Firstly, I extend a warm welcome to all of our Claires Court Schools community, returning as we have this week from our Summer break. From the many parents, teachers and friends I know, our own country seems to have been the most popular destination, though with such a diverse set of ages and stages, I do appreciate most parts of the world will have been included in individual family choices. And perhaps somewhat ironically, after such a wet period over the break, we’ve returned to scorching sunshine and the hottest temperatures of 2023 to date. Actually, school is always so much more pleasant when the sun is out and the children can exercise outside; the buzz on all sites was full evident on Thursday morning, though Mrs Kirby and the ‘Welcome’ balloons up the Ridgeway driveway did rather take the trophy for ‘best dressed’ school!

It must be said that the national picture for public Education (or for that matter Health or Care) could not be much grimmer than it is at present, suffering as such services so obviously are from the austerity cuts of the ‘coalition’ government of 2010, maintained by the subsequent variants of Conservative rule since, where expert report after expert report seems to have been ignored because the conclusions requiring long term government investment in buildings, resources and staffing have been ignored in favour of political expediency, the consequences of Brexit and of course the C-19 epidemic. The latest ‘salvo’ of criticism hitting Prime Minister Sunak and his cabinet is the RAAC fiasco, in which thousands of public buildings housing schools, hospitals and public services more widely have reached well beyond their end of life period, and have now had to be closed because their occupancy truly threatens life and limb. What seems most disappointing of all is that such buildings are being identified in those communities across the country whose voice at national level has been hardest to hear, being most likely from those parts of the community which is most disadvantaged. Having said that, Maidenhead no longer has a central car park to support its high street; at the best of times it’s not been a real attraction and now it resembles many of those satellite shopping streets in city suburbs, hardly one to celebrate the town’s boast of being the ‘Jewel on the Thames’, because you can’t easily drop in by car.

At the Senior Boys assembly this morning, I reminded school that most of the concrete present in our school follows the recipe the ancient civilizations 1000 years before the Romans brought it across some 2000 years ago, and as Hadrian’s wall reminds us, it does last well through the centuries. The principle ingredients for our modern education systems certainly have been known for the same long amount of time – promoted by Socrates during his lifetime 470–399 BC. He believed that as self-learners we must first admit to our ignorance and realise that there is a world of knowledge ready to be accessed, but only once we can accept that we don’t already know everything. So here goes!!!

Firstly, we have to accept that those who write, publish and broadcast the news do so knowing that only ‘bad news’ sells papers. Current government policy on Assessment in Education is so very confused that it’s no surprise that the newspapers have been heralding a catastrophic decline in secondary school standards at both GCSE and A level as being indicative of ‘Trouble’ this August. In terms of results, there has been no decline, just a decision this year in England to reduce the percentage of candidates in each grade band, which was delivered by simple statistical manoeuvre. If only 3% of the country at GCSE are to be awarded top grade 9, then you raise the mark at which a grade 9 can be achieved until only 3% can receive it. Across every subject area, this mechanism was used, so last year’s 54% permitting a grade 5 to be awarded is lifted to (say) 60%, so that we move down the % gaining grade 5 or above from 60% of the population back to 50%. I can give you a real example from our own experience in using a common exam across England Wales for Drama – the grade differentials are 5% – so you needed to gain 5 more marks in England than Wales to reach the threshold of the same grade. And of course, that’s across every subject (just happens we actually use the Welsh board for Drama!!!

Spoiler alert – this section is a little technical. When as Education Secretary, Michael Gove changed both the GCSE and A level examination systems, he did so simultaneously for the period 2017-19, against all professional advice. He wanted to improve and extend the content of the exams to match the most rigorous of other countries in the world, but even in the best of worlds, we would not know whether the curriculum and exam changes have been effective until we had 5 years of data, taking us to 2024 and beyond. For many subjects the only years in which the harder exams were actually sat were 2018 and 2019, and the marking actually was probably softer then than it will be in the longer term as teachers get more experienced and there are mote past paper worked examples. This year’s grade boundaries in Drama are actually higher than in 2019, so Drama teachers (and indeed teachers of all the arts & design subjects) across the country are absolutely up in arms because artificially crushing arts grades (which has happened) drives people out of the creative subjects which of course we are still desperate for in employment terms and in industries where indeed we lead the world.

At our staff Inset on Tuesday at Norden Farm this week, I shared this very short video of Sir Ken Robinson talking about creativity; please watch it because in less than 3 minutes Sir Ken highlights just how creative young children are, and that education has the very really danger of crushing the innovation out of children to their and of course wider society’s detriment.

Education is so much more than Instruction and Compliance checked by testing. Research consistently highlights that children of all abilities do so much better in cities and communities where aspiration is alive and evidence of social mobility is visible. Born in the shadow of Big Ben or Canary Wharf exemplifies that sense of opportunity all can have, as did a hundred years ago when people and communities were embedded around ports, mining, coal and steel manufacturing. Take the complexity and quality of those industries away, replace them with warehousing, prisons, or perhaps even less mass unemployment and both aspiration and ingenuity are killed stone dead.

Nationally over the span of time, government knows this; the effect of moving museums and public broadcasting out of London into our other major cities has rebirthed industries galore. Government needs to understand its role in leadership – crossing your fingers and hoping that we’ll get wind farms to replace the petrol forecourts due to close by 2035 just won’t work. What this means in schools and colleges is that the investment in rebuilding them that was cancelled in 2010 has to restart, and at the pace of 400+ a year. There will be squabbling about new schools needed on green fields (you don’t need to lecture me about those), but creating vibrant learning spaces for children is the prerequisite of those children in due course ‘making the grade’.

And then providing vibrant learning, with modern ways of assessment that don’t hark back to the same methods as those used in the Victorian Era would be the next best thing. Here’s such a report from Her Majesty’s School Inspector back then:

The amount of money that schools were given in the Victorian years often depended on the marks obtained by the children in the school examinations. The main problems were caused by the absence of many children from school for various reasons. This meant that they missed a lot of lessons and might do badly in the exams, or of course not even appear. Really, it’s not change much over the last 143 years; this month’s headlines tell us we have school absence as a major issue in 2023 – here’s the BBC report on that 1 in 5 children missing school statistic from earlier this week -https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66701748. Great news perhaps that Eton and Star academies are coming together to open up 3 new aspirational Sixth Form Colleges in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham, but when that could indeed be at the expense of the DfE and Treasury being required to have a proper plan to fund and renew the public estate of schools.

To summarise, back in 2010 we had a clear plan for the refurbishment of schools at 400+ a year and the redevelopment of our curriculum in schools to be truly suitable for the 2020s and beyond. As a leading headteacher then, I’d regularly been at DfE meeting with ministers and civil servants to ensure that the Independent Sector played its full part in these developments. The money was cancelled by George Osborne, Coalition Chancellor, and the Curriculum was set back at least 10 years by Michael Gove’s reforms in 2014. Where our sector has been able to flourish is because we can choose to be independent, move to international qualifications and of course not rely upon 3rd party system builders to throw up school buildings with finite life spans of 30 years or less. In 2023, our own A level and GCSE results remain very high quality, matriculating our students for their future chosen degrees, apprenticeships and careers. We’ve been able to ‘dodge the bullets’ of government decisions, and across the piece of education, health and welfare, I am delighted that Claires Court Schools Ltd. remain in robust good health. But when we look at the huge criticism that national politicians make of Education, please let’s bear in mind that both the provisioning of and decision making that has been in their hands for the past 13 years, and they are the ones who chose to break the plans, change the grades and … fail.