someone else’s more reliable lips? Perhaps she’ll get what’s coming to her? Then I look hard at the evidence before me and the sorry context in which we’re in and give myself a shake.  Personal integrity is less important than a snappy soundbite: blame and distancing are more worthwhile than trying to solve an intractable problem; sounding iconoclastic is all that matters. Brexit happened thus, and we sink under its weight.
 
Clever people don’t make accidental gaffes. The PM has never said anything he didn’t mean to say, whether he meant it or not. Oxford-graduate KB may or may not care about girls in physics, but she cares hugely about herself, her profile and her future. Raising the numbers of girls in A level physics and Further Maths has been a long and painful journey for all thinking schools. I wonder if she knows this, has tried her best and not-quite succeeded?  She’s had all the plaudits for so long that perhaps she can’t risk-assess admitting failure. 
​
The world’s topsy-turvy, though. This dust’s the dust that fanned
Caesar and Alexander as each gained ground.
Tara’s under pasture. At Troy, it's clear how things stand.
For the English, their time will come around.

​Where next? From Social Mobility Tsar to oblivion, the Lords or a safe seat? I don’t think she need worry. I think she can say what she likes. I’ll keep you informed.
 
CR
29.4.22
 
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On Golden Threads and Lemons

11/12/2021

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If I were a better physicist, I’d understand how time simultaneously contracts and expands. Why is it that watching the end of the year 7 Languages Spelling Bee – which took about 5 minutes – felt like such a blessed episode of calm in the week, while the five hours spent writing a zillion school Christmas cards seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye? Why is it that standing on the yard for 15 minutes in the cold feels like a lifetime but discussing feminism with year 13 for an hour was over in seconds with only a tenth of the arguments covered? Why is it that anyone wants me to give any more minutes of my remaining years to hearing about the reformed NPQs?

Once upon a time we had coherent way of entering teaching but a wide range of incoherent and usually meaningless ways to perk up your skills once you’d become a professional custodian of a dry-wipe marker. This wouldn’t do, obviously, because other countries do it much better and manage to keep hold of their teachers for longer. So, we invented the National Professional Qualifications and spent a few years oscillating like loons between making them compulsory or totally irrelevant. Now, everyone’s had to work for what feels like aeons on How to Do It Better. Result? Utterly incoherent ways of becoming a teacher, numberless as the stars in the sky, but a spiffy new set of free NPQs with, I kid you not, a ‘golden thread’ running through them.

Some of us have an incoherent hinterland in our own heads and can’t just accept a metaphor like that. Golden thread? Is it Ariadne’s? Is it close-binding all mankind? Does it twitch like Father Brown’s? Does it weave a magic spell of rainbow design? Why does it have to be dressed up so? If we had a system fit for grown-ups we could just say that we finally have a set of National Professional Qualifications that build on the same principles, from early career teachers to Heads, soup to nuts. We could say, as has one of its architects, that it has a clear structure, more coherence, a better evidence base, can be done alongside the day job rather than requiring Einsteinian time-bending and includes the SEND skills we all need. Why do we need jollying along like three-year olds?

Some of what we do in school is really quite hard. We have to think a lot, at the same time as preventing children from getting jammed in doors or falling downstairs. We have to consider the purpose of education while handing out glue sticks and marking A-level pieces. We have to explain what acid can do to people who might want to taste it to find out for themselves. We have to have a rationale for teaching Spanish grammar and Venn diagrams at a time of plague; volcanoes and poetry while racism, misogyny and climate disaster mess with the future. We have enough threads going on in our heads to knit a Fair Isle jumper. All we require of policy-makers is that they speak plainly and respect our intelligence.

I’ll get over the confounded golden thread, but it won’t solve the teacher crisis. We need more money in the system so that there can be more teachers so that the teachers we have can have some time to think. That’s how they keep them in other countries, as well as coherent training. We need both.

I worry about the future, of course, for all sorts of reasons. As well as all the above, there’s a nagging fear that people don’t expect enough of one another, enough seriousness or enough concentration. I’m sure that the golden thread is a lovely way of describing some worthy training courses but to me it doubles as a tightening noose of over-simplification in our education system caused by cheapness. What do I want in my metaphorical stocking? A system where more funding buys more time, where academic research is respected and teachers’ intellects taken seriously, for the long term.

I’m one to talk, though. I’ve been pointing at children and saying ‘no noses’ all week like a mad thing which has kept me amused as I hand out masks we can’t afford to children who forget where they’ve put them. I delayed the start of a meeting on the content of the visual arts curriculum by telling the trapped assembled about the plastic lemons my mother hung on her Christmas tree, which I’ve inherited. ‘Was it a recycling thing?’ one asked carefully. In the sixties? No, she thought they looked nice and she didn’t have much spare cash. I think a Christmas tree looks unfinished without them, but that just shows what you can do with a child’s brain if you start early enough. One year she experimented with a special total-lemon tree and we were all surprised by how dull it looked.

Perhaps the other thing I want for schools’ stockings is a bit of imagination in the system as well as coherence. There’s a lot of content in the NPQs but not much room for imagination or flair. That’s another consequence of parsimony: thinking deep and free takes time, which costs. When all your lemons look the same, even golden threads don’t make your system sparkle with the reflected light of the sheer joy of learning in communities of children.
 
CR
10.12.21
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Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115   F: +44 (0)208 331 3004   E: headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
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