Category: Schools

If You Think It’s Wrong, Act On It

10/11/2022

A long-ish blog, second in a quadrennial series on Fury Resulting From Adverts On Trains.

Heading north for a family funeral I had stuffed my rather stylish new handbag with reports I hadn’t had time to read. The first, a cross-sector (heads’ associations, Chartered College and suchlike) legal advisory briefing on gender issues in schools was a fine piece, detailed and helpful. I shall keep it to hand.

The second was the excellent and extremely depressing final report from former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield's Commission on Young Lives 'Hidden in Plain Sight: A national plan of action to support vulnerable teenagers to succeed and to protect them from adversity, exploitation and harm'. It's quite long but I think everyone ought to read it. This blog therefore is a bit of a precis, with the added bonus of Roberts’ General Asperity.

I quote:

Government statistics published last week reveal that in 2021/22 there were over 16,000 instances in England where child sexual exploitation was identified by local authorities as a factor at the end of an assessment by social workers. There were 11,600 instances where gangs were a factor and 10,140 instances where Child Criminal Exploitation was a factor. These numbers are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Those involved in gang activity and criminal exploitation are disproportionately young, vulnerable, and unknown to services. It has been estimated that there could be as many as 200,000 children in England aged 11 to 17 who are vulnerable to serious violence. The report says there are already huge stresses on over-stretched services and the public purse due to a lack of early intervention, and that a combination of Covid, a cost-of-living crisis, and any return to austerity would be a gift to those who exploit children. Over the last year, the Commission has heard from multiple professionals working with vulnerable children that many of these problems have become more extreme since the pandemic, including the ages of those running gangs becoming even younger. It has also heard countless examples of children from suburban, middle-class England being groomed by criminals who have spotted a vulnerability and moved in with clinical ruthlessness.

Imagine the outcry if 200,000 Conservative voters were vulnerable to serious violence?

Notably, clearly and sensibly, Anne Longfield (with whom I have not always agreed) said:

There are parts of our country where the state is completely failing in its duty to protect vulnerable children from the ongoing epidemic of county lines, criminal exploitation, and serious violence. This is a problem hidden in plain sight, rocket-boosted by Covid, which is disproportionately affecting teenagers in deprived and minority ethnic communities and also some families living in leafy suburbs.
It is a national threat to our country's prosperity and security, a threat which is ruining lives and scarring communities, and which is costing the NHS, schools, the police and criminal justice system, and the children's social care system billions of pounds every year.

So, the report recommends:

The Prime Minister recognises the national threat to prosperity and security by the scourge of serious violence, criminal exploitation, and harm and convenes regular COBRA meetings to tackle the root causes of these problems. The Children’s Minister of State should attend Cabinet.
The Department of Education returns to its previous incarnation of Children, Schools, and Families, reflecting the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world class education system.
The Government establishes a new Sure Start Plus Programme, a “Sure Start for Teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. ‘We have chosen to incorporate the name Sure Start as it is a well-recognised and well-respected programme, which we believe was a mistake to dismantle.’ [Not half, say I]
The Government sets a target of 1,000 Sure Start Plus Hubs by 2027 to co-ordinate and deliver health and education support for vulnerable teenagers. Established in and around schools, the hubs will be run by charities, public bodies, business, and philanthropy organisations.
A new drive across Government to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, including the re-establishment of a Child Poverty Unit in Whitehall.
The Government leads a national mission to identify and remove racial bias in the systems that are currently failing many Black, Brown and Minority Ethnic children.
The Government takes a new “Family First” approach that supports families with children at risk of becoming involved with gangs, serious violence, or criminal exploitation and which prevents crisis, financed through the implementation of Children’s Social Care reforms, and delivered by local authorities and family organisations.
Reform of the children’s social care system to provide high quality care for all teenagers, taking an invest-to-save approach and delivered by a partnership of Government, local authorities and the third sector. Implementation of the Independent Review into Children’s Social Care recommendations delivered at pace.
The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community, financed by funds from the proceeds of crime and administered by a collaboration of national charities.
Opening all secondary school buildings before and after school, at weekends and during holidays, to provide safe and appealing places for teenagers, financed by funds from dormant bank accounts and National Lottery community funding.
The Government to promote a new era of inclusive education, ending the culture of exclusion and helping all children to succeed in their education.
One-off £1bn children and young people’s mental health recovery programme, part-financed by a levy on social media companies and mobile phone providers.
Reform the youth justice system to accelerate moves towards a fully welfare based, trauma-informed Child First approach.

To my mind, these proposals are absolutely excellent and should be enacted at once. Youth work is always the first to go under revisionist government, and we’ve had 12 years without it now. The Cabinet’s not short of what we now coyly call ‘high net worth individuals’. Perhaps they could prime the philanthropy for 3 and 4?

Back on the train, I was heading for Cambridgeshire and reading fast. I thought of another vision for education, that of Henry Morris and the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges from the 1920s onwards. He determined that everyone, no matter how poor, should have access to good education in an inspiring setting. The village colleges were secondary schools and community facilities at the same time, focal points in villages where people of all ages came to learn, mix, be entertained and even get babies weighed. Henry Morris didn’t just create village colleges that were big schools – he created community education. Community education where everyone was in it together, where the whole village raised the children and support each other throughout their lives. When I was offering my skills in Leics in the eighties, their Community Colleges had the same vision.

So what have we now? Narrow education behind locked gates, for safety. Education at which many must fail to keep allegedly elite standards high while the country is run by the 7% who went to fee-paying schools and where a mere millionaire just isn’t trying hard enough. Where a known bully and incompetent can be promoted again and again, knighted for his services to the destruction of trust and integrity in public life: obviously a perfect person to be Secretary of State for Education at the time of the biggest increase in child poverty in modern times. I apologise for writing light-heartedly about such a one in blogs passim.

But finally, the advert. As I arranged my affairs, discovered I had only one contact lens and no charging plug for the Great Northern Electrostar making irregular terrifying banging noises upon which I travelled, I read the wall. There was a government poster about sexual harassment in the workplace, showing some concerned citizens saying what they would do to stop it. Good stuff, though not nearly as good as the Scottish That Guy campaign. But it was the sign-off that got me.

HM Government say ‘If you think it's wrong, act on it’.

Tell that to Anne Longfield and the 200,000 terrified children, Rishi.

CR
10.11.22

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One Hand for the Ship

8/10/2022

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Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon reported from a North Sea trawler to which he was poorly suited, being too tall and argumentative, and sick all the time. He described ‘six degrees of freedom’ at sea as pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I found that helpful when I was a young Head in stormy waters but I think we’re all feeling it nationally at the moment. Yaw now?

Heavy weather requires something to cling to so I’m returning to my moutons in the woolly shape of some principles I wrote 11 years ago. These have developed a edu-zeitgeist half-life as well as being inflicted on every group of people I’ve ever met. They are a sort-of answer to the perennial question of ‘what are schools for?’ and I wrote them at the time of the coalition government and to help make sense of Gove’s curriculum reforms. Here they are:

Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society.We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities.We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world.Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission.The teacher’s authority to transmit or broker knowledge is given and valued by society
Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

At the time I was collaborating with Prof Michael Young of the Institute on a book that was published in 2014 and is still being read, called Knowledge and the Future School. Michael and I are chums, so he won’t mind me observing that he’s roughly 200 years old but nonetheless keeps thoughtful tabs on what schools are doing, and why. He’s concerned that schools leap from one two-dimensional solution to another without sufficient mental scrutiny, without thought and without reflection.

In 2011 it was important to conceptualise and reassert the primacy of knowledge in learning – but now we’re in danger again. Post-Covid, people are lurching towards off-the-peg curricula, like the Oak National Academy that sprang up to assist in desperate times but is now set to take over the thinking of a generation of teachers, a Japanese Knotweed of curriculum development. And perhaps schools can’t find space to see that or worry about it in the context of the unfunded pay award, the energy crisis, the fact that families can’t afford to eat and the missing of teacher recruitment targets in eight of the last nine years. By a mile. (Not that we’ll be able to measure anything in a future without maths or geography teachers.)

So what principles might we cling to in this particularly prolonged storm, with buckets of hail being thrown from each side and the siren call of off-the-peg answers sounding through the surge? Here’s my thinking so far:

Knowledge is powerful: it can change the world, person by person.
Children need knowledge to interpret the world and broaden their possibilities.
Knowledge and understanding bring freedom and requires us to choose how to live
Knowledge is real but provisional: it endures and changes.
Knowledge gives people the power to think and act in new and better ways
Knowledge is social, produced in history: good communities are built on shared knowledge
Inequitable distribution of shared and powerful knowledge undermines democracy
Schools give unique access to knowledge, skilfully tailored to the growing human
Learners volunteer to acquire knowledge when enabled by skilled teachers
Good education is not inevitable. It must not be withheld, misused or devalued.

Comments welcome, of course.

I was watching a staircase last week and found a youth walking up it backwards, with one hand for the ship, the better to lecture his comrades. This caused significant embouteillage upstream so I issued a cease and desist. He apologised nicely, but I couldn’t tell if it was incipient demagoguery or a concern for safety that inspired him.

When I visited the Capitol in 1999 the guides walked backward in front of us to prevent anyone slipping off to install Communism. It does feel as though we’re being led backwards at the moment, without reason or rationale.
Pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw are only good to look back on if you didn’t go under. Here’s hoping, for us all.

CR
31.9.22

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I like, I wish, I wonder

14/11/2021

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I note that the late Princess of Wales in the latest film imagines eating pearls at a tedious royal Christmas. I like a pearl myself, though not for supper, and am assured by fashion pages to which I am obviously a slave that you can wear them with anything. This includes PE kit, whereupon earrings and necklace were modelled by a young person going into year 7 assembly on Monday. Lest uniform or H&S geeks are panicking, PE kit is worn all day on post-pandemic PE days, and doubtless the pearls would be cast orf before any kind of throttling danger.

Such Year 7 eccentricities prosper in a happy school. I intervened with a pair blissfully unconcerned about the pile-up of traffic on the bridge behind their experiment into picking up things while pretending they had no hands, as they explained as I towed them into a layby. Another keeps me daily informed on the progress of her new brace.
Year 8 are developing the anxieties of adolescence. I scrutinised a science corridor this morning and advanced upon two pleasant citizens outside a lab. Behaviour walkabout gives you familiarity with those few more likely to be without than within and these were strangers to truculence. ‘We can’t go in because of the lungs on my desk’ was the beguiling reason. And so it was: offal being inflated with a bicycle pump by a technician while the teacher (‘I’m not at my best with this sort of stuff’) kept a respectful distance. The transfixed class bickered mildly about vegetarianism while scrutinising the biology.

I’ve spent a lot of weekends recently separated from the Roberts sofa, at conferences and meetings. It was at one such that a colleague used a new-to-me feedback mantra of ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’. Struth. I like Year 7, I wish they wouldn’t cause an embouteillage, I wonder why some people will happily poke at a pair of lungs while others turn green? She also talked about ‘lethal mutations’ of previously good ideas, an obvious but helpful description, like when a concern for teachers’ workload leads to a rigid, strangulating, pre-packaged lesson delivery.

There is a part of the forest specialising in lethal mutations. Current scuffling under the foliage from Sanctuary Buildings appears to be muffled mutterings about academisation, of interest to those 21% of us secondary schools still blessedly council-run. SoS Zahawi hasn’t really said anything and Herrington the Schools Commissioner says there isn’t a master plan yet. But soft! In a dull-sounding consultation entitled ‘Reforming how local authorities’ school improvement functions are funded’, launched inevitably during half-term, we find:

the government’s longer-term ambition for all schools to become academies within a strong MAT

– an end point which a number of councils are already closing in on, where councils would no longer maintain schools.

The report uses the brain-scrambling terminology of de-delegation which, despite tussling for decades, I have to work out every time. De-delegation is when a Local Authority doesn’t pass part of the schools’ grant into schools’ delegated funding but keeps part of it for a particular purpose. I was once trapped in a consultation about de-de-delegation for which ‘delegation’ didn’t seem to be an acceptable contraction. As Ted Lasso says, I’m still looking forward to having it explained to me. I choose not to panic.

Next door the World Peace Game in is full flow with citizens of the Republic of Tallis alongside those from the hill tribes of Eltham and Parliament. They’ve just had the term ‘sitrep’ explained to them and are dealing with submarine menaces, I think. They understand that negotiation takes forever but is the only guarantee of lasting success. Some of the visitors are very inquisitive about what else is happening here and pass slowly by my door or glue their noses to the window.

They’d have had a treat yesterday for Remembrance, with everyone quiet on the yard under the spell of a magnificent trumpeter from the band of the Grenadier Guards. Someone wrote to me saying that we disrespect the remembering of the war dead by looking at the racism and colonialism inherent in our conflict history and I am sorry if it looks like that. We don’t, but our young people have to learn from the past so they can make the future better.

I like, I wish, I wonder. I like schools and their children. I wish we knew what we wanted from a national education system. I wonder why ideas mutate lethally and everyone shouts madly at each other.

I hear through the door that global warming hasn’t been solved by the 12-year olds. It’s enough to make anyone eat their pearls.

CR
12.11.21

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On the need to dig deeper

12/6/2021

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Three small boys rushed me with a request. ‘Can we start our own club?’ I said it depended on the topic. ‘Japanese Culture’. ‘Manga?’, ‘No, Japanese Culture generally’. I declared in favour with the all-purpose answer ‘Talk to your Head of Year’. Their leader commanded ‘All eyes on Rawlings’ as they charged off. Arigato gozaimasou.

Boys are in the news with the ghastly OFSTED report (as in, a report on a ghastly matter rather than the other thing) into sexual harassment in schools. HMCI was pursued by the Today programme this week on the lines of ‘why haven’t you tackled this before?’ but to be fair to the clipboards, they are at the mercy of Sanctuary Buildings, whom we know to be a bit slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, my Westminster correspondent saw the Secretary of State in the street again at the end of May, customarily laden with bags, describing him as looking like a man about to take the last ferry out. As you would be if your catch-up plan lay in ridicule and tatters and your Tsar had abdicated.

The problem with tackling sexual harassment in schools isn’t having rules and issuing punishments but hearing about the problems to start with. Young women expect that the world will treat them shabbily and therefore put up with outrageous impositions on their persons and emotions. They look upon it as normal to be prodded and put upon, they think they should accept that physical and mental assaults are normal. The report talks about girls being sent dozens of requests for nude pictures and getting dozens of foul nude pictures from boys and men every day. Yet young women are more empowered, more up-front, more determined to stamp out inequity then ever before. How did we arrive at a position where these irreconcilables co-exist?

Ofsted’s report has recommendations for schools, partners and government:

Schools should create a culture where sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are not tolerated, and where they identify issues and intervene early to better protect children and young people. They should assume that sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are happening in their setting, even when there are no specific reports, and put in place a whole-school approach to address them.

This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

All of this is important and true and we’ll try to do all of it, but schools can’t turn the tide alone. Violent coercive behaviour towards women is not new, and I wrote last time about the tsunami of pornography that overwhelms our young. Whom does that serve?

And yet, I read in the news today about another school that’s banned skirts. I’m interested in this kind of thing, as long-term readers know to their cost. Banning skirts, on the face of it, could be a liberating act to remove oppressive gender norms from a community. Tell me more, I thought.

Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, the school has banned skirts because ‘members of the public’ have contacted them to complain. Staff are included in complaints, apparently. The usual sorts of words are used: the need for appropriate schoolwear, of appropriate length adding up to appropriate workplace attire. What?

I was reading Hilary Mantel’s essays in the Lake District sun last week. In one, she takes issue with a writer, saying,
"You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares."

I think that about ‘appropriate’. Appropriate schoolwear is clothes that don’t prevent children from learning and rushing about in the sun, that wash easily, dry quickly and don’t break the bank. Appropriate length, is a skirt that’s not going to trip you up on the stairs. Appropriate workplace attire is – well, who knows? It depends on the workplace: what’s appropriate in a blast furnace might be odd in a tea shop. But what business is what children wear to the man in the street?

We are obsessed with surface solutions. Do girls in schools feel sexually oppressed? Send OFSTED to inspect it. Some witchfinder general thinks that skirts are too short – ban skirts. Really? When will we start a discussion about freedom to co-exist peacefully, without prejudice, fear and oppression?

A young woman dropped by to read me a poem. It was about her struggles and triumph and about her determination to make a mark on the world and change it for the better. Perhaps she’ll start the serious global conversation about the mindset change needed to set girls free. I wouldn’t put it past her. I hope we’ve prepared her.

CR
11.6.21

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Lines

12/9/2020

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An old hand dropped by to muse ‘It’s always useful to throw our processes in the air and see what we can do better’. Good grief, matey, I said. We’ve done nothing else since March. I distantly ran into another of similar vintage on the stairs later the same day. His view was that ‘It’s best to keep things as normal as possible’. Scowling at myself for inconsistency, I agreed warmly as he rushed upstairs to barter with the timetabler. Stap me, but both of them are right.

The things that really matter in school are very simple. Safety, good teachers and good relationships cover it all. Safety is foremost now and our response is rooted in my love of a queue. Lots of lovely lines in zones that keep year groups apart as best we can and every class has to be fetched and returned, like a very unwieldy library book. The lines are a nice way to start the day in nice weather, The solution to not-so-nice weather is best described as a work in progress involving umbrellas. Students being towed from place to place by teachers means they don’t all get jammed in doorways with other year groups.

Its 0905 and from my eyrie there’s a beautiful sight of different aged-lines fanning out like a sunburst from the entrance to block 2, waiting patiently and chatting happily. Some schools do this all the time. It's popular in the newer schools where young peoples’ unquestioning compliance is highly valued. There’s never one solution in schools, though, which is why governments find them so infuriating to run. Safety and compliance are central, but so are questioning and individuality. You can prevent harm, but you can’t prescribe brilliance. Speaking of which.
One of the most irritating training sessions I ever sat through was from a person who billed himself as an iconoclast. He’d written a book that had its moment in the sun so we shelled out for a session. He began with a line-related expansive flinging of the arms. ‘If you imagine a continuum with Ken Robinson at one end, Michael Gove is at the other’. Oh dear. We were partial to Sir Ken, may he rest in peace, at Tallis, not just because of his TED talk (‘Do schools kill creativity?’) that everyone in the world watched, but because he talked sense that reached deeply into our history at Tallis. He wasn’t at one end of anyone’s line.

Robinson was a former teacher and distinguished education academic who finally ended up working for the Getty Foundation. He argued that children do not grow into artistic creativity but are educated out of it by school systems that focus on academic achievement and conformity instead of liberating imagination and initiative. He feared that ‘our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity.’ He wanted a system that didn’t treat children as the same or try to ‘over-programme them’. He wanted all children to be able to to find their talents by being able to try things out at school.

Robinson wasn’t opposed to academic learning or a national curriculum and those who say he was are just wrong. He wanted a curriculum judged by different priorities with parity of esteem between core subjects and the arts. Tony Blair asked him to chair a National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education and the 1998 report ‘All Our Futures’ argues:

that no education system can be world-class without valuing and integrating creativity in teaching and learning, in the curriculum, in management and leadership and without linking this to promoting knowledge and understanding of cultural change and diversity.

Michael Gove trashed him in his puerile ‘blob’ rhetoric, rather than saying: this is best but fiendishly hard to get right. Let’s look at it seriously and build up a wonderful education system, rather than a cheap one that easier to measure.

Ken Robinson used Mick Fleetwood as an example in one of his books. Our Fleetwood Mac man was written off at school, distracted, unfocused, always thinking about something else – but what a legacy. Is there anyone over 40 who wouldn’t recognise Albatross, or whistle along to Rumours, if whistling were permitted?

Which reminded me of the Norman Rockwell picture of the Soviet schoolroom. Look at it carefully. The children are tidily uniformed. There’s an exhortation on the wall about ‘study and learn’ and everyone is focused except for the child looking out of the window. Is Rockwell just making an obvious cold war point about the crushing of individuality and the yearning of the human soul? Or is he saying something about a universal experience of children? About the child who’ll still think his own thoughts no matter what the classroom climate – and the teacher who recognises it?

Yet this picture illustrates much of what’s currently praised in secondary education: absolute conformity, even down to the level of all eyes ‘tracking the teacher’. That distracted thinker would be sanctioned in many schools, and his teacher would certainly be criticised by inspectors. But what is he thinking of? What memory, what experience of school does the picture bring back to you? (Ignore the bust of Lenin, though I did serve in a County Durham school with a bas-relief of Peter Lee on the hall wall who could easily have doubled for Lenin. I thought it was him until I got up close.)

We are constantly distracted by easy ways to fix education or loud ways to argue about it. Robinson wasn’t at one end of anyone’s continuum but wanted a way of combining the best in a good and lively system. Responding to the virus doesn’t meant that we start from scratch nationally, but it doesn’t mean that we pretend nothing’s happened. Learning lines at Tallis doesn’t mean that we’ll always do it – but we might learn something new that helps us. Both of my chaps are undoubtedly right.

I followed a matching pair of year 10s along an orderly and well-spaced-out corridor. As they went outside I’m certain that one said to the other ‘my mask smells of roman numerals’. If he did, what wonderful poetry and maths awaits us in the future?

CR 10.9.20

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Chalk and talk

4/5/2019

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Changeable as the May weather, we waltz towards the exam room with year 11. Some are ready, some resentful, some panicky, all a bit nervous. Some show welcome signs of maturity, others not yet. Some do foolish things, but on Tuesday night we were treated to a wonderful evening of dance, and on Wednesday night, at Bromley FC and in a new strip, our boys WON! The final of the London U16 cup. Both evenings were characterise by elegance, patience, enthusiasm, dedication, collaboration and skill.

I didn’t play footy or dance at school but I did act and speak and I remember very clearly the excitement of participating and cooperating and the uncertainty of the unique performance on the night, of triumphing over the unknown. It’s completely different to the classroom experience.

A person who qualified in the same decade as me came calling and we reminisced. She said, rather tentatively, ‘you know, I don’t think it was all bad, in the old days’. Of course it wasn’t. Her comment transported me to a meeting room next to a canal in Sheffield four years ago where a Young Thing gave a group of us to understand that the past was such rubbish that it effectively needed to be erased from the history of education.

I had a few words in response. It wasn’t perfect, but then we’re not perfect now. Children went to school, teachers worked hard, stuff got learned, art was made, cups were won and exams were taken. What is this trope that schools are uniquely culpable for being the product of their times? Do we blame the Army for not having the right boots in the Falklands, and insist they’re sorry about it all the time? Do we say to the NHS ‘why did so many people die in the 90s, what were you thinking of?’ Not so much. So why do it to schools? Times change, things improve or get worse, we reflect the society in which we are situated, for good and ill.

Oh, and we talked about chalk. There are fewer of us who remember that quintessential teaching skill and the challenge of looking after a beautiful diagram you’d drawn and coloured nicely (I was talking to a geographer). I told her about the old soul I worked with who hoovered up the school’s chalk stocks when the whiteboards first arrived, hoarding it against an upturn in the market. He may have been a mathematician but the gamble didn’t work and when he retired he was offered the chalk to take home. One of our own Young Things was in this conversation with us. She’d had a terrifying and entirely unexpected encounter with chalk in rural Yorkshire, this decade. Taught her a thing or two about thinking on her feet.

Which is what the young people in the exams have already started learning quickly. The language speaking tests are situated near me so I can see them sitting mouthing the phrases, going over everything they’ve learned and worrying about facing the unexpected. The value of examinations is arguable but one of the useful things they promote is the development of confident and lucid responses in uncertain circumstances. There’s value in that experience which our obsessive high-stakes culture has dissipated.

Life is both untidy and unpredictable so schools have to prepare young people for that too. Learning to face things when you’re not ready is also a life skill. Even the young people who struggle against the exam hall tractor-beam know that.

Mind, some embrace uncertainty early. I was emerging from a difficult conversation when two small boys accosted me politely. In a conspiratorial whisper, one with sticky-up hair asked ‘have you got the rugby ball?’ This I could answer definitively. ‘No.’ ‘Someone’s taken it off us’ ‘Who?’ ‘We don’t know’ they chorused. We looked at each other for a moment then parted company, none the wiser on either side. I await developments.

A larger boy stopped me abruptly, silently, later on the bridge. I laid some groundwork for the exchange. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m good’ (not strictly true). He investigated my habits. ‘Have you seen Endgame?’ ‘No, is it good?’ ‘I can’t tell you, it’ll spoil it’. Once again, none the wiser. He has some distance to travel before work as a film critic puts food on his table, I fear.

And a man from Australia who joined the school in 1971 wrote to us. He wants to contact his English teacher. With the benefit of many years, he recognised those whose creativity and relationships formed him and made him. That’s what he remembered, and that’s what we try to do in every age. Knowing things and getting qualifications are important. Knowing that life takes unexpected turns is also important. Learning it in a positive community is priceless.

CR
2.5.19

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Teaching to the test

22/10/2018

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You may know that Ofsted have been thinking, which is good. It’s even better that they’ve been thinking about ‘What is the real substance of education?’ or as a normal person might put it ‘what are schools for?’

HMCI commentary: curriculum and the new education inspection framework

The clipboard brigade make several points, all of which deserve a big tick. I thought you might like a digest, shamelessly condensed and filtered through my own prejudices. They say:

Education is the vast, accumulated wealth of human knowledge, and what we choose to pass on to the next generation. A ‘curriculum gives a school purpose’. Hurrah!
That curriculum is the heart of education. It requires the pursuit of real, deep knowledge and understanding of subjects.
In too many schools, the curriculum is just a combination of the exam board specification, the timetable and the exam results. Not enough schools really think about what they want children to learn. This leads to a narrow range of subjects being taught and too much ‘teaching to the test’.
Inspections have placed too much weight on exam results.
The 2019 inspection framework will emphasise ‘the curriculum as the substance of education’. Inspectors will look at a school’s ‘curriculum intent’.
They’d like to see schools focusing on subjects and subject vocabulary.
They’d like to be sure that ‘disadvantaged pupils are not put onto a stripped-back curriculum’.
They observed that expert teachers in the schools they visited ‘lived and breathed their curriculum’ and that good subject teachers are likely to stay in schools where subjects are valued.
A well-constructed, well-taught curriculum will lead to good results because those results will be a reflection of what pupils have learned.
Parents need to know the substance of what their children are learning throughout their time spent in school.

So far so good. Tallis approves Ofsted’s new thoughts, which will doubtless be a relief to them. But hold on! What’s this? They don’t like three-year key stage fours, like we have. Why?

Three-year key stage fours originated at a time of intense exam pressure. Lots of schools did it to give more time to GCSEs and therefore improve results. This is part of the reason for the current panic about schools just focusing on English, maths, science, history, geography and languages, because that’s what’s been valued in national education talk in recent years. Therefore, lots of schools just do a quick rotation of arts subjects in year 7 and 8 and then don’t offer them much at KS4 so they can tick the ‘EBacc’ box of the subjects above.

Tallis doesn’t do that. We have a very broad curriculum at key stage three with six hours a week of dance, drama, music, art and DT and a very large range of options in KS4. Choosing options early means that our children – who do one more option than many other schools, in any case – have the chance over three years to get into deep subject content, absorb it and make it their own. When I arrived at Tallis six years ago, I was very sceptical about choosing options in year 8 but was quickly converted. That’s not to say that we couldn’t improve the way we do it, of course. So, when the moment comes and we have to defend ourselves, we’ll have a few thoughts to offer inspectors about the what and the why, and how our choices enable us to keep a broad curriculum for everyone. Hurrah again!

It’s good news for everyone that Ofsted have made this commitment to the curriculum. I’m not just saying that because it’s Ofsted, but because it’s right. Schools are where society looks after its young, and the curriculum is what society thinks they should know. A broad, common curriculum which enables young people to think and reflect also means that the democracy speaks a common language. It builds up our communal life. That’s why good comprehensive schools with a wide curriculum are every bit as important to the health of the nation as the NHS. A nation educated together across the whole range of human experience should be well-equipped to understand and change the world for the better. Hold on a minute, that sounds familiar…..

Speaking of which: Black History Month. We’ve had dancing, eating, talking, films and workshops. We’ve had two mini carnivals with mass dancing and Caribbean Come Dine with Me. It’s been a joy. During the lower school carnival I was having our performance review with our Local Authority School Improvement Partner. I had to keep making excuses to sneak looks out of the window to see the children dancing to Sir’s music. They sent me up a plateful of outrageously good food but it didn’t make up for not being outside in the sun. A new colleague said ‘some schools would worry about losing control’ but we don’t. Our systems are good, our community strong and we love to dance, sing, cook and make things. We’re confident to do it because we value it, we do it all the time, and when we go back to class we know each other well enough to settle back down.

What are schools for? Being able to celebrate diversity and inclusivity with laughter and exuberance. That’s not a test you can teach to.

CR
18.10.18

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A Question of Ethics

23/6/2018

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A year 9 said to me exasperatedly on Wednesday: what exactly are schools for? It nudged me to presume upon your good will to ask a question about some work I’ve been doing. Would you mind?

I’ve spent a bit of time this year chairing a national group called the Ethical Leadership Commission. It’s a set of people from all sorts of groupings in education, including Ofsted. We’ve ben thinking about the fundamentals of school leadership, to see if we could help hard pressed folks to see beyond the daily things-to-do, things-to-worry-about and things-to-try-to-forget-about-for-now lists. We wanted school leaders to think about what schools are for and how they should act. Governors, as well as Heads.

This seemed important not just because I like to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s important because the world has changed quickly in education. Now that different people and different organisations run schools, who is keeping an eye on the purpose of schooling, as well as its outcomes? Tallis is a straightforward case, still a community school run by the local authority. Other schools run themselves, are a part of an academy trust or a larger chain, some are church schools, some ‘Free’. I wonder if this confuses taxpaying citizens?

Despite differences in the system, we all have a one crucial thing in common: children. Tiny children, large children, noisy children, silent children, children who love school, aren’t so fussed, like big crowds, prefer to be alone, arty, music-y, scienc-y, mathematic-y, sporty, happy, thoughtful, angry and sanguine children. Parents send children to our schools – all sorts of schools – and trust teachers to do a good job with them. Largely we do. Sometimes there are blips.

Parents and society therefore trust us to do two things. First, to be diligent and trustworthy public servants. Second, to model the behaviour of a good society to children: to show them how to be good citizens. Both of those are huge responsibilities. The first is carried out at work: doing a good job with teaching and results, for example. The second is harder to pin down. We teach character and values, but do parents see that in the way our schools run?

The Ethical Leadership Commission has been working on three things. First, agreeing some key language that school leaders and teachers might use to talk about this. Second, to provide some training materials so that we can all think about this responsibility together. Third, to set up a structure so that there is a space to think about ethics and the pressures that sometimes constrain our decision-making. It’s interesting work, as you can imagine.

I’d be interested to know what you think of the draft words. The first seven are based very closely on the Seven Principles for Public Life. If you work in the public sector, you may know them.

The Framework for Ethical Educational Leadership
Ethical educational leadership is based upon the Seven Principles for Public Life.

1. Selflessness
Leaders should act solely in the interest of children and young people.

2. Integrity
Leaders must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. Before acting or taking decisions they must declare and resolve openly any perceived conflict of interest and relationships.

3. Objectivity
Leaders must act and take decisions impartially and fairly, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias. Leaders should be dispassionate, exercising judgement and analysis for the good of children and young people.

4. Accountability
Leaders are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.

5. Openness
Leaders should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from scrutiny unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.

6. Honesty
Leaders should be truthful.

7. Leadership
Leaders should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs. Leaders include both those who are paid to lead schools and those who volunteer to govern them.

The second set of words try to explain what we think makes up good leadership.

Schools and colleges serve children and young people and help them grow into fulfilled and valued citizens. As role models for the young, how we behave as leaders is as important as what we do. Leaders should show leadership through the following personal characteristics or virtues.

a. Trust:
Leaders should be trustworthy and reliable. They hold trust on behalf of children and should be beyond reproach. They are honest about their motivations.

b. Wisdom:
Leaders should use experience, knowledge, insight understanding and good sense to make sound judgements. They should demonstrate restraint and self-awareness, act calmly and rationally, exercising moderation and propriety as they serve their schools wisely.

c. Kindness:
Leaders should demonstrate respect generosity of spirit and good temper. Where unavoidable conflict occurs, difficult messages should be given humanely.

d. Justice:
Leaders should be fair and work for the good of all children from all backgrounds. They should seek to enable all young people to lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives.

e. Service:
Leaders should be conscientious and dutiful. They should demonstrate humility and self-control, supporting the structures and rules which safeguard quality. Their actions should protect high-quality education.

f. Courage:
Leaders should work courageously in the best interests of children and young people. They protect their safety and their right to a broad, effective and creative education. They hold one another to account courageously.

g. Optimism:
Leaders should be positive and encouraging. Despite difficulties and pressures they are developing excellent education to change the world for the better.

None of us is claiming that we are perfect. All of us know that the responsibility is huge.

Are these the right principles? What do you think?

headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk

CR
22.6.18

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

If You Think It’s Wrong, Act On It

One Hand for the Ship

I like, I wish, I wonder

On the need to dig deeper

Lines

Chalk and talk

Teaching to the test

A Question of Ethics

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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