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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Open Night Again

30/9/2017

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Picture
I'd been in town pestering the great and the good and pottered back from the station at break time. Children often imagine that the road elevation of the grassy knoll to the east of the site is invisible, despite the see-through fence, and can be startled by a known person apparating in front of them.  

Not so the cheery year 7 boys I chanced upon, sitting in a row, phones in hand, chortling and shoving each other hilariously. I asked if they were spying on the road and they leapt up and gestured through the bars at me, explaining enthusiastically that they were 'playing a very intense game'. Parents fear that phones mean the loss of all social skills but not with these chaps. While it did involve phones, the intense game also seemed to require raucous laughter, throwing themselves about on the grass in the way of 11-year-olds, and much rolling around. The old and the new. 
 
Last night was Open Night and we had upwards of 1500 visitors through the doors. Head of Year 7 and I did 6 hall-fulls (with extra chairs). We also combine the old and the new as she's a lot younger than me. Our hall is pretty nice, being newish, and with a film of year 7 at work running on the back wall, flowers on the Tallis turquoise cloths, the stage lights and Freddie on the old Joanna, it's a stylish venue. We don't do the PowerPoint thing, so we talk about what parents worry about: transition to a big school, pastoral care, curriculum choice, break and lunch, form groups. Of course we cover the other things, but we talk about the whole child before we break him into constituent parts.  We'll take care of your little one and try to give her a memorable, happy education.  

This neatly leads me to tell the people about our new school plan's 3 parts: curriculum, inclusion and community. Curriculum: we want to preserve the broadest offer, it's a struggle predicting the future, this is what we do at KS3. Teaching's good, staff are stable (no reflection on their mental state, I mean that we don't have a high turnover). A level and BTEC results are very good, young people come from miles around to study with us in the sixth form. GCSEs need to improve but who knows what this year's results actually mean. So many re-marks, so much alteration. Inclusion's nex, in four parts: provision for learning for everyone and the wonderful work of our Deaf Support and Speech and Language centres. Wellbeing and our concern for mental health. Safeguarding and the time we put into it, and behaviour. We're relaxed but not sloppy. We're fussy about relationships and their development and maintenance. Finally, Community: we want to serve. Join in with us, please.  

I don't know if that's what parents expect to hear but it seemed to go down well. Behind the scenes, we're tussling this week with the progress accountability score. Context is everything here: we have room to improve but we took a principled stand with the year group when the new measures came in and didn't force them to change options so the school would score better. Oh for a national accountability system that's risk-assessed for its impact on children's experience of school. 

(The adults' experience can be mixed, mind you. There was huge excitement - everything's relative - about the Tidy Staff Room competition. You may be interested to know that Visual and Media Arts won the silver Desk Tidy for Most Improved, but Design Technology took gold for Best in Show.  

But reflecting on the week, it's the tensions that stick. We'd been waiting for the progress information so that we could get stuck into the metrics. We're committed to our support services but there's no money to fund them. We'd like to represent our community better.  

When parents come to see us, what do they want to see? How much information helps them choose? We talk a good game, but we're not complacent. We don't stop picking over results in good years or bad until October. We plan for the short and the long term. Do they want to look under the bonnet?  

A young inmate with an eccentric gait came to see me because his trousers had split 'picking up a pen in Geography'. Keeping him at a distance I said it wasn't obvious and he should carry on regardless. He thanked me kindly and rushed off. I think parents expect much the same: they need to trust us to make sensible judgements and carry on. The old and the new combine here too I suppose: we worry about our service to children not less than all of the time, and we deal with each new challenge as it comes along. It's an intense game, and we laugh when we can, but only the young ones roll on the grass. 
 
CR 28.9.17 
 ​
1 Comment

Textbook Tallis

29/6/2014

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Picture
Sol Lewitt All ifs or buts connected by green lines, 1973
We are a textbook school. By that I mean that we appear in textbooks, German ones, published by Klett of Berlin. Our young people help to make the content so that it is vaguely similar to real life, and we appear in the accompanying DVD. We even did a model assembly so that German children experience the full eccentricity of English school life. The book describes life in a range of London housing, school days, even has a diary entry from a dog called Sherlock. There was a dog in the German textbook I used at school in the last century (Lumpi ist mein hund) but we were not privy to its thoughts. It’s interesting to see our lives in text book form, simple but believable.  

Tallis is therefore so well known that German tourists flock to us to check that we weren’t just made up by their English teachers. This week we had a visit from a consulting engineer taking time out from a university symposium to have his picture taken with me, and a visit from 30 12 year olds who spent the day with year 7. They sang us the song with which they start all their English lessons: ‘Let’s go to Greenwich, jump on the bus’. It’s wonderful that they think of us, fellow humans who’ve never met, every time they have an English lesson, and all the more remarkable as sadly we don’t actually teach German. Verzeihung!
The Bishop of Woolwich spent some time with us on Tuesday:  we’re not a religious school in any way, but it was nice to welcome someone who has a heart for South London. Maybe he’ll jump on a bus to Greenwich in his head when he thinks about schools. We had alumni too, talking to our year 12s as they enjoy progression week and start to learn about universities. These adult friends who’ve just left us, finishing their degrees, give great advice and love to reminisce. They remember the particular and the general about school as a launch pad for the world and the many advantages conferred by comprehensive education. They also remember food and trips and tell the young people of today that they don’t know how lucky they are.

On Wednesday I went to the Civic Centre to talk about teachers’ pay policies, an summer fixture. We talked about the challenges of the job and how we use and interpret government policy. Should we try to codify everything we do so it’s used as a checklist? How far does professional judgement and interpretation free or restrict schools? How detailed do policies have to be? Studies consistently show that performance related pay for teachers has very little effect on standards but that doesn't stop us spending a huge amount of time on it year after blessed year. We’re warned to plan for more pay appeals this autumn. Is that really a good use of education time?

The gods of public service provide the 178 from Woolwich to Tallis so I literally jumped on a bus to Greenwich at the end. Halfway along a young man who’s recently left us joined me for a brief symposium of our own on comparative education. We chatted about his new start and he offered a few tips he'd picked up. It was a general picture from a chap with particular outlook, but he remembered Tallis with pleasure, knowing the inside track on the textbook school.

We’re rewriting our own textbook at Tallis. National changes give us the chance to make a sensible unity of teaching, planning and assessment based on what we value. It might turn into an actual textbook one day – Tallis habits for Tallis praxis.  It is in textbook clarity that the real strength of a school lies:  what do we stand for, what do we value, how do we get there, annually judged against how are we doing? I’m not sure we need the dog, but perhaps we might: until recently I didn’t know they wrote diaries. 

Arriving back at school I jumped off my bus while a small gaggle of Tallis got on the front, in acceptably orderly manner. Even before we write it each one of those young people should be able to tell us what’s in the Tallis textbook and whether what we represent, illustrate and illuminate is clear enough to them. If it’s a good text, they’ll always have a bus to Tallis in their heads that they can jump on to help them to the next stop.   

CR 16.6.14

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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
  • Home
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