Mrs Roberts Writes

On battlements

19/3/2021

The book of Deuteronomy advises with varying degrees of utility. I take as my text today chapter 22, verse 8 - from the Authorized Version for maximum portentousness:

When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence.

Had Balfour Beatty employed an Old Testament scholar, we would have been spared last week’s added excitement.

I’m experiencing the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders, online. This is usually a jamboree in Birmingham involving two of my favourite things: train travel and a hotel bath. Sorry, did you expect me to say ‘networking with other professionals’ or ‘listening to the Secretary of State?’. This year the sessions are spaced out so I can be mildly annoyed for ten days rather than furious for two. A diversion has been the same question asked of each speaker: ‘What are you doing for your own wellbeing?’ The President keeps chickens, the Secretary of State has a dog (I hope he’s got someone else to train it, his bizarre instructions would scramble the most patient hound); Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector isn’t coping very well at all but walks a lot and talks to her children whether they want it or not. I’ve observed before that she’s a fidgeter. The Interim Chair of the Ofqual Board is following the government’s instructions about exercise, diet and sleep. Yes, yes, we’re all trying to do that. Me? Jazz, Scotch and detective stories. He may be right.

We’ve been getting a bit shirty aboard the Ark Tallis. What with the return and the testing and the mixed messages about assessment, teachers are tetchy. The best of us are inveterate planners and we like nothing better than having everything under control and the year’s work planned out carefully in advance. This stop-start online-real life malarkey is the very antithesis of what makes for a settled school experience. We are quietly and privately beside ourselves, though generally with a smile you understand. We are also asking each other ‘what are you doing, for your own wellbeing’. The answer? Just about coping, until the roof fell off.

I exaggerate for effect. It didn’t actually fall off. There was a high wind, a funny noise and on closer inspection, large bits of metal deviously working themselves loose three stories up. When suitably equipped folks went to look, they discovered the problem foretold in Deuteronomy so the repair would have to be effected by the equivalent of standing on a step ladder. This couldn’t be done until the wind dropped, und so weiter.

I hate closing – and we’d only just got open – and the testing meant that some children were having other days still at home – but really, this didn’t take any deciding. You can’t risk lumps of metal falling on children no matter how deeply you’re into conditional verbs and screen printing. We declared Monsoon Rules to the irritation of the young who could see that it wasn’t raining and set about getting them home. Everyone was magnificently understanding, thank you.

Unlike Dominic Cummings, who obviously hopes that chucking blame about like a gibbon will distract us from his single-handed undermining of the first lockdown. I like to follow his rantings because I used to work with his mother, and I know the roads well along which he ranged with unchecked eyesight. Deuteronomy is also pretty fussy about people telling the truth in court, and he was brought up in a religious family, so I hope he’s taking note.
Cummings has this week described Whitehall and the Cabinet Office as disaster zones and the Department of Health as a smoking ruin. These are odd metaphors, best used after a catastrophe and not while people are doing their best. He tells us that the outfit he set up, the Advanced Research and Intervention Agency (ARIA, opera lovers everywhere) will both be much more effective and apparently have a ‘higher tolerance for failure than is normal’.
I’ve got a higher tolerance for failure than is normal. We just won’t get some things done and my obsession with keeping everything within tight timescales is having to work a bit loose, like the roof. I’d have liked to hear that Ofsted will have a higher tolerance for failure than is normal when the nation’s schools start being inspected again, but that wasn’t divulged this week.

Most of all, we hope that young people’s efforts will not be condemned as failure when we start getting assessment going. Wouldn’t it be great if as well as rethinking the smoking ruin that is the broad and balanced curriculum, and the disaster zone of ‘fail’ to which we condemn a third of grades at GCSE we could also rebuild trust in teacher judgement?

However, the youth are fully on top of this. I followed two year 13 boys along the corridor yesterday and one was explaining a major breakthrough to his chum. ‘You know, the best thing about having timetable for the assessments is that you can, like, revise and stuff?’

Enough talk of tolerating failure when it’s your idea but insisting on it for the nations bewildered young. Mr Williamson, you had nothing of any note to say this week, but let me suggest something.

When thou buildest education anew after these sore trials, then thou shouldst make a battlement for thy children, that they may succeed and not bring shame upon thine house, by being made to fall from thence.

Or in the modern idiom, rethink assessment, please.

CR
17.3.21

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The falling rain's own sons and daughters

3/10/2020

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I wrote to parents some time ago with the happy news that we didn’t have a plan B for social distancing, keeping year groups apart and rain - except for coats and umbrellas. Today was monsoon protocol day and thankfully, children turned up in the coats, largely. We’ve got the umbrellas for staff, new, highly visible, personally labelled and carefully branded. Only 2% of them fell apart at the first gust, so that’s not too bad.

However, our senior folks are logisticians to match Heathrow, Disney or the Army and when we saw the forecast they jumped to it like good ’uns. Our devised routes and wet weather zones worked a treat. Year 7 in the canteen, Year 8 at the east end of the sports hall, Year 9 in the dojo, Year 10 at the west end of the sports hall curtained off from Year 8, Year 11 in the main hall.

We have routes. Routes to get them to the zones, out of the zones, to the toilet, to the lunch queue and back again. We have routes to detention and places for anyone who gets too excited. We have different rules for packed lunches, sandwiches and Friday fish and chips and a DMZ between Year 7 and 8 dining. We have routes to the prayer room and the library. We have more routes that you could shake a stick at. And we adjusted them all so that Year 11 could have a live assembly in the sports hall about Year 11-y things: exams, working hard and what they might do next year.

We have staff. Heads of Year who didn’t sit down all day, teachers who volunteered to manage zones even though they taught all day, support staff who hold the world together.

And we have children, who did what children do, at various heights. They sat on the floor and chatted, they leaned against the walls and read, they speculated on romance and annoyed each other quietly. They ate tidily and asked teachers how they were. They had elastic bands to confiscate and water bottles to spin, but they held it together. They lined up indoors and waited patiently to be led away. Some of Year 8 didn’t cope so well with a whole day indoors, but they’re at an awkward age. Some will need a bit of re-setting next week, nothing new.

And as I passed thought it all, I saw how open and inclusive they are, how friendly and accepting of the foibles of others – including the bizarre rules seemingly normal adults dream up for them. ‘We have to get there how? Really? Oh, ok then.’

I love Don Paterson’s poem Rain. He talks about looking at lives as if they were in the kind of film that starts with rain and follows its effects on the characters. The last verse moves me every time I read it:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood –
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.

The mess and the damp, the mildly frayed tempers and the setting-rights, the silly acts and the overreactions are all bearable, containable if we can rise up. None of this matters if we have hope and kindness, if we have love. It could have been the worst, but at the end of it, in an empty school, it’s been the best wet day I remember.

Thank you Tallis.

CR
2.10.20

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Whistling

7/5/2018

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It’s a large site so there’s a time lag when it comes to gathering everyone up after break and lunch and posting them into the right rooms. The whistles go in order, canteen disembarking first, basketball courts, fields then everyone else. Whistling is creative here so we do it enthusiastically in fancy rhythms. We could set up a Thunderers Orchestra, the acme of creative crowd control.

A whistle makes shouting unnecessary. In a particular context and time, the whistle means: do the next thing, reset your expectations, desist. I happen to know there’s a nautical signal flag that means ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instruction immediately’ but a whistle is much quicker than that.

Long before the end of lunch one wet day this week I wandered into the canteen in search of hot food and found two sirs chuckling to themselves. A child had been running (indoors! near cutlery!) so a desist and reset whistle was sounded. Upon which 200 children gathered their affairs, put their hoods up and went tidily out into the rain, which wasn’t really the intention at all but made life a lot simpler, if wetter. An old grey whistle trick.

On the other side of the freezing yard, this penguin weather has made the year 11 study hall suddenly more popular - or it may just be the ides of May. So, I write in the silent company of 28 boys and 1 girl, all allegedly working. 9 have headphones in - could be GCSE Pod, could be Tassomai, could be Shostakovich for all I know. 17 have eaten sandwiches, one a large bar of Fruit and Nut. As it's spring and the heating’s off, 20 of us are wearing coats. Two are trying to discuss the work silently because I won’t let them speak, one has been gazing at a strand of his hair for 10 minutes as if all the knowledge in the world was written on it in very small print. They’re a rainbow nation, fidgeting through revision, silently. Borrowing a pen silently, reading poetry silently, sharing revision cards silently, not-before-time silently, satisfaction-of-a-job-well-done silently, 2-weeks-to-go-panicking silently. Blowing a whistle would be cruel at the end so I tell them the time quietly and they too gather their affairs, put their hoods up and move tidily into the rain. They’re still working as they go: It’s hydrogen, man; there’s a gothic theme to Jekyll and Hyde; these equations don’t stay still; I’ve done the reading for next lesson, have you? She’s setting us a twelve-mark question. I’m going Library after school.

It makes a change. On another matter, during the morning I’ve been involved in a phone discussion about why we don’t have a schools ombudsman. Did you know that? The Office of the Schools Adjudicator just looks at admissions, we have tribunals galore, but no ombuds. Because of a deal done in 1972 we can’t even complain about that to the Local Government Ombudsman. There’s no importuning route for schools about local government or about schools for anyone.

It’s not as if we don’t need it. The new landscape of schools is, to put it politely, disparate. One might even say fragmented, confusing, chaotic, perhaps unplanned. It’s hard to know where the gatekeepers are when it’s not obvious where the gate is. Or if there is one. Either way, in the ungated field of a thousand blooms who’ll hear a whistle when it’s blown? Where does the frustrated taxpayer get justice or just a hearing?

Whistleblowing is real whistling. It needs people to stop, consider their actions, desist, reset and do the next thing right. It searches for shared and valued norms and expectations and a common language. It longs for quality in consistency, predictability, effectiveness and diligence. That’s not to say a whistle can’t be blown in anger, malice or delusion but that’s seething humanity for you. Access to support, a fair hearing and justice is a human right. As a rallying cry it’s a little arcane but Bring on the Ombudsman.

The DT showcase last night brought the sun with it, and wonderful work beautifully displayed, canapés and music. I went to look again this morning and found a smallish youth on his knees scrutinising the underside of a Bluetooth speaker in half a basketball, to see how it worked. I’ve commissioned the Black Lives Matter posters for my room and other public places: professional-standard stuff with a necessary message.

And overheard on the bridge: No, you can’t just crack open any egg and a chicken comes out. It doesn’t work like that.’ I assume this was a Biology or Food issue, not a comment on the local elections. It may form part of a campaign: School Ombudsman, because not every egg produces a chicken. I’d give the job to the little chap studying the speaker, he knew what he was looking for.

CR
4.5.18

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Roll of thunder, hear my cry

1/5/2016

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Bertolt Brecht, 1948 Credit: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Drama plumbs depths in the young. Year 11 final devised pieces can be stories of Shakespearean perfidy. In past lives I’ve watched scenes that would make Jeremy Kyle wince with angry foghorns drowning out nuanced human experience. I worry that yelling is the lingua franca of too many homes, while noting its experimentalism in other thespians from very quiet homes. This week was wonderfully different: four pieces on night two of the rehearsals bringing gripping and complex stories, broken hearts and agitprop, physical and verbal dexterity, the odd laugh amidst the agony. Young people who struggle to express themselves elsewhere perform with confidence and power through skilled teaching. Drama is key to any curriculum that offers a voice to the voiceless. It’s not that voices aren’t annoying elsewhere.

This mad weather is no friend to the teacher on yard duty: we expect balmy sunshine in the summer term and are infuriated by cold and rain. Tuesday afternoon started with ear-splitting thunder and stuff falling from the sky. Some year 8 boys approached me, undeterred by the leaky down jacket that makes me look like a seagull pie demanding ‘Is this snow?’ I regarded them and prevaricated (snow excites the young). The Person In Charge of Weather put us right; ‘light hail from an arctic maritime front’. They were disappointed. ‘Don’t hailstones knock you out?’

All this against a background of hysterical squealing and rushing to hug each other before the world ended. It takes industrial shushing to recover from the wrath of God in the last 10 minutes of lunchtime.

Undeterred, year 7 consider the Dalai Lama. I’m an old cynic and was touched by how impressed they were by his thoughts. Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them. Some squirreled the sheet into their bags for further reading: one made a public vow to be kinder to his brother. You forget how easily moved and spontaneously happy a young person can be, despite the prevailing wind. A helpful student enjoys hosting an open evening for next year’s year 12s ‘. "Our school is full of joy" she said. "There's always laughter".

A correspondent wants to discuss Picketty’s Capital with me and I am happy (but ill-equipped) to oblige. Capital as a concept is important to educators because it helps us think about the contribution we make to our children’s futures. It straddles raw achievement, the education of the whole child and our work for a just and sustainable democracy (as the old National Curriculum used to have it). Picketty’s schtick is that that returns on capital are more important than the outputs of work. Education is the best method for building up capital and achieving equality, because economic growth is simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope. However, those who already have capital try very hard to reproduce structures of professional and social control down the generations. We have to create specific institutions to alter this. Turning schools into academies by lure or fatwah will serve to prevent debate in the public forum of local democracy about how we finance the key mechanism in reducing social inequality: schools need to be products of democracy if they are to be agents of social change. But if you don’t want to schools to change the distribution of capital in any form, then removing them from democratic control is probably a very effective way of doing it.

A representative of the people comes to visit. She’s thoughtful and interested, so we offer her school cakes, honest reflection on our pennilessness and a trip round the reservation. She liked the photography and had a trip through the Narnia door into the dark room. At the end, a verdict: ‘you feel at one here: it’s happy’.

A happy and just school isn’t accidental. Schools make commitments to their values and their methods and have to make sure that they work to create educated people to play a part in a just social order. It’s not easily reducible to metrics. The 90% Ebacc-ers – with whom, in another context I used to have more sympathy than I do now – argue that the capital of traditional subjects is greater than that of drama or art. Is it? Or is it just easier to maintain the current social order if no one has the articulacy to challenge it? Roll of thunder, hear our cry.

CR
28.4.16

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

On battlements

The falling rain's own sons and daughters

Whistling

Roll of thunder, hear my cry