primary education

“Ofsted should not inspire us”

theprimaryhead2 Comments

So said @steve_munby to a packed hall during the Inspiring Leadership conference last week in Birmingham. He went on to clarify that Ofsted are regulators and have a clear and important purpose in ensuring standards are met by schools but they should not dictate school development plans. That, implied Steve, is what Headteachers get paid for. The strategic direction and the overarching vision that drives a school forward should be the work of school professionals not school regulators.

I agree.

But…

…before I attended the conference I was having a professional chin-wag with @PrimaryHead1 (and it was professional; we didn’t talk about game of thrones, vinyl or what he wanted as a leaving present from his school (he wants money, no gift, just money so he can update his ‘assembly book’ collection-I’ve never heard such nonsense. Trust me, Threshers will do very well that day)). Anyway, we were having a professional conversation and I was saying that what this country needs more than a no notice inspection is a system of education that considers itself RI.

Yes, I said it. Consider yourselves all requiring improvement.

Why do I say this? Not because I’m lonely being an RI head. Not because I’m jealous of all you good and outstanding swines. Not because I have a Govian mind-set that we’re all rubbish until we’ve proved that we’re not completely rubbish. Not because I’m not creative. Not because I’m negative. Not because I don’t think my teachers are good or that my pupils achieve.

No, I think this because sometimes being RI is great. It’s liberating. It focuses the mind and forces you to go back to basics:

  • Make sure the primary experience is brilliant.
  • Get the teaching of English and maths tip top.
  • Make topics fun and interesting.
  • Get children to love learning.
  • Show them that positive behaviour works and is easier than being an aggressive, rude little grumpy boots.
  • Help out the disadvantaged so they have a fighting chance in life.
  • Enable the staff to lead and enjoy the challenge of working hard.

See, easy. Nice and simple ain’t it.

The best thing is that when you’re RI you’re allowed to ignore stuff. Well, I don’t know if you’re actually allowed, but I have, on many occasion, ignored emails, hit delete, replied ‘no’ and told people to just leave me alone. I have freed myself from gubbins and trust me, it feels good.

If it isn’t on ofsted’s ‘what this school needs to do list’ I’m not interested. So far, I seem to be getting away with it too. More importantly, the school is improving and, in case you’re wondering, it’s a nice school to work at and it’s a lovely school to be educated in. We’re not boring. I’m not a SATS dragon. I just want to focus on great teaching, achievement and making the school a really, really, really good school.

Occasionally another head will ask me: how are you preparing for this or that. At this point I normally pop on my shades, put a matchstick between my teeth, smile and say ‘Don’t bother me Daddio, I’m RI’ then I hit the duke box and we all start jiving.

Imagine if we could all do that? British Values curriculum…behave, we’ve got children to teach. An Olympic legacy plan…um no, that’s just silly. Nonsense word phonic test…I think I’ll just get them to read normally thanks.

We wouldn’t have to put up with the reactionary nationwide initiatives that come about because something not good happened to one school somewhere in Britain and the government think the public expects them to make us all do something new so that it doesn’t happen to us. Being RI gives you the strength to pick and choose and be bloody minded – that isn’t going to help raise my standards so I’m not going to do it, sorry.

So my SDP is gleefully littered with Ofsted inspiration. What would Steve say? What will I do when we get judged ‘good’? I don’t know. And that’s why Steve Munby’s speech has made me think. At the moment I am using Ofsted; they are my weapon for getting the school where I want it. What happens when I get there is another issue. I will no longer be able to hide; I’ll have to join in with all the other schools and do as I’m told. More importantly, I’ll have to think for myself and come up with some grand vision for the school that, at the moment, is mysteriously out of my reach.

Hey, maybe I’ll have greater capacity to improve so I can bolt these initiatives and expectations onto my SDP and it will be fine…or maybe that will cause me to take my eye off the ball: I’ve failed to make floor targets but on the other hand the school does now have a solar panel roof.

I want to have grand visions. I want to create a school that is a shining example of 21st century education. I want to go to outstanding and beyond. But I’m scared. I’m scared that just wanting a really good primary school isn’t good enough, and soon I’ll be powerless to stop myself from getting overblown and overstretched.

So please, can we all decide to be RI and get on with teaching and learning? (Sorry Steve)

SATS: welcome to the circus; don‘t invite Tinker!

theprimaryhead1 Comment

Image

 

SATS is for dummies, administering SATS however…well that’s a task that would tax the finest minds of MI6. Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to correctly use every single plastic bag, fold-out cardboard box, elastic band, sticky address label and registration sheet in your pack before Karla the postman comes to pick them up.

Opening the pack (not the paper-watch it Tinker) you are presented with your diagrammatical instructions. Not at first you understand, no first you have to hold the blank piece of paper under a candle and wait for the lemon juice to colour. Then, you have your instructions.

It’s simple really.

Exactly 7 ½ minutes before starting the test you and another administrator recover your skeleton keys that are hanging on a chain around your neck, insert said keys in the duplicate holes of your undercover SATS bunker and on the count of three turn your keys anti-clockwise until you hear a click. You now have access to the vault. Take out the sealed papers and like ninjas creep up to the testing room.

Upon entering make sure you mentally record the precise seating location of every child within the room – if any of them even think of moving chairs you have permission from the secretary of state to terminate their education with extreme prejudice. Then whip out your serrated jungle blade and open up that bag of papers like a cheap suit in summer. Distribute the papers in silence recording the time each paper hit the table.

Once the papers have been handed out give the children the fifteen digit code that they must copy down in mirrored handwriting before starting the clock. As you were the person who delivered, opened and distributed the papers it is obviously inappropriate for you to continue breathing the same air as the examinees so remove yourself, recording the precise time you left the room.

Using your watch, or through very precise counting, return to the exam room, again mentally recording the location of each child, and demand they put down their pencils through the medium of mime because remember, the walls have ears. Collect each paper in alphabetical order and before the top and bottom papers reach the same temperature as your palms lay them on the table in your office.

Now here comes the tricky bit. Cross reference each paper with the registration sheet provided by your government contact. Tick off each name using the code poor boy, beggar boy, naughty boy and free school meal boy. Once all the papers are accounted for, retrieve from the vault, your clear plastic bag. Insert papers in the bag and seal – unless there is a second part to the test in which case use the other clear plastic bag and seal that one instead. If using the first clear plastic bag peel off and stick on the coded label with the address of the government agent who will mark bits and pieces of your test papers. If using the second type of clear plastic do not peel off and stick on the sticker. Instead, just seal the bag and wait until more papers to arrive and then unseal the bag and put those papers and the new papers into a newer and even clearer plastic bag and seal that one and then attach the coded address label. Don’t forget that at any time you can make the flat pack cardboard box and put all the papers in any of the clear bags in the box but don’t close the box until all the papers are in all the correct clear plastic bags. Then seal the box and put this sealed box containing sealed and coded labelled bags full of papers into another plastic bag which you should then seal but not before making a note of the precise time that you sealed the bagged and boxed and bagged again papers into their final bag (or box). There may be more coded address labels to use at this point or you may find that they have all been used up. At this stage find your red telephone and ring the emergency number at control, use the phrase ‘The Gove has laid a dirty egg’ and you will be sent an encrypted email containing new sticky labels and your letter of resignation. (Be warned that control will be experiencing a high volume of calls at this time and you may experience long delays, your call is important to them).

Finally place all bags and boxes into the vault and double lock the door. You must then check the vault on an hourly basis to make sure that no tinkering or spying has been going on. The whole SATS operation will be over when you open the vault and the papers have just disappeared. At this point send a telegram to control saying:

‘SATS COMPLETE AND SENT AWAY FOR MARKING stop ALL PAPERS ACCOUNTED FOR stop RIDICULOUSLY CONVOLUTED AND COMPLICATED SYSTEM OF ADMINISTRATION COMPLETE stop PLEASE CAN WE stop’

The real problem with insets

theprimaryhead4 Comments

Image

Planning an inset can be difficult. Lofty ambitions can often descend into days that are just easier to manage. I personally tend to fall into the trap of not thinking broad enough; I’ll have a brilliant idea as to how we’ll solve a particular issue and then the night before I’ll realise that Early Years or support staff will literally have nothing to do. This leaves me with two options: run around looking for middle leaders to come up with an additional focus within twelve hours or do nothing, buy loads of cakes and avoid making eye contact with any poor member of staff who is feeling undervalued.

There are, in my experience, three types of inset: the guest, the initiative, the catch-up.

The guest

This can be a high risk (it’s normally high cost too come to think of it) and involves booking an outsider; an expert to teach, motivate and inspire the staff. The Head’s dream is that in one day this person will have the educational Midas touch: transforming tired, stuck-in-a-rut teachers into energetic and free-thinking practitioners with the click of a PowerPoint. The fear is that the guest will come out like some c-beebies presenter coked up to the eyeballs and annoy everyone with their energy and jokes. Never mind that the content is golden, I can tell within five minutes that Sandra (the teacher who has been teaching Year 5 in this school since before I was born) has decided that whatever this performing little monkey is going on about is just a fad and that I’ve only booked them to put a tick on my school development plan. I can literally see the £2800 I convinced the bursar to spend on this clown swirling down the drain. Some of them are responding and making notes but in my heart I know that within two terms the impact of this will be hard to see. It’s a shame because all I wanted was to get the staff excited to remind them that teaching is fun and an opportunity to take risks but I can see that they have other things on their mind.

The initiative

I don’t need any guest this time because I can do it. I’ll stand up and present a ‘new dawn’ and a new way to do things. It’s been really carefully thought out by SLT, it is something we have to address and none of us can fail to see how it won’t transform the teaching and learning in this school and make us a step closer to ‘outstanding’. We plan the day really well too. Time to listen and learn, time to discuss and then loads of time in the afternoon to start putting ideas into action. It’s the perfect inset. So when the day comes and I’ve again forgotten about the support staff and have had to max out my visa on cakes to placate them, I’m still convinced today is going to be talked about for years to come as the inset that changed everything. It starts badly as the PowerPoint version in school is different to the one at home so none of the nice graphics have loaded properly and the font has reverted to comic-sans which makes me physically retch every time I click onto the next slide. Then I realise that the great idea doesn’t sound so simple now I’m actually speaking it out loud and then there are the questions. The annoying, niggly, not part of the big picture questions. SLT, I notice, remain mute at this point leaving me to respond to such weighty educational issues such as ‘will it interfere with PE timetables’ and ‘but I have PPA on that day’ and ‘so is this instead of maths or as well as maths?’. But I solider on, knowing that when they split up in the afternoons and start planning it out, they’ll see the genius behind it. At 2:30pm when I go for a wander I notice that every teacher has decided that they’ll plan it next week and for now, if it’s ok with me, they’ll mark their big writes from last week and try and organise next term’s trip. At 2:45pm I decide to go home and console myself that at least this inset failure didn’t cost me a fortune but then I remember about the cakes.

The catch-up

Even though every inset, no matter how focussed and inspiring, ends up with teachers doing some form of catch-up work, sometimes a whole day given over to this is no bad thing. Especially at the beginning or end of years when teachers can organise their classrooms, establish systems with their new teaching teams and really map out the year ahead. This is a strategic decision. Staff will welcome the space to breathe and get their ‘houses in order’.  This day has nothing, nothing to do with the fact that I’m too tired to try and think of anything exciting or that the bank has frozen my account due to the four excessive bakery orders that I keep failing to make the minimum payment on.

But then sometimes you get lucky all your strategic planning comes together. Your guest was perfect (and affordable) the idea is sound and all staff are involved and excited by the changes ahead. I am thrilled to say that I speak from experience having had a two day inset where my school managed to book @deputymitchell who worked with staff during the first day on blogging followed by a day of 2014 national curriculum topic mapping. The days were awesome.

I cannot recommend @deputymitchell enough. He was enthusiastic but grounded in reality that made all the teachers think that they can do this blogging thing and more importantly made them want to do it. By the end of the first session I knew that the inset was going to be ok and in a year’s time I genuinely think I’ll be able to point to some of the things going on in school and at some of our achievements and say ‘that inset caused this’.

The next day, I presented how our curriculum was going to evolve and teachers had the day to map out their breadths of studies, piece together topics and identify resources. They were focussed on that all day and I was continually interrupted by excited teachers checking if their big ideas for this topic and that topic were ok…I said yes to all of them after all I had told them about the ‘freedoms’ this curriculum gave us so could hardly so no.

And…all the support staff had two days of bespoke training and development and they loved it. Finally, they weren’t just sitting in on what the teachers were talking about or putting up displays. They were learning too and they were extra pleased that they will be expected to feed their training and skills back to teachers next term.

So in short, it was great but then that’s the real problem with good insets. All this motivation and seeing how the teaching is going to improve and knowing how excited the children are going to be and the difference it’s all going to make.

It’s annoying.

Why?

It makes me miss the classroom.