teaching

Top Ten Reasons To Hate Christmas!

theprimaryhead4 Comments

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Christmas is coming.

The head is getting fat.

Please put a penny in the old Bursar’s hat.

(Unless it’s pupil premium money in which case put it in this one to one tuition sack here or PE funding in which case put it in the ‘Olympic Legacy’ pot which currently has been used to buy some more hoops for playtime and free swimming goggles for the under-fives)

Ah Christmas…the most wonderful time of the year unless you happen work in schools. Please allow me to present theprimaryhead top ten reasons why I hate Christmas.

1. T2 OTT

I imagine that when Jesus was born primary schools up and down the UK gave this event nothing more than an acknowledgement. There may have been an assembly or a bit in the newsletter to wish the school Christians a happy holiday. But somewhere along the line Christmas became a BIG deal. And I know who to blame: Head Teachers. They must have all started going to local heads cluster meetings and started sharing what they were doing in their schools to celebrate the Christmas season.

‘We sing carols to the parents in the evening’ (ooh that’s nice I might get my school to do that.)

‘We have a Christmas Fair on a Saturday’ (Christmas Fair? I like the sound of that.)

‘We make Christmas cards and then sell them’ (Sell Christmas cards: got it!)

Gradually every Head started taking on board everyone else’s ideas but there was one tiny problem: they didn’t stop doing all the other things as well. So now every school tries to do every conceivable Christmas activity you can possibly think of and what’s worse: they try to cram it into the last five days of term. And what does this teach us about Christmas? Head Teachers are idiots!

2. Term 2 Data Progress Meetings

Or as they’re more commonly known the ‘if ofsted arrive the first week in term 3 and ask to see the most update picture of achievement across the school then we’re literally screwed’ progress meetings.  Every year I think the same: why am I doing this? Why am I having conversations about pupils that have seemingly made no progress or as teachers like to say ‘well they’ve made progress but not enough for me to feel comfortable saying they’ve made progress on paper’. It’s not the teachers’ fault, I mean I’m, the schmuck who insisted that this year’s Christmas performance was going to be the best ever resulting in rehearsals beginning late October.

3. The Staff Room

Normally a haven for professional conversation and a place where colleagues support each other through the turbulent times of a life in education: during December the school staff room resembles some kind of weird Willy Wonka Factory Outlet. The table groans with tins of sweets, mince pies, candy canes and chocolate logs. All presented with a post-it note saying ‘thought we all needed a pick-me-up.’ And like obedient chubby gazelles we graze on the festive feast of crap until we can barely waddle back to class without developing type 2 diabetes. The only thing worse than the December staff room table: is the January staff room table; where everyone brings in the food they couldn’t bear to even look at over the holidays. It normally takes until March before the last mince pie and festive twiglets have disappeared…and then the Easter pick-me-ups arrive!

4. Christmas Lunch

When Nick Clegg woke up in the middle of night at the foot of Cameron’s bed and casually suggested that all primary pupils should receive free school meals it was quite clearly he had never experienced a school’s Christmas lunch. It is the most cruelly intense lunch hour that exists in modern society. 400 pupils all demanding a sit down meal served by the teachers who despite having taken the lunch register for 14 weeks apparently have no idea who is a vegan and who needs halal meat. After 45 minutes you survey the landscape: gravy literally everywhere, a child crying because they didn’t get fed whilst Toby from Year 3 managed to eat five meals. And then you spot the strict vegetarian with a sausage sticking out of her mouth and all you can think is ‘Well at least it’s only one lunchtime’ Thanks Clegg.

5. Christmas Rehearsals

I’ve tried every tactic: give them loads of time before the performance  date so they’ll know all their lines; give them next to no time so they just crack on and the performance is ‘fresh’; no performance just quality singing. No matter what there comes a point during every rehearsal where the Head has to grumpily moan to all the children (in that public way that really means they’re moaning at staff) that the singing is rubbish, they are coming on the stage too slowly, they’re leaving the stage too quickly, they’re lining up too noisily, they don’t know their lines , they don’t know in what order they need to be in: it’s a disgrace! AND FOR GOODNESS SAKE SMILE: IT’S BLOODY CHRISTMAS!

6. Christmas Performance

Given the high emotions on performance night and the heart palpitations you are suffering before curtains: you can’t help but thinking that this must be something more than a nativity. Children don’t turn up for the evening performance, all the Reception parents bugger off after scene one, you find out that the Year 6 pupils are watching ‘Saw III’ on their ipad and the parents aren’t laughing in the right places. Camera flashes are going off despite your clear safeguarding notice at the start and at the end you realise that you’ve totally forgotten to thank the one staff member who held it all together even though that meant their class making negative progress in writing. Next year we’ll do it differently.

7. The Christmas Fair

Having to spend the one Saturday you could have spent Christmas shopping wandering around your school hoping that nothing gets broken whilst children that normally respect you and follow your every command run past you spilling Ribena into the fish tank. The awkward moment when you’ve got to shut down the mulled wine stand because the caretaker and lady who runs the Y5 netball team are becoming embarrassingly familiar on the adventure playground. And finally being told that the last Head always dressed up as Santa and sang Jingle Bells over the PA to end the Fair.

8. The Staff Party

Never does your body try to convince you that you are too tired to go out more than when you are trying to get ready for the staff party. But nevertheless you muster up the strength to iron your pair of jeans and meet your team for the staff Christmas Do. You spend the night determined not to talk about school, determined not to get drunk and definitely determined not to dance. Three hours later you are chugging back Aftershock shots with the NQT, arguing about PRP with the school NUT rep, and twerking the soon to be retired Mrs Armitage to Slade’s Merry Christmas. AS you wait for a cab in the rain you catch your reflection in the Yate’s Wine Lodge window and vow: never again.

9. The Last Day

Oh this is the worst. It’s like waiting for Godot: Pacing up and down the corridors waiting for the bell to ring. Endless bored children getting sent to your office because they’ve broken some cheap toy another kid brought in for toy day. At the end of the day you watch all your teachers struggle to get all their many presents into their cars (no need to actually buy any wine this year, ho ho ho!) and all you got was a card with your name spelt wrong and box of whiskey liqueurs.

10. The holiday itself

The worst thing about Christmas is the actual holiday itself .Due to the fact that the minute you lock up the school and sigh a big sigh of relief knowing that two weeks of bliss are coming your way: your immune system decides it’s time for a holiday. Consequently your festive break is totally forgettable as you are pretty much off your festive tree the entire time on lemsip and nightnurse. It’s only when you start to feel human again and think that a mince pie and sherry might just hit the spot that you realise tomorrow is the start of Term 3.

Happy Christmas!

How many pupils does it take to get inadequate?

theprimaryhead2 Comments

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I’ve just had an HMI visit. It wasn’t an official 6 weeks after Ofsted visit; it was one out of the three support visits that any requires improvement school is entitled to before the next full inspection.

I dictated the day and had telephone conversations and emails with my inspector who just asked me to make sure that the day was useful to me. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘nothing that I see will trigger an inspection’ (except safeguarding issues such as, oh I don’t know, a child leaving your premises and being missing for an hour) ‘and nothing that I recommend needs to be obeyed-it’s just some extra help’.

Now, I could have sent him to areas of the school that I know we’ve improved with the aim of getting some validation. But in all seriousness: why waste an opportunity! No, I welcome the challenge and advice. Plus I genuinely, one hundred percent respect this particular inspector- he is painfully astute at times and his approach is purely supportive to the point that I  may be developing a serious man-crush.

It was a tough old day. He did see some ropey lessons and worse he saw them with me meaning I had to say it as I saw it (or at least how I knew he saw it) in order to make sure he didn’t back out of his agreement not to trigger a full section 5. But by the end of the day he was left assured that we were ‘on the right track’.

Lesson observations: they got more abuse on twitter than Michael Gove at an NUT rally. The main grudge seems to be: don’t judge me as a teacher based on one lesson – and if you’re talking purely ofsted that one lesson becomes 20 minutes of a lesson. I understand the frustrations felt by teachers and have written about it before with the main thrust of my argument being a good SLT should not judge the quality of teaching on an observation but through a variety of evidence.

Take my handsome challenging HMI inspector. He saw lessons that could be judged inadequate but after looking at books and planning and talking to my middle leaders he was satisfied that the lesson did not reflect the day to day quality of teaching. So I was pleased because overall he was satisfied that my claims of school improvement were not just hot air and he was pleased because I was able to come out and say a lesson was inadequate.

Inadequate. It is such a horribly loaded word that has no supporting features whatsoever. When uttered all it does is break people. But we are all going to have to grit our teeth and accept the fact that it is part of the fabric of school improvement. It hurts – no, in fact it stings. It smarts more than the public humiliation of defecating into your swimming trunks after belly-flopping off the top diving board (er…I imagine). And the immediate response is denial or trying to nonchalantly shrug it off as unimportant but you can’t accept the fact that everyone can see poo dripping down your leg as you get out of the pool someone believes that you just taught really badly.

20 minutes. That really gets on people’s nerves. Can you really judge a lesson to be inadequate after only 20 minutes? Look at it from a different perspective: in 20 minutes worth of a lesson, learning didn’t occur. Does that still sound harsh? Probably. Well get a load of this: it may be because in 20 minutes worth of lesson, learning didn’t occur for some pupils. What? I know. It’s tough. But I watched three children on the carpet (subtly) do nothing for ten minutes. They didn’t engage, they didn’t really answer any questions and then when they went off to do their work they didn’t really know what to do. I looked in their book and they were doing the same work as everyone else. Plus, the teacher didn’t go near them-they stayed with the SEN group-it’s as if those three children had gone unnoticed under the radar. But it’s only three pupils! How many pupils does it take to get inadequate? (In other words: how low are your expectations?)

In 20 minutes, that will get you an inadequate. Why? Not because three children in 20 minutes didn’t make progress at a significant rate; but because the teacher did nothing about it. Now, this is why a lesson observation should only be part of the process. Planning over time, work in books over time might show great learning over time for those pupils and all the others. If it does: great you are a good+ teacher. However, if planning over time shows you don’t cater for those pupils’ needs, if work in books show no progress or clear differentiation and assessment is either static or inaccurate then what I saw in those 20 minutes starts to take on more serious connotations.

As a school leader I try really, really hard to make sure my staff understand that lesson observations offer a snapshot: give me a way in. If they tally with planning, work in books, assessments and progress then it gives me an overall assessment of the value for money of your teaching over time. If it doesn’t tally (lesson was awful:  everything else fine; lesson was great: everything else ain’t) then it gives me somewhere to start supporting you. HMI saw that this was the case and left saying, ok I saw some not great stuff in lessons but I think those lessons were anomalies and all other evidence suggests that teaching and achievement is improving.

However this still leaves us with a conundrum: could a school get ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’ if ofsted only saw requires improvement or inadequate lessons? Truly good and better schools will have all the other evidence to suggest that they are indeed good or better. And even the best teachers can mess up a lesson or even lessons (because remember, how many pupils have to not make progress to form a poor judgement). It is also possible (in terms of probability) that in one school at one given point in time, every teacher in the school will deliver inadequate lessons (one or more pupils not making visible progress in a twenty minutes time frame) throughout the day. But if EVERYTHING else indicates the contrary, will ofsted’s overall judgement overrule this fact? Will we ever read an outstanding ofsted report that reads: ‘the inspectors observed 15 lessons over one day and all were judged to be inadequate: the quality of teaching and achievement in this school is outstanding’?

I don’t know..but it sounds like a bloody good challenge!

When Tristram met ThePrimaryHead

theprimaryhead7 Comments

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I was very excited to be invited to a round table discussion with @TristramHuntMP on Friday. Not least because there is a chance he could be our new man in Whitehall for education: making decisions that will impact upon us all but also because it was at 2:30pm on Friday afternoon which meant I could be home early after popping into Asda to buy a box of wine!

I had no idea what to expect or more worryingly what to ask. I certainly know what I think is important in education and what direction I would like to see it move in but I wasn’t sure if that was the point. I’ve been completely brainwashed by the last ten years of lesson observation expectations: I need to know the learning objective or else I just can’t function! I was also a little bit scared that my question would be too small minded – did he really want to talk about ‘Levels’ or SPAG tests? Is that honestly all I could bring to the table? The big grown up table of education? It would be like the first Olympic committee when Seb Coe asked everyone around the room to think strategically about holding the Olympic Games in London and I’d be the one fixating about the colour of the medal ribbons or why on the Olympic logo, London, didn’t use a capital ‘L’.

This was my chance to make a profound contribution to the future of education and I had nothing! Luckily, neither did he.

Now that’s mean, I’m sorry. That was a cheap gag and in all fairness it does him an injustice. He had some ideas and he went through a few of them; and ok at times his delivery was similar to contestants on ‘Dragon’s Den’: the ones who half way through their pitch realise that their big idea makes about as much sense as the word ‘foap’ in a year 1 phonic test. He would occasionally trail off in the middle of his idea for ‘re-shaping localised school accountability measures through a single representative body who had ultimate accountability for securing improvement measures in sets of locally aligned schools’ (or something) and look at us saying ‘I mean, what do you think?’

Now I can’t speak for the other five head teachers who were there but at no point did we stand up and say ‘By Gove, I think he’s got it!’ But neither did we get up, slap him about the chops and tell him to get a grip. We recognised (at least I did) that he is engaging with school leaders to find out about issues that matter and in my mind he genuinely seemed to care. (I can’t say whether he cares because it’s his job or because he cares about education but either way he’s motivated and he wants to listen.)

I’ll admit the first thirty minutes did sort of go over my head/interests: academy take overs/new schools planning/school improvement models/executive heads. But eventually we settled in to interesting things that will affect everyone in education rather than specific schools in specific circumstances. So what were they? I have tried to summarise some of the things we talked about and what I write will be what I walked away thinking about whilst queuing to buy my box of wine.

Local Authority: There is no model and there isn’t one being planned. The landscape of education is doomed to be disparate groups ‘challenging and supporting each other’. I hate this. It really depresses me. Loads of little power hungry groups all looking for the next weakling to eat up and digest. No shared accountability, no shared vision for standards across cities. Everyone doing what they want and proving that it is working for them even though we’ll all be judging ourselves against different criteria and against each other. I hate it. I actually want to live in a world where we are ‘all in it together’ and this ain’t it. I don’t think @TristramHuntMP wants it either but I think we’ve gone too far to get anything like a unified front back again. I think he looked most pained when trying to establish how getting joined up support and accountability over large areas of the country could work because he knows it’s never going to happen. Gove’s freedoms are in fact opportunities to divide and conquer – destroying consistency, professionalism and looking after all children, families and teachers.

National Curriculum: I think @TristramHuntMP thought I was joking when I said I genuinely wasn’t getting ready for the curriculum because a) I like my school’s topics as they are b) I’m trying to make sure that my ‘standards’ are too good for any ofsted inspector to care about our deviation from the NC and c) I’m banking on him winning and reinstating the lovely curriculum we nearly had through the Rose report. I did say that I was concerned that as there were all these different models of schools that could weasel out of implementing it leaving us poor state maintained schools at a huge disadvantage. His reply was that he was going to make it so that any school could not do the NC which begs the question what is the bloody point of having it anyway?

Standards/Ofsted/Gove: There were questions about the relationship between ofsted and DfE and the need to re-think how primary schools are inspected. Also about the fact that the expectations put on us are being constantly raised but there is no substance underneath to guide us on the path to improvement. 85% floor targets, getting rid of levels, changing tests: all just put out there followed by the caveat that if you moan that it’s not fair you get beaten by the ‘low expectations’ stick. Finally we tried to say to him that as long as you’re not Gove you’ll be fine. He looked at us rather sternly and said ‘But what do parents say of Gove? He wants high standards and discipline in schools. How do I compete with that?’ Therein lies what I think will be the hardest part of his success: convincing parents he also wants that but assuring teachers he’ll achieve it standing alongside us.

He’s made a start: he spoke to six primary head teachers and none of us left angry (although we were all going home early on Friday and this may have been a factor). His main strength is that he hasn’t got a good plan (stay with me Tristram, stay with me) but he’s willing to talk to us in order to get one. So my advice: keep listening!

(oh, and get rid of SPAG, give us back a good national curriculum, change ofsted, get rid of free schools, make assessment procedures consistent from EYFS to KS3, don’t give free school meals for all but help us give FSM breakfasts, make primary uniform compulsory, and stop the birds crapping all over my car outside my school-probably should have said this at the meeting, would have saved us all some time.)