In Memorium

When the third primary headteacher takes their own life in the space of four years it has to be time to do something to reduce the pressure on colleagues. Sir Michael Wilshaw and his political masters should be ashamed that the system they have created is killing decent, caring people whose only mistake has been to care too much for the children they served and the schools they led.

Is it any wonder that there is a shortage of candidates for senior posts in schools? Is it any wonder that something over 50% of new teachers are now deserting the profession within five years of qualification?

Yet political rhetoric would have us believe that the battle against ‘mediocrity’ is being won and that there are national leaders of education who will show us how to run schools properly.   These are not exactly lies, but they are optimistic half-truths. There are some excellent schools that have upped their game to meet the challenges of education in the second decade of the millennium. But the figures clearly show us that it’s not academisation  or Trusts with their £250K salaried CEOs that are the solution – they are as mixed a success story as are any schools. There are some highly effective school leaders who are righty recognised and valued. But there are also the bully-boys, the Johnny-come-latelies who are all puff and little substance who talk in mantras but lack integrity.  We’ve got a lot to learn about looking after our people - there is plenty of evidence from plenty of sources that confirms the importance of school ethos in the drive to raise standards and time will doubtless prove that those schools where staff sign up to the mission because they sig up to the vision will be more successful than those where teachers are bullied into submission, irrespective of short term improvements.

But it’s also our school leaders whom we need to protect, not just from the punitive culture promoted by Wilshaw and Morgan but from the local authorities and academy trusts who lack the respect they should show for their headteachers and think that, by putting them under pressure, they are somehow fighting mediocrity. This is morally wrong, philosophically bankrupt and educationally dangerous. Three headteacher suicides is surely enough. But whether or not the Secretary of State and her Chief Inspector really care has to be doubted.

A Fearful Generation

We are running the risk of developing a generation of fearful adults.  If Professor Ken Robinson is right in his Ted Talk that young children are not afraid to be wrong, we soon sort that out. By the time they leave even primary school they are terrified.

The reason that we are afraid to allow our children to be wrong is that we occupy a professional space ever more crowded with punitive and far reaching measures and a rhetoric from the Secretary of State and her Prime Minister that, 'mediocrity will not be tolerated'.  Well, maybe it's not being mediocre if we let kids get it wrong and then learn to deal with failure.  The trouble is that, as soon as we think that might be a sound idea, we are reminded by some parliamentarian that failure is not acceptable.

In a culture where an Ofsted judgement of less than good - and now, for some 'coasting' schools it seems, even good schools are at risk - spells personal disaster for the  school leaders and so they are afraid and they pass that fear on. This makes schools tense places to work. It's not the workload that is causing the profession to shed members, it's the climate of fear.

The trouble is that politicians decide on this punitive course of action and will not be diverted from it because any diversion will be seen as a sigh of weakness. And weakness begins to look like failure. and our politicians play a high stakes game. They are afraid of failure. And they pass that fear on.

Making Progress

This is a little blog I write for Osiris. It appears here a month or so after being submitted.

Okay, so you’ve got used to the idea that levels have been consigned to the dustbin of history. On the one hand you feel smugly pleased to have made the leap of faith and put your trust in the concept of consolidation before progression, but on the other hand you feel strangely naked without the comfort blanket of APP to wrap round you. For, with the loss of levels, we also lost all that work we had done in making APP work.

I’ve always loved the use of the three letter abbreviation, TLA, to describe a three letter abbreviation. It’s got a kind of US English madness to it. So, despite the loss of APP, we can still appeal to another TLA to see us through this mire of assessment; AFL.  AFL is where it’s at with this business of tracking pupil progress.

Levelling off

Right now, primary teachers are feeling like one of those cartoon characters, running frantically in the air when there is nothing beneath them. There we were, comfortable with levels, knowing what they meant, when suddenly, bosh! The ground falls away.  Some schools have bravely embraced the new opportunities offered by life without levels, indeed folk like Dame Alison Peacock will claim that, at Wroxham School, they never used them anyway. However, it’s unfamiliar territory and even Dame Alison will agree that, while there were levels, Wroxham had ‘a metric’ running in the background for statutory reporting purposes.

Quite a lot of schools are taking the understandable view that it is better to be second in rather than a pioneer, while they stagger on with levels and wait, Micawber-like, for something to turn up. In the meantime a disturbing proportion of schools are clinging to levels because they are a safety blanket – you know where you are with levels!  However – and this is a conversation I have quite frequently with headteachers – how do you work with levels, when there are no levels? The answer is that levels simply do not fit.  Where will these levels come from?

You can’t, seriously, simply carry on using the old national curriculum levels – this is a new national curriculum; it’s different. The levels don’t work. And you can’t, honestly, re-jig the levels, or massage the curriculum, into some kind of levelled wonderland; where lies the consistency? Is your Level 3 the same as the old one? Is your Level 3 the same as my Level 3?  We need to renew our thinking.

Renewing our thinking means understanding the principles that underlie this sea-change that we are experiencing. While there may have been some legitimate sneering that the Expert Panel arrived at a curriculum before they arrived at its aims, the important message is that assessing by a system of levels has never really been a true measure of a child’s achievement. As Tim Oates, Chair of the Expert Panel, has made clear, a level was a variable measure. It could be that a child was Level 4 because he happened to score highly on some low-value test items, picked up a few correct high-value items and emerged with a level 4 score. Or, it might be that Level 4 meant that, on a particular day, a piece of work sort of fitted into a set of criteria. It might not have hit them all, but it was a best fit. And best fits don’t work – ask any craftsman cabinet-maker.  Finally, Level 4 might mean that the child was ‘just-in’ to the band. It didn’t mean that this was a secure measure but a claim could be made that the criteria for Level 3 were no longer adequate and that there were signs that Level 4 might possibly be a better judgement; it certainly suited our purpose for it to be, even though, once the results were in, the child might slip back. But we could always blame it on summer learning loss.

So, get used to it; levels don’t work. The message of the new approach is twofold: fewer things at greater depth and consolidation before progression. This should mean that we free up space to make sure that pupils, in Tim Oates’ words, ‘nail the concepts’. We have to get used to changing our thinking from progress at any price to progress through deep learning. As we drift towards the last national tests to be ‘levelled’ we have the chance to consign what is really a flawed concept (however much we love it) to history. I, for one will not be sorry to banish that dreadful term ‘uplevelling’ from the vocabulary of education.  This, of course calls for a different, and maybe radical, approach to recording progress. But that’s for another day.