A Principled view

This phrase first entered regular usage when George W Bush exercised it regularly during his Presidency. I heard it again on Thursday evening this week, from Donald Clark, e-learning entrepreneur and one of 6 contributors to the Learning without frontiers seminar focussing leading educationalists on “What should be taught in our schools”.  The informal evening of discussion and debate also featured Katharine Birbalsingh (teacher and author), Toby Young (journalist and author), Dr Ralph Townsend (Headmaster Winchester College), Dawn Hallybone (senior teacher), and Tristram Shepard (online educational publisher.  You can hear the transcript to the whole event here, (http://bit.ly/gXNRQS) and each of the speakers did really well, though not necessarily answering the question posed!  I was fortunate enough to be asked to make a contribution, and you can hear that at 69min28secs into the track.

Evenings such as these arise when government calls for national review of provision, and that’s precisely what is going on now, not just because the current national curriculum is to be overhauled, but also because separate review has been called on the ‘new’ idea from Mr Gove, namely the EBacc. All over the nation, teachers of creative and technological subjects are collaborating to make impassioned plea to ensure these subjects are retained post review.  There is no doubt that the drive back to the academic by Mr Gove is set to remove some spurious 4 GCSE equivalent portfolios from the GCSE curriculum, and to focus all schools on the general principles that children aged 16 should have a core of academic knowledge underpinning their qualifications. What seems silly is the idea that creative subjects have no value; the one thing the English curriculum has done over the last 40 years is to encourage sufficient breadth so our base of creative and designers has been broad enough, indeed providing today for large numbers of highly paid and rewarded jobs and ensuring that UKPLC is at the forefront of innovation in the world. 

By the time the main contributions had come to a close, there was broad scale agreement on one thing, that of pupils behaviour, and that’s where teacher and author Kate Birbalsingh really caught the mood, words to the effect  “I don’t really mind what the government wants to include in the curriculum, what I want is for classroom behaviour to be good enough for the children within to learn something, anything”. Kate is attributed as ‘damming the state sector’ but nothing could be further from the truth. Out loud and in print (To Miss with Love, Penguin), she makes it clear that children deserve to be taught well and rigorously, and that if our education is to improve, we must demand above all that classes are orderly places. What is taught in them must also be of value, and that’s where a separation begins between those that believe Shakespeare and a Language have a part to play, and those that believe their charges should be permitted to concentrate more obviously on the subjects they want to do, and that they should be allowed to drop the bard and verb tests. 

In all schools, both state and independent, we have seen a dramatic rise in unacceptable behaviour amongst the early teenage years over the last 10 years or so. Part of the problem seems to lie in the developing ‘virtual network’ to which our children belong, where posting pictures and videos of the lewd and unacceptable normalises such activity and makes it difficult it seems for adults to express disapproval before it’s too late. Many children have become consummate consumers of such rubbish, and through bravado encourage others in like manner. Whereas before, careful parenting kept their charges away from such poor influence, now it resides within their homes, indeed often in the child’s own bedroom, and its effect is corrosive on minds and bodies. In schools such as ours, we’ll cope, because we have such great support from home, where once alerted the problem can be contained.  But it’s the not knowing to start with that clearly upsets the family applecart, that an innocent child’s head is so quickly turned by such trash. 

Claires Court does not select academically in the way that its rivals in the area do, but we have strong selection on grounds of behaviour. What we’ll not brook is bad behaviour and we won’t accept it as normal, and that is sometimes a really hard ask with families where boundaries have already relaxed. What George Bush was referring when he referenced ‘ soft bigotry of low expectations’ was an explanation of why the down-and-out could never achieve, justifying inaction from educators in schools. What the 21^st century parent and teacher must guard against is permitting low expectations to creep in with regards to the conduct of children. As adults, we know when we must scrub up and equally when we can let our hair down; children simply don’t know the difference, hence the need to teach them the range of good manners required in society, from dress to politeness, from hairstyle to language, from writing to organisation, they are all of a piece. So any curriculum we choose to bring in for the future must have at its heart subjects that require disciplined learning. And both teachers and parents will need to accept that means some hard graft in school and at home, for which there is no excuse allowed; but given a balanced approach, there will be still sufficient play for Jack or Jill to enjoy life to the full!

Our final day of the Y11 History trip to Berlin in the February half-term 2011 saw us journeying 30km to the west to visit the Olympic stadium, designed by Werner March for the Summer games of 1936, in which Jesse Owens starred.  Completely refurbished for the FIFA World cup in 2006, it is makes for a great visit, tying in elements of the glory of the Third Reich with the modern era.  The greater area around the stadium is known as the Reichssportfeld and it includes an extraordinary, huge seated open arena for Polo and other major field sports.  The stunning stonework and statues from the 30s remain, and the main stadium has grown modern seating and a roof!

Current occupants of the stadium are Hertha BSC, recently relegated from the Bundesliga. The stadium is also still used for major athletics events, including the 2009 World championships, during which Usain  Bolt further lowered his own 100 m and 200 m world records to 9.58 s and 19.19 s respectively. So when we were able to visit the changing rooms, the VIP areas and stand on the balcony where trophies and medals are issued, we were of course able to feel ‘champions’ for the day.  At the heart of the stadium now is a remarkable chapel, in the shape of the stadium proper, and open for all faiths, photograph taken during our visit.

Throughout our visit to Berlin, we were reliant on our own shoe leather and the Berlin metro system, the U- and S- Bahns. What marks out the U-Bahn in my mind from the rest of Europe is that it travels across much of Berlin on a raised track above the street so you get to sight-see as well as move from A to B.  The reason for the sky-drive harks back to the nineteenth century, when the city fathers were vying with London to build the world’s best sewers, and they did not want that project jeopardised by the trains! The S-Bahn routes are rather more like our suburban tracks out to the dormitories, but they do cross the city centre and those central stations are all great works of their Bismarckian forbears and worth a look for that reason alone.  Outside, amazing numbers of bicycles give testament to the citizens willingness to forebear the car, and to be honest, for the pedestrian this is a capital city that is relatively easy to walk through, and seems to have rather less traffic than your average UK town.

I have yet to visit the east end of London, to see our new Olympic Park at Newham, and I have no doubt I will be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the achievement. Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern games wrote that ‘‘the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part”, whilst charging the competitors through the Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” What I feel I gained from our trip to Berlin this half-term was a participation in fellowship, a better understanding of the frailty of man, greater empathy with our fellow Europeans, and a sense of real solidarity that we do indeed need to be swifter, higher and stronger in all that we do.

OK – post return, here is my animoto mash-up of the trip – enjoy.

http://animoto.com/play/Pat6VJ7hXd0Z2wZwMphk0A

begins one of those great quotations any could use to inspire a trip to Berlin. These days, defined by the 21st century, the visitor to Germany’s capital can only marvel at the extraordinary vitality of one of Europe’s greatest cities.  The investment in major public buildings, the universal coverage of its mass transport system (Train, U-&S-Bahn, tram and bus) , the quality of its walkways and bike lanes and above all the omnipresence of fast food of every description (still have to check out Currywurst) could convince any that bad times have never been part of the equation.

That Berlin has a dark side is put well beyond question by the authorities who have established many major memorials to the ill-treatment of its citizens.  One of my favorites is the Stasi museum, in which James Bond-like gadgets developed behind the Iron curtain by Erich Honecker and his cronies are shown as part of the installations in their party headquarters.  A very much more recent edition is the Holocaust memorial just south of the Brendenburg gate, a vast field of stone bocks beneath which are halls where individual and family stories of loss during the Nazi extermination  programme of the Jews are told from across Europe.

35 km north of Berlin is the town of Oranienburg where the first internment camp was established for Hitler’s opponents and for those elements of society deemed unsuitable such as communists,homosexuals and gypsies. Heinrich Himmler ordered the building of a model camp in the nearby village of Sachsenhausen, one that was then exported throughout the axis territories, including the industrial manufacturing factories for weapons and armaments. Indeed one of the Heinkel bombers was assembled in the units outside the camp from 1942 onwards.  You can get a sense of the awfulness of the camp from this Youtube video – 

More than 200 000 were imprisoned here by the Nazis of which some 50 000 were brutally murdered – as opposed to Auschwitz which served the policy of racial genocide, Sachsenhausen victims were a mix of political opponents and then only later groups defined as racially or biologically inferior – increasingly from the newly occupied territories of Nazi dominated Europe. In 1938, in order to show the world that these new camps were not commiting atrocities, journalists and the Red Cross were invited to view the facilities.  Despite careful screening and choreographed tours, what the camp commander could not hide was the sheer terror the inmates showed for their tormentors, treated as they had been with such ferocious inhumanity.  The medical blocks still stand today and detail case after case of the most extraordinary butchery caused by doctors on their patients.

A journalist working for BBC Australia in 1938 reported back that whilst he had been a pacifist prior to his visit, he could now see complete justification for opposing the Nazi regime with military force, because the hell for their opponents had been revealed at Sachsenhausen.  And this is very much the message that prevails across the various impressive exhibits and displays at the camp, preserved as a national memorial by the East German government in 1956, and much improved as a visitor destination over the past 10 years.  In the kitchen block in the centre, there is now a 30 minute video showing some rare archive footage of prisoners at the camp, and a research centre too where the archives can be checked from a bank of desktop stations.

So we are reminded by the quote attributed to Edmund Burke, the great Irish political philosopher writing in 1770, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”.  Our group of Y11 pupils found this visit to Sachsenhausen the most moving of the trip, with the reinforcement of the personal family tragedies documented so well in  the museums we visited elsewhere.  We can always question whether the modern conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq of the last decade are justified, and we have current inquiries reviewing those decisions to report this year. I feel sure however our pupils returned to England with a great sense of pride that their country did indeed stand up and say something back in 1939.

…boat is a gentle story of companions paddling up the River Thames from London to Oxford in the twilight of the Victorian era. In the travels of our History department to Berlin, this story came to mind on a number of occasions, not least because many of the images both cities use to this day hark back to that period, when they were great rivals and competed in all aspects of technology.  Across both cities, the skylines still show the great Railway stations of that age, and their major  city stations are embedded in the street maps to this day.

Yesterday, we went underground with a historian from the Beliner Unterwelten group, whose remit it remains to ‘show off’ the underground treasures of Berlin. Back in the days of sewer building in the mid 19th century, Berlin and London both planned for services to manage the largest  city in the world.  In terms of effluent, London may have got there, but rather oddly Germany did not. As they say, 2 world wars and a Russian occupation rather did for the expansionist dreams of those german city planners, and Berlin is little larger than 150 year ago, and frankly (we were told) there is not enough waste water coming down the tubes to keep them clear these days!
It is extraordinary just how proud people can be of waterways built to take away our waste. There seem to be countless different tours available to the time-rich tourist in Berlin, able to paddle even along these waterways that flow silently beneath Germany’s capital city, though apparently you do need to be very wary when it is half-time during the football season and all that Pilsner beer drank before the game needs to find relief.  Indeed the cathedrals built to manage our water seem to be in great shape and worthy of a visit all of their own.

Of course this knowledge was a by-product of the real reason we had gone ‘underground’, to view the german civilian ‘Bunker’ provision, so that the population could survive everything Bomber Harris and his planes could throw at them. It seems the word ‘Bunker’ was misused deliberately, meaning apparently that the shelters were bomb-proof. Unlike London’ underground, the Berlin trains run very close to the surface and there was little chance that a tunnel full of loyal citizens would survive a hit in any way.  No more than 50cm of concrete separated the upper layers of the transport system from the air above, and with British bombs designed to crash through 5m of the suff before they exploded, you can only imagine the carnage.  Which we did of course, the 2011 pupils on the Y11 trip to Berlin, and we did not feel very good about it.

Indeed, as we wandered through a warren of interlinking passages we learned of man’s inhumanity to man, the veil of deceit that was required to keep hope alive when all around seemed hopeless. The bunkers contained nursery facilities to ensure the much need children of the Reich could be born safely, and indeed they were, as our guide proudly informed us, because now in their late sixties, visitors return this railway station to find the birthing suite named Gesundbrunnen on their birth certificate!  The walls were painted with a toxic mix of luminous and radioactive paint, so the hard pressed doctors could make and mend whilst underground, that fluoresce visible today as a party trick for visitors to see.

In Jerome K Jerome’s elegant tale of life afloat on the water without a care, they have with them an imaginary dog, Montmorency, to whom is attached some blame and some fame, in roughly equal measure. Now we could all do with such advice, to shift the focus and dodge  the responsibility, and it might seem to readers of the Daily Press that our Teutonic cousins have struggled to accept their responsibilities in this regard.  In my view, nothing could be further from the truth. For the third time now, I have listened to intelligent and well qualified tour guides tell in different ways the appalling tales of life in Berlin under the Nazis. They leave us in no doubt that the citizens had elected and then gullibly accepted a tyranny that became of such monstrous proportions that it sought to destroy everything in its path.

It is certainly the case that the citizens of Berlin have had their city’s life chances badly damaged by the events of the 20th century. Equally it appears, without the determination of three extraordinary men, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, we would not have seen the destruction of the Nazi regime, and for that the free world must be truly grateful. Because what Berlin also does so well is to highlight just how dreadful were the effects of that Nazi programme to exterminate all in their path. Of course I do not wish to belittle the most important of the holocausts, that of the Jews, but it was in Berlin that the exterminations began from 1933, of trade unionists, of liberals and communists, of authors and engineers, chemists and engineers that thought differently. And that is something clearly modern Berliners do not wish to let die, and indeed celebrates in their memorials as well as any societies, a love of living and a tolerance of all, irrespective of gender, faith, political belief or other persuasion. As visitors we have walked their streets, viewed their memorials and galleries, and it cannot be clearer; whilst huge black clouds covered the past of Europe in misery for 60 years, they have gone now, not least because outstanding example is made for teaching about the rights of man on every corner.

I am not quite sure what they feel about virtual dogs though…

Since the inception of Parental questionnaires as part of the Independent Schools Inspectorate toolkit sometime at the turn of the century, the Principals have used an annual survey of parental attitudes to inform their planning for the future. You can see what was hot in 2010 from my annual report of same here http://bit.ly/ge2ovm. This last week we have been interviewing potential candidates for the Head of College post, falling vacant when Mrs Green retires at the end of the Summer. It seems future potential head teachers feel we are somewhat brave in publishing views that might be regarded as criticism, on our website.  What we regard as refreshing honesty, others might consider foolhardy or even worse.

What is unusual about Claires Court Schools is our model of governance; the schools are owned and run by Hugh and James Wilding, steered by capable headteachers with talented senior managers and teachers in support, administered by some remarkable school secretaries, PAs, finance, business, catering, grounds, housekeeping and personnel staff.   My brother and I work full-time within our business, providing what we hope is an appropriate mix of strategic leadership and straightforward day-work, making things happen. We are both supported in our work by wives who are in their own right sector professionals of considerable experience and clout.  Headteachers and their SMTs ensure that our pupils’ councils, constructed appropriately according to age and phase, are able to make comment and feedback on how they, our consumers feel we are doing.  We are partnered in this work by three great Parent-Teacher groups at College, Ridgeway and School. In short, we have established a sensible mix of proprietor, employer, employee, customer and consumer to keep us well grounded and fighting fit.

The questionnaire will not be answered by everyone, indeed perhaps (expect at inspection time) by approximately 33% of our community. It provides a really good safety valve, often highlights areas of concern not visible through other channels, and provides as well very considerable encouragement for us to carry on the good work. The responses do create some tensions; we make clear that the questionnaire is not there as a feedback tool for parents hoping to bypass the headteacher. This has to be so, because I guarantee anonymity for the writers, and I can’t go breaking that principle when I feel like it. The most important positive change in recent years has been the exceptionally positive response we are given to the establishment of a set of core values to hold our young people in good stead for the future.

And it is this area we have found that our former pupils, graduated on to other schools and colleges for the next phase of education beyond the walls of Claires Court, have clearly different experiences than they expected. Whenever you change circumstances, you have every hope that the reasons for change will bring positive outcomes. For parents moving from private to state sector schools, that first advantage of no tuition fees to fund is obvious. What their children notice however,  is that there exists abroad an extraordinary arrogance that ‘successful’ children don’t need boundaries set quite as firmly as this Principal demands, that ‘playing’ hard is appropriate reward for ‘working’ hard, and that the age-related limits for social networking (13),  15+ film and games  classifications, and social drug taking such as alcohol (18), are not appropriate for our kind of children.   It seems that our consistent application of the principles of appropriate behaviour, both in and out of school helps parents hold the line, and once our expectations have been removed, that alternative peer culture, untroubled by our value system, almost forces parents to accept the inevitable breaking of boundaries hitherto held dear.

I am not just talking about 15/16 /17 year olds either. The provision of unfiltered and unmonitored internet access more generally seems to be a right of youth. The nation of Facebook might very well now be 10 times bigger than the UK but the requirement is that its residents must be over the age of 13, and even then supervised in some way.   To find that parents feel their 9 year olds should be permitted to join this adult zone baffles me, in the same way that it does to find Santa putting Call of Duty 3 into the primary child’s stocking, or nail varnish in with Mr Potato Head into the Foundation years’ playpen. Our peer group of parents work hard to hold the faith that childhood is indeed for the young, that playing hard means sport and dance and healthy exercise. Our families live in no Utopian dream that ‘all will be perfect’, but they and we hold firm to the covenant that children need rather less of the ‘old pals’ act and rather more of the honest parenting from Mum and Dad.

So it is that we are now regularly told by curators and visitors alike, in art galleries, castles, museums and exhibitions that our pupils seem exceptionally well behaved, engaged and considerate. Now that expression of approval by people who don’t know us pleases me more than anything, because those characteristics of a CCS pupil are hard won indeed, with no day gone by without boys and girls learning from us first-hand what matters and what is not appropriate.  So come the questionnaire of 2011 and I’ll be looking forward to some more intelligent commentary from those dearest to us, our customers.  It is our parents that see at first hand the benefits of the all-round education our schools seek to bring, and it is they that do deserve a summary afterwards that is self-effacing and honest.  We can only get better by accepting that improvements need to be made. Our aim is of course to be our best selves, and let’s hope in our Jubilee year that we can agree what that looks like!

In one of my roles in education, I lead an initiative across 300 Independent schools promoting engagement with the range of Information and communication technologies. ICTs for short mean so much to so many, precision with regards to their definition is impossible. So here is an attempt to explain my vision of its purpose in education, and to highlight perhaps our next steps within Claires Court Schools.

There is a backbone of modern technologies that underpin our society, from telecommunications through energy handling to commerce and trading. Such gross industrial usage is beyond the role of education to explain, expand or even comprehend. As Douglas Adams once wrote “everything that’s already in the world when you are born is just normal’. What interests me is the arrival of new technologies, which are often first understood by those whose thinking is not conditioned by the natural order of things, and certainly best developed by those whose thinking is sufficiently asymmetric to take the ideas from concept to mass production. Nobody has ever accused Bill Gates or Steve Jobs of being well-balanced individuals, certainly not when they were young and thrusting forwards as pioneers in their different fields of soft and hard wares!

ICT in schools has ceased to be about personal computing and productivity tools; commendable though both are, they are now established aids to life, embedded in both the commercial and domestic world. Nor is ICT in schools about edutainment, the 21st century version of the video recorder attempting to supplant the teacher in the classroom. In my view we now reach beyond ICT completely, in the same way we do the manufacture of the fountain pen or the technologies that ensure the biro can work uphill. We now have tools that work in a digital medium that no longer have us studying how they work, and running 20 question tests of that knowledge. From hardware such as netbooks and Flip video cameras to cloud-based computing, we have kit that works, and we now can use these technologies to engage children in learning in ways never hitherto conceived.

From computer-based teaching tools that are endlessly patient to a repository of searchable knowledge that exceeds comprehension, our teachers can now blend these digital opportunities to engage children anew in the creative arts of learning. From the immediate analysis of disasters such as Deepwater Horizon to the extraordinary new view we have on the universe provided by Hubble and other telescopes, we have gross scale scientific engineering for awe, inspiration and wonder. The challenges for humanity to continue to nourish itself as it grows apace on the planet, brings everything from genetic engineering to green energy production to our school labs. But above all, we have the opportunity to develop skills in visual and creative literacies to a much younger generation, and because they have control at a younger age, a greater percentage of our children can be enabled as successful learners. Passing exams has always been about being well-above-average with a read/write response, separating the sheep from goats simply by the willingness of the learners to be compliant and to be dextrous with these two skills.

It may take some time for we who teach to identify how to value skills in the young such as stop-go movie creation, animating philosophical ideas through cartoon creation or the ability to write using image on film, but I make no bones about the need to come up to speed in these areas, as they form part of the ‘new literacies’ digital technologies are bringing to the fore. 30 years ago, Claires Court seemed to grow a generation of young programmers, inspired by the arrival of computers to the desktop, who learned how to be accurate, precise and thoughtful in coding on machines such as the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC micro. 20 years of consumer electronics followed, during which time the ‘coding’ became embedded on chips, leading to our children become increasingly absorbed in the ‘gaming’ of machines, and distracted from new learning possibilities. As the most powerful computers ever built now appear in their pockets, the opportunity to code and create has returned. To call the current generation of gadgets ‘phones’ dismisses 99% of their capabilities; they are recorders for sound and light, precision devices for GPS and motion tracking, a gateway into a cornucopia of knowledge and the productivity tools with which to stitch the same into knowledge.

This all sounds very grand, but you only have to track the latest movements of our leading junior boys in the upper years at Ridgeway to realise that we are not just taking about blogging and taking pictures. And at secondary level we can now run serious days of broadcasting experience, pupils can write self-revision guides using film rather than paper and pencil, we can celebrate their work not just by wall displays but by mashing together onto YouTube or Glogster and ‘network’ our results to our friends in an instant. Now such learning may indeed outpace the busy parent trying hard to keep a family on the rails, but it should not outpace the educators. I know we have to monitor cyberspace, build into our pupils our values more strongly so that they keep their integrity whilst going ‘virtual’ and above all, learn from our pupils as we have forever done in the past what the possibilities can be. It is they that have the young minds that can shape the knowledge economies of the future; we who educate can’t know that future, but we will for ever carry the responsibility to teach so that our pupils can learn. Expect me as Academic Principal to enjoy that, because I do!

Oh and by the way, here’s a couple of examples of my assembly work developed using three different tools, Animoto, Prezi and Goanimate. http://bit.ly/gLc8FW, http://bit.ly/dU08ge and http://bit.ly/fdXkNS