primary school

Game of Shadows

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According to Dr Avis Glaze there are 21 trends for the 21st century that will have a profound impact on education and therefore the whole of society. During her talk at #ILConf2014 we were asked to pick our top trend. I chose number 16.

A spotlight will fall on how people gain authority and use it.

I chose this as it seemed to me to be a worrying example of locking a stable door after the horse has bolted, set up a meth lab, organised a red wedding and is now trying to become president of the United States.

For any cats without a Netflix subscription let me explain. The authority has already been gained, in shadowy darkness, and the spotlight, by shining on how it is being used, has been turned on too late.

You just have to cast your eyes over the ‘Trojan horse’ headlines concerning those handful of schools in Birmingham that have hogged the spotlight recently. These schools illustrate not the faults of Islam extremism but of the subversion of power within a particular type of school. As local authorities fracture, the cracks have been filled with unregulated systems of power.

Is it surprising that in these schools there are stories of governing bodies becoming distorted with an over-representation of a single-minded vision that has gradually suffocated and silenced the Head? Allowed to operate outside the local authority and with less checks than state maintained schools, for academies, there is no spotlight except for Ofsted.

And when the corruption and damage to a school-full of young people is finally exposed it should prompt the ultimate powers that be to re-think the system; instead however, their solution is to maintain the organisational status quo whilst trying to now catch everyone else unawares.

Sadly it doesn’t stop there. What about those academies where it is not the governors who are operating under the radar and on the sly, but the Heads themselves? Never mind the pathological lying crazies who syphon off the school budget to pay for parties, holidays, unaccountable pay-rises and an awful lot of shoes; what about the career nepotism? What about those organisations where the common interview is something that they have neither the time nor the inclination to bother with? I mean it is easier to invite someone for a cup of coffee and offer them a job whilst you’re dunking your hob-nobs, than go through the tedious process of shortlisting, putting in place a panel, coming up with tasks and actually putting a range of people through their paces in order to, you know, find the best person for the job, but hey…who’s watching?

I’m all for building up a team and spotting talent but I’m also a believer that the good will out. If I had someone in my mind who I wanted to get a job but found someone else better through interview then surely I still win. I get the best person, a nice clean conscience and the smug feeling that everyone else knows I make decisions for the school not for my convenience.

More importantly, if you do appoint through the nudge-nudge wink-wink system how are you building in accountability? How can you justify their authority and your integrity when the spotlight shines on your organisation and it casts no shadow? Your failings are always your own but at least when the gaining of authority has been proper, the processes you go through to sort out the problems are easier to put in place because we can rely on, oh what’s the word, ah, yes; we can rely on our professionalism.

Finally, and this seems like a far more trivial example of the 21st century gaining of authority than those mentioned already, what about twitter? Is it a sorry state of affairs that popular social media users gain authority, or if not authority, influence? I have experienced this first-hand (albeit on an exceedingly small scale) when I was asked to DfE to talk about the new national curriculum and life beyond levels. I was not asked because I am an outstanding Headteacher, or because I was an outstanding teacher or because I have contributed anything of significance to the world of education. I was asked because I tweet and have written one or two blogs about education that, if I’m lucky, contain the odd cheap gag. Is this really an appropriate acquisition of authority? Now don’t worry, I do not seriously consider myself to have any ‘authority’ with the DfE but the principle of government and policy makers allowing themselves to be influenced by social media commentators occasionally seems a bit worrying. I mean, can’t they think for themselves? Should they really go after popular opinion so lazily? Does a massively re-tweeted message necessarily contain a sensible idea?

Probably not.

But at least in the world of social media the spotlight is on. Those tweets and blogs are for everyone to read and opposition to any popular tweet is just as visible to anyone willing to be engaged. If, when the spotlight shines, the public do not like what they see, they will simply unfollow and the deranged ramblings will fade to black and cease to have any influence or authority.

The same cannot be said for those who have been allowed to have authority within a world of shadows.

 

The real problem with insets

theprimaryhead4 Comments

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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.

In the looper

theprimaryhead3 Comments

I’m all about freedom.

 

One of the reasons I became a Head was because I am a control freak. Don’t worry I’m not a megalomaniac; in fact, when I started teaching I thought that I’d never want to be Head. When I was a young and a slightly less tired human being, I was all about the classroom and the kids. The idea of going into management sickened me. If the young me could see me now he would have no problem standing in a field with a shotgun waiting for the current me to materialise, out of thin air, all bound up in a bag, to pull the trigger and end the pathetic existence of this useless head teacher. Then again, the young me was a bit of a tit and we’ve never been able to aim properly.

 

Anyway, I digress. The point is, as I furthered my career, I began to enjoy the influence (not the power) but the influence my ideas, hard work and willingness to support others could have on more than just the thirty children in my class. Then it got to a point where I felt that my ideas could influence a whole school full of children and I enjoy that a lot. The idea that what goes on during a school day is to some extent shaped by what I believe to be important in improving children’s lives motivates me more than anything else. And when it actually works…when you see children ‘improve’ as a result of your ideas, well, that’s a pretty good feeling.

 

Where I am still very similar to the young me (still waiting in that field the idiot, he’s no idea I swapped bags, it’s @oldprimaryhead in there now) is that I tend to ignore some of what we’re told we ‘have’ to do. I prefer to put in place what I believe will have an impact and have the ability to ruthlessly prioritise to help children in whichever way they most need – and if that means not doing guided reading for two terms whilst I concentrate on times tables then that’s something I’ll do and I just won’t tell the Literacy leader about it (I did make the mistake of telling my Deputy Head at the time as she was giving me a lift home – she practically stopped the car and kicked me out). I felt vindicated though, the children still made progress in their mental maths and of course I made sure that they made progress in their reading too.

 

I’ve always been about the freedoms.

 

I behave in a similar way as a Head. There are certain things that I either just don’t understand or believe in. So I don’t do them. I assume that everything will be fine; even when the SIO asks me ‘What percentage of your Year 1 pupils have achieved the phonic screening pass score so far?’ and the answer in my head is ‘I don’t know, I haven’t even asked if my Year 1 teachers are rehearsing for it.’ I don’t let it bother me. I know, it will be fine because I believe in what we have in place down there.

 

All these freedoms are making me nervous.

 

So why then, if I’m so cool and running the school like I’m Shaft, am I so worried about these freedoms the government keeps banging on about? I should love it, right?

 

Well, the big difference between me now and the young me (the pathetic moob) is that I’m a Head. This means that I am not just responsible for the children (that bit’s fine) but I am also responsible for the school. And there is a difference. A school is all the children inside it plus about a million other complexities and issues. What’s more, a school is now increasingly judged on these other things and deemed successful or otherwise as a result of the head’s leadership and management of them.

 

Now, this wasn’t a surprise to me when I became a Head. I didn’t suddenly become aware that staffing, performance management, pupil premium, finance, governors, parents, children in need, children in care, looked after children and loads more stuff besides came with the job, it’s just…there’s a lot there and it’s getting added to all the time. Not just getting added to but levels of expectations on how the school should perform on these areas are being put out there as well.

 

Again, this is ok. If we’re being asked to do something we might as well get told how well we’re doing it. But my problem, the reason why at times I wish I had kept myself in the bag that is now hurtling through time and space towards my younger self, is because guidance and suggested ways of checking to see how I’m doing are disappearing. All in the name of ‘greater freedoms for Heads’. I may know what’s best for children but I struggle with knowing what will be judged best for the school when judgement day comes along.

 

What’s more, I don’t like the sneaking suspicion I have that the judges still know what they’re looking for and know how they’re going to arrive at their judgements but now they’re choosing not to tell me and disguising this as a freedom. They’re letting me fumble around for myself. It’s like they know how reckless I’ve been creating freedoms of my own during my career and now they’re punishing me for it. ‘’Come on, you say you know what’s best…well come on then: You tell me…

  • if that teacher should get a pay rise;
  • how to judge progress throughout Key Stage 2 without levels;
  • what’s a good way of spending pupil premium;
  • why PE is supposedly better now we’ve given you some cash;
  • how parents know where their child is in relation to every other child in the land;
  • what makes your approach to the national curriculum so good;

oh, well your answers aren’t the same as the ones I’ve got in my little golden envelope. Turns out you couldn’t cope with freedoms after all. Come on then, climb into this bag, you’re going on an awfully big adventure.’’

 

Man, these freedoms are killing me. looper