A Principled view

My sons live up in London, and as is the custom amongst families, we went to Sunday lunch with one the other week. Maidenhead to North London has its many traffic moments to enjoy, and what with Bristol City playing Walsall at Wembley, we chose to take the rail and tube (Beaconsfield to Highbury and Islington) and walk up through Highbury Fields to their home. Spring was up, the trains ran well, and time was on our side. Along side some of the Tennis courts there (all bustling with weekend testosterone, grunts and competitive edge appropriate to the location). I spied the Park refreshment kisok. “Coffee?” I enquired.

Waiting in the queue, a small group of 40+ mums came alongside, deep in conversation. Teachers of all ages become really adept at listening to abuse of their profession; this could perhaps be used as a new form of military software by the way, but I digress. “The trouble I got into” said Brown hair, loosely brushed “is that by the time I had chosen to put some behaviour expectations around my daughter, she was up out and away.  Hopeless!” Harmony Blond retorted “What is about teachers that makes them so good at setting boundaries?  What I don’t get is why we don’t listen to them when we are younger – it is as if we are inoculated at school (by bitter experience) to ignore what teachers say, so once we are adults becoming parents, the last thing we will do is follow their advice.” Brown hair retorted “They make it look so easy, and it so is not”.

My concentration was broken for the demand of £3 (good value for an americano and white coffee), so I picked up my crockery and moved away back into the real world. Their conversation wafted in and out of the breeze, and drifted away from the feckless nature of their children as gently as indeed we did from the kiosk once our coffee had been imbibed. Just a gentle soundbyte lost in the wind. Yet I captured it and have thought over it some more over the last 4 days. Perhaps as teachers we could do a little better? As the experts in child development, is it not a little too late to interact with us when children actually commence in our schools?

Not so fast, Wilding. Teachers are not ‘experts’ in child development and they are certainly not experts in individual children before they meet them. As the Bard would have it “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet). What’s worse, we have so many examples over the last 20 years where educational ‘expertise’ has been deployed for no good purpose, not least the industrialising of assessment at 7,11 and 14 in English, Maths and Science. It’s not just the research from across the world that fits my narrative – and caused the DfE to withdraw its national curriculum levels last year, but so much else besides. Witness the ‘noise’ from any of the politicians currently on the stomp about the lack of Mathematicians, Scientists, Engineers and Computer programmers. Maths and the Sciences are compulsory in schools to the age of 16 for all children ever since when, so it’s not that we have not planned teaching and learning ‘space’ in the curriculum. The current decision to make Maths harder and tougher, and similar muscularity about the revision ‘upwards’ of standards in the Sciences might imply English Education standards will move nearer those of 16 year olds in the Asian Tiger economies, but I predict that the government of the day will be disappointed that its newly deployed strategies won’t work as expected some time down the track.

Experts in Child and Adolescent development are recognised by Professorships, and in this field none are better thought of than Sarah-Jane Blakemore, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Until recently, it was thought that human brain development was all over by early childhood but research in the last decade has shown that the adolescent brain is still changing into early adulthood. Sarah-Jayne  has led much of the research which shows that our brains continue to develop throughout the teenage years, and is as easy to understand as any – here’s a recent radio broadcast of hers from ‘A life Scientific’ on Radio 4 –  “She discusses why teenagers take risks and are so susceptible to influence from their peers as well as her childhood growing up with the constant threat of attacks from animal rights groups”.

Coming from an entirely separate direction is the relatively new discipline known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, more colloquially known as Mindfulness. Wikipedia covers the ground quite well here. Developed since the 1980s, it is now being rolled out across the western world as an alternative to other more traditional behaviour therapies such as ‘stick and carrot’, with the latest (2015) research suggesting it has much to offer. We have a significant course programme for teaching and admin staff ourselves rolling out after hours in the Summer term.

If you bring both neuro and behaviour sciences together, it is genuinely easy to understand why we don’t have floods of geeky-teenagers breaking through the doors of universities and employers. During the transitional teenage years the neuroplasticity of the pre-frontal cortex (there, I can use long words) arises because up to 35% of the neural connections dissolve and are repurposed. Whilst this is happening, the brain’s reward system skips ahead of the ‘conscience’ and promotes the kind of activities that bring pleasure and a sense of well-being. By example, how many teenagers do you see trying to solve the cryptic crossword. Move up a couple of decades and a goodly number are seen on the train, skip a generation and you are the odd wo/man out if you don’t have a go at least once a week. What motivates and inspires adolescents are activities that offer more immediate reward, often when working with others, and often when the outcomes are less predictable. It is amazing how much fun children have in the school minecraft club, completing activities that could be described using code and formulae, which they would simply not do that way.

How do you bring enjoyable practical problem solving down to the teenage years, such that Maths, the Sciences and technologies become sought-after disciplines? Most adults know the answer – make the activity relevant, purposeful and meeting a need and you’ll be home and dry. The Western hemisphere has an obsession with including written wordy problems as the harder-to-solve larger mark questions on Maths Exam papers. Such problems do not explore the child’s mathematics and practical abilities, but test rather too fully their understanding of vocabulary and syntax, grammar and semantics. They look at such problems, recognise that someone knows how to do them and thus decide they do not need to! What our old polytechnics understood so well is that less committed students needed more practical teaching time. What old style employers understood is that baby accountants needed time to learn their trade before plying it. Drill the skill, don’t test it too early nor make it count too much. The whole point of double entry book keeping was designed around the fallibility of the human operator to get things right first time.

I’ve been lucky enough to see some amazing shows and plays this week in school, from boys and girls, young and old. Why they have gone really well is that in every case, the children have had a degree of autonomy about their selection of activity. Not only have they chosen their starting point, they have spent hours (beyond any I can count) rehearsing and practising their talent before seen by the crowd until they have Mastery. Their purpose has been pretty selfish really, to prove to themselves they can do something really well and beyond any reasonable expectation of others. And I think that’s one of the big lessons we teachers pass over to children; we might say ‘you can only do your best’ when it’s something we have encountered for the first time. Longer term, that’s not what we intend, much more like “failure is not an option” or even ‘to the victor the spoils” . The Human purpose  is to be mindful of life’s possibilities, and to set out without fear or favour. As another Professor, Stephen Hawking says ” “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.”

Back to the Park then, to an imaginary follow-up to the conversation I overheard. What would I say back to Brown and Blond? I’d ask about the child’s schooling, the who, what, where stuff. I’d ask whether the parents took the children to all those things that builds an education that’s not what happens in school. I’d talk about the listening to the young child reading out loud, for more than 20 minutes each day to an adult with whom they felt secure. I’d wonder out loud whether digital devices are switched off gone 8pm, whether the life blood of family time together was allowed to flow, impeded or otherwise by the idiot’s lantern flickering in the corner of the room or palm of the hand. I’d talk about conversation, laughter, jokes and communication, again within the context of children working with adults with whom they shared close things, perhaps even secrets. You see, the only way to ensure we build resilient children is to ensure that the prefrontal cortex is securely attached to the limbic system, so that what we see and understand consciously together with the people we trust is intimately connected with our feelings about ourselves and them. If actions, emotions and decisions are as hard-wired in as we can make them, when we put them under pressure, they are unlikely to fail, and if they do, we won’t mind. It’s called Learning.

I try to make sure I share the same intimacy with the Americano, hand, eye and mouth. As my wife or sons will attest, in those terms, I am still learning. Where’s my bib?

One of the better independent commentators on Education matters I follow is the Teaching Times, an on-line journal for our industry, published by the Imaginative Minds Group, led by publisher Howard Sharron.

In “Ofsted Is In Denial; Special Needs Do Exist” – Suzanne O’Connell, Editor of their Every Child Update service reminds us that Ofsted is in such trouble over its spectacular failures over the past 18 months that credibility in its work is at an all time low. The article is a splendid short essay highlighting that passionate rhetoric and the setting of high bars for all is a simple denial of the human condition of the whole of childhood around us. SEN and Disability exist, as do considerable issues of Mental health. Suzanne concludes her article “It might be unduly pessimistic and I might be an enemy of promise, but the new consultation provides no guarantee that SEND will hold the attention of inspectors in the way that it should. Neither will it provide those schools who battle daily to support their SEN pupils with the platform they need to celebrate their achievements.”

I quote from her article, specifically focusing on the way children learn, Ofsted has this to say ‘all children and learners progress well from their different starting points and achieve or exceed the expected age-related standards, and/or attain relevant qualifications so that they can progress to the next stage of their education into courses that lead to higher-level qualifications and into jobs that meet local and national needs.’ 

Who can write such complete tosh about all of our children? You can’t have everyone achieving or exceeding age-related standards between say Years 2 and 3 without displaying a worrying ignorance of  child development, unless you set the bar very low indeed. International comparisons highlight that in much higher achieving countries such as Finland, school doesn’t start until Year 2. Child development does not assure anyone that at this stage, the cognitive development of all 7 year olds is sufficiently advanced to set baselines for all children. It’s agenda-driven inspection of ‘stuff’ like this that has led Ofsted to miss so much of the big picture problems reported  in the article.

Considering the same view at upper secondary level, is it really possible in our sceptered isle for everyone, whatever their starting point to leave education through higher level qualifications into jobs that meet local and national needs? This is such a depressing, reductionist view of the purpose of education, and in many senses is of course uninspectable. Education is simply not there just to fill our factories and production lines, or provide workers for the NHS and Military, City and Country alike. Education is so much more than this, multi-faceted and diverse, occurring not just in schools, but at home together and apart from family and in the weft and weave of life itself.

I don’t work for OfSTED, but am a Reporting Inspector for the Independent Schools Inspectorate, where I am tasked with managing whole inspection teams to judge schools against their aims and national standards. Separately, I design and develop national training courses for schools in England to design and build their curricular challenges and for future headteachers so they develop the skills to lead and manage, and know the difference between those 2 challenges. Working with the former Head of our Girls School, Lizbeth Green, I have learned from her just how different the expressed purpose of education is in the Scottish system. Here’s the declared purposes (4 of them, called capacities) north of the border:

“The four capacities. The purpose of the curriculum is encapsulated in the four capacities – to enable each child or young person to be a successful learner, a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor. The curriculum aims to ensure that all children and young people in Scotland develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they will need if they are to flourish in life, learning and work, now and in the future.” This makes rather good reading – employment will follow because those capacities are built, as will perhaps a more fulfilled individual and a better society beyond.

In the Claires Court Essentials, we try even harder, and our curriculum continues to develop such that it is well mapped against those values, characteristics and ways of working. I am not saying success is assured, but I am that our children stand a much better chance of developing the multiple skills and interests, emotional intelligence and thick skin because we have thought of all those needs, and tested them sufficiently during development in school so they’ll stand the test of time beyond.

My work over 40 years in education has helped me understand how important it is that we work authoritatively and with a great evidence base of research to build upon. Here’s an example of that in action. Head of Sixth Form Andy Giles and his colleague, Stephanie Rogers, Assistant Head with responsibility for Careers and Enterprise education, are leading at a national conference for Sixth Forms in London this Friday. Take the opportunity to flick through their presentation on the co-curricular work we have developed for our Year 11 through Sixth Form to undergraduate population beyond. You don’t need to hear their talk to appreciate the quality and depth of their work, highlighting as it does how students can make choices and commit to gain significant vocational skills and experiences along the way that can only enhance the quality of experience they gain in their Sixth Form years, additional to gaining the academic grades…’so that they can progress to the next stage of their education.’

One of the points of their presentation is that all Sixth Form centres can aspire to produce the extra financial resources to make this happen – and in so doing build deeper and more complex opportunities for more in their community to succeed in the future. Working alongside Andy and Steph, I am demonstrating the cloud-based solution we have developed over the last 5 years that now encompasses all of our provision, which enables specifically schools to improve yet further the 4 most important value-adds for teaching and learning. Google Classroom, Apps and environment specifically assist in building opportunities for collaborative learning, enable teachers to give feedback whilst work is building rather than just corrections and marking at the end, massively improve opportunities for peer learning and innovation, and through making choices and thinking about how to reimagine work, significantly improve metacognition and self-regulation.  Google Apps are of course not something that brings in new revenue, but since they are free for schools,  you might wonder why so many institutions are not yet involved?

Two diverse solutions from one institution, both seem to ensure that children of diverse needs can be catered for and inspired, not just for now, but for the longer term. The multiple skills needed, for both the real and virtual worlds will be acquired most successfully because the learning approach we use embraces the ways that make the most impact, and we consistently apply these ways over the child’s career with us. If I may rewrite O’Connell’s words “Either choice, through consistent, insistent, persistent use, though better both, will provide those schools who battle daily to support their  pupils, whether SEN, AG&T or just plain enthusiastic, with the platforms they need to celebrate their achievements.”

I first came across Terry Pratchett’s writing in the mid 1980s, children’s books such as the Colour of Magic and the Carpet People. It was quite clear then that Terry (one of the few authors about whom I feel very personally) showed a fabulous mix of humour and invention, mischief and plain silliness. I have probably read every one of his Discworld sagas, and have preferences for those tales based in the improbable Ankh Morpork, a city state at the centre of that fantasy world, riding on a disc on the back of 4 elephants, themselves standing upon a turtle swimming through the Universe.

Yes you have got it, not a single shred of connection between that world and this, and yet, through carefully drawn characters, embedded jokes that resurface when you least expect them and stories that are rippingly close to those current in the serious press, and elegantly told as any of the best of Chaucer’s morality plays,  Terry made you look at your own self and motivations, from which only good could come. Try this, perhaps my favourite quotes of his that fits my own thinking

“Inside every lump of coal there’s a diamond waiting to get out.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man.

The modern world, as driven by politicians and the agents of government, is beset by the failures of its own machinery. It’s so obvious that targets corrupt behaviour, however well intentioned, as research after research proves. But put someone in charge, and they’ll quickly adopt a target setting approach, because of course, they will build a reward system around that from which they personally will benefit, if permitted. In the Disc world series of books, Prachett spotlights pretty much every industry, from the Police (who are central to so many Discworld novels, known as the City Watch), Film, Education, the Press and Tourism industries.

My leading quote from Terry is well aligned to world book week, because it is through reading only that one can enter his Discworld, explore the multiple adventures of wizards and adventurers, male and female – DEATH’s adopted daughter Ysabell is a fantastic modern role model for feisty intelligent teenage girls for example. Without imagination, nothing can be achieved, except targets. Now goals of course are different, and we can have plenty of those big, hairy audacious things in our lives, such as building a new campus or a vaulting ambition to achieve excellence in unusual ways, and I can but thank Sir Terry Pratchett for nourishing my life and nurturing my soul. When all is unfathomable and little seems to have purpose, a quick flight on the back of a large turtle and the world he supports helps give me both a new perspective and a resolve to do something for the children in my care or the staff with whom I work.

Henri Matisse’s Cut-Outs were among the big attractions at Tate Modern in 2014 – BBC News

There has been a recent ‘epidemic’ of concern being expressed across our country that the nation as a whole is falling out of love with Art.  Visitor numbers are falling at the National Gallery and the Tate, and  and more importantly, where we have seen some modest growth nationally, the increase has been as a result of the success of tourism from abroad rather than attracting the interest from our domestic economy. Read more about that here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31533110.

Last month, the Warwick Commission published their findings from a year of detailed research into all aspects of the creative arts sector – the report is entitled Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth.

The Warwick University research examines from film, theatre and dance to video games, pop music and fashion. It estimates the sector represents 5% of the British economy valued at £76.9bn. As with the previous report from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, we are reminded that the creative Arts are integral part of the UK economy, and of course in the Eastern Thames Valley and towards London, probably upwards of 30% of all permanent high quality jobs are in this sector. Politicians of a variety of hues have of course added the research outcomes to their growing list of manifesto commitments – here’s Labour suggesting that using Ofsted Inspections will improve the provision in our schools!

Here’s Vikki Heywood, the chair of the commission as reported in the Guardian “Two of the most eye-opening aspects of the inquiry are to do with cultural education and the lack of diversity in arts audiences. The cultural and creative economies are one ecosystem and policymakers need to realise that if you fiddle around with the education system at one end then something at the other end goes wonky”.

The Guardian article continues “Some of the most striking statistics are around education. Between 2003 and 2013 there was a 50% drop in the GCSE numbers for design and technology, 23% for drama and 25% for other craft-related subjects. In 2012-13, only 8.4% of students combined arts and science at AS level. The number of arts teachers in schools has fallen by 11% since 2010 and in schools where a subject has been withdrawn, drama and performance has dropped by 23%, art by 17% and design technology by 14%.”

To be honest, all those who lead Education in schools have witnessed a dramatic change in Arts Education over the past 30 years. Primary schools often now speak of not having sufficient time or skill to teach painting and drawing skills – which is rather at odds with the stated objectives of the newest National Curriculum for Art and Design from DfE which says that:

“Key stage 2 Pupils should be taught to develop their techniques, including their control and their use of materials, with creativity, experimentation and an increasing awareness of different kinds of art, craft and design. Pupils should be taught:  to create sketch books to record their observations and use them to review and revisit ideas  to improve their mastery of art and design techniques, including drawing, painting and sculpture with a range of materials [for example, pencil, charcoal, paint, clay]  about great artists, architects and designers in history.”

Of course what happens in state schools is audited by…Ofsted, and measurable curriculum outcomes exist for Literacy and Maths, but not for the other foundation and supporting subjects. Therein lies the major problems for Art and Design, as it does for other key subjects, such as the Humanities, Sciences, Languages and other physical and creative subjects. A decade ago, Roger Cole, celebrated researcher, advisor and author for both government and national teaching community found that in their efforts to raise standards of Literacy and Numeracy in the Gloucester Action zone, primary schools had reduced their curriculum to little more than these core subjects. Despite the very clear focus, achievement against government benchmarks remained resolutely fixed at below 50% achieving level 4 in either discipline.

After Roger’s engagement with 4 schools in question, the writing of new cross-curricular and creative schemes of work, not only had standards risen in the core, but across the breadth of school provision. You can read the TES 2008 article on this here – and a sample comment from an impressed Ofsted “This approach enables all pupils to achieve well in all subjects, involving pupils more holistically in learning”. Roger Cole has visited Claires Court, worked with our teaching and support staff, and no doubt will enjoy making a return to assess quite how our Essentials curriculum has taken the embedding of creativity and innovation into a higher level, supported as it is with universally available software that works on all devices.

Successive governments have panicked endlessly about our nation’s performance in Maths and English, citing the steady fall down the PISA league table that compares country performance across the globe. In recent years, computer ‘coding’ and  the ‘STEM’ agenda have both assisted in wiping good old Art and Design off the central mission schools should have. Whatever the merits of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths for the nation’s economy (and there are of course many), if  Art and Design skills are ignored, we’ll be able to pass Part 1 of the challenge (do we know stuff?) but we will fail abysmally Part 2 (what we can do with this stuff in the context of what people need?). Look at any of the leading scientific and engineering brands in the world, and great creativity and design sit at the heart of their success. Most notable are companies such as Apple, BMW, Disney, Google, HP, Intel… all renowned for great innovation, design and engineering – inseparable in terms of identifying why they work so well.

At the time of writing, I have just returned from a day at the Discovery channel with our Google gang, boys (Y8-11) who meet to programme and mentor others in the dark arts of cloud computing. We have been working with Discovery Education to understand more about their new Secondary service for schools, to train our own pupils to mentor teachers as well as their peers, and to prepare specifically for BBC School Report 2015, one of the great creative media events of the year. We have been engaged with SR since 2009, and you can review our archive here. As the map shows, we are the only secondary school in Maidenhead to be involved this year, and that is illustrative of the national concern we have – schools will always focus on the Part 1 problem, but find it much more difficult to exercise that extra ‘holistic’ muscle to ensure their students can blend diverse input to tell a coherent and compelling story. And of course that is what a great Art education gives – and what great Art pieces show in their exhibition.

So dear Reader, for me it is quite simple.  If as Matisse suggests, “Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent & independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play” then the obvious way forward is to design and implement (with an iron will it must be said) a curriculum that commands of its students to be curious, flexible, persistent & independent, to provide opportunities for children to sense what a spirit of adventure means, and conjoin that with diverse opportunities to explore play. As is demonstrably the case within our walls, we have these elements in place in full measure, and it therefore will not surprise you that we seem to have developed an almost endless production line of deeply talented young artists, actors, designers and performers. And what is better still is that their talents on display are not uniform – there might be great organisation, but the sheer breadth of innovation and individuality helps highlight that the principle of ‘look after the performance and the results look after themselves’ is working really well within Claires Court, true testament to both Henri and Roger!

Thursday 26 February (this week) saw ISA’s annual Junior schools’ conference visit the Institute of Marketing’s fine premises at Moor Hall, nearby in Cookham. The whole day was given over to looking at what assessing children’s achievement looks like in schools after the abandonment by DfE of National Curriculum levels.

Claires Court left NC leveling in 2006/7, when it had become very evident to us that their presence was badly damaging teaching and learning within English at both Key stage 2 and Key stage 3. Most obviously affected was creative writing in years 3 to 6, though at secondary level, the work in years 7, 8 and 9 leading towards successful KS3 examination seemed to be contradictory to the skills needed for GCSE writing in Year 10. Whilst we have no regrets about leaving the National Curriculum and writing our own, we have had to stretch ourselves somewhat to match our assessment mechanisms to the Claires Court essentials that form the weft and weave of our schemes of work across the years from Year 1 to the end of Year 9.

My colleagues, Leanne Barlow (Head of Junior Girls) and Lindsay King (Head of lower Juniors and curriculum leader) presented how we moved from NC levels to the current state of play for junior boys and girls within Claires Court to the ISA Junior Heads, and as an observer at the occasion, it was really rewarding to witness the very genuine approval our national colleagues gave to the presentation and of course the thinking and pedagogy Leanne and Lindsay showed.  I am extremely fortunate to have colleagues of such quality, not just willing and able to design anew but able to stand up to a national audience and provide persuasive commentary on our work.

You can see Barlow and King’s presentation here – http://goo.gl/KSWBVn, our examplar St Custard’s report* making use of our assessment approach here, and the unique Lesson and Work Scrutiny form we use here.

The day included some excellent other presentations, from Andy Mellor on Assessment mastery, from yours truly on the broader perspectives schools are required to keep in mind when designing assessment, quality assurance and monitoring arrangements, and from 2 of the country’s leading experts in the use of digital technologies, Mark Burrowes from 2Simple/Purple Mash, and C-learning’s Paul Farrell, for teaching and tracking. Claires Court already uses the tools both experts recommend, again useful to align these pioneering methods now being recommended for schools across the country with our own 2 or more years experience of using them!

Carey Dickinson, Membership Officer, ISA

ISA’s Membership officer, Carey Dickinson, joined the conference for the day, stayed overnight and then visited all three Claires Court geographical sites on Friday morning. Carey has more letters after her name than most, graduating from Somerville College for her first degree in History, before gaining her PGCE in primary education at Homerton College, Cambridge and then rather later in life acquiring her Masters in Education, before pursuing her interest in Drama  as she moved in to the prep. school world  to lead the Performing Arts department at Dame Bradburys School, in Saffron Walden.  As one of the leading sector professionals in the country, Carey showed really genuine appreciation of Miss Barlow and Mrs King’s remarkable work. The praise was well deserved, as it is this day when the papers and broadcasters carry the news that a national teacher-led commission is being set up to help primary schools in England find new ways of assessing their pupils’ progress.  This further highlights the dilemma the country is facing in measuring children’s progress when the curriculum is being changed at the same time as the tools used to assess its effectiveness have been removed – honestly, very many schools are seriously worried about the limbo in which they find themselves.  Inevitably, this also highlights just how well we have done as a school to be fearless, innovative and demanding of ourselves to establish  a new curriculum approach with assessment, reporting and quality assurance mechanisms in place in good time – as the ISI inspectors found in March 2014 – by their judgement ‘excellent’ indeed.

*The report tables don’t quite print for exemplar work such as this from our MIS database – works fine for genuine reports!

I have had a good half-term, dear Reader. During the business of academic life, it’s almost impossible to reserve the time to go to see the latest films. And there have been some stunningly good films out there passing me by, not least Selma, The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game. You’ve guessed it, James has been to the movies! In their own ways, the films were remarkable triumphs for Cinema, highlighting in each the role of a central male character to the cascade of events happening around them, over which they have only a modicum of control. In Selma, we see 3 weeks in the life of Martin Luther King, as portrayed by British actor David Oyelewo,  in his campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. In The Theory of Everything, we witness the  the story of Stephen (for which Eddie Redmayne has just won the Oscar for best Actor) and his wife Jane’s life, from first meeting in Cambridge in 1964, with Stephen’s subsequent academic successes and his increasing disability. In the Imitation Game, we see three different periods of Alan Turing’s life, as portrayed by Alex Lawther (when at Sherborne) and Benedict Cumberbatch (in adult life), from introvert but brilliant schoolboy to dismissive, difficult, brilliant and plain odd scientist placed at Bletchley Park to crack the German’s Enigma code, interwoven throughout by Turing’s interrogation about a break-in after the war and his homoselual realtionships with others.

It’s fair to say that women play central roles in all three films, so it was not just a festival of celebrating manhood. But what stuck me about all three films were their very obvious relevance to 2015, not least Hollywood’s decision to leave Selma out completely from any of the Oscar nominations. Now is clearly not a good time across the pond to seek to celebrate Good black men – as the opening speech last night by Neil Patrick Harris made clear at the Oscar’s ceremony “Tonight we celebrate Hollywood’s best and whitest, sorry… brightest”. Celebrating Stephen Hawking’s life was indeed a triumph not just by Redmayne, but by the film itself, leaving us clearly in awe of both Hawking and his wife Jane, played by Felicity Jones, an almost never-ending testament of love and challenge as these two grow up together, producing three children and (almost) a unifying Theory for everything. Having seen previous films on Hawking, including Benedict Cumberbatch playing the lead role for a BBC production, I feel I sort of know the story but somehow Redmayne’s portrayal of the Professor, including some very good humour brought it all very much up to date.

Whilst all three of these films highlight the lives of some of the most famous men of the last 60 years, they also remind us of the incredible struggle and conflict they had to face in pursuing hunches and realising dreams. None of the three had an ideal life, and perhaps of Stephen Hawking still with us, a life that none of us could begin to comprehend the difficulties therein. Certainly all three knew how to be very difficult men to live with, and for Turing certainly a very clear understanding that he found it very difficult to communicate effectively with others, whether in agreement or not.

I leave the best line though to the film about Turing’s life, spoken by a number of characters through the film, from boyhood friend Christopher and fellow code breaker, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly) and by Turing himself – “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine” . If ever there was a mantra that we need to embed in the psyche of schools it is this one.

As evidence of that – https://jameswilding.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/normalising-the-extraordinary/ and of course, so many more past pupils of both genders who have gone on to make their way into adult life, professional and personal, and become remarkable people in their own right.

There is no way Albert Einstein could have known where his research into Newtonian mechanics would take him into Space-Time, particle theory, the motion of molecules and that of the Universe. Reflecting on his life after the second world war, he had this to say “If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” Einstein spent most of his life working out how the chaos of the Universe was ordered, and pleasingly for us all his great work stood the test of time.

For the last 5 years, education in England has slowly been beset by educational change on change, to the extent now that everything we are currently working on for school-age children could be in a state of flux. At state primary school level, the National Curriculum has been renewed, but without a nationally agreed framework for its assessment and measurement of progress. Years 2 and 6 are currently required to follow the old English Maths and Science curricula, which is compulsory, though the levels used there-in are discredited. DfE have all sorts of transitional documents out there describing the next year’s curriculum to 2016.  At secondary school, the new national curriculum framework published in December 2014 describes the curriculum to be followed from September 2014. Need I write on? When change is so breathless that the framework around which careful construction is required is published after the start date, you know something has gone aglay. Government masks its ineptitude by stating that these curricula are statutory and must be followed by all state schools.

The GCSEs programmes for English, English Literature and Maths change this coming September 2015, as do most all A level subjects, though Drama, Geography, Languages wait a year and Maths gets to wait until 2017. Ways of grading are changing, GCSE from A*-G to 9-0, and A levels from modular AS+A2 to terminal A level at the end of 2 years. Not only are we to have a complete alpha-numeric soup of qualifications over a period of 3 years, but since the DfE have made it quite clear that the new qualifications are going to be more rigorous (harder), in the basket of qualifications we will also have apples, oranges, pears and such like.

DfE have of course tried to leaven the pain, by suggesting that during these transition years, the percentage of pupils gaining a new Level 4 or higher in English will be the same as those that would have gained a grade C or higher under the old system.  So not only are the exams to get harder, but in order to ensure fairness, candidates will not need to achieve as well as we might expect they would have to, given the more demanding nature of the challenge. Which of course means that once the old exams are through, we won’t be able to compare the next year’s cohort performance with the previous year, because the pass standard will be toughened.

The earliest that education research teams are going to be able to deploy statistical measures anew to compare one cohort to another is from 2018 0nwards. In research terms for independent research teams at for CEM centre, NFER, Institutes of Education and so forth, we are currently moving close to a Black Hole. Yes they can see and collect data from exam candidates at Key stage 2, 4 and 5 but each subject has been ‘pulled’ in one way or another to the extent that meaningful comparisons will not be available.

Within our national schools at the same time, the government has further destabilised provision by changing how schools are run, the money they receive, their mechanisms of government, the freedoms with which they can appoint staff (qualified or not), and whether these curriculum regulations apply to them. The product lines are Local authority schools v academy schools (stand-alone or trust groups), be they selective, comprehensive and secondary modern, free schools and university technical colleges. The  majority of these schools now report directly to the DfE. It is no surprise that the National Audit office (that watchdog of govt financial probity) has just declared (21 January 2015) DfE account “neither fair nor true”. In an extremely rare move, our public spending watchdog, has issued an “adverse opinion” on the department’s financial statements, indicating that it does not trust the accuracy of the DfE’s figures and is unable to assess whether it is providing value for money. The NAO said auditors had identified a level of “error and uncertainty” in the DfE financial statements that was “both material and pervasive”. The comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse, who is head of the NAO, said the DfE’s failure to provide statements that gave a “true and fair view” of the financial activity of its organisations meant it was not meeting the requirements of parliament.

So there we have it. Within the state education sector, its controlling government department for Education and the treasury (let alone independent research teams)  have no chance of knowing whether its experiments with curricula and examinations are going to work until 2019 at the very earliest, and the watchdog that can actually can check something, the spending of our taxes, has every right to be deeply troubled. English state education has been put under the most extraordinary reforms, at break neck speed and at at time when the school population is exploding in most areas of the country. What a Big Bang lies in store?

Private schools within the Independent Schools Council family sit on the side and can only watch and protect their own from the incredibly damaging fall-out from such legislative, statutory and regulatory change.  We would not wish this on our worst enemies, and most of the state schools we work with are actually friends in partnership with provision. As a group of 1300+ schools, ISC has prepared on our behalf a manifesto for the parties moving forward toward general election. Entitled

“ISC 2015 Manifesto – It is time to reset the relationship with independent schools in the UK”

it is a statement of the goals, beliefs and aims of ISC schools. Now independent schools stand ready to reset the relationship; they want to be seen for what they really are and what they can offer for the benefit of all children in this country. The eight constituent associations of ISC have each agreed the manifesto and are fully behind its aims.

Claires Court sits with its mission very close to the ideals of this manifesto, which starts “We believe in: Breaking down barriers: the mission of all schools, whether state or independent, is to educate children to achieve their full potential; any barriers, real or perceived, between the two sectors are counterproductive; Social mobility: independent schools are and will be key contributors to social mobility; unlocking the potential of all children and young people benefits our society as a whole. The whole manifesto downloads from the link above or http://goo.gl/4wBQfw.

Anyone who has read my blog, or has listened to me speak or met me in person, can’t miss both my passion for education and for the pupils for whom I am responsible and my deep belief in the value of evidence-based education. In a school which has been in the same family ownership for 55 years, having had a leadership role for 34 of those years, I suspect I feel best placed to be able to reflect on the best value brought about by long term systemic development. One of the things Einstein struggled with is that the Universe (be that macro or micro) is beset by innumerable variables. Even though he gave us the greatest insight we could possibly have into gravity, we still don’t what it is really, can’t tough or explain it, though it affects everything we do on this planet.

In like manner with children, we know what they are like and love them beyond measure, and know we need to treat everyone as an individual. Whilst we can package them up and average them out, that’s not the same as ensuring that ‘Every child matters’. What we must not do is use ‘hindsight’ to manage education, which is of course what both Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan have done this parliament, recalling what worked for them in schools and imposing it on a country. I have no problem with being told that ‘all children by age 11 must know their 12 times table’, (Nicky Morgan, 1 Feb 2015 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31079515) but it’s the reductionist nature of such claptrap that causes me to have lost complete respect for the current ministers.

I’ll leave you with a final poster meme of our Albert, that perhaps suggests where I might place the current members of parliament in the evolutionary tree:

In a belated effort to protect the Petrified Forest in Arizona, the Navajo Indian curators decided to put large signs up around the desert edge reminding visitors that “At the current rate of fossil theft by visitors, the Forest will completely disappear within 25 years”.  Soon after the signs went up, heard at the edge was the following conversation, from one visitor to her boyfriend:

Soak up the silence … Monument Valley belongs to the Navajo Nation. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Lescourret/Corbis = The Guardian

“Well, we’d better take our souvenirs now then.”

Thursday morning, 29 January 2015, and the air waves are full of critics and apologists alike for the latest raft of Secondary school statistics, published today.  Here’s the BBC take on that.

What is quite clear is that there is no real connectivity for the country with these tables for GCSE performance and tables of previous years. Some years back, the Department for Education (oversees English schools), OfSTED (inspects English state schools) and Ofqual (regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England) encouraged state schools to take up the lead of many independent schools to swap UK coursework GCSEs/BTECs for terminal international GCSEs.  So state schools did. The  DfE forced UK exam boards to swap coursework for mini-exams during the 2 year course, and these controlled assessments prove to be a ghastly innovation, as pupils entered a 2 year period in which they might face over 100 assessment exams for their GCSEs, Given there are about 300 working days for GCSE, in effect this meant students were taking an exam abut every 4 days.

Faced with no UK alternative, more schools moved some or all of their subjects to the iGCSE route, where assessment is solely by one or two long exams at the end of the 2 year period. Guess what – teachers and pupils liked this, because it meant the 2 years permitted subject knowledge and skill development to occur before a sensible period of 6 weeks revision, prior to critical and judgemental assessment could take place in the May/June of Year 11 (in the UK students 17th year of age). Guess what – standards rose in such schools, because the cut and mow was far more appropriate for adolescent development.

At the same time, the Secretary of State for Education (the politician who leads the DfE) of the day, Michael Gove decided that the English GCSEs needed to lose their course-works (wef Summer 2014) and controlled assessments completely (wef Summer 2017 – Art, Drama and Technology are 3 exceptions), and become terminal examinations like their iGCSE cousins –  the bulk of change to commence later this year, 2015 for Maths and English and the others follow suit next year.

Brilliant, what’s not to like? The removal for example, in English the Speaking and Listening coursework components of English GCSE  results in the grade achieved for English simply reflecting the candidate skills in reading and writing. Now that’s not quite so perfect for pupils and schools reared within a climate where all 4 English skills were valued and promoted.  Inevitably, English GCSE pass rates fell in Summer 2014, with a knock on effect for schools overall record of passing 5 GCSEs including English and Maths. In addition, DfE removed iGCSE English as being an appropriate qualification – so those schools with 100% of candidates taking iGCSE English have dropped like a stone to 0% gaining 5 or more GCSEs.

Some schools chose to pursue both iGCSEs (which are examined in January as well as June) and UK GCSEs, recognising that the new English GCSE was likely to adversely affect some in their cohort. It is alleged that the government also required the exam boards to manipulate statistically pass rates at C and above to ensure that fewer gained a C, in part to demonstrate that the exams were getting more demanding. In my school’s case for example, after 2 major appeals (2011 & 2012) in successive years over the statistical manipulation of pass rates, we have chosen to add both iGCSEs for Maths and English as additional cover for our pupils, to smooth their passage through very turbulent times.

At the time of writing, the DfE have just published the 2014 league tables, and I can see neither the English nor Maths iGCSEs reported that our pupils gained last summer at the end of their GCSE course, so they don’t appear in our GCSE success statistics.

As with hundreds of other schools, state and independent, across the country, we are incensed that the government publication of our GCSE results 2014 bears no relationship or accuracy to the actual results our children received this Summer. Some 40% of all examinations taken in independent schools use the iGCSE, and the DfE’s decision to exclude English and Maths iGCSE as valid indicators of performance means that for some schools, such as Eton ad St Mary’s Ascot, the DfE report 0% gaining 5 or more A*to C GCSEs. In our case, because we use a mix of the 2 qualifications, our actual results for gaining 5 or more GCSEs including English and Maths are 76.5, not 59% as stated.  The 2013-14 Achievements Court Circular is currently with the printers and will travel home with our pupils next Friday.  The Achievements brochure carries a detailed breakdown of all of our examination results this year, as well as the previous 4 years of data from 2010 for comparison purposes.

As we still have a mix of subjects using traditional GCSEs, at least we are not reported at ground 0%. But the local and national press will nevertheless report large moves in the swings and roundabouts of school performance, with potential reputational damage for all involved. As for the independent sector, approximately 40% of all GCSE exams sat are as iGCSEs – you can see the ISC information sheet on that here: Year-11-Results-2014.  The accurate figure for the percentage of candidates gaining 5 or more GCSes graded A* to C is 86%, and you can see those figures, accurate for all ISC schools in 2014 as reported to  DfE here, on the ISC site.

I am sure we will be reported as providing for our children well, with the 5 or more statistic showing we are well ahead of the basement level (40%).  But that’s simply not the point.  It really is very senseless for the DfE to capture the vast amounts of data on schools, and then each year, change the rules about what actually should be published, and then sound off about how well their statistics are reflecting a country’s efforts to realign for the 21st century against the tiger competitive economies of the far east that are said to educate their children so much more effectively than the UK.  Actually what Britain hears from those economies in Europe and the Far East is that their very rigour in technical examinations is destroying the creativity in their students that modern economies require.  They are sending delegations to England to see the best of what we offer and enquire how our schools (such as Claires Court) are able to juggle both academic needs with intellectual and creative skill development. Just 12 months ago we had some 150 teachers from Sweden here to explore how teaching and learning worked in a digitally empowered institution.

It is difficult to believe DfE could make things worse, but they have. As a result of the Gove reforms, DfE/Ofqual have insisted that practical examinations in Science are removed from the A level programme, because they believe the terminal only exam will give us greater rigour/make the exams harder, such exams to start next year. This week, in a speech to the Carlton club, Gove’s successor, Nicky Morgan has called for Ofqual to put these practical exams back into the A levels, because of the significant pressure from Universities and employers alike demanding that the outcome from A levels must be more than just an exam result – a successful A level student should also have strong laboratory-based practical skills. Not surprisingly, the exam boards are digging their heels in now, because after 2 years of argument with Ofqual, they have last month received approval for their new A level course, whereby the practical skills are embedded in the end of course exams, which are to examine much harder technical and mathematical skills than hitherto.  When the people in charge of education run the system like a push me-pull you train, is it any wonder that those ‘spectators’ to the politics decide to take their school into a different qualification framework that has remained stable for decades.

I am told the Navajo quickly took their signs down, when they saw an dramatic increase in theft from their ‘Petrified Forest’.  You don’t improve peoples’ behaviour by making them fearful of the future. People learn to do better things because that which is important is valued, time after time, season after season, generation after generation. Claires Court exists as both an Academic Institution, in which knowledge, skills and the ability to pass exams are nurtured and as an Educational Community in which all  are supported, pupils, teachers, parents and their families to a greater end goal than ‘pilfering’ – oh, and we don’t want a petrified Educational forest in the first place!