A Principled view

Date:  9 July 2011

Time:  2 pm to 8 pm

Time of this entry 10 pm, Monday 11 July 2011.

When a school celebrates its 50th birthday…

First upload of pictures has happened, two more to follow, here’s an animoto of some of the pictures – http://goo.gl/AuQev

With so many lovely people, families, friends joining us to celebrate our Golden Jubilee finale, it seems sensible to let their words speak for us in this context:

“Just a short note to say thank you very much for such a lovely day on Saturday, and all the hard work that must have gone into organising everything.  We had a lovely time amongst lovely friends!! ”

” I’m sorry I didn’t see you to thank you personally on Saturday.  I had a great, relaxing time – thank you very much for arranging the day.”

“A big ‘thank you’ for a lovely afternoon on Saturday – R and I enjoyed it very much – as did everyone there!  Well done to the organisers too!!

“Just a massively large thank you from our family for such a fabulous day on Saturday. It was brilliant and a lovely way for us to remember your fabulous school. Do please pass on our thanks to all those involved for a job seriously well done.”

“Just to say that Saturday was lovely – such a civilised way to spend an afternoon.  Good food and the Jazz Band and Steel Band were great.  Many thanks.”

“Many thanks for a super afternoon on Saturday. So pleased weather held out. It was a great event.”

“Just a brief note to say thank you for a most enjoyable end of Jubilee Celebrations party on Saturday.  We thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere, the music, the food and all the side shows and activities.  All in all a very appropriate end to the years celebrations and for our family a fitting end to our association with Claires Court.”

…takes my breath away, and makes me proud to lead  my school.

Being in charge at the start of any academic year is an onerous responsibility – the who, what, where, when, why and how of school planning has to be tested throughout the organisation, ensuring that at every level, we actually have a plan.  Knowing what we are going to do to monitor and review the plan in the light of time and circumstance, and giving time and space for that review to happen are key parts of my work. Sounds boring of course, but then here’s the bite…

As any school term comes to an end, our work builds to a crescendo of activity, and as each year builds to an end so the opportunities for me to enjoy what we do, to witness the shades, tones, variety and spice of school life grow too. By the way, most who know me professionally understand that I have a passion for educational research; with Claires Court covering every age and type of day education to be found in England, I do tend to compare and contrast what we do against norms to be found elsewhere.  Our target remains to be outstanding in what we do, so the comparisons can make colleagues within CCS feel the collar tighten! I’ll give three examples of that joy of my work, and you’ll have to be the judge of my idea of fun!

I look forward to the publication of AR’s annual report on “What kids are reading” (not on-line) – read a blog here: http://www.ransom.co.uk/blog/?p=501– and I share the reports once it’s in with my English teaching and Library colleagues. The report is a bit skewed, as the books have to well known enough to be available digitally on the AR system, and I don’t extrapolate too far from the evidence they give. The concern growing (in the nation as well as in the report) is that our children are learning to read well, but as they hit the teenage years, children make choices that cause their reading age to regress quite severely; the easier and shorted the read the better is the stark conclusion. However, what fascinates me more is what children write about, and we’ve a number of projects on-going which encourage such writing, one of which being our Year 6 girls mob-written summer novel.

I say ‘novel’ but it’s really more a collection of short stories; this year’s edition is entitled ‘The  Dice Strikes 6’. We are into the third edition of the work, featuring the remarkably familiar sounding J.K Wilding, the bad tempered school proprietor, whose ground-hog day mission remains to recover a pair of lost dice stolen from him by the then Year 6 two years ago, the dice passing on to successive generations on girls in the prep. top year. An all-seeing, wise though often rather grumpy Mr Carruthers also populates the story; as form teacher of Year 6 he’s inevitably part of the narrative and like JK, an adult male likely to have much of his dignity removed by the emotional and descriptive work collaborated on by a group of 11 year old girls. Suffice it to say that I have been presented with this year’s book, and it’s a hoot!  Once it has been digitised, I’ll share the link. No great work of literature perhaps, but Year 6 have had a lot of fun, writing!

Underpinning extraordinary amounts of what we do is our mission to teach about creativity. Having bigged up the girls, it is only fair I point out the boys are no less active as story builders, and here’s how they done it recently using paints and camera –  http://goo.gl/nvYmq.  It is always going to be a big issue that some get to go on cricket tour and others can’t; if the alternatives come out as cool as our recent provision has, then it’s difficult for any to get upset.  The two adults in the picture series are Ridgeway’s Art teacher Martin Goddard and our Artist in Residence, Frances Ackland-Snow. Frances is leading our summer development of the Arts award through our Summer camp programme, a really exciting development now jumping down to the primary years, and one she is helping us to pioneer.  A lot of OfSTED ‘speak’ talks about giving pupils opportunities to take responsibility for their own learning; I’d always hope we do that well, but whether you’d actually leave that task to the Zombie boys of Film club, I’m not so certain.

Every year, including this Jubilee one, our Parents, Teachers and pupils collaborate to host a summer fete, this year held on Saturday 18 June. The great danger with any Saturday in the Summer is that it will of course clash with so many other events, so we have to be really inventive to ensure its ‘attractions’ are worth the visit by a school community willing to spend. Sure it is a fundraiser for our PTAs, but more importantly it provides our community, past and present, to come to school and enjoy some fun. You can see some photos I took on the day here – http://goo.gl/ONya3 . The novelties this year include a Dodgem car arena, and (I suspect an ISA school first) an inflatable ‘Pub’. Amusingly it was pointed out to me that the Pub seemed to be on occasion overpopulated by school staff, though since the senior boys’ staff were deployed to ‘people’ it, that seemed a base accusation. Suffice it to say that both were a great ‘hit’, not unsurprisingly so when the weather went foul and our visitors sought indoor attractions for shelter!

The highlights will continue every day to the end of term, across sports, drama, music, academic or recreational, often both. Off-stage now, most of my work is ensuring we are setting up the best we can for the next academic year; close to deadline activities such as new staff and pupils to be interviewed and welcomed into our community, critical path analysis of calendar and timetable creation so we create a plan for tomorrow that looks as or more effective than that for today. But the on-stage bit just couldn’t be better; I am delighted by the achievements of those I work with, both adults and children, employees and customers alike. When two dads, Felipe Foy and Chris Basley, give up their day job for the week to ensure we have an extraordinary funfare established to celebrate our Golden 50 years of achievement, I am genuinely humbled by their extraordinary efforts on our behalf.  Talk about ‘ordinary’? – talk about ‘extraordinary’, please!

The highlights will continue every day to the end of term, across sports, drama, music, academic or recreational, often both. Off-stage now, most of my work is ensuring we are setting up the best we can for the next academic year; close to deadline activities such as new staff and pupils to be interviewed and welcomed into our community, critical path analysis of calendar and timetable creation so we create a plan for tomorrow that looks as or more effective than that for today. But the on-stage bit just couldn’t be better; I am delighted by the achievements of those I work with, both adults and children, employees and customers alike. When two dads, Felipe Foy and Chris Basley, give up their day job for the week to ensure we have an extraordinary funfare established to celebrate our Golden 50 years of achievement, I am genuinely humbled by their extraordinary efforts on our behalf.  Talk about ‘ordinary’? – talk about ‘extraordinary’, please!

In my efforts to understand and contribute in the rapidly changing world involving learning, my research is both wide ranging and eclectic.  Which it needs to be,  because none of us have any idea where the next good idea that takes hold is going to come from. Married to a Historian to her bone marrow, I am often humbled by my wife, Jenny’s grasp of the sweep of History. We spent half-term down near Dartmoor, and made our first foray into the rocks near Hound tor. It’s an extraordinary place, not least because of the impressive pile of rocks and boulders that give this pile its name, and as legend has it, Conon Doyle the inspiration for ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.  As we wandered around the surrounding moor, we came across the footings of a deserted village, Houndtor, well written up I discover on the internet (http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/hound_sett.htm), and nearby across the way a much later granite quarry of the 1820s, well served at the time by a tramway, built of the same indestructible material (http://goo.gl/0DZLA ).

One place, 2 completely contrasting deserted centres of conurbation, one listed in the Domesday book, the other responsible for the stones that make up  part of the British Museum amongst many fine buildings nearer to the quarry in Devon, both falling foul of changing times and technologies. The medieval village it is thought failed largely due to the rapidly worsening weather of the time, making grain harvest impossible, with perhaps a final sweep of the Black Death to depopulate it completely.  Five hunder years later, however lovely Devon granite was in the 1850s, it came at a much higher price than that quarried further west in Cornwall, and the quarry and its workings were abandoned pretty much immediately.  The granite rails that made the tramway were no longer as easy to manipulate and use as the new ‘Iron’ rails, and so were abandoned too.

Around the time of the closure of the Haytor granite quarry, across the pond in Washington, Abraham Lincoln was preparing his annual message to Congress for December 1, 1862.  Whilst it turned out was a mainly routine report (if anything can be regarded as such during a period of extraordinary civil war), it was within this message that Lincoln gave first voice to his controversial measures such as voluntary colonization of slaves and compensated emancipation (in short, his proposal to pay the Slave plantations off).  He chose to soften Congress to his plan through this great rhetoric: “We can succeed only by concert. It is not “can any of us imagine better?” but, “can we all do better?” The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country”

Moving on 150 years, and surveying the current educational landscape, I can’t help feel we could do with some one of Lincoln’s courage and stature to help bring some sense out of what seems little better than a scrap heap of granite chippings! It’s depressing to read that teenage literacy is plumbing new depths; we are making good progress apparently up to Year 5, but beyond then, the books of choice to read are those that are easy and short! Now my essay is not just about a lack of interest in books such as those written by Conon Doyle, but the formidable problem that has developed over the past twenty years as we have tried to open up higher tiers of study to our pupils. It seems contrary, but by making specifications so clear about what needs to be studied for Science or History or English, we have reduced the canon of work to be studied, such that reading in depth per se is no longer a requirement either for study at school, or dare I suggest at University too.  And if the situation seems to be a concern at the top of the educational tree, it looks even more worrying for those in charge of schools at the start of the process.

“Thousands of children ‘not ready for school’ at five” is the headline from this weekend’s Daily Telegraph, going on to claim that  Children are failing to develop vital physical and communication skills after being robbed of interaction with mothers and fathers during the early years.  The paper reports that these are the findings of Sally Goddard Blythe, director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology in Chester, said many early developmental problems could be overcome with old fashioned one-on-one interaction between parents and children.  The worrying bit on this doom-mongering is that Ofsted’s research doesn’t actually back this up entirely; reported in the same article, Ofsted claimed earlier this year that growing numbers of schoolchildren were diagnosed as having special needs when they were actually “no different” to other pupils.

And here’s the rub; throughout our travels in the west country over half-term, I saw children and families at recreation together; some were tethered with ropes as they climbed the more serious granite Tors, other were just flying their kites, or crabbing on the jetties, all seriously engaged and enjoying the moment. It is the frequency of such interactions that learning happens, between peoples working together. As I sit and write, a solitary activity it must be said in the early hours of the morning, I do believe that Mrs Goddard Blythe has it right; it’s the interaction that is key, not the passive entertainment that is often easier to just receive.  Reading takes effort, as does climbing or fishing; they are skills to be acquired, and for which no excuses must be made.  There will be those for whom reasonable adjustment needs to be made, but a rock to be climbed won’t get easier by cladding it in scaffolding, or a Kite to be flown if its lead made shorter. Be sure in your parenting and you’ll be rewarded by your children’s achievements. As one Dad made clear to his small son who was rejoicing in his collection of estuary crabs, all scuttling in tangles in the bottom of the bucket. “Why must I put them back, Dad?” squealed the boy. “the crabs have their life to lead too” replied his father.  And I thought  “so that others can have the fun of catching them too”.  And we were both right!

Each week, I write to a private audience of over 400 teachers and fellow professionals in Independent Schools, in a newsletter to highlight topical issues in education. The network is known as the ISANet, and as my latest is almost entirely topical on national issues, I thought I would share it live so to speak.

Half-Term Newsletter 23 May 2011 

Dear colleagues

It beginning to get a bit hard to write a suitable digest each Monday night to inform, highlight, extend and occasionally amuse – this is because no week now passes without many massive news hits that have direct impact upon schools!

ISC are up in front of the Upper Tribunal, sitting at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to challenge the Charity Commission’s ‘narrow’ definition of Public Benefit.  It’s quite obvious that this case is far more explosive than some might suggest – http://goo.gl/BV3RB gives you a flavour of the sharp debate.  As a proprietor, I am watching this very carefully indeed, as this is an ill-wind, a court case to have been avoided like the plague.  In the current climate, we don’t need yet more bad news about private education.

Sticking with the BBC site, here’s the news of the proposed new East London Free School sponsored by a whole bunch of Public Schools for the sub £25k family income earners – http://goo.gl/mme1y.  What strikes me about such a proposal is that as a one off, with a shared address book of the rich and famous London Livery companies or peoples, I’ll not be surprised if it doesn’t take off – but where on earth is the scalability of such projects?  Yep, they’ll all study from 8pm to 5pm, follow compulsory activities such as debating and public speaking, play sport and serve the community, as if schools don’t do this now?

Following in similar drift, Mr Gove is now suggesting that popular state schools should be allowed to scale up indefinitely, with the obvious result that the weaker failing schools will be allowed to do just that – fail. It will be those with sharp elbows that get first on the bus to swap places, and those that know least that will get swallowed up in the swamp. I thought the whole point about the consistent development of outstanding schools in the recent past was that to continue to get the money, they’d have to take the failing schools under their wings. This new policy smacks of Titanic type ‘fitting-out’, only providing enough lifeboats for the First Class passengers.

It is extraordinary isn’t it; despite none of the current coalition government coming from a teaching background, they all seem remarkably rich with initiatives – David Willetts’ short-lived idea that the rich could bypass UCAS selection by paying the ‘foreign’ tuition fee seemed a perfect idea until it hit the press – here’s what the Mumsnet shriek looked like – http://goo.gl/VHqQ3

As Theresa Ward and Paul Bevis comment on the ISANet, we are ill-served by the recent glaring headlines that the Council of Europe want to see radio-waves removed from our schools, or at least those generated by the wi-fi networks and by mobile phones.  This seems classic bad science, almost dare I say as bad as the Rapture moment that failed to arrive this weekend – as Kiwis spotted first that the earth did not end after all on Saturday, here a link from down under to follow that – http://goo.gl/YHmVY. The problem about the EMR stuff messing with children’s brains is that it was front page of the Telegraph, so it must be true!  For a balanced view of this, please go to your ISANet and read a little more –  or here http://goo.gl/WyeRQ. The thing we do know as teachers is that we would not give our children mobile phones under secondary school age – and most of us find it incomprehensible that children much younger are permitted to have so much contact with their microwaves – see here from the horror movie – http://youtu.be/V94shlqPlSI.

Final piece of doom on the Government cuts comes from the BBC – which gets my BATA vote for best easy to access news service on the Web – this is the story about childcare tax credits which look doomed from 2013 – http://goo.gl/dhCY1.

It does seem to me to be extraordinary that the early noughties might be looked back upon as the Halcyon days of consensual politics in education, when government listened to the early years educators, developed some really joined-up excellent EYFS care and associated funding and ensured above all that the incredibly diligent early years professional staff engaged in training and support to lead our provision from a cottage industry of all-sorts to being the envy of the developed world, or at least that bit of it that needed early years care. After a decade of incredible, careful and well planned steps, our Nursery provision now is being decimated by the inclusion of just 4 year olds in state primary provision. You can find some enlightened professional opinion on this matter in the UK, just across the Scottish boarders as it happens, where the debate continues to rage that children should stay that extra year til 6 in Nursery – http://goo.gl/piUWE!

To conclude, I do believe that the challenge consenting, co-ordinating amazing independent schools such as ours are under real threat from the current tide of negativity.  Every day, amazing things happen in our schools; pupils and teachers come together and work, learn, inspire, perspire and yes cry with frustration when stuff doesn’t go well, but that’s the creative process. And what we do is a precious commodity, carefully honed over many years by dedicated families working hand in glove with very special places we call ‘ISA’ schools.  If you feel like joining your voice to mine, please add to the blog on the ISANet, or of course below on this ‘Principled View’.

James Wilding

jtw@clairescourt.com