A Principled view

Into my seventh decade of wandering the planet (sounds really old), and I continue to learn in this connected educational world in which I work. Commencing teaching under old style O levels and A levels in the 1970’s, I joined a profession hungry for change. The experience of the educator in those days was either to train the regurgitation of facts, practice the skills of paraphrase and precis or to borrow time from these acts so as translate those facts into a new context so that if nothing else some reason was shed onto the process. All seemed very dry and bookwormy.

In Biology, for example, considerable lesson time was spent learning the relative stages of cellular and tissue development from zygote to embryo for differing fauna, and not jsut to know how to label them, but to draw anew – here’s an example (actually almost).

Over 40 years the change in body of scientific knowledge to be learned and skills to be practiced is huge. What is on the syllabus now in most subjects is far ahead than at the start of my career.  It is a sobering thought that almost all the practical industrial Chemistry I was teaching in 1978 had ceased to work that way in the UK prior to the second world war. I embarked upon the updating of the sciences straight away, and pupil engagement grew rapidly (all boys, as the girls did not join our school until 1993). We doubled the number of science labs (1>2), we grew a lab technician (Chris Perry), Jacky Burgess joined the team and science expanded to ensure everyone who could would follow the three disciplines we still have today, Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

The explosion in scientific method in use in the school through the 1980s was phenomenal. Not only were the labs repositories of live invertebrates (locusts and butterflies), but fish, toads and mammals too. Throughout this time we were building radios, investigating digital circuits, creating flip-flops and on one disastrous occasion, blowing up ‘Thermite’ bombs in the dark and losing some eyebrows in the process. Given this specific experiment was used industrially to weld rails in situ in the 18th century, the knowledge was not new, but the excitement was real. Children in CC labs from the age of 10 learned to manipulate quite complex equipment and made stuff happen. And when the Technology block opened, with 5 labs and workshops, our hands-on approach gathered pace. The Motor car was joined by the Hovercraft and GoKart, and all was well until the Millenium bug hit. Everyone went digital in 2000, and we stopped making big mechanical objects work. Shame.

It is thus that I commend the arrival of some new back-to-the-future science down at the senior boys and senior girls with a STEM project involving the design, build and financing of an electric car. So long as the groups steer well clear of my own electric beauty, they’ll be fine. It really is worth noting that practical skills are in extraordinary short supply; 21st century digital natives don’t actually know how one end of a spanner works with a bolt any more than I did way back when. But the palpable excitement that some Frankenstein of a car or two can be created has wet a lot of whistles.

 So give me none of the facts v skills and  knowledge v wisdom debate, because this whole dialogue within education (drummed up by those with a political agenda)  that one of the emboldened entities above is more important than the other is sterile and pointless. They are in all practical ways joined together. Back in the day, no self-respecting vehicle-owning student at University was short of a Haynes manual or two, which rather neatly brought the facts of what made up a car in line with a description of the skills required to mend it NB facts+skills=knowledge. And if you were daft enough to set about a Haynes project to refurb a derelict car and make it roadworthy, then you would end up a poorer, but wiser man. Wisdom = knowledge in action. And have learned some useful and transferable mechanical skills.

We can test the acquisition of facts quite readily, and perhaps in order that we may compete with Malaysia, South Korea, Shanghai or Singapore, politicians are eager to raise the testing stakes further, making facts more important than skills. Now these are all countries with a retro-look about their education provision, because corporal punishment is endemic in all. I know where I’d rather live, in a democratic country liberated from corporal and capital punishment and where the voice of the child can be heard.  But that’s another post. In the meantime STEM club, keep up the good work, and by the way, across over in the aforementioned countries, there will indeed be boys and girls like you just as engrossed by this kind of project. Engineering excites us all.

@laurenlaverne: NY resolution 2014 c/o Mark Twain: “Let us endeavour to live so that when we die even the undertaker will be sorry”
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One of the Journalists I admire most is Ben Goldacre. Back in the day when the paperboy (most likely one of our own sons it must be said) trudged up the driveway to chez Nous to drop off a copy of the daily Guardian, on receipt I would quickly flick through the pages to see if Ben had reported on an aspect of Science, reported in the press or journals in some way. Its headline was Bad Science.

For those not aware of the Goldacre Oeuvre, it needs to be pointed out that he is not universally liked. Over the last decade or 2 of his work, he has managed to attract the wrath of big pharmaceutical companies and of other stake holders in the medical world. Read more here – http://www.badscience.net/about-dr-ben-goldacre/

It must be said that I have tried to book him for speech day, but his agent (and Ben) tell me he is too busy. That’s a good thing, because Ben and his work needs to be out there and in public. In short, he is the independent principled reporter doing that thing that gives journalism a good name – turning over the rocks and exposing corruption wherever it occurs.  And not just in Medicine.

In their book, Bad Education, Debunking Myths in Education,  Philip Adey and Justin Dillon debunk  many of the educational myths currently supported by those who don’t know better.  You can buy your own copy of their book here – and as the Amazon website states – “This book asks awkward questions about these and many other sacred cows of education. Each chapter tackles a persistent myth in education, confronting it with research evidence and teasing out any kernel of truth which may underlie the myth.”

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Education-Debunking-Myths/dp/033524601X. Suffice it to say that on publication I bought 10 copies and force-fed my senior managers with it. That’s a good thing by the way; as the legendary researcher John Hattie’s work exposes, direct instruction is enormously powerful. But I digress. Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Pharma:How Drug companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, he explains how all that happens. Today in my in box popped up a post-publication sequel from Mr Goldacre, and it makes sobering reading – in short things are not getting better.

Now as someone who writes about education, I’ll cease publicising stuff about another sector of public interest, and revert to words on Education. Messrs Adey and Dillon do us all a great service, by surfacing current knowledge on what research evidence indicates about best practice. But like all books, their work is based in the past, not the present. Education is now such a political football that researchers the world over now await the latest government dictat and policy statement, and then almost before the ink is dry on the parliamentary order or OfSted memo, teams of researchers set out to investigate what’s happening in the classroom as a consequence and report back.

And what’s good for us who run schools is that there are just as many heads and classroom practitioners awaiting the very first soundbite from that research, to check our status and position accordingly. Have a look at Larry Ferlazzo’s website just to get and insight into what I mean in this regards – the man is a legend of the ether.

Closer to home, Tom Sherrington at King Edwards Grammar School, Chelmsford does a pretty good job too, making a principled stand against the tide of authoritarian hogwash, http://headguruteacher.com/2013/12/19/taking-stock-of-the-education-agenda-part-2/ being his most recent example. I was moved to comment on his latest post “I read your blogs in awe and sorrow. Awe because your values seem so clear and driven by the professional integrity absolutely necessary when the education currency has been so debased by the false gold of political expediency.And equally because as a genuinely independent headteacher of an avowedly broad ability school in the private sector, I see formerly great state schools being reduced to empty husks by the pressure to conform to the 2 legs good 4 legs bad theologies you speak of.”

Tom was kind enough to ping back ‘Thanks James. I recognise that sorrow…but I remain hopeful that the tide is turning. Albeit slowly!’

At the close of the year, I think it is worth restating that for our school, Education works because we have clear Aims, Values, Characteristics we know need to be admired and a principled framework established within which to operate.

The Key Values of Claires Court are:

• Responsibility for ourselves

• Respect for others

• Loyalty to our School

• Integrity above all

We aim for our pupils to pursue and acquire:

• a modern relevant education

• a love of learning

• a range of life skills – academic, social, musical, creative and sporting

• a strong spiritual and moral character

We call our Learning Philosophy the Claires Court Essentials. These cover the entire age range of the school, and are developmental in their approach. They are underpinned by leading research outcomes, identified by John Hattie and other world researchers as the best way of proceeding in education.

Plus…

• We recognise the importance of building confidence and self–esteem in each of our young people, and to prepare them for the next step in their schooling

• We work in partnership with parents and guardians to help our pupils achieve their full potential

• We promote an understanding of the need for care and consideration for others within our community and the wider world

These final 3 bullets no longer sit in our aims, hardwired as they are in everything we do and promote. Sure Thing, we can’t please everyone every time, but that’s because their concerns aren’t that we miss these targets, but simply that our hairshirt might sit less comfortably than they would wish.

As readers of my blog and/or watchers of our newsletters may know, we have had an extraordinary end of term, in both school development and pupil achievement terms. We have been able to identify a possible complete renewal of the school and envision how that might be funded without cost to parent tuition fee on our 50+ acre campus by our Junior boys school, Ridgeway. At the same time, to have one of this year’s GCSE students, Amber Hill be voted as BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year brings particular pleasure and resonance to a school leader who makes it pretty plain to anyone who chooses to listen – we don’t select our pupils on ability on entry, but what we do try to do is help our young children look to the future and achieve beyond the imagination. Here’s a simple set of slides from an assembly at the start of the last academic year, one in which we celebrated that 2 past pupils had competed in the London Paralympics – http://goo.gl/DrXJhB. Almost 2 years ago I took a senior school assembly focussing on our forthcoming charity week, the talk being entitled, Normalising the Extraordinary – http://goo.gl/3vidWa.

Arguably one of the most powerful educational tools in the box is building in children the ability to hear and make verbal their inner voice. I have no doubt that anyone listening to Amber Hill on TV last Sunday evening couldn’t help but be impressed by her simple, straightforward grounded comments. ‘Cool as a cucumber’ is Amber, and she needs to be in her chosen sport of skeet shooting.

And for a child to develop their inner voice, their teacher must be very careful in what they do and say. Successful learning comes from missing the target hundreds of times, but only just. In educational terms this is what is understood by the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky who developed the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, often understood to refer to the way in which the acquisition of new knowledge arises through the skill of the teacher placing the next step within reach of the learner. In recent years, in state schools it has been required to show that every learner makes progress every lesson, a methodology imposed with little research to indicate that it would work. It seems blooming obvious that ‘no child should be left behind’, but that’s not the same as requiring every child to stay up with the pacemaker. Education isn’t linear and learning specifically is not. We can all remember the striving to achieve the unachievable, and great teachers make that struggle evident, not invisible.

This summer not only did Amber shoot in World Championships, but her contemporaries Ellie Rayer played Hockey for England whilst Josh Harris and Rory Kempson rowed for England in the Home Countries regatta. Their fellow students, from the junior boys school, Nikolai Hinterreither and Ethan Bains–Gillespie, were selected to play Chess for England for the next 7 years, until they are 18 years old. For a school to graduate 6 internationals in one summer is quite an achievement, and for one of those to be voted BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year is beyond our wildest imaginations. And that’s what our school programme sets out to achieve for our young people; we are modest when we state we wish them to reach their potential, but what we know is that their potential is far beyond their own belief system when they join our school.

If you were able to listen to Amber speak last Sunday evening, on receiving her award from Clare Balding, you hear our school talk – straight, no-nonsense, unassuming. It is by small steps that might journeys are made, it is by striving and failing and having another go that we can develop the character that underpins success. That’s what brings me to work each day, and a promise to find for each child the chance to excel, not in things the government wants, but that which has grown within their own heart.

Herewith our end of term Newsletter. Enjoy.

 This article written to accompany the Achievements & Results Court Circular, to be published Tuesday 7 January 2014

http://goo.gl/6gNB5N

The Registrar is often asked by prospective parents “Why is your last Inspection document so old?”, noticing as they do its date of February 2008. The answer remains very simple – we are an independent school known to be good, with excellent pastoral care and extra-curricular provision, and in terms of many of outcomes for children, outstanding for a school of our size. This means that we don’t have to be inspected frequently, but our time is now up and when the Inspectors visit, they will see from the many and diverse achievements listed evident in this series of Court Circular publications looking back on 2012-13 that we have developed yet further our reputation for providing outstandingly for our pupils.

Throughout the development of Claires Court as an educational institution, the individual child has been at the heart of our planning. Entering the school from Nursery has no selection criteria, being automatic for those that choose us as their Junior school. This may impose a breadth of ability on us in these lower years, but it’s not one that concerns us. Our benchmarking agency is CEM centre, University of Durham, and we send them our data on pupil performance on entry into the school at Reception, and we use that data, and follow-up assessments to monitor pupil progress up through the school, all the way to A level. Published in 2008, “The first seven years at school” research report by Professor Peter Tymms and his co-workers at CEM/Durham made it quite clear that the most important years for educational progress to be made are those in the first 3 – that’s Reception, 1 & 2, though of course appropriate interventions by skilled teachers higher up the school continue to make a difference all the way through. The critical 2 main foci for attention must be Mathematics and Reading, and though developing Vocabulary is important, its contribution to the child’s future success is not so important.

What the research made crystal clear was that progress is very varied from one year to the next, fundamentally down to the critical importance of the adult working with the child at schools, namely the teacher. For children to make progress every year, the teacher has to ensure that the key interventions are made week by week, term on term. Building on that research, we have continued to provision the use of specialist staff to support the Form teacher in their role, and it is so rewarding for example to witness the real joy our children show at the learning of modern languages. Frankly, the introduction of Mandarin into the mix of French, German, Latin and Spanish in the primary phase has stepped up the process of language acquisition even more. In short, our children in the junior years are really best placed to make the most progress, given the year by year focus on the core subjects, amplified by specialist staff who support the form teacher in those interventions.  And prepare them we do, for a range of secondary destinations with the skills and interests that will nourish their development into their teenage years.

The research has another major key finding though;

“Not only does this analysis underline the importance of looking at progress year on year but it also highlights the value of taking the long view. An effective school must surely be the school which has a long term positive impact on its pupils and this may not be the same as relative attainment at the end of the last year. The analyses presented in this paper suggest that large gains in a single year of schooling are likely to have just a little impact in the long run.

It is the cumulative effect of the whole school experience which matters.”

And that’s why we have every confidence that the vast majority of our children developed in our junior schools are going to do even better with us in the Secondary and Sixth form years. Given our clear values Responsibility, Respect, Loyalty and Integrity, how could I as Academic Principal, look existing parents in the eye and say “I am sorry, your child is no longer good enough for the school?” It’s true of course that we can’t be the right school for every child, particularly those who require intense resources to support specific difficulties, be they academic or behavioural. What is the case though is just how well our Claires Court Essentials are a best fit now for the secondary phase.  As with the early years research, we know it is essential that it’s at the first three years of secondary that the most progress can be made. There are deep and profound differences between the specialist subjects the soon-to-be teenage learner encounters in years 7 and 8. And Intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct too, with no child being the same. Through our breadth of provision, through the children working with specialist staff on a question based curriculum, we enable Years 7,8 and 9 to develop their developed abilities still further. I am a great fan of the educationalist, Sir Ken Robinson, who repeatedly blames school for their narrow focus, and has this to say on the matter: “…how our education system is outdated and is based on a hierarchy wherein most useful subjects for a job are considered to be the most important and academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image”. Over the past three years, we have dramatically developed our curriculum to include those skills and talents we believe are needed for the future, to develop and nurture our students’ creativity. Here’s Sir Ken again: “In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.”

That’s why we attach to our curriculum so many empowering visits to museums and galleries, travel into the natural world for field trip and research, and provide specific problem-based learning opportunities for collaboration and research. This marks Claires Court out as significantly different from so many other schools, because we set out to provide that whole school experience that CEM centre research states is essential for effective education. Sir Ken also assures us that we are right, stressing: “the importance of an educational system which nurtures the gift of the human imagination and ensures that children have brighter futures and better tomorrows. Clearly, for a brighter future, education needs to appreciate the true value of human imagination and nurture it”. As one of the earliest adopters of cloud-based technology, we have given to our pupils a whole host of tools that ensure they can research, add value, modify, imagine and re-purpose solutions to problems. It is only with the arrival of these tools that genuine collaboration has been possible on a daily or even minute by minute basis. Co-workers don’t need to be in the same room to be on the same page and problem! And because the tools are universal, visible and usable on any computer platform, there are fewer excuses for not being able to participate – which kids being kids will always happen.

Claires Court as a community did not appreciate we were going to lead the way in digital literacy and computing, but we now do. In 2010, we created three things; a vision for how schools can integrate their entire productivity backbone, how teachers and pupils can access anytime, any where both the tools to be productive and the information to go with it, and developed a training programme from beginner to certified trainer in tools for the job that will serve the individual in good stead anywhere and in any language in the globe.  Now that’s some success, and I guess why Google and Samsung are happy to encourage us to this day. The video Samsung produced of our work here has been shown across the globe, and we welcome visitors to the school to explain how this success has been engineered. As 2014 beckons, we have over 450 Chromebooks, 200+ PCs and work stations, 100+ Macbooks and netbooks deployed in the school, and commence a formal trial on the additional use of Samsung tablets in January. I really don’t think it’s about the technology by the way; tools are just that. It’s about the development of proper young craftsmen who has the vision to make choices, and does so – the written form one day, a video the next, drawings and cartooning the third.

One of our students, Joe Reeve, has written us an App so that our digital space, “The Hub” can be added as an extension to the Chrome browser, making it available in one click for quick reference. That’s both neat and ingenious, and I am sure more Apps are on their way from our community of learners. There are commercial Apps out there that now rank schools, and about 5000 secondary schools in the UK, state and private. Now Apps aren’t necessarily going to take all a school’s successes into account, but our aims is to be in amongst the top 10% or so for academic success. Of course we could push our children solely down the ‘academic curriculum’ path, but for most, they haven’t come to Claires Court to be nurtured solely this way. That’s why we are also known for Art, Drama, Public Speaking and Citizenship, Sports and our work with those less fortunate.  Mr Andy Giles and Mrs Rogers run our Sixth Form of 110 or so students with great skill and passion. In his exit survey each year, Mr Giles finds that Year 13 rate their experience with us in the 90%+ satisfaction level. No, even at this level, we don’t select out our weaker pupils – they are as welcome as the most able to give of their best in their A level studies. And the telling evidence from CEM centre on our A level performance in the Summer of 2013, is that our students do far better than their abilities would predict – “It is the cumulative effect of the whole school experience which matters”.

So please don’t belittle the academic achievements you read herein. As the award of the Whitbread prize to recognise the best achievements for a GCSE pupil in an ISA school  to Gabriella Lindley shows, it was not just the A*s that counted – her all round achievements, for herself, for her school and for others in need are what counted. And for her contemporary George Monk, I commiserate – 9A* and 4 As really not quite enough this year! With so many candidates with a history of arriving at Claires Court for their secondary education having failed their 11+ and being told they weren’t good enough – their excellent results are a formal and public endorsement that what we do and the way we do it works.

So dear Reader, enjoy the edition of our Achievements brochure when it is published (any time soon), and read it with the following in mind. If we deselected our weaker pupils, then we could publish better results. But they wouldn’t be better for those deselected. We haven’t become the school we are disrespecting those who learn differently. We have supported some amazingly gifted and talented children this year, whose successes are writ large across our various publications. As our BAFTA winning former pupil, Rupert Houseman pointed out to us at Speech Day – “I came to Claires Court age 11, shortly after learning I was severely dyslexic, and Claires Court taught me how to read and write. It makes me really laugh out loud that I make a living reading and write and get paid for it.  I could never have dreamed in my wildest dreams I would get paid to read out loud.  And that’s thanks to you guys here, I could never have done that without you, and that’s why I am here today!”.

James Wilding

! December 2013