What we are learning from Corpus Christi, in their agony

This week's news of a 15 year old stabbing Ann Maguire in Leeds is totally horrendous and has appalled the nation.

But the response from the local community in the way it has drawn together is awe-inspiring.  Pictures of the parish church filled with young people coming together to mourn, to sit in silence, to try to understand what has happened, demonstrate the power that schools have to pull people together.

I saw something similar happen when Matt Fox, the superb music teacher at Saint Gabriel's in Lambeth, suddenly dropped dead in the middle of band practice just a few months ago, from a massive heart attack. The way the students and staff pulled together to cope with such a shock was so so impressive.

Terrible events test communities to their core.  At times like these we see what that core is made of.

In its agony, Corpus Christi school in Leeds is sending out a power wave to the world around it, demonstrating that love and respect for each other, embodied in the love they had for their lost teacher, is what, above all else, it stands for.

For that we are grateful.

Most heads are rubbish at recognising their genius

This is so true.

Over the last few months I've visited about 25 superb schools - maintained and academies - and have been overwhelmed with admiration for what schools are doing:

- The school in Birmingham where the head has worked out how to get into the Somali communities and Bangladeshi communities and get them working together for the benefit of their kids. He's got Aston Villa and Birmingham International Airport working alongside him and his team.

- The top team in Hemel Hempstead where home school links start pre reception and have created the best example of parents supporting the school of any I have come across.

- The academy in Huddersfield where they could only give me an example of one student becoming NEET in recent years, because their 'beyond school' programme has been so effective.

- The primary in Folkestone where the number of pupils getting level 6 in Maths is huge, and where the whole school curriculum is centred on getting children to ask questions, from when they first start in Reception.

I have taken with me one of the  senior researchers from The Key, who has joined my two-hour interrogation of the head to dig down into what the school has done to discover how they can advance learning.  The researcher then writes up a number of case studies and publishes them within answers to questions from school leaders, thereby making them available to the other 40,000 school leader members of The Key.

Each month I feel more and more privileged to be working with so many school leaders - heads, deputies, business managers, SENCOs - who are doing amazingly creative things for their children and young people.

Stop reading the newspapers: they only focus on bad stuff

Remember: what you are doing is of absolutely huge value to our children, our young people and through them, society as a whole.

Keep encouraging your staff with your vision.

And - if you want to tell the world, we'll help you at The Key, if you will invite me to visit...fergal.roche@thekeysupport.com

Ofsted should make chalk and talk teaching mandatory...

I mean, it's obvious. 

I have just read an article by Toby Young lauding the rightness of lecture-style teaching and how wonderful it is that we are returning to the safe haven of some yesteryear when we knew what we were doing, while he lambasts any attempt at getting the children to take a leading role in their learning because it is child-centred.

Ironically, or hilariously, depending on your viewpoint, the education you get at Oxford or Cambridge –the hallowed land of those who preach this reactionary idyll - is predominantly discursive.  You read your essay to your tutor and then discuss it.  The lecture, which seems to be Young’s preferred modus operandi for the masses, is not the dominant means of teaching.  So – is it one rule for the country’s intellectual cream and another for the dregs?

Learning is most effective when the learner is most fully engaged.  Showing a YouTube clip to a class and getting them to write questions on their mini whiteboards makes huge sense in the teaching repertoire.  All have to focus, all engage, all produce a response.  How different this is from the history A level classes I endured when the teacher literally stood at the front of the class and read out his notes, which we copied into our books.  Only when we wrote our weekly essays did we actually interact with the subject matter. 

Unfortunately, the ridiculous polemics that form the core of our political discourse today mean that you are either a rigorously demanding academic who teaches from the front OR you are a child-centred leftie who cares not a fig about standards, as long as you start from where the student is and work from there.  What a lovely simple world Toby Young inhabits.

Of course, if he felt able to put aside his desire for eye-catching melodrama, he would realise that our leading teachers weave together the rigour that he demands together with the engagement that is essential to learning.  Some might be a bit left-wing, perish the thought, but they will be no less rigorous. 

And some of the right wingers in the profession might think about what motivates each student and work from there.  How spineless is that!

Please let’s bring back rational, balanced argument – and not always feel that every sentence we utter has to contain the full dramatic mix of a Shakespearian tragedy.

And stop telling highly skilled professionals how to do their job….. please?

But, Toby, if I've misunderstood what you were saying, I apologise.  

Exeunt omnes.  

Many headteachers are not going to like this, but...

...the balance of power in schools needs to shift considerably from heads towards the board/governing body.  If governments and local authorities want and/or need schools to look after themselves more, then it's essential that their boards assume more power.

We simply don't have enough headteachers who can run things on their own, with little need for a powerful board.  In fact, we don't even want to encourage such lone ranger leadership, as it so often leads to dodgy ideosyncratic decisions and financial improbity. 

To start with, governors need to have more control over how money is spent - in reality, not just theoretically.  They need to make decisions to spend some money on equipping themselves with the necessary information, knowledge and skill to be able to perform as a board that has complete responsibility for how well the school is run.

Governing body agendas are going to have to be led by the governors, too.  I know that this sounds obvious, but at the moment they are set for the most part according to standardised models provided by local authorities or by the senior leadership. 

Governing board agendas should focus on setting the development plan, monitoring evidenced progress in reaching the targets in the plan, setting the budget and monitoring progress against it, deciding on capital requirements and how they will be financed, closely managing risks, checking the performance of the head.  And little else. 

The sooner governing bodies realise the need to move in this direction, the more quickly they will be able to take the appropriate level of responsibility to ensure their schools reach and maintain outstanding standards. 

The governing body runs the school, with the head acting as their principal agent to do so.  The head reports to the board.  The main role of the governing body is not, in fact, simply to support the head.  Governors need, to my mind, to be much more demanding of the head.

By taking on more authority and accountability in this way, governing bodies will actually lighten the burden on the head, who will no longer be in such an isolated position of responsibility. 

In short, the balance of power needs to shift towards the board/govening body. 

Is PISA helpful?

In parts.

But, according to Pasi Sahlberg, it can release a GERM (global educational reform movement) which encourages governments to assume they need the following:

1.     Increased competition between schools that is boosted by school choice and related league tables offering parents information that helps them make the right "consumer" decisions.
2.     Standardization of teaching and learning that sets detailed prescriptions how to teach and what students must achieve so that schools' performance can be compared to one another.
3.     Systematic collection of information on schools' performance by employing standardized tests. These data are then used to hold teachers accountable for students' achievement.
4.     Devaluing teacher professionalism and making teaching accessible to anyone through fast-track teacher preparation.
5.     Privatizing state schools by turning them to privately governed schools through charter schools, free schools and virtual schools.

Sahlberg points out (I haven't corrected his grammar) that what governments should actually focus on, is the following:

-      Countries that give schools autonomy over curricula and student assessments often perform better
-      Success is often associated with balanced professional autonomy with a collaborative culture in schools
-      High performing education systems engage teachers to set their own teaching and learning targets, to craft productive learning environments, and to design multiple forms of student assessment to best support student learning and school improvement.
-      High average learning outcomes and system-wide equity are often interrelated. Equity in education means that students' socio-economic status has little impact on how well they learn in school. Equity is high in the agenda in all successful school systems. Focus on equity means to give high priority to universal early childhood programs, comprehensive health and special education services in schools, and balanced curriculum that has equal weight in arts, music, and sports, and academic studies. Fairness in resource allocation is important for equity, too. PISA 2012 shows that fair resourcing is related to the success of the entire school system: High student performance tends to be linked to more equitably resource allocation between advantaged and disadvantaged schools
-      School choice does not improve the performance of education system. School choice and competition between schools are related to greater levels of segregation in the education system. That, in turn, may have adverse consequences for equity in learning opportunities and outcomes.
-      PISA results show that more successful countries pay more to their teachers and give them higher status in society.

I am going to have to reflect carefully on what Sahlberg (from Finland, by the way) is saying, as I find some of his conclusions uncomfortable. 

I'll let you know how I get on.....

Original article in The Guardian is here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/08/pisa-education-test-scores-meaning

The best approach to spending pupil premium money

Headteachers of the most outstanding schools I know take a very holistic view of their school.  Several commented recently that each child in the school - whether in receipt of pupil premium (PP) or not, is 'owned' by someone on the senior leadership team (SLT), so that if any individual has a problem, it is addressed by the SLT member.  It is almost as if they see every child/young person as having a special need and resent government telling them where they should concentrate their attention.

At the recent conference on pupil premium run by The Key, it was remarkable to see the difference in attitude between the heads of outstanding schools and those of other schools vis a vis accounting for PP spending.  The heads of the former, what Brian Lightman of ASCL would call confident schools, took pride in the achievement of every pupil in every cohort; the heads of the latter, constrained schools, were highly anxious about how Ofsted would view what they are doing with the extra money - and scared to do the wrong thing. 

There seemed to be quite a gulf between the two.

While Ofsted continues to be such a dominant influence on the way so many heads run their schools, we will continue to bemoan the ubiquitous restrained, constrained behaviour that Brian Lightman talks about.  There has got to be some way of ensuring that standards keep rising while giving full rein to the creativity and dynamism that, to my mind, is latent (if not actually seen) in most schools in our country.

I have spent many days over the last few months visiting some of the country's leading schools and am in awe of some of the amazing work that is going on.  The vibrancy and excitement of the pupils was quite electric at Sandgate primary in Folkestone last week.  There is no limit to children's ambitions; the school guides and shapes learning in the school, which is led by the children's enquiry.  I came away thinking how exciting it is to work in such an environment....

...and somewhat angry and disappointed that our system deprives so many school leaders of the confidence they need to run their schools in this way.

The sooner the gulf is filled in, the better.

Let's create outstanding teachers, not wait for them to come along

At our evening meal yesterday I was having a good chat with my 13 yr old daughter about the teachers she finds inspiring.  She conceded that about three out of her dozen or so meet her criteria for inspiring.

I've been reading Bounce by Matthew Syed, which makes a convincing argument that strong motivation, hard work and sustained application are much more reliable predictors of outstanding performance than innate talent.

My daughter's face came alive when talking about her inspiring teachers; she looks forward to their lessons, makes really good progress and works hard for them.

And then she talks about her un-inspiring teachers.

The difference is stark.

If Syed is right - and the evidence he offers suggests that he is - then we need to motivate teachers much more, so that they have a sustained desire to be outstanding and inspiring.  Great teachers are NOT born.  They have somehow learned to be brilliant.  Let's determine that all good teachers will become outstanding within the next year.  The school I visited last week, Lampton Academy in Hounslow, has written its own teaching standards to try and ensure that all teachers reach mastery level.  I love it.

Really I just want more (well, all, actually) of my daughter's teachers to be inspiring.

But wouldn't it be amazing if we could make it so that all of the teachers in our nation's classrooms were inspiring.

An impossible dream?