the primary head's blog

Lesson 1

The lesson started with a brief rundown of the learning objectives and, for a second, the children seemed engaged. The teacher attempted to positively engage with a disruptive child; this ended with the child and teacher tussling over a metre stick. Thankfully the teacher won and order was restored. Clear expectations were given and the children listened well to the instructions. As the children worked, the teacher wandered around seeing who was doing what. There were no targeted questions and all children were carrying out the task with little difficulty…this could be because there was no challenge. A mini-plenary was attempted but, as the worksheet had not been replicated on the interactive whiteboard and the visualiser was broken, the children had to strain their eyes to see the teacher modelling the next step on his own worksheet at the front of the class. Still, the children seemed to understand. The final stage of the lesson was not successful as the resources had not arrived, meaning the whole class had to share two silver pens. The lesson ended with the teacher saying that he would finish it off for them as there wouldn’t be time to revisit the activity later on.

Lesson 2

The main input fell flat because the image on the interactive whiteboard was too small and then became too blurry when the teacher enlarged it. However, the teacher soldiered on and the children seemed happy to go along with it. The main activity was completed successfully with the children regularly being stopped in order for the teacher to highlight examples of good work and learning attitudes. The final section of the lesson would, after the lesson, give the impression that the children had independently created a mnemonic that supported their knowledge of planets but, in reality, this was teacher-driven and all the mnemonics were harder to remember than the nine planets in the first place. The lesson ended earlier than the teacher expected and there was no extension activity planned. The teacher read a story about a lighthouse keeper that had no link to the lesson or any prior learning. All were engaged by the story, except for one pupil who repeatedly called out that he hated the teacher and the story.

Lesson 3

The lesson began with an ambitious starter activity. This comprised of a large-scale whole class activity involving a roll of toilet paper. The activity was meant to take place in the school hall but the teacher had not checked the rota and it was in use. Not to be deterred, the teacher made the decision to take the lesson outside. Five minutes later, thirty children were battling against the wind, desperately trying to hold down a roll of toilet paper that stretched the entire length of the playground. The teacher then tried to illustrate the position of the planets using sheets of toilet roll as a scale; however, as more and more of the toilet paper blew up from the ground, this became impossible, and the teacher made the decision to take the lesson back inside. Back within the safety of the classroom, and with no more toilet roll, the children worked in groups to create a planet map using black sugar paper (that the teacher had stolen from the art cupboard) and a metre stick. The plenary was surprisingly successful and prompted lots of interesting questions. Nobody seemed to mind that a third of the lesson time had been wasted.

Lesson 4

This lesson started well and it seemed as though all the steps had been thought through. However, it soon became apparent that the two resources the children were meant to use did not fully match, making it impossible to complete the activity. The teacher improvised and adjusted the purpose of the lesson. The children didn’t seem to mind and also didn’t seem to notice. As the lesson went on, it became more apparent that the lesson was based on the children’s ability to complete tasks on time rather than acquiring knowledge. The teacher made sure that at the end of the lesson this was revealed as the true purpose of the lesson. After the lesson, as the teacher was assembling the children’s work for a display, it dawned on the teacher that an opportunity had been missed and that the lesson would have a more nuanced purpose had one adaption been made.

Lesson 5

The introduction was clear and the lesson, backed up by decent resources, had a purpose. The lesson was differentiated and the teacher supported some key pupils. At regular times the teacher paused the lesson to explore how different pupils were choosing to approach the work. At times children became stuck but, through prompts and re-direction, the children were able to work their way through the problems. The lesson ended with the children’s effort and work contributing to the completion of a shared class goal. It was rather tedious to sit and watch the children go up, one at a time, to complete this goal, but they seemed to like it. Just before the plenary, the lesson was interrupted, as the teacher had forgotten that the morning session was ending early that day to accommodate Mothers’ Day Lunch.

Lesson Feedback

I enjoyed teaching every year group this week (except for Year 6, and not because of SATs before you roll your eyes, but due to my scheduling; their time will come, don’t worry) and I like to think that the children found it mildly entertaining. I put it down to conditioning over time that I was unable to stop the observer in me picking apart every detail of my lessons. However, a level of reflection is the life-blood of teaching. Not to needlessly dwell on what didn’t go right in every lesson, nor to bask in self-congratulation, but to continually ask of yourself: how can I make sure I am effective?

So much went wrong this week. Re-read my experience and take your pick. But it’s all about context. These were stand-alone lessons. I would have been kidding myself if I had thought I was going to waltz in and deliver outstanding lessons and I would be deluded if, afterwards, I claimed I had. I didn’t learn anything about teaching or myself as a teacher during the week but I gained experience. Experience that allows me to talk to teachers with one more grain of understanding.

Not of teaching. Any faults that I happened to make this week would still be faults I would expect to see improved in anybody’s teaching. And if you think I can’t pull you up on mistakes just because I once happened to make them too then you’re a fool. If you recognise ineffectiveness, you do something about it; that’s a minimum expectation for a teacher. This week I forgot about having to walk through one’s resources before taking them to the front of a class. By the end of the week I’d addressed this. I would expect any teacher to do the same; just as I would expect any teacher, who finds themselves outside with bits of loo roll flapping around the playground, to stop the lesson and start again.

The experience I gained was of children. I have conversations with teachers about children all the time. But I never really get to experience their ‘class’. Observations help, but until you’re the one ‘in charge’ you don’t know how it feels. Only when it’s your lesson that is being pushed and pulled in thirty different directions can you really talk to the teacher, with empathy, and discuss things that did or didn’t work. The benefits go beyond just giving teachers advice too. Opportunities to engage with parents because you also ‘know’ what the issues are, having experienced them first hand, are extremely valuable and supportive to teachers.

It’s a small gesture and it won’t change the world. But it helps keep you connected. It also, in my case, keeps you grounded and certainly makes you appreciate the fact that we don’t judge individual lessons anymore.

It was about 9:00pm on a Saturday night. I was in London, having spent the day completing the Bermondsey Mile. Maybe it was the fact that I was out with a fellow teacher and we were putting the world of education to rights. Maybe it was because I can’t switch off. Maybe it was the deregulated levels of alcohol in all the craft beer I had spent the day ‘evaluating’. But for some reason I found myself checking my work email, whereupon I saw that my budget had arrived.

Hurray!

Show me the money!

Let’s make some dreams come true!

I couldn’t be entirely sure what was suddenly causing my head to spin: was it the effects of hipster booze or was it down to the slim-lined figures that were now dancing in front of my eyes?

So I decided to do the decent thing and email it to my business manager. Knowing that it was now safely in her hands, I felt free to enjoy my evening of getting lost on the tube, speaking to cockneys and trying to take a selfie in front of Big Ben.

It was early on Sunday that I received an email from my business manager: firstly, telling me that in no uncertain terms should I ever email her at the weekend and, secondly, telling me that whatever I had planned on doing that Monday I should forget it because we needed a meeting to discuss our new budget that was, in her off-duty vernacular, tighter than the appalling skinny jeans I had worn at last year’s summer do.

My head hurt and my stomach was in knots – but you don’t subscribe to this blog to hear about my hangover cures – so I’ll spin on to Monday.

To cut a long meeting short and to save you from the expletives (me), the frantic calculator tapping (her), the shouting (me again), the long silences and staring into space (both of us) and the hiding under my desk and refusing to come out again until she promised to make it alright (me), the budget is pretty pants.

This year I, and many other schools, are battling with the added cost of the new National Insurance arrangements. This is where all employers have to pay the standard rate of National Insurance contributions instead of the contracted-out rate. In a two-form entry school like mine, where the teaching bill is over £1 million, this means that we will have to find in excess of £25,000.

This alone adds an even greater pressure to the additional cuts in general funding which are, in themselves, significant. There’ll be more than one Head this financial year that will be suffering frequent night terrors involving turning up naked at a governors’ meeting only to find that the word ‘deficit’ has been scratched onto their torso by the chair of the finance committee using a sharpened twenty pence piece.

The fact is, not only have we got to pay out more but we have been given less by which to do so. I still have the same number of staff to pay and I still have the same number of children to educate. As time goes on, and as additional cuts are made to services that I once used to rely on, I have an increased moral obligation to provide additional support to children and families that need it most and who are unable to access it elsewhere.

Now, more than ever, all eyes are on schools as we are expected to do more. We must do more for children academically. We must do more for children emotionally, socially, mentally and pastorally. It is every child’s and parent’s right to expect every school to deliver whatever is needed in whatever capacity or else we are judged to be failing.

And yet our ability to fund the resources that can help us help our families is being left to wither on the vine. The most vulnerable families are being told that schools have pots and pots of cash that are ring-fenced just for them so that we can buy in multiple support services that will help make a difference and allow them to make accelerated progress whilst nurturing their social, emotional and mental stability. Whereas, in reality, it is becoming harder and harder to justify the added expense that these additional services are costing. Never mind the old expression ‘what they give with one hand, they take away with the other’; this year’s budget is more like ‘what they take out of one hand they prise out of the other with a massive claw hammer’.

Thank goodness that ‘quality first teaching’ is still such a buzzword because it’s about all schools have got left to afford.

I will be watching through my fingers how other schools cope under such financial pressures. The really lucky schools will have members of staff who resign or retire and they simply won’t be replaced. The less lucky schools, I imagine, will reluctantly slash the ‘above and beyond’ elements of their provision. The unlucky schools will be having to go down the road of ‘managing change’.

And all through this we will be expected to dance to the tune of ‘raising standards’. Standards that have not so much been raised but rather catapulted into the sky without a parachute.

It’s difficult to pin-point a time when the odds have been so stacked against a school’s favour.

I fully expect every school’s reimagining of their vision statement in September to result in the following strapline:

Striving to achieve more with less.

It could have been simpler. I mean, usually, you admit an error, apologise, make amends and then apologise again for good measure. Even if, whisper it, you don’t actually feel like apologising, you sometimes do it. In these cases, you can issue, what I like to call, a casual apology. This is similar to idiots who are often forced to apologise for a choice bit of casual racism or sexism; you know, where the person apologising doesn’t really see what everyone else is upset about but they realise that they might have to acknowledge the presence of upsetness in others. A racist, who has declared that they have an unexplainable problem with people who have ‘negroid features’ may wish to apologise, not for what they said, but for the offence their comments have, apparently, caused. The everyday sexist who is surprised that his ‘cuddly‘ nature is misinterpreted as opportunistic, inappropriate and unacceptable groping by the poor and undeserving pretty girls in his office, may, grudgingly, admit that he can see how his actions may have been misconstrued as deplorable and offer an apology, but, you know, they were different times.

Now, I’m not calling Nick Gibb or Nicky Morgan sexist or racist. I’m not. I’m just saying that they might want to learn a thing or two from recent sexists and racists. Or to be more accurate, take the advice that publicists and agents have given recent sexists and racists. So, to be clear, I am not calling Nick Gibb or Nicky Morgan sexists or racists. I’m just saying, maybe they should apologise like recently exposed sexists and/or racists.

Because, let’s be honest, they have made a mistake and they should really apologise. To be fair, we don’t know if they intentionally went out and made the mistake or if the mistake was made by the sheer magnitude of their incompetence. Either way, they’ve gone and done it and the world has been awaiting their apologetic volte-face ever since.

Not Nick Gibb and Nicky Morgan though. That isn’t their style. I mean there isn’t a paper towel absorbent enough to clean up the mess they’ve made over end of year assessments, but by jingo they’re committed to saving face. It’s like seeing a puppy sitting next to a hefty turd, steaming away and slowly melting into the carpet, looking up at its owner with an expression of pure innocence whilst wagging its tail. It’s almost like they’re proud to be racists or sexists, or puppies that have defecated all over my new rug, or, in their case, appalling bastions of education.

It hasn’t been a good year but most of us were cracking on with delivering a new curriculum hoping that, at the end of the year, any test would provide us with a fair reflection of our children’s levels of attainment. We were assured by the DfE that expectations would be similar to previous years’, give or take the odd exclamation mark. And then the news broke that the expectations were significantly higher than we had been led to believe. All over the land, educators were faced with a dilemma: to enable our children to make months’ worth of progress within a couple of weeks we must either begin hot-housing or begin building a time machine big enough for 60 kids.

I was half-way through fixing an electric cable between the local church roof and the school’s mini-bus’s flux-capacitor when I got an email from the NAHT saying that an ultimatum had been sent to the government to either recalibrate the expected standard or delay the date of data submission. Then I heard that all the major unions were going to meet up and discuss the possibility of suspending SATS. Online rationale and emotions rose; I put away my blue-prints for time-travel and I was suddenly filled with hope, as well as a sudden understanding of why I should never be the leader of a union.

The next morning, as I feverishly told my Year 6 teachers all about the union action, I felt certain that the ‘powers that be’ would come to their senses. They would issue a full and frank apology, sort it out and we’d all move on, the best of friends.

Not quite.

A concession has been made. And for that, I thank Nick and Nicky from the bottom of my heart. We now have a few more days to submit teacher assessments. If my teachers started ticking the boxes yesterday, we’ll just about make it.

But they have gone about it in the mealiest mouthed way imaginable.

First we get Gibb’s letter where he graciously tells us that he is ‘prepared’ to ‘relax’ the deadlines for ‘one year only’. What do you mean relax? I think you mean change. I think you mean that you will admit a lapse in judgement and move the deadlines to a more appropriate time that supports and respects the amount of time and effort we’ve put into your new curriculum and recent upping of the ante. Relax indeed. I bet there was a great deal of whooping and high-fiving when that word was hit upon during your multiple advisor led letter writing process. Yeah, don’t say ‘change’, it sounds too weak. Say ‘relax’ instead; that makes it sound like we’re in charge but, you know, we’re wearing slippers. Oh, and ‘for one year only’. Well thank you Gibb for being of the generous opinion that we’ll manage to grasp all of your subtle curriculum changes within the next twelve months. I think you’ll find we might have been alright with your original deadlines had you not moved the goalposts to sometime next academic year.

I was about to get onto the fact that you decided not to issue an apology, not even a pretend one like a good racist or sexist, but then along came Nicky Morgan’s hostage video.

Up against a black background, Nicky Morgan’s face emerged and she began talking to someone. I’m not sure who. It certainly wasn’t me but she seemed pretty sure that she knew them personally. She kept telling this person that they agreed with her. She kept telling them that they, like her, wanted to raise standards and that other people (I assume she meant people like me) were being disingenuous by thinking that they should follow the advice she had given us through the exemplification materials. She kept telling whoever she was talking to that this was scaremongering, as if she had only released the exemplification materials to weed people like me out. She assured us that schools should be able to prepare children for the tests by focussing on making sure each child reached their potential regardless of where the standard is set. At this point in the video her eyes go even wider as if to suggest that her internal monologue is screaming ‘But that doesn’t make any sense!’ You’re right Nicky’s internal monologue, it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense that you can prepare a child to succeed in a test when no one knows what a good score in the test is. Sadly, although I know to you and your imaginary friend it sounds very worthy, getting a child to achieve their potential doesn’t provide any comfort because your recently released materials have invented a new level of potential that will be extraordinarily challenging for a lot of children to reach. Although, I am painfully aware, by your smugly written piece to camera, that any resistance to these higher standards will be judged as low expectations.

Again, like Mr Gibb, you offer not one jot of an apology. You make it sound like you are making concessions to mollify the troublemakers. You sound as if this was all rather tiresome and couldn’t we just crack on with getting eleven year olds to write like post graduates. How frustrating! (Sorry that use of an exclamation wouldn’t get me a point at KS1.) How frustrating that is! (Much better.)

It’s such a shame because saying sorry can really help mend relationships. Even some ex-sexists and/or ex-racists, whose new best friends are black and/or women, have said sorry and are now living happy and indiscriminate lives. It’s just a shame that neither Nick Gibb nor Nicky Morgan are interested in learning from their own mistakes. They seem more concerned with playing down their errors of judgement and ploughing their mistake deep into the ground. At what point, I wonder, will they cease and desist and stop hiding under a pretence of improving standards in favour of coming out and valuing the profession above anything else?