15 April 2008, by Bernard Trafford
It was Hermann Goering who famously declared, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol.’ (Actually, sheer pedantry demands I point out that he was misquoting a cleverer line from a 1933 play that said, ‘When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my Browning.’ But it spoils the joke to have to explain the double entendre about the poet and the gun-maker both called Browning). From a fat militarist given to wearing outrageously silly uniforms such a profession of philistinism might appear just that: but Hitler's comical yet murderous military chief had a shrewd eye for fine art, gained by plundering great works from all over occupied Europe. So I'm alarmed to find myself agreeing with him about culture - or Culture. As for Creativity and Cadet Forces (all recent daft government ideas start with C, apparently), don't get me started.
I'll explain. Since the start of the year we have witnessed a flurry of government proposals to enrich the education of the nation's children. They sound plausible when worthily (if dully) expanded by government spokesmen but are likely to be about as successful as a dodo doing aerobatics. Talking of non-starters, I barely know where to begin.
Culture. Ministers want our kids to have five hours of it every week. Why five? Why not four, or six? It’s even more arbitrary than the sport/physical activity targets: there at least one can presumably work out some kind of physio-medical rationale. Quite where those five hours will come from is not specified; but they’re unlikely to be able to be squeezed into the teaching week, given the undiminished pressure on schools to hit literacy, numeracy, SAT and GCSE targets.
What is Culture, anyhow? Is literature no longer taught in English? Or has the literacy imperative reduced it to the lowly function of being a text that children have to prove they can decipher and to hell with the aesthetics?
Is art Culture? Or music? Drama? Does history never deal with it? Our policymakers appear so eager to prove themselves right-on and in touch with ‘yoof kulcher’, that they forget that a lot of culture is actually covered in existing subjects. Nah: don’t be stoopid! That’s all just old school stuff. This politicians’ Bright Idea is something else. It’s new, it’s real, it’s (spare us) relevant!
Television images announcing the Grand Plan for Culture showed visiting drama specialists working with children in a school. Importing arts groups for a day, or a week, can spark an interest, get ideas going; but it cannot engender real, sustainable development. This kind of tokenistic input is like sticking a cherry on top of a diner’s burger in case he doesn't have time for pudding. Real culture is organic: it needs to be developed over time (over years), where children are led, trained and above all inspired by teachers who work with them on a long-term basis. At WGS we still rely on those inspirational teachers who teach a full week and still do all that wonderful drama, music, sport, outdoor pursuits and all the rest outside school: that’s what we call real education, led by example.
Not long ago our lords and masters complained schools weren’t teaching children to be entrepreneurial. Maintained schools have Enterprise Weeks now, so that problem’s solved. Hurrah! But it’s not enough: now we’re told we need to make schools more creative.
How this government expects schools to encourage children to go for creative, open-ended solutions when they are the most tested pupils in the world is beyond me. The people complaining about lack of creativity are the very ones who won’t let up on the testing-and-accountability business for a second. Teachers daren’t encourage risk-taking in exams. There's no room for clever-clever, creative responses that don't match the marker’s template. Keep it simple and get it right: that’s the only safe way. And results are so important - for the school, if not for the kids - that we have to play safe. It’s a brave teacher or school that doesn’t.
Our elected guardians never rest. Most recently we’re told that Gordon thinks Combined Cadet Forces (CCFs) would be good for kids in maintained schools: they would teach them discipline and self-respect. No, they wouldn’t. You don’t change children or their schools by rubbing camouflage paint on their faces and getting them to march up and down the playground. CCFs run successfully (and more imaginatively than I’ve described) in schools where discipline and self-respect are already endemic in the school: the good CCF is a symptom of those qualities, not the cause.
So is this Cadet Force wheeze just more motherhood-and-apple-pie? Possibly, though a conspiracy theorist (or just someone mildly paranoid – like me) might reckon that taking Ministry of Defence funding away from independent school CCFs and moving them into maintained schools would smash what left-wingers see as the perpetuation of the Officer Class.
As always, politicians refuse to see the contradictions in adding bright ideas on top of their unremitting drive for results: in thinking up new ways to compensate for the disastrous side-effects of that pressure. As a result these add-ons they dream up are mere window-dressing. Ministers (Prime and other) are just fiddling with the problems they identify. They're fiddling (ha ha!) while Rome burns - a truly Cultured and Classical metaphor.
So, yes, hand me my pistol. On second thoughts, if there’s a cadet handy, I’ll get him to lend me lend me his antiquated Lee Enfield 0.303 rifle. At least when that was made the army’s equipment actually worked.
And I’ll reach for my Browning too and read a spot of poetry, quietly giving thanks for the fact that, WGS being independent, we don’t have to do all that tosh if we don’t want to. We’ll carry on doing real education with (I hope) minimal interference. Salute!
This is an edited version of a piece due to appear soon in SecEd, THE Voice of Secondary Education
19 February 2008, by Bernard Trafford
There it was again; last week, yet another call to "phase out grammar schools." Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University and the National Centre for Social Research have found that grammar schools and faith schools are socially exclusive and draw the overwhelming majority of their pupils from wealthier homes. Specialist schools, which can select up to 10 per cent according to a particular aptitude, are doing so in ever greater numbers. They too are accused of being "socially selective by default", since more affluent families are better placed to fund resources, travel and opportunities for their children to develop skills in, say, music, languages or even sport. The National Union of Teachers’ Steve Sinnott was quick to capitalise on this, "nailing the lie that selection helps those from disadvantaged backgrounds. On the contrary, it widens the gap between the haves and have-nots."
Is that true, though? And should we worry about it? The answers have to be yes, and yes. Social mobility is declining in the UK. The most recent international comparison of school standards, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s (OECD) PISA study, demonstrated that the UK has the biggest gap in the world between the best performing schools and the worst. Of course we should be concerned. It's a national disgrace.
But what we should not do in response is to allow the self-proclaimed levellers to jump on the social divide bandwagon and demand the closure of the160 remaining grammar schools - let alone of the entire independent sector which usually gets tarred with the same brush at this stage in the argument. To regard this segment of schools, identified by the PISA report as the best in the world, as creating - indeed, being -the problem and thus seeing their abolition as the solution is crazy. To close the best schools in an attempt to improve the least successful is about as sensible as shooting the first 200 runners in the London Marathon to spare the feelings of the rest of the field. The survivors might feel better, but there is no evidence that they'll have improved their performance as a result.
There's the rub. The best bits of the system should surely be part of the solution: in the UK, however, they are characterised as the problem. The wreckers would like to get rid of the high-performing schools, but there's no reason to believe that all the rest will improve as a result. Yet there is a peculiarly British feeling that there's something a bit grubby about excelling.
Of course, as a nation we're terribly good at (and awfully brave about) losing, but losing well. The stiff upper lip is alive and flourishing. And grown men don't cry (except for the odd footballer). But there's something in our national psyche that equates excellence with elitism: not elitism in the original sense of identifying and celebrating the best, but in a new and contemporary interpretation with a dirty connotation of social exclusivity. This collection is wrongheaded, but it is both strong and prevalent in just the same way as any mention of independent education and media leads inevitably to the monicker "public schools" and the inclusion of that quaint old 1896 picture of two Eton boys in their school uniforms and top hats juxtaposed with two local urchins. A picture is worth a thousand words, particularly if it’s obsolete and misleading.
In my inaugural speech as HMC chairman last October, I described how I believe the politics of envy are alive and well. If anything, the intervening four months have seen envy blossom. What kind of country, ruing the gap between best and worst, would seek to destroy the best? Britain, apparently, or at least some parts of it. I recall, as a very inexperienced head in 1991, talking to my opposite number at one of the (then) prestigious new city technology colleges. "If Major loses the (1992) election," I asked, "Do you fear for your school under Labour?" My colleague was sanguine. "Do you think anyone would be daft enough to have a go at anything as good as this?"
Kevin (later Sir Kevin) Satchwell of Thomas Telford School was right then. Knowing him, he's probably right now. But his comprehensive school is hugely oversubscribed, and the admissions police are now out in force. Will he have to hold a lottery for places as other schools are starting to? Lotteries aren't fair: but they're equally, illogically unfair to all, which is a kind of rough justice.
The government has failed since 1997 to grasp the nettle of over-subscribed schools. It simply ducked the issue of selection. But if the best schools are so good because of selection - and they are - it's time politicians stopped pretending they aren't there, turning a blind eye, sanctimoniously concentrating solely on what they tend to call "the vast majority of schools" and choosing to ignore the danger to the country’s best schools. If selective and partially selective schools are failing to find talented children from poor homes then, rather than lambasting the schools which have to make those hard choices, we should be taking a hard look at the social policies that are failing to tackle poverty, disadvantage and lack of aspiration. Schools are not the villains here. They aren't conspiring to exclude children from less affluent homes: but government and society are in danger of doing so, acting out of a warped and damaging sense of misguided egalitarianism, one that drags down instead of raising up.
Independent schools are actively looking for talented, disadvantaged children - without government help but, mercifully, without interference either. Maybe the government should do the same for its own schools (and silly new targets for Gifted and Talented children won't do anything to help). Why not help selecting schools to continue to thrive, and then focus on building up the remainder? Not those in dire straits, many of which are already enjoying streams of new money through Academy status, but those bumping along in the middle. They are largely ignored by government which should be pouring resources, ideas, innovation and talent into them, instead of hedging them about with red tape and the constant threat of hostile inspection with the dubious justification of public accountability.
We won’t make struggling schools better by destroying those that are already flying. But that’s the proposal that is being aired too often, and without being countered sufficiently strongly. If we’re not careful, this country will begin to slip down the path that’s being charted by those negative voices claiming to speak for equality – voices which, instead of being greeted with outrage or simply laughed out of court, seem to be granted ever-increasing column inches. If we’re not careful we shall end up labelling all excellence or aspiration as elitism, destroy what is fine, good and truly world-class. If we allow that to happen, we might as well pull down the shutters and proclaim the end of UK plc.
04 February 2008, by Bernard Trafford
MORE LEAGUE TABLE LUNACY
It goes on and on. As schools awaited January publication of the latest GCSE league tables the Guardian reported, the day before term (7th January), on some Bristol University research which has found that these latest “contextual value added” (CVA) tables “are meaningless, with some of the data at best misleading, at worst dishonest.”
Bristol's Professor Harvey Goldstein criticised government for continuing to “ignore the overwhelming evidence about the weakness of league tables” and “pretend that they are non-problematical. No wonder people have become cynical.”
The Bristol research team is absolutely right, but the consequences of these endless streams of league tables are far more damaging than merely engendering cynicism. They do damage because they put pressure on schools not to do their best for children in terms of meeting their individual needs but instead to teach them courses and enter them for qualifications that improve the school’s league table position. Pressure is exerted on schools direct from government, via local authorities and through OFSTED. I don't blame maintained schools at all for giving into those pressures: they can be immense. Distortion of curriculum and thus of children's learning comes from government because of league table pressure: schools are forced to concentrate their limited resources on pushing children over target thresholds; for instance, focusing particularly on children on the C/D borderline to try to ensure they get back the Cs that count in league tables.
I really don't understand why this lunacy is perpetuated. There is no doubting the absolute sincerity of ministers’ ambition to improve opportunities for all children and to raise standards in all schools. Many of their solutions to perceived problems are imaginative: but then most of that good is undone by the mantra-like insistence that league tables are good and necessary when they are neither. The schizophrenia of this approach is holding back progress.
The fact that league tables are unnecessary is demonstrated by the fact that many successful independent schools have effectively turned their backs on league tables in the past two years by following International GCSE maths and science courses instead of the mainstream GCSE. These schools have chosen iGCSEs because they see the syllabuses as more challenging and more useful. iGCSEs don't count in government league tables so those schools are disappearing from them: I don't see that disappearance doing them any harm! On the contrary, parents are respecting them for choosing courses that suits their children. My mischievous side half wishes that WGS had gone down that path too: but, in truth, our Sciences and Maths departments declared themselves content to stay with GCSE, a professional decision I support and endorse.
I sincerely hope that ministers will start to see that it's time to kill off the league table monster. The Bristol research shows that attempts to make them more sophisticated have just made them even more misleading. HMC schools exerting their independence and going for non-league-table qualifications demonstrate that there is no tangible link between league tables and raising standards.
I know my maintained sector colleagues are crying out for an end to the absurd pressures put on them by the tables. If ministers were to find the courage finally to end their tyranny, they would receive the thanks of the entire profession and the gratitude of millions of children and parents.
Another thing guaranteed to raise my blood pressure recently was the suggestion from the DCSF that there should be league tables in relation to gifted and talented pupils in maintained schools, identifying what proportion of pupils attain grades at the top grades (Levels 7 and 8) in 14-year-olds’ (Key Stage 3) SATs. Not only will these new league tables create still more pressure: they will also act against the original intention of identifying pupils who are identified as being gifted or talented. In raising the status of those who excel in traditional academic subjects, assessed in these national tests, they will devalue the achievements of those talented in other areas such as music, dance, drama, art and even sport. It will be yet another own goal in which ministers’ preoccupation with schools’ accountability will result in the means damaging the laudable end.
25 January 2008, by Bernard Trafford
A belated Happy New Year!
Here’s a New Year resolution for everyone – BOTCH!
It’s shorthand, of course: read on…
BELIEF: Believe in your abilities and trust yourself to take risks. Make the most of your flair: play to your strengths and make the most of them at the same time as trying to work on your weaknesses. If you are brilliant at drawing but find essay-writing hard, you’re clearly going to have to improve your essay-writing. But you can always use your flair for design to make all your work attractively presented and graphically interesting.
ORGANISATION: Dull but necessary! Use your time well, including homework slots. Be punctual to lessons and turn up equipped with everything you need. Use the library for working, not for wasting time. Take opportunities to get things done, not to put them off.
THOUGHT: Don’t just repeat the ideas of others, and always look for deeper meanings and understanding. Use our SUCCESS acronym, the WGS path to Higher Order Thinking.
COMMITMENT: No getting away from this! Put the effort in. Keep at it. Persistence is vital: don’t leave questions out because you can’t do them, but come back and really work at them. Get and keep fit: a healthy mind works better in a healthy body.
HONESTY: Don’t kid yourself. Take real responsibility for your own learning. Don’t go through a process of self-assessment just to keep your tutor happy: be honest about what you can do and what you will need to improve so it’s useful to you. Don’t make empty promises that you can’t keep. Don’t compare yourself to the best person in the class: compare yourself to how you were doing last week and see if you’re making progress. How about being really honest about the time you waste at the computer and spend half an hour less per day on networking sites, friends’ pages etc? Use the time instead to read an informative newspaper; to find articles about subjects you’re interested in; to try reading a magazine related to your favourite subject.
“a little concern is healthy: it’s unhealthy to worry a lot.”
Have a good one! BT
19 November 2007, by Bernard Trafford
Well, we continue with the roll-out of our SUCCESS initiative. We think that, like the best ideas, the acronym is simple, memorable and easy to use: it's also capable of leading us into very significant depth.
As we begin to observe just how much impact it has within the School, I can't resist asking myself whether this is something that would have value more widely. Is it something we should share generously with our neighbours? Perhaps we should market it and make a fortune!
Actually, I don't mind sharing it at all: for example, the generic SUCCESS poster is available on this website. Moreover, on 16th November I was speaking to the Headteachers’ Association of Scotland (HAS), addressing the question Creativity or survival: can school leaders be creative under pressure? You won't be surprised to know that my answer to the question was yes. In fact, some of the best and most creative ideas we come up with at WGS have been as a response to pressure. But the pressure we most frequently experience is that of needing to satisfy the exacting demands of our parents and students, and that is a positive one. It’s the most effective way of marketing the school too.
But if we were in the maintained sector I don't know if we'd manage to be so creative so often. If we were constantly having to meet targets that may have little meaning to us but are demanded by government; if we were looking over our shoulders constantly at the next potentially hostile inspection by OFSTED; if we were constantly burdened with the task of satisfying an insatiable bureaucracy, I think we’d find creativity was often something for which we had little time. It is a question that I tried to explore in Scotland.
What's this got to do with our bright idea about SUCCESS? Everything and nothing. Everything, because in Scotland I talked about SUCCESS as an example of the sort of creativity that happens when we have an initial idea and a group of enthusiastic and imaginative teachers then get round the table and develop it from the barest outline into something coherent and able to be developed throughout the school. Nothing, because I suspect it is so much something that is essentially of WGS, growing out of its distinctive (and very creative) ethos and culture, that it is not transferable. So, no, I don’t think we’ll market SUCCESS either, nor make our fortune with it, though we’ll gladly share it.
Early in our discussions of SUCCESS we looked at the many, many websites and pages dedicated to thinking skills. Government is quite keen on them, and is pushing the concept hard. The trouble is, as soon as anyone gets hold of a simple idea like this and tries to make it universal, it becomes immediately complicated. It loses that blessed simplicity and moves from a few useful keywords to pages and pages of explanations, heavy-handed guidance and rather obvious advice. Government is particularly bad at this, with its obsessive attachment to excessive detail, monitoring and accountability.
I know I'm always banging on about how governments mess things up. But they do! I've been following with interest developments at Wellington College whose Headmaster Dr Anthony Seldon - surely one of the most original and inspirational school leaders in the business - is promoting what is simplistically referred to in the press as "happiness classes" but is actually a very much more subtle and sophisticated attempt to develop his students’ self-awareness and emotional intelligence. (I read a particularly busy and useful description - which he told me the other day he can't remember writing! - in the most recent edition of the RSA Journal).
Good for him, good for Wellington. But I have to confess I was worried when it was reported in the press a few weeks ago that the Secretary of State, Ed Balls, thinks that happiness classes are a great idea - and that we should all have them.
Oh no, not again! It'll become another thing to be jammed into PSHE, along with Citizenship (though that is supposedly a separate subject) and all the other bright ideas that politicians come up with, usually when they see something wrong in society and demand that schools do something about it: we’re always expected to fill the gaps. So Happiness will be the next thing, and I can predict the one after that. At the moment government is carrying out a consultation on how schools can promote safety among children: I'm quite sure that Safety Classes will be the next thing, something else to stick into the PSHE syllabus (must remember to warn Mr Bennett!), on top of green issues and measures to reduce obesity, rape and alcoholism (though they’re mostly David Cameron’s current obsessions, so may take longer to percolate into the list of demands made of schools).
It drives me mad. PSHE has always been a good idea - but only when it can be a brief pause during our students’ busy week to think about the social, personal and emotional aspects of their life. The system insists on cramming those lessons ever more full of content, because there's a demand that we deal with every aspect of sex, drugs, puberty, emotional health, citizenship (both the mechanisms of state and the concept of democratic participation) and every other thing that a Secretary of State (or Prime Minister) has ever had a bright idea about.
Pondering this problem is bringing me towards a deep resolution which I can't fully express in words yet. When I do, I guess it'll be another article that I’ll hawk around a few newspapers or educational journals hoping that someone will listen! In the meantime I’ll commit the half-formed thought to this blog.
I'm beginning to think (but don't tell anyone!) that we probably had it right when we were content that we taught separate subjects. At schools like WGS we do it very well: we’re an academic school that still teaches proper subjects even to 11 year-olds - like three separate sciences, history and geography (not humanities), French, German and Latin and so on. Of course we do: it is what defines us.
Where in schools we have generally gone wrong in the past is that we have never made explicit the connections between subjects. We’ve been too busy ploughing our subject-furrows (‘we’ve got to get through the syllabus!’), and children have been taught to think in separate compartments. But it is only when we make connections and comparisons that we really start to understand: you'll see that our SUCCESS initiative comes into play here.
So I don't think we need to fill up the week with more PSHE, citizenship, safety or happiness classes. I do think we need to run emotionally intelligent schools that are very conscious of overarching moral and educational themes, explicitly emphasised through assemblies and all kinds of other means: as an example of other means, Citizenship should be ‘learned’ (if it is indeed something that can be taught or learned anyway) not in lessons but by the presence of a vibrant and active student body which readily participates in a Student Council and is encouraged and expected to do so. As a result, while they are learning the knowledge and skills of specific subjects, children start to understand wider, bigger, deeper overarching and interconnected truths.
In the end, when our students are faced with hard choices, what is going to protect them and help them to make right decisions is not the earnest form tutor worthily explaining to a group of 14-year-olds that ‘cocaine is sometimes called Charlie’, and that ‘crack is even more immediately addictive’. Students are likely to know that the teacher’s knowledge of those facts is minimal, unlike the way in which his or her subject teaching is founded in enormous and fundamental understanding. No, what will enable that young person to make a right decision, to say no when the dangerous options - sex, drugs or one of the host of other perils that they encounter when find themselves out in the big, wide, hazardous world - is an ability to sum up situations; to weigh up positives and negatives; to make empathetic and imaginative judgements where specific knowledge is lacking; and to have the self-confidence to make judgements on decisions that are right for them, regardless of the views or persuasions of others.
Wow! That’s not a blog! It’s a short book. Sorry. More when I’ve thought it all out properly.
16 November 2007, by Bernard Trafford
SUCCESS! SUCCESS!
Two major successes to report here. Hooray!
First, I can break my self-imposed near-silence in blogging terms because my successor has been named. While the school has been, to some extent, in limbo I felt constrained about writing very much. I'm delighted that Vincent Darby has been appointed to follow me. WGS is lucky to have attracted an experienced head from what is, let’s make no mistake, one of the highest achieving maintained schools in the land - and, indeed, one of the top scorers by any measure and in either sector. Vincent knows and loves the West Midlands, and is wise enough to know that he in his turn is lucky to have the chance to move into the independent sector, bringing his deep understanding of high expectations and outstanding attainment into a sphere the freedom of independence and a far greater level of resourcing combine to give him scope for creativity and innovation that he will not have known hitherto. Good for the school, good for him: that is the best way all round, and with all my heart I wish him great success and happiness at WGS.
Second, while the Governors have been embroiled in the lengthy and painstaking process of appointing a new head - which they went about in a thoroughly professional and methodical way -the rest of us at WGS have been busy pursuing another form of success. This particular success - or, more precisely, SUCCESS -is actually a shorthand, an acronym to describe the seven stages that we want to use at WGS to encourage students to move from routine comprehension into a much deeper level of understanding and Higher Order Thinking. Since the early summer a group of 12 teachers - a highly creative and open-minded bunch of volunteers from across a wide range of subjects (and representing a good mix of experience, too) - has been working to identify in the simplest terms the stages through which all of us, whatever our age, proceed from superficial to deep thinking and questioning. Is it possible, we asked ourselves, to distil those stages into a simple mnemonic or acronym which we can all use routinely in the classroom?
We think we've done it! The letters that form the word SUCCESS actually stand for:
START OUT
USE IT
COMPARE
CONNECT
EXPLORE
SYNTHESIZE
START OUT AGAIN
Confused? There's no need to be. We've been floating these ideas in many classrooms throughout the term, but are now conluding the process of designing a generic poster which will appear in every classroom over the next couple of weeks in order simply to remind us all, students and teachers, what SUCCESS stands for and how to use it as a process of thought - as a pathway, indeed, to Higher Order Thinking.
Here is the simple explanation that will appear on the poster:
WHAT IS SUCCESS AT WGS?
SUCCESS is an approach to Higher Order Thinking for all, students and teachers alike. It’s designed to lead us from the basic process of learning something new and then practising it – Starting out and Using it – to something much deeper.
When we start to make Connections and Comparisons with other things we’ve learnt, even with other subjects, we start really to understand, not merely to repeat.
Having made connections, we embark on Higher Order Thinking when we Explore this new knowledge; for example, when we hypothesize and ask, ‘What might happen if…?’
True deep learning occurs when, after all those stages of thinking, we Synthesize: we pull all those strands of thought together and work out what we have learnt, how we have learnt it, and how we can apply that new knowledge. Then we can Start out again; but this time from a new, more advanced point: so SUCCESS is not a circular process but an upward spiral.
The SUCCESS acronym gives us all key questions that act as triggers to move us through the process of Higher Order Thinking. You can use the same questions in different subjects. Look in classrooms and laboratories for SUCCESS posters related to specific subjects.
You can also follow the SUCCESS process on your own when you’re trying to analyse how well you’re learning and progressing – not just in lessons, but in a host of other activities too.
14 September 2007, by Bernard Trafford
EM Forster famously wrote an essay calling for ‘two cheers for democracy’: only two, rather than the usual three, because it doesn’t always work brilliantly. It can be slow, cumbersome, inefficient: it takes time to take everyone’s views into account, debate them, negotiate, give and take, and ultimately forge a consensus. So much easier, sometimes, to have a strong leader who takes forceful, decisive action, who gets things done. ‘At least he made the trains run on time,’ Italians were reputed to say about the fascist leader Mussolini.
Unfortunately, Mussolini also trampled on human freedoms and dragged his nation into an unwelcome and hugely damaging war, rapidly finding himself in thrall to a very much more ruthless and evil tyrant, Adolf Hitler. That’s the trouble with tough guys, men of action (it’s usually men!): if permitted to, they turn first into bullies, then – if still unchecked - into tyrants. So here we might appropriately quote Sir Winston Churchill, who successfully led the good guys against those two and remarked, ‘Everyone agrees that democracy is a damned bad system: until they look at all the rest.’ (It’s worth adding here, in parenthesis, that Churchill also said of school Headmasters that there were possessed of an awesome degree of power ‘that a Prime Minister could only dream of.’)
In our national democracy, we may be driven mad by inter-party squabbling and political point-scoring: they often appear to be more important to our elected representatives than improving the state of the country. Back in school (I’m getting there!), we may be driven mad by the hot air and good intentions that sound great in the Student Council but don’t get anywhere. Loose linkages; lack of tie-up between the grass roots back in the form room and what the elected representatives get up to in the weekly meetings; the infuriating inefficiency of those who are supposed to take something further but don’t get around to it; all these very human organisational failings conspire to rob a School Council of the success and thus the respect it wants and needs.
So what do we do? Do we give up on democracy? We’re seldom tempted to do that on a national scale, and I don’t think we should do so in schools. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. And I want to say three cheers for the current Chair and Secretary of the WGS Student Council, Mike Maddox and Dave Jackson. Maddo and Jacko (we go for original nicknames at WGS!) have spent the summer redesigning the Council (at least, when Mike wasn’t climbing 18,000-foot volcanoes in Ecuador). They looked critically, with at times painful honesty, at the Council’s strengths and weaknesses. They researched good practice elsewhere. They took advice and borrowed good ideas. And right now they are in the throes of re-launching it, with (for the first time) a detailed constitution laying down how it will work.
They’re adding an Executive with one representative from each year-group. Not to run the thing – that would take power away from the people – but to act as the administrative centre, and the point of accountability, making sure that points brought from class councils (the grass roots) are taken forward for consideration by the full council, and that any action decided there is carried out within a defined time-scale. Generally people say that you need small working groups to get anything done, and I expect that’s true. But these bold democratic architects are determined that the re-branded Student Parliament, made one third bigger to number over 80 elected representatives from Big Six right up to the Upper Sixth, will be where the power resides. This belief in getting all the ages together is, I’m proud to say, a very Wolverhampton Grammar School thing, and has always been jealously guarded by the Student Council, something held in the heart even when cold logic has demanded splitting it up into year-groups or other subdivisions. There is an overwhelming conviction that enormous 18 year-olds should listen and accord respect to the views of 10 year-olds – if only so they can hear a Year 7 voice (as they did a few months ago) respond indignantly to some sixth former’s assertion about what was best for younger students: ‘We’re not animals, you know. We’ve got minds too.’ Well done Joe Evans!
Well, whether you’re a parent, a student or a teacher, you might be wondering why I’m giving so much platform space and time to one facet of what’s an incredibly busy school life, a facet indeed that arguably suffers from receiving too little time from too many busy people. Let me tell you a bit of my own story.
I know about this school democracy stuff. I researched it deeply in the 1990s. In fact, during the 1990s – you’ll find this hard to believe – I was believed in many educational circles to be some kind of dangerous lunatic! You see, giving a voice to children, according their views dignity and respect, was seen as undermining the very authority and fabric of schools. In 2007 I think we might agree that in many schools in difficult settings both fabric and authority are feeling more threatened than they ever were in the 90s – but not by creeping democracy!
No: loonies and prophets eventually have their day. Currently I seem to have achieved expert status in the field of School Councils and next week I’m chairing an event at which two major reports from research into student voice, school councils and school democracy will be launched in the presence of Schools Minister Lord Adonis; the Children’s Commissioner Sir Al Aynsley-Green; university professors; the media; you name it.
Now, I haven’t achieved all that. I’ve just been around a long time, as you’ll know too well! I was quite early researching in the field, and I’ve kept at it, that’s all. And nowadays what’s increasingly being called Student Voice is accepted by Government and academics as a vital ingredient in school improvement – which I always define as making schools better, nicer, happier places for children and teachers to be in, and as a result finding that they get better educational outcomes, including exam grades, too.
Wolverhampton Grammar School is a lovely school. If you ask around, what people say makes it special isn’t any one aspect; the academic results (you’ll remember this year was our best-ever at A level: 74.3% passes at A and B grades, 100% pass rate overall); the sport; the drama; the music; the wonderful annual art exhibition; the super new buildings; the handsome old buildings; the pastoral care; those amazing outdoor adventures, such as a record 53 students heading off to South America this past summer. They’re all great. But people will say to you about WGS, ‘It’s the atmosphere, the feel of the place.’
It is the atmosphere. I believe it’s the most important, and I hope it’s the most lasting, thing I’ve helped to develop and sustain as Head for 17 years - so far. It is intensely democratic. Not in the sense of votes, hustings, politics and arguments: but in the sense, so deeply and so widely felt, that everyone is respected and valued; that support and understanding are freely and readily given. That everyone has a right to be heard; to be treated fairly; to feel happy and safe.
Last January’s Inspection Report put its finger on it, in a couple of phrases that you’ll see reproduced, perhaps repetitively, in our glitzy new prospectus. It remarked that ‘The school provides a model of a multi-cultural community where all are valued and treat each other with respect and dignity.’ That’s a spot-on judgment by a team of outside observers. The report also said that our students are ‘outstanding learners with an excellent attitude to their studies.’ I’m quite sure that the one flows from the other.
This amazing, perhaps unique, atmosphere doesn’t happen by chance. You’ll understand from the way I started that I see the visible symbol of student empowerment, the Student Council – er, Parliament – as being central. But so too is the generosity from everyone that is essential to such an ethos. It starts with the amazingly dedicated, hard-working and, above all, caring staff who, with their studied avoidance of intolerance or cynicism, set so fine an example - an example that their young charges can hardly fail to learn from, to emulate, to pass on to younger students as they get older. High standards are set not by driving boys and girls or pressuring them – but by believing in them. That’s why we can be relaxed and egalitarian, but still have a traditional Prize giving that marks and rewards the excellence achieved by so many without (I hope) in any way making those who don’t win a prize this time feel bad.
It’s not perfect, of course. We have our ups and downs – but when the downs come we’re able to talk openly about them, and how we can avoid them another time. When we’re all walking the talk of this ethos: none of us has to strike postures, defend positions, man the barricades. On the contrary, we can be very open and easy, honest and forward-looking.
So I guess you’ve heard my educational philosophy there. Someone who’s heard it more often than he’d really care to, occasionally (if we’re brutally honest) through a mildly alcoholic haze, is our principal guest tonight. Kevin Riley, twice a Headmaster, now in Harrow, London, cut his teeth in middle management here at WGS. We became somewhat symbiotic, worked together, started families together – well, with our wives, obviously, but we are godfathers to one another’s children. And when I’m in doubt or turmoil, he’s still the person I turn to for advice.
He produced his first play at WGS in 1982. In many ways it would be true to say that 1982’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was the start of the modern era in drama at WGS: having been here all that time I can trace the organic growth in school drama from then to now, and I’m praying that, 25 years on, Kevin will be at the opening of the Hutton Theatre on the second night of As you like it at the end of November. That will be indeed fitting, the only sorrow being that my predecessor, Patrick Hutton, after whom we’re naming the theatre, died before we could show it to him.
So, Kevin, thank you for coming.
And thanks to all of you for listening.
11 September 2007, by Bernard Trafford
Sorry. "You don't ring, you don't write," as the outraged mother says in the old joke, and regular readers of this blog (both of you) may be feeling the same way. Well, it's true: I haven't been blogging a whole lot since May. Though we've not been labouring the point on this website, June saw me coping with the announcement of an impending personal/professional change as many people know; in July it was the usual end of term madness; and during the summer holidays my brain turns gradually to sponge. That’s therapy.
Still, we're back now. My synapses seem to be connecting again. We’re all in top gear and far too quickly feeling as if we haven't been away at all!
But the new school year is always a great time. It’s exciting to see lots of bright keen new (mostly quite small) faces: eager 10 and 11 year-olds finding their way around, having a go at everything, learning all too quickly how to annoy sixth formers. And the new Lower Sixth, whether they’ve come up from our Year 11 or joined from outside, suddenly looking like rather serious players in school life, still a bit amazed that they’ve passed the GCSE hurdle and are now regarded as proper senior students. Everyone’s mad-keen at sports practices, desperately competing for places in teams. The play’s in rehearsal – life’s back to normal, except that it’s all a bit different, fresh and new. Oh, and now the holidays are over, the weather’s improved.
I love it. This week we look briefly backward before resuming the relentless onward progress that is the school year: Prize Giving will reward last year’s achievements, and then on Saturday well over 100 OWs aged 19 to around 45 will play sport – mostly football, but with growing numbers each year of hockey and netball players – and in the evening we’ll fill Big School for a reunion dinner, serenaded afterwards (deafened, even) by the Reunion Big Band. About 11pm, when I’m trying to empty them all out in order to allow the catering staff to clean up, someone will accost me, leaning heavily on his mate. ‘Oi tell yow what,’ he’ll slur, lurching towards me. ‘It’s a **** fantastic school.’
He won’t be far wrong at that.
Next blog will be my Prize Giving speech. There’s lots I want to say about the school and what it stands for. But that won’t get published till after I’ve said it – or no one will stay awake.
12 May 2007, by Bernard Trafford
The Sunday Times of 6th May gave front-page coverage to the new Thomas Deacon City Academy in Peterborough, currently under construction, which is not building a playground because (writes Geraldine Hackett), ‘those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.’
Don’t worry, though. ‘Pupils will be able to hydrate during the learning experience,’ we’re reassured.
At WGS we usually refer to ‘periods 1 to 8’, not ‘the learning experience’. And we get a drink rather than ‘hydrate.’ There’s some strange use of language here which betrays the mindset of the Academy’s sponsors, who felt that playgrounds ‘did not fit into the concept.’
You see, they don’t want children running around the place in free time. The Sunday Times explained: ‘there will be a 30-minute lunch period when pupils will be taken to the dining room by their teacher, ensuring that they do not sneak away to run around.’ They don’t need to, because even running around will be properly organised and controlled: ‘exercise for pupils will take place in PE classes and organised games.’
Wishy-washy liberals like me, of course start bleating that children need to let off steam. Not in Peterborough : they simply won’t feel that need because, says the head teacher, ‘they will not be bored.’
Wow! At WGS we earnestly try to ensure that every lesson is interesting and fulfilling. There’s an unwritten, unspoken rule that teachers simply don’t and won’t serve up dull stuff to the students: it goes against what we believe in. And if something genuinely necessary but rather dull has to be done (and I’m not sure it ever does, actually), we are at least honest about it. But can we really claim that our pupils are never, ever bored? I’d like to hope so, but I don’t think I’d dare promise it.
Besides, after a really fizzing, hard-working, high-achieving five periods before lunch, teachers and students alike are all the more ready to let off steam.
The academy gave an additional reason for leaving a playground out of the plans: ‘we have taken away an uncontrollable space to prevent bullying and truancy’. All schools, without exception, need to be vigilant and proactive to prevent bullying: but abandoning play in order to prevent bullying sounds to me like suggesting we can put an end to traffic accidents by closing all the roads. Now, there's a thought.
I’m wriggling with discomfort writing this. I have a go at loony government policies, but I always say that how a school runs itself should be its own business and would never normally criticise it. But this report reminded me vividly of a conversation I had with a senior civil servant around 1990, when the National Curriculum was brand-new and we were all beginning to realise that we had created a monster that would never fit into the school week. ‘I don't know what all the fuss is about,’ said the mandarin. ‘If children and teachers did a proper job, worked 40-hour weeks and took four weeks holiday a year, we could fit everything in that we wanted to.’
They’re still out there, the people who think childhood is an unnecessary and rather tiresome distraction from work. Welcome back, Mr Gradgrind! Let’s forget lessons and drinks breaks, and go instead for in-learning-experience hydration. Abolish play time and we’ll get a lot more work done and put a stop to bullying at the same time.
So is it time to say goodbye to childhood, kids?
Not yet. Not at WGS, anyway. I’m staying wishy-washy, student-centred - and proud of it!
A revised version of this article should appear in SecEd (“the ONLY weekly voice for secondary education” – www.sec-ed.com) in the next couple of weeks.
26 April 2007, by Bernard Trafford
As I wrote in my end-of-term letter, the WGS Choral Society was in exceptionally fine voice for its annual performance on Tuesday 27th March. Handel’s coronation anthem Zadok the Priest was suitably magnificent, with a brilliant, focused ring to the choral sound. Vaughan Williams’s exquisite Serenade to Music was heart-stoppingly beautiful and Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, perhaps the most mysterious and unusual of the many settings of the Mass for the Dead, haunting and immensely memorable. It’s difficult music, too: even adult choirs quail at the thought of the Duruflé which our singers sang with accuracy, beauty and, one felt, an understanding and love of the music.
In addition to those glorious choral pieces, we had another of those great opportunities to see an outstanding sixth former display his talents in a solo concerto. Anthony Price, the leader and mainstay of the school orchestra for so long (and a central part of the sound and light team for drama over many years) performed Kabalevsky's Violin Concerto with the invited orchestra. It’s a quirky, very Russian piece, with an astonishing number of notes for the soloist to play! Anthony’s performance was simply commanding, an astonishing thing to witness.
At WGS we simply assume that the Choral Society will tackle music on this scale every year without fail: but for many music departments, even in other very good schools, a concert (or even one piece) as challenging as this would be an ambition built over many years, not an annual expectation. So we shouldn’t take all this for granted, either musically or in terms of commitment - yet I'm afraid we are in danger of doing just that. A proportion of the choir members are, I regret, complacent and lazy about attending rehearsals, becoming passengers rather than true contributors. But if neither parents nor their peers turn out in any significant numbers to support the concert, perhaps it really does appear to them that it doesn't matter very much.
Performing arts need audiences. The school is currently putting colossal investment into the arts: in 2005 the music block extension and recital room/recording studio, this year the Arts Centre. But performances have to communicate. I think everyone's proud of the arts at WGS: but in truth they're pretty laid-back about showing it.
And that's a danger. Real, good singing (let alone choral singing) is pretty rare in schools nowadays. Many schools make do with getting a few youngsters to grab a microphone and ape the acts of current pop stars, a second-hand, derivative sort of performance that has little true quality. To lose our choral heritage - that of WGS or, indeed, our whole unique British tradition – would be tragedy, and a criminal piece of laziness. But we could do so, just by failing to support it, by taking it for granted. We are facing a stark choice: cherish it; love it; or lose it.
Am I just making a fuss? Am I overstating the importance or appeal of the music I’m trying to protect? I don’t think so. Here’s a test. Click on the link and listen to the six-and-a-half minutes of the first piece from that concert. Handel’s Zadok the Priest was written to be played and sung at the coronation of George II in 1727. It’s been performed at every coronation of a British monarch since. It’s magnificent, so much so that it has occasionally been used as a TV theme tune for international football. For reasons I can’t fully fathom, since Zadok is well out of copyright, European matches are nowadays generally introduced by some music that’s a pale imitation, indeed a rip-off, of it.
It starts with a slow crescendo of repeated figures by strings and woodwind, a full 90 seconds or more that builds gradually and inexorably to the moment when the choir starts singing in a blaze of glory. When I hear it I almost want to shout for excitement and joy. Our Choral Society felt that moment and gave it their all: the sound was electrifying.
Have a listen and just think: wouldn’t it have been an experience to hear that happen with our own singers and local instrumental players in our own Big School? Wouldn’t it? So why weren’t you there?
Love it – or lose it. The stakes are high.
Zadok the Priest
19 April 2007, by Bernard Trafford
It was good to spend Easter as one of 1,800 delegates at the International Confederation of Principals’ biennial convention, held this year in Auckland, New Zealand. It was impressive to be addressed by both that country’s education minister (who the next day blotted his copybook by using the F word about a fellow MP in parliament!) and its Prime Minister, Helen Clark, who was forthright and, for a politician, unusually specific about her education policies, about what she would do and what she wouldn’t. Ironically, though, we found ourselves enjoying both the Maori Haka welcome and speakers of the quality of Sir Ken Robinson (the creativity guru) against the backdrop of a politico-educational storm: the opposition National party was looking to grab votes and media backing for a campaign to introduce age-related testing in primary schools. The New Zealand Herald was all for it, and published with glee (4 April 2007) a letter which said:
‘Primary schools need to be held accountable, just as high schools are…We invest millions in our children’s education and we expect much better results. Forget the usual lazy blah from the teachers. They obviously hate any kind of public accountability or competition…The system is not working, and we need to support ways to fix it. Let’s lengthen the school day, reduce the number of holidays and test for results.’
The letter began:
‘Is their [primary school principals’] opposition to the National Party’s testing policy the proof that they know they are doing a rotten job for far too many young people?’
We loved New Zealand, but moved on to visit family in Australia. And, right on cue, that nation was also split over education. John Howard’s federal education minister failed to persuade state leaders to adopt a national curriculum: they preferred to retain the local colour of their particular states. And she was furious that they also refused to countenance performance-related pay for teachers. For the moment, at any rate.
It all gave me a depressing sense of déjà vu. In the UK we’ve seen all this. Politicians towards the Right love to play the ‘get tough’ card: and newspapers love to play to an innately conservative (small c) readership. After all, it’s all so logical, so persuasive. If schools are doing a good job, why should they be against standardised testing? Parents have a right to know how their children are getting on. Surely the standardisation of a national curriculum is sensible, so that children can move between schools and follow the same programmes of study wherever they go. And why on earth should we reward good and bad teachers the same? Track their pupils’ performance and pay them accordingly: it’s just plain commonsense.
If schools and teachers have nothing to hide, why should they oppose these measures? When they object, the media become suspicious: there’s a scent of professionals closing ranks, of cloaks of secrecy. It’s so easy to manipulate public opinion against a profession: the UK press has proved that often enough.
Yes, we’ve been there. The great, seductive fantasy - plain ‘paper and pencil’ tests, a minimal agreed core curriculum, uncomplicated payment by results – quickly dissolved when we woke up from the dream: in no time at all we found we were doing things not simply but simplistically, and brutally to boot. The testing became more complicated, because ‘paper and pencil’ was too crude to produce usable statistics. The curriculum became a battleground for subject lobbies and pressure groups. And performance pay became bureaucratic and burdensome - and never did sort the teacher sheep from their goat colleagues, because it doesn’t work like that.
The rest is history. Fifteen years on, no one in the UK (except politicians and, I guess, some people in the DfES) even bothers to defend the over-rigid curriculum (OK, there have been a few minor concessions recently to ‘personalisation’). Nor the constant pressure of excessive testing on children and teachers alike. Nor the labyrinthine process of teachers’ performance management. But we’re still stuck with them. We’ve got the T-shirt.
At WGS, as I so often say, our independence makes us lucky. We are able to stand aside from the worst lunacies of government over-prescription. We don’t have to do all the tests; we have a lot of say about our curriculum; but we do still have to do the same over-examined GCSEs and A Levels. But we are insulated to some extent. My heart bleeds for our cousins Down Under. Someone (I suspect I know which off-shoot of government, too) has been selling them the idea that it’s all hunky-dory back in the Old Country. I just hope those fantastic school leaders I was lucky enough to meet as the home team at ICP Auckland are strong enough to hold out against the political pressure and say, ‘Not here.’ I hope someone here will get the chance to tell them the truth about our experience. I really do hope so.
02 February 2007, by Bernard Trafford
Business knows best. It’s official. To run the new model of extended schools which will provide wrap-around 24/7 social and health care for children, families and the community on a single site, the PwC review foresees a new model of school leadership, importing managers from outside education, preferably from business.
The report downplays the urgent need to find more heads for the future. There isn't a shortage, it says, and there won't be. PwC acknowledges that heads are driven mad by the constant flood of contradictory government initiatives - but neither that factor nor the ever-increasing challenges of the job warrant increasing pay in order to fill senior posts. As Jim Callaghan famously didn't say: "Crisis? What crisis?" PwC can’t see one, but governing bodies all over the country are already living with it.
To be fair, PwC, government and teachers’ leaders all agree on the need to fast-track young leaders. Given proper emphasis in their training on deep understanding of values and emotional intelligence, not mere assessment of management skills, such people could be a huge asset to the system. But even in this positive move, government betrays its underlying obsession. Downing Street has been leaning on business to sponsor this accelerated training.
Why? Apart from trying to save money through sponsorship of something that it ought to fund properly itself, why is this government - or this Prime Minister - so dazzled by business? What is there in the commercial model that suggests it has the answers to the problems of public services?
The classic view of business is that it abhors waste. If it isn't super-efficient and cost-effective, we’re told, it goes to the wall. But that's not necessarily true. If part of its operation isn't making money, a firm can lay off staff, scale down or close down that segment. It can decide to take smaller profits for a time. It can put up the price.
School have few such choices. They could offer fewer courses. They could cut costs by increasing class sizes, or by replacing qualified teachers with cheaper para-professionals - a dangerous course which, in many people's eyes, has gone quite far enough. But all these damage and reduce the opportunities available to children. One thing schools cannot do: they can't stick the price up: that is set, at bargain basement level, by government.
Business knows about motivation and productivity, though. Or does it? How are the City’s blue-collar workers, cleaners and caterers motivated by the annual bonuses paid to senior managers, bungs on a scale large enough to distort the entire London property market? Can the nation’s schools learn anything from fat cat companies that reward bosses for “making savings” by sacking workers?
Besides, is the private sector really that tight on costs? When I dash from yet another meeting in London to catch the train home to the Midlands, I walk to my standard seat through six first-class carriages full of lawyers, accountants, bankers and business people, all of whom are presumably sticking top-price Virgin tickets (£210 return) on expenses charged to the client. That’s what I call lean or cost-focused.
Still, maybe business has something to teach schools. Successful firms stick to what they are good at. They keep things simple, and nowadays tend to break big corporations down into smaller, more manageable units.
By contrast, schools aren’t simple organisations. They’re messy because they are concerned with people who are so damnably individual and variable. Extending their role to include all those health, social and child-minding functions risks distracting them from their core purpose - teaching and learning, the education of the young. And the resulting monolithic institutions may be just too complex to be run by a single boss, whether former teacher or ex-tycoon.
Experienced business people recruited to lead the new extended schools may come to the conclusion that the job can't be done. They may be right.
01 February 2007, by Bernard Trafford
It was racist. The Big Brother row, I mean. Of course it was. And I, for one, was greatly cheered by that fact that 40,000 people complained. Those of us who run schools know that it takes a certain level of effort and/or outrage to persuade even the most easily offended parents to lodge a complaint. So 40,000 is a very significant number.
So we can all pat ourselves on the back. What a sensitive, tolerant nation we are, roused to righteous anger when someone displays pig-ignorant, foul-mouthed, unacceptable behaviour on a TV show that is otherwise devoted to… Hang on a minute. Pig-ignorant, foul-mouthed and, by most decent standards, unacceptable behaviour is precisely what it’s devoted to.
The concept of Big Brother is to confine a group of people in a small space, the Big Brother House, and watch how they cope. Under such circumstances a group might ordinarily decide that the best way to survive this incarceration is to cooperate. To avoid this, Big Brother introduces a competitive element, with a large cash prize and the added promise of celebrity status, the winner being decided by the vote of the viewing public.
It has to be that way. Watching the subjects as they learn to give and take and develop a means for peaceful and harmonious coexistence might be a fascinating study for a student of psychology, but it would make lousy television. The competitive element introduces the need for the participants to outdo one another, to scheme, to form and break alliances. To prevent them from becoming comfortable they are required to perform bizarre tasks or challenges, often demeaning in nature.
And to test their tolerance, preferably to breaking point, the mix of (frequently prickly) characters includes not only racial and cultural diversity but also those who might in some circumstances be the subjects of suspicion or prejudice, such as gay and transsexual participants. As the pressure is cranked up, the participants start to lose their cool. Tolerance and harmony are among the first casualties – bickering and intolerance the early winners.
Of course they are. Winners and losers; the victorious and the humiliated; the triumphant and the distressed. This brand of reality television depends of these opposites for its very lifeblood. It becomes compulsive viewing when, under that deliberately induced pressure, a housemate cracks, abandons the usual restraint implanted by upbringing and social convention and gives way to raw anger. That’s when there are confrontations, provocations, insults, even fights. Horrible, hurtful, abusive things have been said in every series – yet no fuss has been made till now.
Why? Bullying and humiliation have been at the centre of every series of BB. It’s much the same in the Get me out of here kind of programme while even the dancing, singing and business (The Apprentice) shows are harsh (I’d say shaming) to their losers. If contestants cannot withstand the ordeal, they don’t win the twofold prize, so a sub-plot of “reality TV” is to see how much degradation they will accept in order to stay in the race. Millions watch them go through it.
Racial bullying is intolerable. But all bullying is unacceptable. I find it worrying that bullying and humiliation were apparently OK in the BB House until they became racial. Bad as it is, racial bullying is only one of many forms of denying another person’s worth or dignity as a human being. Why has it taken till now for anyone to say, “Stop!”?
Apparently in response to the BB scandal, Education Secretary Alan Johnson said that schools need to do more to promote tolerant citizenship and stamp out racism and bullying. Schools are already working very hard to do so. It’s what children experience outside school, and particularly on television, that makes our job so hard.
30 January 2007, by Bernard Trafford
You’ve got to feel sorry for Ruth Kelly. At least, I do. It’s a terrible situation to find yourself in as a parent.
Your child has special needs. With the proper help he can learn to overcome some of the difficulties, and develop strategies for coping with or getting round those that can’t be surmounted. That’s what special needs teaching does. But can you get that specialist help? It seems Mrs Kelly couldn’t, and that’s what this story is all about.
Dyslexia (it’s rumoured her son is dyslexic) is a particularly good example. Dyslexic children can be hard for non-experts to judge. You often get sufferers who are academically very able. They may seem bright, articulate, quick to grasp new ideas and to find creative solutions to problems. But the classic symptom is that they just can’t get those ideas down on paper. Too often in the past, teachers have accused such children of being lazy. “You clearly understand this, so why don’t you write it down? TIDILY!”
It’s worth noting that more than 80% of the male prison population have poor writing, and 50% have reading difficulties. Being unable to read and write properly cuts people off from the rest of society. So do the prison walls that too easily become their home. It’s all so avoidable: if dyslexia is identified early in a child’s schooling, before underachievement and humiliation have become the everyday experience, and avoidance strategies and disruptive behaviour apparently the child’s only solution, if specific teaching is given and due allowance made in exams, dyslexia doesn’t have to blight their life. Most would agree you can’t cure dyslexia: but sufferers can learn to live with it successfully.
The attention given to dyslexics (particularly expensive resources such as one-to-one teaching) leads some critics to sneer and describe it as the “middle-class disease”. And, indeed, it is the middle classes – like Ruth Kelly – who use their affluence or influence to opt out of what the state provides, to go private. In her position, as a Cabinet minister and former Education Secretary, Mrs Kelly has been criticised, even vilified.
Politically, she’s in an impossible position. But as a parent, she’s no different from other parents of children with special needs who cannot get them the help they need. No matter what it says to the contrary, government does not provide sufficient money to fund special needs properly. So Local Authorities are forced to ration them. And countless children get too little help, too late, with their learning difficulties.
At the school where I am Head, Wolverhampton Grammar School, we have a specialist programme for bright dyslexics, and we constantly meet parents who are desperate and exhausted. They have fought tooth and nail to get resources allocated in order to give their children specialist support, but such resources are scarce, and usually inadequate – particularly if their difficulties are not all that severe. Not bad enough to tick all the boxes required to get state support to swing into action, but certainly bad enough to be condemned to a miserable school experience of failure and underachievement. So, in desperation, they come to us. It costs them an extra third on top of the annual school fee at this independent, fee-paying school. But at least they get the help that they need.
With the help that proper specialist remediation and tuition give, dyslexic children regain confidence, learn about what they are good at, take pride and achieve highly. And they come to terms with their difficulty, building up a repertoire of coping strategies and learning the patience to live with those limitations that dyslexia still imposes on them – limitations that are far fewer and smaller than they dreamed when they joined us.
There is no magic about this, just proper levels of resourcing, expert help, a belief in children, and children’s belief in themselves. Come to think of it, that combination is fairly magical.
It’s easy to have a go at Ruth Kelly. Not everyone can afford the solution she chose. But, if I were in her situation and had the means to do something about it, I hope I’d put my child’s future above power, position and career. I can’t criticise her for that: but I can criticise the government of which she is part for putting her in that position.
27 January 2007, by Bernard Trafford
Good teachers have always known their pupils. They know what they are capable of. They know what they are like on a good day. They recognise a bad day. They can see when they’re on song and excelling and can be inspired to even greater heights. And they spot when they are underperforming. Good teachers always did. And they kept mark-books, so that they could keep track of progress.
In the new thinking of “2020 Vision”, the government’s attempt to envision a future for education in this country, “assessment” has now become a mantra, recited as if teachers have never thought of doing it before. And it all gets tied up with the use of "data". Strictly speaking, all those marks that accumulate over the years create a set of data, and that’s what most sane teachers use to keep track of their pupils’ progress – as they always have. But that isn't the sort of data that government has in mind.
What government calls data is another stick to beat schools and teachers with. Its national tests are used to create “benchmarks”. If children don't progress neatly from one benchmark to the next in the correct space of time, the school must be failing in its duty. Data is used to look forward, to predict how far children should progress in a given period.
National benchmarks are created out of figures drawn from a vast number of pupils. As generalisations they have some value. So a teacher might use them as a kind of general guideline to give an idea of the sort of progress a child might be expected to be making. But to use it to demand a particular level of performance from either the pupil or the school is statistically absurd.
Yet that is the road down which we're being taken. Schools and teachers are required to know exactly what children should be achieving, according to government figures (enforced by their still fearsome inspectorate, OFSTED). And they’re supposed to share this with the children. Sadly it’s already common in schools to hear children say proudly, “I’m working at Level 6.” Frankly, I’d rather hear them talk excitedly about something new they’ve learned.
At Wolverhampton Grammar School, the only school I can claim to know inside and out, teachers certainly know their pupils and regularly review their progress. 95% of the judgements we make about their progress are based on our knowledge of the individual child and on our experience as teachers, experience that grows day by day throughout our careers. We use data, but have learned to do so cautiously, trusting our own record-keeping more than national benchmarks.
Besides, we have discovered over time that nationally benchmarked performance indicators (that’s the kind of jargon we use nowadays!) are usually over-cautious. Year after year our GCSE candidates score far more highly than those benchmarks predict they should.
So what is the use of telling a 15 year-old that the figures predict her to gain a string of Bs at GCSE when we know that she will get mostly A and A* grades in her exams? What happened to high expectations? In fact, if teachers did simply rely on the cautious predictive data that is available to them, it really would be the “excuse for underachievement”, that politicians constantly accuse teachers of hiding behind. But good teachers don't trust such data: they use it only to inform their professional judgment. And the vast majority of the UK’s teachers are good ones who care about their pupils and want the best for them.
Why won’t politicians and the media trust professionals? Why won’t they accept the fact that bullying professionals doesn't work in the long run? Let's reinvent a society view of real professionals who can be trusted to get on with the job. And let's get back to focusing on what education is really about, equipping children for happy and successful lives as individuals, not as government statistics. The first step would be to scrap league tables. The second would be to make schools pupil-centred, not data-driven.
23 January 2007, by Bernard Trafford
Despite its protestations to the contrary, government knows that it's running out of ideas about education: January’s league table fiasco is just the latest indicator of that fact. In some desperation, former Education Secretary Ruth Kelly set up a working party that has just produced its “2020 Vision” report. What will education look like in the year 2020, and how should we get there? The great idea at the heart of this report, and a vital one, is a move towards “personalising learning”. This means giving kids the education they need as individuals instead of forcing them all to follow the National Curriculum in the same way, as if they were all identical ingredients in a sausage factory.
The overall vision is right, and not before time: but in the report lurk the same pitfalls that bedevil the system at present. For example, there’s a “new” view of testing, rebranded as “Assessment for Learning”. This great idea is that teachers will regularly assess (test) their pupils to check that learning has taken place.
Marvellous. I confess I thought teachers had always tested their pupils to check how much they had learned. Then they’d go over it again to improve or deepen that understanding, and move on to the next stage when the children were ready. Clearly I was wrong: I must have been imagining how good teachers operated. They can’t have been doing any such thing, or they wouldn’t have needed this great new [sic] concept of Assessment for Learning (we refer to “AfL” now), around which a bandwagon and whole industry of expensive consultants and self-appointed experts is growing up.
Teachers are told, via PowerPoints, brochures and (the now-phrase) “teachers’ toolkits” that the whole point of AfL is to use assessment (testing) to help learners improve their work. Amazing. Next the experts will tell us that the point of buying petrol is to keep your car running. But, even if the teaching profession can swallow this great new lesson in sucking eggs, there’s more bad news. The Secretary of State has already made it clear that this idea of teachers testing children when they’re ready for it won’t be enough on its own. Oh, no: that would be trusting them far too much.
There will still be the same old government tests, the stultifying SATs, but they’ll be disguised by being split into small chunks spaced throughout the year. Not much change there, then: the dead hand of government is still in place. Education will be personalised – but, er, still standardised. In fact, the much-vaunted “personalised learning” will be like the old Ford car of legend: you can have any colour you choose so long as it’s black.
John Dunford, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, warns (Times Educational Supplement 12 January 2007) that this ministerial insistence on change without real change will cause the proposed reforms to “turn into just another steamroller that will crush schools’ enthusiasm for personalised learning”.
He’s right. Weed-killer spread thin is still weed-killer, and is still poisonous. The National-Curriculum-and-testing monster hasn't gone away at all. Like the deadliest monsters, it’s merely changed its shape.
19 January 2007, by Bernard Trafford
On the day the latest secondary school league tables were published, 11th January, the Daily Mail screamed: "Some of the worst schools in the country for GCSE results find themselves near the top of the new list, while top-performing grammars renowned for helping pupils achieve streams of A and A* grades slumped to the bottom.
"Critics said the government’s 'jiggery-pokery' would confuse parents looking for the best schools. They also warned the new measure could write off thousands of disadvantaged pupils by allowing teachers to use poverty as an excuse for underachievement."
The last comment hints at the real story. League tables never were about children: they were designed to put pressure on schools and teachers. Thatcher’s, Major’s and Blair’s reinventions of Britain have all constructed a curious media consensus around knocking professionals - in health, in law and order, in education. They have sown distrust, perpetuated an image of protectionism an underperformance, rendering “professional" almost a term of abuse. And then they have put the professionals under immense pressure by means of artificial measures and setting mechanistic targets.
It wouldn't be so bad if they had solved the problem, but they haven't. In early January successful tycoon Sir Gerry Robinson presented a fascinating but sadly predictable series of BBC2 programmes charting his efforts to improve performance in a Rotherham hospital. To be sure he found entrenched attitudes among professionals who proved themselves spectacularly resistant to change. But change was blocked still more effectively by heavy-handed managerialism, imposed on the Health Service since 1999, and by the fact that the money the Health Secretary, when interviewed, swore is flowing into the service simply doesn't arrive in the same quantity at the point of delivery.
Sir Gerry would have found the same problems in the education system. Yes, there are teachers who are resistant to change. But a stifling managerial conformity, where the National Curriculum rules with its relentless testing and is enforced by OFTSTED, its Rotweiler of an inspection scheme, squeezes all but the strongest, most individual teachers into a mould where they are forced, robot-like, to follow prescribed teaching styles and even detailed lesson plans: it’s teaching by numbers to keep the bosses off their backs. And, as in the Health Service, the money that hits the “bog-standard” school bears no relation to the showers of new money that ministers would have us believe is flowing into the system. In many schools it just doesn't arrive.
A recently published book about life as a police officer, featured by Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph 23.10.2006, describes a life of “filing, stapling and writing forms, reports, statements, emails and exhibits.” In Wasting Police Time: the crazy world of the war on crime (Monday Books £7.99), PC David Copperfield (a pseudonym for a real, serving officer) tries to give people “an idea of the depths of sheer incompetence our police are plumbing, how thousands of officers are struggling to keep their heads above a sea of paperwork while their money is wasted and crime books are cooked in ways that would make Gordon Ramsay proud.”
In Rotherham Gerry Robinson found dedicated and creative people trapped in a rigid, stifling system. PC Copperfield contrasts the dismal reality of policing to the glowing pictures of falling crime rates pictured by ministers. It’s all very familiar: the same pattern emerges in schools. Politicians and civil servants invent strings of surveys for gathering figures, and create complex procedures to ensure that doctors, nurses, police and teachers jump through hoops in the way they want: the result is paralysis.
It seems the police could do with a visit from Sir Gerry. Schools certainly could. Can we have him next?
15 January 2007, by Bernard Trafford
At last it’s happened. After 15 years of confusion and misleading information, the myth that school league tables tell us something useful has been dispelled. They’ve been revealed as no more than smoke and mirrors.
How has this happened? When highly selective academic schools ruled the roost, enjoying their “top 10” or “top 50” status, and those tough schools in deprived areas bumped along at the bottom, hounded by school inspectors and vilified in the press, there was a sense of natural order. “Don't hide things from parents,” said the politicians. “Give them raw figures.”
So raw figures was what they got. Schools and teachers have always known the tables were flawed: schools and the children in them are all so different that they can’t be usefully compared by a simplistic measure. Gradually parents have realised the tables don't do justice to the schools they know. Eventually, even politicians have started to get wise - or at least have woken up to the fact that it's all a bit more complicated than raw figures will allow.
So a new idea has crept in. There is a strong argument for saying that children start from all kinds of different points, not on a "level playing field" (a term much used in the years of debates about league tables). A grammar school selects its pupils: its academically able children should obviously be expected to achieve high grades at GCSE and A-level. By contrast a neighbourhood comprehensive, far from creaming off only the brightest children from its locality, takes all them across the whole spectrum of ability. If that neighbourhood is relatively poor, its children are likely to have fewer educational opportunities; their homes will probably have provided less stimulus and support from the earliest years (and through the years of schooling); and a greater proportion are likely to have learning difficulties.
So children in some schools are starting the race much further back down the track than the academically able who fill the grammar schools. As a result the idea of “value added” has gained credence. Instead of simply counting how many get past the winning post (in terms of GCSE grades, for example), a value-added analysis measures how far children have travelled – from their starting point, however far back, to the point they have reached at age 16.
And so in January we have seen three sorts of GCSE league tables. First, the old ‘first past the post’ raw figures. Second, the same thing but now toughened up to include counting how many children passed in English and Maths. The third are the new tables that have caused the fuss: based on what’s known in education-speak as “contextual value added” (CVA), they have turned the accepted educational map on its head. On publication day, 11th January, the Daily Mail screamed in outrage: “Some of the worst schools in the country for GCSE results find themselves near the top of the new list, while top-performing grammars renowned for helping pupils achieve streams of A and A* grades slumped to the bottom.
“Critics said the government’s ‘jiggery-pokery’ would confuse parents looking for the best schools…”
Good! Politicians should never have tried to kid parents that league tables told them much. The sensible advice to parents has always been, look at league tables if you like, but don’t believe figures. Go and see the school instead. After all, we all know the old saying about statistics and damned lies.
According to the Daily Mail, Schools Minister Jim Knight undermined his own statistics by declaring: “I don't think we should draw too many conclusions from these figures.”
Yes, Minister. Except, perhaps, the conclusion that league tables have finally had their day. They were never much good anyway, and the new ones are topsy-turvy. The old ones proved the obvious: that schools with the brightest children score most highly. The new tables, trying to be fairer, are so bewildering that they give no sense of order or proportion. But they do prove just how daft it is to try to place complex institutions like schools in a silly, simplistic rank order.
I suggest we just turn out the lights on league tables, lock the door and throw away the key.