Blog

Dateline: Friday 4 May 2018

Problem: Recruitment and Retention of Teachers in England

Headline: Teachers to be offered year’s paid sabbatical to improve retention

I won’t be the only head/teacher listening to the news headlines or indeed reading these proposals in print that was perplexed by this announcement by our new Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds.  As ever, it does seem as though Mr Hinds needed to have some ‘good news’ to present at the start of the Teachers’ conference season, partly because that is expected of any Prime Minister or Secretary of State when they are speaking to a large public audience. What the Rt Hon MP could not do is stand up in front of committed educationalists and say ‘All’s well, carry on’, because of course within the government’s educational estate, there are some significant long term problems, that no matter what government has tried to tweak, are legacy outcomes from previous failed initiatives and can’t be resolved with ‘gimicky’ headlines such as this.

I agree that schools need to be learning institutions for the staff as well as the children, and that can only happen if the staff have the opportunity to study and learn whilst on the job.  That ‘opportunity’ is about ‘time’ and that ‘time’ is bought by giving teachers sufficient non-contact hours from classes, and ensuring that the work overflow from contact-time does not consume all the available extra. However, as we all know, the school culture must be set around self-improvement and developing others, not just about creating schemes of work, marking, writing reports and data entry/analysis, otherwise the additional energy will be wasted on ‘spinning the hamster’ wheel, not generating new ideas and improving opportunities for all.

When the decision was made during Michael Gove’s tenure as Education Secretary to change every teaching programme in every school in England from Reception to Year 13 5 years ago, and to change every mode of assessment that went with that, it sent the teaching faculty here and every where else to be honest into a flat spin. As an private school, we can choose to be independent of much that central government force-feeds its own schools, but we could not avoid the change for all secondary examinations that are now mid flow. A level grades have not changed, but the subjects have been made harder, so achieving those grades more difficult, demanding an increase in knowledge retention and skill deployment. GCSEs have had the same ‘toughening-up’, with the added dimension of a complete change in nomenclature (numbers over grades, e.g. 4=C) and a switch from criterion-lead marking (a C means the pupils can do this, that and the other) to % cohort classification (63% of pupils will get a level 4 or above).  The latter approach is simply inappropriate and unfair; why does setting an arbitrary bar and %cut mean our pupils who clear the bar will be more capable than before?

What has also been of real import in the state sector is that teacher load has also been increased in terms of class size, with teachers increasingly used to facing classes in excess of 30 at almost all levels below age 16. Some 20 years ago the decision was made to support the teachers in the state sector through the additional employment of teaching assistants and learning support assistants, who now number perhaps 40% of a school’s teaching faculty. As a professional teacher, having additional adults in your room may in one way ease the load, but in plenty of other dimensions decreases the efficiency of the teacher because they have even more variables and liaison activities with which to engage. As austerity measures have rolled out in recent years, numbers of support works have declined, class sizes have increased further, all of which seems to cause the perfect storm of poor teacher retention and the concomitant low teacher recruitment.

Our industry is well used to Secretaries of State coming up with Golden ticket solutions that will noticeably improve teacher retention. Claires Court has not introduced performance-related pay for example, now rolled out in every state school at great expense of time and effort. Because it ‘works’ in ‘business’, Michael Gove and his DfE apparatchiks felt PRP should be rolled out for all teachers as well, back in 2014, suggesting that it would reward the best teachers, encourage teacher recruitment and retention.  Guess what; it dramatically increased teacher and management work load without any benefit to the pupils, and after 4 years, we have the researchers from LSE making it clear that PRP per se does not work- https://www.tes.com/news/performance-related-pay-ineffective-schools-study-finds. Surprise, surprise, the Human Resource Management tool that works best in schools with teachers is the same as for pupils, intense provision of teaching and training.

None of the pressures in the last paras have affected my staff here, because we are completely confident that the pupil:teacher ratios we run are the best in the long term for both pupil progress and achievement and teacher’s well being. Whilst all the research indicates that dropping class size from 33 to 28 gives rise to no difference for pupil outcomes, cutting the class size by half and doubling the non-contact time for teachers actually does make the difference an educational  community needs to thrive. And those are our metrics: class size wherever possible 20 or less and teacher non-contact time at 20% as opposed to at best 10% in public service. If you do the mathematics on that =+0.5 day per week additional non-contact time over a period of 10 years will of course mean a teacher has been given the equivalent of a year of additional work space for personal endeavour, time for research, enquiry, ‘career’ resighting and additional professional qualifications. And in addition, that’s not just given to staff because they have made a really good case for it, but to every teachers, because they need it.

In our research-led community over the past 6 years, with the time to be curious and make enquiry, we have been able to build and embed the Learning Essentials, the use of G Suite and other digital tools, introduce mindfulness and other core thinking tools to support children and adults at work and even have many staff taking part in a mental health induction training programme.  We have increased the number of staff involved in staff development and training this spring/summer. Currently we have 28 teachers in training and 4 working towards Masters qualification, we’ve won the right to manage the provision of apprenticeships under our own training regime, and we have have remarkable initiatives such as ‘Girls on Board’ and ‘The Learning Scientists’ underway helping us retain our pathfinder and trail-blazer ambitions.

Giving teachers a year off at the end of 10 years might work for a very few, nice to have etc. but in no way is it going to lead to the resuscitation and renewal of interest in teaching in the state sector that Mr Hinds suggests. For 90% of teaching staff that is going to be in the future anyway, years ahead down the line. What they needed to hear was the following:

1. The team around the child includes teaches, parents, health and care personnel. The critical staff shortage is affecting all 3 professional groups, and the £5 million  would be far better spent putting school nurses and police liaison officers back in place, with clear pathways for additional support available at a much earlier stage to ‘nip problems’ in the bud, linking health and care much more closely to school and family.
2. Children can only learn the behaviours and skills we want them to acquire if they are taught them; society cannot surround them with fast food and instant entertainment, and wonder why we are generating a new generation with a propensity for obesity and short attention spans. Rather than ‘pass the buck’, government should re-invest in the community education programmes we need to support adult education in their local communities.
3. It was Margaret Thatcher who said “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families”. Sadly, we are reaping what she sowed; learning from the likes of Finland, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand, where educational outcomes for all are so much higher, we need all schools to be valued for what they bring to their local community and kept integral to the planning for the success of the whole community, not just the easy bits.

And of course if we cannot afford these strategies in all schools and communities, bring them back into play in the communities where deprivation is most acute. Such choices take wisdom and conviction; here’s hoping after a false start, Damian Hinds shows a better set of heels next conference time.

Last weekend, 40 boys and girls from Year 10 spent 2 days on the Ypres Salient in Belgium. It’s difficult to emphasise just what an important experience this is for any person, in part because the lies from their leaders, the sheer waste of life and the impartial injustice to all are so starkly evident. Their visit included:

• visiting the UEFA memorial battlefield site of the famous Xmas 1914 fraternisation between Tommy and the Boche, where Christmas gifts were exchanged and we lost on penalties to the Germans in umpteen impromptu games of football;
• sitting in the Hooge crater area, learning about the bravery of the 175th Tunnelling company whose gallery excavations covered 58m, where they exploded 2 huge bombs to literally undermine the enemy;
• conducting a headstone survey at Tyne Cot cemetery, the resting place of 11,954 soldiers of the Commonwealth Forces – this is the largest number of burials contained in any Commonwealth cemetery of either the First or Second World War, and the largest Commonwealth military cemetery in the world;
• following the lives of some known individuals of the First World war period through the ‘In Flanders’ Field‘ museum;
• attending the Last Post ceremony (our 4 in the last quartet) and laying a wreath in respect for all the fallen, including those former pupils of Maidenhead College, whose names are on the Menin Gate where the service takes place;
• visiting the trenches and exploring the use of military equipment at the Passchendaele Museum;
• contrasting commonwealth war memorials with those of the German allies at Langemark cemetery;
• appreciating and understanding the horror of a gas attack at the advanced field dressing station at Essex farm;
• visiting the Lijssenthoek military hospital site at Poperinge, learning more about Triage, battlefield dressings and the care of the wounded during this period, whilst also appreciating that so many other nationalities lost their lives in and shortly the Great War.

Throughout the 2 days, we were accompanied by Warrant Officer Richie Parsons, now a territorial medical officer but accompanying school trips to add detailed factual accuracy and exemplar kit demonstrations at our many stops over the 2 days. Below you can see some a collage given a sense of our learning experience over the 2 days.

Amongst the busy life I lead as a school principal, leader, counsellor, mentor and blogger, I also teach classes, currently some Year 8 History and Year 9 Spanish. It’s important to note I have always taught, secondary and sixth form it must be said, in order to validate some of the decisions I have had  to make over past years.  It’s one thing to know the theory, quite another to have the experience to understand how that might roll out in practice.  When the Chartered College of Teaching opened 12 months ago, I became a founding member, because I am utterly convinced that Teaching is a unique profession, not just an extension of business or commercial activity.

Rachel Jackson, from the Institute of Education at John Moores University in Liverpool writes under this headline in today’s Impact magazine from the College. Rachel’s quite right about the activity of teaching being that complex, and not the first from our profession. Here’s Lee Shulman,  an American educational psychologist, widely quoted on the difficulty of Teaching.

Here’s Rachel writing further: “It must be remembered that education was considered a discipline of philosophy at first but due to the desire to find ultimate answers to questions of pedagogy, it was thought best to view education scientifically. This ‘big R’ Research, as Goswami and Stillman put it, was seen as inadequate if teachers are not granted the space to think carefully about the implications. Over 30 years on, are we philosophers or technicians?

The dominance of the ‘science of learning’ reinforces the perception that teaching is merely a technical endeavour but, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle  maintain, it is so much more than this and ‘practitioners are legitimate knowers and knowledge generators, not just implementers of others’ knowledge’. Winch et al.  see teaching as consisting of tacit understandings and reflective thinking as well as technical information but surmised that until teachers are given the space and the capacity to think deeply about the evidence they are bombarded with, teachers cannot be philosophical. As Ball, Maguire and Braun put it, teachers remain ‘ciphers’ who merely ‘implement’.”

Over the last 5 days since our return from half-term, those I work with have noticed I have been a little vexed. Obviously, with the new Campus proposals and consultations underway, pressure groups and their arguments to consider, I have a whole new wall of work to consider. We’ve also had 2 Year 11 parents evenings to handle this week, discussing exam possibilities as well as future destinations with some 100 families and the young people concerned. We had over 160 children involved in our Scholarship examinations, so I have had all those cases to consider, as well as those applicants in contention for Sixth Form award as well. With some of my leadership ill or injured too, there have been additional parents consultations to attend and monitor, and of course the daily ‘Russian Roulette’ of school life brings its unexpected experiences too. Late on Wednesday evening, I needed to act as paramedic, accompanying one of our older pupils home in their mother’s car for example.

None of the above vexed me.

Prior to half-term, I had been asked to read a manuscript of a new book on Childhood and parenting, to provide feedback and perhaps a ‘quote’. Since the book has yet to be published, it’s title is confidential, but the 6 authors are coworkers in one of the psychology services we use. Mothers as well as clinical psychologists, these current practitioners have chosen to write in depth, giving pen-portraits of case histories, about the children under the age of 11 they have been working with in recent years. The book is over 300 pages long, and the contents are a page-turner. I’ve already replied in draft with my quote: “This is a remarkable book; it is packed with wisdom from expert practitioners whilst at the same time illustrated with case examples that highlight very specific strategies for successful therapeutic interventions that parents will recognise straight away.  The writing exudes empathy from the 6 authors, everyone a mother and still working on getting it right for their own children”.

What vexes me is that I never knew being a parent was so hard, and on reading through the very many case notes in the book, we obviously had it so very easy when bringing up our own children. Equally vexing is that I recognise the exemplars in so many of the cases I and my colleagues in leadership are dealing with each day. We are facing an epidemic of mental health issues in our schools in England and mine is certainly not immune from the crisis. National statistics suggest that 1 in 10 of our children are suffering from a diagnosable mental health disorder, that’s over 100 children at Claires Court, 2 in every class at any one time. Those individual mental health issues may be resolved, but of course those unseen at an early age in others will rise up to take their place.

I have tried my utmost to ensure that we have both the qualified staff and expertise/experience in place to manage the daily issues that confront teachers and parents in the daily care of their children, to ensure we are so much more than ciphers implementing from a cue-card. What’s so comforting about the writing of the 6 clinical psychologists (coming from healthcare) and of researchers such as Rachel Jackson (coming from educational research) is that both confirm the sheer complexity of what we in teaching have to do each day, and that there are sources of confirmed knowledge and proven therapeutic pathways that will keep teachers and parents able to manage well the daily challenges they face…which I repeat are “As challenging as in an emergency room during a natural disaster”.  

Let me finish on a hopeful note. Almost everything a parent naturally does to provide for their children is intuitive, and most get this right. A baby needs an adult nearby whenever they need them, to comfort, console, secure and care. Readily available parents, and as we are proxies to this, teachers too, are able to provide physical reassurance to help children feel safe, and by being consistent in such support allows children to learn how to calm themselves. What is less obvious to parents as their children get older is that that need for a place of safety does not get less, and this is not just about ‘space’ in a physical sense, but also of that in time. Being together, not making all of life the treadmill that some days feel, keeping blame away and keeping hope in conversation alive and eternal is the way forward.  As we all age, what next has to be done is not quite so intuitive and automatic.  Telling children not to worry is often the worst thing that can be said, as is expecting that learning is linear and there won’t be serious hurdles along the way.  It should be no surprise that in really effective schools, mental health matters are pre-eminent, because the children do feel safe and able to surface their worries and cares. That does not mean that every child needs clinical interventions, but it does mean that those of us with responsibility must (and do) consider these as serious options. And it means I need to get to know my pupils well, and that’s why I need to be in the classroom, so I keep that particular skill ‘honed’.

Back in April 2018, Charlie Booker wrote this headline piece in The Guardian newspaper:

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. Last week I watched, open-mouthed, a Newsnight piece on the spread of “Brain Gym” in British schools. I’d read about Brain Gym before – a few years back, in Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science column for this newspaper – but seeing it in action really twisted my rage dial.

Brain Gym, y’see, is an “educational kinesiology” programme designed to improve kiddywink performance. It’s essentially a series of simple exercises lumbered with names that make you want to steer a barbed wire bus into its creator’s face. One manoeuvre, in which you massage the muscles round the jaw, is called the “energy yawn”. Another involves activating your “brain buttons” by forming a “C” shape with one hand and pressing it either side of the collarbone while simultaneously touching your stomach with the other hand.

Throughout the report I was grinding my teeth and shaking my head – a movement I call a “dismay churn”. Not because of the sickening cutesy-poo language, nor because I’m opposed to the nation’s kids being forced to exercise (make them box at gunpoint if you want) but because I care about the difference between fantasy and reality, both of which are great in isolation, but, like chalk and cheese or church and state, are best kept separate.
Honestly, the whole article is worth the read – https://goo.gl/EitPrw , and the comments that follow, though its audience is of the adult variety.

So what progress has been made over the last decade then? Firstly, Brain Gym, Learning styles, Multiple Intelligences, Left/right brain learners and other learning science neuro-myths have slowly and steadily been debunked, though probably not quickly enough to prevent too many schools wasting teachers and children’s time on them.  The basis of these neuromyths have been well intentioned; Howard Gardner in his work on multiple intelligences wasn’t trying to invent a new way of teaching, rather than debunk the post-war simplistic approach that advocated that brains could be trained to do anything.  Here’s Gardner writing back in 1993, 10 years after his seminal book Frames of mind. The theory of multiple intelligences was published: In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings – initially a blank slate – could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early ‘naive’ theories of that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. (Gardner 1993: xxiii)

It’s easy with the wisdom of hindsight to work out how some in the ‘education gig economy’ thought you could just parcel up mini-packages of the above and peddle how a specific intelligence might be more rapidly developed.

Likewise, once those dramatic colour images of the human brain in action started appearing alongside articles on cognitive science, it was amazing just how many myths re-emerged around whole brain/left brain/right brain learning.  That’s not to say that we don’t have different parts of our brain processing different things in different ways, but there are far too many interconnected neurons for us to imagine the bits don’t speak to each other at lightning speed. We’ve know from the very many head injuries endured by soldiers in wartime that damage in different areas causes irreversible damage to specific functions such as speech and sight, but we also know from the remarkable recoveries made by some that the very nature of the brain’s make up enables it to adjust and repair – this is called neuroplasticity, and actually we rely upon this in schools because the whole nature of a child’s growing development through education relies on the basis that neural connections can be made and remade. Here’s the dictionary definition of same:

The profession has been led by people such as Bennett, and research organisations such as the Education Endowment Foundation, who have clamoured for government to ensure that educational change is led by well-rehearsed scientifically endorsed programmes of study. It’s not just Brain-gym adoption that has let this country, the States and many other parts of the west down; whole swathes of the world have been force-fed linear learning and achievement levels up through which children should be marched and by which schools’ efficacy can be judged by government inspectors. The entire English National curriculum has needed to be torn down since 2008, because it was built on such well-intentioned thinking, with no research basis to back it up.

Here in England, we’ve seen the wholesale scrapping of the assessment mechanism using coursework, ‘controlled’ assessments and modular examinations for both GCSE and A levels, again because of the well-intentioned approach that children should be validated by what they achieve along the way as well as by that which can be passed in a terminal examination at the end of a 2 year period.  The first major problem that the above brought was the inevitable grade inflation that came with this approach, that being, if the subjects and courses become more accessible to children by way of the validation systems of assessment, then more children will achieve and succeed at the highest level. The second major problem that arose was that ‘higher achievement’ did not mean successful ‘skill acquisition and embedding’, such that a C grade pass in English and Maths did not mean the successful graduates were literate or numerate.

We are now in the new, brave tomorrow where all skills needed to be kept practiced and alive over a 2 year period , so that on assessment day the successful student can demonstrate that they have all the skills and knowledge at their disposal, and to be honest, so long as the terminal question papers are appropriately tailored, it’s likely good schools will be able to enable and empower just as many of its learners as hitherto to success.  The courses are deeper, richer and encourage time for thinking and personal research, because they are not being constantly interrupted by their own or other subject’s assessments.

So now the old myths have gone, what are the new ones emerging?

Firstly the most obvious one is that the general requirement for schools to have a much more academic and rigorous approach (in order that England can rise up the PISA tables, provide better students for the economy, now and the future). This is being translated by proxy into a narrowing of subject disciplines from the age of 5, and with children being identified as falling behind from the very start.  The use of assessment to determine whether children are making progress assumes that education is the ‘filling of a pail’.  Now I get that, so that so long as I can measure the depth of water in the pail, and ensure that a child’s learning keeps up, then those ‘falling behind’ can be spotted and chivvied along. The trouble is, whilst we can measure the depth of water, that’s not a proxy for the ‘depth of learning’. WB Yates reminded of this with his illusion that ‘Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire’, and it is so much harder to measure the latter.

One new parent to our school with a 7 year old spoke to me on Wednesday afternoon about the difference her son’s experience of education was since changing schools. “In his last school, all he did all  day was write”, and when I picked him up each day, he seemed exhausted by the experience, the day dragging interminably from  one writing experience to the next.  Here, the school day is 2 hours longer, and it seems to whistle by, because he has so many different things to do, such a wide variety of learning experiences to enjoy. ” Now that’s one way to measure the lighting of a fire, anecdotal of course and not easily put into a league table.

As austerity bites, so many of the broader programmes of study are being replaced by narrow, writing-only based disciplines in state schools. Many headteachers and schools are shouting the odds about this, and making a serious fuss, but others are gently pressing forward and seeking to become ‘Ofsted – outstandin’, by focussing on the progress grades achieved by those children in a narrow range of subjects and gently ‘losing’ the children that are not sufficiently compliant to this narrowing of approach.

Spot the narrowing visible in the now ‘required’ English Baccalaureate; English, English Literature, Maths, sciences (inc computer science), History/Geography, an MFL and one other. “A multimillion pound investment in music and arts education will help hundreds of thousands of young people from all backgrounds enjoy potentially life changing cultural activities, Schools Minister Nick Gibb announced today (18 November 2016).

Over the next 4 years the government will provide £300 million to a network of 121 music education hubs to work with schools, local authorities and community organisations to get more young people taking part in music and arts.  Music hubs help hundreds of thousands of 5- to 18-year-olds each year access activities like playing an instrument, singing in a choir or joining a band. Today’s announcement will allow them to reach even more pupils.”

Previously, this was funded in some 25,000 state schools, so you can see why the subject of Music is in such danger now, because schools can point to the new ‘hubs’ and suggest that this activity is no longer part of their core business.  Art, Drama, Design/Food Technology, Music and RS are now in danger of disappearing as school competitive sporting provision has done before, because the priority for an academic education sanctions their ‘departure’.

Secondly, there is a gentle permissioning of parents to give up on their children, because parenting has become ‘harder’. This needs both careful consideration and checking, because whilst for individual adults of any generation, parenting can be made harder because of partner separation, work challenges and the like, the data doesn’t actually show this over time. Simple measures such as infant mortality have crashed more then tenfold over the last 100 years. There are though many challenges now, cheap junk food, glamour accessories and easy access to technology contributing to an affordable adolescent lifestyle that’s difficult to combat when at the same time children are surrounded by advertisement that empowers them to expect freedom and access to the above.  School can be a very successful antidote to this.

What’s not a myth is that schools play a central part in a child’s life, and adults therein are likely to spend more time with the children than the parents are able to.  As other parts of our welfare state aae squeezed to look after the aging end of our society, so schools need to offer more opportunities not less for the child as they pass through education.  It’s easier for these centres of excellence in understanding and managing children to do so than suggest a wider society should try harder. In just the same way that more GPs in a community leads in the longer term for hospitals and care homes to become less busy, so research-led schools that cover more of the education space will led to a safer society and better educated community.

All we need now is for the numbers of uniformed police to be increased once more. Whilst I have to accept that there are many more crimes now to be committed on-line, so that space needs care, I also know just how important it is to have school liaison officers who work locally and get known in all the schools. As with school nurses,  it’s not good enough to spread them so thinly that they are invisible.  And that’s no myth here RBWM, where there are no longer any police officers assigned to the role. RIP

And in 2018, that’s idiotic, whatever the cause.

As ever within Claires Court School, it has been a busy week. And that for week beginning Monday 22 January is more than just an understatement!
3 things in the public arena plus 1 inspection visit from out of the blue have a nasty habit of blowing you off line…or could of course, if the good ship CC didn’t have the most amazing crew of adults and children.
Item 1 of 4
Let’s go with the Independent Schools Inspection to start with…
Claires Court was last inspected in March 2014, so since last March ’17 we have been expecting our next inspection, as is the legal requirement parliament has placed upon DfE and their agent inspector organisations.
Claires Court sits alongside our nearest neighbour schools of Eton, Herries, Highfield, Redroofs, St. Pirans, and Wycombe Abbey (depending upon age/stage) as a member of the Independent Schools Council, so the DfE inspection framework for our schools is managed by the Independent Schools Inspectorate*.
When I say ‘we were inspected out of the blue’, that’s not quite the case.  We have been awaiting a phone call every Monday; my HoD History and wife takes a much more pragmatic view about schedules and calendars. “Just don’t answer the phone on Monday morning, James” she says each weekend knowingly. “As ISI only ring on Monday, that’s your permanent get out of jail card”.
My very good friend and colleague in leadership, Justin Spanswick, works like me as an Inspector within ISI, in addition to leadership within Claires Court. His best guess for our next was actually last March to the day, mine was 1 week less than 4 years; so since that first ‘failed’ guess by JMS, the reality is, I have spent every Sunday for 46 weeks polishing up our data so that ‘if we were rung 9am Monday, we’d be good to go. And pretty much every Monday morning, circa 9.15 Justin has checked by email or text;”Have we been rung?”.
Monday 22 January will go down in the annals of CC’s move to internet telephony as the day the internet broke our phones. Sadly, ISI still got through despite that break, circa 9.15 to let me know we were to be inspected this week. So much for Mrs Wilding’s cunning plan.
Fast forward to Thursday evening, the ISI team have come and gone, and as ever we are sworn to confidentiality on the outcomes. The visit has gone brilliantly well, the pupils and parents have responded magnificently in over a thousand responses to the ISI questionnaire, the inspectors work is done, and we now await our inspection report to share with you. Confidentiality on outcomes is assured in the meantime.
Item 2 of 4
The Claires Court planning application is in, and we are beginning to gather momentum this week. Inevitably, we are watching the reactions of those within RBWM who are developing their own opinions, and why not? We are a free and democratic country, and planning law permits this process of public scrutiny and exploration of views. The Maidenhead Advertiser letters’ column and other social media seem to have commenced casting me as a ‘pantomime villain’ and I know, and am so strongly advised by others, that I will for the time remain being ‘ever thus’. ‘Enjoy the moment and move on’ they say, because the application we have made is so very much more detailed than a few soundbytes in confidential email heaven. At the time of writing, it seems important to emphasise that our application be read in detail, to comprehend its contents and genuinely understand the seriousness of our intent. In the meantime, I am sworn to confidentiality, and to say nothing more; the school has made its case in detailed written form, and it is for those who wish to take an interest to read our case and consider their conclusions.

Item 3 of 4.

Today sees the latest publication of the DfE’s aggregation of exam results for both GCSE and A level. Suffice it to say that the DfE analysis is shared with us for 24 hours, before they break cover with its outcomes on the BBC, other news and media channels. We are sworn to secrecy… “there must be no break in confidentiality”, yet as dear reader you will spot therein, that trio of secondary independent schools I mention are all NP in the GCSE tables, and as for A level this year, seem too to be cast adrift with nonsensical data.

‘Baffling for parents’ is how Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, describes the secondary school performance tables; they cannot be compared with previous years because the government had “once again moved the goalposts”. Honestly, the publication is baffling to schools too!

At GCSE level, Claires Court is so erroneously reported, it’s beyond a joke. For example, our GCSE scientists in the main pursue ‘triple award science’, the papers being identical to the separate qualifications of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, but which ‘title’ of award you receive depends on timing and choice of ‘tick in the box’ framework. Many schools like us do not want children to give up on the science they don’t like, which they could by ‘downing tools’ on the separate subject award, so by going ‘triple’, it forces the child to buckle down and study for all three GCSE disciplines (Biology, Chemistry, Physics). This year, DfE rewards the alternative – you get credit for acquiring a C or higher grade in Physics, Chemistry or Biology separately, but whilst your triple award pathway is opening up all routes to A level and University Science degree, it registers ZERO on the DfE scale.

It’s the same at A level – just go look at Buckinghamshire, and it becomes very obvious that the better your pupils have done at GCSE, the worse they will gain as value-added at A level. In short, we can keep the outcomes of the DfE analysis confidential for 24 hours, but now they are released, it’s obvious that there was little point in requiring confidentiality because the ‘data published’ is simply ‘junk.

Item 4 of 4

Schools work within the ‘Health and Care’ system, and inevitably, our experience of the emergency care offered by the NHS is amazing, whether that be for children or staff. We’ve had three unfortunate major RTAs within the school community within the last fortnight, with the cars written off. It’s not appropriate for me to go into any detail, though in short, other drivers unlicensed or insured have been involved in the mayhem.  Fortunately, those involved are alive and well, thank you.  Creating a ‘safer’ society on the road always include education, and our Sixth Form attend the ‘Safe Drive, Stay Alive’ show every year to be informed, shocked and we hope educated to drive safely and be insured. The attendees this time round were handed a sealable cloth bag to hide their phone in, which prevents signal reaching the phone and distracting the driver. That’s an important innovation we could all think about acquiring moving beyond education and emergency care, the other health and care services are beginning to struggle to such an extent, that even when required care pathways are identified, the timescale for the commencement of support are stretching way into the future. I can’t tell you any of the details here, but at every age and stage we manage on a weekly bases cases of considerable need. Perhaps one of the biggest changes our school has wrought since the last inspection has been the introduction of our fully qualified school nursing staff, together with nationally recognised first aid training ‘school’ they can run for us. This last fortnight has seen all of our contracting coach company drivers receive updated training in safeguarding from our school nurses, because the local authorities no longer necessarily offer this service in a timely manner.

At the end of one of the busiest weeks ever, I am proud of all my staff in equal measure, but I give particular praise to the school nurses for their imaginative and professional solution-finding in a time of such challenge, and to our Administration and HR department, for working so hard to find the right kind of staff and solutions that support the school’s key values and ensuring that we stay safe in all that we do.

Over recent years, the attention given by governments and the media to the outcomes from the international PISA assessments has become pretty intense. These assessments take place every three years, and their focus on the skills of 15 year olds covers Maths, Science and Reading, the latter being the focus for 2018. You can read more here – https://fullfact.org/education/what-you-dont-find-out-about-englands-educational-performance-pisa-league-table/

The English national focus has been on the achievements of both 10/11 and 15/16 year olds (Years 6 and 11), looking at the examination outcomes for English and Maths, and for Year 11 also to include 6 other subjects, one of which could be Literature, the others focussed on 2 sciences, 1/2 humanities, an MFL and one other (known as the EBACC). For state schools completing at the end of Year 6, the SATS outcomes for pupils dominate how the schools themselves are viewed by their inspectorate, Ofsted.  For state secondary pupils, getting the mix of subjects right has also become part of the judgment measure, to ensure the highest score in these 8 subjects to measure progress against the EBACC measure, more of that here.

Over the past 3 years, it’s become very apparent that performance in this explicit DfE measures has become an obsession for most state schools, because they have no opt out and they are judged against their performance as a school by the outcomes in these subjects.  The national and educational media, coupled with Institutes of Education across the country are reporting a groundswell of dissatisfaction of the consequences of this relentless focus to drive up standards so our state school pupils perform  better in comparison with other countries. Some schools are disapplying their weakest pupils as quickly as possible to get them ‘off roll’, others are shutting down the teaching of all other subjects other than English and Maths in the final year of primary school, whilst at secondary school, subjects as diverse as Art, Drama, Music, RS, Technology and Sport are seeing numbers of pupils and teachers spiralling downwards as the subjects don’t carry the same value for the educational league table, if at all.

From pedagogical, philosophical and social mobility stand-points, this is an utter disaster for the children, because it is not permitting them to build domain expertise in sufficient areas that interest them at an appropriate age. Junior children are no longer able to draw accurately, and fear the process because it does not come naturally. Secondary children see creative and athletic disciplines as something they might do at the weekend, competing of course with all the other engagements that adolescents have to content with at the same time. Obviously, if the children are fortunate to go to a performing arts school or specialist sport or technology college, this is not the case, but the practical facts of the matter are that the focus has changed from specialisms to the core, and schools are choosing the same for all of their pupils, despite its obvious lack of merit for their broader educational development.

I have no problem if travellers wish to go to PISA, check out the leaning tower, look around the attached cathedral, get their photo taken holding it up or pushing it down, and sending that image as a postcard back home to prove they got there, bought the T-shirt, dropped the feather and ball from the top of the tower to explore gravity and then come back home. But that focussed journey is not the same as spending rather more time in ITALY, a country of great and diverse representations of culture from Ancient Rome to the present day. Their art, technology, music, drama food and philosophical thinking bursts upon the visitor and engages us in so many more ways, and this takes time, effort and commitment to get the full picture.  In the end, no doubt the tour operators will rub their hands with glee if they can reduce costs by increasing volume to the one city, grow the communication channels by increasing plane, hotel and bus size, with the expertise of the support team reduced to knowing the 10 pages from the guide book and testing same via extensive essay writing and number crunching around the limited palate of knowledge, skills and understanding required to visit PISA and return.

But if we want to develop the kind, caring, supportive, skillful and successful adults to lead the future of our country, they need to be permitted to be more than just tourists to PISA, pursuing a narrow course of study judged primarily by a tick box culture against core standards.  Reductionism of this kind reduces quality, not grows it; read this article published today on the future of Design Technology to see just how challenging the matter has become in a subject which really has to be at the heart of what every school offers its children from 11-14 – https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2018/01/13/saving-design-technology/

We don’t get it all right in the independent sector by any means.  For example in my school, I need to be able to extend the girls programme to bring resistant materials and robotics into the mix, and the boys to add food and textiles. But at least the design experience and skill applications are covered by all pupils in a sustained way for 3 years, and the potential designer/builder has been inspired by age 14. The whole educational country,  be that ITALY, ENGLAND or wherever, needs its landscape explored. Sure, there are fun things to find in PISA, but that’s not enough to nourish and inspire our children.  It’s disappointing that our sector is receiving even greater blame for supporting privilege and elitism, when in our own minds we are doing quite the reverse. Certainly, the development of the whole child and our focus on growing great young adults, with excellent temperaments and a willingness to strive, is of greater importance than exam results.  Conservative minister and minister of health in the House of Lords, James O’Shaughnessy, who spent 4 years at Claires Court as a child spoke with great passion about the development of character education in schools being of paramount importance when he visited us in September last year. I ask the question – what kind of character to you build in a PISA tourist as opposed to a traveller who spends the time and trouble across ITALY?

In short, let’s not encourage educational tourism only to a narrow core band where success is measured through the passing of an exam.  None of us make best friends with people because of their grades, but because they have a much broader knowledge and understanding of who they are and how they fit, and the skills to make their lives all come out well, wherever they find themselves placed as adults in this world. I leave you with the writings of Plato, who was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

It’s that time of year when the Season in which we are expected to be jolly has passed and the school bells are soon to ring in the New Year. Here’s yours truly on Christmas Jumper day on end-of-term Friday, standing by the tree at Senior Boys, showing some of the hampers soon to off into our local community via the Lions, Foodshare and the Salvation Army.  I had the photo taken because I had been invited to write a Fly-on-the-wall end of term item for Schools Week, one of the professional journals that report on Education matters, and they wanted a photo to go with the article. You can read that here: https://goo.gl/duUFz2.  It struck me that in line with the 9 lessons and carols, Tim Minchin’s 9 life lessons, it was time I added to the set of 9 with my own 9 lessons for learning, gathered over the 42 years I have been a teacher. Where possible, a bit like the advent calendar, I have tried to illustrate a little more with a link to something more luscious.

1. If you can do but one thing to help others learn, be kind, both to them and yourself.
2. If you are planning to teach, know your stuff.
3. If you are planning to learn, sleep well, and in between try to ‘know’ stuff by learning it.
4. Whether you are planning to teach or planning to learn, do so with a passion.
5. As teachers and learners, keep your eyes on the ‘near horizon’ so you know where you are going, but keep them open for other possibilities along the way.
6. Understand your intelligence arise from 3 parts – a. your cognitive efficiency (brain-power, mainly down to short-term memory) b. crystallised intelligence (stuff you know) and c. fluid intelligence (how you see patterns, make links across areas and use logic), and in knowing what you use best, work with that whilst seeking to improve the other bits.
7. Lead a rich and diverse life at whatever your age; interleaving and spacing what you do, and see and listen to with lots of other activities, which helps ‘grow’ your fluid intelligence.
8. Get lucky by practicing lots, by learning stuff by rote and putting that learning under pressure by testing yourself.
9. Keep striving. Achievements open doors; sometimes those achievements are paper-based, such as GCSE and A level grades and get you a place on a training programme or at University,  others are practical, such as passing your driving test or an ‘open mike’ night audition, which give you new opportunities. Never give up, because actually none of us ever do…

So, please do have a great Learning Year in 2018, bearing in mind that that we are forever forgetting. Though that is another post.

“The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.”

Yeats wrote this poem in the early part of the last century, at a time when his fame as a poet was world wide, but his ambition was to become renowned as a playwright; his joy of writing for the stage was clearly tempered by the experience of working with those that ran theatres and bankrolled their productions. In short, he hoped to break through the crippling need for perfectionism in the creation of his poetry, whilst maintaining both its complexity and ambiguity. As the final sentence suggests, Yeats ‘ere longed to release his creative self to write unburdened of the rules of the game.

2018 is set to be a milestone year for my work, one in which we seek to win permission to build a new campus for our school.  The purchase of the adjacent field by our Junior Boys school at Ridgeway 4 years ago reunited much of the package of land originally put together by a Mr Louis Gilau, a South African as it turns out, his own trade being that of a ‘Diamond merchant’.  During my father’s time as headteacher at Ridgeway, he would regularly suggest to new pupils and parents that they should keep their eyes peeled for any ‘lost’ jewels left behind by Mr Gillow; sadly none have turned up, so the investment we need for the new buildings will have to come from a mix of capital obtained from the sale of our other 2 sites, if possible from the building of houses on part of the estate, and from a commercial loan.

There is no doubt that that our school needs to be released from the constraints it currently faces, spread across Maidenhead and increasingly cramped by the issues of space and unequal distribution of facilities across the 3 sites.  I remember my first contact with RBWM planning officers in 1982, when they first expressed the opinion that the senior boys school site was overdeveloped for its purpose. Over subsequent 35 years, our school has grown as the town has grown, we’ve gained new accommodation and added girls into the mix. With both sets of residents in the Ray Mill and College areas keen to keep the roads uncluttered with parking, parking restrictions grow like topsy, yet we can’t bring all of our traffic onto site without reducing still further the space in which education can happen.

There remains a pressing need to increase the efficiency of our school by bringing our separate site operations together; maintaining the separation of genders for the middle part of their educational development will remain a key construct, but increasing the opportunities for social development across the genders is a growing imperative, one not just for this school but for the wider community.  It’s fascinating to see the success our partnership sports organisations enjoy doing just the same, be that in Athletics, Cricket, Hockey, Rowing, Rugby, Sailing or Tennis.  There is an intensity of engagement required to maximise performance, but at the same time, a need to ensure rest and recuperation within the wider community.  I’ve noticed this most recently with our elite performing Tennis players, who work jointly with us and Delgado and Lee’s Pro Tennis Academy, Living Tennis, at Bisham Abbey.

Developing Tennis players need upwards of 20 hours a week of ‘Court’ time (20 hours on court as well as at school), but clearly other skills and talents need to be developed alongside, and not just those within a narrow academic programme. Rubbing along in a much bigger school assists those players to accept failure is a normal part of learning, permits them socialise with others,  above all helping build a sense of mutual respect despite differences.

It has often been said that Education is the most complex of all human activities, given that all the moving parts are living organisms, capable of their own independent thoughts and with their own idiosyncratic ambitions.  It’s clear that such a description can be given to the methodology that underpins making planning application as well, because all those component parts consist of human entities, with their own hopes and ambitions as well. I have every hope that this author will not feel like the ‘colt’ in Yeats’ poem, forced to ‘shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt’ as if pulling the broken stone required for road-making.  Perhaps in 12 months time, I will be able to report on the outcomes from the process I outline above.

In the meantime, I bid you (perhaps as W.B Yeats would) “Sláinte mhaith” for 2018, and in the light of the other many serious negotiations going on in England over the next 12 months, mix the metaphor with this very Royal message!