Education? Education?? Education???
by Richard Mollowen
I left teaching in 2005 after thirty-odd years in the job.
On this page I'll publish extracts, which will be changed regularly, from my book "Education? Education?? Education??? - eat my chalk" which picks up and mixes events from my own education, from my career in the classroom and in 'education management'.
1977
The Trip
It’s the Summer Term with my Third Year (Year 9) class, and we’re getting close to Activities Week.
Where shall I take my Form for their trip? The traditional ideas: Alton Towers, the Zoo, a stately home – are all taken up by other groups before I can motivate myself to get organized. (Probably I’ve been too busy, getting promoted.)
It’s Gillian who saves me with the idea. She’s the class’s Mother, a broad, loveable fourteen year-old who will still be instantly-recognisable if I meet her thirty years later. Which I don’t. A lot of the time she acts instinctively as my mother, as if she understands I’m still wet behind the ears. If I’m late in the morning from my lift, or from the bus if I missed it, or after an extended morning briefing in the staffroom, I’ll find Gillian taking the register – more accurately and clearly than I would have.
“Sir, our Trip”.
“Yes, Gillian, sorry. Anyone come up with any bright ideas?”
“Well sir. You know you’re sometimes late because you live In The Hills?” Since I once used this phrase to describe where I live it has several times come up in these phonetic initial capital letters when they refer to it, Gillian and her steady-eyed, curious bunch of friends.
“Ye-es….”
Well why don’t you take Uz – To The Hills –and we could see where you live, like?”
Partly my heart must sink at the idea. But it occurs to me that many of this class would feel like strangers in their own city-centre. This is a community that sticks to its maze of streets round Greenwood. They shop at the local SupaSave, buy their clothes at the row of dodgy shops with the parkas and jeans on racks on the street – next to the fluorescent hanging feather-dusters and whatever goods, orange Hallowe’en masks, silver Christmas trees, inflatable pink Valentine hearts on sticks, are disposably in season. Maybe they make it to Skeggy or Blackpoolfor a day away, or a spell in August. If the go-getting families make it to Spain, we’re still in that time when they’ve just been flown in and out of Dreamland.
My village, though, can be reached on the bus – and twice a day, without changing, on just the direct” bus, which goes round all the houses and feels as if it takes forever. This is a bus-ride to the countryside they can take for themselves, any time they want, if I can show them it can be done.
“That’s a really interesting idea, Gillian, and it doesn’t cost much. We can get there on the bus.”
On the top deck, this beautiful July morning, we head out through baking city streets past flaking factories and flashy used-car marts, and pretty soon we can see The Hills. Little Kevin tells me all about the First Division heroes of his football-team of choice – up to now, watching them has been his only reason for ever getting on a bus. He’s kneeling up on the bus-seat in front of me, animated, facing back into my face. He talks about football like an old man (so steeped is he in the lore of
the team). Even more than his failure-to-thrive companions, he is wry, wizened. He is at once the brilliant little winger I have seen on the field, or dribbling round his friends on the yard with a “tennisser” – and his own grandfather, who takes him on the bus to the matches with all his old
pals….
Gillian and her group are their own apprentice-dinnerladies’ outing, chattering, whooping like women rather than giggling like girls.
We get down from the bus at the bottom of my street, a stone terrace of old mill-workers’ cottages, facing: a railway-line; an empty playing-field; a still, scummy canal; green, rising ground with a scattering of grayish sheep; receding, darker hills; a few wisps of white cloud in wall-to-wall blue space.
The group totters for a few moments, a huddle insecure, assaulted by the lack of signs, traffic, rubbish or people.
I take them to our house. They are captivated by Karen, my dazzling,“well-spoken” newlywed
wife. They tuck in, in our kitchen, to orange-squash and biscuits. By the time that’s finished, it’s eleven. I point to the top of a nearby hill. It’s only a mile away, up a rambling lane. The view down the valley today will be astonishing. We set off, walking fifty yards up the road, across the level-crossing, along the edge of the football-fields behind the goalposts (Kevin diverts himself by scoring an imaginary goal, with an imaginary ball – why didn’t we bring a real one?) and then we’re on the canal towpath. There is a picturesque little stone bridge to take us up the lane, up the hill…. But only four of us will reach it.
The group of teenagers stares into the canal, fixated.
An occasional ring of ripples as a dark fish rises. The boys flock dreamily to the water. They kneel,
as if at the side of the Sacred Ganges, to dip curious fingers into it. In response to this event, the girls spread out their coats and sit, then recline, tipping pale squinting faces to the sun. At first they are almost silent but they soon pull out plastic bags of sandwiches and dare to chatter, but quietly as if in church before the service. The lads, munching their own, now spread out in intent knots of two or three to look for better angles on the spreading rings in the surface-mirror.
Amazed, somewhat bewitched myself, I have to let them take their time. I think of the screaming roller-coasters, of chimps’ backsides and parrot-shrieks. And here we are. I thought maybe there
wouldn’t be enough to do. The top of the hill isn’t far, though, and I suggest we move on over the bridge and up the lane.
But by now the scene is fin de
ciecle, après midi. They might be wearing boaters, twirling parasols, disporting themselves in striped bathing-costumes for the brush of the passing Impressionist, as the sun stands
still forever.
Three of them, about two-thirty, make it to the bridge. Two are boys, discussing the best spot to fish. The third is Gillian, with me.
“It’s brilliant here”, she keeps saying, rather as her grandmother might – except her gran’s word would be“lovely”. “It’s brilliant. Your wife’s gorgeous sir, i’n’t she? If I lived out here I’d never
move. I’d be made-up.” What she keeps unspoken, a mystery too deep for fathoming in the ginger
waters of a three-foot-deep canal, is – What are you doing coming into town from this – to teach Uz? Sir?
Teaching you, is how I can afford to live here, Gillian – though sometimes it feels that I am turning into a migratory creature. I’m neither one thing nor the other. Neither here nor there. This is the life I am turning into.
At three, attracted by the end of school at the little local Primary, an ice-cream van chimes to a halt between our house and the bus-stop. Perfect end to the Works Outing. They hurtle towards it yelling and leaping.
We ride back, clutching our cornets, into the warm dark fume-tunnel of city streets: grime, drabness, the crumbling lines of brick and dust. If now they’re quieter again, more bemused, I can’t tell whether it’s Gillian’s unspoken question that’s stolen their tongues, or the sense of
relievedly returning to a known, womb-like prison.
And I’m left with: is it that sunlight on still water is truly a universal gateway to peace and enlightenment? Or did they just not dare lose sight of the bus-stop?
"Parental Choice"
So this new government thinks we should now have "Free Schools", set up by groups of interested parents. Meanwhile, agreed repairs and refurbishments of existing schools disappear once again into Neverland. 9/7/2010
The extract below reflects more recent news, too, from the eternal fantasy world that is Government Educational Policy.
Parents of schoolchildren: in the last thirty years, we have been turned into “good people who remain silent” – not as to what is best for our own children – but certainly for everyone else’s. OK, no school is a concentration camp. But many of us remove our children from our local schools and send them elsewhere – as if this were the case. What is on offer nearby may be good enough, we imply, for other people’s kids, but not for ours.
We are offered the choice – more accurately, we are offered the “choice” – and we take it: to a “better” comp up the road – more our kids’ class of kids, more our choice of parents. Or to a fee-paying school which automatically will respond more directly to our children’s perceived needs.
And in doing that, we make the school we reject into a ghetto.
Extreme terms to be using? Sorry, no more than the truth. Nigel Davies (1) points out that the most obvious indicator of educational success is the economic viability of the child, via the parent/s. It’s pretty obvious that schools with the highest proportion of poor children have most problems, and lowest measurable success. These schools are obviously places that a “good” (which means Like You and Me) parent wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole. This inevitability was always the shadow behind the expansion in Parental Choice.
The received wisdom of the past twenty years is that this circumstance – the circumstance of a haemorrhaging pupil-roll, plummeting public esteem and reduced resources – will cause the “failing” school to “compete” more vigorously. Well believe me, that school is fighting its socks off to be a better school. For that, it strives with might and main for better results. But for that, principally, it needs – better kids. Parental choice means it doesn’t get them.
But anyway, if it fails, it will be a Darwinistic proof that it was never fit enough to survive. So that’s all right then. And the other schools around can use their increasing resources to expand, and take the pupils. Hmmm. But maybe the Governing Bodies of those schools don’t want any more of these kids.
The process that remedies the “failed” school? “Special Measures”: -
1) Sack the boss and any older (more experienced) senior managers.
2) Send in Ofsted inspectors on a regular basis to scare everyone silly.
3) Put a Superhead in charge (who’s already a “successful” Head, but in a school that may not even be local, and may well be quite unlike this one) to scare everyone silly.
It's the received wisdom that, if a school loses its pupils to parental choice or falling numbers of school-age children in the area, it’s obviously fault of the Head. He/she simply wasn't scaring everyone silly enough. As soon as that Head, and some other teachers who knew the pupils and their families really well, have been replaced by younger, more dynamic (cheaper to employ. Sssshh) teachers (who will take a while to get to know the pupils) educational standards are bound to be “driven up”. (Hmm.)
After this point (unless the new SuperHead really does wear a blue cape, and perch, arms akimbo, on sky-scrapers – unusual behaviour, even in a headteacher) the school will, predictably, return to failing. The publicity relating to its original “failure” will already have caused parents wherever possible (and good teachers who don’t feel able to continue under ridiculous Inspection regimes, and having their work dictated by a stroppy SuperOutsider) to bale out as soon as they have found somewhere else to go. But most can't go anywhere. Despite the rhetoric, they have no "choice" at all.
Solution: kids remaining are be given a new (more expensive) uniform, preferably based around a magical “blazer” (perhaps in Superman Blue).
The school will be renamed: College. Academy.
Then, presumably, it awaits the arrival, into a region few people normally move into out of choice – of aliens from outer space; aliens who are going to be fooled by a blazer and a new name into believing that these pupils are the sort they want their kids to mix with. What the school does await, until the cows come home, is any locally-based perception that this school is in any significant sense “better”. Ofsted may say it is. There may be some educational “evidence”. Statistics can be tweaked for a while (see Education? Education?? Education??? Part One, “The Advisor”). But these parents live locally. Excuse me. This is the same place. These are the same kids. It’s the same old building.
But the new Head, the Local Authority and the Government now have a trump card to play. By manipulating bidding processes and PFI partnerships they access millions of pounds to build a new school building – quite possibly on the old school’s playing-field - while the old school works in the noise and dust of construction. They give it Specialist or Academy status, which will include even more financial breaks in the future. They close the Dirty Old Failure and reopen it as: the Glittering Success. New staff will now come in, attracted by the purpose-built labs and computer-suites, like bees to a honey-pot. Parents and kids come in at Open Days, just to gawp at the new Atrium.
At last! If that won’t turn the perceptions of the local parents around, and get some more bright kids back in the school and therefore turn the school around, nothing will. Even so, it isn’t going to be instantaneous. A large proportion of the new Academies continue to struggle for years after they’re built. Check out even the Official Statistics. Buildings are easy to replace. Aspirations, in a community and its youngsters, are more difficult.
But don’t get the silly simplistic idea that, if education in this country were run as a public service and not as a set of discreet small businesses, this new building would have been seen as essential, and the funding found for it, years before all this happened.
The process of the Market, don't you see, is healthy and cleansing. I don’t think the education of hundreds or even thousands of kids going through that school while it was under that cloud, with that falling budget, in Special Measures, working on a building-site – suffered all that much.
And anyway – have you seen the new building*?
The old Head wouldn’t have known what to do with it.
*Of course, since this chapter was first written, new buildings (and even repairs to the old ones) are out of the question again anyway. Unless....
1 Nick Davies: The School Report Vintage 2000
Copywright Richard Mollowen 2010
by Richard Mollowen
I left teaching in 2005 after thirty-odd years in the job.
On this page I'll publish extracts, which will be changed regularly, from my book "Education? Education?? Education??? - eat my chalk" which picks up and mixes events from my own education, from my career in the classroom and in 'education management'.
1977
The Trip
It’s the Summer Term with my Third Year (Year 9) class, and we’re getting close to Activities Week.
Where shall I take my Form for their trip? The traditional ideas: Alton Towers, the Zoo, a stately home – are all taken up by other groups before I can motivate myself to get organized. (Probably I’ve been too busy, getting promoted.)
It’s Gillian who saves me with the idea. She’s the class’s Mother, a broad, loveable fourteen year-old who will still be instantly-recognisable if I meet her thirty years later. Which I don’t. A lot of the time she acts instinctively as my mother, as if she understands I’m still wet behind the ears. If I’m late in the morning from my lift, or from the bus if I missed it, or after an extended morning briefing in the staffroom, I’ll find Gillian taking the register – more accurately and clearly than I would have.
“Sir, our Trip”.
“Yes, Gillian, sorry. Anyone come up with any bright ideas?”
“Well sir. You know you’re sometimes late because you live In The Hills?” Since I once used this phrase to describe where I live it has several times come up in these phonetic initial capital letters when they refer to it, Gillian and her steady-eyed, curious bunch of friends.
“Ye-es….”
Well why don’t you take Uz – To The Hills –and we could see where you live, like?”
Partly my heart must sink at the idea. But it occurs to me that many of this class would feel like strangers in their own city-centre. This is a community that sticks to its maze of streets round Greenwood. They shop at the local SupaSave, buy their clothes at the row of dodgy shops with the parkas and jeans on racks on the street – next to the fluorescent hanging feather-dusters and whatever goods, orange Hallowe’en masks, silver Christmas trees, inflatable pink Valentine hearts on sticks, are disposably in season. Maybe they make it to Skeggy or Blackpoolfor a day away, or a spell in August. If the go-getting families make it to Spain, we’re still in that time when they’ve just been flown in and out of Dreamland.
My village, though, can be reached on the bus – and twice a day, without changing, on just the direct” bus, which goes round all the houses and feels as if it takes forever. This is a bus-ride to the countryside they can take for themselves, any time they want, if I can show them it can be done.
“That’s a really interesting idea, Gillian, and it doesn’t cost much. We can get there on the bus.”
On the top deck, this beautiful July morning, we head out through baking city streets past flaking factories and flashy used-car marts, and pretty soon we can see The Hills. Little Kevin tells me all about the First Division heroes of his football-team of choice – up to now, watching them has been his only reason for ever getting on a bus. He’s kneeling up on the bus-seat in front of me, animated, facing back into my face. He talks about football like an old man (so steeped is he in the lore of
the team). Even more than his failure-to-thrive companions, he is wry, wizened. He is at once the brilliant little winger I have seen on the field, or dribbling round his friends on the yard with a “tennisser” – and his own grandfather, who takes him on the bus to the matches with all his old
pals….
Gillian and her group are their own apprentice-dinnerladies’ outing, chattering, whooping like women rather than giggling like girls.
We get down from the bus at the bottom of my street, a stone terrace of old mill-workers’ cottages, facing: a railway-line; an empty playing-field; a still, scummy canal; green, rising ground with a scattering of grayish sheep; receding, darker hills; a few wisps of white cloud in wall-to-wall blue space.
The group totters for a few moments, a huddle insecure, assaulted by the lack of signs, traffic, rubbish or people.
I take them to our house. They are captivated by Karen, my dazzling,“well-spoken” newlywed
wife. They tuck in, in our kitchen, to orange-squash and biscuits. By the time that’s finished, it’s eleven. I point to the top of a nearby hill. It’s only a mile away, up a rambling lane. The view down the valley today will be astonishing. We set off, walking fifty yards up the road, across the level-crossing, along the edge of the football-fields behind the goalposts (Kevin diverts himself by scoring an imaginary goal, with an imaginary ball – why didn’t we bring a real one?) and then we’re on the canal towpath. There is a picturesque little stone bridge to take us up the lane, up the hill…. But only four of us will reach it.
The group of teenagers stares into the canal, fixated.
An occasional ring of ripples as a dark fish rises. The boys flock dreamily to the water. They kneel,
as if at the side of the Sacred Ganges, to dip curious fingers into it. In response to this event, the girls spread out their coats and sit, then recline, tipping pale squinting faces to the sun. At first they are almost silent but they soon pull out plastic bags of sandwiches and dare to chatter, but quietly as if in church before the service. The lads, munching their own, now spread out in intent knots of two or three to look for better angles on the spreading rings in the surface-mirror.
Amazed, somewhat bewitched myself, I have to let them take their time. I think of the screaming roller-coasters, of chimps’ backsides and parrot-shrieks. And here we are. I thought maybe there
wouldn’t be enough to do. The top of the hill isn’t far, though, and I suggest we move on over the bridge and up the lane.
But by now the scene is fin de
ciecle, après midi. They might be wearing boaters, twirling parasols, disporting themselves in striped bathing-costumes for the brush of the passing Impressionist, as the sun stands
still forever.
Three of them, about two-thirty, make it to the bridge. Two are boys, discussing the best spot to fish. The third is Gillian, with me.
“It’s brilliant here”, she keeps saying, rather as her grandmother might – except her gran’s word would be“lovely”. “It’s brilliant. Your wife’s gorgeous sir, i’n’t she? If I lived out here I’d never
move. I’d be made-up.” What she keeps unspoken, a mystery too deep for fathoming in the ginger
waters of a three-foot-deep canal, is – What are you doing coming into town from this – to teach Uz? Sir?
Teaching you, is how I can afford to live here, Gillian – though sometimes it feels that I am turning into a migratory creature. I’m neither one thing nor the other. Neither here nor there. This is the life I am turning into.
At three, attracted by the end of school at the little local Primary, an ice-cream van chimes to a halt between our house and the bus-stop. Perfect end to the Works Outing. They hurtle towards it yelling and leaping.
We ride back, clutching our cornets, into the warm dark fume-tunnel of city streets: grime, drabness, the crumbling lines of brick and dust. If now they’re quieter again, more bemused, I can’t tell whether it’s Gillian’s unspoken question that’s stolen their tongues, or the sense of
relievedly returning to a known, womb-like prison.
And I’m left with: is it that sunlight on still water is truly a universal gateway to peace and enlightenment? Or did they just not dare lose sight of the bus-stop?
"Parental Choice"
So this new government thinks we should now have "Free Schools", set up by groups of interested parents. Meanwhile, agreed repairs and refurbishments of existing schools disappear once again into Neverland. 9/7/2010
The extract below reflects more recent news, too, from the eternal fantasy world that is Government Educational Policy.
Parents of schoolchildren: in the last thirty years, we have been turned into “good people who remain silent” – not as to what is best for our own children – but certainly for everyone else’s. OK, no school is a concentration camp. But many of us remove our children from our local schools and send them elsewhere – as if this were the case. What is on offer nearby may be good enough, we imply, for other people’s kids, but not for ours.
We are offered the choice – more accurately, we are offered the “choice” – and we take it: to a “better” comp up the road – more our kids’ class of kids, more our choice of parents. Or to a fee-paying school which automatically will respond more directly to our children’s perceived needs.
And in doing that, we make the school we reject into a ghetto.
Extreme terms to be using? Sorry, no more than the truth. Nigel Davies (1) points out that the most obvious indicator of educational success is the economic viability of the child, via the parent/s. It’s pretty obvious that schools with the highest proportion of poor children have most problems, and lowest measurable success. These schools are obviously places that a “good” (which means Like You and Me) parent wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole. This inevitability was always the shadow behind the expansion in Parental Choice.
The received wisdom of the past twenty years is that this circumstance – the circumstance of a haemorrhaging pupil-roll, plummeting public esteem and reduced resources – will cause the “failing” school to “compete” more vigorously. Well believe me, that school is fighting its socks off to be a better school. For that, it strives with might and main for better results. But for that, principally, it needs – better kids. Parental choice means it doesn’t get them.
But anyway, if it fails, it will be a Darwinistic proof that it was never fit enough to survive. So that’s all right then. And the other schools around can use their increasing resources to expand, and take the pupils. Hmmm. But maybe the Governing Bodies of those schools don’t want any more of these kids.
The process that remedies the “failed” school? “Special Measures”: -
1) Sack the boss and any older (more experienced) senior managers.
2) Send in Ofsted inspectors on a regular basis to scare everyone silly.
3) Put a Superhead in charge (who’s already a “successful” Head, but in a school that may not even be local, and may well be quite unlike this one) to scare everyone silly.
It's the received wisdom that, if a school loses its pupils to parental choice or falling numbers of school-age children in the area, it’s obviously fault of the Head. He/she simply wasn't scaring everyone silly enough. As soon as that Head, and some other teachers who knew the pupils and their families really well, have been replaced by younger, more dynamic (cheaper to employ. Sssshh) teachers (who will take a while to get to know the pupils) educational standards are bound to be “driven up”. (Hmm.)
After this point (unless the new SuperHead really does wear a blue cape, and perch, arms akimbo, on sky-scrapers – unusual behaviour, even in a headteacher) the school will, predictably, return to failing. The publicity relating to its original “failure” will already have caused parents wherever possible (and good teachers who don’t feel able to continue under ridiculous Inspection regimes, and having their work dictated by a stroppy SuperOutsider) to bale out as soon as they have found somewhere else to go. But most can't go anywhere. Despite the rhetoric, they have no "choice" at all.
Solution: kids remaining are be given a new (more expensive) uniform, preferably based around a magical “blazer” (perhaps in Superman Blue).
The school will be renamed: College. Academy.
Then, presumably, it awaits the arrival, into a region few people normally move into out of choice – of aliens from outer space; aliens who are going to be fooled by a blazer and a new name into believing that these pupils are the sort they want their kids to mix with. What the school does await, until the cows come home, is any locally-based perception that this school is in any significant sense “better”. Ofsted may say it is. There may be some educational “evidence”. Statistics can be tweaked for a while (see Education? Education?? Education??? Part One, “The Advisor”). But these parents live locally. Excuse me. This is the same place. These are the same kids. It’s the same old building.
But the new Head, the Local Authority and the Government now have a trump card to play. By manipulating bidding processes and PFI partnerships they access millions of pounds to build a new school building – quite possibly on the old school’s playing-field - while the old school works in the noise and dust of construction. They give it Specialist or Academy status, which will include even more financial breaks in the future. They close the Dirty Old Failure and reopen it as: the Glittering Success. New staff will now come in, attracted by the purpose-built labs and computer-suites, like bees to a honey-pot. Parents and kids come in at Open Days, just to gawp at the new Atrium.
At last! If that won’t turn the perceptions of the local parents around, and get some more bright kids back in the school and therefore turn the school around, nothing will. Even so, it isn’t going to be instantaneous. A large proportion of the new Academies continue to struggle for years after they’re built. Check out even the Official Statistics. Buildings are easy to replace. Aspirations, in a community and its youngsters, are more difficult.
But don’t get the silly simplistic idea that, if education in this country were run as a public service and not as a set of discreet small businesses, this new building would have been seen as essential, and the funding found for it, years before all this happened.
The process of the Market, don't you see, is healthy and cleansing. I don’t think the education of hundreds or even thousands of kids going through that school while it was under that cloud, with that falling budget, in Special Measures, working on a building-site – suffered all that much.
And anyway – have you seen the new building*?
The old Head wouldn’t have known what to do with it.
*Of course, since this chapter was first written, new buildings (and even repairs to the old ones) are out of the question again anyway. Unless....
1 Nick Davies: The School Report Vintage 2000
Copywright Richard Mollowen 2010
