The third category visitor is from Sanctuary Buildings, on an immersion visit. This great scheme puts civil servants into schools for three days to see what kinds of legs policies have and what schools are actually like. I’ve had a few over the years largely, in the north east, from the Finance and Pensions department in Darlington. Useful, but…. This week’s was from Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism which was apposite as we’ve been considering our Prevent duty. We were glad to talk and learned from each other. A contribution to the system!
 
We lay on the full Monty for visitors – trips round the building, meetings, shadowing students, party bags to take home – including this time a vuist to my own classroom where the civil servant enjoyed cutting and sticking on comparative religion. (I still see Pritt as a classroom luxury : Gloy used to ruin exercise books.)  ‘How studious the children are, how confident.’
 
More policy legs in discussion up in town next day, explaining how progress measures feel on the ground, how accountability bites. I’m working up a snake-in-the-grass image. How we prefer the predictable to the unfathomable, the stable to the whimsical. The legislators listened so were also issued with an open invitation to the good ship Tallis.
 
Both Deputies were out training, one on mental health and one on assessment, though a combined session might be very useful. Returning to the mothership, I received the command back from the unflappable F. He’d navigated smoothly through the morning, but the afternoon was all excitement. A lunchtime delegation to complain about a peer who’s become deranged with power since joining the Police Cadets. He’s been threatened with the removal of his hi-vis jacket. A welcome return of a colleague from illness. A training session on dyslexia. Preparation for a hearing. A brainstorming session, teachers and students, on branding Tallis character: we’ve no time to do it in and no money to do it with, but it’ll be great. 
 
Downstairs, fever pitch. Hundreds auditioning for We Will Rock You prepare for stardom at the south end of the dining room. At the north end The Big Book Sale could take over Hay on Wye. The year 9s in charge have baked a sorting hat and made notices. One lurches towards me despairingly and takes his coat out of his mouth (we have rules about that sort of thing) to complain. ‘ I’ve been REALLY ill for THREE days but I’ve got 100% attendance for three YEARS so my mum won’t let me stay at home.’ I congratulate him on his persistence and advise him to drink more tea. He droops even further: ‘my Mum MADE me some tea in one of those hot coffee cups but I FORGOT it so I’ll have to drink it when I get home. ‘
 
At the end of the week, some hard decisions. Comes with the territory. 
 
Best of all it’s red tags week now the trees are up. Everyone writes a message and the lunch time ladies kindly hang them on the trees. For the last two years some of them have had to be censored but this time there’s only one unsuitable joke. I read some as I pass. One is ‘I hope for good enough GCSEs to get into the sixth form and peace in Syria.’ Perfect, the personal and the global from a young person who values his own future in a safer world.  Education to understand the world and change it for the better.

CR
2.11.15

It takes time to argue modern inclusive and life-affirming principles from the writings of people struggling to stay alive. For all we know, they were the best thinkers of their time. The much-criticised Prevent training materials covers this journey quite nicely with case studies. A young person is distressed by an aspect of his life, searches for a simple answer, adopts an immaturely rigid religious or quasi-political position, finds affirmation within that group, starts to be a danger to himself and others and needs to be rescued. Schools should keep an eye out for distress, sudden change or unexpected behaviour. Use the safeguarding systems, don’t be afraid to report things, follow up, support the child. We know how to do this and the best of us have strong and sophisticated systems to protect children from themselves and others. Some of the training is a bit crass and patronising, but we got used to that with the National Strategies, didn’t we just?

I described Prevent to a cleric who became terrifically aeriated about supervising Friday prayer. An outrage! So I told him a about a school with a Christian Union annually staffed by posh and shiny gap year volunteers with full DBS clearance from a local church. Sensible sixth formers kept an eye on things in the room, right up to the day they planned a prayer walk in the yard to hand out sweets with texts against homosexuality. After that, always a teacher in the room. Of course we supervise prayer, in the same way that we supervise play or crossing the road on a school trip.  Some things can be dangerous and children don’t always see it. Adults can be misleading, harmful or just plain wrong.   Schools are designed for supervision. It’s what we do for society, looking after the young.

Good liberal folk, secular or religious, are queasy about Prevent because discussing religion is embarrassing. Most Brits aren’t religious and find it rather inexplicable. Church schools, however, are quite popular and we’ve happily let them chug along since 1944 because their religion is pretty mild. Imagine our horror when deregulated schooling and unreconstructed religion met and brought us Trojan Horse, whatever that turns out to be. OMG, literally. What were we thinking?

Like a child who’s forgotten her Spanish homework, we don’t have the vocabulary for the lesson. We once had checks and balances to prevent religion harming civil society but we didn’t look after them and now we’re confused. So now we’re using the law and the strange concept of fundamental British values (we could just call them human rights) to give us a language to distinguish between good and bad religion. We have to do this because, nationally, we don’t trust ourselves to articulate an argument that falls between ‘all religion is wicked’ and ‘believe what you like’.

However, optimism is part of Tallis character. In the new RE GCSE from 2016 every child should study the two largest religions and every one of them could leave school equipped to make a judgment about faith. That might lay the foundation for better national conversation about the role of religion in a secular democracy and help children experiment more safely, a bit like teaching them to swim.  
 
The training isn’t perfect but it might help people who haven’t known how to think about tricky issues before. Preventing what, exactly? At the very least theological illiteracy, bad religion and the abuse of young people’s search for meaning.
 
CR
1.10.15