DANCING ON THE TABLES - PART 1
DANCING ON THE TABLES
Pamela was a quiet child. Over her three years in school, she had developed a talent for blending into the background. She didn’t struggle; she didn’t have her hand in a permanent upright position begging to answer every question; she wasn’t badly behaved. She just arrived in the morning, got on with her work and left at the end of the school day. There was, however, one exception to this daily pattern: the PE lesson because Pamela hated PE. I never did find out the reason: was it a fear of going on the apparatus, a dislike of competitive games, a lack of co-ordination? Whatever the problem was, Pamela had developed a strategy to deal with it – she never had her PE kit in school. All the other seven and eight year olds would be lined up at the door, shuffling impatiently as they waited for me to give the order to proceed to the gym, and there would be Pamela, sitting at her desk, resplendent in the clothes she’d come to school in.
“Pamela,” I would wearily enquire, knowing full well what the answer would be, “Why aren’t you changed?”
“I’ve forgot my kit,” would come the familiar reply. For the first few weeks of the new school year, I countered this by asking her to go to the teacher in charge of PE who kept a supply of spare shorts, t-shirts and plimsolls in a box in her classroom but Pamela, a resourceful child, had a way of dealing with this too. As the class and I set off to the gym for the PE lesson in one direction, she would start her long and tortuous journey to collect the spare kit in the other. Once we had turned the corner, she’d reduce her speed to somewhere between a dawdle and standing still. Then, on eventually reaching the classroom where the kit was stored, she would wait at the door until someone spied her through the window, take ages to find some kit that would fit her and then return to the classroom at a pace equivalent to the one she’d employed on the outward journey. The whole performance was a masterpiece in precision timing, her eventually entry into the gym inevitably coinciding with me issuing instructions to the class to get down off the apparatus because the lesson was over.
At about week five, I snapped. An alternative approach was needed and in the heat of my frustration, I came up with the first thing that popped into my head.
“Pamela,” I said, “I see you have forgotten your kit.” Pamela nodded, giving me a pitiful look that indicated how sorry she was that this situation had inexplicably arisen again.
“I’ll tell you what I'll do,” I continued, “If you remember to bring your kit next week, I will dance on the tables.” It was a bizarre offer to make but immediately I realised it was a stroke of genius for whilst Pamela sat there quite unmoved by the prospect of me making an utter fool of myself, the rest of class appeared decidedly keen, and so I left it at that and waited for peer pressure to take its course. I have no way of knowing what went on over the next few days in the playground, in the dinner queue or on the way home from school. I’m ignorant of the inducements that were made to Pamela, the encouragement given, the possible blackmail. What mattered was the result and this I discover the following week when the children once again got changed for PE. There standing in line, her face beaming with pride, was Pamela, resplendent in pristine shorts and t-shirt. All eyes turned to me. I congratulated her for finally bringing in her kit and then, remembering the adage I was taught when training to be a teacher: never make a threat or a promise you’re not prepared to keep, I mounted the children’s desks and began my performance.
I’m not sure that I’d have scored many points for technique or artistic interpretation, but it was a dance that captivated my audience, created an uproar in the classroom and ended with a burst of spontaneous applause. Having danced, we set off for PE where, I have to say, Pamela carried out a range of physical activities with an assurance that belied her total inexperience. Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to do PE: it was all too easy; she was a natural.
News of my dancing quickly spread around the school. Ten minutes after I dismissed the class for lunchtime, I was sitting down in the dinner hall when the headteacher came to join me. “I hear you’ve been dancing on the tables,” he said as if this was an everyday occurrence. I hastened to explain what had happened and whilst not advocating adopting table dancing as school policy, he realised that I had taken an unusual approach to solve a recurring problem. I was quite the hero in the staffroom and I began giving advice about how other teachers could solve some of their recurrent problems. After six years of teaching, I had finally arrived, a voice to be listened to, an educationalist of note. And so it was that the following week my class, once again got changed for PE. As I scanned the line of children, I noticed that someone was missing. Where was Pamela? And then I spotted her, in her seat, in the clothes she’d come to school in. Before I could say a word she spoke:
“I’ve forgot my kit.”
WE WENT DOWN TO LONDON
There was a knock at the door. We were keen to discover who could possibly be making a nighttime call on our colleague Dave, whose room we had gathered in at the end of an exhausting day. It was a woman in her late 50s, dressed in a white fluffy dressing gown and pink slippers. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, casting her eyes over the four of us, “I’ve got the wrong room.” As Dave closed the door, we immediately burst out laughing, teasing him about having a secret tryst with this mysterious lady. Then came a second knock and there she was again. “I was right,” she declared, now clearly annoyed. “You are making rather a lot of noise and we have a party of schoolchildren trying to get to sleep along the corridor. Please keep your voices down.” We nodded obediently, chastened by our reprimand. We were all too aware of the children down the corridor: we were meant to be in charge of them!
As a primary school teacher for twenty years and a headteacher for another eighteen, I always had a driving passion for education to be as enjoyable and memorable as possible, providing children with a wealth of experiences and opportunities. Residential visits fit that bill perfectly. Maybe it was my own experiences of a week in Derbyshire as a ten year old that inspired me to pester fellow staff to get involved and then later, as a head, persuade nervous governors to let me organise visits when the schools had never run them before. The result was an involvement in over thirty trips during my career: hiking over hills in Derbyshire; careering about on quad bikes in Wales; cramming forty children onto packed underground trains in London.
Things didn’t always run smoothly. In the early days, staff would sleep in the same large dormitories as the children, not an ideal arrangement, especially if the child in the bunk bed above you decided to be sick in the night as one boy did in a youth hostel in Derbyshire. Rather than mess his bedding, he sensibly leaned over the side of the bunk and liberally sprayed everything below. Now he could have leaned over to the left, where his clothes for the next day lay in a pile on the floor, or to the right where… I think you get the picture. Clearing up sick at three in the morning wasn’t great fun, but it was a lot better than stinking of it for the duration of the next day. Of course, being ill when away from home was no fun for any child, and neither was being homesick.
The few who were homesick usually got over it quickly. There was one occasion when a ten year old begged us to let him phone his parents. We reluctantly acquiesced and so he related to them just how unhappy he was and how much he was missing them. As he put the phone down, one of his friends came past and asked if he’d like a game of snooker and off he went, cheered by the prospect, perfectly happy now and he remained so for the rest of the trip. His parents, however, probably had a miserable week worrying about him. I vowed never to let that happen again. I only had one child who was still homesick after the first night away and she was equally inconsolable on the second day. We had taken over a small hotel in Scarborough in the off-season and so the children were free to roam around the building unsupervised. On Day 3, we all made our way down to breakfast individually but once seated, I noticed that the homesick girl was not there. I went to look for her and found her in the entrance hall wearing her coat and hat with her suitcase in her hand.
“What are you doing?” I enquired.
“I’m going home,” she informed me. I hastened to point out that a. her parents weren’t going to come all the way to Scarborough to fetch her and b. we weren’t going to take her all the way back home, so she was stuck there for another three days (although I did it in a far more sympathetic way than that). A few minutes later she was seated at the breakfast table and we never heard another word from her about missing home.
For the staff, the visits were incredibly rewarding. In a different environment, you got to discover so much more about the children. There was the opportunity to develop relationships with some of the more difficult children, and that stood you in good stead when you got back into the classroom. It was great seeing timid children grow in confidence and supremely confident ones show a bit of uncertainty. This was especially true when it came to conquering fears and it wasn’t just the children who got to do that. I would never have discovered the joy of abseiling, were it not for the fact that I didn’t want to be the only one in my group who didn’t go over the edge.
Of all the visits I organized, the four weeklong sojourns in London were my favourites. The city has so many fascinating places to visit and I was able to indulge in my fantasy of being a Blue Badge guide, talking animatedly about the history of various landmark buildings not only to the children, but often to interested tourists who would gather on the fringes of our group, pretending to be studying their maps or reading their guidebooks but in truth listening to a free guide. On our return to school, we would put on an assembly with the children talking about the things they'd done. I wrote a little song about one of our visits and the propensity of one of the teachers, Mrs. Lucas, to find any opportunity to have a cup of tea. Indulge me:
We went down to London, on a big electric train,
We went down on Monday, on Friday we came back again,
We saw Big Ben and the Tower too,
We didn't have time to go to London Zoo,
And after everything that we had to see,
Mrs Lucas had a cup of tea.
I realise it's hardly in the same class as a Time Rice lyric but it proved a popular ditty, so much so that when Mrs. Lucas sadly passed away a number of years later, I began her funeral oration by quoting it - much to the surprise and then delight of the mourners.
The first year, we stayed in a youth hostel in Holland Park. Our dormitory was the scene of a burglary on our last night there. The thought of thieves creeping around our beds as we slept was far more horrifying than losing a few items. We contacted the police who duly arrived and made an inventory of everything that had been taken. My colleague had quite a few of his designer shirts and trousers stolen whilst I was a little peeved that they’d left all my clothes. I did lose a razor and they had also taken our first aid kit. The police officer then asked if anything else was missing and one boy piped up, “They’ve taken my backpack.”
“What was in it?” enquired the constable, kneeling down to be at the same level as the distraught child.
“A ruler and pencil from the Natural History Museum,” replied the boy. Bless that policeman. He carefully wrote down the child’s missing items which, in reality, were probably worth more to him that Chris’ clothes and my razor. Fortunately, the street value for stolen pencils and rulers is not great, even ones from the Natural History Museum, and the thieves had jettisoned the backpack in the youth hostel grounds where it was found and reunited with its grateful owner.
For the other three London trips, we were based in a University of London hall of residence. It was there that we met our dressing gowned bursar. I'm not sure what the children would have included in their highlights but for me it was standing within touching distance of Big Ben (the bell, not the tower whose proper name is The Elizabeth Tower as I'm sure you know) as it struck twelve noon - not as loud as you'd expect; being filmed by an ITV film crew for an insert into one of their live broadcasts; tying up an escapologist in Covent Garden (thank you children for volunteering me) and meeting the Prime Minister. We'd been allowed to take the children down Downing Street and as we stood looking at the black Georgian door of Number 10, it opened and out came Mrs. Thatcher. She was just setting off on her way to the Commons but seeing a school party on the opposite pavement, she came over and began speaking to the children, asking about the places they had visited. The children, awed by the sight of this famous woman off the television, just agreed with every enquiry she made.
“So,” came that familiar voice, “Have you been to the Tower?”
“Yes,” replied the children,
“No we haven’t,” I countered, slightly confused, "we're going there tomorrow."
“What about St Paul’s?”
“Yes,” they all chanted,
“No, not there either,” said I. It was our first day so we’d not really been anywhere yet but the children were just so overwhelmed. Standing next to me was the tea-loving Mrs. Lucas whose politics were slightly to the left of Lenin's. She hated Maggie with a passion and kept whispering in my ear how easy it would be to attack her, something I really didn’t want to hear and certainly didn’t want any surveillance equipment in Downing Street picking up. So my replies to Mrs. Thatcher, correcting the children mindlessly answering, "Yes," alternated with increasingly desperate whispered requests to Mrs. Lucas to keep her mouth closed. It was not easiest few minutes.
As the years passed, many schools stopped doing residential visits. The requirements of new legislation, introduced after a number of school visit tragedies, and the nervousness of local authorities who were held responsible if things went wrong, meant an increase in workload for the teachers organising the trips. Although some of the paperwork required was a bit over the top, generally the new guidance was a good thing and I never entertained the idea of stopping what I saw as an essential part of a child’s education. However, even with the best planning in the world, events can take a strange turn.
Peveril Castle, in the Derbyshire village of Castleton, stands high on a hill, overlooking the youth hostel where we stayed a number of times. One on of these visits, we had just unloaded our bags and checked that we had all our first aid and medical kits – the previous year we’d forgotten to unload them from the coach which drove halfway back before a frantic phone call forced its return. Everything was ready for our ascent to the castle. A healthy one to ten ratio meant we had four staff for look after forty highly excited children. We had just set off when word reached me at the head of the line: one of the boys at the back had had a fit. I wasn’t to worry though, because the two first aiders had the situation under control and were taking him back to the youth hostel. That meant it was now forty children and two staff, but that’s why you have these high ratios – for unforeseen emergencies. And then, bless her, the teacher who was left with me discovered she had a fear of heights. Why, at the age of 26, she chose this particular moment, I will never know.
“I can’t go on,” she trembled, rooted to the spot, her eyes closed, her body rigid. And so, there I was, with forty children and one dithering excuse of a teacher refusing to move, half way up a very steep and hazardous path. Fortunately, some of the children were magnificent, holding the teacher's hands and coaxing her up to the top where the ruined walls provided some containment as she recovered and the other two staff finally arrived with a much-recovered boy.
MANAGING BEHAVIOUR
Remember that adage: never make a threat or promise you don’t intend to carry out. I put this to the test on my very first teaching practice as a student, standing in front of a class of ten and eleven year olds. Sally, I remember her name so clearly, was probably now be identified as being on the autistic spectrum and would receive extra help and support.. Back then, she was just a ‘difficult’ child and in my highly stimulating art lesson, she was doing a fair bit of stimulating herself, with a pair of scissors. I’d already asked her to put them down two or three times when finally I’d had enough.
“If you don’t put those scissors down now, I shall… throw you out the window!” The words just came out of my mouth. The effect was electric: the whole class watching intently and praying that Sally would continue to defy me. Then I remembered the advice of my tutor and I quickly modified the threat to, “Well maybe not throw you out of the window, but I will be very cross.” Cue mass disappointment from the other children, but thankfully also a downing of the scissors.
There have always been concerns about behaviour in schools. In the 1970s, my mother was the headteacher of an infant school and the head of the juniors, Brian, used to give talks about education from time to time to groups of businessmen. He’d always start by reading from the Chief Inspector of Schools’ Annual Report and, as he listed the many issues facing schools: lowering of standards, lack of challenge, too many children leaving school with poor qualifications, dreadful discipline, the listening businessmen would nod their heads in agreement, despairing at how things had gone downhill from their own schooldays in the 1940s. Brian would then finish by closing the report and saying, “ That was the Chief Inspector of Schools’ Report for 1946.” There never has been a golden age of education and behaviour has never ever been perfect. After a career of many years in the classroom and as a headteacher, I can say categorically that behaviour is not a problem in the vast majority of schools today but you have to work hard to keep it that way.
Another piece of advice given to rookie teachers is to refrain from smiling until Christmas. Whilst it is important to set your standards clearly with a new class (it’s far easier to relax your standards than to ratchet them up,) I could never manage the not smiling bit beyond the start of the first lesson. My strategy was to build up good relationships quickly so that if there were digressions, a disappointed look from me was far more effective than a rant. One headteacher I worked for told me that he thought the mark of a good teacher was someone who could take the children to the edge and then bring them back again. Sometimes, I put this theory to the test. One day, after a very rare heavy snowfall, I took my class outside for a fun snowball fight as a reward for working hard all day. I divided the children into two teams and battle began. After standing there, getting cold for several minutes, I decided to join one side, to help them out of course, and pretty quickly the children on the other side were directing every one of their snowballs at me. Then my side cottoned on and they too turned on their leader. My pleas of, “OK everyone, back to the classroom,” were studiously ignored and under a heavy barrage I had to flee inside and beg another teacher to go and get my class back: I had taken them to the edge – and over!
Some children come into class with a whole host of issues in their lives and their behaviour can be explained, although not excused, by what they are having to deal with outside of the school's protective environment. I once taught a very troubled lad called Adam. He was very well behaved in school but got into all kinds of trouble once he was out and about. On Monday mornings, whilst I was calling the register and collecting up dinner money, I used to ask my class of ten year olds to write a short paragraph about something they’d either heard or read in the news over the weekend. It was quite bizarre to discover one child writing about an arson attack in the locality and how the police had cautioned someone over the incident. Bizarre, because I knew that the arsonist he was writing about was, unbeknownst to him, sharing the same desk - it was Adam. Although he was as good as gold in class, Adam did have a tendency to take things that didn’t belong to him. When we did a project on the countries of Europe, each of the display boards in my classroom was covered in photos, maps and a collection of items acquired on foreign holidays. Amongst the objects brought in by the children was a fair amount of pre-euro currency. One morning, I entered the room to find every single lira, peseta, punt and franc had gone missing from the walls. I had my number one suspect and so at break time I kept Adam behind and confronted him with the case of the missing currency.
“It wasn’t me,” he protested. I ignored his predictable response and continued with my accusations, but the more vigorously I questioned him, the more vehemently he denied it. Finally, faced with the prospect of a lot of grumpy children whose prized possessions had disappeared and, worse still, their unhappy parents coming in to complain, I said, “ Here’s the deal. If you return the money tomorrow before school, I will say no more about it.” The next morning, after going to the staffroom for a cup of coffee, I returned to the classroom to find every coin and note restored to their original places. I kept my side of the bargain and said nothing. Stealing was such a rare occurrence in primary schools that the culprits tended to get a reputation. So when a piece of one of the computers went missing, it was to Adam I immediately turned. As with the case of the disappearing currency, he accepted no responsibility for the theft. It was only when I showed him how I thought someone had opened up a flap on the back to remove the item that he corrected me, showing me exactly how the piece had been extracted. “Back in the morning please,” I smiled, and it was.
As a headteacher, the final sanction was to exclude a child. I was never keen to do it but I had to on occasions, as much as to make a statement to the other children and their parents about where the line was drawn. All schools have challenging children, some more than others. The supportive way we dealt with them in my last school, especially those on the autistic spectrum, meant that we attracted children with similar issues whose parents were often in a state of despair and saw us as their last hope. It was immensely rewarding when we heard how these children had gone on through secondary education and succeeded in later life, when they could have easily fallen foul of the system. When, in 2014, the Ofsted inspectors questioned the School Council about behaviour, one child explained, “Nearly all the children behave well, but there are a few who find it hard and it’s up to us to help them.” The inspector was impressed and I was thrilled as it encapsulated the ethos my staff and I had built in the school.
Jake was one such emotionally disturbed eight year old who would often get very upset over something that was important to him but usually inconsequential to anyone else. His usual response was to take himself off out into the school grounds, either because he needed time on his own to sort his head out or he wanted some extra attention. I’d instructed my support staff to follow him at a distance but to make no attempt to try to catch him because that would either disturb his time out or give him the attention he craved. However, one day he went further than he’d ever done before. Cornered in the playground by a teaching assistant trying to sort out a dispute, he climbed over the high fence surrounding the school. As luck would have it, this coincided with the dinner ladies clocking off and heading home. Their instinct was to protect this vulnerable child out in the big wide world and this negated any advice I'd given them about not chasing. Rather like a herd of lionesses hunting down a stricken wildebeest, they tracked the poor child, then encircled him and moved in for the kill. I stood helpless, some distance away, as he darted this way and that, trying to escape their clutches, until one of them finally nabbed him and he was returned to school. It wasn’t the way I’d have done it, but then, he never ran out of school again!
SPORTING SUCCESS
My educational belief that all children should be entitled to the widest possible range of experiences during their primary years, meant that I was always committed to providing sporting opportunities for the children I taught. Alongside class PE lessons, I ran a number of extra-curricular sporting activities over the years in order to further develop the interests and talents of the children.
After being fairly useless at football as a youngster, I developed a passion for watching the game whilst at university and when, in my second year of teaching, another member of staff suggested that I help him with the football club he was about to start, I jumped at the opportunity to learn from an expert, with the hope that, after a few years, I’d have the skills to run a club on my own. Two months after setting the club up, my colleague got another job and I found myself in sole charge. I have to say that both the team and I were fairly clueless and consequently we rarely had a win to celebrate. After each Saturday morning defeat, I would descend into the depths of despair that would last well into the next day. By contrast, the children were already looking ahead to the rest of the weekend by the time they reached the changing rooms. It wasn’t fair.
The worst part was the half time team talk. I’d been on a Football Association Schoolteachers' Course so I knew how to develop the children’s skills in our weekly after-school practices. What I didn’t have was any particular tactical nous and this became evident during the half time team talk. I considered myself a fairly inspirational teacher, getting children to push the boundaries of their imaginations when they were writing stories, finding unusual and memorable ways to teach maths concepts. I could gee up a class with my tales from history but could I encourage a group of disconsolate children during the half time team talk? No I could not. If this wasn’t bad enough, the parents who’d come along to support their offspring, many of them accomplished players of the game, would gather round to hear me deliver my words of wisdom. Relief eventually came in the shape of a very knowledgeable parent who, in addition to being the father of ten year old midfielder, also happened to be the chief soccer correspondent for one of the national newspapers. So for a couple of years, he would stand next to me, giving me hints as to how performances might be improved. These I was then able to relay to the team at half time with the result that we began to actually draw and win the odd game. I found it strange that on Saturday mornings, he would be quizzing me on my team tactics and during the afternoon, he’d be posing the same questions to the likes of Bob Paisley and Brian Clough.
One particular match stands out in my memory. We played a nearby school that had an excellent record, having won the league many times. The problem with primary school football is that each year you lose most of your team as they move to secondary education. The younger players who replace them will have a different skill set to the ones who’ve just left. Of course, they may be much better or they may not have a single footballing brain between them. The latter situation had occurred with our visiting team and the weight of expectation to live up to the glory of their illustrious predecessors led them to employ any tactic they thought would give them an advantage, including an offside trap that was wholly ineffective. I won’t go into the ins and outs of the offside rule except to say, for match officials to spot a player in an offside position, you really need linesmen or referees assistants as they are called nowadays. They did not offer to provide one, we didn’t usually play with them and, as a consequence, I failed to spot a single offside of which, I suspect, there were quite a few. At the end of the game, my school had won, albeit through a controversial penalty that I had awarded. As I left the field, delighted to have beaten such a successful school, an elderly gentleman who had been supporting the opposition came up to me.
“I’ve been following football for over 70 years and that is the worst display of refereeing I’ve ever seen!” he complained. A proud moment for me in my refereeing career – it’s always good to be number one.
I never liked refereeing, always tending to penalise my own side in 50:50 situations and question myself if I got disagreement from the sidelines. Once, I met up with my squad at an away game, having come straight from a headteachers’ meeting. The opposition teacher approached and asked if would referee, she being over eight months pregnant and likely to give birth at any moment. Reluctantly I agreed and made my way onto the mud bath that they described as the pitch. Unfortunately, I had no change of clothing and so, moving very little from the centre circle, I refereed the game in my suit. My shoes never quite recovered. Football success finally arrived at my last school where I had the services of a talented ex-parent and, at times, some pretty special footballers, four of whom went on to become academy players at top English clubs (one of whom has actually played for his country - I know Grenada isn't the highest rated team in the world but, an international none the less!) We won the second division and then followed that up by winning the first in two glorious years, the decades of dismal failure slipping from my memory.
Football was not the only sport that was on offer to the children. At my last school we ran clubs for hockey, rugby, tennis, cricket and rounders. Rounders, a game similar to baseball, was always a sport I enjoyed teaching and every year, as the summer term came to a close, the staff would challenge the leaving year 6s to a contest. Whilst those staff who could actually connect the bat with the ball were likely to send it to the far reaches of the field, there were many equally impressive children who could bat, bowl, throw and catch with great accuracy. Unfortunately for them, the challenge was always open to the whole year group and so, along with the brilliant players there were plenty of other children to get in their way, mess up the catches and take up the batting time. As a consequence, the staff won eleven times to the children’s one victory in the time I was there. We felt justified in our total domination of young people a fraction of our age: it was an important lesson for them to learn – life can be unfair. In previous schools we'd also played staff versus children football matches at the end of term until these had been deemed unsafe by the government, as if a fifteen stone teacher tackling a slight nine year old posed any greater risks than a few broken bones! Being rather useless at football, I enjoyed these games immensely as they made me appear much better than I actually was. One particular game stands out. One of the teachers, Brian, was an excellent player, had a kick that could go from one end of the pitch to the other, a throw-in that went nearly as far, and silky skills on the ball. After he'd popped in his fourth goal in a matter of minutes, the referee, one of the other teachers, beckoned him over. After a brief conversation, the referee brandished a red card and Brian left the pitch, his head bowed. When the staff team quizzed the referee about the reason for the sending off, she was quite clear. "He was sent off for playing too well." It's funny but I don't remember reading that rule in the FA handbook.
Contrary to what you might read in the news, sporting competition is alive and well in primary schools. One traditional favourite, a relic from the past, is sports day. There are those who hanker for the sports days of old where children sat around for ages doing nothing whilst an endless steam of races unfolded before them. There are those who advocate sports days where the children compete in teams, scoring points for a variety of activities. The ones we ran were a mixture of the two, as I believe competition to be a good thing so long as it’s not the only thing. Races gave the talented athletes the opportunity to shine whilst the team events relied on everyone contributing to the overall success of your side, no matter how talented you were or weren’t. We'd finish with some fun events, such as a mums' race and a dads' race, the latter not being that much fun for the father who collapsed on his ankle, resulting in us having to summon the paramedics. The worst thing about sports day was the weather. If it was an overcast day then all was perfect. If it poured with rain, I cancelled and rearranged. But if it was blistering sunshine then we had to ensure there was shade for competitors and watching families and worst of all, if it was drizzling then it was my job to inspect the state of the grass. I had to weigh up the chances of a child slipping over and seriously hurting themselves and then make a decision that would please and annoy children, staff and parents in equal measure. My most painful sports day came in my first year of teaching. Sent back into school to fetch the relay batons, I cornered a little too quickly and fell all my length on some uneven paving slabs. I then had to hobble round for the rest of the afternoon in torn tracksuit trousers, my limbs covered in plasters. And, just when everything began to stiffen up, I had to endure the teachers’ wheelbarrow race, where I was painfully bounced up and down the field in an actual wheelbarrow.
Every school I worked in took part in an annual Area Sports competition where local schools assembled at a proper athletics stadium to compete against each other. It was a logistical nightmare with hundreds of children from anything up to fifteen different schools all watching, competing and running round the outside of the track to the toilets and refreshment facilities. I was never involved in the organisation of the event and after the experience of my very first area sports, I never offered my help with adjudication either. But that first year I did and it didn't start well. For the finals of the running races, I had to stand with seven other volunteers at the finish line, my job: to identify the child in each race who came in fourth. In many of the longer races this was a fairly straightforward task because the field became stretched out as it approached the finish. For the short sprints, it was nigh on impossible to separate the bodies as they threw themselves over the line. I would go to nab the child I thought had come fourth, only to find two other people already grabbing him or her. Or I would confidently go after my charge only to have my decision questioned by another volunteer looking for the second placed child or the seventh placed child. It was mayhem. So when I was then allocated to the position of takeover judge during the final events of the meeting, the relays, I thought things couldn't get any worse: they did.
I trooped off to the point where the third leg of the relay ended and the fourth and final one began. I was given a white flag and a red flag with the instructions to wave the white flag if the handover was completed in the box marked on the track and if nobody strayed out of their lane, or the red flag if an infringement had occurred. I took my job seriously but in the first few races everything went well, nobody broke the rules and the white flag was raised with regularity. And then it happened. An enthusiastic child on the fourth leg, busy turning to see where the baton was, strayed out of her lane and into the path of a child from another school. I waved my red flag enthusiastically until one of the officials ran up to see what the matter was. I explained about the infringement and he trotted off to disqualify the school that had committed it. It was unfortunate that the school had, prior to disqualification, been in first place. It was even more unfortunate that it was the year 4 girls' relay team from my school. Still, I would have felt dreadful if I'd not been truthful. It was just unfortunate. Having been deprived of a first place, the teachers in the stand were fairly irritated by my honesty but after our eleven year old boys won the last race of the day, they were ecstatic, until one of them caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye. "He's waving that wretched red flag again," she shouted. Yes, only two teams were disqualified that year and I disqualified them both. And yes, they were both winning teams from my school. When I said that I didn't volunteer any more after that first year, perhaps I ought to rephrase it: I wasn't allowed to volunteer after that first year.
One sport where we had continued success was hockey. We did run a hockey club at school but most of those attending were also talented footballers and when it came to tournaments, they just transferred their football tactical awareness to the hockey pitch. One teacher from a visiting school came up to me as my team was pummeling theirs. “We spend so much time developing the children’s skills,” he bemoaned, “And they look really good back at school. But as soon as we get into a competitive game, it all goes to pieces. How come your players are so good?” I confided that our players were probably not as technically skilled as his team but their knowledge and experience of how to play as a team was the real difference. Of course, for a side to be successful, you need skill, understanding and the right attitude. This was to be my hockey team’s downfall in the last tournament I took them to before retiring. I had a brilliant squad who were also our really successful football team that year, winning their area games and proceeding to the finals at the training ground of our local Premier League team. Success continued until they got to the semi-finals where, conceding an early goal, they fell apart as a team and began arguing with each other. That is as far as they went, but the next term they had the chance to redeem themselves. In their regional hockey tournament, they had beaten all and so progressed to the county championships. Here, a number of round robin games would provide the eventual winners and for most of the tournament they were on course for that top spot. Then they met the team that did actually win it, on goals scored, and after conceding an early goal, history repeated itself. Some of them had tantrums, some reacted to minor scrapes and bumps as if they required amputations, one child said he just couldn’t go on and left the pitch in tears – and I just stood and watched them self-destruct, absolutely lost for what to do, dumbfounded by the appalling attitude I was witnessing, something I’d not experienced in 38 years of running school teams. We conceded so many goals in that game that it cost us the gold medal. As I watched them collect their silvers, I had little sympathy for their disappointment as they’d brought it on themselves and they’d ruined my plans to go out in a blaze of sporting glory.
MEETING WITH THE PARENTS
There is a poem by Alan Ahlberg called Parents Evening. It looks at the parent-teacher meetings from the views of a parent, a child and a teacher, with all three sharing the same deep sense of foreboding about what is about to take place. For me, parents evenings were never that much of an ordeal, but I did learn to expect the unexpected. The parents you dreaded meeting would often turn out to be an absolute delight, whilst sometimes the ones you felt would be very happy with the progress their child was making, would be anything but. I remember being particularly pleased with the way one child had really come on during the term, but when her parents sat down, the father was only interested in castigating me for some mistakes in the homework I'd sent out: it was the early days of computing and my copy and paste skills still left a bit to be desired. "You teachers have it easy," he complained, "working just from nine till three. I sometimes don't get home until seven in the evening." I could have told him that at seven, I'd not have been home that long myself with the prospect of an evening's marking and planning ahead of me but I thought better of it.
My first parents evening was a learning experience. Later, as a head, I always stressed to my staff the importance of being honest with parents and having those difficult conversations about their child’s behaviour or learning issues. My opening remarks to Peter’s parents, “Well, you’ll be aware of Peter’s problems,” instantly reduced Peter’s mother to tears. She obviously wasn’t aware: previous teachers had only told her the positives. But on occasions, talking about a child’s difficulties becomes an almost impossible task if the parent didn’t want to hear what you had to say. Stuart had quite a few difficulties with his learning. He struggled to read, he struggled to write and he found maths a permanent mystery. When the first parents evening arrived, I had a list of notes to share with Stuart’s father regarding the nature of his difficulties and what could be done at home to support the work we were doing in school. When I outlined his specific problems in reading, Stuart’s dad's response was, “But apart from that, everything’s fine?” Well, unfortunately it wasn’t, but with every new issue that I raised, I got the same response: “But apart from that, everything’s fine?” As the interview stretched on and on, leaking into the next two appointment times, I was getting nowhere. Finally, I decided enough was enough and ended the interview by saying, “But apart from that, everything’s fine.” Stuart’s dad smiled, and left the room a contented man!
Sometimes, meeting parents for the first time explained the way their child behaved in class. A perfect example of this was Katie. She would appear to listening intently to everything I had to say as I explained how to solve a maths problem or write an introduction to a story. Then, with a smile on her face, she’d say, ”Oh, all right,” head back to her seat and proceed to get everything completely wrong. Either she hadn’t listened to a word I’d said or she hadn’t a clue what I’d been talking to her about. I spent some considerable time trying to get this point across to her mother at parents evening and when I’d finished, her mother just smiled at me and said, ”Oh, all right.”
With so many parents to see in such a short time, parents evening could become a bit of a conveyor belt and I suppose it is inevitable that sometimes mistakes were made. Fortunately, I never encountered the problem that happened to one of my colleagues. As some satisfied parents left the room, Rosie consulted her timetable for the evening and found that her next appointment was with Robert’s parents. She went to the door, popped her head out and announced, “Robert?” to the waiting group. Up stood a man looking very dapper in a suit and tie and he followed Rosie into the room. Once seated, Rosie outlined the progress his son had made that term and the areas he needed to work on. It was only after about ten minutes that Rosie mentioned Robert by name.
“Robert?” said the young man, “My son is called William.” Rosie looked at him, totally confused.
“Then why did you come in when I called out Robert?” she asked.
“Because my name is Robert,” came his perfectly rational reply. Cue a completely different conversation, a timetable gone completely to pot and a very confused parent.
I received very little in the form of training when I became a headteacher. There was something called Headlamp that the local authority put on for newly appointed heads. When I put, ‘Bartholomew out on headlamp training,’ on the staffroom noticeboard, some of my staff thought I was doing car maintenance classes. I actually remember very little from this training, but one thing did stick: publicise all the great things that are happening in your school whenever you can so that you create a picture of what a wonderful place it is. Then when the inevitable problems occur, parents will be far more likely to accept them as temporary blips, rather than major crises. Often, I have read in the press about parents up in arms about some decision that a school has made and thought, well we did that and I never picked up the slightest murmur of discontent. Sometimes, parents did bring me their concerns. My approach was always to listen carefully to what they had to say, to try to understand it from their point of view and then to outline either what action I would take to rectify the problem or to explain the reasoning behind why the school had made certain decisions. I was very non-confrontational, unlike one headteacher I worked for who was faced with an angry parent haranguing him in a playground full of children. To her threats to contact the local media about the incident, he countered with, “Oh good, I’ve always wanted to be on television,” and then proceeded to point out to the assembled school, “Now children, this is not the way to sort out a problem.” The parent left, still grumbling, but with the wind knocked out of his sails.
Sometimes, even the most patient headteacher is left scratching their head when confronted by the parent for whom logic appears to be an unknown concept. The aforementioned headteacher would frequently complain about Mr. W H who was a regular visitor with some complaint or other. When his child reached year 6, there was the opportunity for her to go on a residential visit. In order for the visit to go ahead, we had to ask for money to cover the costs and along with the other parents, Mr. W H signed his child up and paid the deposit. And that was the last payment that we ever received from him. Many letters were sent, asking him to pay the balance but to no avail. Eventually, a decision was made. It was more important for his daughter to go on the visit than it was to fully cover her costs and so no further action was taken over the debt. Now, when setting the cost for a residential visit, there are many unknowns: admission prices may rise, transport costs may change. We tended to over-estimate and then issue a refund once the trip was over and all the accounting completed. This year was no exception. There was an £8 refund per child and this was duly paid to all the parents, well all the parents who had paid the full amount. Enter Mr. W H demanding his £8.
“It’s not fair, everyone else has been given £8 and I want to know where mine is,” Mr. W H thundered.
“But you didn’t pay the full amount,” came the headteacher’s patient reply.
“But why should everyone else get some money and I don’t,” continued the angry parent, “It’s discrimination.”
“If you’d paid the full amount then you’d be getting the £8 refund but you still owe us £50.”
“Well, I think it’s disgraceful. I’m going to contact the BBC.”
“Oh good, I’ve always wanted to be on the television.”
When I became a headteacher, my interaction with parents increased dramatically. The start of the morning was the most likely time for them to ask to see me and I’d try to leave my timetable empty whenever possible in case Mrs. X wanted to have a quick word about little Mark or Mr. Y needed to tell me about his Alicia. Sometimes, I was fulfilling the role of a councillor when parents were at the end of their tether and finding it hard to cope. I was a friendly face who would take the time to sit down with them, sometimes to offer support, but mainly to listen. Many meetings with parents took on a different purpose during the last few years of my career after the government introduced sanctions for parents who took their children out of school during term time. I didn’t agree with the policy because on many occasions, term time was the only time that some families could get time off work or afford to go away. However, once the strict rules came into force, I had to follow a fairly brutal line in order to ensure consistency, especially with fines being imposed on those parents who broke the rules. Parents made appointments to see me to plead their case but, during two years of this strategy, I only authorized two absences. The first was for a honeymoon where the marrying parents wanted their children to come along with them: on their return it transpired there had been no wedding! The other was to take two children to visit their dying grandmother in central Africa. After granting this on compassionate grounds, I was a little suspicious when the parent’s best friend came to me the following week with exactly the same request. These suspicions were confirmed when the two families didn’t return for five months. Then a year later, they returned to see me: granny was apparently dying again. This time I said no.
I hated the thought of parents having to lie to me or that I had to become Sherlock Holmes in order to find the truth. The mother of two older girls came to visit me one day, asking if the girls could have a week’s absence. I informed her that I wouldn’t authorise it but that she wouldn’t be fined if it the absence was five days or less: that was the policy. Two days before the absence was due to start, neither girl was in school. We suspected that they had taken more than a week for their holiday and so we issued them with a fine. On receiving this, their mother came storming into school, demanding to speak to me. “I telephoned the school on the Thursday before our holiday to say the girls were sick and wouldn’t be in school,” she complained. This was a lie. First of all, one of the girls had told all her friends they were flying out on the Thursday and because of this any phone call would have been noted. I agreed to check our telephone log and get back to her. Of course, there was no telephone call. Now I was faced with a dilemma: calling a parent a liar is not good for home-school relationships, and then I had a stroke of genius. I rang the mother and left a message on her answerphone, “I’m sorry but we don’t appear to have a record of your telephone call. However, if you can provide us with details of your flight out on Saturday then we’ll cancel the fine.” We heard no more.
One of the best jobs I had was showing prospective parents around the school. I loved showing off our dedicated staff, wonderful children and stimulating learning environment. Normally parents would see the school as it was, no frills, no added incentives to get their names on our admission lists. I did warn the couple coming round on the penultimate day of the autumn term that things would not be normal but it was the only day they could do and so they duly arrived after lunch for their tour. The first room we went into was the hall where all of our infant children were having a very boisterous Christmas party. We then set off for the upper junior classrooms. The first room was in darkness, the staff having put on a video for the children, both as a reward for the children’s hard work during the term and also to give staff a bit of time to themselves when they could collate children’s work and update records with the children around if they were needed. I explained this to the visitors and they nodded in acknowledgment. The second room was also fairly dark because the staff here were also showing a video. I explained that this was a fairly rare event. We did once convert the school into a multiplex cinema for an afternoon when we were raising money for charity and children choose which films they watched in return for a donation to Children in Need or Red Nose Day, but that was a planned event. The third room was, you may have guessed, in darkness with the video playing out on the screen. Slightly embarrassed by a distinct lack of teaching taking place with the older children, I assured the parents that the three lower junior classrooms would be more representative of the work we usually did. They weren’t. All three were showing videos. Then came the infant classrooms but as the children were in the hall partying, the classrooms were deserted – nothing to see except piles of school uniform (you've got to party in your party clothes) and empty food containers. Eager to show that we did actually do some teaching at the school, I told the parents about all the activities they would see taking place in our nursery. I’d never known them show videos for more than a few minutes, maybe at the end of the day. We walked in to be greeted with sixty children sitting passively on the carpet – watching a video. I never did check to see if these parents entrusted us with their child. I suspect we didn’t give the best impression that afternoon.
One particularly difficult meeting I had with parents concerned a case of bullying between two eleven year old boys. Every case of bullying I dealt with as a headteacher was different, covering a wide spectrum from friends falling out (the most common scenario) to rare, but highly distressing, deliberate acts of physical and verbal intimidation. In this case, there had been ongoing problems since the boys began school, and whilst we constantly monitored the situation, resulting in many months and sometimes years of calm, occasionally something would trigger a fall out between the two boys and one always came off worst. The bullied child’s mother and I had had many meetings together, but for this meeting dad came along, and it quickly became clear that he was there to show his estranged wife that he didn’t rate the way she’d been dealing with the issue and that he intended to give her a lesson in how to deal with incompetent headteachers. Throughout the meeting he adopted a very aggressive stance but, as I pointed out repeatedly to each of his prepared questions, we had put into place many measures and taken a number of actions including, on this occasion, excluding the bullying child. Eventually, as I batted yet another accusation away, he leant forward, shook his head and said, “You know your problem?” I waited for the tirade of abuse, "You’re just too reasonable.” I could wish for no better description.