The Older I Get The Better I Was Update and Tribute

I started teaching in 1976 and spent four years and two terms at my first school, a High School in Rowley Regis. Someone very recently posted a teaching staff photo on Facebook and it stirred some powerful emotions: I wasn't on it; I’d only just left when it was taken and in spite of my absence it’s a good photo! The colour quality is good and it captures the essence of the memory I have for my former colleagues. As is the way of things on Facebook, someone posted another photo, a black and white one of the Staff Football team: we were playing the 5^th Year (Year 11’s now) in a match that celebrated their final year in school and the restorative (albeit temporary) power of the male ego: you know, “The older I get, the better I was,” sort of thing. No one took it dreadfully seriously a light-hearted piece of “pupil engagement”.

1976 marked a time when challenges to the assumed comfort of education as a key player in developing a productive and employable workforce were raised; notably from the political left. Jim Callaghan and Shirley Williams each voiced concerns about the worth, value and relevance of what was taking place in our classrooms. In doing so they added fresh fuel to a debate that eventually led to changes that have in so many ways “wiped the smiles off the face of education.”

And there is the starkest of differences: fun. Things like this happened regularly and often:

·          Teachers running lunchtime activities (Formal)

·          Teachers running lunchtime activities (Informal)

·          “Catch Up Classes”

·          Teachers having time to socialise and build up productive relationships with the kids

·          Teachers having time to socialise and build up productive relationships with each other.

·          Whole staff social events

·          Spontaneous “stuff”

As I reflect on the journey we’ve been forced to take, it feels that we have lost some of the essence of purpose that made a job a calling. It’s hard to look at the “progress” we are alleged to have made without concluding that it has been successful largely in an unintended outcome: it has made a calling a job.

The above reflections gained an additional poignancy this week as I read (again on Facebook  about the death of a former valued colleague, Bob Ashwood. Bob was a talented teacher, a great colleague and one of the rare people whose character becomes part of “what goes on around here”: they effortlessly shape culture. The warmth and esteem in which Bob was held is clear from the response to his untimely death from the people he taught. Bob helped keep the smile on the face of education and his passing creates a reflective space that is occupied in no small measure by talent, integrity and a lightness of touch that is often only the property of professional heavyweights. His work outside of teaching is captured in this link. http://www.athleticsweekly.com/news/athletics-community-pays-tribute-to-bob-ashwood/

It feels that Bob’s life was about “a calling,” one that touched countless numbers of people from many walks of life.  

Exclusion From School-Inclusion In Prison.

Edinburgh University has carried out research that suggests that excluded pupils are more likely to go to prison as adults. I'm pretty certain that many of its readers will have reacted with mock (Oh really!!!) shock: did we need another report to tell us this? Well, yes and here's why. Looking through the TES summary http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6318854 there are some success stories and maybe we should be focussing on what appears to work.

I was brought up in Birmingham and we are blessed with the "Number 11 Outer Circle 'Bus Route. 

The route takes you around 26 miles of Birmingham and when we were kids....yes you get it, this is how we spent our sad gaming platform free existences. It prepared me well for my work in Education generally and working with challenging young people particularly: mainly because if you wait long enough, the Number 11 will, unfailingly turn up again and do the same thing as it did the last time. Only the drivers (and heck the dates me) and  the conductors were different.

The Education Workforce has been driven around the place by a plethora of Drivers and monitored by a head scratchingly diverse range of conductors some of which should not have been allowed anywhere near the Education Bus. Others have skipped along a continuum of bus driving techniques

• Break neck and destabilising-inducing panic and vomiting amongst the passengers
• Ponderous to the point that everyone thinks we've stopped
• Indifferent to the needs and understanding of the passengers-about their journey requirements, arrival times and so on.

Amongst all of this uncertainty, one fact remained the Number 11 would always be there.

And here we have it. Schools, academies and other providers are subject to regular changes in the manner in which they are expected to deal with challenging young people. The report "Vexed Questions over Exclusion" raises an interesting success story: that Schools with behavioural values based tend to do better in addressing challenges and that punitive approaches work less well.

Teaching values is tough: particularly when we consider how we (the adults) manage the gap between our Espoused (what we stand for) Values and our Lived (What we really do) Values. Kids can spot the gap from miles away and the bigger the gap is, the less credibility we have, proving to them that Monkey Say and Monkey Do are two very different monkeys that pretend to be the same one.

We can take a punitive approach-a "Short, Sharp Shock" that has more to do with organisational revenge than moving processes and people forward in a meaningful manner. It will gain populist applause and eventually serve no one as thresholds slip, consistency vanishes and appropriate responses to challenge converge into a Number 11 Bus route of sanctions.

Where we have have strong values, where what and who we are is informed by what we do and say and vice-versa, we stand at least a chance to deliver a strong message based on how we deliver the values we espouse. And yes, there need to be sanctions, sanctions that go hand-in-hand with well measured support and access to a range of options that engage with the person, not just the behaviour. This might give us a better chance of keeping the important link between the provider and the child.

I'm off to relive my childhood on the Number 11!

Teacher Bashing Dips as Weather Warms!

This week I am pleased for my colleagues and friends who are employed in the Education Workforce because  they might now be able to go about their business without any more than the usual level of comment and interference from Tabloids, Talk Shows and Tirade Mongers.

Last Thursday's edition of Question Time morphed into a pastiche of the "Four Yorkshire Men Sketch"  (Python. M. Drury Lane 1974 http://tinyurl.com/bb6ubeo ) as the Q T panel members vied with each other acquiring as they did the skill of opposites, talking hot air about cold weather.  The snow, or more accurately the response of schools to it being there has given countless opportunities for pundits around the country to "talk snow balls." Opportunities that say more about how small-minded and vindictive we have become than they enlighten or provide a basis for sensible and informed discussion.

Sometimes I dislike predictability: at its worst it can take me back to the wet Sunday afternoons of my childhood: oppressive, grey and unrelenting. But guess what, there are other occasions when our inbuilt need to conserve that which is dependable fills me with something like joy and so when I hear "It's 'elf and safety gone mad!" comments I find myself (a) punching the air  and (b) wanting to punch the person who's fallen into this lazy analysis of important and difficult decisions.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed that schools are large and complex organisations that require a lot of people to arrive at more or less the same time (remember how easy the school holiday time commute is in comparison)? Before opening their collective mouths with yet another salvo of asinine observations, commentators might want to think about where schools are. Generally they are where people are-you know, houses and stuff , often on busy and not always easy to reach urban environments. Here's something else, the workforce doesn't live on site and have to use the same roads and systems are all blessed with.

I'd like it fine if the tub-thumpers would just have a look about. They would see most schools are quite old and when planning permission was granted it was given (I'm guessing here) without too much consideration of how the workforce and learners would get there in challenging weather. The date(s) of the buildings (or yes, the sites) suggests that they were acquired at a time when there was much less commuter traffic and ruddy faced children could snowball their way to school and make ice-slides in the playground. A broken bone was as nothing providing it wasn't jutting out through the flesh. Even if it was, fathers could be relied upon (after work) to pick up their osteo-damaged offspring , throw them across the crossbar of their bike and whistle home where mother might apply a poultice.

Society has done a fantastic job in training schools to be risk averse and with that idea in mind I wonder what the view of pundits would be in the event of a loss of life or serious injury that occurred to someone when on a journey they didn't need to be making to a place that no reasonable person would consider should be open?

Well the snow has gone and we can expect a return to a more usual fare of "under-performance", "unemployable kids" and (Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner!), "the holidays.