DANCING ON THE TABLES - PART 5
TESTING TIMES
When I retired, I missed my daily interaction with children in assembly and staff in staff meetings. I decided to put together a talk about my teaching pedigree and began researching the history of primary education in England over the five generations that my ancestors and I had been teaching. One of the first things I discovered was that, despite many changes in the world of education, certain issues kept reoccurring in every generation. One of these was what is referred to as high stakes testing. In the nineteenth century schools were paid according to how their children did in the three Rs (reading, writing and ‘rithmetic), fractions, dictation and reading from a newspaper. This led teachers to concentrate on these specific areas to the detriment of the rest of the curriculum. The phrase ‘narrowing the curriculum’ came into being and reappeared next during the time of the eleven plus and more recently with the every growing dominance of SATs, the tests given to ten and eleven year olds in May each year.
I have always tested children. Weekly times tables and spelling tests were a constant feature of my class teaching and as a head, I oversaw reading, spelling and maths tests. They were one off, snapshots of what a child could do on that particular day and helped teachers in their on-going assessment, identifying what steps they needed to take next in order to progress effectively. SATs began life like this. The first couple of years, I carried them out in my classroom, in test conditions, but without any pressure from outside the school. Then Ofsted was introduced and test results became something that was easy to measure. They became the basis for making judgements about a school and league tables were complied and published. Judgements could mean schools being praised or pilloried in the local press. Sadly, some excellent teachers left the profession because they couldn’t cope with the new demands the inspection and test regime created. Whilst I despised the uses the test results were put to, I did benefit from them, becoming a marker of maths papers, a job I held for twenty-five years. Government ministers, always needing to prove how successful their policies were, would leap upon any improvements in results. Such an improvement happened within the first few years of their introduction but the reasons they gave for dramatic rise were nothing to do with better teaching or government policy. The first papers I marked took no time at all to complete. Apart from having to mark perfectly correct answers wrong because they didn’t fit into the accepted answers of the mark scheme, most of the papers in the first year were only half attempted. By the following year, far more of the papers had been answered and by year three, it was unusual to find any where the child had not made attempts at nearly all the questions: the reason for this – exam technique. When the results don’t matter, you let the children work at their own pace and complete what they can. When your job and the school's reputation is on the line, you make sure they go through and answer all the ones they can first, have a guess at multiple choice questions because there is a chance of getting them correct, show their working out in every question because it may reward you with a mark even if you get the question wrong.
Most years, I would end the testing week by firing off a missive to either Ofsted or the Department of Education about some concerns with the tests or the results. Ofsted would always reply in full, addressing the issues I’d raised and whilst not necessarily agreeing with me, certainly taking the points I'd raised seriously. The DoE were useless. This was characterised by the reply I received after a particularly stressful set of tests one year. Natalie was a very good mathematician. She was easily at level 5, the level above that expected of most children. She was nervous of the tests so we had done quite a bit of work preparing her but, five questions in, she hit a barrier. She could not understand what the question was asking. The more she read and reread it, the more complicated it became. Staff only became aware of this when they noticed her crying. They were horrified because, rather than leave the question and come back to it later, she’d just stalled. With only fifteen minutes left to complete three quarters of the paper, she hadn’t a chance. When her results came back, she’d not even achieved the expected standard, level 4 and in doing so, lowered our results by a significant amount as well as attaining a completely inappropriate score. I wrote to the DoE complaining about the stress that the tests were placing on young children. The reply told me in quite plain terms that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that children were not stressed by testing, this from a civil servant whose last experience of school would have been when he attended one as a pupil. Other examples of the ridiculous measures we had to take to ensure our results reflected the quality of teaching in school included sitting in one child’s kitchen, administering the test to him in his pyjamas because he was too unwell to come into school and letting a sick child come in just for the test, letting her use my office and then having to clear up the mess as she threw up on completing the last question. §The powers that be did try to address the issue of children who were unwell by allowing them to take the test within a certain timeframe. All I had to do was to ensure that the child didn’t come into contact with anyone who’d taken the test. Now, I’m sure this sounded very sensible when someone suggested it – we don’t want the other children telling the sick child what the questions are. The practicalities though were impossible. Unless I’d sat outside the family home all night, confiscated their computers and mobile phones and cut off their landline, there was absolutely no way that I could keep the sick child from contact with others.
The importance of the tests seemed to grow each year with ever more draconian measures introduced to stop any form of cheating. Test papers had to be checked when they arrived in school and then resealed and locked in a secure room where only a couple of people had access. I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you the measures adopted by the marking administrators because it would break the Official Secrets Act or some other regulation. Obviously we couldn’t discuss any of the papers with colleagues or family and travelling to and from the marker training, the mark schemes had to be in plain carrier bags so as not to arouse attention. But having to work with the blinds drawn at the training venue in case a journalist with a telephoto lens was busy snapping our deliberations seemed to me a tad over the top.
Whilst SATs week was stressful for the children, it was equally bad for staff. I would often be roped in as a ‘reader’. My job would often be to support a child who had significant issues with reading and processing information. In a maths test, it is the child’s mathematical knowledge that is being assessed, not their reading ability and so I would read the question to them if they asked me to. The problem with this was that I had to sit with them and, in between reading the odd question, I had to watch them fill in their answers. The agony of watching a pencil hover between correct and incorrect answers; the pain of seeing them get hold of the wrong idea and spend ages carrying out some pretty complex calculation which bore no relation to the actual question; the misery, whilst they were checking their work, of observing them rub out a perfectly correct answer and replace it with a wrong one. By the end of the tests, I’d be convinced that all our children had failed and that I’d be out of a job in a few weeks time.
ON THE TELLY
When I was a young lad, I rather fancied being a television presenter. I now know that I would have been totally useless at the job. Interview me for an article in the newspaper and I will present a coherent and succinct response. Put a microphone in front of me for a radio interview and I will come across as eloquent and knowledgeable. Point a television camera in my direction and I become a jabbering idiot, barely able to string a sentence together. When our regional news broadcaster came to film a feature on our work with dyslexic children, I felt fairly confident. First they interviewed some of the children who explained the difficulties they faced and the support that staff were giving them. Then it was my turn. I knew what we’d done: the training that staff had received, the changes to the way we taught reading. It’s just that I was unable to articulate these in any way. The interviewer, a patient young woman, tried again and again as I stumbled over my words. Eventually, after about five takes, I managed to get my replies into some sort of order but now there was another problem. I was coming across as incredibly boring, answering in a monotone. The interviewer encouraged me to be more dynamic, to show enthusiasm, to make my face come alive. It seemed to work because after a few more goes, it was in the can. I watched it later that evening, giving myself a fairly generous B-. The children were nailed on As.
My first appearance on the small screen had come after a training day at the start of the academic year. This was always a time for restating our goals, reviewing the previous year and identifying the developments we intended to introduce. It could be a bit dry and with everyone returning after a long summer holiday, I needed something to lighten the atmosphere and get staff on board. As they trickled in, I would have a PowerPoint presentation running in the form of a quiz. This particular year, it was all to do with numbers and one of the questions was, ‘How many sets of twins do we have in school?’ Before we got down to the main business, I ran through the answers. The twins question drew quite a response, not only from the staff but also from some of the governors who’d been invited in to take part in the day. Ten sets of twins in a school of 280 is a significant amount. One of my governors was particularly impressed with this figure. He’d worked in hospital radio for many years and had good contacts with the regional news people at the BBC. “They might be interested in running a story on this,” he told me. I was happy because it would mean good publicity for the school. After contacting the parents of the children involved to get permission for their children to be filmed, a time and date was arranged. The problem was that the BBC was late. The filming had been scheduled to take place during the lunch break when there were plenty of lunchtime supervisors around to share the task of looking after the twins. As the bell went for the children to return to class, my secretary informed me that the camera crew had been delayed but they’d be there in fifteen minutes. I was now on my own with twenty highly excited children ranging from ages 3 to 11. It was not a pleasant experience. They were totally hyper and my ever more desperate requests to stay together where I could see them, seemed to have the opposite effect, the children scattering to the four corners of the field. Eventually the three crew members arrived and began interviewing the children. They also filmed them playing wild games and asked me some impossible questions such as, “Why do you think you have so many twins?” Was it something in the water?
I felt far more at ease with the broadcast in the run up to the 2012 Olympic Games. There was a huge push to get children not only interested in the event but also to encourage them to be more active. A famous Olympian was visiting the city and, because my school was always heavily involved in any sporting ventures that the local authority organised, they chose us as the venue to film his visit. He spoke in assembly about winning his gold medal and then went out onto the field and organised games with a class of seven and eight year olds. My role this time was to wander around in the background in a headteacherly way, something I was much happier doing. We actually took all our older children to the Paralympic Games with brilliant seats right at the front of one of the stands. I made an impromptu appearance on the huge screens there when, during a break in proceedings, one of the roaming cameramen positioned himself in front of me and one or two of the children. He then zoomed in on me and it stayed like that – for ages. I tried to act nonchalantly but, as he showed no sign of moving on and as my stomach began telling me it was lunchtime, I decided to eat my lunch. The watching crowds got a close up view of me consuming my sandwiches, an apple and a biscuit before the cameraman decided that perhaps enough was enough.
I got a fourth chance to appear on the small screen after our Parent Teacher Association tried to arrange a disco for the children. These normally ran very smoothly with the younger children coming along straight after school and the older ones turning up later in all their finery. On this particular occasion there was a snag. The person they had booked to run the disco never materialised so we had to send the children home very disgruntled. Our PTA chair contacted the disco organiser who was nothing less than difficult and, feeling angry and frustrated, she then contacted a BBC consumer affairs programme. She didn’t expect anything would come of this but a few days later they contacted her. The disco organiser had already been the focus of a feature a couple of years previously where he’d defrauded another school. It appeared he was up to his old tricks. In order to create a backdrop for their story, the television people wanted to film us having to turn children away and also recreate what the disco would have been like. There were a number of scandals a few years back when it was discovered that some things we’d seen on television were not quite what they seemed: filming captive creatures and inserting the clips into documentaries on animals in the wild, that kind of thing. A similar scenario happened here. Anyone familiar with primary school discos knows that there are two different kinds of behaviour – the way the girls behave at a disco and the way the boys behave. The girls stand around in groups chatting, doing the occasional bit of dancing but mainly standing and chatting. Meanwhile, the boys run around like mad things, doing slides on the floor and disappearing off into the corridors and toilets followed by staff telling them to stop. It has always been so. This didn’t suit the requirements of the BBC however. After a few minutes of filming this ritual, they called a halt and told the children they’d got to dance. This they eventually achieved but it was a complete fabrication – shameful! The section of filming where they wanted to see the turned children away was to feature both the chair of the PTA and my good self. The children were very good at appearing to be upset and disappointed, turning away from the school’s main entrance and sadly walking back up the path to the road. I was very excited about the broadcast because this was my first appearance on national television and so I made sure that all my family and friends knew the broadcast date. The programme began and soon we were onto the dishonest disco provider. They’d door-stepped him, they’d interviewed my PTA chair and between these features they shown the totally inaccurate disco scenes and the turning away of children. I looked forward to my starring role but the wretched PTA chair was standing at such an angle as to obliterate my image almost completely. My eldest son rang me after the broadcast.
“Did you see me?” I asked expectantly.
“I think I caught the edge of your ear,” was his blunt assessment of my acting debut.
THE ART TEACHER
In my loft I have a pastel drawing of a fish head. I drew it when I was training to become a teacher and it is by far my greatest achievement in the field of art. Let's be honest, it's my only achievement in the field of art. As a primary school teacher, you have to be able to teach all subjects but, having been fairly dire at art when at school myself, I found passing on these particular skills and techniques to a younger generation somewhat of a challenge. When I found something that the children could do and that looked half descent when completed, I rolled it out, year after year: silhouettes at Halloween, bonfire collages of tissue paper flames on black paper, sunsets in various shades of red and orange.
The art lesson was a mixed blessing. There was little planning but a fair amount of preparation; there was no marking but quite a lot of clearing up to do. And then there was paint and glue. I never ceased to be amazed at the variety of places primary children could get paint: on the walls, on the ceiling, on each other, on me. Glue had a similar distribution pattern, with the added problem that paint washes out whilst dried white PVA glue doesn't. A particular favourite of mine was glitter. You can't have Christmas decorations, calendars or festive scenes without a good sprinkling of glitter and, boy did they get a good sprinkling in my lessons. Not only was I once blamed for getting through a year's supply in one lesson, but one caretaker issued a ban on me ever using glitter again – and this was in a school where I was the headteacher! I also upset another caretaker with some excellent stained glass windows. It was a simple idea: the children coloured in outlines of a church window with wax crayons and then brushed cooking oil on the back to make them translucent. Not only did they look amazing, but they stuck to the windows really easily, the oil forming a bond with the glass that took the caretaker several hours to remove when we finally peeled them off. That resulted in another ban.
One school I worked in was a converted secondary school which had long featureless corridors. The headteacher, wanting to improve the environment, had display boards put up all along one side and it was our job as teachers to keep them decorated with children's artwork. We would agree a theme and then each teacher would get his or her class to illustrate an aspect of it. One autumn term, the last theme we covered before the inevitable Christmas displays was music and each board featured scenes from classical pieces that appealed to children. One had the instruments of the orchestra from Benjamin Britten's 'Young Persons' Guide to the Orchestra', whilst another had a mass of insects that linked to 'The Flight of the Bumblebee'. The board nearest the hall was the preserve of a specialist unit located in school where the children had limited skills across all areas of the curriculum. The artwork there was always sensational, mainly because everything had been drawn by the staff and coloured in by the children: expectation back then were not high. This term they had done Saint-Saens 'Carnival of the Animals', so when the time came for them to put up their Christmas display, a near perfect reconstruction of Giotto's 'Nativity' as I recall, a pile of carnival animals were left discarded on a windowsill. This was too much for one of my colleagues and me and we set about adding these creatures to the completed biblical scenes adorning the other boards. We had Mary, Joseph, the donkey and an elephant making their way to Bethlehem, we had the three wise men and a tortoise bringing gifts to the baby Jesus: all very puerile but immensely satisfying. We had just inserted the final lion on the hillside with the shepherds when the teacher in charge of the special unit rounded the corner. Seeing our handiwork, she shook her head and declared, "I don't know who are the more silly: you or the children." We knew!
With the introduction of the National Curriculum, art lessons became about much more than learning to hold a paintbrush and produce a nice picture. As teachers struggled to cope with the new demands, a series of sample lessons were produced nationally. One of these was to copy Van Gogh's techniques to create giant sunflowers. It was seized with alacrity by the teaching profession and for years you couldn't go into any school without encountering a wall of sunflower pictures. I suspect the practice continues to this day. At my last school I had a teaching assistant, Norma, who had a degree in art and had worked as a clothing designer. Not only was she brilliant when we needed backdrops for our school plays, she was a great help to non-specialist teachers in the classroom. When legislation came in giving teachers time out of the classroom for planning, preparation and assessment, we got Norma to cover the classes, doing art with the children and producing amazing results. Initially we went through the pretense of the teachers organising the lessons with Norma carrying out their instructions, but it soon became apparent that Norma was a far more skilled 'art teacher' than any of the actual teachers and relished being in control. Eventually we were able to get her onto a pay grade that reflected the teaching she was doing and handed over the art curriculum to her. One of the highlights at this time was having some of our work exhibited in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Norma also arranged visits to galleries and entered the school into art competitions. My only concern with these arrangements was what the Ofsted inspectors would say when they next inspected us. Before they began their tour of lessons, I explained the situation. “We have a brilliant teaching assistant with an art degree who teaches all the art in school,” I stated boldly, “because she’s the best person to do the job.” The inspectors smiled, commented on the quality of displays they’d already seen and told me it was absolutely fine. Another phew.
POLITICIANS - BLESS 'EM
“What I use is a spider’s web.” The group looked interested and asked the teacher to expound on her method. We were in the early stages of implementing the new National Curriculum. Not only did we have chapter and verse on what should be taught but we were expected to assess each child at one of ten levels in each of the attainment targets. The science curriculum alone had seventeen attainment targets although this was reduced in one of the frequent revisions that have taken place since 1988. Whilst teachers had always assessed children’s ability and aptitude, this now took on a life of its own. Huge conferences were held by the local authority, run by the primary advisors, backed by an impressive number of advisory teacher who'd been seconded from their schools to promote the subjects where they excelled. The only problem was that none of them seemed to have the faintest ides how to record these assessments. It was always a case of 'get into groups and share what you are doing'. Forgive me for being cynical but what politicians tend to do when they have no idea what to do is to say we’ll leave that to the professionals. Of course, when it comes to their pet projects then education is far too important to be left in the hands of teachers. I’d already had to sit through the triangle method of recording: one side drawn for the concept being introduced, another side for the child showing understanding and the third side when the child was proficient. The problem that always arose was, how do we know this learning is embedded. I will no doubt happily recite the five times table into my dotage, but ask me about rift valley formation, solving quadratic equations or flame tests of metals, and I will struggle, despite having qualifications saying that I know about these things. Actually I think copper burns blue. What has happened is that I have continued to use my five times table regularly whilst the opportunity to put my rift valley knowledge to the test has yet to come up. I was getting mightily fed up with these endless meetings. Rather than listen to people espousing the triangle method or the spider's web for the umpteenth time, I would sit there working out the cost of releasing all these teachers for the day and providing them with lunch (the lunches were rather excellent). What we could have done with the money.
I can remember a cheer going up in the staffroom one lunchtime early in my teaching career. The news had just come through that Education Secretary, Shirley Williams, had lost not only her portfolio but her seat in the General Election of 1979. Maybe it comes with the job, being loathed by the professionals you are responsible for guiding. You may recall my desire to make a strong impression when I first attained headship. I suppose politicians are no different. For some, it will be the peak of their careers, for other a stepping stone to greater things, for nearly all, a chance to make an impact. And this is what they do. First they have to set out a whole load of new priorities, even though the last set of initiatives have yet to be fully followed through. When it’s a change of government, obviously you have to belittle the successes of the previous administration, never mind if you rubbish the work of thousands of professionals in the process. Then there is always that olive branch to the profession – we will reduce bureaucracy and paperwork. They all say it; they may all aspire to deliver it, but what usually happens is they strip away a couple of levels but then add a few more of their own devising.
New initiatives nearly always require new policies. Best practice determined that formulating these should be the task of a working group consisting of staff and governors, sifting through the guidance and recommendations, putting forward a coherent set of aims and objectives with guidelines to follow. All staff and governors should then discuss these before they are sent out for parental consultation and final adoption as school practice. In reality, I started pinching them from other schools off the Internet. There were just so many. After inner city riots, Labour required us to have a policy on Social Cohesion. I can remember many of my colleagues in a state of high anxiety because they were due an Ofsted inspection and hadn't yet got their Social Cohesion policy in place. After celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, revealed that school kitchens were serving up rather more than the choicest cuts in their turkey drummers, we had to have a policy on Healthy Eating. Each policy had its merits but there were so many of them and all needed reviewing at least once every three years, some of them on an annual basis. I could have spent all my working life as a headteacher on policies: it was ridiculous. The best policy that we ever had was the Christmas Policy that I sent my secretary to type up, wondering what her reaction would be. Among its many requirements were for the front of house staff to wear reindeer antlers wrapped with tinsel for the last four weeks of the autumn term and for mince pies to be provided for the headteacher on a daily basis. It kept us all sane. One final word on polices. During eighteen years, only once did a parent ever ask to see a policy because she disagreed with our policy on giving children medicines. As a qualified nurse, she then queried the policy as being poorly written. I took great delight in informing her that it was a sample policy produced jointly by the Department of Education and the Department of Health. She could take her complaints to them.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s the education ministers were fairly benign. Fine, so Sir Keith Joseph wanted everyone to be above average, something espoused by Michael Gove many years later, but peace reigned until the 1988 Education Act at the hands of Kenneth Baker. In came the National Curriculum, in came SATs, in came Ofsted. Decades of continual change then followed. When Labour came to power in 1997, their big ideas were the National Strategies for Literacy and Numeracy. The process the profession was going through was explained to us thus. Imagine a square divided into four smaller squares. Before the National Curriculum the teaching workforce was in the bottom left square: ill-informed without knowing what to teach (and still some of my pupils got to Oxbridge – however did that happen?). With the introduction of the National Curriculum, we moved up a square: we still didn’t have a clue how to teach but at least lots of panels of experts had decided what it was we had to teach. Now Labour were going to move us horizontally so that we’d be a skilled and informed workforce with a prescribed curriculum so that, eventually, we’d be able to move down to nirvana, the fourth square where a brilliant talented workforce would be able to choose what it was that they taught. We never got there.
The National Strategies now lie in the back of cupboards or they are propping up wonky tables in staffrooms. This is a crying shame because they had so much useful material. The problem was that it was too much, too quickly. I remember voicing my concerns to our local MP when, two years after the onslaught of literacy, came numeracy. I was told that there was no time to waste if we wanted an educated workforce who could compete in a world market. I was all for that, if that was what education was determined to be about, its just that there was never any time for the initiatives to embed themselves in teachers’ practice. There were lots of excellent materials being sent out, if only my teachers could spend all day, every day studying them. Unfortunately they also had to do the odd bit of teaching. Some of the early stuff was a little condescending. I remember fuming at the example lesson plan where they expected teachers, in a lesson where the children would be cutting out shapes, to write in their plans ‘give out the scissors’. Even my most newly qualified teachers had probably worked out that for cutting to occur, scissors might need to be distributed. For my experienced staff it was downright insulting. One afternoon, every headteacher in our local authority and the adjoining ones were required to attend a briefing with the Minster of Education. It promised to be an enlightening session, with the brief: find out ways to raise the attainment of your children. What happened was the Minister delivered a bland speech and then asked us to get into groups to share ways we provided extra support for children not reaching the expected levels. I was tempted to mention the spider’s web but instead decided to take absolutely no part whatsoever in what was an blatantly political charade, aimed purely at getting better test results and not at all concerned with raising the quality of teaching and learning.
My first interaction with our local MP came shortly after I’d got the job of headteacher. The Ofsted report I inherited was glowing, so much so that it was mentioned in the Chief Inspector of Schools’ Annual Report. I was invited to a number of functions in Westminster which I declined, feeling that the report recognised the work had been done by my predecessor rather than me. When the MP asked if he could visit the school, I suspected he was jumping on the bandwagon, possibly about to claim the success of Conservative policies for the children of our three villages. When he brought a photographer with him, we were left in no doubt and there was much grumbling in the staffroom as he made his way to the front gate. Unfortunately, the gate was locked so, using his training as a guardsman in his younger days, he attempted a vault. It was not altogether successful. He managed to rip the underside of his trousers and I had to leave the howls of derision in the staffroom to greet him with a straight face. To his credit, he paid us another visit the following year. We only had small cohorts taking the tests but if the year group was over ten, the results had to be reported. We had a traveller camp in the catchment area and, come SATs week, all the travellers decamped to their annual fair in Stowe on the Wold in the Cotswolds. The percentage of children achieving the expected level was already in the 60s before a single question had been asked. Consequently, one year we were the lowest scoring school in the authority and we suffered a fairly ill-informed press report as a result. I countered with letters to the editor and the MP picked up on this and made a visit to talk to my staff about the unique pressures they faced and to offer his support. It may not have made much difference to our league table position, but it certainly raised morale in the school.
In 2010, the coalition government got their turn to mess with education and, for once, they did something useful. The Pupil Premium was designed to provide extra help for those from poorer social backgrounds. I’d seen a presentation a few years earlier that compared English school leavers with those of other European countries. Our average ability children were attaining a level fairly commensurate with average pupils from the rest of Europe. Our more able children outshone many countries, including places like Finland, held up as a fine example of an education system. Where we fell down was the long tail of under-achievement, strongly linked with social background, and it was this that the coalition sought to address. Unfortunately for me, this influx of much needed cash coincided with a reduction in my budget, so for two years I had to use the money just to retain our staffing levels. It then became apparent that my strategy was being reproduced in schools across the country. The government then did something very intelligent. The Sutton Trust and researchers from Durham University examined every piece of recent research to ascertain the best ways for schools to spend their Pupil Premium money. They were then put in a sort of league table with those that were most effective for the smallest outlay of money at the top, and those that had proved to be a waste of time and money at the bottom. Teaching assistants appeared fairly near the bottom. There was uproar and rightly so. There is the world of difference between a teaching assistant who has been trained in particular areas, gaining qualifications and allocated appropriately and one who sits at the back of the class to keep an eye on Johnny or hear some readers. Some of my TAs knew far more about areas of specialised special needs such as autism or speech and language difficulties than most of my teachers. Accordingly, the teaching assistants’ position in the league table rose after further consideration. But, if anything encompasses a politician’s approach to education policy, it was this list of effective interventions. Right down at the bottom, costing a lot of money and producing little or no improvement in attainment, was structural change. So the government introduced structural change, creating lots of different types of schools, predominantly the academies which, at the time of writing, were doing no better than the local authority schools. Also near the bottom was performance related pay but despite the research showing that it cost lots of money for few discernable benefits, it was introduced. You couldn’t make it up. Under Michael Gove, the curriculum was revised again, this time it seemed to mirror the content he’d been taught at school because, well it worked for him didn’t it. When he removed the levels, I decided it was time to retire. Admittedly, having levels was found to be holding back progress but it was another case of leaving it to the professionals to find a solution because the politicians hadn't bothered to sort it out. The Department of Education issued some ‘best practice’ advise which I found astonishing. One of the schools they quoted had come up with a revolutionary way of assessing children’s knowledge. At the end of a topic on The Romans, they gave the children a test about The Romans. I was doing this nearly forty years before and whilst it gives you a good idea how much the children know about The Romans, it is totally useless in comparing performance in one school with another, something we were still required to do for Ofsted inspections. I did think about sending the DoE a suggestion for their bank of good practice: “Have you thought about using a spider’s web?”
CHILDREN ON STAGE
I loved being a teacher: developing new skills, imparting knowledge and molding attitudes. I loved being a headteacher: leading the school, sharing success and meeting challenge. But what I probably enjoyed more than anything else was when children were involved in performing. Now that I am retired, I have a stack of folders at home, full of various musical jottings, waiting for me to have the time when I'm not quite so busy when I can turn them into viable musical plays that primary schools might be willing to hand over a bit of money for. They are the result of thirty years writing and composing for Christmas and End of Year concerts. Working towards a performance gave children and staff something challenging to work on. At my last school, the new musical play always began with an afternoon of auditions for solo singing parts and it was a magical time. Singing on their own in front of over one hundred other children takes some doing although sometimes, the children would ask a friend to sing along with them to provide moral support. All kinds of children came forward to have a go: the loud brash showy ones, the quiet retiring ones, wonderfully well behaved children and a few who were frequent visitors to my office for breaking the rules. All were treated the same – they were listened to in respectful silence and then given rapturous applause for their efforts. Not only did we get children singing solos but I also wrote duets and on one occasion a quartet with four of them singing their different lines at the same time – not bad for primary aged children.
Concerts didn't always go as planned. I remember one child totally absorbed in his dance routine, thrusting first his right leg to the side and then his left, until one thrust went further than planned and he disappeared off the edge of the stage onto the top of his watching classmates. Other children got the giggles and completely dried up, something the adult audiences found particularly amusing and I found rather irritating. During rehearsals, children were always going missing: they weren’t at school, they’d gone off for extra maths, they were trying on their costume or visiting the toilets. Various teachers would fill in for them until we'd frequently reach the farcical situation where the complete dialogue was being conducted purely between the adults. I used this situation in a play I wrote for Christmas about a school rehearsing a Christmas play. It featured a pantomime donkey and an inn-keeper who informed Mary and Joseph that he'd got plenty of empty rooms they could stay in. One of the scenes featured the shepherds on the hillside and was based on a concert that had taken place the year before I arrived at the school. One of the older boys had begged to be given a speaking part but the teachers were reluctant. He was a nice enough lad who would try his best, but he was a child who found most areas of the curriculum a challenge. Would he cope? Eventually, his nagging won him the part of Shepherd 4. In rehearsals, he'd acquitted himself well, delivering his one line with the air of a seasoned professional. The problem came on the evening of the first performance. All went well to begin with. Shepherds 1 to 3 discussed the chill night air and their important sheep protecting roles. Then Shepherd 2 remarked how bright the sky was becoming. Shepherd 3 added that he could see a galaxy of stars and Shepherd 4 added his well practiced line, "And the moon." The dialogue continued as Shepherds 1 and 2 noticed an approaching band of angels. "Look how dazzling they are," remarked Shepherd 3. At this point, Shepherd 4, knowing that he followed on from Shepherd 3, added, "And the moon." This caused a slight delay as Shepherds 1 to 3 desperately tried to work out what to do next. Deciding to follow the play's script, Shepherds 1 and 2 began their observations on the Angels again. Shepherd 3 spoke of their dazzling nature to be followed by another, "And the moon," from Shepherd 4, now getting into his stride. It needed someone to break the cycle but Shepherds 1 and 2 seemed unable to do this, so yet another round ensued giving Shepherd 4 what turned out to be his final rendition of, "And the moon," before one of teachers despairingly asked if the shepherds could please be quite so that the Angels, standing there utterly confused, could deliver their lines.
When there was a play to be performed, the displays in the hall would reflect this. When we performed a musical that I’d set during the nineteenth century, the walls were full of dirty factories, smoke covered slums, canals and railways. When the setting was ancient Egypt we had mummies and pyramids. The title of the play would always feature somewhere and this was easier to do if the display board was sufficiently large enough. At one school, I was faced with placing the name of the play ‘ARGONAUTS’ on a fairly narrow display board. I found a solution by dropping every alternative letter to a lower position, so managing to squeeze the full title on the board. From then until I took down the display, I kept being asked, "Who is AGNUS ROTE?"
Sometimes, I would get a bit above myself, as with the musical I wrote about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I decided to set it in the round; that is, with the stage in the middle and the audience round the outside. It was also quite a complicated storyline, so much so that the following year, I overheard one parent say to another, “Well at least I could understand what was going on this year.” In one scene, I had Arthur and the knights cutting their way through a magical forest. Any of the older children who wanted speaking parts were guaranteed to get some lines but there were other children who did not wish to speak and many of them became trees in the forest. They were taught to swing their bodies about like tree trunks, their arms becoming the branches, holding back the progress of the king and his entourage and a jolly good job they made of it too. All was set for our opening night and then, a couple of days before, a sickness bug swept through the school. Children were dropping out on an almost hourly basis and I had to replace the speakers with children who’d opted not to speak, or as I then called them – trees. Soon my magical forest had been destroyed and by the opening night just one lone tree had survived. I had to explain to the audience beforehand, “When we get to the scene in the forest, the one child waving her arms around represents a mass of magical trees.” I think the audience appreciated this, but for poor King Arthur and his knights, having practiced cutting their way through countless flailing arms, it was with utter confusion that they faced a solitary tree, waving energetically but offering no resistance to their path at all.
Whilst King Arthur’s forest was a bit of a one off disaster, our summer musicals always seemed to feature some last minute hitch which was usually solved by the children themselves. There is nothing quite so frustrating as working for weeks to create a polished performance only to have a key character fail to turn up on the night. This was sometimes due to a last minute illness but not always. Often it was down to parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t get their children to school for an evening performance. Usually other children would step up to the mark, taking over the part with minute's notice and doing a pretty good job as the unofficial understudy. I always made sure these heroes got extra applause at the end of the evening. It didn't always work out that way though, and I will finish my ramblings with one final story concerning a missing child who couldn’t be replaced.
I’d written a play based on Grimms Fairytales and decided the way to grab the audience's attention right from the start was to have it begin in an unconventional manner. Accordingly, as the lights came up, two children would be on stage and they would immediately burst into song, alternating their lines as if in conversation to set the scene. The two boys that I chose had worked incredibly hard to learn their choral lines, giving up many of their lunchtimes to practise until they were supremely confident. The first night arrived and when one of them hadn't arrived with ten minutes to curtain up, I wasn't unduly concerned. At five minutes to go, I was starting to get edgy and when, with everyone lined up backstage, he still hadn't turned at the time we were scheduled to begin, I was in a flat panic. Unlike covering for a spoken line, his part required a good strong voice, an intimate knowledge of the song and the ability to sing perfectly in tune. None of the other children could meet these demanding criteria so there was only one thing for it… I'm sure the audience were as perplexed as the remaining child on stage because, as he sang his lines, a voice from out of the darkness on the far side of the hall replied – it was a strong voice, it had an intimate knowledge of the song and it was perfectly in tune. The trouble was that it was two octaves lower than it should have been. Sometimes the only solution is to you do things yourself.