A Principled view

Just a short blog for the mo’ to explain what has happened to the previous Principled View, ‘down a woodland track’.  Like previous pictures that illustrate my blog, the trees and paths were not part of CCS’ educational journey, just appropriate illustrations for my conversations.

This week (15 October onwards), Year 6 Boys and Girls are away at Osmington Bay, on a Field studies week away from school. They come back Thursday, get scrubbed up at home and return to work on Friday to prepare their presentations and conversations to present (formally and in groups) to their Parents at the close of Friday afternoon.  Giving great feedback, quickly and simply after a learning journey is a pretty firm guarantee that the lessons of the week will not just sink in but will become memories for a lifetime.

The picture above shows some of them on the Jurassic coast down there, at the close of a busy day, and I for one am proud that Children’s learning experiences can be so clearly sculpted outside and beyond the classroom.  The picture came via our ‘Hub’, indeed there are 20 Chromebooks down there struggling for connectivity in the wilds, but suffice it to say, the point of this week is highlighted by this picture. A coming-together, a reflection, big skies for even larger dreams and an outstanding photo opportunity caught and shared in the blink of an eye.

It is not quite the season to be jolly.  As all who live and work in schools now, we teachers are seasonal creatures, driven be calendar and event more than most, able to ride the various winds that blow, and hunker down when the winter comes,wrapped in tinsel and warmed by seasons greetings.

It is the season for us to receive lectures, from the party politicians at conferences of all colours, about how perhaps we i/c education plc should be doing a better or different job, and I’ll admit to being old enough to listen and judge for myself whether the advice is good, sound, convenient or even arrant nonsense.

Education UK is awaiting the arrival of Professor John Hattie, researcher extraordinaire from NZ via Melbourne University’s  Education Research Institute, on tour here to highlight how the best can be gained from our children. He has written prolifically, his seminal work being Visible Learning (2008), and when he updated this work, he added Teacher competency to the list of the best four things we can do to raise achievement. Now, Hattie’s overall rules for improvement are no magic bullet, more of the ‘Teacher know thyself and thy subject’ and ‘if things aren’t working, do them a different way’. At Claires Court we have focussed his research onto these 6 positive outcomes:

1.The deployment of our professional skills – ‘The Credibility of the Teacher’

2.Behaviour of Pupils

3.Feedback to/from Pupils

4.Metacognition & self-regulation strategies to improve thinking and learning

5.Peer tutoring

6.Early diagnosis, intervention, remediation and acceleration

Teachers and Pupils knowing each other is really key to progress, and after 6 weeks of the new academic year, most in this relationship struggle are where they need to be. For teachers, it is their credibility in the classroom that is key to success, and this is where Hattie’s research is so powerful.  He lists four territories that Teachers need to occupy successfully, those being Trust, Competence,  Dynamism and Immediacy.  I think these are pretty self-explanatory and work both ways.  Trust for example is not just about Trusting the teacher, it calls up the need for mutual respect, and our school values fit well with these headings.  Immediacy is not about prompt response, more about lowering barriers and inclusion, ensuring children are given a voice.

There is also a parallel debate about what makes children great learners, and lifestyle choices are to the forefront again. Most worrying for our school is the report out this week (see BBC Education news) that children by the age of 10 have five screens at home through which they can view rich media, that’s  bedroom TV, PC or laptop, slate, phone and games console and all of which out of reach much of the time of their parents. What the research makes absolutely clear is that there should be no external rich media stimulation less than 1 hour before bedtime, so that’s a tough ask for families that use TV as a reward for after all other things are done.

Now readers of my blog won’t expect this just to be a lecture, so I’ll finish with some lovely words by Guardian writer, Anne Wood, writing about the worrying signs that Britain is no longer investing in its program-making for children.  The article published on Tuesday (http://goo.gl/ergWe) is entitled “Television that makes children smile is so valuable” and includes this priceless summary: When children are smiling they are confident. When they are confident, they are curious. When they are curious, they are ready to learn. So please may we allow children and parents to relax a little, smile and be confident? Enjoying good children’s TV together may be only one way to relax, but it is a highly valuable one. Producing television is an art form whether for children or adults.

The key to success is in the penultimate sentence, ‘together’. And that’s where the most success can be found in any endeavour, not in the individual pieces however well crafted but in the whole, and if fit for purpose it will not only ‘Come and See us, and Make us Smile’, but a whole lot more! With our School Bonfire night almost upon us, and with fingers crossed for good weather this Saturday evening, I have every hope our ‘Pinewood’ Blockbusters display won’t just be a great success in itself (no pressure, Sean at Star Fireworks), but it will provide reinforcement that in our immediate area we can’t half make great films and TV for all the family, and in addition that our school community will reaffirm their faith in coming together as one big family for an hour or so! Because I trust my school, I for one will have a big grin on my face, come Saturday night!

It is difficult to find scientists from the past who capture the imagination as much as Albert Einstein (his quote leads this post); his renowned intelligence, his originality and his creativity set him above and apart from his peers, truly a genius of the last century.  In case you can’t list his achievements, here’s a quick synopsis:

1. Created the heretical view that there was more to mechanics that Newtonian principles, leading to the idea that mass and energy can be equated though the e=mc2 stuff,
2. Developed a modern understanding of what gravity is all about, supplying fodder for umpteen sci-fi authors such as spacetime and black holes, gravitational lenses, worm holes and stargates,
3. Sorted out quantum theory, worked out how particles, molecules and photons did their thing, and largely explained the Universe as we know it.
4. Invented a fridge with no moving parts, and created a unique hair&moustache style, iconic and recognisable to the present day.

It’s fair to say that some reckon Einstein had learning difficulties, though the jury seems to have set that idea aside in the light of his own mother’s pleasure that at the age of 7, little Albert was top of the class.  Given that he remained individualistic throughout his life, difficult and argumentative and other-wordly, I prefer the idea that Albert was the ultimate independent learner, and that this rebellious streak made him question the relative order of things wherever and whenever they arose. He was for example pretty quick to spot that Nazi Germany was not suited to high achieving jewish scientists such as he, emigrating as early as 1933.  As one of his professors said “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything!” Apparently Einstein made a mess of one of his early jobs, as a teacher.  “Einstein’s ideas of minimum routine and minimum discipline were very different from the views of his employer.”
One of the lovely things about running a school which embraces difference in and breadth of ability is that all human life resides within, and that diversity sparks all sorts of new and creative happenings.  For those that do achieve through traditional means, sticking to conventional processes may deliver the goods, but my goodness it makes a dull diet.  As Ofsted’s research showed this last year, and restated by their Chief Inspector Michael Willshaw last month, schools are far too keen to accelerate children to early examination at secondary level with absolutely no long term benefits, outcomes that other researchers have highlighted for decades. As this week’s report from one of the leading independent school groups, HMC, makes clear, achieving A* grades at GCSE often means bright children have to dumb down their responses to fit the perceived right answers to win the grade.
I am delighted that from the ranks of those we teach, we have indeed encouraged artists, engineers and musicians, scientists of the microscopic, the rocket and outerspace in equal measure. Of course I am proud that we have filled the ranks of the professions, academic and medical, accounting and legal, but there is something much more rewarding to know that we have created an environment in which all can thrive and in their own way. That’s why we have not sat on our laurels, and this last 6 months or so expended so much effort to develop our curriculum to encourage enquiry and challenge yet further.  I can’t believe how extraordinarily supportive of such an approach are our cloud-based ‘hub’ and collaboration tools, as it has become so much easier to share and revise thoughts, ideas and propositions.
Since Einstein challenges us to think the impossible, that’s quite hard, but the absurd is actually rather easier, as I guess most know that children enjoy the wacky, non-sensical and preposterous.  So let’s continue to bring on our young scientists racing slugs and woodlice against toothbrush motors, to encourage coders to program and pen-test, to support authors and linguists to write and speak in different voices, and above all, support achievement for its own sake and in all of its guises. At a time when every single phase of the school curriculum is under review by this current government, I am delighted we choose to follow our own stars, happy in the knowledge that great figures of the past would thoroughly approve of our mission.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Albert Einstein 

Great OECD report on what they feel countries need to do.  Read that here – http://goo.gl/1KlEB.  
What a shame Mr Gove doesn’t read the Guardian.

Literally having just commenced a new series of GCSE syllabi following governmental disquiet about the modular approach, we learn this week that there is be further wholescale reform to our secondary public examinations programme, with GCSEs to be replaced by the English Baccalaureate from 2015.  Of course there is much to conclude about what has worked and hasn’t worked since GCSEs came into play in 1986, but it does scare the living daylights out of me that it seems the politicians are making educational policy now with scant regard for educationalists or parliament.  Frankly, the plans suggested for the future are going to produce a sorry mess that are unlikely to see any firm conclusions for years to come.
It seems to me that Mr Gove is signalling a green light to the wholesale cancelling in the state sector of the kind of courses such as Physical Education, Drama, Music and Technology that have so obviously liberated our young learners for the past 25 years and that have inspired our future leaders in those arenas.  As a Scientist married to a Historian, I ought perhaps to hanker back to rigorous academic subjects of the past, but I don’t.  Those GCSE courses that Mr Gove has so disparaged have enriched and enhanced many young adults, and given them real insights into how to problem solve and work in a sustained manner over a longer period of time.  Narrowing the curriculum in vain pursuit of a better educational programme is not what the other leading economies are doing; yet again, we are being given a national remedy based on little more than wind and hot air.  Thanks goodness as an Independent school, we can plot our path very carefully for the benefit of all of our pupils, whatever their ability.

Enough of a knee jerk rant, there will be plenty of that to follow in the press and media for some time to come.  I am turning my attention to the concept of ‘Blended Learning’, as printed in the pages of TESpro last Friday.
Blended Learning
It might sound a bit reactionary, but I have decided there is no such thing after all as Blended Learning.  The phrase implies that this is something new, that has arisen with the advent of new technology in recent years, without which it is not possible to survive in 21st century education.  Yet in reality, whatever the technology that has developed across the generations, those that follow their forebears have simply learned in a variety of ways and from a variety of sources, stood on the shoulders of giants and made their mark.  TESPro actually suggests that we all be better off just talking about Learning, and exploring new ways of undertaking that activity and sharing those ways, for good or ill with those that follow.

Google chum Mark Allen and I had a brief exchange over the weekend about the benefits of the latest little vanity purchase we have both made, the Nexus 7, a smart little tablet that Google produce for £150 or so, and that now is rarely seen apart from my pocket.  Mark asked me whether I had seen anything useful in terms of classroom practice I could share.

10 Android 7s out there on trial
I have got 10 of the little beasties out there on trial and it does rather seem that the pot of gold beyond the rainbow is now right under our noses.  As a straightforward consumer device for research, reading books, camera, calculator, communicating with others using a range of texting and cloud based services, typing up work and such like, the Nexus 7 and its bigger brother and competitor, Apple’s iPad, actually do what pretty much most people need.  That is until some real work needs to get done, where either a better keyboard and functionality is needed, so step up the Chromebook, Laptop or PC.
But since it appears that sustained coursework etc. is now on its way out, as we return to the sharp edge of terminal tests and knowledge based assessments, I suspect the slates are going to come into their own at the higher levels of GCSE and A level.  Lower down, we are still going to need to provide learning variety for our young boys and girls, and books, solid little things with pages that turn and covered with words to explore, chew and tumble in our minds’ eye will stay important.  What price the sight this summer of tech savvy children leaving their gadgets at the door of our Art workshops held in a disused shop in Maidenhead Town centre, swapped for the joy of learning to use brush, paint, craft materials and a dose of inspiration from young artists who know a little about showing learners what colour on paper looks like.

So I’ll keep both my Nexus7 and pencil and pad in my pocket for the foreseeable future, both to keep just one step ahead or so of my students, as you never know which actually you will need next. After all, you can’t mark a piece of timber with a table when you want to cut it! 

When I first became the leader of Claires Court Senior Boys school, my title was Master-in-charge.  My father was my boss; four years previously, he had detached himself off up to Ridgeway to establish a separate space for the education of boys aged 5 to 11, whilst Claires Court morphed from provisioning the prep school age range 6 to 13 to teaching up to O’Levels. David Wilding was and remains a remarkable man, who knew how to build schools to last. He was certainly not going to let me have wings and fly solo in my first headship, taking over as I had from Michael Randell who had found three years running the senior boys school a good step back into the private sector from leading a secondary state school PE department. Michael moved on to head up the Oratory Prep School and create there a powerhouse of the Prep School boarding world. My father had through his time in National Service at the end of the Second World War become a second lieutenant in the household cavalry, driving tanks in Germany. He built in our school a real understanding of Chain of Command, like the miltary, we all had to know our place and role in his ordered community.

My first week in charge saw the local rep from Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools come in to see me, feel my collar, check the resisters, check the boundary fencing of the school and give me advice on how to complete the corporal punishment book and where to buy my canes from. I really don’t think HMI was on contract for the ‘Mr Wippy cane company’, but it did seem rather odd that throughout the visit which lasted at least an hour, we did not once speak about education.  My readers will be comforted by the fact that I did not ‘cane’ pupils for long, but at the same time, good friends and parents of the school such as the Dibles, Dunsbiers and Dunsters and  whose boys I had in my charge made it quite clear I had to keep up that tradition until I had earned the authority to use my ‘something better’ approach. After all, as another pupil of that era, Patrick Fanning would tell me time and again, ‘Sir, a good boy is a well beaten boy’.

Throughout the 1980s I would continue to take a very keen interest in the broader developments within education, meeting with Sir Keith Joseph, architect under Thatcher of so much in 1964 or 65 for example albeit briefly to understand his plans for the merger of O’levels with CSEs and the development of the curricula for GCSEs. Let’s be quite clear, at that time I had no idea who was in charge of education, and I don’t think anyone else did either, and such was the wishy washy nature of central civil government’s role in education that Sir Keith could personally choose to authorise each new subject curriculum. I am no fan of the old O’Level, which by the early 1980s had become a utterly sterile vehicle for teaching and learning.  For example, half the Chemistry O’Level course involved learning of the industrial Chemistry of the Victorians and early 20th century.  I remember teaching children how to label the Bessemer converter (a regular favourite) and was marking their work when my father-in-law Jack, an expert in Steel stockholding,  visited one Saturday in 1978; “James, no wonder schools are failing their pupils if you are teaching about a piece of kit that last saw use in the 1930s!”

That was a salutary lesson for me, and I shifted completely to a modern science programme based on Nuffield Science, where process rather than key facts led learning. My early science education was supported by great giants of the independent sector at Oundle, Radley and Uppingham Colleges, and the passion that us young scientists shared over the Easter Holiday Science course for prep school teachers lives with me still.  We were inspired to become leaders of thinking about teaching and learning because of the sheer vacuum that existed then. Publishers were so set in their ways that we all became authors of our own little ‘books’, created using hand copiers and methylated spirits known as Banda machines.  My ‘Idiots Guide to Common Entrance Science’ was soon being sniffed eagerly by children age 10 to 13 at Claires Court, providing as it did a short cut to the learning needed to pass CE.

As our school expanded through the Thatcher years, leadership from the Secretary of States for education successfully brought in GCSEs. Far more importantly, central control of what was to be taught in schools from 5 to 16 became order of the day. The National Curriculum was born in 1988 creating a minimum basic requirement for content in all schools, enabling the comparison between schools through league tables, whilst at the same time creating a free market in which schools could operate.  Ok that’s the History lesson over, so I’ll get to the point.

Since 1988 central government’s grip on state schools has got tighter and tighter, and now in 2012 will see for the first time the majority of secondary schools, perhaps even all schools in the direct control of the DfE as Academies. Claires Court is now surrounded by them, offering as they do (according to politicians) the chance to become like those of us in the private sector, independent of local authority control and therefore more likely to become successful schools. Mark my words, this is the most dangerous, unproven and ludicrous development in school management to have happened anywhere in the world.  The thing about Local Authorities is that actually they are local, have authority and can provide knowledgeable support and guidance. National government will be no better at regulating schools than they are banks, health or our geographical borders.  As my father would be the first to say, ‘where, oh where, is the Chain of Command’!

We will see develop in our area of the eastern Thames Valley as elsewhere a received wisdom that the narrowing of the curriculum is a good thing, that Year 8 for example is when GCSE choices are made and the concept of a broad secondary education for three years be neutered by the decision to required children before they are 13 years old consider in which subjects they wish to drop/specialise.  It is not just ludicrously premature, but it flies in the face of the established criteria in the leading world exconomies that breadth is best to 18!

The same ideas are washing over the primary years too. Mr Gove might well speak of the need for languages and computing to be taught as early as possible, but in actual practice he is introducing more testing of the core not less. And schools of course are monetised by meeting the wishes of their masters, and what is measured becomes what is important to be taught. As the locally based subect advisors of the LEA are stripped away from supporting schools, nearby expertise will be replaced by on-line formulaic advice web-pages, helping schools line up their development plans to ensure that bench marks are met.  Oh deary me.

It is humans that make the difference in all command and control systems, as all the experts know.  Yep, human error is something to worry about, but I’d much rather rely on my father’s decisions in the turret of his tank that a 21st century robo-cop instead. It’s an eternal truth I am afraid that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, just look at the unfolding crisis in Syria, for example. And what follows the authoritarian grab for control is the inevitable chaos that follows; just as Syria’s stablity is now completely gone, so has that of state education in the United Kingdom. And the Chaos has now begun to arise all around.  Next post will offer solution…

So which will stop first, the rain, or the bad news about Banking or the frantic pace of speculative change in Education?

OK, for those that don’t like rhetorical questions, we can dispense with the first; as that fine upstanding man from the BBC said this evening on the radio, our weather seems to have got ‘stuck’.  Stateside they have heat waves, pondside we get the jet stream delivering cold, wet and windy summers. This one has given us the wettest June since records began, an average 6 inches, so just as well South East Water still have a hosepipe ban on us in Maidenhead, then, because clearly we have still not yet had enough water.  What upsets me most about hosepipe bans (when it is raining cats and dogs) is that the water companies can get away with leaking water mains, because no one can see the puddles from the burst pipes, because we are too busy wading through the flood waters.

Now I am one of the greatest fans of the British banking sector.  It has looked after my money for 43 years, it has helped me gain a mortgage, enter the property market, run a business and find investments funds for the future.  It is now doing so for my family, working as they do elsewhere in the UK, they too need a safe secure place to keep their earnings and debts.  Moving up a notch, world banking has helped so many of us in the UK, drawing investments in etc. that UK plc would be dead in the water if we didn’t have it.  Whilst the UK banks were going to the wall 4 years ago, we were all told then that European banks were so much safer because they had invested much less in derivatives and bundles of loan stock.  ‘That’s all right then’, said the sages, because those banks had their money tied up in good old bricks and mortar.  Now we read that those ‘bricks and mortar’ homes are the cheek by jowl, megalopolis by blocks of flats for sale from Ventimiglia in the north of Italy across to Sagres in Portugal. Rather more Sand and Tender than we would like, you might say.  And this weekend we learn that the ‘good old boys’ were fixing it for their friends, so that the books would look better and reputations could be saved.  Fat chance that now.  Barclay’s Chief Exec Bob Diamond* wrote to his staff and I quote “We all know that these events are not representative of our culture, and it is my responsibility to get to the bottom of that and resolve it.”  I wonder what culture he is thinking of then, that previously bundled up the derivative stuff, or fueled the disastrous subsequent property crashes elsewhere in Europe and indeed has left its scars deep in towns in the less affluent parts of the UK.

As for education, we have got to feel sorry for the poor men at the ministry, who can clearly have no idea what their Secretary of State is going to say next.  From ‘Bring back O’level’s’ through ‘Grammar tests for primary pupils’ to ‘compulsory phonics’ tests for 6 year olds, the headlines extolling the benefits of yet more change roll out.  Just about every vested battallion is up in arms at the fact that Mr Gove asks for professional advice and then ignores it, preferring instead to cherry picks from convenient ‘world research’ data, and place his personal beliefs above sound pedagogic theory.  As one of his own advisors for the Primary review, Andrew Pollard commented last week “It is overly prescriptive in two ways. One is that it is extremely detailed, and the other is the emphasis on linearity – it implies that children learn ‘first this, then that’. Actually, people learn in a variety of different ways, and for that you need flexibility – for teachers to pick up on that and vary things accordingly”.

Michael Gove spoke recently at one of the day conferences hosted by Public Schools that litter this time of year, this one being Brighton College, Independent School of the Year 2012.  You can read his speech here – http://goo.gl/2enra, and in some senses it is an educational advertisement of the highest order for our sector, because so many of our past pupils occupy seats of power and influence, in Government, in the Press and Media, on stage and screen, in the England cricket team and across the Olympic squads.  Actually I have banged on about this for years, for without the independent sector, we would not have exam bodies, a military or judiciary, and that’s another side to the same story.  For most who succeed in life, you have to learn to take risks, to learn to serve others first, to study beyond any reason for learning other than the joy itself.

Not a day goes by without news of another initiative.  Today, it’s the forced study of English and Maths to 18 for everyone who ‘fails their GCSEs next summer’,  I read on the BBC. Yet for many of us who run successful, yet diverse schools in the independent sector, this change management that goes from ‘back to the future’ to a new ‘funding fad’ to reward schools willing to toe the government line, makes no sense.  It should surprise no-one that talent in its droves continues to emerge from our sector.  Take a look at the simple news story running on the Independent Schools Association website – http://goo.gl/BLNrh – about the ISA National Festival of Sport, that brought together over 800 athletes from 32 schools across the country in Nottingham and Leicester this last weekend. Any school could go, there was no pre-selection of athletes, no prior selection of the fittest – for our school as for so many others, we took pupils who could run, jump, throw, kick and swim a bit and hoped they would enjoy a national festival in this Olympic year. For this to happen, teachers across the country had to give up months of time to plan, prepare and bring this to fruition, and for my school, it seems we came back with over 100 medals, including 3 major relay golds and 1 silver.  And so many other schools will have gone back, not just with medals, but with memories and yet another stir of the creative and competitive pot.  And please bear in mind, no such national festival event has been run for any other group of schools, state or independent in 2012 – how sad is that for a nation apparently that sought to inspire its young to leave the couch and take to the track!

One major reason for our sector’s success is its size.  Not in terms of the percentage of the country educated (that’s only 7%), but because of the size of the institutions.  Claires Court may be 1000 children strong, but we are organised into 6 working units.  The average secondary Independent school is less than 400 in number, and those that are bigger, such as my nearest rival Eton College, organise their 300+ boys a year into much smaller house units with plenty of space for peer mentoring and vertical learning.  And the point is that ‘we’ have done it so for years.  That’s why every child pretty much who wants to find what they are good at can, not because they have to pass a phonics, grammar, English or maths test at any age, but because they are expected to excel in something.  A second is because we really do develop them young enough to love competition, despite the possibility of failure.  Later this week, boys in Year 7 and 8 conduct their separate Drama festivals, and there are prizes for all, from comic genius (unintentional) to best actor. The girls are going out under canvas and expeditioning to take risks and get wet, and the staff are too. The curriculum may have gone to ‘the Olympics’ , having run the world last week, we get to race robots against woodlice in science it seems, that’s physics taking on Biology by the way. But it’s not just fancy stuff, the History projects and English writing carries on, with teachers trusted to lead by example in the best way they know how.

Track record is all about developing trust, and our sectors’ previous looks pretty attractive just now.  In harsh economic times, there will be indepedent schools that have borrowed too heavily, and news of Llandovery College’s inability to pay this month’s wages is just the latest in steady trickle of private school bad news stories. Yet even in trouble, parents will know that this Welsh school gave their children every possible chance in life to succeed, in a culture that was far more than force feeding 1950s spellings. I wish ill on no one, from bankers to politicians, but I do not appreciate those that feel it is easy to be clever in complex areas such as weather forecasting, banking or education.  We all know how difficult it is to get the predictions for a dry spell right, and economics has got no easier, whether you cheat or not.  In education, there is no simple fix, but so much evidence that what works is very visible and in our midst as I write.

Despite the rain, the cricket is going well thank you, with one of our 12 year olds, Kieran, bowling a double wicket maiden last week, and then in harness with another, Tom, helping win the Berkshire club U12 championship on Sunday. Semi-finals and finals in a day; some would say cruelty and beyond boys so young, others of course that without such challenge, you’ll never learn of what you are capable. I spent much of the weekend in the company of those for whom sport is perhaps less important than leadership and challenge, with 19 boys and girls on expedition on the Chilterns’ edge. And when you see the very real pleasure Laura got, from taking off her 15Kg rucksack off her 14 year old back after a day hiking up hill and down dale, I don’t doubt she will become a leader in the future.  I’ll just keep her and her friends learning a little bit longer, about themselves and their capabilities above all.  You can’t fail the Duke of Edinburgh award you see, just find you have to keep striving a little bit more to achieve it! And then you move up a level…

*Obviously Bob’s work was easy – he spotted he was to blame, so jumped before he was pushed (news Tuesday 3 July).