A Principled view

These are the words from of one of those great songs from the early 80’s, Hallelujah, written by Leonard Cohen.  For those that can’t reach back that far, you’ll know the song as sung by Jeff Buckley, featured in that wonderful modern cartoon film, Shrek.  It has been covered by all and sundry, and deservedly so – it’s a great song to sing!

As the shades of 2012 fall away, and the bright new dawn of 2013 breaks upon a somewhat sodden Thames Valley, I can’t help feeling inspired.  Like the ‘Hallelujah’, coming to work in Education is a celebration of joyous humanity.  Our school community is of course filled with individuals young and old, and in each in their own way will have doubts and uncertainty about purpose, but absolute willing to give our whole host of challenges their best shot, because that’s the way we like it.

The glow of success still warms us from the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the Olympics and Paralympics, not just in terms of performance, but equally in terms of majesty of occasion and warm hearted endeavour.  Lord Coe thanked us all at the closing ceremony “When our time came – Britain we did it right.”  Back to the lyrics – “I’ve heard there was a secret chord …, It goes like this, The fourth, the fifth, The minor fall, the major lift”.  That is indeed the nature of human endeavour, a key stroke here, a tickle there, a time to stand up and be counted, a time just to hold a hand and be of comfort.

If you can’t remember what Claires Court is all about for 2013, then you can catch site of my Christmas Newsletter here.  There are clear and coherent set of steps that we have put under way to keep our school, its provision and the opportunities that creates for pupils, now and in the future, ahead of the mainstream education world.  Yes, we are excited about the acquisition of 48 acres by our junior school, which sensibly developed over the next few years can provide ‘game changing’ facilities for us all.  But buildings don’t make great schools alone, and it is the heart and minds of my teaching colleagues that have worked so hard over the last 18 months to synthesise the best of all worlds for our school community.

This coming term, there are weekdays when I simply won’t get home, because of the extraordinary range of diverse activity on offer and underway.  As a celebration of what outstanding school can do, when examinations are not to the forefront, go no further than January to March in Maidenhead.  We publish this Friday the Sports Circular of 2012, covering pretty much every blade of grass and drop of water, stick, leather and net offered in combat, a remarkable testament to the athletic life we promote.  Fixtures start Saturday, weather permitting, and the roads around Maidenhead already seem to swarm with the bodies of our older athletes raising the heart rate in preparation for competition.

I’ll be at the launch party of our new Town centre based, computing initiative, ‘Hack Club’, with 6 or so of our young computer mentors drawn from Year 9 and 11, teaching the public about what’s best in computing and the digital landscape.  We are all pretty amused that our host coffee shop is called ‘Java&Co’ – one of the languages of the world wide web, and the worst that can happen is a lovely cup of hot coffee and a croissant all-round.  If you want to join us at the bottom of Maidenhead High Street– 10 am here – or of course on-line at www.clairescourt.com, where we hope to running a live feed of the event for a couple of hours to Midday.

Best to end with a bit more of Leonard Cohen: “And even though it all went wrong, I stand before the Lord of song with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah.”  Here’s hoping 2013 lives up to all of our hopes and dreams – Hallelujah to that!

ISANet Newsletter 26 November 2012 – the ‘Weather-affected’ edition.

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Frederick Douglas*

This clear sighted statement about the development of the child into adult is by an orator I knew not of, whose story is worth reading*. In many ways, this is why I come to work each day, to ensure that young boys and girls grow successfully and develop a degree of resilience that will sustain them through Life’s troubles, whenever and wherever they might come. Hold that thought…

The immediacy of modern news is such that I don’t read about the failure of a new flood relief scheme pump to work, I actually watch the news video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TmK0TkHnUE
I am sure that every possible procedure was put in place to ensure the system would ‘fail-safe’, yet it did not, and people’s homes have been flooded out. The cost of the Flood-relief scheme was £1.5 million, and precious use that turned out to be. Hold that thought…

This last week, we learn that the DfE has overspent its £7.3 billion pound academies budget by £1billion, because of a tenfold increase in the number of English schools converting to academies. “The Department for Education (DfE) met the expense from its overall budget”, says the National Audit Office report. “The department was unprepared for the financial implications of rapid expansion,” the authors say. The government said it made “no apology for spending money on a programme that is proven to drive up standards” (source BBC news)

As no-one seems to have found the evidence that turning schools into academies actually leads to school improvement, (here’s one sophisticated report that tests the thesis- http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck/8994) it seems to me that such statements are made by DfE officials and ministers in turn, cynically avoiding the truth, and despite that, used to justify over spending £1000,000,000. That’s a big number!

Here’s the maths. The £1billion pounds is over a two year period March 2010-April 2012, in which the number of academies has grown by 2000 (from a low number of 203). The overspend represents a whopping £500,000 per school. Now you and I know that if we had that sort of extra money falling in our laps, we could make a pretty good case for suggesting that we could improve our school performance too! More on So where did all the money go here.

But as with the Flood relief scheme in Kempsey, this extra spending is no guarantee of making improvements; at least we know in Kempsey that to put the matter right, the pump has got to be switched on, but in education the picture is so much more complex. Across the country, what state schools are crying out for is for their basic infrastructure to be repaired, for roofs to be mended and for buildings to be renewed. The casual response of the DfE is that this extra spending has happened within Budget – coming from the draconian cuts that Local authorities have had to endure from their budgets. The DfE has built few if any accountability measures into their Academies, and you can read more here, on the govtoday website.

Learning things
1. I think we all know the secret of learning is not just about learning to read, but learning to listen well as well. Here’s a lovely UK website that has a mine of audio stories you might like to check out – http://storynory.com/
2. I don’t know much about the Knewton corp, rather grandly suggesting that “Education is right now undergoing a monumental shift, from the one-size-fits-all factory model to a digital, personalized model. Knewton is at the forefront of this change”. Well anyway, I was researching how to speed up reading, and this page on their blog covered a lot of the ground well.
3. Google’s world of wonders is like their Art project, a way of going somewhere without using petrol! I love the Jurassic coast and Ironbridge as examples of places you can visit virtually, as well of course as the Barrier Reef and Scott’s Antarctic hut, two sights rather further away.

Onto things Digital
● The Inaugural ISANet Unconference took place on Saturday 24 November. The main stream of talks was provided by Learning ‘slams’ during which 5 minute sessions under pretty rapid fire delegates highlighted some learning approaches or technical tips that worked for them, and this provided for an interesting, if eclectic mix of subjects. Unwitting stars of the show were undoubtedly the students of Claires Court and Wellacre Academy who presented with great polish and in addition were on hand to show the adults how to work the kit!
● I came across this simple little Google Search into Movie creator at the Unconference – really quite fun – here’s the tool, and here’s two movies I created about the ISANet using it – http://goo.gl/17Fym and http://youtu.be/Ida8O6Wgtp4.

And finally:  As the pressures of term get tougher, Happiness moves into short supply – watch this short TED talk by Shawn Achor on ‘The happy secret to better work’ – amusing and thought-provoking. http://goo.gl/C4WTh

Thanks for reading, listening and playing with this slightly edited membership newsletter for teachers and techies in education.

Best wishes

James Wilding

jtw@clairescourt.com

* http://www.frederickdouglass.org/douglass_bio.html . As I am married to a History teacher, I was reminded of his claim to fame as an upwardly mobile slave.

This famous quote from General Ferdinand Foch, when he held firm to prevent the French Army being overrun at the first battle of the Marne, 5 and 12 September 1914, is one that causes me to smile and reflect.  There is no doubt that as our old Registrar, Anita Roberts used to say, ‘Life is hard and then you die’.   I am not  so taken with writer David Gerrold’s addition –  ‘Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.’ Those that know me understand that my almost permanent state of mind is ‘ruthless and relentless’ optimism, which is why I guess I have stayed at the helm of this great school for over 30 years now.

I imagine the quote really does not adequately cover the Department for Education’s mood music in November 2012.  Here is what Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union which represents civil servants, has to say, “Gove appears to want to run his department as some kind of nightmarish right-wing experiment, playing politics with people’s livelihoods and putting at risk the very important services DfE civil servants provide to schools, teachers and the public”.

Let’s inspect what is happening within Gove’s department just now – as reported by the Parliamentary Education Select committee “staff morale in the DfE is flagging as a result of extensive restructuring over the past two years“.  A further review has shown that up to 1,000 people are at risk of redundancy as a plan to reduce administrative spending by an amazing 50 per cent by 2015.  Half of the buildings the ministry uses will go, and ‘everyone will be told to focus on ministerial priorities’. Over the weekend, schools learned via Mr Gove’s stooges at OfQual that the January GCSE resits for English won’t publish their results until August, so that we won’t have a repeat of this year’s crisis.  This is utter nonsense, because the January resits are vitally important for those candidates who are post 16 and need to gain a C grade in English to ensure they can apply for Uni, or for work with employers who demand C and so forth.  This morning, the exam board has notified us to confirm this and to say candidates can have their money back if taking the exam in January is no use to them.  Throughout the country then, umpteen hundreds of candidates whose results were blighted by the unfair upwards readjustment of grade boundaries  will learn today that actually what ever efforts they have made, they won’t hear for another year what grade they have been awarded. Expect trouble at mill all around, particularly in hard pressed English departments who thought that they had got it right last Summer, have been accused of cheating and over-marking by OfQual and Mr Gove subsequently, and who have spent their own time and energy to put right this wrong this term.  Perhaps they will be encouraged by Mr Gove’s words last week  “Exams matter because motivation matters. Humans are hard-wired to seek out challenges,” he argued at the Academies’ conference in London last Wednesday.  “Our self-belief grows as we clear challenges we once thought beyond us. If we know tests are rigorous and they require application to pass, then the experience of clearing a hurdle we once considered too high spurs us on to further endeavours and deeper learning.  There is no feeling of satisfaction as deep or sustained as knowing we have succeeded through hard work at a task which is the upper end, or just beyond, our normal or expected level of competence. Exams show those who have not mastered certain skills or absorbed specific knowledge what more they need to practise and which areas they need to work on.”

Our candidates don’t have any memory of where they went wrong last summer (they did not go wrong, of course, just scored lower than the revised higher score to gain a grade level implemented to lower overall pass standards) but what will irk them further is that there will be no chance of remembering what they did wrong in January when they get the results in August.  The wonderful thing about politics is that when the ballot is taken on a Thursday, our masters know our feelings within 24 hours or so – no waiting around for 7 months or so!

*From Wikipedia 1914

On the outbreak of the war, Foch was in command of XX Corps, part of the Second Army of General de Castelnau. On 14 August the corps advanced towards theSarrebourg–Morhange line, taking heavy casualties in the Battle of the Frontiers. The defeat of XV Corps to its right forced Foch into retreat. Foch acquitted himself well, covering the withdrawal to Nancy and the Charmes Gap, before launching a counter-attack that prevented the Germans from crossing the Meurthe. Foch was then selected to command the newly formed Ninth Army during the First Battle of the Marne with Maxime Weygand as his Chief of Staff. Only a week after taking command, with the whole French Army in full retreat, he was forced to fight a series of defensive actions to prevent a German breakthrough. During the advance at the marshes in St.-Gond he is said to have declared “My right is hard pressed (“driven in” in some versions). My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.” These words were seen as a symbol both of Foch’s leadership and of French determination to resist the invader at any cost, although there is little evidence that Foch actually said them.^[5] Foch’s counter-attack was an implementation of the theories he had developed during his staff college days, and succeeded in stopping the German advance. Foch received further reinforcements from the Fifth Army and, following another attack on his forces, counter-attacked again on the Marne. The Germans dug in before eventually retreating. On 12 September Foch regained the Marne at Châlons and liberated the city. The people of Châlons greeted as a hero the man widely believed to have been instrumental in stopping thegreat retreat and stabilising the Allied position.