Thought for the Day

A short story by The Old Grey Owl

“It’s ten to eight and time for Thought for the Day. The speaker from our Cambridge studio is…”

“A smug, patronising bastard,” continued Ollie automatically, his left hand flicking out to jab the mute button on the radio.

Some days, he added his own ending to the familiar link in his head. Other days, when he travelled to work with a tightening knot in his stomach, he voiced it. Saying it aloud, with a mannered delivery, added to the pleasure and invariably came accompanied by a wry smile of appreciation for his own wit. In the last couple of months, that had become a daily event.

He talked out loud regularly in the car on his journeys to and from work. He often thought that it was a good thing that the dashcam was a device only configured to look out at the other traffic, not in at the driver, but in his darker moods he thought that it was only a matter of time.

Playback of footage taken inside his car would reveal some uncomfortable truths. A man who would randomly shout at other drivers, pressed into action by a range of motoring misdemeanours: not indicating, driving too fast, driving too slow, straddling lanes. The M25 was a rich source of examples of this kind of incompetence, bad manners and stupidity.

The rest of his repertoire was not provoked by any activity outside of the car, but by the entertainment he had selected inside. Mealy-mouthed, vacuous Government Ministers, desperately straining to fill their allotted time by describing what was already known so that they could not be pressed to give a direct answer to the original question, drove him to fury. He would bang the dashboard and shout at the top of his voice, hurling foul-mouthed abuse at the blatant lies and distortions the disembodied voices were peddling. Favourite songs from the treasure trove of Spotify and Bluetooth inspired lusty singalongs, swaying and headshaking in time to the beat. Occasionally, in town streets, he would find himself intoning a Test Match Special type commentary, or shrieking a Match of the Day style soundbite as he described the antics of the people on the streets.

Outside the car, walking through a shopping centre, or pottering aimlessly at home, solitariness was always accompanied by silence. It was invariably a comfortable silence, a silence that fitted him snugly like a familiar pair of old trainers. So why the change whenever he got in his car and pulled away from the kerb?

The solid clunk of the driver door closing, the rolling pull of the seatbelt and the ensuing metallic click as the buckle engaged, all signified a retreat into a private, protected, invisible world. Despite the wrap around plate glass windows, it was if he were invisible once strapped in, in the same way that those who populated television screens were detached from the viewer in their front room. They were there, but not there at the same time. He imagined it was the same feeling of anonymity, of invisibility,  that internet trollers wallowed in. In the shadows, they were emboldened to spew vitriol and bile, confident that no-one would ever know who they were.

“Oh look, there’s another one,” he thought as he had to brake to accommodate the Nissan Micra that was serenely hogging the middle lane at fifty miles an hour. Too scared to mix it with the articulated lorries in the slow lane, relentlessly nose to tail from Prague to the Midlands, and resolutely refusing to contemplate the outside lane, where people actually broke the speed limit, the Micras of this world provoked the purest form of his fury.

“Moron!” he muttered at the windscreen, as he swerved around him, like a stream in flood surging around a rock in the middle of a river bed. He glanced back in the rear mirror as he pulled away from the Micra, just to check. Yes, there it was, another “Leave means Leave“ sticker, slightly obscuring the driver, squat, low down in his seat, flat cap seeming to float in the air above his head. He bellowed curses at Micraman, who just for that moment became the target for all of his frustrations with stupid Brexiteers and their little Englander small -mindedness. A little unfair, he knew. For all he could tell, Micraman might have principled, reasoned objections to the Europe that went beyond the outright xenophobic. And he would never voice this level of anger in the staffroom, where some people went quiet the second it came up as a topic of conversation. The only safe ground was to blame “the bloody politicians”, which everyone seemed to agree with. Everyone except him, that is. Blame the Government, certainly. But MPs? No, they were doing their jobs properly. If he saw one more bloody Vox pop on the news giving air time to someone saying, “They’re all the bloody same, that shower. I’m never going to vote again”, well, he didn’t know what he would do.

Still, the guy in the Micra couldn’t hear him, so he reasoned a foul -mouthed bellow at the rear-view mirror wouldn’t harm anyone and provided a healthy release for him. And God knows, he needed some kind of release at the moment. Particularly today. Another bloody lesson observation, another evening spent tweaking a lesson plan and polishing his PowerPoint, another troubled night’s sleep, worrying about whether he would get into school early enough to do the photocopying he really should have done on Friday. And to add yet more pressure, he’d been asked to bring in his identity documents because his DBS clearance had run out. That had been another forty -five minutes wasted the night before, ransacking filing cabinets in his study, trying to remember where he usually kept his passport, birth certificate and proof of address. Pressure, pressure, pressure.

He glanced up ahead. Shit. The signals that straddled the M25 blared their amber numbers. Just as he clocked the row of 50s, the car crested the brow of the hill and there laid out below him, in that familiar descent towards the Dartford crossing, was the beginnings of the banked -up lines of traffic, the red stop lights spreading back towards him like an incoming tide. He slowed, checked his rear-view mirror and indicated to move into the left-hand lane, ready to leave the motorway and join the A2. There was a grim satisfaction to be had from deftly slipping in between two gargantuan lorries, into a space barely big enough for that Micra he’d seen moments before. He smirked to himself. Micraman would need a space the size of three cricket pitches before he dared to change lanes. The smirk died on his lips almost as soon as it had formed, as the line of traffic he’d just joined slowed to walking pace and then stopped all together. The knot in his stomach tightened.

“Come on, come on,” he shouted at the windscreen, slapping the steering wheel and then gripping it white knuckled. He looked across at the car to his left and just caught a glimpse of the driver, a young blonde woman looking at him horrified, mouth agape. Their eyes met and she looked away, embarrassed. She began talking into her phone and her eyes flicked across at him a couple of times. His mouth set into a straight line. Now he was an object of fear and ridicule. How much worse could things get. The last time this had happened on the way to work, he had ended up sitting in traffic in this very spot for about two hours

He couldn’t be late. He couldn’t walk into his lesson without that photocopying. Maybe he could just explain and apologise and reschedule. “Sorry, dreadful traffic on the M25 this morning” Even just trying it out for size he knew what the response would be. Excuses were letting the kids down. They’ve only got one shot at their time at Secondary school. If you had any kind of moral purpose, you’d get up an hour earlier and make sure you got in on time. It’s not as if it’s a surprise, the traffic on the M25 being bad. His heart pounded against his chest and that familiar tightening behind his eyes began as his head started to throb.

Deep down, he knew that it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. He knew he was going to fail the observation. It was his third in a row after all, and according to their Performance Management protocols, it was three strikes and you’re out. Each one had come up with different reasons why his lesson was unsatisfactory. The first time he’d been baffled and then confused and then angry. It had never happened to him before. He’d always been a Good or Outstanding. He was so used to being good at his job, being the member of Senior Management who could hack it in the corridors and the classroom, the expert, the person that others sought out for advice or help. And now, suddenly, when he wasn’t that person anymore, he was adrift. He didn’t know who he was.

Back in the day, on the rare occasions when something went wrong, he would have talked it through with Helen. Her calm, rational reassurance would have made everything alright again, but now, since the divorce, he didn’t really talk to anyone, well, not about big stuff anyway. And so, he was left with the growing understanding that he was yesterday’s man, whose views on how to run schools and deal with “challenging” kids, were deemed old fashioned and unfit for purpose. He had, almost overnight, turned from being part of the solution, to being part of the problem.

And so, he knew that he could have spent all night perfecting his lesson plan, could have photocopied the entire contents of the schemes of work filing cabinet, could have slept overnight in his classroom to ensure he was there in time on Monday, and they would still have found a reason to fail him. And from there it was a matter of weeks to competency procedures, union representation and a hush-hush deal being offered to him to resign for a pittance.

This analysis was already there in the murky depths of his consciousness, fully formed, but it was only now, in the strange stillness of a choked and stationary M25, that it revealed itself to him and that he accepted it with a calm, zen like feeling of inevitability and release. The knot in his stomach eased slightly and the pounding behind his eyes relented. He would do his lesson, whenever he got into school and they could say what they liked. Just an ordinary lesson, one of those that over the years had generated hundreds and thousands of excellent exam results, one that he could churn out without spending hours of agonised preparation on. And then, what would be, would be.

The sun peeked through a sudden gap in the bank of clouds above, bathing the lines of cars in a warm, golden glow and he felt himself caressed by a gentle wave of relief. At exactly the same time the traffic began to move. It was not just one of those five-yard crawls that resulted in another forty minutes of stasis, it was proper, genuine movement. All around him, in cars, lorries and vans of all descriptions, drivers broke into smiles, tentative and hesitant at first but then as the traffic accelerated, broad and strong. Some even laughed out loud.

As Ollie pulled on to the A2, he couldn’t remember a time when he had felt happier. The birth of his children, perhaps? Meeting his wife? The surge of the traffic, blue sky above and bright sunshine all around kindled an almost alchemical reaction. Base metal had turned to gold, somehow, and his spirit soared. The silence in the car suddenly seemed at odds with this feeling of euphoria and his finger automatically jabbed out at the volume button.

He knew even before the first word reached his ears. Something in the tone, an uncomfortable agglomeration of vibrating air patterns, a dog whistle like scream, whatever it was, it announced itself to the world. Thought For The Fucking Day.

“…. and so, although Jesus exhorted us all to turn the other cheek, there are times when we must make a stand, no matter how uncomfortable that might be. We too, must be prepared to throw the money lenders out of the Temple and be prepared to face the consequences of our actions, no matter how daunting those consequences might be.”

His initial instinct to scream at the radio, so strongly embedded, suddenly faded as he listened to the words. He never listened to the words. He didn’t have to. Whatever it was, it would end up with some God or other telling all of the sinners to be nice. Comfort for the simple -minded, he always thought. But this morning of all mornings, the words caught somehow. The moneylenders in the Temple. He frowned and hit the mute button again before the pantomime of political debate started up again.

Looking up, he realised that he’d taken his eye off the ball and his exit was fast approaching. For some reason, maybe the volume of traffic that had build up on the M25, maybe the return to school of the Private school kids in their massive pretend off-road vehicles, the lane of traffic to his left was full. Full and fast. He indicated to move left and waited for a gap, or for someone to slow a little and let him in. His eyes flicked rapidly to rear view mirror, then side mirror and back again. Nothing.

“Come on, come on, come on. Let me in you bastards,” he muttered.

He looked ahead, checking the road ahead. It was then he noticed. Right in front of him, also signalling left and trying to squeeze into the exit lane, was Micraman.

“How the hell have you got there?” he wondered aloud.

Maybe it was a different Micra, he thought. But no, there was the “Leave means leave“ sticker, and there, bobbing up and down around it, was the flat cap. Unless Micras were always sold to aging Brexiteers, it was definitely him. And he was in some distress, if the behaviour of the car was anything to go by. It veered and wobbled alarmingly in the lane in front of him, and the flat cap was frantically moving left to right like a set of demented windscreen wipers. Framing the picture in his own windscreen was the traffic signal above, indicating the road options on the A2 after his exit. Canterbury. Car ferries. Ramsgate. Dover. The Channel Tunnel.

The road was running out for him to make his manoeuvre. He was going to have to go for it in the next couple of seconds, or he wouldn’t make it. The nose to tail lorries closed ranks, like roman centurions forming a shield wall. Suddenly, up in front of him, a tiny gap appeared and he prepared himself, clenching and unclenching his knuckles around the steering wheel. Just as he was about to dart into the gap, the Micra swerved at the last moment, and by a miracle, managed to insert himself in the chink they had left. Micraman had either had his eyes closed or had nerves of steel. The lorry at the back of the gap blared his horn, the driver’s hand jabbing down at it in fury, and there was an accompanying screech of brakes.

Ollie had watched the whole thing unfold in terrible slow motion. He instinctively flinched as the Micra jagged across the lanes, waiting for the impact that would surely follow, but apart from the horrible, accusing vibrato horn screaming, there was nothing but the smooth flow of traffic. The last thing he saw of the Micra, as it disappeared off to his left, was the sign in the rear window, “Leave means Leave”, being swallowed up by the chasing pack of lorries.

His own car sailed on down the A2, the signs for Dover, Ramsgate and The Channel Tunnel now a comforting reminder of where he was headed. He looked down at the passenger seat. The burgundy cover of his passport peeped out from underneath a folder of his documents, its gold lettering catching the sun pouring through the windscreen. “European Union. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.

“Yes,” he thought, the beginnings of a smile playing across his lips, “Leave really does mean leave.”

Knife Crime and schools: Panic +Populism = Poor Policy

Well, it’s all brewing up nicely, isn’t it? The austerity chickens are coming home to roost and only the most slavish Tory ideologues can willfully avoid the obvious conclusions. Civil society in general is falling apart, but I’ll confine myself for the moment to Education, where several interesting threads are coalescing.

Britain’s finest minds tackle crisis head-on and fail. Again

First the knife crime and exclusion conundrum. It is absolutely staggering just how totally wrong the politicians and commentators, intelligent people all, can get this. Why can’t they be bothered to do some proper research or get briefed by someone who knows what they are talking about?

The general thrust of the “argument” put forward by lazy hacks seems to be: Crisis in number of deaths and attacks involving young people and knives. Plus surge in permanent exclusions from school. Plus Ofsted’s belated concern about schools using “off-rolling” to manipulate their figures. The answer is obvious. It’s the schools’ fault for excluding too many students, who are left as vulnerable, easy prey for hardened criminals. And the media crew fall over themselves, hugging themselves with glee, as an opportunity presents itself for them to indulge in one of their favourite pastimes, Teacher bashing. An easy narrative, that they can get three or four weeks of cheap copy from.

The trouble is, it’s far too important to shrug one’s shoulders and move on. The track record of Government in making populist policy on the back of misleading headlines goes back a long way. Sometimes it comes back to bite the perpetrator (See Sajid Javid wriggling in the backlash of his nakedly populist, inhumane edict on Shamima Begum and her baby), but generally it bites us, The British People, as we are routinely referred to these days.

Let’s separate exclusions from Off-Rolling for a start. Off-Rolling is an indefensible practice that has only one motivator: to massage performance table figures for the benefit of the school. If accountability measures are so high -stakes that people’s jobs are at risk, then it’s fairly obvious that the ever- resourceful school leadership community will come up with allowable scams to achieve better headline figures. I don’t blame them for this. School leadership is an incredibly stressful, pressured and difficult job. The thing that constantly takes me by surprise is the way that the powers that be (The DFE and Ofsted) profess surprise, shock and disappointment that schools are behaving in ways that are a direct result of policies implemented by the DFE and Ofsted, as if it is nothing to do with them. Rather than blame schools and heads, change the accountability system and use a bit of imagination when you’re about it.

Permanent exclusions are an entirely different matter. On the Today Programme on Radio 4 last week, Justin Webb casually used the phrase “a handful of tricky students” to describe the kids that were being permanently excluded, as if schools couldn’t be bothered to deal with them in-house. It was another one of those moments of banging the dashboard and screaming at the radio, much to the surprise and amusement of other drivers on the M25.

Schools absolutely need the facility to remove students from classroom, for the benefit of the rest of the class, and for the benefit of the child being removed. If it has got to that point, the school is clearly not meeting the needs of the child and another solution has to be sought. In my experience, permanent exclusions are the front sheet of a very thick file detailing all of the efforts that the school has made to engage with the child and the family. It is not a decision taken lightly.

The kids who are off-rolled are much more likely to be dealt with by a chat with the parent, usually the mother, where it is politely explained that they might like to take their child out of school for the the last two terms to avoid them being permanently excluded, with that forever on their record. They become officially home schooled. The school agrees to let the kid sit the exams at the school, usually in a separate room from the rest of Year 11. These deals often come with offers of help with revision materials etc, which is a sweetener. The school has effectively washed its hands of the “tricky student” because they do not figure in the results.

The numbers are increasing in part because of Gove’s boneheaded imposition of the new exams which make the experience of many troubled and challenging children even more alienating than they were already. (see my blog from Feb5th on this: https://growl.blog/2019/02/12/english-teaching-paradise-lost ) Kids vote with their feet. If you want to do something about Los Disaparecidos sort out the curriculum so it meets the needs of the students rather than the needs of Tory politicians pandering to the ghastly conference attendees.

The issue is not with exclusion, it’s with the next step. Exclusion to what? And this takes me back to the first point at the beginning of this piece. It’s a question of money and austerity. You can’t do Education on the cheap. It’s an investment, not a burden, and you get what you pay for.  Pupil Referral Units need a massive injection of money, sustained and guaranteed over years. It needs to be transformed explicitly into a high status career track for teachers, a place where behaviour specialists, therapists, educationalists, highly skilled subject teachers come together and work with small numbers of excluded students. Top quality people need to be incentivised to choose that route as a career track. I’m sure that the top quality people who are already working in that sector, would benefit massively from such an approach and would welcome it.

Of course, this won’t happen. History teaches us that the same inadequate, careerist Government Ministers will make the same inadequate, populist policy decisions, piling further responsibilities onto schools with less money and with their hands tied behind their backs. I fully expect someone will soon pompously announce to camera that a) they are giving the police extra powers and b) they are banning permanent exclusions from schools. Phew, thank goodness for that. Sorted!

Are you, or have you ever been, Pixellated?

It’s that time of year again. A couple of months to go to GCSE exams, the last round of data collection is in, and Senior Leaders are in full panic mode. 4Matrix has well and truly pulverised the figures and a list of students and teachers has popped out of the end. SIMs has generated data cards on every Year 11 student, cross-referenced against pupil premium, target grades and subgroup and the War room wall display is dutifully constructed, so that everyone, can see the current state of play. The more gung-ho schools and the most desperate schools will run at least one other data trawl and one more set of mock exams to generate maximum panic as they reveal you are miles away from your targets. As the weeks roll by, the pressure ratchets up and further strategies, each one more extreme, more perverse, more hyperventilating than the last, are rolled onto the battlefield, the modern educational equivalent of the Trebuchet or the Battering Ram.

Pixl time.

That’s what it is in London and the North East. I believe there was a Pixl toehold developing Bristol way a few years ago, but that might have changed now. It’s been some time since I was involved in the exam frenzy that is Pixl, but the techniques they pioneered, the general approach they represented is widespread now, regardless of whether your school is a member of the organisation or not. And it really is time for a rethink.

I first got involved with Pixl as a Deputy Head of a school in challenging circumstances with several years of GCSE results that were unremittingly crap, over ten years ago now. I know that data gurus will wince at the imprecision of the descriptor “Crap”, but as a “words not numbers” kind of guy, I feel it’s more accurate than a spreadsheet in giving you a full picture of the situation. Crap from top to bottom. I had just joined and like many schools they had had some kind of woolly mentoring scheme for Year 11 that had failed dismally despite an enormous amount of hard work from many people at the school. Except the Year 11s, obviously. No-one knew why it had failed so comprehensively, so Pixl’s arrival on the scene, (or London Challenge as it was known then), came just at the right time because it was providing much needed answers

We met with the Pixl head honcho and signed up on the back of his assurance that paying £3K a year was chicken feed because it guaranteed that your headline 5 A*-C figures would go up by at least 10%. It was a no-brainer. We had been on the verge of following some scheme called “Assertive Mentoring”, but went for London Challenge instead because there were several other local schools that had done so successfully, and because there was a network of support, an infrastructure to help each school through.

It was a stunning success.

Our results went up by 20%. Simply by doing our job properly, in a coordinated way, joining the dots and going the extra mile. The next couple of years confirmed it. This was an approach that worked. And it turned me into a much better Senior Leader and a much better classroom teacher. It showed me what was possible. It reminded me who were the adults in the room. It taught me to think out of the box and not to just accept how things had been done in the past. To analyse a problem and arrive at solutions, regardless of structural or institutional barriers.

Every London Challenge meeting (or PIXL meeting after the Government disbanded London Challenge) was productive. There were always new ideas, and intensely practical suggestions about strategies and approaches. Back at school, staff were receptive and eager to try these new ways of doing things because they were passionate about serving their community and their students, who frankly, had been given a raw deal by society. All was well.

And then….

As the government began to move the goal posts, PIXL responded. Each change designed to make some of the strategies unfeasible was met with ingenious new ways of delivering results. And then there would be another change and so on. Until the King was backed into a corner of the board, one move closer to checkmate. Gaming the system became the new Government catchphrase. We all thought we were just doing our jobs properly, trying to deliver for our students, but apparently not.

But even from the beginning, there were doubts. Remember the ALAN tests? Numeracy and Literacy tests that were worth half a GCCSE each, they were a useful qualification for a small cohort of Year 11 and they had the added bonus of getting them over the line of the magic five. I remember being at one meeting and some new convert to Pixl stood up and proudly told everyone how the entire year11 cohort had been got through both ALAN tests, adding x percent to their results. He received rapturous applause. What a guy!

But, what about the kids? Did they all need it?  Of course not. But they were dragged through it, sacrificial victims to the headline figures. Aren’t they under enough pressure as it is? And what about the staff who had to haul them through? I doubt they had much say in the matter.

And then there was the consultant who told us that it was imperative that our GCSE English key marginals had to achieve at least two grades above their target grade for the written coursework to maximise their chances of getting a C or above. As someone who had done coursework for the previous twenty years, working for the exam board as a senior moderator, I knew that there was only one way to achieve that, and it wasn’t by inspiring the students. It was to cheat.

At the same time the London meetings took on the air of an evangelical religious meeting. Fervour was in the air. People speaking in tongues. Tambourines banged. Individuals singled out by the saintly head of the organisation to stand and bask in the frenzied approbation of the congregation. Dissent was out of the question. It was simply not possible to question anything suggested from the front of the auditorium.

Very early on, it had been suggested that D grade (back in the day, younger readers, a C was the magic bench mark and anything below that was worthless in terms of league tables) was just not good enough and that to accept that was to fail one’s students. The suggestion that, for some students, a D grade represented a real achievement, massive progress after much hard work, was treated with disdain. You were either laughed at for your naivety, or castigated for your lack of “moral purpose”.

Ah yes, moral purpose. Smug, sanctimonious PIXL apparatchiks used this vile phrase to make it clear that anyone in the Pixl universe who did not sign up to every last madcap scheme the organisation sponsored, was in some way, a lesser human being. You were letting down your students. You were being selfish. On judgement day, there would be no way you would pass through into the promised land, because you had comprehensively demonstrated that you were not worthy.

And so, towards the end of my time under the PIXL jackboot, we had moved on from Twilight training sessions, after 6pm, walking talking mocks, constantly using the PIXL library of mock exams to drill our year 11s endlessly after school. The latest thing was to do a last -minute revision session at about 7am the morning of the real exam. The idea was that you could somehow subliminally plant key information in the minds of the students, sitting in their proper exam seats in the proper exam hall, in the last few hours before the exam was due to start. It was a brave Head of Department or Senior Leader who stuck their head above the parapet to venture the opinion that this was just voodoo exam prep, a busy activity to be done for the sake of doing something, anything, without any evidence that it worked. And heaven protect the teacher who suggested that staff had already done more than enough to support their Year 11 students and that to ask more was to risk burn out.

It got to the point where these additional activities were expected, not just by Senior Leaders, but by parents and students. Complaints were made by parents about a Department that were not willing to lay on a pre -exam session at 7 am, or an Easter revision session, or a twilight slot. You were accused directly of letting down little Johnny. A culture developed amongst students that said that attendance at extra sessions should be enough to guarantee success, even for those students who messed around with their friends when they did attend and who didn’t show up for mainstream lessons, or did show up and were involved in constant low -level disruption.

And what, ultimately, was the result of all of this “support”?

A generation of kids who developed the attitude that it did not matter what they did, in terms of class work or homework, there would always be some mug teacher who would give yet more time to them, even when they had thrown it back in their face during normal lessons. Because the kids, being very wise, had clocked that the whole thing mattered much more to their teachers than it did to them. The ultimate in spoon feeding. This, of course, was going on at the same time as Senior Leaders were launching yet another initiative to encourage independent learning, when the whole structure of Year 11 GCSE preparation rested upon an enormous, tottering edifice of dependency.

If I were the Secretary of State for Education, I would bring the whole tottering edifice crashing down. I would ban after school lessons, holiday revision schemes, the whole works. Teachers would deliver high quality lessons. Students who did not get the grades they needed would resit the year. This would incentivise students to take responsibility for their own learning. Over time there would be a revolution of attitude and students would inevitably, become independent learners, doing what they needed to do to get the grades they needed to enter the next chapter of their lives. And it would only work with an accompanying revolution in school accountability measures, which have so blighted and distorted the educational process.

Or, as has been recently suggested, get rid of GCSEs altogether, and get back to Teaching and Learning.

I hope that Year 11 teachers everywhere, and Senior Leaders and even senior members of PIXL don’t take too much offence at this. I know it’s not as simple as bad guys and good guys, bullies and victims. I know that the overwhelming majority of people involved with PIXL are well-meaning, good people who want the best for the students. And if some of them are building careers, as are some of the Year 11 teachers who are burning themselves out delivering all of this stuff, as well as trying to give their students a leg up, well there are worst things to be guilty of than that. I just wish we questioned it more and campaigned for alternative approaches. Because if there is one thing I’m sure of it’s this. The annual, exhausting scramble for GCSE results that are good enough to placate OFSTED and Performance Managers is inevitably self-defeating. And it’s not education. That is something much bigger, finer, more valuable, more important, more precious. Something, in short,  worth fighting for.

The Demon Headmaster- Satire or Instruction Manual?

Back in the 1980’s grateful English teachers seized upon “The Demon Headmaster” as an engaging playscript for Key Stage 3 classes. It started life as novel by Gillian Cross, but it was the script that was most in demand. We taught it as a satire, a bit of light relief. Its shelf life was extended by the TV version in the nineties, and its dystopian vision of the school of the future, run by crazed, sinister and nameless aliens retained its appeal. It was a clever, far-fetched, mad idea that teachers and school leaders might have strange ideas of power and control over unsuspecting humans. It allowed for the perennially attractive idea of a resistance movement, secretly fighting against the monolithic powers of darkness and oppression. And just like “The Handmaid’s Tale”, it’s back, with added relevance for the strange times we are living through. Strangely, it’s set in an Academy, with a robotic Head teacher who has weird ideas of how to treat children and staff. Where do they get these crazy ideas from?

How we laughed at the idea of silent corridors, kids chanting oppressive mantras in the playground, a Headteacher whose big idea was the importance of order above all other things! Little did we know that it was destined to be a set text on NPQH programmes, a sort of “Headteachering for Dummies” guide. Senior leaders everywhere, who are trying to hold the line of ethical leadership against the rising tide of the New Authoritarianism, stand firm! You may get your feet wet, but the tide will turn.

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-02-11/the-demon-headmaster-bbc-reboot

Gove’s Greatest Gaffes

Number 3. The Free School Programme

Another great example of ideological correctness trumping effectiveness. At a time of unprecedented austerity, His Goviness decreed that Free Schools were The Answer, and hang the expense. If they were the answer, it must have been a very silly question. On the back of zero credible evidence (I’m discounting the report in Which magazine comparing the best school systems in the world that came between the list of best small family saloons and the best bagless cylinder vacuum cleaners) Gove pumped billions of pounds of tax payer dosh into this madcap scheme to let anybody set up a school. You could use any derelict building in the High Street (and, let’s face it, the supply of derelict buildings rocketed round about this time) to put the students in and you could get any Tom, Dick or Harry to teach them. If you remember, this was also the time of Gove’s other stroke of genius, getting ex-service veterans fast tracked through teacher training, to sort out local-authority -sponsored feral student behaviour.

There didn’t even seem to be a fit and proper person test, similar to the one that so effectively inoculates Premier League football clubs from being taken over by dodgy Russian oligarchs, drugs barons and people with pending court cases regarding human rights abuses. ( Oh. Hang on a minute…) There quite clearly couldn’t have been such a test, because the poster boy for this libertarian movement was Toby Young, a man whose brain could not cope with the onerous task of  tweeting messages while considering , at the same time, all social norms of acceptable behaviour with regard to women and minorities.

In a report published in Schools Week in January this year, ( https://schoolsweek.co.uk/revealed-the-hidden-cost-of-free-schools )

 it was revealed that between 2010 and 2017, the DFE spent £3.6 billion on setting up Free School. A quarter of it was spent on Lawyers’ fees. £3.6bn! That’s nearly four bungs to the DUP. At a time when class sizes are rising, teacher pay has been frozen for years and class teachers are resourcing teaching materials out of their own pockets. Value for Money, as Conservative spokespeople are wont to say. Value for Money my arse, as Jim Royle was wont to say. You can’t put a price on ideological purity.

The adventures of Multi Academy Trust Man!

Ban the Booths?

The Isolation Room in StalagLuft III runs out of A4 lined paper again

I’ve followed the recent debate on the use of isolation rooms in schools with some interest. It seems to have divided opinion, with a vociferous group condemning their use matched by an equally passionate opposition who take the view that staff and students need to be protected from the disruption to teaching and learning that poor behaviour usually brings. I wonder if the two sides are as implacably opposed as they appear.

At the last school I worked in as a Deputy Head, a school that could reasonably be labelled “challenging”, the isolation room was an essential component of our behaviour management strategy. We called it “Inclusion” to try and signal that students were placed there as an alternative to exclusion. We were actively trying to keep them in school. When I first arrived at the school the room exhibited all the very worst characteristics of an isolation room. It was staffed by a motley collection of odds and sods, who just happened to be free at that time (including NQTs!). It was in a tiny room with a handful of graffiti -covered desks, no window, no computer and, most of the time no books, paper or equipment. Some students were placed there for days at a time. Some students placed themselves there, to escape lessons and to meet their mates for a bit of R and R.

We appointed a behaviour specialist to run it, moved it to a large, airy, well stocked room and linked it to the SEN department. Over the years it was staffed by outstanding individuals, most of them not teachers, whose skill and dedication brought about genuine and positive changes for many damaged students. We had exciting plans for its development. We intended to link it to SEN formally and have two distinct wings: a temporary short- term penal institution with strictly enforced rules and a work programme that mirrored the classes they had been removed from. The second wing was for an alternative curriculum provision for groups of up to fifteen students. This could be for a month. It had specialist subject teachers attached to it as part of their timetable and we devised therapeutic programmes with counsellors and specialists to help these students address and confront some of their issues.  The aim was for them to be readmitted to the mainstream at the end of their programme. It took a lot of negotiating and planning to set it up, but finally we were ready to implement the new system.

And then, after dodging the austerity bullet for several years, we couldn’t avoid it any longer and we had to cut. We could not afford to set it up as we had planned. It stayed as it was, still doing stirling work. And then we had to cut again. And again. And make the brilliant, skilful staff redundant, or move them out of behaviour provision and into delivering mainstream classes. By the time I left, it was just about functioning as a sinbin. And it could have been so much more than that.

Looking back, it seems clear to me that isolation rooms, or whatever you choose to call them, only work if they are properly staffed and resourced and if there is a commitment to work with the students in there, rather than simply getting them to copy in silence, the educational equivalent of solitary confinement. Even Steve McQueen had a baseball and a glove. That was the trouble with those Prisoner of War camps. They just weren’t tough enough. Students should not be left in there for days on end, and neither should staff, unless that is their interest in terms of their career development. The trouble is, I suspect this controversy stems from the fact that the tough, zero tolerance devotees amongst headteachers will not see a problem with solitary confinement.

There are very few educational ideas that are intrinsically good or bad in themselves. A rubbish Senior Leadership, that hasn’t read the “How to be an emotionally intelligent human” manual, can poison the most enlightened, liberal initiative. Just as an example, I used to work in a school that completely ruined Charity MUFTI days. The kids were asked to donate a pound for the privilege of wearing their own clothes for the day, with all proceeds going to the charity they had chosen. Pretty standard practice, huh? And this, believe it or not, turned into smiling, happy kids being confronted by stern faced suits at the school entrance, making them wait silently in line while they handed over their “donation”. And, of course, some of them were from families that didn’t have two pennies to rub together, never mind a pound. At a stroke, charitable engagement turned into a Sheriff of Nottingham type tax grab and the day started with a sour confrontation.

If they can’t even get that right, I certainly wouldn’t trust them to run an isolation room.

Group Think

The blind leading the blind………..

The grass flattening takes my mind back nearly twenty years ago when I was on the Deputy head interview treadmill. At one gruelling interview process lasting three days (including an evening meeting the Governors, who appeared to be the Tory Party at play in deepest Surrey. The point of this bit seemed to be to see whether you could hold a plate of canapes, a glass of dry white wine and still engage in small talk about property prices and skiing holidays) I found myself in a group of five candidates sitting in a circle. There was an outer circle, accommodating members of the panel with clipboards, frantically scribbling notes as we all strutted our stuff. We were meant to be members of the Senior Leadership group and, at intervals, we were given a little slip of paper with a hot educational topic on it. Each candidate took it in turns to introduce and chair the discussion of the topic.

All was going well until a new topic was introduced. To combat vandalism and poor behaviour in the toilets, the school was going to introduce CCTV cameras inside the toilets and the cubicles. Three of the candidates fell over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate their toughness. Nothing would stand in their way of stamping out bad behaviour. Their proposals got wilder and wilder as they tried to trump each other’s hardman credentials. I felt increasingly uncomfortable as this authoritarian auction proceeded, but shamefully, I kept my counsel. But then, the fifth candidate, a young woman who had been under the radar until this point, interjected and gently pointed out that perhaps the issue of privacy had not been given a proper airing. Silence filled the room and a look of horror spread across the faces as they all realised that they had just made themselves look rather foolish. It would be lovely to report that the young woman got the job, but I’m afraid this story does not have a fairytale ending, not even for me. One of the brutalist, authoritarian, sharp suited chaps got it, despite not having uttered a word of sense nor imagination throughout the three days. I’m pretty sure that he would have been first in the queue for grass flattening had it been around back in the day. He’s probably advising them on it now.

“Flattening the grass” and the ethics of behaviour management

“

It sounds like the sort of thing the servants might have been tasked to do before a nice picnic on the lawn in gentler times, but the metaphor conceals a more sinister practice. In the last week, allegations have emerged of Academy Chains using this tactic to establish new zero tolerance regimes in recently taken over schools. John Tomsett, Headteacher of Huntingdon school in York, posted, “ Later in the week I heard of a MAT-endorsed behaviour ethos-setting exercise called “flattening the grass” rolling assemblies. Allegedly, this involves the MAT executives visiting the school, en masse, to stand around the edge of the assembly hall whilst the head of school outlines, in emphatic terms to year group after year group, the MAT’s expectations of students’ behaviour. Before the assemblies begin, individual students are identified for the head of school to single out in front of their peers until they cry. If the head of school is not emphatic enough, the MAT CEO walks forward, replaces the head of school and concludes the assembly in a more suitably emphatic manner. The students are the “grass” which is “flattened” by the experience.” https://johntomsett.com/2019/02/03/this-much-i-know-about-behaviour-management-flattening-the-grass-and-mary-myatt/

This allegation, condemned for a while on Twitter until it all went quiet, has resurfaced in Schools Week in an article by John Dickens which accuses The Outward Grange Trust and the Delta Academies Trust, both of which run many schools in the north of England, of routinely adopting these practices. The article quotes unnamed employees of the OGAT trust and the allegations are backed up by testimony from parents and students. When the TES asked OGAT to respond to the allegations they were not denied and subsequently they have employed a “political and media relations firm”, Abzed, to handle the fallout.

‘Flattening the grass’: what’s really going on at OGAT and Delta?

What madness is this? How have we got to this point? The response to these allegations by critics thus far has been wholly inadequate: mild, tentative and questioning. A raised eyebrow rather than a full-throated roar of condemnation. “Flattening” students until they cry? This is a practice with more in common with psychological torture and interrogation techniques than with school behaviour management. They are children for goodness sake, children for whom the organisations in question have a duty of care. I’m sure that every member of staff in these schools wears their ID lanyard (too fearful of being “flattened” themselves, no doubt) and they have been granted the Ofsted tick for safeguarding. But I have no doubt that the pupils at these schools are far from being “safe”.

The real tragedy here is that we have constructed a culture where this is no longer remarkable. The smack of firm leadership is de rigeur these days. The “I make no apologies for insisting on the highest standards” brigade have been allowed to chip away at civilized norms of institutional practice so that just about anything goes. The end justifies the means it seems and anyone who challenges that is dismissed as a bleeding -heart liberal. And so these ghastly practices spread slowly and insidiously until the fabric of the system is riddled with them.

It has to stop. Now. There needs to be an immediate official enquiry and a statement from the DfE condemning these practices in the strongest possible terms.

English teaching – Paradise Lost?

In her article in The Guardian, Susanna Rustin asks the question, “Are (students) being put off by the way the Government says it (English) must be taught?”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/study-english-a-level-university-government-taught

The answer, for anyone who has taught examination groups in Secondary, or in Primary schools working towards Year 6 assessments over the last five years or so, must be a resounding yes, yes, yes. Where there used to be job satisfaction now lies frustration, boredom and anger. Joy, once a regular companion on the road in English lessons, is now a rare visitor. When it does come, it is considered a distraction, an irrelevance, a false friend. Internal observations, performance management, analysis of exam results and residuals have no time for this imposter. So irrelevant is it, that there is no metric to measure it. And without measurement, there can be no value.

This arid wasteland has been coming for a long time. The ideological tide has turned and there has been an inexorable sense that incremental changes, in themselves often individually justifiable and manageable, together are being used to create a model that is brutally functional, with no room for beauty, or the shiver of emotion that a handful of crafted words can produce. At Primary school, young children are frog marched through parts of speech, and the disembodied parsing of their own language so that they can spot a prepositional phrase at five hundred yards. I take my hat off to Primary colleagues who have had to wade through all of this nonsense while still managing to preserve a love of reading amongst their charges.

Then we have the fool’s gold of assessment without levels, provoking an enormous waste of teacher hours and ingenuity to come up with a multitude of systems that are impossible to compare and are less precise and accurate than the system they replaced. Many of these new approaches were, in reality, levels with a different label. There seems to have been a new orthodoxy established here, and I have visited many schools where the GCSE grading system has simply been adopted from Year 7. This compounds the idea that everything in school, from the minute the child enters, is geared to their final product or outcome, their GCSE grade. So once the common grading system has spread across the school community, GCSE style assessments and texts follow. Students in Year 7 begin to tackle “GCSE style” exam questions, on language and literature to better prepare them for the final ordeal. They analyse Victorian non-fiction texts for structural devices. Extended writing, where students have the space to develop ideas and sustain them over several pages, has gone the way of the quill and VHS recorder. And when the few students who have retained their interest in books arrive at their first few A level lessons, they are frightened by the demands of an A level coursework essay, which seems inordinately “long.”

The new Assessment Gods also decreed that “Best Fit” assessment was dreadfully old- fashioned and not fit for purpose because Teacher Assessment of children’s reading was wildly at odds with test scores. No, that was woolly liberal thinking, the product of Gove’s Blob. Mastery Assessment was the thing. As blindingly obvious as a populist’s analysis of the impact of immigration and just as helpful and accurate. What a con! I have struggled in vain to get my head around mastery assessment. I’ve tried to go beyond nodding my head and saying, of course students must know one lesser thing, before they can progress on to the next higher thing. Clearly, everything must aggregate incrementally, so that bit by bit, the grains of sand accumulate to form a mountain of knowledge. Secure knowledge that is. And from this flows the obvious conclusion, that students must be held back, protected from knowledge they can’t possibly grasp, until they have mastered the simpler knowledge. What nonsense. This is not the way people learn. They learn haltingly, unpredictably, differentially. Mastery assessment was a gift to hundreds of charlatan CPD providers (“Mastery teaching in Geography.” Only £275 per course delegate, with discount for early booking) but not much more. I might be wrong, but no-one has explained it to me satisfactorily yet. Certainly not Mr Oates.

Best fit, certainly in English, is a much more useful concept that allows professional teachers to exercise judgement, balance strengths and weaknesses and arrive at a considered grade. Unfortunately, judgement and balance imply a lack of rigour, a subjectivity, a lack of irrefutable evidence. The idea that criteria- based assessment, examinations and mark schemes provide more reliable and valid assessments of students’ achievement is fanciful. That is just the justification, however. The real pull of the number for the accountability gurus is the fact that it can be aggregated, to provide system wide judgements. This assessment is not for the benefit of the student, it is a mechanism to judge (and find wanting) teachers, schools, and local authorities. Though not, interestingly, Academies. I prefer to go back to Myra Barrs and think, “Words not Numbers” http://ioe.academia.edu/MyraBarrs

This new assessment brutalism has been accompanied by the new GCSE specifications. No tiers of entry. No texts allowed in the Literature exams. Complex questions, highly demanding reading requirement and great pressure of time has produced a system where Senior Managements, and hard- pressed Heads of English, have to plan their delivery of the spec, usually over three years with endless repetitions of exam practice. Drill, drill, drill. Schools where students spend a year learning their key literature text. No-one has yet explained to me how making the exam harder means that standards rise. The necessity to keep the same percentage grade distribution between the old spec and the new clearly shows that standards haven’t risen. Once again, UK education reverts to type, serving brilliantly the top 40% and failing miserably the bottom 60%. Its no surprise, but a tragic policy consequence, when students are delighted to wave good bye to the books they have been battered with for two or three years and vow never to pick up a book again.

Meanwhile, as Rustin reminds us, there has been a crisis of teacher recruitment. I’ll leave to one side the dog’s dinner that is Tory policy on this area. The supply of trainee teachers has virtually dried up, with the latest figures telling us that between 40 and 50 % of teachers leave teaching within their first five years. In a previous life, as a Secondary Deputy Head, I interviewed many candidates for jobs who told horror stories about the harsh and bullying regimes in some of the best- known Academy chains, who seemed to have an explicit policy of burning young teachers out, with a view to getting two or three cheap years out of them before getting rid. This has also impacted on English teaching. The Male English teacher is a particularly rare beast, at a time when positive male role models are more important than ever. The Male English teacher is fast becoming as endangered as the word’s insect population.

It’s a toxic cocktail: salary stagnation, oppressive and bullying accountability regimes, grindingly dull officially -sanctioned teaching approaches, a supply of trainees that has turned into a trickle. English teaching was always a very demanding job, requiring real dedication and a willingness to go the extra mile and burn the midnight oil, but it’s compensations more than made up for the sacrifice. The classroom was a crucible of creativity and regeneration and kept us all, students and teachers, coming back for more. I fear that it will take a long time, and a concerted effort to change a mechanistic, functional culture, to repair the damage that has already been done. I’m afraid that the worst is yet to come.