A Principled view

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).

As readers of my first Principal’s Blog of June will know, this sceptred Isle is doing my head in at present, what with ‘the rain that raineth every day’. How on earth is a child to learn to value the ‘Summer game’ when, despite the very best of a groundsman’s efforts, the green sward is actually unplayable without flippers and water-wings?

Back at school today, and it’s clear that whilst many enjoyed the ‘diamond’ celebrations, other teaching and support staff succombed to the typical teacher lergy – having burnt the candle at both ends by the end of May, those who permitted themsleves an exhausted slump let down their immune system barriers too!

There are so many more major education news stories breaking this week, it is going to be difficult to keep up. First things first then.

• It is reported today that Mr Gove is moving rapidly forward with the dismantling of the National Curriculum at primary school level, and replacing it with something that is even more prescriptive than before. Having decided that NC levels don’t work, he has demanded that a replacement set of assessments need to be in place for May 2015. In the hands of skillful teachers, pretty much any curriculum is exciting imaginative and rewarding; I dread the compulsory arrival of ‘all pupils being able to recite their 12 times table at 9’ or the imposition of synthetic phonics over and above a more blended programme. What I think is right is that schools must present their pupils with real challenge. The current advantage for our kind of school is that we know this, and that all of our children must thrive, not just jump hoops. Read more about the Govt. proposals here – http://goo.gl/LMqK8
• On the digital side, the ICT national curriculum has been retained, but schools are free to do something better, and I honestly think ISA schools can continue to lead from the front in this area. Critically important is to get the mix right, and a great picture of what needs to be achieved has been produced by NAACE.

The critique of this disapplication is that schools lack the imagination to devise a better curriculum and need firm guidance. This so smacks of NC dependency – as teachers I really do thing we should be able to devise great things for children to do, and they are very capable of leading us forward given some encouragement.

• I fear the arrival of compulsory MFL at primary school level, one of the new recommendations; in the right hands, this can be a liberating experience, but how are state school teachers to differentiate between the increased requirements to encourage rote learning in English, Maths and Science, and not make that fundamental mistake of force feeding 7 year olds vocabulary and grammar to learn at the same time in the chosen target language. It really is a confusing call to arms – more of that below. In the meantime, I wonder how the British Dyslexia Association will advise their advice downwards to include 7 year olds on how SENCos can support MFL – http://goo.gl/iEaqT . Expect a new raft of ‘statementing’ to rapidly follow, as Parents, whose own education made none of these demands, show they have neither the ability or patience to keep up with Mr Gove’s new way of learning.
• The whole problem to my mind in ‘going back to the future’, building in all these ‘memory’ challenges for children is that we don’t seem to have the 21st Century young adult in mind when going about the rough drafting of such changes, let alone the younger learner. Lordy me, how on earth are they to keep up with their recitation of Cargoes by John Masefield, a party piece apparently of mine, when aged 8 (perhaps the kind of verse Mr Gove has in mind?):

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,

With a cargo of diamonds,

Emeralds, amythysts,

Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

With a cargo of Tyne coal,

Road-rails, pig-lead,

Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays”.

• Just think of the amazing curriculum week you could wrap this poem around, offering as it does in under 100 words a possible insight into everything a child should ever know, from the history of the ancients to the boom and bust cycles in our Island’s economy, with the whole problem of the mediterranean’s alternative economy to the Euro as a sandwich in the middle! As the DfE gently stated after Mr Gove announced his curriculum – they’ll be saying a bit more after the drafts have been further consulted upon! You can have your say here – http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/
• University status is now going to be conferred onto colleges down to 1000 students in size – http://goo.gl/eEYoj. What is happening here is that those specialist University colleges such as St Mary’s and Marjons can grow up and join the big boys, even though they are small – is this not grade inflation?

One of my google thingies is a search on all matters relating to ‘Closure of Independent Schools’ which automatically pops results into my in-box daily. As a result, I have been following the heoric struggles of a number of our independent schools in England to keep afloat despite the stormy economic weather we have faced for years now. Well done to Chetwynde School in Barrow that announced last week that it had found a mystery benefactor and its future was secured for next year – a story that has run for weeks – http://goo.gl/bnH0D. Bad luck to Norman Court School near Winchester that lost its benefactor, and is closing next month – http://goo.gl/3U282.

What amazes me is that there is now more than one English curriculum school a day opening outside of the UK, actually over 400 a year – that’s more than in ISA, HMC, GSA or SHMIS! There simply are not going to be enough English teachers around to keep them populated with suitable, qualfied teaching staff at this rate, but it’s a great British export of which we should be really proud. In many ways, it’s so easy if you are running a school abroad to work out what your first MFL is going to be – English of course, unless you are close to the Chinese economic area. Malaysia feels it has really struggled since it abandoned English as one of its core subjects, though its great rival Singapore is now much more actively teaching Mandarin. Do bear in mind that India overtakes China in 20 years time as the most populous nation, and since English is that countries dominant language of business and education, I guess our language will continue to give the rest a good run for their money.

But that growth of English education abroad does provide our sector in the UK real opportunities to find friends and partner up. I am a great advocate of cross-country blogging, where primary schools in Quads of Four join up to meet and write together – you can find out more from Deputy headteacher Dave Mitchell, and do give it a go! “QuadBlogging is a leg up to an audience for your class/school blog. Over the last 12 months 70,000 pupils have been involved in QuadBlogging from 2000 classes in over 35 countries. The concept is simple, either watch the short video to the right or keep reading…http://goo.gl/OVG7L “

And finally, spare a thought for those half-term holiday revellers whose caravans got caught in the floods in Wales – here some remarkable footage from YouTube.

(this newsletter was also published for the benefit of the 300 schools in ISA as part of a weekly briefing I provide).

I studied Twelfth Night for my English Literature O’ Level extermination back in the day. That was the first time I was introduced to the heroic nature of clowns & fools, who are it must be said obligatory characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Now I am not going to bore you, dear reader, with an essay on the finer points of the Bard or indeed other authors, past and present. The simple fact is, whether writing Comedy or Tragedy, Shakespeare took it upon himself to introduce a character or group of characters, who by their words or actions could both lighten the load and bring broader social comment to bear.

The Fool inTwelfth night is introduced to us as Feste, but from that point onwards is simply referred to as ‘Fool’. Towards the end of the play, he has this song to give:

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain, it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain, it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain, it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

And in April, May and June 2012, hasn’t it just rained!  So we can of course be certain that whilst Twelfth Night is set on the Adriatic shores of modern Croatia, in practice our Will is drawing on his intimate knowledge of British weather.  So pity the modern day entertainers, be they actors, athletes, singers, sportsmen or whoever.  In that time of the year when the  calendar is crammed full of outdoor events, isn’t it a crying shame that the weather can’t be relied upon to behave and give us some balmy climate fit for purpose.

As I write, the rain is scudding across the window panes early morning as we return from half-term.  Like the Monarch of our Isles, we won’t be prevented from making a really good fist of school, at work and play for the remaining 5 weeks and weekends of term – didn’t the Queen do so well last weekend? But perhaps like that Fool from Shakespeare, I have been made somewhat melancholic by the interminable drizzle that has punctured our cricket season so effectively! Thanks goodness athletics, DofE, rowing and sailing seem slightly better prepared for a ‘wet’ life!

I have been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently, in part because my time has been filled with some quite extraordinary school-based activity. Now that’s not just the usual business of school, busy every day clearly, and now with the examination season well under way, this morning we have over 600 children being put through their paces. That change in operational behaviour needs care and consideration to implement the short whole school exam season effectively.

The new business I am about is the whole scale review of our curriculum currently under way, brought about entirely through our own choice. Now the review is not just about the explicit set of classroom activities our teachers use to engage their pupils; we are including all of the other things we cause to make happen too, from homework, clubs, activities, trips, residentials and other opportunities.

Review does not mean whole root and branch reform of everything of course, because so much of what we do is effective, engaging, exciting and dare I say even fun. But I do suspect that our review is going to cause some more radical reorientation, because the removal of examination by bite-size does mean we have time to build and develop rather more carefully the reading, writing and investigative, skills of our pupils, so that they stand the test of terminal examination at the end of a 2, 3 or 4 year course. Let me explain further.

Currently, with a GCSE syllabus broken down into between 4 and 8 assessment events, with some resit opportunities for those modules’ controlled assessments which did not give high enough outcomes, there has been precious little time or need to build in deep reading and research activities. BBC GCSE bitesize and of course many other publishers, including the exam boards themselves, have produced umpteen examples of multiple choice assessments which learners have used to good effect to rehearse and improve their ability to respond under pressure. The examiners themselves have highlighted the very specific responses they are looking for in answers involving continuous prose, one way for Language, another way for Literature for example on the same extract. Successful learners have been able to quote this assessment mantra, understood the requirements to lay down with a trowel in like manner when answering questions on Shakespeare. It has been much less about the ‘book’ and much more about ‘pleasing the examiner’.

Put simply, short-termism has been the order of the day. If you can learn all that you need on Forces and Motion in 3 months, take an assessment on that knowledge and move-on, then there is neither time, space or need to build in activities that build more profound understanding and embed more permanently the subject skills and techniques required. But that comes to an end from this September for exam groups beneath Year 11, and it is quite clear that the long range intentions of those that manage UK exam factory plc. are to leverage similar change at A level too.

Exploring further the research evidence flowing out of Ofqual, OfSted, DfE, other national and international bodies, it’s clear that the England approach of National Curriculum levelling itself is running to the end of its course, providing now a corrupting influence over what happens in state schools, with its target-led approach to raising standards. In addition, whether it be for the early years, for specific subject based education such as Mathematics or more generally in terms of subject acceleration toward public examination below 16, early teaching of more advanced skills and subject matter is almost entirely counter-productive. Full-time socialisation might be important for those under 6, but starting academic work and losing a child’s natural curiosity to play at this age is wholly counterproductive. As yesterday’s report on Maths education shows by Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Schools, , accelerating children towards GCSE grade C early “is at the expense of adequate understanding and mastery of mathematics needed to succeed at A level and beyond”.

One of the great purposes of Education to keep learners open to learning in all subject areas for as long as possible, to build innate competency as deeply as one can, and to refuse to let go of those ready to give-up, to keep them engaged so that when that next step of intellectual development happens, the individual child has remained open to the possibility that they ‘can’ achieve after all. The leading countries for achievement (as identified through the OECD and their PISA research) do so by starting education later, by having a less crowded curriculum, by using assessment testing for diagnostic purposes (rather than for league tables) for intervention and support, and by keeping their learners as broad as possible for as long as possible.

So it’s our job as educators to keep our young boys and girls open and prepared for future challenges. They need to be able to analyse, reason and communicate effectively, and have the capacity to continue learning throughout life. The fact that the word ‘teacher’ only appears in this essay twice is critically important; the process of education is not about ‘us’ the adults. We know our responsibility is to keep the child at the centre of each learning opportunity; the room they find to day-dream or switch off might be important too on occasion, though that’s another blog. Sure, there is a body of knowledge to wade through, poems to memorise, languages to practice and skills to acquire, but the plan needs to be long-term and joined up. It takes 7 years of practice, or 10,000 hours (dependent upon which research model you use) for a dancer to be genuinely able to improvise, for a sportsman to reach the peak of their game under pressure, or dare I say a Historian to write a great essay; that degree of discipline builds deep knowledge and technique, and we should wish that for all in our schools.