A Principled view

…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