Category: Society

One Hand for the Ship

8/10/2022

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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Pushmi-pullyu

8/11/2019

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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

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Whereas

6/7/2019

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‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’

Available in more than 360 languages, the UN Declaration of Human Rights is the most translated document in the world. It provides a foundation for a just and decent future for everyone, and gives people everywhere a powerful tool in the fight against oppression and affronts to human dignity.

The declaration is 70 years old this year and Ai Weiwei has designed a flag to celebrate it, which we’ve got three of. Some of our children went to meet him and all of our children have looked closely at the declaration on our very successful community day on 19 June. We had a wonderful display of pennants of rights all around the concourse, but weather intervened and they had to go.

You could stop reading at this point and watch the film, but just in case I’m invited to become PM in the absence of any other reasonable candidate, I thought you should be reassured about our stance on Human Rights at Tallis.
It is very important that we all know and support these hard-won rights which protect and support us all. Here they are, very briefly paraphrased by me:

Human beings are born free and equal
Everyone in the world is entitled to these rights and freedoms
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person
Slavery must be outlawed
Torture or inhuman punishment is outlawed
Everyone must be recognised before the law
Everyone has an equal right to the law
Every country should uphold these rights
No one should be arbitrarily arrested, detained or exiled
Rights should be upheld fairly and publicly
People are innocent until proved guilty
Private and family life, honour and reputation must be protected
People may freely move around the world
Asylum from persecution should be provided internationally
Everyone has the right to a nationality
Marriage should be freely and equally entered into and dissolved
Everyone has the right to own property and not have it taken off them arbitrarily
People must have freedom of thought, conscience and religion
People must have freedom of opinion and expression
People must be free to assemble and associate peacefully
People need free elections, democracy and public services
Social security and cultural rights are needed to safeguard the dignity of the person
Everyone has a right to work, equal pay, trade unions and protection against unemployment
Everyone has a right to leisure, limited working hours and holidays with pay
Everyone has a right to basic healthcare, especially children and mothers
Education must be free, accessible and allow for full personal development
Everyone has a right to culture, arts, science and the fruits of their own production
Everyone has a right to a social order which protects all of these
Everyone has duties to the community
No one may try to destroy any of these rights and freedoms.

Here, in this advanced democracy, now, I’m worried about 17 of these. I’m worried about the Hostile Environment policy, internet trolling that destroys lives, vanishing public services, removal of legal aid for the poorest, zero-hours contracts and the functionalism of education. I could go on.

One of those rights, of course, is to an education. Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre includes a wonderful sculptured layout of 90 tonnes of straightened steel reinforcing bars from substandard regional government buildings that didn’t survive the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. So many of them were schools which collapsed on top of the children and teachers. When I saw it in the Royal Academy a couple of years ago it was like seeing the timbers of Aberfan laid out before you, and hearing the cries of crushed children.

But young people are defined by optimism and they love to learn something new. Our film explains their ‘favourite’ human rights and gives a flavour of the deep learning that happened on that day. And one of the groups came up with this. The future’s in safe hands.

CR 5.7.19

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Arrested on a train

5/10/2018

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I was minding my own business on the jolly old Southeastern into London Bridge when my attention was arrested by a poster advertising a grammar school served by the same locomotive. It asked rather loudly, ‘HAVE YOU JUST BEEN DEEMED SELECTIVE BY BEXLEY’S 11+ TEST?’

Immune to the concerns of other passengers I approached and photographed this shameless assault on language and then asked everyone on the mothership what it meant. I don’t allow that kind of talk at Tallis so no one knew. Consulting the ether, apparently, ‘deemed selective’ is the status a child attains who has passed the 11+. Charming.
I’m trying to keep up with the reading so I’ve already told you about Robert Verkaik and Melissa Benn this year. Now I’m going to tell you about another bonza tome, Miseducation : inequality, education and the working classes by Cambridge and LSE Emeritus Professor Diane Reay. Brought up on the Derbyshire coalfield, she taught in London primary schools for 20 years, so she knows a thing or two. It’s very readable.

Her first chapter, Why can’t education compensate for society? sets out her thesis. Both class and poverty have always distanced working class children from education, but recent fads and interventions have made this worse, not better.

Focusing on test scores as a measure of school quality has a particularly dangerous effect on schools which serve largely poor communities. Those pressures – and their leaders’ choices - lead to narrowed curriculums and obsessive teaching-to-the-test largely unknown by more advantaged children whose teachers are more confident about results.

Schools serving poorer communities have a majority of young and inexperienced teachers, committed and determined but rarely from similar backgrounds to the children. They may have been skimpily trained on programmes which stress the adoption of particular practices (fancy uniform, zero tolerance) said to be modelled on the public schools, but which rarely exist there.

Schools justify these hideous proxies because they say they need to re-shape children’s character and outlook in order for them to succeed. Some go further, saying that children from ‘chaotic’ homes need order and structure in school to be able to free themselves from the lives their parents lead. Some – fee-paying as well as and normal schools – equate parental worth with cars and holidays, a ‘nice house’.

In this way, loose talk about social mobility becomes a frontal assault on the parenting of those trapped in poverty. ‘This education will give you a good life, better than your parents’. Ergo, your parents are deficient, shameful, they have let you down. Reay uses a clear phrase here, describing ‘shame as the darker side of optimism’. Optimism is expected in school, or at least its functional twin, aspiration. Optimism is natural to young people despite teenage gloom. Aspiration is more specific, always linked to hard work, good exam results and university entry. In this way, social mobility is outsourced to the child: if he isn’t sufficiently aspirational he throws away his chance of escaping poverty. It’s his fault.

In a chapter called Class Feeling: troubling the soul and preying on the psyche’ Reay quotes from extensive interviews with children in primary schools where they define themselves by their grades, where they ‘know’ that they’ll have a ‘bad life’ if they get a ‘bad score’. This focus on grades above all, she says, has ‘shifted children’s self-identification as learners’. They are their grades, not their efforts and their insights. If grades are bad, they must be bad, and unworthy of escaping poverty.

While advantaged children also suffer from soul-destroying commodification by potential exam results, they do not have to engage in ‘rational computation’ in order to meet the goals that best suit their interests. If you ‘know’ that you will go to Oxford (Cambridge, St Andrew’s, Durham, Imperial or wherever) because that’s where people like you always go, you don’t have to think much about it. Everything about your life has readied you to get in. You are fine being yourself, you don’t have to learn to become someone else. Oh, and personal private tutoring is built into the family budget.

So, not only do many poor children go to schools where the teacher shortage really bites, but some of the newly-popular ways of running schools are deliberately framed as places where children have to disown their parents. From a position of poverty (30% of all children now), they are expected to value material success as an output of education which, if they fail, is their fault for not aiming high enough. While current policy claims to try to raise working-class achievement, by its approach and funding it actually ensures that failure is firmly located in the working class. If you remain working class like your parents, you are a failure. What kind of madness is this?
Uninformed madness. 'A plethora of spectacular educational irrelevancies such as standards, testing regimes, raising attainment and achievement levels, league tables, school choice, academies and charter schools, performativities and managerialism, image and impression management, academic/vocational streaming, punitive naming and shaming strategies and the rhetoric of school improvement and school effectiveness have obscured the crucial importance of social class to educational success.’

What does work? Reay says: collaboration rather than setting and streaming. Intense personal learning relationships between teacher and child that empower students as ‘knowers’. Passionate engagement, original thought. And perhaps working towards an answer to the question ‘why English education has never embraced approaches that work and adopts those that don’t?’ Grammar schools, anyone? Why bother with the 11+ test? The evidence shows that the ‘deemed selective’ child was actually selected much earlier.

Anyway, the reason I was on the train to start with was to go on the Worth Less? school funding march. We were, as the organisers said, ‘relentlessly reasonable’ and have carried on being so this week as the sheer effrontery of the DFE claim about funding has been systematically unpicked and exposed as shameless falsehood. The UK Statistics Authority is calling it in for investigation, so all power to their spreadsheets and swivel chairs (which is how I picture them).

I was directing traffic and some year 8 boys passed me. One said to the other ‘I’m praying for something good to come out of it’. Who knows what that problem was, but Amen to that.

CR
4.10.18

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Sorry

18/10/2015

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My Apologies

Cultural notes 1: we had Radio 3 and the BBC Concert Orchestra live from Tallis launching the 10 Pieces secondary project. 21 young people played with the orchestra and the jazz group did their cool stuff. Potential highlight of the year and it's only October? Notes 2: theatre lovers are too late to go see Rob Brydon in Future Conditional at the Old Vic, remarkable because it doesn't put a foot wrong about education. Admissions, snobbery, state v private, teacher workload, culture and learning all covered sensibly. There's a wonderful section where teacher Brydon is compelled to write an apology to a parent and muses aloud about what he's sorry for. Sorry about the mother's life and the failure of hopes and dreams, sorry about the state of the world and the injustices of society, sorry about what a child seems doomed to turn into.

We've been apologising at Tallis this week. Year 7 had local history walks last week (not all at once, you understand, that would be lunacy) and a group was remarked upon. On investigation, it seemed they had overheated with the sheer excitement of being out together for the first time and had not matched behaviour to venue. This kind of thing brings the sky down on a class. Form tutor, head of year, assistant head and I expressed shock and outrage. The hapless eleven year olds were packed off to reform their characters and compose letters of apology, each according to the vocabulary, shame and imagination available.

The letters were wonderful. Deep and specific. Guilt was confessed and forgiveness begged. All apologised unreservedly. Several wrote about letting the school down and one pleaded that our august institution wouldn't be judged by 'this tragedy'. We corrected the spelling and posted them. Sorry.

Apology is one end of accountability. Sometimes things go wrong despite our best efforts. Sorry it didn't work, sorry we did one thing and not another, sorry we made a choice that turned out to be wrong. Sorry we couldn't make something happen, sorry we ran out of money. Sorry doesn't put it right, but it oils the wheels of forward progress. And it can unnerve. Passing through the lunch queue last week I bumped into (sorry) a year 11 character and asked how she was. "Oh, you know, tired cold hungry stressed out, all of the above." I apologised and she had to laugh. "You're not going to do anything about it, though, are you?" I told her she'd feel better after lunch and that she should keep me informed. She said she liked hearing northern people talking, so I laughed too. Tired cold hungry is sorted out by a school dinner, and the stress might be a good thing depending on the work rate of the youth under advisement. But I'm sorry if its bad stress and I'm sorry if the system doesn't allow you to make mistakes and ends up commodifying you by unpredictable exam results. I note that when we had 31 GCSE results in one subject upgraded by re-mark no one apologised to us or the children.

Back on the history walk, we had a whale of a time. An ancient philanthropic foundation, First World War shelling, Second World War shrapnel, Saxon mounds, Henry 8th and a brief history of time at the meridian. I brought up the rear so kind souls dropped back to keep me company. One has an ingrowing toenail, another's brother is frightened of squirrels. One used the walk as a recruitment event for scouting "We sleep in tents! We make our own meals! We crawl through mud!" One's worried about his Nan and another's Dad's a window cleaner (a cold job). Some didn't have jumpers on, some were equipped to accompany Fiennes to the pole. We dawdled and rushed as required and were sheepdogged by an irrepressible Head of Department. We rather swamped a bus but gave up our seats and got in everyone's way. Sorry for being young and foolish, cheerful and mildly ridiculous.

Back in class, I finish the lesson with The News. What's going on, people? Someone said: black people are 3 times as likely to be tasered as white. A parent's opinion was proffered but that didn't satisfy us. I won't quickly forget the anxious and bewildered looks on children's faces as we failed to resolve it. I'm sorry that's the news.

And I'm sorry that the other news is about grammar schools. Sorry that David Willets' magisterial 2007 speech on the "overwhelming evidence that academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it" is (in his own words) like light from a dead star. Sorry that other schools will have to deal with the anxious and bewildered self-reproach of failed poor 11 year olds. Sorry we prefer prejudice to evidence.

CR

15.10.15

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British Values

15/6/2014

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The Mykonos Vase, c. 670 BC.

Such a long time since we talked. Keeping well? Good. I promised to tell you more about OFSTED, but compared to the Birmingham excitement, I don’t have much to say. Inspectors came, got us straight away and despite not being able to stop themselves asking finicky questions, delivered a clear and helpful report. In the through-the-looking-glass language of school accountability we got a good good. Fair play to them: a British value?

More excitingly, the week before half term was Deaf Awareness Week which we threw ourselves into with typical gusto. Huge prizes (small badges, wrist bands, useful leaflets) were offered to those who had another go at signing during sunny days in the yard. It seems as though everyone learned how to say good morning and good afternoon, and some could even say who they were – a benefit in any language. We made a little film in which we chuckle at ourselves a lot. Is not taking ourselves too seriously another British value?

After that it was half term. I had a wet week in Germany and visited the Nuremburg courtroom, where genuine British values played a part ‘the tribute of power to reason’ that picked up the stitches of civilisation again. US Judge Jackson’s speech for the prosecution is an astonishing feat of rhetoric, but it was Maxwell-Fyfe’s calm and methodical cross-examination which broke Goering. Unflashy but effective is a British value too.

The memories of wars are heavy this year. Before half term we’d met with our vicar to plan our part in the redevelopment of the war memorial in St James’ Kidbrooke. We think it’ll be interesting to find out who we’re related to and what happened to them. We need to think about the D Day anniversary too, once we can have some assemblies again after exams. Remembering (and getting round to it in the end) are British values too.

And so is going to Tyn y Berth for a week with year 8 to be outdoorsy or walking down to Sports Day in Sutcliffe Park or selling doughnuts for charity or other ordinary things. It’s being so astonished by the sun that you get half-dressed outside after PE just for the feel of it, or getting really cross with an inanimate object and having to climb down afterwards. But it’s also putting other people first and creating the circumstances for everyone to get along together, and taking care of the hard-won victories of democracy and equality. Trying to make things better for everyone is surely a British Value?

There are so many irritating factors in the Trojan Horse furore, so many ways in which conspiracy may be alleged on all sides that paranoia and suspicion may well have become British values as well as Corporal Jones-y panic. Useless to speculate on Wilshaw, Gove or May’s motives but I wouldn’t be British if I didn’t add my two-penn’orth. We HAD a statement of British Values for schools – it was in the preamble to the 2008 version of the National Curriculum and it was wonderful. It said

Education should reflect the enduring values that contribute to personal development and equality of opportunity for all, a healthy and just democracy, a productive economy, and sustainable development. These include values relating to the self, recognising that we are unique human beings capable of spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical growth and development, relationships as fundamental to the development and fulfilment of ourselves and others, and to the good of the community. We value others for themselves, not only for what they have or what they can do for us, the diversity in our society, where truth, freedom, justice, human rights, the rule of law and collective effort are valued for the common good.

We have them in the Teachers’ Standards 2012, telling us that teachers must not

undermine fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs;

We had all this and a great Citizenship Curriculum. We’ve standing orders for RE which ensure children learn about and from religion. We’ve a distinguished tradition of assemblies and community activities and an inspection system that, until two weeks ago, was in grave danger of working sensibly. Struth, we know what to do. But now we’ve got academies and free schools that don’t have to build up the common good, a moral panic just before an election, knee-jerk reactions, and wanton ignorance of the honourable purposes that direct daily life in school. Such a shame that hypocrisy is a British value too.

CR

11.6.14

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Banding Together

16/3/2014

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Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square, 1964

I love the list we get in March of our next year sevens. I see the names and picture keen bright eleven-year-olds grinning as they find their way around the big school. I love it that our admissions are handled calmly, fairly and by the Local Authority.

I once worked in a school where admissions resembled the Schleswig-Holstein question. You needed a map, a compass and a Bismarck’s understanding of county bus routes to get a toe-hold in the discussion. There were years when revised admissions criteria might as well have been in Babylonian Cuneiform. Two years running we had public meetings with that Great Panjandrum, The Schools Adjudicator: beat that for complexity.

It was just an oversubscribed LA school in a city where a vengeful providence had put all the schools in one corner. We didn’t go in for aptitude tests, priest’s references, pricy uniforms or parental interviews. We had no choice about and no view on which 11-year olds joined us in September. Admissions were County Hall’s problem. If the LA had sent us 240 penguins to educate, we’d have got with the fish and the ice skating.

As it was, we tried to work out which friends our new children and their parents could agree on liking, which classes to group them in and how to get that perfect mix of background, test scores and gender in every single form group. We hoped for a balanced intake, but had no means of promoting it.

In London admissions are different. Children take a test in year 5 and are allocated one of 4 ability bands: this combines with parental preference to give schools a balanced basketful of children. This wise process is reinforced by the Sutton Trust’s latest characteristically sensible publication. Last month’s report on Banding and Ballots recommends banding to achieve a comprehensive intake, especially in urban areas. It meets the Trust’s laudable aim of improving social mobility through education.

Why is this important? Why is it right to divide children up and then spread them out? Is this not social engineering of the worst sort? Why not make every child go to its local school and let the devil take the hindmost? Why not leave year 7 to the market and the pointy elbows of the argumentative classes?

A good comprehensive school like Tallis is a work of art and a force of nature. It contains within its warm and cheerful walls the raw materials of the good society. Children of all kinds thrown together make friends across the divides and learn something about how to bear one another’s foibles and burdens and how to respect one another. They reject snobbery and develop an immense pride in diversity, community, fairness and justice.

A Head I worked with had a leaving speech for his upper sixth which I’ve plagiarised shamelessly ever since. He would warn those heading off to university to be understanding towards people who had not enjoyed their advantages. He spoke pityingly of young people from dull schools where everyone was alike, who then might find it hard to get along in real life. He said that being an alumnus of a comprehensive school was the best possible preparation for life, and that such young people had a responsibility to keep to the values that formed them, to make the world a better place.

We have to be organised about what we believe is right for our society and our young people. Parents are individually and collectively wonderful, but they need a structure to relax against, where what is right for their children is also right for other peoples. A proper, balanced comprehensive school gives us a glimpse of a just society in which no-one is disadvantaged by money.

It’s not easy to balance all schools and is almost impossible in rural and post-industrial places. Children in some areas would have to spend hours on buses to be part of banded intakes, and that wouldn’t be right either. School buses are at the mercy of the Lord of the Flies at the best of times. Heads in London have little idea of the time it can take to resolve a bus disagreement including soup and chewing gum. But a good is a good, and just because something’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it. If we thought that, who would understand A level Economics, surds or the offside rule? We need banded and balanced intakes in all our schools for the common good. Time to try harder.

CR 12.3.14

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

One Hand for the Ship

Pushmi-pullyu

Whereas

Arrested on a train

Sorry

British Values

Banding Together

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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