DANCING ON THE TABLES - PART 4
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE PUBLIC
The doors of the train opened and forty children boarded. The looks on the faces of the passengers told many stories. Some barely glanced our way, some of the older passengers smiled benevolently, but many looked horror struck as their journey from hell had just got a little bit worse. At the start of a week in London, our children would lack confidence, being thrown about as the train lurched from side to side and forever checking how many stations to go. By about Wednesday, they were seasoned professionals: anyone would think they'd spent all their lives travelling underground. Once the other passengers saw that the children were sensible, well behaved and considerate, they relaxed and the journeys were always uneventful. It was one of the few occasions that I came into contact with the general public during my years as a classroom teacher. But as a head, these encounters became more frequent.
In my opinion, anyone who buys a house in close proximity to a school must realise that there will be some disruption to your everyday life at the beginning and end of the school day. My school was on a small housing estate on the city limits with just one road in and out. This caused considerable problems around traffic, both moving and stationary. The majority of our parents had no option but to drive to school, living a significant distance away with the only pedestrian approach along an incredibly busy main road with no pavements. This meant there were an inordinate amount of cars as children were brought to school and collected. The mornings were less fraught as the arrival of children was staggered and many parents simply pulled up and jettisoned their load of children. The afternoons were different, with parents parking their cars so they could walk to meet their children at the classroom doors. Like all schools, we had zigzag lines outside our two exits and rarely did cars stop there. However, anywhere else was fair game and this included blocking the driveways of local residents. We had to try and find solutions and so, with the assistance of the local authority, we developed a travel plan. One easy fix was to introduce a voluntary one-way system around the estate. Whilst this brought cars onto roads that would otherwise have been fairly free of school traffic, it did avoid the situation that was happening most days where, because of parked cars reducing the road to one lane, we had gridlock as vehicles attempted to use the same bit of road to go in opposite directions. Next we got a footpath opened up to a nearby estate where many of our children lived. We installed bike sheds and encouraged the children to walk, scoot and cycle to school. Despite this, every so often I'd get an angry phone call from a resident who'd just had a heated exchange with one of the parents and I had to calm the situation down and reassure the resident that we'd put something in the next newsletter about it. I became an expert on the law surrounding parking. Park across an empty driveway and you're being inconsiderate and selfish: park across a driveway with a car on the drive and you're breaking the law. I had to urge residents to take number plates and report the drivers to the police, pointing out that my jurisdiction ended at the school gate.
During one blitz on inappropriate parking, my chair of governors stormed into school. "Have you seen how they are parking out there?" he asked, "They are parked so far onto the pavement that there is no room to get by." My extensive knowledge of parking regulations meant that I knew there had to be enough room to get a wheelchair or a double buggy past so I agreed to his suggestion that we needed a short sharp shock to make the poorer parkers act responsibly. The next afternoon, I went outside at the end of the day and took photographs of what was really appalling parking, to be published in the next newsletter, albeit with number plates blurred, in order to shame the car owners into more responsible action. The only problem was that the car parked furthest across the footpath and so qualifying as the worst example unfortunately happened to belong to my chair of governors. I published the pictures but it was never something that he ever recommended again.
Generally, we had little to do with the locals. Apart from parking and traffic, we were considerate to our neighbours and so it was a shock the when something blew up unexpectedly. In order to supplement our funding, the governors decided to advertise the hire of the school hall. Being stuck on the edge of suburbia meant we had very few takers. However, one weekend, it had been hired out for a wedding reception. It was summer but the weather had been lousy for weeks. Fortunately for the happy couple, a change brought blistering sunshine and tropical temperatures for their special day. At exactly the same time as the reception moved from the meal and speeches to a very loud disco, local residents, enjoying their first decent day of the summer, spilled out into their gardens to enjoy a peaceful evening. Exacerbating the situation further were the unbearable temperatures in the school hall, so windows were wound down and doors flung open as some of the guests continued their celebrations in the playground. It was not a great combination but I was totally unaware of this as I arrived at school on the Monday morning. The forty emails should have alerted me to the problems to come and then the phone calls began. It took me most of the day to calm things down, my final email sent to governors in which I strongly recommended wedding receptions be taken off the list of uses the hall could be put to.
I did struggle with the man who lived around the corner from the school who usually rang me up to moan about parents parking outside his house. On a couple of occasions I went to investigate and found the cars parked quite properly, not obstructing any driveways or blocking footpaths: he just didn't like seeing cars outside his house. One day, he rang me to talk about a completely different subject: litter, specifically litter on the footpath to the other estate. I explained that we didn't allow children to bring in sweets, we sold healthy snacks at break time and insisted that rubbish from packed lunches was deposited in a large dustbin before children left the dinner hall. The only way the children could be dropping litter was if it was things their parents had brought them at the end of the school day. I promised to talk about it in assembly and, of course, to put something about litter in the next newsletter. "Do you know," concluded Mr. Angry, "the worst thing about the litter is the number empty beer bottles and lager cans." I did point out that our children, all being aged eleven or under, were most likely not the ones who'd been drinking and that perhaps the real litter culprits were the drinkers, but he was not to be dissuaded from his chosen line of attack.
The school fete was another occasion when I would come into direct contact with the general public. Whilst most people attending would be related to the children in some way or another, local residents would also pop in to see what was on offer and to swipe up any bargains. I usually spent the day manically putting up stalls and games, then wandering around surveying the scene and socialising followed by more mad packing away at the end of the day. One fete began particularly badly as I drove to school along the busy main road that carried a lot of commuter traffic in and out of the city. My Parent Teacher Association had erected a large, bright yellow banner on the roadside that read: 'SCHOOL FATE TODAY.' I did a double take as I drove along and then despaired. What kind of message did that send out about our school, the name of which was emblazoned along the bottom of the banner? On arriving in school, I picked up some coloured paper, scissors and tape and five minutes later I was parked up next to the banner, turning the first giant A into a equally large E. I asked them to order another banner the following year. This wasn't the only time the PTA had spelling problems with an order. In our summer musicals, all the children would be wearing costumes except the small band of helpers who became the stage hands, adding and removing props and scenery with little fuss between scenes. I thought it would be a nice idea for them to have black t-shirts which identified them as the stage crew. The PTA offered to buy them and an order was sent off. When it arrived in school, I quickly ripped open the package to discover the t-shirts all bore the legend 'Stag Crew' on the back, wording more appropriate to the printing company's normal clientele and remarkably unsuitable for nine and ten year olds. The t-shirts went back.
One member of the public who made quite a stir attended one of my first summer fairs as a head. He wasn't completely unrelated to children in the school: he was the boyfriend of one the mothers and he'd come along to support her and her children. Unfortunately, the children's father was also there and on seeing his wife's lover an altercation ensued. It resulted in one barging into the other and the police getting involved. School fetes are stressful enough without that kind of malarkey. This same father, incidentally, marched his children out of the local church in the middle of a harvest festival service because his wife had turned up to watch and when she eventually decided to leave him, he asked me to break the news to his three children because he was too distraught, one of the most difficult tasks I ever had to carry out.
On a lighter note, every so often, our local top-flight football clubs would send us free tickets for one of their games. The free tickets were a way to support the local community, to encourage new fans and fill up half empty stadia when the opposition wasn't that appealing. The first game I took a party to, we actually lost a child as we came out of the stadium. As the accompanying parents went into meltdown, I made my way to where we'd parked our cars and there was our lost soul. It was only afterwards that the implications of what had happened hit me. It was a little while before I took up the next free ticket offer, this time travelling by train and walking to the ground from the station. The outward journey had been a doddle, the adults amused when one of the children asked a policeman who he thought was going to win. "Manchester United," came the reply which caused some consternation amongst the children: Manchester United were playing Southampton that day, we were playing Cardiff. The return journey was more fraught because, as we waited to cross a busy main road en route back to the station, a young member of the public or football hooligan to give him a more accurate title, came up to me and said, "You need to get these kids out of here, there's going to be a huge fight." I surveyed the scene. A large group of troublemakers were assembling a few yards away, readying themselves to attack the Cardiff supporters on their way back to the station. Unfortunately there was no other way for us to go so I ignored the friendly advice and marched the children confidently and rather quickly through the crowd of thugs and on to catch our train.
There are times when members of the public really let themselves down. Two occasions spring to mind. The first occurred at a services on the M5 as our school group returned from a week in the Forest of Dean. Our arrival there coincided with that of two coach loads of pensioners. As our children politely held doors open and waited their turns, the pensioners barged past, pushing some of the children out of the way, with not a hint of a 'thank you' or an 'excuse me'. My children were outraged. The other occasion was just before Christmas. Our children came from three villages and although we had a lot to do with the residents of the village that the school was situated in, there was little interaction with the other two. I thought it would be really good to take a group of parents and children round one of these other villages to do some carol singing. One evening, our little makeshift choir assembled at school. Carol sheets were handed out, collecting boxes for our chosen charity were divided amongst some of the parents and off we set. The endeavour began well with a number of villagers commenting on what a lovely thing this was to do. Nearing the end of our singing, with thoughts of hot soup and mulled wine back at the school, we trooped down the path of a house festooned in Christmas lights. We gave a rousing rendition of Good King Wenceslas, our enthusiastic delivery making up for any musical deficiencies, and then someone knocked at the door. No-one answered. Fearing the residents may not have heard our performance we embarked upon an encore, this time extolling the delights of the little town of Bethlehem. The door was knocked and still nothing happened. We were just trooping up the path, giving it up as a bad job, when an upstairs window was thrown open. There then followed a tirade of abuse aimed at our little group which included several words that even the adults hadn't encountered before. As we scuttled off, the angry resident's words followed us – not really the kind of interaction with the local community I'd had in mind.
KEEPING THEM SAFE AND SECURE
The safety of children in school is of paramount importance to all staff but especially the headteacher. After the dreadful events at Dunblane, school security became a hot topic and soon schools all over the country started sprouting security fences, door key codes and CCTV. One could argue that Dunblane was the first incident of this kind and that if a crazed gunman was set on getting into most schools, he or she would most likely succeed, but it would have been a brave school that bucked the trend. The first time I had reason to thank the security locks we'd installed on the external doors was when Grannie Connors died. The matriarch of an extensive gypsy traveller family who lived on a site in my school's catchment area, Grannie Connors was unknown to me, but her sad demise resulted in a gathering of the clans and, during the course of one afternoon, we admitted about twenty little Connors. Some stayed with us until just after the funeral, others for a few weeks longer and one family appeared to take up permanent residence on the site. Their son, Tom, had school dinners at lunchtime but, after three weeks, we'd had no money to pay for them. This was unlike traveller families who would usually pay up religiously. Letters were sent, messages left, threats made. Eventually I rang Tom's father to tell him we could no longer provide a dinner and that someone would have to provide him with a packed lunch. Leaving me in no doubt that there would be no packed lunch making an appearance, I informed him that Tom would be given some milk and a biscuit but that was all. After being sworn at, one of only two occasions during eighteen years of headship when this occurred, he hung up. When lunchtime arrived, we had the tricky task of telling Tom about his reduced diet and his reaction was to head off to the cloakroom in tears, telling me that he was going home. I couldn't let this happen, so summoned my deputy and we followed him into the cloakroom to try to persuade him to stay in school. When it became obvious that our explanations were having little effect, I positioned myself on the self locking outer door, my hand over the lock, my deputy stood in front of the door back into school and there we stayed for the next hour. Tom made various attempts to break free, as we sent a host of messages through one of the teachers on the other side of the door to the local authority to enquire if what we were doing was acceptable practice – it was, and to see if they had any suggestions on how to resolve the standoff – they didn't. Eventually, Tom gave up, had his milk and biscuit and went to afternoon lessons. He went home after school and we never saw him again.
When I moved to my last school, it was already surrounded by eight foot high metal fencing which had proved no barrier to one family during the summer holidays. Looking for a suitable spot to have a run around, a game of football and a picnic one balmy day, the father went back home and returned a few minutes later with two ladders. These were placed either side of the fence, enabling the entire family to gain access to the school grounds for an enjoyable afternoon. We received plenty of advice on how to make the school more secure. One police presentation talked about ways to direct the public towards controlled entrances to the school such as the front office. They showed us a fascinating video featuring a man in a deck chair on a beach. People walked by right in front of him. Then he got up and drew a large circle around his deckchair in the sand with his spade. From that moment on, people passing by walked around the perimeter of the inscribed circle, even though there was nothing to physically stop them taking the same route as before. Notional barriers work to keep people from going places you don't want them to visit. Some schools had security as tight as the Bank of England. I took a group of four children to a neighbouring school to work with some of their children on a joint project that we were involved with. Our visit coincided with one of our year groups taking part in an inter-school sports afternoon at the same school so, on completing our business, the children and I made our way onto the field to see how the sports were going. So far, so good but, on our return, we found the door we'd used to exit the school was firmly locked. I discovered another door which took us into an inner courtyard. As we wandered around this, seeking a way into the building, the door we'd just come through closed behind us and also locked. Try as we might, we could find no way out. In the end, we had to knock on windows and eventually we managed to summon the cook who had to ring the front office to get permission for us to escape through her kitchen. It was security gone mad. Ironically, two months later, the school failed its Ofsted inspection purely on a technicality about security.
We regularly reviewed our security arrangements and had to draw up plans as to what to do in an emergency. My senior leadership team was rather taken with the 'helicopter' procedure, where we had to imagine that we were flying above the scene of the emergency, looking down – taking an overview. Our first 'helicopter' moment came one Thursday when the caretaker greeted me on my arrival at school with a worrying observation. "I can smell gas," he said. We quickly discovered the smell was coming from the kitchens and immediately contacted the Gas Board who promised to send someone out to investigate. We now had to decide whether to let the children into school. If there was any chance of an explosion then it wasn't safe and so we closed. We rang the local radio station to get the message put out before parents set off to school and staff went out onto the surrounding pavements to turn the children away. By nine o clock, we had completed our mission. By ten past nine, they had fixed the leak!
This reminds me of the very first time I closed a school. I was in my first term as a deputy when the head went out on a course for the day, leaving me in charge for the first time. At eleven, it began snowing; by twelve it was settling. Knowing that most of our children were bussed home on narrow country lanes and the buses wouldn't come if there was a risk of snow blocking the roads, I made the decision and a number of village representatives were contacted. Parents began making their way to collect the children. As they arrived, the sun burst through, the snow stopped and, as the last few parents set off with their collected children, not a spot of snow remained. I hated closing the school for snow. I was in a no win situation. If I kept open, I was putting the safety of staff who had to drive to work at risk: if I closed, I was hugely inconveniencing parents. I'd make the decision, then listen despondently to the local radio. Almost inevitably, if we closed you could bet on our nearest neighbouring schools being open. Likewise, if we stayed open, our neighbours would close. There was never any collaboration or joint decision making which would have made things much easier.
Two weeks after the gas scare, I arrived to school on the Thursday morning to be, once again, greeted by a worried caretaker. "The boiler's packed up," he informed me. As we were in a pretty nasty cold spell and the classrooms were well below acceptable temperatures for staff to work in under Health and Safety rules, our 'helicopter' decided to close again. This time it took far longer to get things back to normal. Then four weeks after that, on yet another Thursday, it was a police officer arriving at the front office before school that set alarm bells ringing. This time, we didn't need the helicopter as the police were telling us to close. A body had been found in the field that bordered the school grounds and they needed to secure the area in case foul play had been involved. In the event, it turned out the deceased had died of natural causes. When I informed the local authority of our closure, the rumour went round their offices that it was the body of the school's building advisor, the man who'd made such a spectacularly bad job of arranging for the roof to be replaced: they thought we'd finally had enough and bumped him off.
It was quite a few years after this run of three emergencies that another arrived. I was sitting with a group of older children one afternoon, hearing them read and questioning them about the text, when my office manager approached me with a beckoning finger. "I think you'd better come and see what's going on," she whispered out of earshot of the children who were desperately trying to eavesdrop. "What's the matter?" I asked. "We have armed police at the front of the school," came her reply. When I went out the front door, I was met by about ten officers in black uniforms, all carrying automatic weapons. They wouldn't tell me what was going on, but told me to make sure all the children were inside and all the external doors locked. I knew we had a class outside playing hockey, so my first job was to get them in quickly without causing any alarm. Then I sent staff around to check the external doors were closed: teachers were notorious for propping them open on hot days, despite regular reminders not to do so. Half an hour later, we were advised to let the children go home through the entrances on the far side of the school. Parents had been directed there and, despite my protestations that we knew nothing about the police operation, a number grumbled about how we knew but were deliberate keeping the truth from them: first hand experience of how easy conspiracy theories can emerge. It later transpired that there had been reports of shots being fired in the 'body' field, something that turned out to be true, much to the consternation of a rather surprised and embarrassed farmer who'd been dispatching the odd rabbit or two.
We always held half-termly fire practices which the children treated sensibly with a certain 'here we go again' attitude. After picking up on any points for improvement, I would always stress that we did this so that if there ever was a fire, we'd get everyone out quickly because they'd assume it was a practice. After the armed police incident, we thought that we ought to practice getting the children in as soon as we could in case we needed to do another lockdown. Even though we'd talked the children through what was going to happen, the first time we tried it, the children began to panic and demand to know what dangers lurked outside. This happened nearly every time we practised our in-vacuation procedures. One last word on fire practices: the caretaker had a special key for turning the alarm on the central control panel when we had a practice. One day, I was looking through some paperwork and discovered that we had yet to have a practice that half-term and the opportunities to do so were running out. The caretaker was on a break until just before the children finished for the day so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I found a 'smash the glass in the event of fire' alarm and carefully unscrewed the cover. As I took the cover and restraint glass away, the alarm went off and the children left the building in an orderly manner. We timed their response, gave feedback and let them back into school. I now carefully replaced the glass and cover but, pressing a little too hard, the glass broke. I soon discovered that there was now no way to turn the alarm off. My secretary got onto the alarm company who promised to send someone over as soon as possible to fix it. In the meantime, whilst the main alarm fell silent after a prescribed number of minutes, the control panel in my secretary's office continued full blast for the remainder of the afternoon. I kept apologising and she kept saying it was OK, but it wasn't and she left shortly after the children, nursing a major headache.
Back to the advice the police gave us regarding directing people to controlled areas of the school. Our experience on attending their briefing did make us wonder if they knew what they were talking about. My chair of governors and I had been invited to attend the meeting at the police headquarters, just outside the city. We'd pulled into the car park and looked for signs to show us where to go. Then we spotted a man who I was sure I had seen at headteacher meetings before. He was obviously going to the same meeting so we decided to follow him. He entered a large building on the right hand side of the car park and we followed him in. He went through a door, holding it open for us and then repeated this procedure as we continued through the next three doors. Finally he took a left turn through an open doorway and closed the door behind him. Now we were confused, even more so when we read the sign on the door: Detective Inspector Williams. He wasn't someone I'd seen at headteacher meetings, he was a police inspector who'd led two perfect strangers attending a course on keeping you premises secure, right into the heart of police headquarters – so much for security!
LOST PROPERTY
We would regularly ask parents to carry out a simple task. This was to place the names of their offspring on any item of clothing that they might bring in to school: shirts, trousers, skirts, plimsolls, jumpers, hats – because if they could wear it, they could lose it, and lose it they did on frequent occasions. Come a bit of warm weather and three hundred children would jettison their identical sweatshirts on the school field. At the end of the lunch break, most of these would be reacquainted with their owners but there were always a pile of unclaimed items with either no names inside, names that had faded to illegibility or names of past pupils from whom the clothing had been passed on or purchased second hand. Of course, when the child discovered they were missing some item of clothing or equipment, it was never lost – it had always been 'stolen'. Various children would be implicated because they’d been seen in the proximity of the pencil case or standing by the child’s peg in the cloakroom. At the end of the day, parents would be informed and many came into school to demand that the staff stop immediately what they are doing and locate the lost items. We had a large wooden chest where anything abandoned and unnamed would be deposited and that would be the first port of call. As the term progressed, the box would fill quickly and then begin to overflow into the surrounding area. Three times a year we would put everything out on display and invite parents and children to cast their eyes over it after school in the vain hope that some things may be recognised. Any clothing left would then be sold fairly cheaply as second hand uniform. I would reckon that hundreds of pounds worth of parents’ money was thrown away each year and all because of a lack of names on clothing or equipment.
Sometimes things went missing deliberately. One such occasion happened when a mother came into school one afternoon, pointing out that although her son had come to school in the morning wearing the accepted number of shoes, he now had only the one. This 50% reduction was obviously a concern and an extensive search began. We scoured the cloakrooms, examined every nook and cranny in the classroom but the missing shoe's whereabouts remained a mystery. As we stood around, contemplating how something as large as a shoe could possibly have disappeared into thin air, a memory from earlier in the day came flooding back. I’d been in the staffroom talking to one of the teachers when there had been a loud thump. It had appeared to come from the ceiling but that would have been impossible. I’d opened the staffroom door to see if I could locate the cause of the thud but there was nobody about and so I thought no more about it. Perhaps the noise had come from a shoe being lobbed into the space between the false ceiling and the roof. The cloakroom was next door and there I discovered a missing polystyrene tile, removed by the caretaker earlier in the week because it was broken. “Just a moment,” I said disappearing off to fetch the caretaker’s ladder. On my return, I climbed up and peered into the void. There, above the staffroom ceiling, was the aforementioned shoe, apparently thrown there by some mean child as a joke and then forgotten about. I reclaimed it and, descending down the ladder, presented it to the bemused mother with the words, “There you are – one shoe,” as if finding shoes in the roof space was an everyday occurrence at the school. This wasn't the only occasion when I retrieved missing shoes. Often children kicking footballs would also kick off their shoe and a number would land on the the roof. Then I would be up another ladder getting it back. One child's shoe made an adventurous journey over the fence into a jungle of thorns and brambles. Once again, I valiantly reunited it with its owner, but not before covering myself in a mass of scratches and deciding that, if it happened again, I'd make a note of where the shoe had landed and inform the child's parents – there were limits.
Residential visits were a constant source of lost property. With children being required to look after their own belongings for five days, it was inevitable that some things would be misplaced. The more canny parents sent their children with inventories taped to the inside of their cases but for most children, what they took home was an approximation of what they come with and there would always be several items left behind after the children had taken their cases out to be loaded onto the coach. At one outward bounds centre, our coach pulled up alongside another coach which taking a school from Manchester back home. Somehow, one of our cases was put on the Manchester coach and so when we unpacked back at school, one child was case-less. Phone calls the following Monday established the whereabouts of the misplaced case and the coach company, who’d made the loading mistake, brought it back to school a week or so later when one of their coaches was passing nearby. I rang the parents who I thought would be delighted; however I was told they didn’t want it back. I now had a case full of dirty clothes abandoned and beginning to smell in the school entrance hall. Eventually I told the parents that I didn't care what they did with the suitcase so long as it left the school premises as soon as possible. I think they took it to the tip.
Once the children had taken the cases out of the rooms, we would do a sweep to round up the debris that had been abandoned. Anything embarrassing or unpleasant such as pants and socks would be immediately binned – nobody would ever claim these as their own in front of their friends. Some things were claimed and the rest joined the overflowing lost property box back in school. Once, we found a toiletry bag. No big deal normally, but this one had been bought especially for the trip and was still in its sealed plastic wrapper. Inside, along with the unused soap, the unused flannel and the unused antiperspirant was a virgin toothbrush and toothpaste. We asked whose it was but all the children denied ownership. There was only one way to identify the owner. We walked amongst the children using our noses to locate the smelliest and soon homed in on Anthony. We took him to one side, where he finally acknowledged that it was his wash-bag: he'd not washed all week. His one concern was that his mother would find out. We promised not to tell her, but I rather suspect that mother would have quickly discovered his secret as they drove home in the close confines of her car.
A TRIP TO TAIWAN
“Would anyone like to try the shrimp’s brains?” the waiter enquired. “He will,” came the reply as nine fingers pointed towards me. A ten-day British Council visit to look at Taiwan’s education system was turning out to be quite a learning curve.
Being a bit of a magpie, I liked to visit other schools and steal all their best ideas. This was the thinking behind the British Council visit: take ten British headteachers, put them in Taiwanese schools and let all concerned learn from each other. In practice, the Taiwanese schools and culture were so very different from our own that it was hard to find much that would work in our own schools. For example, most of their primary schools had over a thousand pupils and at lunch and play breaks, the children would all go outside with absolutely no adult supervision whatsoever. We observed, open-mouthed as the older children took responsibility for the younger children, knowing where staff were if they were needed and it worked brilliantly. Whilst we’d have liked to try it out in our British schools, we could all see the headlines in the national papers. I did try out a limited version of this on my return to England. During the cold winter months, the children were not allowed to play on the field as it became very wet and muddy. This meant games of football being played on our limited playground space with the inevitable injuries sustained by non-footballers who happened to get in the way. My plan was to allow children in the oldest two classes to play on the field providing they had a change of clothes, they weren’t late back into class and, most importantly, if there was a dispute, they resolved it themselves like the Taiwanese children. Any involvement of lunchtime staff meant a suspension of football on the field. Given this incentive to police their own games and take responsibility, they stepped up to the mark and there were just a handful of bans imposed over the ten years the scheme was in operation.
Another major difference between our culture and theirs was their attitude to competition; I believe that competition is a good thing provided it is part of a balanced approach to education. In Taiwan competition was everything. We were treated to displays by schools' swimming teams, their gymnastic teams, even a diabalo throwing team. The biggest competition was for the best test results and parents placed such high value on these that the majority of children spent every evening at their local cramming school, practising, practising and practising. Taiwanese society is highly aspirational (a good thing), fairly law abiding and deferential to authority (another good thing), and obsessed with these tests (not a good thing as evidenced by their high teenage suicide rate). English schools are frequently hammered by politicians and the media for not doing as well as South East Asian schools in international tests, but it has far more to do with the culture than the quality of teaching or the methods used. It is no coincidence that the ethnic group that performs best in English schools is the one composed of children from China and South East Asia. A study in Australia illustrated this perfectly. Australia came somewhere around 15th in the last international league tables, but if you extracted the results of second generation South East Asian children, those who had been born in the country after their parents moved there, they would have performed better than every other country except one – it wasn’t the quality of teaching in schools, it was cultural background these children shared. We did some work on raising aspirations on my return. Whereas their children aspired to high status careers such as becoming lawyers, doctors and successful businessmen and women, our surveys showed a desire to become footballers or pop stars, or with the younger children wizards and fairies! We did get one child who wanted to become a marine biologist and another who had a yearning to become an undertaker.
On our first day in Taiwan, we were free to explore the city. Our British Council hosts had taught us a few words of Chinese on the coach from the airport and one of my colleagues was very keen to try these out. “Che che,” he would say to anyone who helped him in any way. When he said this to our hosts as we boarded the coach on day two, they enquired what he was trying to say. “I’m saying Thank you,” he explained. “Oh dear,” they replied, “Thank you is pronounced chi chi.” It transpired he’d been thanking everybody by saying the Chinese word for toilet. No wonder there were so many bemused shopkeepers! There were many sights to see on that first free day and my nine headteacher colleagues and I were keen to visit what was then the tallest building in the world, Taipei 365, but there was a problem. Getting there meant using the city's metro system whose station names were, not unreasonably, written in Chinese. Being something of an underground railway enthusiast, I had already studied the metro map in great detail and immediately took charge. When the others discovered that this would be the 20th underground railway I had travelled on, I became the resident expert and soon I was being quizzed on everything from rolling stock to station design, about which incidentally I knew nothing. It is the custom on these trips for the visiting teachers to provide a ‘British’ gift for their host schools at the end of the visit, such as, it was suggested, Scottish shortbread. I had racked my brains for an original British gift and ended up buying... Scottish shortbread. At Heathrow however, I had decided this wasn't enough and I had bought an additional gift. So when it was agreed we would pool our presents to be distributed amongst all of the schools we had visited, out came the shortbread. And then I added my Heathrow purchase – a tea towel with a map of the London Underground on it. My status immediately transformed from underground expert to underground nerd.
On our last evening, the senior staff of the school where I'd spent the most time took me out to dinner. Teachers were well paid and respected in Taiwan and, once trained, relatively free from scrutiny from the government. There was an expectation that they would undertake further studies to keep themselves up to date and to carry out their own research. They were given sabbaticals in which to do this, quality time away from the hurly burly of the classroom. I was very envious. The senior staff had chosen a top class restaurant which was amazing: lantern lit paths around amazing gardens where diners were eating under the stars. It was explained to me that it was the traditional to have a drink when, and only when, a toast was made. Our meal began and, one by one, members of our group stood and made a toast. As we sat down, my wine glass would be topped up so that after about 15 toasts, I was starting to feel slightly tipsy. After 30 toasts I'd decided it would be prudent to start on the soft drinks and so I declined any more wine. This caused some consternation amongst my hosts. Disappointedly, they explained that they had read many articles about the drunken behaviour of the British and they had wanted to observe the phenomenon first hand!
Now I’m a bit of a fussy eater. I confided this to one of my colleagues on the plane coming over, telling her that I was a bit concerned about what I was going to eat over the ten days. However, when I came down to breakfast on the first morning, there was a magnificent selection of local delicacies. Some of the other headteachers were already tucking into to their traditional English, but I decided on a selection of noodles, beans and strange looking fish in exotic sauces. With that one move, my reputation as the one who’d try anything was established and every time we were offered something unfamiliar, I was volunteered for trying it out.
THE ART OF DELEGATION
There is an art to delegation and it takes time to perfect the skill. Done well, it empowers others whilst it relieves you of the burden of having to do everything yourself. By the time I’d moved to my second headship, I’d begun to hone my skills but it was still a learning process. By the time I retired, my staff would say I’d got delegation off to a tee, especially when it involved jobs that I didn’t want to do. At some leadership training, I was introduced to the idea of the monkey on your back. The monkey is some unpleasant task that comes your way because the person faced with dealing with it cons you into thinking it needs sorting out by someone higher up the leadership structure. They pass the monkey on. The trick was to pass it back again wherever possible. I made the mistake of informing my senior leadership team of this strategy and after that, one particular teacher would come to me with an issue I’d given her to sort with the words, “You can have your monkey back!”
My first attempt at delegation at my new school was a bit of a disaster. The school had only been open five years and was located on the edge of the urban sprawl from the city. This meant we backed onto farmers’ fields (where shots and bodies would be encountered) and we had a large playing field with nothing but grass on it. Granted we were luckier than many inner city schools where playground space was at a premium and children had to use local parks for their games. My deputy head, Helen, came to me with an idea. She wanted to enlist parents to help transform the outside environment into a much more interesting place for the children. Her plan had two parts: to thin out a little spinney we had growing by the side of one playground to make a nature walk, something I’d had at my previous school which turned out to be a great educational resource; and to dig beds in the blank canvas of the school field to be planted with trees and shrubs. I gave her the go ahead and she entered into the challenge with great enthusiasm. Come the day when the transformation would begin, parents arrived at school with spades, forks, chainsaws, and one even came on a JCB. The beds were dug out in no time at all and, having seen that all was good, I made a fatal mistake – I left her to it. It wasn’t until much later in the day that I returned to the scene and found that one or two things had not quite gone according to the original plan. For a start, the spinney hadn’t been trimmed back: it had been nearly obliterated. Instead of an abundance of trees, it now numbered about six, rising up from the barren earth in a scene resembling the aftermath of a nuclear attack. All along one side of the playground had stood a row of young saplings. Not any more. Never mind that this was never on the plan, the parent with the chainsaw had lopped them all off near to their base. The only part that appeared to have gone to plan was the beds cut out of the field. These had been covered in weed suppressing material and covered with bark chippings. I think Helen had managed to get a local garden centre to provide the chippings free of charge because they were everywhere – on the beds, in the area previously known as the spinney and down the side of the playground. It was too late to do anything about it so I thanked her and the parents for their efforts and then the problems began.
The first issue was the chippings down the side of the playground. It is sometimes said that if you remove a pebble from the beach will not cause any harm, but that if everyone did it, you’d end up with no beach. Apply this theory to chippings down the side of a playground and I have the proof. Two days after the project completed, there were hardly any chipping left. Dinner ladies, ever vigilant, spotted one or two children stuffing their pockets with them, apparently to take home. I know not what intrinsic value these tiny pieces of wood held for my children, but they almost completely stripped the area in a week. I had to read the riot act in assembly the following Monday and declared an amnesty for any chipping returned and we did actually get some back. The sparsity of chippings highlighted the forlorn looking tree stumps, left behind after the chainsaw massacre. They particularly vexed my caretaker who rated them a health and safety hazard. I’m afraid that our views were not compatible and so he resorted to a more devious way to get his concerns across: he got someone to write an anonymous letter to me, threatening me with the Health and Safety Executive if I didn’t do something about the trip hazards. Annoyed at being blackmailed like this, I decided to get the caretaker to tape the whole area off. It now looked more like a police crime scene than a playground for children. We tried to think of ways to remove the stumps but they’d originally been planted in compacted gravel and we could neither dig them out nor get a saw close enough to the ground to render them harmless. One parent had a brilliant idea. Why not turn the stumps into little stools for the children to sit on? The parent kindly cut out wooden seats and fixed them onto the stumps. It was the perfect solution and the tape came down. However, as the summer progressed, the stumps began sprouting shoots that made it impossible to sit on the stools: the tape went back up again. This problem was not resolved until the caretaker left the school and I allowed nature to take its course and let the trees to regrow.
The beds of trees and shrubs were less of a problem to begin with but then, as birds foraged through the chippings and the wind and children distributed them further afield, we were soon left with vast areas of black weed suppressant that started to fray at the edges. And then the weeds took over. At the time of our first visit from Ofsted, the beds looked every bit as desolate as the spinney and playground edge. Fortunately, the inspectors found other things to be not impressed with in our fairly average results but the wildernesses splattered around the school field can’t have helped create a positive picture.
Travel forward ten years and the grounds are a joy to behold. The spinney is a spinney again, the side of the playground is a mass of trees and the beds are wonderful places for children to make pathways and dens. It all turned out well in the end, but it taught me a valuable lesson about delegation: when you delegate, you need to place your trust in those you’ve delegated to but you also need to carefully monitor what they’re doing.