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When we was Phab!

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It’s good to get away. Not just to get away from the hustle and bustle from your own environment but also to have an opportunity to meet other like-minded (or not) people from your profession. At a time in the academic of year where the promises of Autumn seem to be at their most fragile and you feel success is balanced on a knife’s edge, it’s good to get away and realise that…you are not alone.

It was the annual Phab (that’s Primary Heads Association of Bristol to you) conference in Chepstow. A day and a half of Heads and Deputies talking, laughing, eating, drinking, singing (partly due to the drinking) thinking, supporting each other, reflecting and looking forward.

Listening and talking to other Heads about their schools, achievements and struggles. Not only do you realise that there are situations that are way more challenging than yours but more importantly you find yourself able to offer support and advice. This in turn is reciprocated and suddenly you have an idea you can take back and a person you can go to after the conference to ask for help. I believe they call this ‘networking’. I prefer to call it ‘chatting with a purpose’ and is a good example of why I love being Phab.

Our highly esteemed Chair @overton66 had started the main proceedings on Friday with the statement: ‘I know we seem to say this every year but it really does feel like we are living in uncertain and exciting times in education’. He’s not wrong. The landscape of education is changing more rapidly than Phab’s resident in-house band’s set list. (Current name: ‘The 4Heads’ although I’m leaning towards ‘The Phab 4’.)

The big movers and shakers of Bristol LA have changed, there are many different school models across the city, and partnerships are popping up here there and everywhere; all this against a backdrop of a never endingly changing national picture of expectations from Whitehall. The goal posts are not so much as changing, as more disappearing leaving schools to put down their own jumpers for goalposts and hope for the best.

How awful!

But as Gus Hedges, the smooth talking Chief Executive of GlobeLink from ‘Drop The Dead Donkey’, always said: ‘’Problems are just the pregnant mothers of solutions.’’

Our new LA leaders were also there at the start and made it very clear to us that as the redefining of what it means to be a school in Bristol gets underway, it will be done with us not to us. If that’s not an incentive to get involved then I don’t know what is as I genuinely think they meant it.

Then, to get us inspired, we had the pleasure of working with Mick Waters. In just over an hour he had gone through:

  • What was important in a child’s experience of schooling.

  • The danger of PISA.

  • The damaging role politics has played in education.

  • The shifting sands of assessment data.

  • The false prophets behind Gove’s ‘freedoms’.

  • What the new national curriculum has left out.

  • The rich educational, cross curricular, mind expanding opportunities of a 6 minute video of a man dancing with people around the globe.

I think it is also safe to say that pretty much everyone in the room agreed with his every word. I did. This did occasionally lead me to think ‘Oh goodness, I have become conditioned by Ofsted? – Do I only care about data and things that can be measured? Am I ruining the lives of my children?’ (Luckily, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t, I don’t, and I’m not.) But I recognised that as a city we have a chance to address all those issues and build a stronger and richer experience for our children.

Then it all got terribly exciting. I mean we started thinking about where Bristol could go. How we, as an educational city, could write its own mandate for what we will give the children that grow up under our watch. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? I think we’ll do it, I genuinely do. But for it to work we are going to need an almost Herculean effort from the LA. Because after we’d all decided what it was we were going to put in place so our children could succeed and be fully prepared for a life of contributing to their world fuelled by a love of learning and life; we would have to have a guarantee that no one could come and dismantle it. It would be a bit like a fixed mortgage. We would need the LA to buffer any national changes or additional crazy expectations that came from Whitehall in order to win votes or to be seen to be addressing society’s ills in the eyes of the media/public – they would have to stand up to national government and say: ‘No, we can’t do that at the moment, we’re busy.’

Imagine that?

Imagine working in a world where you were in control of the goalposts. Imagine a whole city working together to give the same experiences and entitlements for every single child. Imagine raising standards in every single area of the widest curriculum? Imagine being able to do this and know you were making a difference? Imagine that the best ideas, the ones that the professionals deemed to be important, were valued and respected and given the time and freedom to succeed.

That is what it should mean to be in education.

Having the chance to instigate it?

That is what it means to be Phab.

How the mighty have fallen

theprimaryhead8 Comments

It happens to the best of us I suppose. You reach a point where if you allow yourself to stop, take a breath and reflect on the situation you’re in, you immediately feel like climbing under a table, breathing into a brown paper bag and perhaps, should the urge take you, quietly vomiting into a shoe. This is why you shouldn’t stop of course. Just keep on going. Just relentlessly chug away like a demented robot who has overridden its self-destruct button happily busying itself unaware of course that it’s about to burn out.

But, because I am not a robot and neither are you, we all occasionally stop and that can often seem like a huge mistake.

Today, I read a reference someone had written for me, about me, for when I applied for my current job. Now, before you start to worry, I don’t make it a habit of reading my own references. I don’t take them home on a Friday, pour myself a glass of wine and regale myself with how great I am. (That would be madness and besides, I have a blog for that.) No, I had in fact been asked to provide a reference for an old colleague and I thought before I start, I should read a successful one (well I got the job didn’t I?) to look at the basic structure of the thing and steal some sentence openers otherwise I was in danger of starting every line with the words ‘And another thing they do well…’

As I read my own reference two feelings began to emerge. One was that I appeared to be the most amazing Deputy the world has ever seen and the second was that I sort of remembered who this person was but felt it certainly wasn’t the current ‘me’.

Again, don’t worry: I know I wasn’t the most amazing Deputy in the world. But I was pretty good. And reading back this distillation of my four year stint I kept thinking: ‘Wow, I did a lot and I did it well.’ Then, thinking about my current job and everything that I’m in the middle of doing I couldn’t help but think: ‘What the hell happened to me?’

How did this cool, calm and collected leader who went from one success to another turn into this husk who seems to be staggering to life raft to life raft narrowly missing open mouthed sharks, sea snakes and floating pieces of excrement?

I do not know.

Then I read my reference again. And as a little treat, I read it again. Then it began to dawn on me. Reading back all of my achievements I began thinking back to those times and how I felt when I was actually there doing it. In retrospect, it all went so smoothly; at the time though, well that’s a different tale.

I remembered all the frustrations and challenges that were part and parcel of success. I remembered the feelings of self doubt on the journeys home, the conversations with the Head saying: ‘What the hell are we doing? Nothing’s working, I mean nothing we are doing is bloody working!’ Because when you’re in the thick of it the dream you had that started the ball rolling, always seems far, far away. Like when you dream you’re running a race and the closer you get to the finishing line the further away it gets. (I’ve never actually had that dream, but I’m sure more sporty people have and the metaphor sort of fits so I’ll ‘run’ with it.)

When you look back though, the success that you achieved for your school tower over the stress and torment it took to get there. So, I realised I hadn’t changed, I hadn’t gone from hero to zero: I’m just doing what everyone else is doing: fighting on. And sometimes it is a fight and sometimes it feels like you’re losing. But we all know it’s going to be worth it – whatever it is you’re personally fighting for, whatever it is that is keeping you from sleeping, you know that your hard work, determination and belief will win in the end. And when the next person writes your reference they’ll focus on everything you achieved and the way in which you refused to be ground down when it got tough.  Hopefully they’ll miss out the bit where they found you underneath the table being sick into a shoe and jabbering on about sea snakes otherwise you’re really stuffed.

So keep going and when you do stop and it feels like it’s all too much, just remember: this ain’t the first time and if you keep doing your job, it won’t be the last.

 

No 1 on the wing

theprimaryhead1 Comment

So I went to prison on Friday. Not for my crimes against blogging but to meet an offender who was involved with the theft of my school’s laptops over a year ago. It was part of a restorative justice programme and I was invited to meet him and explain how I felt about the crime.

I’ll admit it, I felt a little bit fraudulent about the process. This was not a personal crime: I didn’t feel violated and it didn’t affect me personally so I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to provide the offender with the required amount of anger to restore justice. But as I’d never been to prison before I thought I’d sign up and give it a go.

I had a pre-process meeting with a police officer who would lead the conversation and he took me through what the prison visit would consist of. He also went through what I would say and took notes in case I dried up on the day. I had to really think hard about what I wanted to say – in terms of being authentic and what I thought I should say in order for the process to work. I mean the actual fact that the laptops were awful and the break-in gave me a chance to improve ICT provision probably wasn’t the right message to pass on so I settled on the following:

· I did have to improve internal security on the school site which many parents were concerned about. (I had only been the Head for a month before the robbery happened and straight away I was telling parents that they would be unable to breeze through the school as and when they wanted because I was putting timed locks all over the place– and this tainted my ‘honeymoon’ period somewhat.)

· I had planned to improve the playground but had to spend that money on the internal security as well as improved laptop cages so, one of my big ‘pledges’ had to be put on hold.

· Time…this all took time and took up governor meetings and it was boring and tedious and not what I wanted to spend my first few months in headship doing.

· Staff stay late when we rent out the school hall in the evenings and now they were understandably anxious about an intruder suddenly appearing in their room.

So I turned up at the prison, handed in my keys, phone, showed my ID and we walked through a sort of security air lock room to get through to the prison site and went into the room. The offender was then brought in (I had been asked how I wanted to greet him – I went for a ‘Hello’ and a handshake) and sat down and the process began.

What struck me first, was how young and nervous the offender looked and very soon I found myself talking about the burglary itself. It turns out that he was not one of the people that broke in but was a ‘handler’. There were 15 laptops stolen, he was given 4 to stash (a year after they were stolen) and then tried to sell them on to, as it turned out, some undercover policemen who were taking part in ‘Operation Harvest’. He was serving a 21 month sentence….21 months in prison for trying to sell four crappy laptops.

I asked him how much he intended to sell them for: he reckoned £250 for the lot. He seemed a bit surprised when I told him that it had cost the school around £25,000 to get the security doors done, laptops replaced, networked, new security cages and locks. We both agreed that the cost of the illegal activity in terms of his incarceration and my budget going on security rather than a new playground hadn’t really been worth the potential financial gain. (I also didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was deluded if he thought he would make £250)

I asked him if he felt differently about the stolen laptops when he realised they were from a primary school. He said that at the time he was gutted because it meant they were actually stolen (this wasn’t the first time he had ‘handled’ goods but in the past he could just about lie to himself that the goods were kosher). This time he couldn’t do that and he knew one hundred percent that he was doing something wrong. That worried him. Although he admitted at the time it worried him because it was more likely he would be unable to sell them / get caught. Once in prison, he said he felt bad about the children missing out on ICT – you can read as much honesty as you wish into that last sentiment but again, he seemed genuinely shocked when I said it took over nine months to restore ICT provision (he had estimated a fortnight).

Then he talked about his sentence, the life he had left behind and his plans following his probation. This was, for me, the most interesting part. He talked about how he was now ‘Number one on the wing’. This effectively meant he was head prefect. If other inmates had problems with their cells or life inside, they would go to him and he would liaise with the screws, sorry, prison wardens. He helped set the menus, helped serve and clean up. As he was talking about this his whole body language changed. He sat up, he smiled and he looked proud. He enjoyed the responsibility and the respect it got him.

When he is released he will have many check-ups as he begins to rebuild his life on the straight and narrow. Life will feel very restricted. I reflected and said that it was just another chance for him to show responsibility like he is now as ‘Number one on the wing’. I also said that everyone’s life consists of being checked up on – I didn’t bore him about Ofsted and SIO visits and SATS and HMI and pupil premium and PE and pupil premium plus and universal free school meals and parentview – but I did say that my life is full of rigour and checks and it is dealing with these successfully that gives me a sense of pride. If he embraces these as opportunities to succeed at, he too will feel the pride he currently feels, and he will be in a better place to look after his three year old son, his finance, his ill mother and his deaf brother. We agreed that he had lot of reasons to make it work.

Now, I’m not saying that at this point in the conversation he looked at me and said ‘My God, you’re right, I never thought of that before: I’m a changed man! Thank you!’ But I think it resonated…a bit. Just as he left, we shook hands and he apologised for his crime and I accepted his apology and wished him luck. He gets out a day before my birthday…I’m not planning on inviting him to my birthday party but I will think of him: I hope he’ll be out of prison and I hope he’ll be more than number one on the wing.