Today I take my texts from the great poet Tomlin. We’ve adjusted our mobile phone rules, on which I have pontificated at length in the past and even in the press. 
 
This was tannoy 1 on Tuesday, day 2 of the new jurisdiction. It caused groans. 
 
The corridors, the walkway and the blocks are no phone zones
Don’t forget this simple rule also includes headphones
 
Things, as Mr Blair didn’t say, could only get worse. Changeover 2 cause people to bang their heads on desks, though I thought it a great improvement.
  
Help us keep a great big smile on all your teachers’ faces
By only using phones at social times in social spaces
 
This was followed by a specific warning at changeover 3. I think the scansion needs attention and there’s too much dangle in the second line. 
 
Help us keep your phones and keep them firmly in your pocket
You don’t want to get to lunch when it’s allowed, but you have lost it.
 
He busked the next one but the final exhortation was perhaps the worst of all.
 
Thanks to all those students who can now go straight on home
For the rest, attend the green canteen for some harsh words and your phone
 
See how we model creativity to the children? I shall enter him for the Forward Prize for Poetry next year.
 
Changing a rule in school is an interesting process. It takes us a long time to decide and we have to argue amongst ourselves for weeks until we come up with an agreement. Children then have to be warned and the infrastructure put into place. In this case, consistent instructions, seven assemblies, tutor group scripts, padded reusable envelopes with labels, lists of names, boxes to put them in, safe places to store them, return mechanisms, FAQs with staff and, after a pilot week, tweaks to the system and a clear message for parents in the newsletter. That’s the easy part.

The harder part is actually changing our daily actions. In this case, moving the ‘no phones’ rule back from the classroom door to the outside door, and developing a consistent and safe way of removing offending items and retraining their owners. After that we work through the ones who just forgot, the ones who thought it wouldn’t happen to them, the ones who thought they’d test a new system until we’re left with the dogged recidivists who can’t let it go. That’ll take a while.

It’s been interesting to see how annoyed some older students have been by this. Unusually, we made the new rule fit post-16 students too, except for subjects where teachers need them to use their phones, or where it has long been allowed in a very thoughtful and controlled manner. We thought long and hard about this, worrying that years 12 and 13 would feel affronted by being treated the same as the younger ones – but then decided that the new rule was whole school.

Why? Because we try to model a way of living in community that will help young people understand the world and change it for the better. While we don’t demonise phones as such, we were losing too much lesson time arguing over them and that was in the sixth form too. We decided collectively that we weren’t helping our young people learn a more sensible way to be, and we’ve changed our minds.

And we’ve changed the way the adults act too. We’re not checking our phones all the time or walking along looking at them, except for the safeguarding team. We’re all in this together, because phones are addictive to adults as well as children and we can all demonstrate a bit of self-control.

The poet Nick Drake wrote about the ancient Aztec rubber ball game, in the voice of a young missionary priest who becomes captivated by it. He describes the ball:

I have it now
In the palm of my hand.
It is a small, dark ball, warm
As an egg, or a fallen star,
And decorated with skulls;
It is heavy as a stone, and yet
What spirit moves it? Whose god
Created such a wonder 
That leaps for joy? And why 
Does my body tremble with delight
To play the game again? 
Pray for me, now –
For I find I cannot let it go.

Isn’t that like a phone? There’s a fear in the last line of being overtaken by something that you chose to do but can’t stop. That’s always terrified me. I think our new rule is both moderate and humane and I hope it helps young people to put their phones down from time to time outside school too. Perhaps to play football or write poetry, who knows?

Changing your mind after reflection and investigation is a sign of good learning and a hallmark of adult life. Our legislators could learn from this.
 
CR
7.3.19

I was goggling at the injuries our Head of Geography returned from cycling round the world was laughing off, while she talked about plans for the year. Her team can look forward to some quality time together with all the affordances and accoutrements of the modern department. Rounding off the list she declared happily ‘We’ll all be singing from the same hymn sheet’. And I was off.
 
Hannah may not get very close to an actual hymn sheet, but I’ve done my time with them. I’ve been around schools for such a long time I’ve done hymns in assembly and hymn practice as a punishment. From Victorian doggerel to fancy modern jobs reeking of substitutionary atonement Ive shouted ‘Louder!’ with the best of them. Having a full set of the same hymn sheets was a luxury. Some partially eaten, many illegible. Some had hymns under different numbers, others unpredictable new words. Hymn sheet rustling was another irritant: rehearsals for cathedral events involved training hordes in picking up and putting down a hymn sheet QUIETLY. We moved on to projectors, overhead then digital, with a trusty child to move the words on while everyone looked upwards angelically to sing from one glorious hymn sheet with ginormous writing.
 
If you’ll bear with what’s obviously a metaphor extended beyond endurance, there's a further complication on Sundays.  Hymns have been rewritten or adjusted to improve or take out the gratuitously offensive. A lucky congregation has a full set with the same words, but people remember the old words and sing them instead. Or do it from memory and ignore the hymn book altogether. I may be one of those people. Then there’s the curve ball of Right Hymn but Wrong Tune.
 
Singing from the same hymn sheet with up-to-date and acceptable words to the right tune is obviously the harmonious way to go. The Geographers above will do it naturally. Doing it across school is a sine qua non of effective leadership, every procedure clear, everyone knowing what they're doing. I love an agreed procedure, but only where necessary. If all of life is scripted, when do we write our own lines?
 
Single hymnsheet-ness is big in schools. We are trusted to look after the nation’s young, so we shouldn’t do it randomly. We’re paid by the state so we should plan it carefully. We’re highly educated so so we should do it effectively. We're human, so we should do it humanely.
 
There’s been a bit of a to-do this term about schools with fixed rules. One was about trousers in Houghton-le-Spring. I was Head of RE there for 3 years, and once had a conversation about lecterns with a child that I still can’t fathom. (How exactly do they run up and down the street all night, banging on doors and windows?). Uniform in most schools is the uber-hymn sheet, but you’ve heard me on that before. The second, Great Yarmouth, story which has attracted so much interest it could almost be upgraded to a hoo-hah, is about the single hymn sheet for everything. Uniform, listening, pencil cases, walking, going home, bed time, coat hangers, sitting up straight. It's a bit extra, but schools have always had different ways of going about stuff and what appears oppressive to one child may be liberation to another.
 
However, given that the unexamined life is not worth living, we have to be prepared to live with the examining. Where is the line between wanting to enable children to escape generational poverty, and denigrating the efforts of those who have loved and supported their children despite it? If a school wishes its children to transcend their parents lives, what are we saying about our fellow citizens’ choices? If uniform is exposed as being all about conformity and conservatism, what to do with the child wired as a rugged individual? Is the single hymn sheet always a good thing? What if the words don’t make any sense? What if there’s another tune?
 
I'm a tidy soul and can see that purity of heart is to will one thing, but I struggle when that becomes a red line. We all have our fancy rules to keep one another safe and make it possible to teach and to learn but further than that, what? We can’t claim we’ve learned anything about social justice, that’s for sure. Or defeating poverty. Or making children happier. How is a zero-tolerance hymn sheet riffing on conformity and conservatism the answer?
 
The best school hymn was written in 1931 by the agnostic Jan Struther to a folk tune called Stowey, a three-verse metaphor requiring no faith assumptions. When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old ends with
                  And let me set free with the sword of my youth
                  From the dragons of anger, the power of the truth.
 
It’s a hymn worth learning off by heart to sing on your own no matter what everyone else has on their hymn sheet. What kind of school enables children to embark on battle and adventure to understand the world and change it for the better?
 
CR
15.9.17
 

Imagine my concern, then, when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools started in about the crisps. Apparently an inspector was out inspecting and was going about with the Head. Students were eating crisps on the floor blocking the corridor and they didn’t move, so the pair of them had to step over ‘prone’ bodies. Ofsted are going to inspect for that kind of thing from September and woe betide any school with supine crisp-eating barbarians. 

I’m a bit of a behaviour nerd and I like things to be orderly and pleasant with only as many rules as are needed to discourage foolishness. Calm is generally good, but young people need memorable experiences so we sometimes generate a bit of noise and excitement. (Street dance flashmob last week, Tallis Festival today). Children should be polite and well-mannered and the crisps incident sounds pretty shabby. But this was all rolled up with children having to stand when teachers enter a room and a quarter of headteachers not knowing what day it was. I’ve been thinking about this on my bicycle and unpicking my disquiet. For what it’s worth, here’s where I am.

Schools are where society looks after its young. We educate them to understand the world and change it for the better, and develop the lifelong skills of inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline and imagination. We enable them to make a relationship with the ideas that define and unite us. That’s brokered by strong relationships between teachers and students, the heart and root of education. It happens in school communities which are safe and happy and where progress is good.

Beyond that, what? If I go into a classroom I expect everyone to be engaged in learning. If I go into an assembly I expect silence. If I go into the yard I expect rushing about. If I go along a corridor I expect pointless chat. We don’t call students ‘mate’ but I call everyone ‘dear’. We also don’t have HMCI’s favourite standing-up rule, silent corridor rule, tie-up-to-the-neck rule (we don’t have ties). We do have stringent rules about oppressive language and violence, and we’ve decided, all 1800 of us, that we value honesty, respect, fairness, optimism and kindness. We work damn hard to create a place where young people learn to live well in community. We enjoy ourselves together.

Sir Michael, I think I saw you on London Bridge station a couple of weeks ago and you looked pretty tired. I’m pretty tired myself. If we make all the above work, will that do? Do we have to stand up as well?         

CR 16.7.15

   

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