Thomas Tallis School
  • Home
  • About
    • An Overview >
      • The Leadership Team
      • Who was Thomas Tallis?
      • Why Tallis?
      • School Vision
      • Mrs Roberts Writes
      • Tallis at 50
      • Artsmark
      • Prince's Teaching Institute
      • Secondary School Direct Hub
      • International School
      • Ofsted
    • School Prospectus
    • Tallis Praxis
    • Tallis Habits >
      • Tallis Pedagogy Wheel Guide
    • Tallis Character
    • Tallis Threshold Concepts
    • Policies & Guidelines >
      • Data Protection
      • Making Complaints
    • The Pupil Premium 2022-23 >
      • The Pupil Premium 2021-22
      • The Pupil Premium 2020-21
      • The Pupil Premium 2019-20
      • The Pupil Premium 2018-19
      • The Pupil Premium 2017-18
      • The Pupil Premium 2016-17
      • The Pupil Premium 2014-15
      • The Pupil Premium 2013-14
      • The Pupil Premium 2012-13
      • The Pupil Premium 2011-12
    • Exam Results 2022 >
      • Exam Results 2021
      • Exam Results 2020
      • Exam Results 2019
      • Exam Results 2018
      • Exam Results 2017
      • Exam Results 2016
      • Exam Results 2015
      • Exam Results 2014
      • Exam Results 2013
      • Exam Results 2012
      • Exam Results 2011
    • COVID-19 Catch-Up Report
    • Early Catch Up 2019/20 and Action Plan 2020/2120 >
      • Early Catch Up 2018/2019 and Action Plan 2019/2020
      • Early Catch Up 2017/2018 and Action Plan 2018/19
      • Early catch-up review and action plan 2017-18
    • Job Vacancies
  • News
    • Tallis Newsletters
    • Tallis Photography
    • Tallis Video
    • Tallis Sounds
  • Calendar
    • Term Dates 2022-23
    • Term Dates 2023-24
    • The School Day
  • Curriculum
    • Curriculum Areas >
      • Business & ICT
      • Computing
      • English & Philosophy
      • Design & Technology
      • Humanities & Social Sciences
      • Languages
      • Mathematics
      • Performing Arts
      • Physical Education
      • Science
      • Visual & Media Arts
    • Pastoral Care
    • Guidance >
      • Tallis Futures
    • Key Stage 3 >
      • KS3 Assessment guidance
      • Tallis Choices
    • Key Stage 4
    • Tallis Post 16
    • Exceptionally Able Learners
    • Special Educational Needs & Disabilities >
      • Learning Support Unit
      • Support Centre for Autism and Language Impairment
      • Deaf Support Centre
      • English as an Additional Language
  • Community
    • Letters Home 2022-23
    • Bromcom Guide for Parents
    • PTFA
    • Governing Board
    • The Tallis Agreement
    • Admissions
    • Attendance & Punctuality >
      • Apply for Exceptional Circumstances Absence in Term Time
    • School Uniform
    • Support Your Teen
    • Online Safety
    • Tallis Post 16
  • Students
    • Year 11 Support & Guidance
    • Bromcom Guide for Students
    • Co-curricular Activities
    • Exam Revision
    • Stay Safe
    • Duke of Edinburgh Award
    • Rewards
    • Reading
    • The Library
    • Cycling at Tallis
    • Alumni
  • Staff
  • Contact
    • School Map
    • How to find us
  • Search
T: +44 (0)208 856 0115

EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

Catastrophic Equilibrium

17/11/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
I’m starting to write this before the Autumn Statement, as we may not be able to afford to type afterwards.

A month or so ago I berthed alongside one of the movers and shakers of the pre-Coalition education world. We lamented the present and made helpful suggestions for the future. Unfortunately, none of the recent Secretaries of State for Education were within earshot, but the retro-Scandi décor very much appreciated our wisdom, I felt. At one point he asked ‘Do your teachers call each other Sir and Miss’? I knew what he was driving at.
 
We weren’t talking about the semi-formal way a pair of teachers might refer to one another while talking to children – as in ‘Sir told you not to reproduce the Rokeby Venus on the corridor wall, didn’t he?’ to which Sir might respond, in serious tones, ‘Indeed I did, Miss, and I checked he understood that Spanish Golden Age is next term, not this.’ I’m talking about conversations without children, but where the child-facing persona seeps into ordinary professional conversations. ‘Did you bring the year 11 predictions, Ms, and what are you going to do about them?’ ‘I did, Sir, and have many innovative plans’.

It's quicker than names, of course. School life is brisk and I can see that Mr Fotherington-Thomas talking to Ms Potter-Pirbright might take up more time than anyone has left, but they could be Clive and Gert behind closed doors without frightening the horses. What my interlocutor sought was further evidence of the creeping infantilisation of teachers. He had a hunch that leaders insist on teachers calling each other Sir and Miss as part of a focus on ‘professionalism’ which is anything but.

I wrote a piece for the trade press last week in which I discussed this in a slightly less abstruse way. I won’t rehearse it here, but it was about government support for a particular brand of online learning, whether that meant that online learning was being proposed as a solution to the crippling national teacher shortage, and whether that meant that teachers as a species of skilled scholars with a deep intellectual hinterland is further endangered. Will cheap and easy solutions lead to cheapened education planning? Autumn statement notwithstanding, the answer mustn’t be yes.

Anyway, as the gods of Blackheath Hill decreed that my driving needed attention, I found myself on a Speed Awareness Course. I must say that it was excellent, especially when the facilitator led the ten of us to a point of action-planning our new lives as safer drivers. He didn’t quite call it that, but he forced (enabled) us to tackle our habits thuswise:
  1. This is the problem…..
  2. It might be caused by….
  3. I could fix it by…..
  4. Why might that not work?.....
  5. To help my plan I will…..
 
Isn’t that fabulously clear? Google offers me a 46-page guide to action planning that the NHS uses, even my own goes on a bit, but any decent plan covers the same ground. So, if we apply this to the matter in hand:

  1. The problem is that we don’t have enough teachers
  2. This might be caused by low salaries compared to other postgraduate professionals and an unreasonable expectation to solve all the nation’s ills all day every day
  3. We could fix it by funding education better so that we train teachers properly and give Clive and Gertie time to think and refresh their training, as professionals do
  4. Why might that not work? Because we hold children in little value in the UK. We refuse to fund the education system properly so everything we do, we do cheaply. This treats Sir and Miss like children or expendable units, so they leave.
  5. To help the plan we should fund the education system in a way that treats teachers as part of the solution rather than the problem, attracts and retains high-quality teachers, supports and develops our young people and builds up the nation’s life. My shaker and I don’t think this is unreasonable.
 
I note as I finish that, according to the BBC, J Hunt has pledged £2.3bn, for education. I’m not sure that’s a big number and I don’t know how much of it has already been announced or promised. More on this next time.
 
Hunt’s done whatever he’s done as part of a government running a country in what Gramsci called a state of catastrophic equilibrium, where everything is simultaneously failing and stable, where things can’t carry on but nevertheless must, year after year. That’s where we are in schools. He needs to have done enough to tip the balance back towards equilibrium from collapse, but it needs more than that to educate a people, to save the future.
 
CR
17.11.22
0 Comments

Congratulations are in order

10/3/2022

1 Comment

 
Picture
Dear Sir Gavin,
What a flap your knighthood caused! I was at a Heads’ Conference just after it landed and really, we could hardly concentrate on budgets, absence, exams, staffing, budgets, racism, teacher shortages, budgets, sexual violence, climate emergency, budgets and political impartiality when we had your good news to discuss. When I got back, I opened Brighouse and Waters’ new 640-page About Our Schools for solace and launched into Danny Dorling’s preface. I wonder if his first line: ‘we often don’t truly value something until we’ve lost it’ was about you? 

I don’t know if you saw it, Sir, but sadly, political impartiality prevents me from reporting the reaction of the shadow education secretary. I can tell you that Mr Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said head teachers and parents would be surprised to learn the news. He admitted that the pandemic would have been challenging for any education secretary but, a teacher himself, couldn’t help but observe that your tenure had been one of endless muddle and inevitable U-turns. Gosh. Me, I just don’t think we ever grasped the master plan. Am I right?

You could have helped us, though, so I expect you’ll welcome two suggestions. They’re both from our latest Teaching and Learning Newsletter which, though we say it ourselves, is pretty sharp. 

The first is about using metacognitive and self-regulatory strategies by modelling your thought processes out loud. That’s when teachers explain their thinking when interpreting a text or solving a mathematical task or whatever.  The best ones can simultaneously explain how it relates to bigger objectives and suchlike. You could have tried that?

The second is about producing beautiful work, as I’m sure you were frustrated by the quality of some of your outputs. It can happen to any of us, and I know I would have been. Mary Myatt, for example, talks about eliciting and celebrating work that is original, that represents the fruits of considerable labour and which is worth keeping.
She describes it as a ‘worthwhile endeavour not just for pupils, but for adults as well. It shifts the landscape, it raises the game and it means that we have to continually ask, is this the best it can be? It’s a question worth asking: What do standards actually look like when met with integrity, depth, and imagination?’ Great questions. I wonder if you might have time to reflect on them, from the back benches, or do the fireplaces’ siren calls lure you out of public service? Ah well.

Worse things than old Barton’s opprobrium happen at sea, as I’m sure you discovered, Sir G, when you were in Defence. I was musing on this these with a trainee teacher of my acquaintance, not at this school. She described a (to her) nightmare experience with year 9s which sounded OK to me for someone of her inexperience. It could have been worse, I consoled. How? How? she goggled. Well, she could have had a wasp in the room. Hymenoptera care nothing for a sassy lesson plan. Speaking of, I was nearly flattened by two enormous year 10 girls this very morning, leaping into each other’s arms to avoid ‘a really big bee’, so I know about being blown off course
However, the new tack brought me face to face with a larger youth surreptitiously blowing into a prototype water bomb-balloon affair. We dealt with that silently. I frowned, he raised an eyebrow to demonstrate he’d considered fronting it out, but I won and it went in the bin. Perhaps silence could have been a strategy for you, Sir? Less retrofitting strategy required? It can be tiring.

Indoors – it was a bit parky to stay out - I perused the breaktime hordes in the canteen. They were doing their muttering and eating thing, some reading books, others bickering, some sharing phones, some with the bacon or sausage sandwich fare that so tantalises the tastebuds at 11:00 here in SE3. Others were extracting snacks from pockets, bags, marmalade sandwiches from under hats and suchlike.

After that, mock exam-gathering at one end of the canteen while year 7 and 8 took their turn to gather at the south end to be ushered reluctantly into a singing workshop. They really didn’t want to do it, but the leader was compelling and lured them in. It's lovely to hear children in unison and even better, given the last year or so, to watch them too, laughing and gesturing despite themselves keen to respond to the big character stomping in the big boots and making them SING. One head of year stayed for two hours.

Would a song help, Sir Gavin? Gavin is derivative of the Old English Gawain, of the Green Knight fame. His quest was also tricky, if I may quote the Armitage translation?

In a strange region he scales steep slopes;
far from his friends he cuts a lonely figure.
Where he bridges a brook or wades through a waterway
ill fortune brings him face to face with a foe
so foul or fierce he is bound to use force.
So momentous are his travels among the mountains
to tell just a tenth would be a tall order.

It must have all been very tricky. How we do feel for you. If only you could have been rewarded somehow, for everything you must have wanted to do.

But what am I like? I nearly forgot where we started: you were given a knighthood!

​Did you miss my letters, Sir Gavin? Send me your new address: I’m happy to oblige.
 
CR
9.3.22
 
 
 

1 Comment

Thinking Allowed

2/3/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Oh give me a break. Buffeted by Cornish winds, I’m warned to be politically impartial and then there’s a war. Given that all sides of the House agree that this is a result of unprecedented aggression etc, am I allowed to talk about peace? What is balance, this week? Do I just teach one side? Please don’t answer. I’m sure it’ll get us into trouble somehow.

When the western political situation took a turn for the worse with the previous inhabitant of the White House and depressing shenanigans this side of the pond, I decamped from Radio 4 to 3 avoid it all. This time, I’m taking refuge in the Thinking with Pinker podcasts, a short course in cogitational improvement. One episode is called ‘You Can’t Say That’ and it’s on ‘taboos, heresies and counterfactuals’. I’m swum in the seas of religion all my life so I know a bit about these. I like to think that makes me reasonably sharp at spotting myth, sentiment, falsehood and claims of destiny. Before you get cross, Pinker isn’t talking about the language of racism and misogyny: rudeness and oppression are always wrong. He’s talking about the ruts of acceptable thought in which we stick ourselves.

We love this in education. We’re counterintuitively keen on confining thought and easily attached to totems. Exams, for instance. Rather than looking at the current circumstance as a chance radically to reform the whole outlandish structure, we’re swimming frantically back through the shark-infested waters of memory testing and cheap proxies to replant our flag in the Land of the Forgotten Third. And we delude ourselves and yes, I have an example, a sub-heading on the BBC Family and Education page asking ‘How will my exams be different this year?’.
This makes no sense. For a start, a child wouldn’t ask it. Barely a one sitting public examination this year will have ever taken one before. Year 13 didn’t do GCSEs. They have no idea what’s different, or similar. The question actually being asked, by anxious adults, is ‘are exams children take this year worth anything to the elitist calibration mindset we’re trapped in?’. If it was a child asking, the question would be ‘What’s happening and what do I need to do? Will I need a pen?’

I’m not opposed to exams. It's reasonable to measure learning, not least to assess current aptitude for choices at 18. It’s also perfectly legitimate for the state to want to measure its system. But we could do so much better. My counterfactual would run: ‘If we already knew that exams were a flawed way of measuring children’s learning, we would have seized the opportunity of the pandemic to ……’ Why can’t we think about that? If not now, when?

Children, however, can turn their minds to other things. Wandering about to spy on the choices Deputy Head candidates made at break I chanced upon the conversion of a bench seat to a table tennis table, requiring the game to be played inelegantly at the stoop, then the peer-review of an engineering prototype. This latter was a small boy whose friend claimed he’d made a device to extract apple juice from apples. I thought it needed further development, myself. Squeezing the air out of one of those tiny soy sauce bottles and trying to jam it into the side of a Gala didn’t appear to be extracting a marketable product, and at least one of the potential investors thought it was disgusting, but a refined model may have legs? Or show signs of being remotely able to work.
 
Year 8 have been thinking about what they can do to help children in Ukraine. They settled on a sort-of sponsored walk (steps in tutor time) for War Child. This seems like a sensible way of expressing concern and fits with one of our repeated sayings, on every Christmas Card since 2014, Eglantyne Jebb’s ‘all wars are wars against children.'

Good for them. Meanwhile, in peace time, we were trying desperately to track down some Food Bank vouchers.   
But by the time you read this we’ll have appointed a new Deputy Head and that’s always exciting. Deputies forecast, control and make the weather in school and good ones are beyond rubies. Lots of people have been involved: students, teachers, classes, year groups, support staff and governors over a two-day grilling process. I did this twenty-five years ago. I didn’t get the first one I applied for, largely because I couldn’t express a thought about the curriculum. I got the second one and it changed my family’s life. It’s a great job in the right school.

I have put some time into thinking about the curriculum since then, despite national lurching from one set of ossified prescriptions to another ever since. We think a lot at Tallis, and we try to teach the children that an unexamined life is perhaps less rewarding than one where you create informed choices. As a colleague said at the end of term, we try to link our epistemology to our ethos here, which is great if you can remember what epistemology means. As we say to the children – we know we’re learning when we’re thinking very hard – but within the bounds of kindness and respect, the blessed exam specifications and the impartiality rules, we can think what we like. Impartiality is the child of considered thought
 
CR
2.3.22
0 Comments

Minister, Teacher, Soldier, Spy

29/6/2020

3 Comments

 
Picture
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

Hancock's Half Hour

13/6/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Hancock’s Half-Hour
 
Dear Mr Williamson,

You look more than usually frazzled at the moment so I thought I’d try to cheer you up. Would you like a joke about the Marmite shortage? It’s all stuck in a lorry travelling yeastbound. Sorry, perhaps that’s the wrong joke for someone accused of being asleep at the wheel this week.

Perhaps an undemanding film would help? Steve Martin’s 1987 Roxanne has long been a favourite on the Roberts sofa. He plays the frustrated Fire Chief of a small town whose crew are hard to train. At one point he says:

I  have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.
I have a sinking feeling when the Department’s daily briefing flops into my inbox that it’s not quite the first place I expect to find clear and precise advice. Sorry. 

Maybe a political Drama? I’d steer clear of The Thick of It, to be honest, under the circumstances, but there’s a favourite episode of The West Wing where a briefing goes all to pot. (Series 1 Celestial Navigation). The Deputy Chief of Staff takes the podium instead of the usual spokesperson and ends up saying that the President has a secret plan to fight inflation which he’s not going to tell anyone about. I think a secret plan’s probably on a par with a ‘very big plan’ for getting everyone back to school or a ‘huge job’ to catch up disadvantaged children. The PM’s such a joker, isn’t he?   

Children’s laughter is missing from HMS Tallis at the moment. While teenagers can be hard to amuse its great fun when you manage it. Even the coolest adolescent will eventually let a chuckle slip and the rolling eye and weary sigh is just a different sort of belly-laugh. Classes love to be diverted with a groan-worthily predictable witticism that makes a teacher memorable and a ridiculous joke can make the driest content palatable. I once heard a lunatic maths teacher declare that ‘fractions make you taller and more attractive to the opposite sex’ to year 9 and I worked next to a gifted mimic twenty-odd years ago who could do a whole lesson in a voice of the class’s choice. Myself, I use the Billy Conolly method and laugh immoderately at my own jokes well before I tell ‘em.
Of course, this only works if humour adds to the security and quality of the classroom. A good teacher keeps it witty and prevents sarcasm or unpleasantness. Children soon twig on if jokes are a distraction from a teacher not knowing their stuff: chaos follows that. No amount of droll banter appeases a class if their books are never marked or the lessons are rudderless and drifty. You have to earn their laughter.

We keep it light at Tallis and we try to look as if we’re enjoying ourselves, because we usually are. Sometimes levity’s just wrong – this isn’t a piece about racism, for example. Judging content and tone takes skill and experience. Everyone remembers cringeworthy moments when you’ve got it wrong, and can issue a quiet shudder. Leaders need to set the tone at every gathering, and I wonder if that’s what troubling you, Mr Williamson? You know, I don’t think it’s entirely your fault?

What about some poetry, then? One of my favourite recitations is Siegfried Sassoon’s The General which if you don’t mind I’ll quote in full:

Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
 
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.    
 
Oof. I wonder, Mr Williamson, if this strikes a chord?

One of my personal cringe regrets is laughing at Boris Johnson when he used to be on Have I Got News For You. Sober analysts at the time warned me this was a ploy to get into the nation’s easily-amused hearts, but I still chortled through his blundering routines. He’s harmless, I said. A frothy cross between Stephen Fry and Bertie Wooster, a buffoon in the English upper-class-twit tradition.   

But where has it led us? The CV-19 crisis lurches between underaction, overpromise and retreat. The star turn is exposed without the braying laugh-track of the Commons and his flannel misses the note nearly every time. It’s too painful to watch. A cheery old card indeed, and he may have done for us all, in one way or another, by his plan of attack.

Mr Williamson, there’s a time to weep and a time to laugh. For so many reasons, this is the weeping time. You look as though you might know that. Your colleague the Secretary of State for Health certainly does. He could have been the man of the moment. In March he looked reliable and on top of his brief but now he looks exhausted, all at sea. In his half-hours at the briefing he looks like he’s given way more than an armful. 

I’m grateful to a colleague for this witticism, but it’s not really funny, is it?     

Yours ever,

​Carolyn Roberts
12.6.20        
       
 
 
0 Comments

Listening and travelling

19/12/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
A creature of habit, I have a view about how long terms should be. 15 weeks is fine for Autumn, but it should be 8 followed by 7, not what we’ve just had. I’ll complain to someone about it. Anyway, we’ve got there. T.S. Eliot’s Magi knew a bit about endurance, as they reflect in old age on the journey to follow the star.
 
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
 
And how deep the winter has been so far.  All that shouting, all that messy politics, all that dislike and distrust as darkness deepens in just the worst time of year.
 
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
 
The end of the autumn term does feel like we’ve been travelling all night, coming to school in the dark and leaving in the dark. And folly is easy to find this December. Folly in the mad consumption of Christmas, folly in austerity’s punishment of children, folly in the state of the climate, folly in leadership of all kinds.  
 
However, we take our pleasures where we may. We’ve been having a great time in assemblies this week rockin’ around the (dancing) Christmas tree, Heads of Year in Santa hats, Pastoral Welfare Team in tinsel, Parris on drums and Tomlin on the old joanna. Hearing’s only part of the experience, and it takes time before it turns into listening. We heard an enthusiastic rendering of an old hit: we listened to a slightly raucous gift of love from people whose working life is devoted to the children’s welfare. 
 
The penny doesn’t always drop quickly. I was directing traffic indoors at the crossroads of block 5 and 6 when two girls waltzed past, one saying ‘but I hate my name, I’d rather be called Val or Tina’. No disrespect to any so-called readers but I thought these were old-fashioned sort of names. It was a day before I realised she’d said ‘Valentina’. 
 
Governors visited a couple of weeks ago to give us the once-over. They talked to some BTEC students in the sixth form about their work, their endeavours and their plans. Students said ‘we love it, but there is a stigma attached to BTECs that is completely unfair’. We can’t do anything about the ridiculous way qualifications are turned into a snobbish calibration of worth but we can do something about hearing their anger, listening to their complaint and advocating for them.
 
We should understand this at Tallis. Our lives are enhanced by our deaf students and their skilled signers, teachers and advocates. It adds a dimension to our experience that some communities never know. Likewise our students for whom language itself poses a problem and for whom the world is full of discordances and jarringly inexplicable noise. People who can’t hear can still listen: people who hate noise can teach us to long for calm.
 
Not that adolescence lends itself to quietude. I joined a science class who chunter on so much they can’t hear themselves think, the concept of an unexpressed thought alien to them. They were all wittering about work but there’s only so much ‘I need a pen, have you got one, does the stapler work, why not, where’s the pencil sharpener, what did you get for number 4, why is number 10 wrong I thought it was right, what’s wrong with my formula, what’s the pass mark, I’ve stapled the wrong bits together, Miss! what does this say, what did you ask us to do?’ one can take. After a bit I called a halt and blessed silence engulfed us so we had the chance to organise a thought, to listen to our learning.
 
The advantage of the election being over, and it being nearly Christmas is that we all might get a similar break from each other in national life. Having been a Radio 4 addict since I first encountered it at 19 I’ve found news so difficult in the Trump-Brexit era that I’ve avoided it. I know a whole lot more about Radio 3 than I used to, which really does require listening. However, this ostrichy approach must end with the old year. I must return to the fray in 2020.  
 
The three kings in the poem reach their destination and don’t quite know where they’ve arrived they’ve got to
 
Finding the place it was, you may say, satisfactory.
 
But that’s not how it ends. Children are a gift and a life, exuberant, reflective or both at once is never satisfactory but wonderful, terrifying, joyful or desperate. We can’t be indifferent to children, and we can’t ignore them. We have to hear them, listen to them, travel with them and resist folly as we serve them with integrity, courage and kindness. Here’s to Christmas, and a better New Year.
 
CR
19.12.9   
0 Comments

Pushmi-pullyu

8/11/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Travelling from Liverpool Street to Ware (Where? How we laughed) was diverting due to tangled announcements.  The outward and inbound messages were delivered tidily together giving the impression of simultaneous forwards and backwards motion. This was moderately amusing for those of us who could identify where it began and familiar with the route. It was potentially catastrophic for the inexperienced and just plain disturbing for those joining part way through the journey. Several people stepped onto the train, then off, then on again in response to what they heard, like an annoying video meme.
 
That the whole zeitgeist of the time feels like a mad seesaw or Dr Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu is too obvious a point to make, making us all miss-step and doubt our capacity to plan or make any progress anywhere. People cope by not listening to the news, not talking about the news, ranting endlessly about the news, making up news or succumbing to despair. In this we have a lot to learn from the common or garden adolescent. Such a youth may be clueless, confused, misinformed, brilliant, tentative, furious, doom-laden, perspicacious, happy or sad within a day, or an hour, or a conversation. They’re like this because they’re detaching and rebooting synapses and suchlike all the time. It’s exhausting and maddening for the child and witnessing adult, but at least we know what it is. Politicians, largely over 25, have no such excuse.
 
I sit to write this in the green canteen, the home of the XFN Study Hall. Not a cheesy radio station, XFN stands for expectations, effort and engagement and is our latest way of tricking and training the reluctant of year 11 into working. Starting in September, we identified 50-odd who needed attention and kept them behind to work for an hour every day. We measured them and released those who’d responded to treatment after 6 weeks, adding others who’d lost the plot or showed no capacity to find it. That was where the fun started. Some of the originals were glad to be out of it, but some wanted to stay. Some didn’t want to stay but their parents wanted them to, some weren’t invited to join but volunteered to join the crew – lured by the custard creams? – and some have parents who want them to join no matter how well they work under their own steam. Some approach with the brisk step of enthusiasm, some have to be lassoed, some adopt a mournful drooping air to demonstrate that the effort required will not be easy to generate. Some come with a current love interest and hardly mind at all.
 
And they all do it in the developing knowledge that they are competing for every mark, for every grade with students everywhere, and that no matter how hard they work they might not get the 4 or 6 or 9. I tried to explain this to an interested non specialist representative of the intelligentsia last night. The logic eluded him. So you’re telling me that 90% might not necessarily be a grade 9? It might be 91% one year and 85% the next year? How does this help? How do you know what to tell them? ’. Good questions, sir. Come and watch us at work.
 
So the excitement and torture of adolescence is compounded by the swings and roundabouts of comparative outcomes: the excesses and exaggerations of press and the politics butt up against the despair and uncertainty of the way we live now. Last weekend another interlocutor, in the west, told me how posh Greenwich is, and Camberwell. And, in fact, Peckham. And everywhere else in south London, well-known fact, poverty’s over, children of austerity not in need. What are we all going on about? Good lord. Where to start? With the facts that the deprivation in London looks less because that in the north has got so much worse? As one might say to an opinionated but lazy A-level student: interesting view point. Come back when you’ve balanced the facts and we’ll talk then.
 
Scepticism and clarity are required skills of the day job. We have to hear the pronouncements of the young through the ears of age. You say you want to go to the toilet, but I think you’re just trying to avoid work. You may indeed have left your homework at home, but chances are that your bedroom is a stranger both to book and biro. You say you were prevented from getting to school on time by a tiger on the pavement, but it hasn’t been on the news so we’ll assume you weren’t. You promise to start revising for the mocks, but every indicator in the universe suggests that you won’t get started before you’re 25. It’s not that we don’t believe you, just that we’ve heard it all before and we know better than you do what you might possibly mean, and why. We trust and disbelieve at the same time, supporting and punishing, interpreting.
 
I hope that the election allows us to think. I hope it is conducted plainly and honestly. I hope that it is focused on the good of all and the best for a happy, safe and united society. Heads have been sent about three versions of the public sector advice about not being partisan in our professional capacity during this time of increased trial, so I hope our trustworthiness is repaid in kind. I hope we can go forward, safely towards some sort of peace together.
 
Two year 13s dressed in black were so obsessed with an argument about graphs that one walked into a wall and the other into me. I said, loving the graph-work, but have a care for the fixtures and the elderly. I know you didn’t mean it but there’s more to life than winning an argument. Is that bipartisan enough?
 
CR
8.11.19   
0 Comments

Vain and vapid

21/6/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
One of Jane Austen’s nastier creations is the ghastly Sir Walter Elliott in Persuasion. Vain, vapid, disregarding, flimsy and partial, he wafts about in a cloud of debt preferring his horrible daughter to his good one. At one point early in the book he’s told by his agent that he must retrench and move to Bath because a gentlemen may live cheaply there. Off he goes and devotes his time to his rich relations. Long story. 

Retrenchment aptly describes schools and their budgets since 2010. Beginning with austerity (formerly known as public sector cuts) funding has plummeted. Governments since 2010 have tried doggedly to avoid solving the problem. 

First, they said there wasn‘t a problem and school leaders should stop going on about it and do their jobs properly.
Second, they said that there well may be a problem, but that because the money was hiding in clumps and not fairly distributed. The National Fair Funding Formula would sort this out so everyone would be happy. Then the NFFF lost it’s Fair and set about redistributing only the money that was already in the system. 

Third, they said that there was, actually, literally loads more money in the system so, like, what is the problem, really? The UK Statistics Agency took a dim view of this. In the interest of balance, they were critical of a union counter-narrative called School Cuts which gave crude and scary headline figures slightly detached from the context. They then issued four rebukes to the DfE along the lines of ‘I am sure you share my concerns that instances such as these do not help to promote trust and confidence in official data, and indeed risk undermining them’. Do the sums properly, would you? 

Fourth, Lord Agnew put some embarrassed civil servants on the road to go over our budgets with a bottle of champagne promised to any head where they couldn’t find savings. Churchill Pol Roger at £150 or Co-op Les Pionniers at £19.99? I don’t think anybody knows.

As a top-notch strategy for a major public service, guaranteed to bring about the world-class system which politicians apparently desire this is flaky. Schools have had to devote a disproportionate amount of time – and therefore cost – to dealing with the terrible effects of the 8% drop in funding and trying to gather counter-arguments. ASCL cost it at an extra £5.7 billion to deliver basic expectations: £40.2 billion compared to the allocation of £34.5 billion. The Worth Less? campaign has mobilised the reasonable, the parents and the Tory shires. 
 
It is perhaps hopeful therefore, that the next PM will allegedly make school funding a Thing? None of them have looked closely at what heads are saying but all of them are frightened that the ballot box will be impeded by the begging bowls of headteachers. None of them will say: ‘we didn’t care so much about schools, we don’t really care now but I’ll say anything if you PLEASE elect me. And by the way? We’ve spent the money on Brexit, on nothing.’
Notwithstanding, Gove has said he will spend an extra one billion on schools. Javid promises “billions more for education”. Johnson will spend at least £5,000 on every secondary pupil (which wouldn’t help us in London). Even the hapless May is reportedly setting a £27 billion education “spending trap” for whoever follows her. What should they spend it on?
 
As part of the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), teachers in England (and elsewhere) were asked precisely this: 'thinking about education as a whole, if the budget were to be increased by 5%, how would you rate the importance of the following spending priorities?’

The answers are clear.
  1. Recruit more support staff to reduce teachers’ administrative loads
  2. Recruit more teachers to reduce class sizes
Teachers in England want these more than they want a pay rise. Politicians, it seems, will say anything to get a clap. I’m not hopeful but always ready to unlock the coffers and await the coinage.

I’m surrounded by adolescents all of whose brains are being rewired as they go about.  It means that they take risks, push boundaries and – some of them – like the PM contenders, will say anything to get out of trouble. I was showing a Dignitary around this week when we chanced upon an altercation in which intemperate language was used by a youth. I was the net winner in this tussle, one phone the richer as I whisked off to a calmer spot.  The youth had to be confined to (our in-house) barracks and as part of the punishment, apologise honestly to me. This he did. It might not stick, but it was properly done.

Adults can do it too. A parent was agitated and spoke with asperity. Time elapsed and an apology appeared: time to think, heat of the moment, sorry.  Can we pick up where we were before I lost it?

A group of 18-year-olds, in sight of the final A levels, gather to chat on the yard.  Eight years of their education has been sacrificed to shallow, doctrinaire, fearful and punitive spending cuts. Above them a small child pelts along the empty bridge at full throttle, full of energy and on a mission. Perhaps he’ll be luckier.

Sir Walter was a foolish spendthrift and the capable Anne was rescued from his stupidity by the Austen’s best hero, Captain Wentworth. He’s described as having ‘spirit and brilliance but no fine friends to recommend him’ much like the state schools of the nation. We don’t need a hero to rescue us, but we need honesty, openness, truth, trust, justice, wisdom, service and an apology. How dare they use the children as a bargaining token in their vain and vapid competition?    
 
CR
19.6.19
0 Comments

A mighty storm

2/11/2018

1 Comment

 
Picture
It’s a wet day and a small child is tangled in his mum’s folding umbrella in block 5. I assist and we proceed companionably upstairs, gradually uncovering destination cluelessness. He needs repeater stations to get him from place to place so we set one up with Miss in my office to complement the nice ladies on reception. Miss provides him with a post-it – his second of the day - to help. He sticks this on his jumper to keep it dry while repeating the umbrella experience with a sausage sandwich. 
 
Outside, we are buffeted by elements. A year 9 eccentric advises ‘we should put these clouds in the IER for throwing wet at people’ so we discuss if that would be foggy in a room. ‘No, but there’d be a lot of banging’. What? 

We’ve had trouble with water all week. First we didn’t have enough, then it went a bit cloudy, now it’s falling from the sky. At least the roofs don’t leak. If they did, though, we’d have £50k to spend on it, thanks to the Budget. Tallis is lucky to be watertight, though we pay for the PFI privilege. 
 
As the National Audit Office reckons schools need over £6.5bn just to bring buildings up to standard. The budget announcement was not warmly welcomed by school leaders. Tin-eared was used, also patronising. Demeaning was accurately applied by one Head who wrote:
This “little extra” certainly does not touch the real and ongoing burden of escalating salary costs which are crippling schools each and every year. These are not “Little Extras” they are the specialist Maths teacher in your child’s classroom, the LSA who helps your child learn to read, the specialist Physics teacher supporting your daughter in her A level, the pastoral support worker helping your son manage a family bereavement or breakup. What we needed was the improved annual per-pupil spending that allows us to pay teachers’ and support staff salaries. 
 
What we needed and what we will demand from the Comprehensive Spending Review is a root and branch overhaul of the austerity shouldered by schools who now represent the 4th emergency service for our communities plugging gaps in social, emotional and health provision; at times providing transport, food and clothing for families where austerity politics have left children without.
Quite.

​We had sad news this week that the founding Headteacher of Thomas Tallis, Beryl Husain, has died. Her successor Colin Yardley wrote this piece which, with thanks to him, I reproduce here. Plus ca change. 
During the late 1960s and early 1970s the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA), which replaced the LCC, was building a new secondary school to serve the massive Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, then under construction by the Greater London Council. The First Oil Crisis hit the economy and all public spending. Even while it was being built, the school suffered cuts, narrowing the corridors, losing a couple of staircases and lopping some classrooms and the assembly hall. Of course, the building was not completed in time for its planned opening. It was due to be a mixed comprehensive school, but had to start life in a nearby secondary modern boys’ school, Briset Road School. After a couple of years there was eventually the move to the new building, which was still not finished.

​Not only was a large part of the building still in the hands of contractors, but incessant cuts left it shoddily constructed, with the flat roof leaking from day one. All of this amounted to an inauspicious beginning for Thomas Tallis School, named after the Tudor-period composer who had local connections. Fortunately for all concerned, especially the children, Beryl had been appointed Headteacher. She immediately proved her mettle by refusing to have the school officially opened because the building was, in her view, far from finished. In fact, that first building was never officially opened. She insisted on compensation in the form of an on-site playing field for the school, pointing out that all the ILEA had to do was buy an adjacent private sports ground and give it to her. She won that battle.

Beryl knew that, in order to survive, let alone thrive, Tallis had to compete with the surrounding well established schools and win. She appointed a young staff, most of them in their first job and over half of them women. It was to be mixed ability teaching in all subjects and at all levels. Homework was obligatory for all. All assemblies, notwithstanding the law, were non-religious.

A predominantly young staff could be moulded in her own image. Beryl considered herself a trainer, as well as the leader. One of her catch-phrases was: “Look after the nitty-gritty.” In other words, get the detail consistently right and the rest will follow. During the 1980s the school became fully subscribed and the hottest ticket in town. In 1990, it was at the centre of the Greenwich Judgement saga. Greenwich had just become an education authority on Thatcher’s break-up of the ILEA. The Council declared a new policy that only children resident within the borough could be admitted to the borough’s schools. This brought an end to the free movement across borders under the all-embracing ILEA. A group of parents just across the border in Lewisham kicked up a mighty storm. They resented the prospect of being unable to send their children to the school they considered their best choice  ─ Tallis. The case had to reach the House of Lords before it was determined that free movement had to be maintained.
​
By the time Beryl retired in 1986, the windows still rattled and the roof still leaked, but she had built a dedicated and outstanding staff and her school had the best results of the Greenwich county schools and was heavily over-subscribed. A measure of its success was the fact that the staff sent enough of their own children to the school to muster two football teams. Beryl was a bundle of energy and enthused all around her. She is remembered with admiration and affection.
What a wonderful eulogy: I am very sorry not to have known her. I’d like to have seen her response to the plumbing difficulties we had this week.  

Please accept this wisdom from other Heads this week, as a respite from my ranting. I need to concentrate on communicating with the young after another child stopped me on the bridge. ‘Why is it’ he demanded ‘that every time I look up Thomas Tallis I just get a picture of some guy with long hair?’ So much for my September assembly on the man and his music. I’ll have to remind them about the ‘mild and quyet’ Tallis, ‘O happy man’. We’ll all have to remind the government that schools can’t run on thin air, insults and lies.
 
CR
1.11.18  ​​
1 Comment

‘I’m not committed to love, I’d be fine with war’

16/9/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
I return to the Tallis Hug. For new readers, this quite a feature. Students here hug each other desperately as if waving goodbye to an émigré, when they part for a lesson. They hug when they reconvene in sheer relief that the loved one is safely returned to whichever draughty part of concourse or canteen is home. This is inexplicable to the northerner for whom a raised eyebrow is an embarrassingly gushing show of affection. And they come pre-programmed. 

Directing canteen traffic in the early hours of the term small child rushed up to me with a story of lost bag, shoes and bus before leaving home, followed by confusion and excitement in school. ‘Now I’m FINE!’ she squeaked. ‘Can I get a hug?’ ‘No!’ I squawked, rearranging her outstretched arms and backing into a dinner lady. ’We don’t do that here!’  Which, as explained above, is patently untrue. What I meant was - you’ll find plenty people to hug here, but not adults and certainly not me. The exuberance of youth. 

In telling this rocket-propelled putative hugger something about the Tallis way I was – rather magnificently – following my own instructions. My theme for the year is Tallis as usual. We don’t want to invent any new ways of doing things this year, just to do everything we already do better, and more consistently. That’s not to say that we won’t have some creatively eccentric new ways of teaching, but we want our running procedures to be reliable, predictable and better.

Which subtle segue leads me into the general state of our education system. Not enough money, 40 000 fewer teachers that we need, exam system that can’t bear the weight put on it, financial scandals etc etc. My solution to most worries is reading so I’ve just finished Melissa Benn’s Life Lessons. Benn is a tireless campaigner for community comprehensive schools but in this little piece she also turns her attention to the state of adult education and the universities, as well as schools, proposing a National Education Service. (Before you reach for the pen to report me to the Secretary of State for contravention of Staffing and Advice for Schools September 2018 para 5:33 (expressing political views) this is not quite the same as the one that Labour talked about a bit at some point.)  It’s well worth reading, not least for this.
Why do we still know so little and celebrate even less the successes of comprehensive education? That a new generation of educational activists and administrators, including anti-grammar [conservative MPs] and many in the academy and free school movement now adhere to its principles so hard fought for half a century ago but rarely give it credit is not merely a form of disguised tribalistic discourtesy: it is also the result of a long-standing distortion of the historical record  
​She goes on to say:
It should not be forgotten that today’s widespread commitment across the political spectrum….to the idea of all children getting a shot at an ‘academic education is the direct result of comprehensive reform.  It changed our attitudes for the better and should be built on, not dismantled.
One of the things we often say at Tallis is that the comprehensive dream is a vision every bit as precious as the NHS, and every bit as complicated. Model communities of local young people taught with expertise and equity is a blueprint for a better society. There are other barriers, mind, and I’ll talk about my next reading book, Robert Verkiak’s Posh Boys next time. 

Reading was on the agenda in year 7 assembly too. ‘Reading makes you kinder’ said Ms R. ‘You all need to read more’.  Perhaps the year 11 boy who bizarrely told Sir in English that he wouldn’t need English after leaving school could be persuaded that he might need kindness? Not that the conversation I had with Sir didn’t have its odd turns.  It was in discussing the choice of poetry for GCSE that he gave me the title of this piece. Which poems would you rather read?

We are committed to love at Tallis in that we are committed to kindness and service. Part of that is to be reliable, predictable and better. War and love, love and service, expertise and equity, creativity and eccentricity: Tallis as usual, hold us to our promises.
 
CR
13.9.18
0 Comments

Whistleblowing

5/11/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Roll your eyes if I’ve told you before that I'm a third-generation teacher. Therefore, I wear around my aged neck an ancestral whistle. Despite straitened finances Sir begged leave to buy whistles for mute duty teamsters. For prudence's sake he proposed an economy plastic version which offended my DNA, so I authorised a batch of genuine Acme Thunderers, literally old-school. A charming colleague earwigged this esoteric exchange. ‘Can I have one of those please, the name sounds pretty cool?’ Some days it's easy to oblige.

Some days it's easy to get along. I followed two smaller learners as they trotted along the green upstairs corridor between blocks 5 and 4. 'How do you know we'll get to Drama this way?' 'I'm following my gut'. ‘OK then.’

We entertained a journalist on the day of writing. She wanted to hear from the youth so we plucked a few out and let them loose on her: 'Why do you like it here?' 'People help you. They hold your hand through stuff'. Then they took pains to explain that the handholding was of the metaphorical supportive type, that it wasn't babyish or a soft option, but a way of enabling them to learn really hard stuff in a kind and supportive atmosphere.

I wandered out and Crocus was lying in wait for me again. She's taken against her options and appears to want to try them all out to find a set that suits. She's come to me because her Head of Year's told her that the trial period's over and she needs to love the ones she's got. She wanted to put her case before another judge, but really once it gets to me there's nowhere else to go, and I'd said no before half-term. There are things to battle for in life, and changing options for the third time isn't one of them. I threatened to blow time on my Thunderer if she lurked around me again on the matter.

After that I nearly tripped over some sixth form who were waiting tidily on the floor. I put it to them that, despite the hi-vis attributes of red tights, their proximity to the door constituted a trip hazard. They happily entertained themselves shuffling along until they were fully visible. Another visitor remarked: it's very calm here.

Boundaries, gut feeling, calm and a bit of support and kindness go a long way in a human institution. Children push their luck because they're full of hope that the world will bend itself to their personal needs. We can love their importuning while teaching them that persistence and discipline really requires them to get stuck in, that a best fit might be the best fit and that if something's hard, well, perhaps it'll get easier. Good habits are the basis of the good life and perhaps, a better world.

Which is why the news from Westminster is so grim this week. Not because it’s a surprise that things go wrong but because such wrongs have lasted into the modern world. When I was growing up the owner of the ancestral whistle was pretty clear that gender relations were apt to go awry and that women should have their wits about them. Over years as a Head I've packed brilliant and lucky young women off to be interns in MPs' offices and have never heard a word against the members for whom they worked, but plenty about unreconstructed attitudes in the febrile air of the crumbling Palace. Who says that the prize of survival in a political party is so great that a young person has to allow frankly stomach-turning, outrageous, not to mention illegal, assaults upon her dignity and person? We’re not talking about louche and left-over Edwardians who don’t know any better, but men of my own generation who very certainly do. 

Where's the common-sense politeness, respect and good behaviour? Where's the kindness and support. Where's the example to the young, for goodness' sake? For shame.

Which brings me back to the young chaps in the corridor helping each other through the day, Crocus wanting to shape her own destiny, and the year 11 physicists I saw on Thursday morning. They were all smiles and kindness to each other and their teacher. They smiled when they found out they didn't have to learn THIS equation. They smiled when they commented on each other's graphs and they chuckled quietly in appreciation of Sir's liquid pressure demo with three holes in a tube. It could not have been more cordial, pleasant and respectful. 
    
Some of the rich and powerful could learn from this, as they're finding out. Who'd have thought the ship of state would be so storm-toss'd by these young people? Bring it on, ladies. Acme Thunderers all round. Blow those whistles until we find a better way to be.
 
CR
3.11.17
0 Comments

Get on with it

9/6/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
How time flies. I went north in half term to reconnect with the haggis, the midge and the tent, returning for a wash and to finish off maths revision week before the exam on Election Day. A steady flow of revisers all week, checking and remembering, worrying and planning.  

We also had a week feeling the pinch of reduced public services: school staff who should have been on holiday actually on the phone all week for and with parents and children, trying to get referrals into overstretched social care and mental health provision. These good colleagues take calls everywhere: on holiday, on balconies, at relations, in supermarkets, in despair that there’ll ever be a service sufficient to need. Is this how the taxpayer imagines children should be cared for?

Still, summer’s apparently here so we come back to school and it’s like jumping into one of those lifts from the 80s that just kept rattling on round a loop. 6 weeks to go. Good grief.

Our Business Director hasn’t done a whole year in school before. She fears September careering towards her with so much to do.  I try to explain the dreamtime myth of ‘in the summer’ in schools. We imagine there’s world enough and time to do everything we postponed until after the exams, knowing full well that the half term vanishes and the gap between July 21st and September 4th is telescopic, actually only a few days once the August excitements are over. I’ve said it before: September’s about 7 weeks away and time’s a funny thing.

All the more so as the clocks (and inexplicably, my watch) have all slowed down and we’re a bit adrift. We don’t have pips and we can’t use the tannoy during exams. I led the minute’s silence on Tuesday after the English exam and it took us a while to settle on when 11 o’clock actually was.

At sports days on the back field, time is success. 270 year sevens buffeted by the wind.  Rain drives us indoors at lunchtime and Lake Tallis reappears on the yard (No Swimming). We fill the unforgiving hour with 60 seconds worth of distance run. And despite the unpredictable new exams and inexplicable cuts about to ruin us, we throw ourselves at every day. We live as if we are immortal.

Which is just how the people on London Bridge approached Saturday night. While I was cycling back over Lambeth Bridge from watching our violinists at the Albert Hall, guests to our city and locals died crudely and cruelly. ‘You are the best of us’ the Mayor said of the public servants who responded so quickly. Good people, doing what they can, cheerfully or fearfully getting through the minutes as well as the years, never knowing when darkness lies one step ahead. They didn’t enter the public service to be the best, but because they know that life is short and it could be better.

Which is why this election, like the European vote before it, has been such a monumental exercise in hubris. Quelle distraction. We all have jobs to do and impossible decisions to make because government sentimentality about public service doesn't extend to financing it properly. Persuading people to concentrate on froth and verbiage for 8 weeks doesn’t stop the young, the old and the sick needing more spent on them. Hollow election rhetoric doesn’t put police on the streets and it won't get a sick teenager a doctor. We didn’t have time for this vain campaign.
Our year 9 political correspondent and I convened on the stone stage on Tuesday.  She’s enjoyed the campaign, which demonstrates the optimism of youth. She predicted a hung parliament: Hayley for PM. Tallis, as usual, had a Labour landslide. We know what we value: fairness, and decent public sector funding giving a helping hand for those in need.  
Picture
Do we know what the future holds? Grammar School expansion should return to the grave and the Funding Formula enabled to work by dropping a whole lot more money into the pot. Perhaps someone will be put in charge at Sanctuary Buildings who’ll sort out the teacher shortage – but I mustn’t get carried away.  

So while the parties fight it out in the Palace of Westminster we need them to look hard at what they say they value and think again about the state of the nation. It's time to start governing for the people not the politicians.  Get on with it, would you, please?
 
CR
9.6.17
 
0 Comments

The Voice of the Sluggard

24/3/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
When Alice has her day in court in front of the King of Hearts in the matter of the tarts, a guinea-pig becomes overexcited and is suppressed by playing-card soldiers putting him in a bag and sitting on it. I had assumed Michael Gove had undergone something genteelly similar at the hands of the Conservatives but too soon. With muffled roar, the self-styled ‘slavish backbencher’ addresses the world (a conference in Dubai – how much?) from within the bag. ‘London schools’ success is due to aspirational immigrants’ he trumpets. They have raised standards because of their high expectations! Simultaneously, they have prevented ‘some people’ from getting places at good schools! In other parts of the sceptred isle it hasn’t gone so well! With a message for those who like to criticise immigrants and teachers equally he’s back in our ears. Good and bad at once! Tricky, eh?
 
My head still rotating on its stalk I stepped out into the corridor for un-Goved air. I exchanged cordial greetings with the young people and advised on matters from precise location of the Exams Office to the correct carriage of a basketball in an enclosed space. They smiled and grumped their way to class in this corner of world city where ‘immigrant’ really only means that you might speak more languages than the next person tripping over his feet.
 
It’s a stupid smokescreen from one of the great communicators of modern politics, part of a revisionist plot to remove the impact of funding from the legacy of the London Challenge. Simultaneously saying that non-immigrant parents aren’t involved in schools or want great things for their children while saying that immigration works in London but not in the north he only manages to illuminate the thing he tries to mask. It’s the economy, stupid.
 
People from all over the world make London a wonderful place to be no matter what, but schools don’t run on ambition and aspiration. If that was so, Oxford and Cambridge would be full of the children of the poor. Schooling for social mobility works when aspiration is generated, harnessed, transformed into a successful education by gifted and valued teachers in stable and respected schools. One of the things the London Challenge tackled from 2003 was the unhelpful distribution of those schools. Expensively, government set about four controversial policies to improve London’s education: the challenge itself, which involved school-to-school support and big data; Teach First; the academisation programme and higher expectations of challenge and support from local authorities. London children were funded well in schools who were given the cash to release teachers to share and learn across the city. It worked, demonstrated by the well-worn but nonetheless remarkable statistic that London thereby became the only capital in the world where achievement is higher than the national average.
 
What Gove doesn’t say is that before he got involved in 2010 there was investment in teaching, training and release time, for thinking and learning, and that there was money to go with the aspiration, and a plan. He doesn’t want to say that because he took the money away and, as a slavish backbencher, he has to support a range of harmful and destructive policies. There will be no release time in the future. There will be no training in the future.  There will be no sharing of good practice and no learning from the best. There will be fewer teachers, not more – 6% fewer applications this year at a time of shortage - and there will be little support from the local authorities now almost starved to death.
 
Oh, and those ‘refugees from Somalia or Kosovo’ who arrived new in our schools? They were welcomed with language programmes, counselling when they needed it, tailored curricula and intensive intervention to get them up to speed. Their parents looked for help from an education system for which they’d travelled halfway round the world, and they got it. Where the journey had nearly killed them, we helped put them back together. Now we’re taking it apart. 
 
And why hasn’t that happened for refugees from the same places who fetched up in Sunderland or Scunthorpe? Follow the money: it was underfunded schools that will stay underfunded while London schools become underfunded. It was grinding poverty with no shiny city on the doorstep. So when Gove says that success in London was solely because of the aspiration of children and their parents he says it because that comes free, in the free air of the world city – so we can do it without the visionary public investment we once had. Shame on him.   
 
In better news, the Year 13 BTEC farewell music performance by Streamlined was sublime. The Danes who visited us and built recycled models were charming. The Tallis Centre for Contemporary Arts is beautiful. The pi competition was sheer entertainment. And in my close surveillance of year 8s some of whose habits are not yet Tallis Habits, I’ve chanced upon a tiny diverting commentator whose favourite adjective is ‘tedious’. Gove is tedious. Back in the bag with him. As the King said ‘If that’s all you know about it, you may stand down’.
 
CR
23.3.17
Picture
What are the values and principles that underpin great leadership? Could expressing those make a better education system? In this article for the ASCL's Leader magazine I share my thoughts and ask for yours on proposals for a new Commission on Ethical Leadership in Education.
0 Comments

Aboard the Tiger

16/12/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Our 2009 summer holiday was Syria by public transport: Durham to Damascus, one world heritage site to another.  We had a vague plan which was almost literally derailed by being shunted into a siding in Belgrade for 12 hours. Consequently, we missed the twice-weekly train from Istanbul Haydarpasa, so did the final leg to Aleppo flying at night from Ataturk because the Syrians didn’t allow air traffic in daylight.

Aleppo was exotic, a flight of fancy from the witches in Macbeth, Aleppo bound aboard the Tiger, a terrifying taxi ride to Agatha Christie’s Baron Hotel, needing US dollars in hand. The Baron was a bit edgy for me so we decamped to a coolly soulless modern hotel. We explored the second century Citadel on a site used since 3000 BCE in 40 degrees of heat and nearly dehydrated to death without cash to buy water. A friendly shopkeeper took us in, explained that the government didn’t deal with capitalist Visa and told us where the cashpoint was for the odd European traveller. The next day we wandered off to find beautiful 13th century Madrasa Firdows and sat on a wall watching children on what looked like a holiday school at the mosque, supervised by a young man with a limp. Round the corner was the 10th century Maqam Ibrahim Salihin, with a rock ‘honoured by Abraham’s transit from Ur to Hebron’. We ate inflated bread and I was issued an all-in-one gown with a pointy hood to go into the Ummayyad Mosque where the courtyard was too hot to walk on. In the suq I regretted some pretty nifty, pretty pricy earrings in gold with red and green dangly hoops.

A punctual train got us to Damascus and another unnerving taxi to a palace hotel in the old town for days of investigation: the head of John the Baptist, Saladin’s tomb, Straight Street and the National Archaeological Museum, one of the finest on earth. We saw paintings from the third century Douro-Europos synagogue, exhumed from the desert, alone of its kind. And the train back at the end of it all from Damascus to Aleppo where we watched pilgrims hustling an elderly Imam from the station mosque onto a rusty train to Tehran. We crossed the border overnight to Adana with its Hadrian bridge and the best sleeper train I’ve ever been on, to Ankara and the Gilgamesh bas-reliefs, half as old as time.

Aleppo wasn’t perfect. A hotel man stood by to climb on the roof to start the petrol generator when the grid gave up. It chugged along with every household’s, adding nothing to the air quality. We got a dose of the lurgy, but I’ve had that in Copenhagen. The banks were tricky, but the streets were safer than Sofia en route. The tragedy of Syria isn’t that it was a bit rickety or that the jewels of humanity have been blown to bits. The tragedy is that the people are dead and the children orphaned and dying in an ancient place where men and women have lived good and fulfilled and creative lives for thousands of years and no one can stop it.

But this week was Tallis in Wonderland. We had dance, drama and music, from the tiniest to the biggest, stylish and happy. We had comperes and a Mad Hatter and film of Alice in Tallisland. We had dancing boys and an acapella choir, a clapping song, leaping girls, wonderful bands: White Rabbit and A Town Called Malice in A School Called Tallis.

According to the theology rooted in the streets of Damascus, Christmas is about birth and hope. A few train journeys west we take it for granted that the electricity works so the hospitals are safe and the schools won’t be shelled. We expect that there’ll be clean lavatories, mock exams, a Christmas Show and visits to the museums and galleries of the capital. We expect a Drawing Exhibition on the theme of Obsession and a visit to Barclays to talk to the mentors in front of people who make financial weather in the world. We expect Duke of Edinburgh’s Award badges and performance management and governor elections and Christmas lunch with free food for those fallen on hard times. We expect a clear policy for dealing with Harmful and Abusive Behaviour. We expect not to die, every day.

While Samira hurdles over the benches in the yard at the end of lunch and Ellis bounces at his friend, while Jane re-reads a favourite novel as she walks through block 5 and Jebi the Sapeur struts his stuff in SE3, the children of Aleppo are terrified and cruelly murdered. And we in the west, through fear, apathy, pork-barrel politics, obsession with nationality and disregard for humanity, can’t do a thing. The world’s been changed for the worse in Syria, and we must do better.       
 
CR
15.12.16
0 Comments

I have forgotten

3/7/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
​One of the poems at the annual creative writing evening at Tallis was I Have Forgotten. In it the poet lists the things from her life so far that she’d put in her rucksack perhaps in the hope of being surprised by it all when she found it again in later life. It reminded me of a boy a long way away and hopefully quite old now who, in his childhood, moved from carer to carer with his things in a carrier bag. Though he had a good long-term placement by the time we met, the damage was deep and he was hard to educate.
​
The evening under advisement is the product of a week at the Arvon Centre in Shropshire for our young people who are keen to write and willing to have it scrutinised and criticised by peers, teachers and a poet in residence. It’s a wonderful thing and we try to make it affordable for all who qualify, but each place works out a bit pricey and cake sales don’t quite bring home the bacon. We subsidise some through the School Fund, but that’s not exactly brimming with moolah in these straitened times. Anyway, the poetry was wonderful and the confidence of the young writers (and teachers who submit to the same discipline) impressive. What a memory.

​
So I mused on school and memory as I trotted from place to place this week. A colleague asked : ‘what should we do about the EU vote?’ and I had to think. Not too much. Help the children to understand the enormity of what’s happened, and what the future might hold, but keep everything else normal so that there’s a backdrop for their interest and fears. London voted pretty solidly, so there’s no need to frighten them with the idea that all of a sudden people are less keen on diversity than they were a week ago. That being said, they should be able to look back and say ‘I remember when the vote happened.  We did such-and-such and Mr X explained what had happened. He was so right/wrong.’ That’s about as far as I get with a Brexit comment. The rest is silence.

So back to the memories. I was watching year 10 being summoned, corralled and sorted for exams. Girls cling to one another, boys thump each other companionably or mumble to themselves until they’re up against the piece of paper alone. We make them practice in year 10 in the hope that they remember it in year 11 and don’t waste time gazing about themselves. Everything’s easier in school if you have a fixed routine and the young people have something simultaneously to batter and shelter against. Then when they meet up in later life, or meet another former inmate, they can reminisce about how utterly wonderful and unreasonable school was and how it set them up for life.

HMCI’s been at it again: still people left to annoy but so little time. Children’s Social Care departments are useless: weak leadership and high caseloads.  Weak leadership is a shame, though with the constant carping it’s a blessed miracle there are any at all. High caseloads? It’s like complaining about big classes in schools and I’m lost for another way to explain it: if there isn’t a sensible high-profile training route to respected and reasonably paid jobs in local authorities with the money to support a decent staffing establishment then exactly how is the service to improve and the caseloads to reduce? Shall we just shout at people until they give up? Is that going well so far?

Which takes me back to the little chap and his carrier bag. His life was better because of a social worker who stayed long enough to see him into a better place. She was an unusual woman, determined and exacting. She kept structures tight and reliable enough so that he had a ghost of a chance at life. And it takes me on to a whole new annoyance about inequality and our current leaders who change their minds about how schools should run and what they’re for almost monthly so we don’t know how to safeguard our ethos and traditions. I assume that if you’re educated expensively and privately you go to schools with long histories and very clear routines. They’re exceptionally secure institutions, so if your life is a bit ropey you’ll be protected by them. If you’re not expected to live for most of the year with people who don’t want you,  perhaps the pain is lessened and the school experience gives you happyish memories where otherwise there might be nothing but sadness. Call it resilience if you like, but its really just luck and money.
 
CR
30.6.16
1 Comment

You in the grey

22/6/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Bruno Quinquet, from The Salaryman Project, 2013
All of a sudden the noise level drops. Examinees are counted in and a Deputy flies off in the minibus to collect a straggler to post into the exam room by the skin of his teeth. One such trip last week led to a scrape through the traffic calming measures about with which we are hedged. Ribs are tickled, legs pulled, invigilators say the hall’s cold.  

Break seems like a rather bald cocktail party. We’ve room for 2000 but 3 year groups have engagements with the examiner and another has been walked to the park for sports day. That leaves years 7 and 9 at break. Watching two small girls annoying each other over a hairband after the pips I remind them that someone, somewhere is waiting for them. They charge off like Usain Bolts each clutching an end of the item under dispute, not stopping until a door presents a cunning obstacle through which they bundle each other.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest a young teacher is seeking the class she’s meant to be covering while PE are encouraging competitiveness, resilience, grit or whatever’s currently fashionable. 
We are foxed by the room number so I have time to tell her that when I was a lad we spent our lives covering and never got a free lesson from one year’s end to the next. I once worked in an excitable sort of school where someone set fire to the cover sheet on the staffroom noticeboard as a leaving gift. Workforce reform in 2001 put paid to that, but we’ve devised new ways of making teacher workloads unmanageable since then. 

Year 11 emerge from History with mixed interpretations, appropriately enough. We loiter and question. After GCSE maths last week one teacher ran a masterclass debriefing in the yard, working out what’s yet to be asked. When I was a lad (2) we invigilated all the exams so we watched it happen, but that went the way of workforce reform too. Science offered yard advice on Friday afternoon about revision: get up after Fajr prayers, that’s a good time to start (0340). Oh my days, as they say.      

Year 8 return from Sports Day chuffed with themselves so lunchtime is louder. I wander to see how many Tallis Rules posters are still on the walls in June and order some more. A colleague returns, be-shorted, from the Geography trip and presents me with a pencil which I lose immediately. He turns up the volume at the end of the day, admonishing a swearer ‘you in the grey jumper, wait outside my office’. Tallis wears grey jumpers so that’s a bit like shouting ‘you with the arms’. However, the jumper recognises itself and trudges off, minding its mouth.

In the promised land of the summer term we have to do all the things we promised we’d do. I like trips, so we’re Tallising about all over the place. I’ve a minor speaking gig in sunny Birmingham, two colleagues are working with a partner school in Copenhagen. Back on the mothership, controlled assessments battle with speaking tests, opportunities for Taekwondo with science assessments. Everyone’s eyeing up space for next year and I’m worrying about stuff. 

The timetabler is having a day off at a conference on costing the curriculum. He’ll come back with bad news because there’s no good news to be had, even for ready money. 16-19 funding is going to be about half of what it was in 2011 and all kinds of things are at risk, everywhere. Nothing we do is free of cost, but some of what we’re used to might prove to be luxurious, superfluous to the austerity imperative. Pastoral care, enrichment activities, work experience, A level languages, economics, further maths, music:  all the things that give a poor young person a fair chance against a rich one for a competitive university place. All to go, to keep taxes down?

The Secretary of State talks of languishing? Show me the languishing, as young people are hassled from pillar to post to meet facile targets amidst constant turbulence. Show me the languishing as we work through the night to second-guess and justify our every action. Show me the languishing as we wait for the cynical release of the next wave of changes, probably in August? So I was delighted to hear Nick Gibb promise us lead-in time for the next set of changes. I’ll gladly believe when I see it: ‘You in the grey suit, give us a break’. 

CR

12.6.15

0 Comments

How's the election going for you?

26/4/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
A vandalised political party poster from the 2010 campaign.
We’re terrifically excited at Tallis. We had a Community Day before Easter on Protest and taught our young people about democracy and participation. We’ve got posters up all over the yard, showing the parties, their leaders and the Woolwich and Greenwich candidates.  We’ll have an election on 5th May so will confidently be able to tell the nation what awaits us all before the actual day.  

Talking this through at Governors last night, one suggested that we should make the children register to vote before they actually put the cross in the box. I think that’s a great idea, because the issue isn’t so much persuading people that democracy is a good thing or the least worst thing, but in getting them to stir their stumps and fetch up to the polling station. We like campaigns at Tallis. We had LGBT month which was very successful with special assemblies, t-shirts, lanyards, posters all over the place. I heard a child explain to another, as if to one of surprising density, ‘Its Gay Week, innit?’. Not a single poster was removed, defaced or misappropriated. 
Not so much with the election: I regret to report that politicians have not fared so well. Two of the leaders grew tidy Hitler moustaches mysteriously overnight and have had to be replaced (the pictures, not the leaders). Instructions about the democratic process have been reiterated: we don’t deface, we vent our feelings in the ballot box. Participate civilly!

I’m not surprised that the Get Over It campaign was more respected than some politicians. Young people cannot fathom the ways of the old. It is blindingly obvious to most of them that inclusivity is the right way to live. They’re interested in people’s struggles and would like to understand the world and change it for the better. Prurient prejudice is incomprehensible: why would you be bothered about sexuality? What is the matter with you people?    

Politics, however, is encouraged by a bad press which gives an excuse for not voting. Young people and non-voting adults believe that politicians lie and can’t be trusted. One reason is that it’s hard to make a political promise – an economic promise - that is simultaneously easy to understand and true. Politics involves compromise, and you need a clear understanding of the flawed possibilities of human life to keep cheerful about it. Being outraged about inequality and politicians’ refusal to tackle it is reasonable and understandable: not voting is unreasonable and nihilist. Decisions are made by those who show up. We do the best we can. 

However, one does sympathise with despair at political pronouncements. The government have decreed that all year 7 students who didn’t meet the expected standard (what we used to call level 4) in reading, writing and maths in year 6 will have to take the tests again. That was 21% in 2014.  21% of Year 6 students have SEN and are mostly exempt from the proposed re-sits. So who’ll do the tests? When? Will secondaries keep these little ones out of the timetable until they pass? Will that help them get cleverer? How will Ofsted measure it?

And so to #2 in an occasional series of Things Overheard That Make Me Want To Bang My Head Against A Wall. A renowned prep school was being discussed at a small hotel to which I betook my weary bones after Easter. Thus: ‘It’s wonderful, so very child-centred. They value childhood and even teach some of them how to be children. Oh, and they all swim across the river with their clothes on.’ Try that in a state school and count the days until the Head appears in the paper and her job in the TES. I hope that none of the children frittering away their time learning to swim were under par in the KS2 tests.  Oh, I forgot: they don’t have to do them in the private schools. Endless testing: good for other people’s children. Learning how to save your own life and have fun too: good for rich people’s children.

Sometimes at school we have hard messages to impart which help young people grow up. We tell them if they generally tell the truth, try hard and act honestly that they will be believed. If they generally behave unfairly or thoughtlessly they are less likely to be trusted when it matters most to them. Children understand that so most of them learn that honest error is forgivable but sustained deception makes community life unsustainable. We teach them to make up their minds about people based on how they treat others. And then we tell them to vote.  

CR 22.4.15

0 Comments

Better in Madrid

29/3/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Warren de la Rue, Total solar eclipse of 1860 in Spain
We didn’t see the eclipse, but Tallis youth described it on Sky News and the radio. Science large and small went and stood on the MUGA and were careful with their eyes, but as the whole of SE3 was shrouded in dense cloud, all we got was a sense of teatime in the morning. A year 11 said ‘It looks better in Madrid’, but that would be so for any March day in an English yard.   

The spring conference season brings light and fog to educators. First there was the Greenwich Heads’ Annual get together, then the ASCL conference last weekend (the Association of School and College Leaders, since you ask). This latter outfit’s gig is the stadium rock of our world: 1200 delegates, big name speakers, all the politicians. 9 till 6 then dinner and dancing. Your correspondent hasn’t actually done the dancing since 1998, but I believe that the younger generation still manage it: dancing deputies, a sight to be seen. 

ASCL made a proposal this year alongside our usual calm campaigning on funding. In order to protect our children’s interests, what about an Independent Commission on the Curriculum made up of teachers, governors, employers, parents and politicians to review the core curriculum once every five years. That way, we put up a shield between children’s learning and the need for Secretaries of State to make their mark (not literally, though the help would be welcome) on children’s exercise books. 
Mrs Morgan is underwhelmed: ‘what our children learn in school should be determined by our democratically elected representatives’.  

I used to agree with this because I’m all for democracy, but I’m done with it now. Politicians have an eye on the electorate, the press and their legacies (3 eyes in total). They know precious little about children and less of pedagogy or epistemology. Few of the current cabinet went to state schools and the current enthusiasm for the excellent Greycoat Hospital does not make them curriculum thinkers. Even the CBI despairs, begging for schools to be allowed to offer the rounded and grounded curriculum that their members crave. I strive to be apolitical but here’s what Roberts thinks: stack the commission if you will, fill every position from Chair to tea-boy with political placemen but give us a break.  One mega idea (diplomas, EBacc, grit, phonics, Mockingbird) every five years will still get you into the history books but it might mean that a child has only two major upheavals in his school life, three if she’s unlucky. Leave us alone, to think, to plan, to teach. Struth. Commission the thing, would you?

A smaller national conference happened in terrific Tallis last week. We shared a love of expansive education, helping young people think and make links with the world. Two delegates nearly didn’t make it at all because their train went the wrong way out of London Bridge and, in the manner of a Secretary of State, without planning, warning, apology or support, deposited them in Hither Green. Isn’t it the whole point of trains that they don’t get lost? However, our people are teachers and despite all provocation got back on track and arrived on time.

As did the hundreds of young people from other schools we interviewed for our sixth form, the parents who came to find out about revision and the friends who joined the PTA’s Wine and Chocolate evening. We did it wearing lurid socks for Down Syndrome, eating cakes for Ecuador, setting off to Zaragoza or Santander or the history trip or Snowdon or the Maths Feast. We did it winning the year 8 London Sportshall Athletics finals or at the Fashion Show Abstract Couture. We did it because you can trust us to teach our hearts out, if you just let us.

I told them all this in a recent speaking tour of Germany. I describe it thus because saying ‘some nice German English teachers were kind to me in Leipzig and Duisburg’ doesn’t sound quite so grand. I talked to teachers brought together by Klett publishers who use Tallis and Greenwich as a way to learn English. They were interested in our pastoral work and outraged by interference in the guise of accountability. The teachers wanted to know about the triumphs of multiculturalism and goggled at photos of our building and laughed with our Good Morning video. 100 German 12 year olds shared their excitement with us this week: we love this link.  

The Germans know a thing or two about politics and the curriculum. Perhaps that Commission isn’t such a bad idea.            

CR

23.3.15

0 Comments

Cultural Revolution

1/3/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
Bob and Roberta Smith, Portrait of Michael Gove, 2013
Genuinely, I like politicians and take my hat off to those who throw themselves into public service. Sure, there’s a risk of self-aggrandisement, but that’s true of any job requiring a bit of performance. You should meet some headteachers. You won’t be surprised to know that this one is a Radio 4 listener who has her horizons widened by arts programming.  

So, knee-deep in half term’s laundry (my own, you understand, I don’t take in washing for the community) I heard young Miliband explaining his aim to beef up arts, culture and creativity, a response to the Warwick Report demonstrating how creative and cultural opportunities for young people have vanished from schools. He cursed Gove and all Goveites and set out on a mission “to guarantee every young person, from whatever background, access to the arts and culture: a universal entitlement to a creative education for every child”. OFSTED bloodhounds will seek it out.

Hmm, I said to the socks. In 2011 Darren Henley (Classic FM and the Arts Council) produced the excellent Cultural Education in England for the DfE and DCMS. It made 24 recommendations, 15 directly involving schools. So what happened to culture in school?   
Gove’s Ebacc was too small. It didn’t include an arts or practical subject. I assume this was so it wouldn’t look like the National Curriculum, which enshrined an entitlement to the broad and balanced curriculum including the arts. So, this happened. The requirements of the NC were lifted, pressures to increase results every year increased, schools focused time and money on English and maths, undervalued arts withered and died.  No one banned arts, but everything else was compulsory. Labour and Coalition trussed up schools in the lunatic knitting of cash flow and the performance tables.    

Arts decline easily. Despite our pre-eminence as a creative nation, we leave culture to the same divisive market forces as everything else. We don’t prioritise access to the arts in school because Secretaries of State say things like ‘I want England to be top five PISA for English and maths by 2020’.  They don’t realise that if state schools have to increase time and funding for maths and English then other things go and the arts deficit isn’t made up by children going to the opera with their parents. 

As I remarked to the tea towels, politicians misunderstand the purpose of education and are diverted by falsehoods. Here are 7 that were comprehensively debunked by the OECD earlier this month.
  1. Disadvantaged pupils always do badly in school: no, successful systems mitigate social inequalities.
  2. Immigrants lower results: no, not anywhere. 
  3. It’s all about money: no, there is no correlation.
  4. Smaller class sizes raise standards: no, teacher quality and workload reduction raise standards.
  5. Comprehensive systems are fair but you need academic selection for higher results: no, there is no tracking, streaming or grade repetition in top performing systems.
  6. The digital world needs new subjects and a wider curriculum: no, in top systems the curriculum is rigorous, with subjects taught well and in great depth.
  7. Success is about being born talented: no, all children can achieve at very high levels. Top systems  "level up" so that all students meet standards formerly expected only from elite students.
 
So if the current SoS wants to be top 5 she’s going to have to look coolly at some vote-losing issues:
  1. Stop describing poor families as a drain on the system
  2. Stop talking rubbish about immigration
  3. Stop fiddling with school funding
  4. Sort out teacher recruitment and workload
  5. Value comprehensive schools
  6. Stop adding things to the curriculum
  7. Believe that all children can learn

A more equal society raises standards and a less equal one depresses them. Schools should enable children to build a better future and wedge the doors open to their cultural birthright, starting with the arts. Systematically open up the palaces of privilege and high culture. Dial down the exclusive rhetoric on STEM and the economic functionality of education, talk up the balance of things that help children fly.  Architects need artistry, maths and music go hand in hand, science needs philosophy, drama explains everything and what is life without poetry?

At Tallis every week is culture week but children still need persuading that this is theirs too. So this week we've hosted a world famous violinist, 100 year 8s have made a film, year 9 premiered a National Theatre competition performance, sixth form artists are in Berlin, we hosted hundreds of little dancers from primary schools yesterday and trained colleagues from a nearby PRU. We value equality and justice and culture opens doors.  Education to understand the world and change it for the better.

CR

26.2.15        
1 Comment

Where do you go to my lovely?

15/2/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, A Child's Face, 1944, Theresienstadt (Terezin)
Year 11 English last week considered loss and beauty in the poetry of the Great War. Diverted from a film still of la Redmayne (‘he really is beautiful, sir’) and recommending further reading (‘there’s a lovely sonnet of Milton’s’) we tussled over the number of horsepersons of the apocalypse. One amongst us had forgotten Death who, as you recall, brings hell in its wake. GCSE approaches so I investigated how close we are to peak poem. ‘I’m working for an A*’ said one no less beautiful specimen, skilfully tangling himself in a roller blind and nearly falling out of the window.  

War troubles me for all the usual reasons, though I don’t think I’m a pacifist. Holocaust Memorial Day in January troubled me more after I went to Auschwitz in 2006: not so much the camp as the bureaucracy. I think to myself – if you were a headteacher in such times, when would you know something was amiss? When would you worry? When would you act? Would you worry about having to submit the names of children of a particular group? How would you feel about the yellow stars? About an edict to segregate classrooms? If the attendance of particular children became something you weren’t accountable for? If they disappeared? If you ran a really successful school, followed all instructions properly and kept the system stable for the others? When is a headteacher culpable? When the men in uniforms appear in a truck for the children you’ve been told to line up in the yard, doing it as they’ve been taught and telling jokes to keep each other cheerful? If not then, when?
So much of what we believe now about human rights is rooted in the soil of Auschwitz. Children’s rights pre-date that. The plight of small blockaded children after the First War compelled Eglantine Jebb to start Save the Children, but nothing saved them from Hitler. French primary schools commemorate exactly this. Since 1997 plaques have appeared in Paris and beyond explaining exactly what happened. From this school, this arondissement, such-and-such number of pupils were deported as a result of Nazi barbarity with the active complicity of the Vichy government.  Those headteachers of the little ecoles maternelle and splendid lycees: what did they think they were doing? Did they believe the rhetoric? Were they just following orders? Were they protecting their own income and fragile safety under the jackboot of tyranny? What would you do?        

Children are easy to miss. Many of them are small and all of them are powerless. They are either weak and easy to neglect or adolescently strong and easy to corrupt. They like certainty and are poor judges of what is good for them. They get hungry and tired quickly. They can’t vote and don’t pay taxes. They are easy to kill.     

Schools keep children alive because schools are where this society looks after its young. School attendance is a human good. If we see them every day we know they are fit and well while we try to push a bit of Spanish or algebra into them. School is about regularity, routine, walls of safety to batter against until you can look after yourself. Chasing persistent non-attenders is depressingly hard and helping children escape from that chaos unbelievably difficult. It can’t all be done by a workforce occupied in the parts of a volcano or the uses of copper sulphate. An old head once described the perfect Education Welfare Officer as having the personality of a Sergeant-Major and the speed of Linford Christie (it was a while ago), but they are disappearing with the fading of public services. How does a school, or a council, choose between keeping children warm or paying the people who’ll check that they’re still alive?    

Free schooling up to adulthood is a great achievement of civilisation and education makes people live longer. We have a duty in school to make sure that adults don’t mess up children’s lives by withholding or denigrating education. Here’s to the schools that know where all their children are, every day, and here’s to the workforce who make that possible. Here’s to the attendance officers, social workers, youth workers and police officers who support us and the parents who persevere. Here’s to the whining school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school and here’s to the teachers who make sure he knows that Shakespeare said it. 

It takes a village to raise a child and some of our villagers have council identity tags and unreasonable workloads. We are partners in protecting ourselves from error and our children from harm. Who’s campaigning on that manifesto?

CR 12.2.15
0 Comments
<<Previous

    MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

    A regular column about school life.

    Archive

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013

    Categories

    All
    11+
    1970s
    80s
    90s
    Aamilne
    Ability
    Absurdity
    Academics
    Academies
    Academisation
    Academy
    Acadmies
    Acas
    Accountability
    Achievement
    Addiction
    Administrators
    Admissions
    Adolescence
    Adulthood
    Adults
    Adventure
    Adversity
    Adverts
    Advice
    Aiweiwei
    Aleppo
    Alevels
    Alienation
    Allourfutures
    Altruism
    Amandagorman
    Ambassador
    Aneurinbevan
    Annefrank
    Annelongfield
    Anthonyburgess
    Anthonyhorowitz
    Anti Racism
    Anti-racism
    Apologies
    Apology
    Appointments
    Appraisal
    Apprenticeships
    Arabic
    Argument
    Ariadne
    Aristotle
    Army
    Arrogance
    Art
    Arts
    Artsmark
    Ascl
    Askforangela
    Aspiration
    Assemblies
    Assembly
    Assessment
    Assessments
    Attendance
    Attributes
    Austerity
    Authority
    Autonomy
    Autumn
    Aztecs
    Balfourbeatty
    Banding
    Battle
    Battleaxes
    Battlements
    Bbc
    Beauty
    Bees
    Beginnings
    Behaviour
    Belonging
    Berylhusain
    Beveridge
    Biafra
    Billlucas
    Billyconolly
    Biology
    Blackhistorymonth
    Blacklivesmatter
    Blogosphere
    Borisjohnson
    Boundaries
    Bowie
    Boys
    Breaktime
    Brexit
    Briefing
    Bruisers
    Brutality
    Bsf
    Btec
    Budget
    Budgets
    Bugsy
    Building
    Bullying
    Bureaucracy
    Cambridge
    Cameron
    Campaign
    Cancelled
    Capital
    Catalytic
    Celebration
    Ceremonies
    Ceremony
    Certificates
    Chalk
    Champagne
    Champions
    Change
    Changes
    Character
    Charity
    Charlescausley
    Charteredcollege
    Checklists
    Childhood
    Childq
    Children
    Chinese
    Choices
    Chriskillip
    Christmas
    Churchofengland
    Cicero
    Citizenship
    Civic
    Civility
    Civilservants
    Classrooms
    Climate
    Clipboards
    Clothes
    Clubs
    Cocurricular
    Code
    Cohesion
    Collaboration
    Colleagues
    Commission
    Commissioner
    Committee
    Commodification
    Commongood
    Community
    Compassion
    Compliance
    Comprehensive
    Compromise
    Concentration
    Conference
    Confidence
    Conformity
    Confucius
    Conkers
    Conservative
    Consultation
    Context
    Contingency
    Continuity
    Control
    Controversy
    Conversation
    Coronavirus
    Corridors
    Costcutting
    Costofliving
    Courage
    Cover
    Covid19
    Covid-19
    Craft
    Creativity
    Cressidadick
    Crime
    Cslewis
    Culture
    Cupboards
    Curiosity
    Curriculum
    Cuts
    Cyberspace
    Cycling
    Dameedna
    Dance
    Danger
    Danielhuws
    Darkness
    Data
    Davidharsent
    Deadlines
    Deaf
    Debate
    Decisions
    Decolonising
    Deliverology
    Democracy
    Demonstration
    Deprivation
    Deregulation
    Derekmahon
    Design
    Detention
    Determination
    Dfe
    Dialect
    Dianereay
    Diary
    Dickens
    Difference
    Dignity
    Diligence
    Dipsticks
    Disadvantage
    Disaster
    Discipline
    Discourse
    Discussion
    Diversity
    Dofe
    Dog-whistle
    Dominiccummings
    Donaldtrump
    Donpaterson
    Doors
    Douglasdunn
    Drama
    Dreams
    Driving
    Drking
    Dt
    Durham
    Earthday
    Easter
    Ebacc
    Eclipse
    Economy
    Eddieandthehotrods
    Edhirsch
    Education
    Effort
    Eglantynejebb
    Election
    Elite
    Elites
    Elitism
    Empathy
    Empowerment
    Endeavour
    Endurance
    Engagement
    Enrolment
    Entitlement
    Epiphany
    Epistemology
    Equality
    Equipment
    Equity
    Ethicalleadership
    Ethics
    Ethos
    Eton
    Evaluation
    Events
    Everyday
    Examboards
    Exams
    Excellence
    Exchange
    Exclusions
    Expectations
    Experience
    Explosions
    Expolitation
    Extremism
    Facilities
    Failure
    Fairness
    Faith
    Fame
    Family
    Farewell
    Fashion
    Fatherbrown
    Fear
    Feminism
    Festival
    Fidelity
    Filming
    Finances
    Fitness
    Fog
    Folly
    Food
    Foodbanks
    Football
    Frederickdouglass
    Freedom
    Freeschool
    Friends
    Friendship
    Fsm
    Functionalism
    Funding
    Future
    Gaffes
    Gardening
    Gavinwilliamson
    Gcse
    Gcses
    Generosity
    Geoffbarton
    Geography
    Geordie
    German
    Germans
    Gestures
    Gillliankeegan
    Girls
    Globalwarming
    Goats
    Gotomeeting
    Gove
    Government
    Governors
    Grades
    Grammar
    Greenwich
    Grenfell
    Guidance
    Guilt
    Habits
    Handwashing
    Happiness
    Harassment
    Hartlepool
    Headship
    Headstart
    Headteachers
    Health
    Heating
    Heatwave
    Helicopter
    Heritage
    Hippocrates
    History
    Hmci
    Hmi
    Holidays
    Holocaust
    Homelessness
    Homesecretary
    Homework
    Honesty
    Hope
    Hopes
    Hospitals
    Hugging
    Humanity
    Humanrights
    Humanutopia
    Humility
    Humour
    Hunger
    Hymnsheets
    Hypocrisy
    Ict
    Illumination
    Imagination
    Immigrants
    Inclusion
    Information
    Injustice
    Inquisitive
    Inspection
    Institution
    Integrity
    Interdependence
    International
    Interpretation
    Interview
    Interviews
    Investment
    Invictus
    Invigilation
    Invigilators
    IPad
    Islam
    Janeausten
    Jeremyhunt
    Johndonne
    Johnlecarre
    Johnmasefield
    Johnrawls
    Journeys
    Joy
    Jubilee
    Judgement
    Judidench
    Justice
    Kaospilots
    Katherinebirbalsingh
    Kenrobinson
    Kidbrooke
    Kindness
    KingcharlesIII
    Knifecrime
    Knighthood
    Knowledge
    Ks3
    Ks4
    Language
    Languages
    Laughter
    Leadership
    Learners
    Learning
    Leavers
    Leaving
    Lessons
    Levels
    Liberal
    Liberty
    Lindsayhoyle
    Lines
    List
    Listening
    Literacy
    Literature
    Liztruss
    Lockdown
    Logic
    Logistics
    London
    Londonchallenge
    Loneliness
    Lordagnew
    Louismacneice
    Love
    Luck
    Lucyholt
    Luddite
    Lunchtime
    Machiavelli
    Macpherson
    Management
    Mandarin
    Mandela
    Marland
    Martinlutherking
    Mastery
    Maths
    Mats
    Matthancock
    May
    Measurement
    Media
    Meetings
    Memories
    Menstruation
    Mentalhealth
    Metacognition
    Metaphor
    Metrics
    Michaelgove
    Michaelrosen
    Michaelyoung
    Mickfleetwood
    Middlesborough
    Midlands
    Misconceptions
    Misconduct
    Miseducation
    Misogyny
    Mistakes
    Mobilephones
    Mobility
    Mocks
    Mojo
    Monarchy
    Money
    Morale
    Mothers
    Motto
    Movies
    Multiculturalism
    Music
    Musical
    Myths
    Names
    Nasuwt
    Nationalcurriculum
    Nationality
    Neo-trad
    Neu
    News
    Newyear
    Newzealand
    Nfff
    Nhs
    Nickclegg
    Nickdrake
    Nickgibb
    Nickymorgan
    Nihilism
    Noah
    Nolan
    Normanrockwell
    Npq
    Nqt
    NSPCC
    Numeracy
    Nuremburg
    Oaa
    Oath
    Obama
    Objectivity
    Oecd
    Offence
    Ofmiceandmen
    Ofsted
    Oldtestament
    O-levels
    Ombusdman
    Openevening
    Openness
    Opportunity
    Oppression
    Optimism
    Options
    Outcomes
    Outrage
    Oxbridge
    Parenting
    Parents
    Parentsevenings
    Parliament
    Participation
    Partnership
    Pastoral
    Paternalism
    Patience
    Paulmuldoon
    Pay
    PE
    Peace
    Pedagogy
    People
    Performance
    Perseverence
    Persistent
    Pfi
    Philiplarkin
    Philosophy
    Phones
    Phonics
    Photography
    Physics
    Piersmorgan
    Pisa
    Place
    Planning
    Play
    Plumbing
    Pm
    Poetry
    Police
    Policing
    Policy
    Politeness
    Politicalcorrectness
    Politicians
    Politics
    Poor
    Populism
    Posh
    Post16
    Postcovid
    Postmodernism
    Poverty
    Power
    Powerpoint
    Practice
    Praxis
    Predictions
    Prejudice
    Preparations
    Pressures
    Prevent
    Pride
    Primeminister
    Princeofwales
    Principles
    Priorities
    Private
    Privilege
    Problems
    Procedures
    Professionals
    Progress
    Progress8
    Protection
    Protests
    Proxy
    Psychology
    Pta
    Pti
    Public
    Publiclife
    Publicsector
    Publicservices
    Punctuality
    Punctuation
    Punishment
    Punishments
    Pupilpremium
    Qualifications
    Quentintarantino
    Questioning
    Questions
    Quotidian
    Rabbieburns
    Racism
    Radical
    Radio
    Raf
    Rain
    Rainbows
    R&d
    RE
    Reading
    Recessional
    Recovery
    Recruitment
    Refugees
    Regulations
    Relationships
    Religion
    Remembrance
    Reports
    Research
    Resignation
    Resilience
    Resits
    Resolutions
    Resources
    Respect
    Responsibilities
    Restorativejustice
    Results
    Retention
    Revision
    Rewards
    Rhetoric
    Rich
    Richisunak
    Rishisunak
    Riumours
    Romans
    Roof
    Routines
    Rudeness
    Rudyardkipling
    Rules
    Ruthperry
    Safeguarding
    Safety
    Sajidjavid
    Sanctuarybuildings
    Sarcasm
    Savethechildren
    Scandal
    Scholarship
    School
    Schoolboys
    Schoolcouncil
    Schools
    Schoolsweek
    Schoolwear
    Science
    Screens
    Seanharford
    Secretaryofstate
    Selection
    Self-actualisation
    Selflessness
    Send
    September
    Service
    Sex
    Sexism
    Sexual
    Shakespeare
    Shops
    Shortage
    Siegfriedsassoon
    Silence
    Singing
    Sixthform
    Skills
    Skipping
    Snow
    Socialcare
    Social Care
    Socialmedia
    Socialmobility
    Society
    Software
    Sorry
    Speech
    Speeches
    Spending
    Sports
    Staffing
    Staffroom
    Standardisation
    Standards
    State
    Statistics
    Stephenlawrence
    Stevemartin
    St.lucy
    Stress
    Strike
    Strikes
    Stuck
    Study
    Suffering
    Summer
    Sunderland
    Superhead
    Support
    Supremecourt
    Surestart
    Surprise
    Survivors
    Syria
    System
    Taiwan
    Talk
    Talking
    Tallis
    Tallisat50
    Tallischaracter
    Tallishabits
    Targets
    Tate
    Teacherly
    Teachers
    Teachfirst
    Teaching
    Teams
    Technology
    Teenagers
    Tennyson
    Terrorism
    Testing
    Tests
    Textbooks
    Thankful
    Thanks
    Thinking
    Thomasfuller
    Thomastallis
    Time
    Timetable
    Timharford
    Timoates
    Timpson
    Toilets
    Tories
    Traceyemin
    Tradition
    Traditions
    Training
    Trains
    Transgender
    Transition
    Treasury
    Trips
    Trump
    Trust
    Truth
    Tsarinas
    Tsars
    Ttra
    Tutor
    Tutoring
    Tutors
    Tweetgate
    Twitter
    Tyneside
    Ucas
    Ukraine
    Ulysses
    Umbrellas
    Uncertainty
    Undergraduates
    Understanding
    Unemployment
    Uniform
    Unions
    Unitednations
    University
    Vaccination
    Vaccine
    Values
    Veilofignorance
    Victorian
    Vikings
    Violence
    Virtues
    Virus
    Visitors
    Visits
    Vulnerable
    Walkabout
    War
    Warchild
    Warmth
    Weather
    Welcome
    Wellbeing
    Westminster
    Whatwouldyoucut
    Whistleblowing
    Whistles
    Whitehaven
    Whiteness
    Whitepaper
    Wilshaw
    Winniethepooh
    Winter
    Wisdom
    Woke
    Women
    Words
    Workload
    Worldbookday
    Worldpeacegame
    Worth
    Writing
    WW1
    Xfn
    Year
    Year11
    Year13
    Year6
    Year7
    Year9
    Yoga
    Youth
    Zahawi
    Zeitgeist
    Zoom

    RSS Feed

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
  • About
    • An Overview >
      • The Leadership Team
      • Who was Thomas Tallis?
      • Why Tallis?
      • School Vision
      • Mrs Roberts Writes
      • Tallis at 50
      • Artsmark
      • Prince's Teaching Institute
      • Secondary School Direct Hub
      • International School
      • Ofsted
    • School Prospectus
    • Tallis Praxis
    • Tallis Habits >
      • Tallis Pedagogy Wheel Guide
    • Tallis Character
    • Tallis Threshold Concepts
    • Policies & Guidelines >
      • Data Protection
      • Making Complaints
    • The Pupil Premium 2022-23 >
      • The Pupil Premium 2021-22
      • The Pupil Premium 2020-21
      • The Pupil Premium 2019-20
      • The Pupil Premium 2018-19
      • The Pupil Premium 2017-18
      • The Pupil Premium 2016-17
      • The Pupil Premium 2014-15
      • The Pupil Premium 2013-14
      • The Pupil Premium 2012-13
      • The Pupil Premium 2011-12
    • Exam Results 2022 >
      • Exam Results 2021
      • Exam Results 2020
      • Exam Results 2019
      • Exam Results 2018
      • Exam Results 2017
      • Exam Results 2016
      • Exam Results 2015
      • Exam Results 2014
      • Exam Results 2013
      • Exam Results 2012
      • Exam Results 2011
    • COVID-19 Catch-Up Report
    • Early Catch Up 2019/20 and Action Plan 2020/2120 >
      • Early Catch Up 2018/2019 and Action Plan 2019/2020
      • Early Catch Up 2017/2018 and Action Plan 2018/19
      • Early catch-up review and action plan 2017-18
    • Job Vacancies
  • News
    • Tallis Newsletters
    • Tallis Photography
    • Tallis Video
    • Tallis Sounds
  • Calendar
    • Term Dates 2022-23
    • Term Dates 2023-24
    • The School Day
  • Curriculum
    • Curriculum Areas >
      • Business & ICT
      • Computing
      • English & Philosophy
      • Design & Technology
      • Humanities & Social Sciences
      • Languages
      • Mathematics
      • Performing Arts
      • Physical Education
      • Science
      • Visual & Media Arts
    • Pastoral Care
    • Guidance >
      • Tallis Futures
    • Key Stage 3 >
      • KS3 Assessment guidance
      • Tallis Choices
    • Key Stage 4
    • Tallis Post 16
    • Exceptionally Able Learners
    • Special Educational Needs & Disabilities >
      • Learning Support Unit
      • Support Centre for Autism and Language Impairment
      • Deaf Support Centre
      • English as an Additional Language
  • Community
    • Letters Home 2022-23
    • Bromcom Guide for Parents
    • PTFA
    • Governing Board
    • The Tallis Agreement
    • Admissions
    • Attendance & Punctuality >
      • Apply for Exceptional Circumstances Absence in Term Time
    • School Uniform
    • Support Your Teen
    • Online Safety
    • Tallis Post 16
  • Students
    • Year 11 Support & Guidance
    • Bromcom Guide for Students
    • Co-curricular Activities
    • Exam Revision
    • Stay Safe
    • Duke of Edinburgh Award
    • Rewards
    • Reading
    • The Library
    • Cycling at Tallis
    • Alumni
  • Staff
  • Contact
    • School Map
    • How to find us
  • Search