Dear Senior Leaders

A few years ago I decided not to climb the greasy pole of school management. I looked, dabbled and tasted.  I did not like it.  However, I do admire those who do climb to the top and make a good job of it once they are there.  I also have an intense dislike for colleagues who climb, forget why they bothered, and then lose sight their job is really all about.  Sadly, being a senior leader is a goal in itself for some people and they forget it’s all about making things better for students.

Sadly, even those leaders with a clear view where they want to go get lost along the way as they become sidetracked by wider agendas and outside forces.  This year has been a challenging one for most schools and the school I work in  is no exception.  As we close the calendar year, I would just like to offer five observations to senior colleagues who may stumble across this blog:

1)  A soufflé does not rise twice:  If you have a major initiative or reform you want to  launch, get it right first time.  Teachers are cynical and have long memories.  If it goes wrong the first time, you will struggle to get it off the ground a second time – no matter what you rename it.

2)  Listen more than you talk:  It is not a sign of weakness to admit that people know parts of the school better than you do.  They can offer sage advice, wise council and background information that can help you get to where you are going.  Listening to the right people will stop things going wrong.

3)  Schools are not democracies:  We sometimes forget that we are running important organisations that need quality-first decisions.   Sadly, our sense of fairness and equality mean that we let everyone not only have a say, but also carry equal weight.  But that’s just silly.  Not everyone deserves a turn –  if they moan about being left out, explain why.  If they are just not good enough to be on a working party, if their ideas are daft or their analysis flawed – tell them so they can do something about it.  They are professionals and adults.

4)  Avoid the rush for glory: The school is not about you are your dream of headship.  Before you launch an initiative, ask yourself honestly why you are doing it.  If “it will look good on my CV” appears anywhere in the top five reasons, stop it.  Staff will see through CV-padding exercises and the initiative (and you) will lose credibility.

5)  Differentiate:  Know the starting points of your staff and your departments.  Do not launch a whole-school initiative that fails to acknowledge the different strengths and weaknesses of your teachers.  The weak will not get it, the lazy will ignore it and the strong will feel patronised and devalued.  Lay out broad objectives and outcomes to the whole staff and then discuss a differentiated way forward with individuals and teams.

I hope this helps.  After all, we are all in this together.

Forget Ofsted, listen to Beth.

Beth is 14 years old.  She is a bright and inquisitive young lady; but she’s by no means a “swot”.  Beth is also something else – she’s outspokenly honest.

Beth is my friend’s daughter and attends the local school which is rated as “Good with Outstanding features” by Ofsted.  Beth disagrees.  She has made it her own personal mission to expose her school and show it up for the fraud that it is.  She’s worked out who the weak staff are and she had identified the flaws in the school’s internal procedures.  Beth takes every opportunity she can to make the weak staff look, well, weak.

Beth can get away with this because she has discovered that the very things she hates about her school are the things that make her untouchable.  She knows, that as a well-behaved, hard-working students who takes part in a whole raft of extra-curricular activities, that her teachers not able to challenge her when she asks why they have not marked her Geography book.  She also knew that when she embarrasses her History teacher for not knowing the real story of Hitler’s rise to power (he offered the Channel 5 version) that she could not be punished because the teacher would look stupid.  Beth is also really aware that no one is going to tell her off for mocking her RE teacher for dictating the answers to a test and then saying how well his class did when he marks the papers.

But Beth’s subversive activities do not stop at the classroom door.  She also challenged the headteacher during a recent purge on poorly-equipped students.  She asked him why he only sent the “nice” kids to seclusion for not having a pen and pencil and left the real hard cases alone.  He said there was no truth in the accusation, but he never came back to Beth’s tutor room to do another equipment check.  He was left looking weak in front of a whole class of Year 9 students.

Beth tells me these stories when I go to visit.  Her parents are open mouthed at her antics and encourage her to stop.  What they should of course be doing is banging on the headteacher’s door and asking why their daughter and her friends have the time on need to carry out a terrorist campaign against the school.  However, they instead blame the whole thing on their daughter’s “feisty” attitude – after all, they have been reassured everything is OK as Ofsted rate the school really highly.

Why I Love Parents’ Evenings

Many teachers moan about parents’ evenings.  I can see why.  They involve parents and take place in the evenings.  I prefer to spend my evenings reading, watching TV, eating, sleeping and planning lessons – often all at the same time.  However, they have become a little bit like reality TV shows – as the years have gone by I have managed to first accept their existence and then even start to love them.  The key to this transformation has been to develop a way of bypassing my great parents’ evening hang up.  I have issues with touching dirty people and parents’ evenings usually mean shaking hands with some of our less hygienic clientele.  In my early career I spent evenings watching the grubby parent move up the queue and get closer, and closer, to my desk.  Sweat would start to run down my back.  I would spin out a conversation with a clean middle-class parent in the vain hope that their greasy-haired counterpart would remember they had not taken a bath that week and go home to freshen up.  I would cling to the belief that by discussing Tabatha’s last essay with her carefully toileted mother, the bacteria under the finger nails of the malodorous one’s nicotine-stained hands would have more time to do its job and cause major organ failure.  However, the parent never died and never went home to take a shower.  They always joined me at my desk and always shook hands.  I would then spend the rest of the evening avoiding touching anything that could not be disinfected when I got home.  This fear became so great, that in the first week of September I would scan my new classes for grubby children who were obviously the offspring of grubby parents.

After a few years I realised I had to come to terms with this and thought of strategies overcome my fears.  At first I thought of aversion therapy – go around town touching dirty people.  But that was a blind alley.  You can do aversion therapy if you are afraid of cats.  You can go to a cats’ home and stand in a room full of meowing felines until you realise they are not going to attack you.  Eventually you become more comfortable and you find you can stroke a cat without it ripping off your hand.  You see, aversion therapy works with irrational fears.  It does not work with real fears like being buried alive, being murdered or Conservatives governments.  My fear was well-grounded.  Germs kill, or at least give you sore throats and headaches.  Therefore aversion therapy was out of the question.  Instead, I turned to coping strategies.  When the walking Petri dish that is a dirty parent approaches, you greet them warmly, but from a distance.  Then, when they get to the desk you start to play with your papers and then write something down.  Your hand in otherwise engaged and you avoid the handshake.  At the end, you politely close the conversation down and at the moment when a handshake may take place, you pick up your cup and take a drink – thus avoiding contact.

This was a life changing strategy for me.  It allowed me to start to love parents’ evenings.  Firstly, it opened up the new sport of trying to spot the most aesthetically pleasing parents. I expected the most aesthetically pleasing to attend with the more aesthetically pleasing children in my class – but this was a false assumption.  The roulette wheel that is genetics throws up some strange combinations.  Two handsome parents can produce a child that would frighten sheep.  Dad’s square jaw and broad shoulders combined with Mum’s large breasts and small feet can produce a very ugly and ill-proportioned young girl.  However, the careful selection of features from the best bits from two horrifically ugly parents can produce a pleasant-looking child.  Equally, the hard paper round endured by some Mum’s renders them a shadow of their former selves.  The good looks sported by their offspring are still evident if you look closely; but they have been corrupted by years of early morning feeds, broken marriages and over exposure to Eastenders.  It’s a bit like going to the Forum in Rome and having to imagine what it looked like in its heyday – the grandeur is evident, but bits are broken or missing.

Parents evenings also offer another opportunity – they allow me to enjoy the bizarre conversations that can crop up with parents.  Take my meeting with Mr and Mrs Barkley about their son Andrew.  From the start it was a real insight into Britain’s cultural history.  The Barkleys, despite being around 50 years of age and living firmly in the 1990s, had clearly just stepped out of a 1950s seaside postcard.  She was huge, red faced and kitted out in a polka-dot dress.  He was small, dressed in his Granddad’s demob suit and about four feet tall.  All he needed was a knotted hanky and the picture would have been complete.

I had been waiting to see the Barkley’s for two reasons.  Firstly, there was the complete lack of coursework.  Andrew had not handed in a single piece.  This was not a major problem as his potential as a student was rather limited and his scholarly output, if it had been handed in, would not have contributed to the expansion of human knowledge.  However, I wanted to raise it with the Barkleys so they were not shocked when Andrew failed his GCSE.

So I mentioned the lack of coursework.  “It’s in the attic” snapped Mrs B.  “Well, is there any chance that someone could go up and get it” I enquired.  I specifically used the word “someone” as her girth made it unlikely she would be able to ascend into the upper layers of the Barkley’s house.  “It’s up there in boxes from when we moved from the old ‘ouse and we have not ‘ad time to unpack” came Mrs B’s next excuse.  “Oh, when did you move house?” I asked.  “Last year” she curtly snapped back in such a way as to put an end to all other enquiries.  But I am more resilient than that.  “Ah, well.  There is the problem you see, the work was done this month.  So it’s unlikely to be in the attic”.

“Oh no, the boy’s very keen – he did it last year before we moved” came the unlikely, but forceful reply.  It was delivered with a face that once again suggested that I was wasting my time on this topic as it made it clear that I was unlikely to ever exhaust the stream of lies Mrs B was prepared to tell to protect her first born.  “Well, let’s just say that without the coursework, Andrew will not be able to pass the exam” I said, surrendering to the inevitable and moving on.  Mrs B folded her arms across her bosom and in doing so occupied much of space between the two of us.  I quickly checked for signs of dirt – I had no plan for avoiding weighty and bacteria-encrusted folded forearms that were forced in my direction by such a formidable chest.  Fortunately, though from another age, the Barkley’s clothes had been subjected to modern laundry practices.

“Is there anything else?” asked Mr Barkley in a meek fashion that was clearly the product of many years of henpecking.  Mrs B’s head turned and looked at him.  She was clearly about to chastise him and then stopped.  I think that her reappraisal of the situation was based not on a desire to save him any embarrassment, but more a realisation that he had asked a question and not expressed an opinion of his own.  This enquiry from the diminutive Mr B opened the way for my second concern.  “Well yes, yes there is.  But it’s a bit delicate” I said with some caution.  The look I got from Mrs B that made Mr B flinch.  He gave me a look that said “Run, save yourself now, it’s too late for me, but you are young and could still have a happy life if you drop this yet-to-be revealed topic”.  I got the impression it was a look he had given before.  I decided to press on.

I boldly said “Well you see, Andrew is quite disruptive”.  Although I did not think it was possible, Mrs B grew in size and Mr B shrunk even further.  It was as if she had taken some of his tiny frame in order to prepare for battle. “Not in a naughty way” I clarified.  This led to some shrinkage on Mrs B’s part, but her husband did not grow back to his previous state.  “You see he breaks wind and it smells.  The other students get very upset and it spoils the lesson”.  The reaction was not what I expected.  Mrs B stood up.  Threw aside her chair.  Burst into tears and ran out of the school hall.  In the absence of her ever-changing body shape I noticed that the waiting parents were open mouthed with shock, but their offspring were in fits of stifled laughter.

Part of me hoped that this would signal an end to the whole thing.  However, Mr B stayed put and grew back to his original size.  “Mr Chipping, we’ve had all sorts of problems with the Boy.  We’ve been to the doctor and the specialist, but they can find nowt wrong with ‘im.  It’s like having cattle in the front room when he gets going.  Mr Chipping, the Boy’s a beast!”, explained Mr B in a voice that was much more confident.  It was also much louder.  The lines of parents waiting to see me and my two adjacent colleagues were by now biting their knuckles in order to avoid breaking into fits of laughter.  Mr B then went into a long explanation of how Andrew’s bowels had almost caused a split in their marriage – he seemed to see this as a negative thing and I almost pointed out that such an rift could be a good thing for him in the longer term.  I restrained myself from giving this advice and in doing so I possibly saved my job.  He then apologised for the problems Andrew had caused and said he had to go and find his wife.  He went off with an obedient, but loving expression on his face.  He was clearly unhappy at being separated from Mrs B even for such a short period of time – she was not my idea of a beauty, but she was clearly his.

Mind your own business

 

School days start with Radio 4.  6am, news headlines, coffee, business news, sport and then shower.  This is not always a calm start.  Quite often a news item will cause my blood pressure to shoot through the roof.  Today, was just such a day.  In fact, by about 6-20 I was yelling at the radio.  Some bloke

from the CBI was spouting off about how schools are not preparing students for the world of work.

What was the in-depth, evidence-based analysis on which the gentleman based his criticism?  A-Levels are based on “chalk and talk”.  Quite clearly, this captain of industry has not been into a school since he left the minor public school that prepared him for the strange unreality of the boardroom.  For a start, the only chalk left in schools is in the indigestion remedies teachers gobble down after rushing their lunch.  More importantly, it ignores the advances in pedagogy that have characterised the past 20 years.

When you actually listened to his argument, it became clear that what he actually wanted was for schools to do his job – he wanted to pass the training of his workers onto schools and therefore save his business money.  Well that’s not what schools are for.  They are not there to serve the needs of a specific business.  Rather they aim to develop a rounded individual with the capacity to operate in the world of work, not just today, but for the next 50 years.

The approach suggested by the CBI is flawed.  I grew up in a mining village.  The local school provided a basic curriculum to equip boys to be coal miners and girls to work in the Coal Board officers.   This is the approach suggested today by the CBI.  However, it did not work because the coal mines closed and the skills provided by the school in the 1970s were ill suited to the modern information economy that grew up in the 1990s.  The result was long-term unemployment for thousands of men in the late 30s.  Similar situations can be found in North East England where some schools tried to suit their curriculum to the car industry and even call centres.

A modern-school curriculum needs to develop not only the traditional subject-specific skills, but also skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.  These skills are the skills of the future.  Information handling, problem solving, planning and communication are the skills of the future and they are the skills that can be found in classrooms today.

The CBI was wrong to make its early-morning pronouncements.  It shows just how ignorant they are of modern schools.  It also shows their arrogance and sheer lack of self-awareness.  If the CBI wants better schools it should encourage all its members to pay their taxes in full so we can fund the schools our children deserve.  Until they do that, they should leave me to have my breakfast in peace.

What Ofsted don’t want…

Ofsted visited this week.  As a head of department it was not an enormous disruption.  I think I was observed.  An elderly gentleman came into my classroom during a Y12 lesson on Stalin.  He sat at the back, then got up, peered over the shoulder of a couple of students and then left.  He was either an HMI, or a old man trying to save on his heating bills by hanging around my classroom.  Maybe he was both.

Now there is a reason why the visit of these geriatric snoopers caused such minimal disruption – I always plan lessons and I occasionally mark the work that results from that planning.  As it turns out, that’s all they wanted.

Let me share with you some things Ofsted did not ask for:

1. Vast amounts of planning – I gave them nothing in terms of planning, they asked for nothing.  Some colleagues tried to give them planning – they turned it down.
2. Huge portfolios of work – again, they recoiled at the mere suggestion.
3. Vast amounts of data – they just wanted a simple overview of the kid’s ability.  A seating plan with target grades written next to the student’s names.
4. Self Evaluation Forms, Team Improvement Plans, Examination Analysis or CPD records.

In short, they did not want anything the senior leadership team said they would want.  They did not ask for any of the things that seem totally pointless to any sensible teachers but were justified  by senior management because “Ofsted would want them”.  They did not ask for any of the things that have taken up days of my life over the past year.  Most annoyingly, they did not ask for any of the things that have distracted me from my core job of ensuring out students have good lessons that allow them to make progress.

I now feel a little more empowered to say “no” when asked to do pointless jobs.  If any of my readers want to be empowered in this way, feel free to print off this post and make like a latter-day Martin Luther and nail it to the door of any offending senior manager.

Good luck!

Nietzsche had a point

Last Tuesday I sat down to each my lunch.  For those of you who like detail, it was a ham and cheese bagel.  As a department we tend to eat together and decompress after a morning of teaching.  It’s usually a time of merriment, gossip and mutual support.  However, Tuesday was different.  The usual midday lull was rocked by the news that Ofsted were coming – two days Wednesday/Thursday.

The news was greeted with silence and then a general calm.  Each member of the department reached for their timetable and studied it quietly, assessing the task ahead.  We then ate our lunch and then calmly went about our business.   I was humbled by this.  I’m an old lag, the rest of the department are quite young.  Yet these young staff professionally prepared for the next two days without panic or fuss.  They adapted their lesson plans slightly and polished their PowerPoints.  Their initial reaction set the tone for the next two days.  At no point did they panic or create a fuss.  They supported each other and they supported me.  Most importantly, they delivered some good lessons to our students without disruption or stress.

Ofsted came and went – there were no casualties on our corridor.  In fact, relationships were left stronger and the teachers felt better for having survived.  Nietzsche may have had a point – What does not kill us makes us stronger.

Marking Time

We could show these to children when they come to ask for real feedback and support.

Ofsted seem to have a new hobby horse – marking exercise books.  The knees of LEAs and senior leaders have been jerking all over England in response to this latest pronouncement.  Ofsted say it, so we must do it.  The cry has gone out that we must once again provide written feedback on every piece of work that children write down.  This week I have had a number of conversations with students, teachers, senior leaders and governors about this issue.  Here are the main reasons these people have said this is a stupid and retrograde issue:

• Teachers do not have an extra 8 hours a week to do it.
• If they did, it would be a waste of eight hours.   Kids don’t, or can’t, read teacher’s handwriting.  Written feedback for many pupils is a waste of time.
• Not all subjects have the chance or need for written feedback and they seem to cope ok.  Some of the best lessons I have seen have been drama and PE lessons where the teacher has had no need to get out a red pen.
• Feedback is best when it is instantaneous and interactive – i.e. when teachers discuss work with students while the work is being produced.  Read Matthew Syed’s excellent book, “Bounce” if you want to know why.
• Teaching has moved on.  Lessons are more complicated and take longer to plan.  Teachers have other things to do than mark everything that a student writes.
• We have developed rigorous assessment schemes that test student understanding and provide opportunities for in-depth written feedback with proper curricular targets.  These assessment opportunities are planned and therefore effective.  They are effective because they place realistic demands on teacher’s time.
• We have developed much more effective ways of giving feedback – it has taken years to perfect and is based on real research done by real experts (Remember Dylan William). It’s called Assessment For Learning.  It was developed for a very specific reason – traditional marking and feedback of the kind recommended this September by Ofsted was not working.

Ofsted (or rather Mr Gove) seem to have seen the word feedback in research and taken it to mean “marking”.  Sadly, they cannot see the difference.  Everyone knows feedback is vital – that’s why teachers have become good at it.   Mr Gove needs to realise that progress is not always a bad thing.

The Monster Comes

Some time ago I went on holiday to France. I was staying in a complex that had a large swimming pool that closed at 8pm. At about 7-45 one of the Dutch mothers would announce to her children that the “monster was coming”.  The children would run for their apartment.  One evening I was out for a walk when this happened – one of the children ran past me.  As she did she urged me (in Dutch) to get inside before the monster got me.  I smiled and thought it was cute.

This week this story sprang to mind when the latest Gove leak caused panic and despair in a fellow Head of Department.  Over the photocopiers he started to list the dangers of the Abac (where does Mike get these names from) and how it would ruin education.  I just smiled the same smile I gave to the little Dutch girl.  I suddenly realised that there is no way Gove can pull all this off.  The Parliamentary time alone will be a limiting factor.  As will Ofqual, Ofsted, the exam boards and the Education Select Committee.  This last body will be a significant problem for Gove as it chaired by independently-minded Graham Stuart.

Teachers could also prove a problem for Gove.  Industrial action aside, Gove will find it hard to outwit and outmanoeuvre the teaching profession.  For example, Gove wants to make History teachers cover Churchill in Secondary Schools.  At the moment he appears in Year 9, Year 10, Year 11 and Year 12.  I’m not sure how much more he wants, but I have a few suggestions.  His alcoholism, his mistreatment of striking miners, his failure in Turkey in the Great War, his political infidelity, the failure of the Gold Standard, his racism, personal financial irresponsibility and love of the fascist Edward VIII all spring to mind as additions to the curriculum.

The monster may well be coming – but we are ready.

 

Sick and tired

The walking agar plates that are better known to you as “children” have got the better of me.  Kneeling by coughing Year 9s to support them with their assessments, one-to-one tutorials with sniffing sixth formers and marking Y10 essays produced by snuffling students have led to me getting a cold.  I hate colds.  They are not dramatic enough to merit staying in bed or taking a day off, but they do enough damage to make you unable to your job properly.  Fatigue, headache, cognitive slowness, snuffling and coughing are all the things a teacher needs.

I knew it was coming on Friday when I snapped at my Year 11s.  They are in the final hours of their controlled assessment and were moaning that time was running out.  They then decided to sit and chat instead of working.  I did something I rarely do – shouted.  I raised my voice and told one young lady h0w stupid she was for wasting her time.  She looked sad – I felt bad.  By 7:30 that evening I felt really bad – both physically and emotionally.

I’ve now spent my weekend looking at a pile of marking – it’s not going to be done for Monday morning.  Planning is equally thin.  I’m going to have to wing it next week – Let’s see if the world comes to an end.  I doubt it.

They think it’s all over…

An old story for modern times.

It’s the last day of the school year and I have finished teaching.  No more lessons.  Just a few jobs to do and all is quiet around me.  A couple of quizzes and an “educational” DVD are going on in the adjacent classrooms as the other members of the department plod through the last few hours of what has been a generally positive year.

Then my peace is shattered as a classroom door flies open and a small girl arrives at my office door.  “Mrs Harper says can you remove Brett please”.

Brett has only been in school a few weeks.  He had been come from a forces school in Germany where he was getting into trouble.  His mother had moved the family back to the UK without Dad so Brett could avoid an exclusion – something that counted on Dad’s military record.  This had not worked so well and Brett was finding it hard to settle.  I go to the classroom and ask Brett to come with me.  He is small boy with tanned skin and big brown eyes that focus in different directions in a way reminiscent of a chameleon.  He follows me into my office and I sit him in the spare chair the other side of the desk to my seat.  It would be easy to ignore him and just let him sit while I do the last bit of admin of the year, but that can wait.  I start a familiar script:

“Why were you removed?”

“Talking and shouting out.”

“Why?”

“I was just being stupid.  I don’t like this school.”

That last bit is not part of the script.  Usually, our students don’t hate school.  I have to ad lib some new lines.

“Why do you hate it here?”

“I want to go back to Germany.”

“But you have a new house and friends here.  Where is your Dad at the moment?”

“Still in Germany with his regiment.  It’s better there.”

“Is he staying there or is he being posted again”.

“He’s there until January, then he’s getting out and coming to live with us.  My Mum won’t let him go back to Afghan again so he has to get out.  If she’d not been a daft cow we could have stayed in Germany and Dad could have stayed in as a soldier.”

“But he would have been posted into a very dangerous place.  Do you think it’s fair to send your Dad into danger and make your Mum worried just so you can stay with your friends?”

This last question is not one I had thought out and it was a stark one to throw at an angry 11 year old.  It is clearly not one he had thought about either.  He rolls his uncoordinated eyes around in his round face.  He is clearly running through some new thoughts.

“It’s not fair, is it?  I’ve been a knob really.”  He admits after a while.

The bell goes at this point, he stands up, and I gesture for him to leave.  He meets his friends as they came out of the lesson and they go off to lunch.  I am left thinking that we now have a generation of forces children who have had a childhood punctuated by tours on active service where serious injury and even death are possible.  The impact on these kids must be massive and we cannot be sure what the long-term effects will be.