Interaction and
Interpersonal skills are the stuff of life, whether two, or many,
Interlocutors; after all, life is essentially group activity. The
Interplay between people can lead to
Interesting developments. The
Interconnectedness of life can be exaggerated in some social situations like a school, where
Interlopers can find difficulty in integrating, adults as well as children.

Internalised rejection can lead to
Intermittent disagreement and the need for
Intercession to restore equilibrium. Learning to
Interact with each other starts from birth, parents and others trying to
Interpret sounds and developing speech,
Interspersed with an ongoing personal monologue
Interpreting their surrounding world. This
Intergenerational
Interaction leads to
Internalisation through reflection.

Interleaving of experience, known as life, ensures that new contexts require
Internalised knowledge to be brought to the fore in a more mature way, leading to an
Interchange of information.
Interactive conversations allow for query and clarification.

International diplomacy sometimes requires
Intermediaries to
Interpret the thoughts of one party to another. The simplicity of all these situations is learning to communicate, to
Interpret, because, at heart, humanity is
Interdependent. The group can support the individual through mutual
Interest.
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Interventions are essentially discussions, questions refining understanding between people, in order to fine tune responses. Good
Interventions require active listening and reflection before responding.
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We are all in this (world) together. Life is groupwork...

School life’s a bit more complicated than singular elements and we won’t solve workload with mantras.

Paul Daniels was a magician whose career was a regular sight on the television. As with many in his position, the phrase, “Take a card, any card”, was a standard line. It could be considered as the means by which education policy is currently being determined, but, in this case, it is likely to be take a single topic and work on that; this weekend, it seems to have been workload.

While I was enjoying the West Sussex hospitality of the #LearningFirst conference, elsewhere, Damien Hinds, Amanda Spielman and Nick Gibb were highlighting the need to address workload, as if it is a single entity that can actually be controlled. Political parties always wish to be seen to be improving education and each will claim to have the magic solution. Spoiler; there isn’t one…if there was, we'd have found it by now. Human systems are complex.

Efficiency, or, in political terms, looking for ways of continually saving money and at the same time demanding improvement across the school system, is perhaps desirable, but saving money can become the greater imperative squeezing out the potential for improvement. In any “business”, efficiency requires a period of analysis, quality planning and implementation, with ongoing monitoring and excellent communication throughout, so that all participants are aware of progress within the development journey.

No aspect of the system be “ring-fenced” and become untouchable and that includes the top down impact of Ofsted and DfE.

Having entered Teacher Training College over 45years ago, taught and been a head teacher within a 32-year career in schools, it is almost flippant to say that I have heard it all before. However, that is true, but it is also true that the impact of successive change has been tinkering, superficially revolutionary, as one system replaced another, often with piecemeal impact.

Evolutionary development was a part of system change until 1997, at which point National Strategies were introduced, with some good elements, but with significant downward pressure that had greater control over practice than previously.

Significant developments were hidden behind the political mantra of the literacy hour and the rise of the subject consultants with their ready-made solutions; the rise of the end to end bright idea, exacerbated by the introduction of Assessing Pupil Progress. This led to endless mini-lessons being taught, with specific points in mind, losing overall dynamics in the process.

It sometimes felt like the plumber’s visit, with the inevitable “Who put this in? I’ll do a better job than those cowboys.”

Each school is in a unique situation, based on location, staffing and resources. The former, ranging from leafy suburbs to inner-city can be a determinant of motivation and aspiration, both important to success. The resources, from building to moveable items, can encourage or discourage potential teachers and motivate students. The best teachers inspire students, encourage them to aspire and show them ways to achieve, with support, space and time to think given by management.

A school’s ability to attract teachers is likely to be, in some, way, determined by locality, perhaps house prices or rents, quality of the building and resources and the general feeling when visiting the school. Proximity to a university ITE department might be a factor in attracting trainees into their first jobs.

The system within which teachers work is often the limiting factor, if they are required to think and work to defined approaches. Teaching should be efficient and effective, but real learning can be messy. Internal supports, such as mentoring and seeing the whole institution as a training organisation might be key.

Consider; if, in every school, every teacher could be internally trained to the capacity of the highest quality teacher in any subject, through 30 meetings a year of quality internal CPD, supported by external expertise and challenge as identified, could the whole system benefit?

Internal controls can sometimes run counter to efficiency, especially with regard to the planning cycles. Schools should determine and communicate a coherent, holistic curricular approach, together with resources to make this a reality. These overviews will inform decisions by a classteacher over the year where they will have the class. By creating an annual plan, they are essentially demonstrating curricular coverage; one source of concern. If these are broadened over a term or half term with greater detail, the medium-term plans are likely to be the only document tat any SLT needs to know that their teachers are well planned.

If annual plans are written in July (part of a closure day) before the year, holidays can be enjoyed more. If the first two weeks of any year are given to the teacher as personal topics, to settle, get to know the children and instil some habits that will be a part of the whole year, part of a September closure after two weeks can be devoted to plans for the rest of the term, based on more detailed understanding of the children.

If, however, teachers are regularly required to hand in detailed plans for every lesson ahead of teaching them, their focus may be on the plan, rather than the needs of their learners. Planning for lessons, by each teacher, has always been a fundamental part of the role, but, on a lesson by lesson basis, what a teacher needs to write down, as an aide memoire to remember for that lesson will vary considerably. This links with experience; an early career teacher, making sense of the whole, might need to record more, which reduces as their career and confidence develops.

Ofsted and the DfE are significant parts of the system and both can appear, at times, to see themselves as founts of all knowledge, although other countries often appear to be seen as having better systems, forgetting that those countries may have been and visited ours in the past and learned what (not to) do.

There are aspects of Ofsted which I would seek to keep and tweak. There are potentially limitations to the system, which can have a detrimental impact on school development.

It is always encouraging to be told that your school is good, even better maybe to be outstanding. At the other end of the scale, a school potentially struggling with a very wide range of issues, causing distractions, will not be helped by simply being told that what they are doing is not good enough, by a team which then leaves the recovery to others. It is a very expensive audit tool and as such should add value to school development, if the country is to make full use of visiting expertise, which we are told is outstanding.

From the point of an Ofsted visit where need is identified, interventions by Local Authorities or others, such as Academy chains can sometimes then exacerbate the situation, as multiple (often simplistic) agendas are pursued, within very tight timescales. There have been examples of heads being dismissed, or resigning, as a starting point. People losing their jobs might be “Pour encourager les autres”, but it has a system-wide impact and questions over who would want to be a head; at its best, it is the best job in education.

Listening to Sean Harford on Saturday, it is clear that Ofsted has data available that indicates whether there are question marks over a school performance. Where this is the case, it is right and proper that a visit should be made and a report made available that describes, from an external viewpoint, what issues might be affecting the school; the qualitative to balance the quantitative.

As an enhancement, I would institute a validation system, like an MOT test, based on agreed teaching standards and CPD opportunities created from PM journeys.

Every head teacher and other observers would be formally trained in lesson observation.  
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This judgement would be sampled and validated through joint observations during inspection visits. Perhaps it would be better to have a coherent form of quality control, supporting their continuing professional development needs, rather than capability processes that can sometimes be haphazard as they are irregular needs.  The evidence would enable teachers to make valid claims for promotion and ensure national consistency.

I’d want every school to be visited every two years, by an experienced assessor, to explore the effectiveness of the school, looking at the local context, local issues and the internal organisation, working to validate school self-evaluation, with one of two outcomes, acceptance of judgements (possibly with advice notes) or a decision that an action plan would be needed and a second inspection visit necessary, within a specific timescale. The knowledge that the process itself was part of school development journeys would take the cliff-edge nature of Ofsted away and make better use of national expertise in local contexts.

Why two years? Schools can experience very rapid change, especially through staffing and this can have an immediate impact, especially if change is at a senior level. I would expect every school inspected to have a detailed description of development since the last inspection and an action plan for the subsequent two-year period, which would form part of the validation exercise. What has been the two-year development, how is it to be sustained and developed?

Would this system be cheaper? Possibly. To some extent, it would depend on the decision on the first proposal (external or internal) and the contact time needed for the second.

However, it would allow latitude for evolutionary development, especially if the system was allowed to run for a number of years.
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The role of headteacher can sometimes be summarised as “management by swan”, serene on top, but paddling like mad beneath. There are many incidents, some funny, some difficult, many just part of the day to day activities where “someone” has to take specific action, because it’s “someone’s” job.

​Someone, early in my teaching career uttered the immortal words, "Expect the unexpected and you won't go too wrong".
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Snow

I’d done the course, as an aspiring Deputy Head, dealing with the roles and responsibilities of management and, along with colleagues had considered the myriad of potential eventualities that might occur. The reality, when it came, had not been prepared, nor could it have been.

I had been a deputy for all of a couple of weeks when the head went off on a course. Signal a rapid change in the weather, with an overnight deluge of snow; many colleagues will recently have had the same issue to deal with and may still be suffering the aftermath. Inevitably, the calls from colleagues started arriving to say that they wouldn’t be able to get in. I had, but mainly because the motorway had been gritted. All available staff were deployed to the gates to turn back families and also to mop up the solitary children who had walked alone, to start the calls home for them to be picked up.

Eventually, children had all been dispersed, so staff also started their way home.

Before I could do the same, the caretaker arrived to say that we had run out of heating oil, none had been ordered and, if it couldn’t be sourced, we’d be closed another day. The forecast was for a thaw. Several phone-calls to the supplier and a bit of arm twisting resulted in the promise of a delivery by the early evening. In the interim, the individual hot air blowers started to shut down. In so doing they were drawing any gunk into the pipes from the oil tank, so, when the oil arrived this would necessitate an engineer to come and bleed the complete system. Calls were made to the engineers, to put them on standby.

The oil tanker arrived with the dusk, so the tank was filled by torchlight. The engineer arrived around 7.30pm, having been to several schools earlier in the day. By 10.30pm, with the school filled with a blue haze where each boiler had belched out exhaust fumes, we had virtually reached the point where the system had been put back together.
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Arriving home after midnight, having had to secure the school and set alarms, the alarm was set again for 5.30am, to get into school to check that everything was working.

Wind

I took up my headship in January 1990, walking as calmly as I could through the avenue of Scots pines that lined the path between the car park of the old Victorian school and the “new” school, Scola built, in 1975. These trees had been a part of a large estate from which the original school had been carved and were somewhere over 90 years old, planted during the Victorian period. The original school dated from 1846, with the benefactor board being found in the new school loft area.

On January 25th we had a seasonal storm. This one took everyone by surprise. It was a case of the wind howling relentlessly. The first sign of a problem was a child detailed to tell me that a classroom window had shattered and that the class had moved to the school hall. It was clear that the wind had become extreme.

Parents began to phone to say that the local roads were being blocked by trees and could they pick up their children to get them home safely. Rather than being marooned on an “island” with 160 children, the message soon got out that getting home was better than sticking it out at school. One phone line was permanently in use by office staff, phoning home or emergency numbers. As numbers allowed, non-essential staff were also sent home.

As always, we were left with a small number of children whose parents could not be contacted. They were taken to the lee side of the school, to enjoy regressing and a distraction through using the Reception class equipment.

Meanwhile, the wind picked up even more. As the children dwindled in number the safety of the staff became paramount. It was decided that those living furthest should leave first. Most of the cars were in the old school, but the wind frightened many and they took the long walk around the road. We asked them to phone when they arrived home.
By mid-afternoon, the school was almost empty, and, having contacted our local contractor, were waiting for the glazier to arrive and make good the broken window.

Consoling ourselves with a cup of well-needed tea, the first “crack”, sounding like an explosion near to hand, was the precursor to a substantial demonstration of the power of nature. The view from the office was directly through the avenue of trees. Within ten minutes, 20, 25m trees had been reduced to matchsticks, swaying and toppling, taking each other down like ninepins. Trees that had stood for 100 years were no more.

The clean-up took the best part of week, with the whine of chainsaws the backdrop to all learning.

It did make for a great deal of very exciting writing and artwork, right cross the school. Well, if you can’t make use of an event…

Electrical faults?

The new extension to the main school, negotiated over a number of years, based on the sale of the Victorian school designate as excess places brought the fun and games of endless negotiations with builders and architects.

Part of the build went into the winter period, and this included extending the alarm system.

The caretaker had been off sick for a while and, while we had a good cleaner prepared to undertake some locking up, as senior key-holder, I was, at that point, first call for an alarm activation. Over a period of ten days, we had eight times where the alarm was activated, with me turning out to school in the middle of the night, needing to call the alarm company. The police were involved on a couple of occasions, checking the building, as was the security company who also did periodic checks.

The police letter saying that call-outs would be suspended led to serious talks with the builders and alarm company, who eventually agreed to do a full survey, during which they discovered that the wiring into the new extension had been “pinched” between two different materials. Cold nights had caused some movement, resulting in the alarm going off when the temperature had changed.

It all needed ripping out and redirecting, causing further disruption, but no more call-outs, at least for a while. There were many other occasions with a semi-rural school on the edge of a large estate.

​It’s probably one thing I don’t miss from headship.

I didn’t grow up in a reading household, but we were taken to the library in Exeter and I remember coming home with a fish identification book, as I’d started fishing with friends in the River Exe.  Around the age of seven, I received a Biggles book as part of my birthday present and remember being unable to stop reading it until I finished it. It hooked me. I don’t remember the weather, but, as life was more often lived outside, it may well have been raining and staying in was better.

​Specific books do not appear again until I was 15. I had a serious rugby accident tearing knee ligaments and needing an extended period of R&R. In that time, I read Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, which left an indelible impression. At the same time, 1984 and Animal Farm also made an appearance. Were they read for pleasure, or just because I had time to read them?

For quite a long time in my school-based life, giving time over to reading, apart from during school holidays often made me feel guilty. 1994 brought news of my first wife’s cancer and, in response, the purchase of a “life project”, a small cottage in France, to make an escape from real life worries for short periods. I started to find some books by Georges Simenon, via charity shops and local second-hand bookshops, to read when not involved in a DIY project or gardening. Slinging a hammock between two trees and having a half hour break created small reading spaces. Eventually, over time, the Simenon collection grew, in French and English, to be supplemented by other authors. I had developed a proper habit and stopped feeling guilty about “just sitting and reading”. It took a lot of effort and occasionally rears its head.  

​Children “reading for pleasure” appears to have been a cause of concern for the whole of my career in education, during which, having undertaken a post grad diploma in reading and language development, I have done surveys of reading at home, including numbers of books in the home. As a result, during home visits, I have met adults who rarely read anything in book form, have no books in the home and couldn’t tell you the name of any children’s author, whereas I have also visited homes where there have been library rooms and parents read to their children almost from birth.

If we were to consider reading for pleasure as something that one does outside a requirement to do so, inevitably, the approach by children to reading at home will vary considerably.

Reading at home, as mandated by schools as part of homework, can often mean children reading aloud to an adult. This then becomes a situation where a child performs to an adult, who may or may not appreciate any nuanced difficulties that the child might encounter in a specific book. If the adult then chooses to be judgemental, this can demotivate the child.

If schools were to allow children to take home books that they can read with ease, alone or to another, they may well derive greater pleasure from the experience, as they might be able to demonstrate greater facility and receive praise. In some households, too, the busyness and pressures of some family lives can mean limited time available, so reading is something that must be done, rather than a pleasant shared experience.

I have to admit to being a fan of colour coded systems, originally started by Cliff Moon for the Reading Reading Centre, where a wide range of books is sorted into broad categories of challenge.

Some will say that children judge each other, based on their colour book. They always have and always will, even if/especially if whole class reading from one book is the norm; see above and replace one parent with twenty-nine peers as was my early school reading diet.  

Within a colour coded system, teacher-level, guided books were also colour coded. As a result, a nominal decision was taken to allow children to take home any book on a colour below their guided level book, so that they could go home and read for themselves or with a parent. They were able to change their books daily if they wished. In every colour there were at least fifty books, so a child could have ten weeks of self-chosen reading, during which time, hopefully, they had moved on in teacher reading challenge.

When they finished the scheme, they had “free choice”, but with the rule of thumb of the “five finger rule”; if they read the first page and found more than five words that slowed them down in their reading, they might choose to come back to that book at a later stage.

In addition, each class had an author of the term, with books selected to provide extension, broader challenges. Letters or postcards to the authors were seen as alternatives to book reviews. One or more of the books might become the teacher read aloud book.

There needs to be thought on three layers of books; fluency, mild challenge (teacher led, five finger rule), frustration- too many words unknown reducing fluency and understanding (10 words per page as a simple rule).

Mentoring and coaching were embedded in the approach, as teachers and children regularly shared what they were reading with each other, were active in book selection from our termly bookshop, from Wessex Books (now Wells, Winchester), so were able to guide children/peers individually to books that might interest them.

Books were freely available, read by children and teachers, not just in a(n) ERIC (everyone reading in class) way, but through lots of book sharing, with enthusiasm for the process, the activity and the outcomes. Book walls shared some of the reading; eg an “I liked this book” wall.

Ease of access and availability of good quality books, time to read, share, model and talk books, all contribute to a reading culture. With tablets and laptops having recording facilities, children can read aloud to themselves and listen back, to embed some self-assessment/adaptation.

If schools don’t create a reading culture, home cannot always be relied on to do so. If children are to learn that reading can be pleasurable, they must have access to material that allows it to be so and to have time and space in which to develop independent reading habits.