UNFORGIVING BOXES

Let’s have a bit of self-evaluation. Tick a few boxes under the heading personal development. Nothing too rigorous though. What have I actually been doing over the past five years? I’m sure there are some people who wonder what I do with my time. I wonder myself.

It is five years to the month since I wrote the first edition of School Report in January 2001. What have I done with all those unforgiving minutes which have raced by at cosmic speed? Not enough is the answer. Not enough for myself, and, of more importance, not enough for other people.

I’ve kept myself constantly involved in the world of education. I’ve done some thinking: about what has been happening and what has not been happening. I’ve penned a few thoughts in the form of articles for the TES, the Western Daily Press and the Bristol Evening Post.

I’ve done some visiting, a lot of visiting. I’ve been to a huge number of schools delivering poetry books, doing poetry shows and observing my teaching assistant students. I’ve been to primary, secondary and middle schools, a special school and a learning support unit. I’ve been to schools with less advantaged catchment areas and those with pupils from more privileged homes. I’ve been to tiny village schools and those in the inner city. At one village school the headteacher showed me a life-size iron-age hut which he and his pupils had built and which they now used as a quiet sitting area. He also helped me with a line from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem which I had struggled with for years.

I’ve done some teaching. Different from my twenty-five years in primary schools. I now teach adults as well as children - teaching assistants working towards their NVQ qualification. It’s as rewarding and fulfilling as a class of Year 6’s. Not as lively and demanding but with plenty of interest. I still teach young people but on an individual basis. In the past five years I’ve taught A-level English, GCSE maths, and maths and English at the primary stage. It’s some of the best teaching I’ve ever done.

I’ve done some learning: an NVQ assessor award, GCSE maths to update me on the present requirements of the subject, the poems of Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas for my A-level teaching. I’ve done some creating: revising and redesigning my Key Stage 2 poetry anthologies. On a very small scale I’ve been entrepreneurial, running a holiday bungalow in the Mendip Hills.

I hope that what I’ve been doing has been of some help to others – teaching assistants, pupils, holiday visitors, readers of children’s poetry. I know it’s not been enough. I should have done more.

Sixty seconds’ worth of distance run for every minute? Nowhere near. A few seconds at best. Targets not met, time frittered away, too much day-dreaming and lack of focus. All a bit different from the action-packed world of aspiration and achievement which is today’s education. I’ll leave you to tick your own set of unforgiving boxes about what you have achieved since 2001. 


“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run”

Rudyard Kipling

MANY MISSIONS, ONE VISION

Five years on from the year of the space odyssey and all our odysseys continue. Five years ago I wrote a short essay for the first edition of School Report. I called it “Many Missions, One Vision”. Its theme emerged from two sources. One was the film “2001, A Space Odyssey”.   The other was the fashion for mission statements at the time. Every school had to have one. These carefully crafted aphorisms were being proudly displayed in entrance halls and on headed paper up and down the land. There was no shortage of missions in the world.

Mission statements are still around. I still see them when I visit schools but maybe they haven’t quite the kudos they once had. Whether they have any effect in promoting the objectives they proclaim is open to question. About the same effect probably as some obscure Latin phrase sewn onto a blazer. Useful now and again for a bit of exhortation in assembly and to try and generate some collective pride in one’s school, but not much more. It certainly wouldn’t do any harm, though, if pupils learned their mottoes and mission statements.

The original version of the essay can be found by going into Archives. These updated thoughts differ only slightly from the original:

For those in the business of education our journeys and missions continue. The journey is not always easy. No one said it would be. There are asteroids to dodge on a daily basis and more than enough dazzling supernovas, in the form of endless new initiatives, to turn away from. But as we all know it’s a journey full of interest, full of discovery and full of reward.

What, though, is its purpose? What are schools for? What is their mission? Whatever the answers we come up with we can be sure that this purpose will be rather more than can be captured in one brief statement however elegantly it is worded and however good it sounds. Mission statements speak in broad terms about grand designs. But big missions are only possible when the small missions contained within them are successfully pursued. In school there is an abundance of such missions. Apart from the family and the government there is no other organisation which has so many.

Teachers have hundreds of them, daily, weekly, termly. Every minute is a mission, often more than one. Simply asking a child to listen is a multiple mission – a mission to improve behaviour, help concentration and convey some aspect of learning. Practising percentages is a multiple mission. It is a part of the maths mission for the school, which is a part of the government's numeracy mission, which is a part of the mission to improve industrial competitiveness and also, we hope, the mission to produce capable, responsible citizens.

Children reading an article together about how much pollution is caused by cars is another example of a multiple mission: to improve skills in reading , thinking and discussion; to achieve higher test scores; to create an awareness of environmental issues; to develop literate, informed and thoughtful members of society. Not bad for one third of a literacy hour.

For the most part individual teachers’ missions are the missions of their school, and these are largely determined by the expectations of society and its constituent groups: parents, taxpayers, business interests, politicians. Our education system is expected to meet countless objectives and deliver on countless demands. Very little is omitted.

We take it for granted that it is every school’s mission to develop caring, industrious, thoughtful, well-skilled, knowledgeable, resourceful, adaptable, creative, healthy and confident adult citizens, who are honest, truthful and courteous and who will respect each other, the law of the land and cultural, gender and physical differences. Quite a responsibility and quite a challenge to say the least.

But there is more. Society expects teachers to enable pupils to fulfil their potential, although how this is identified is not always clear, achieve excellence, but whether for all of the time or some of the time is uncertain, and to be successful, without defining the nature of success. Pupils have to learn how to co-operate and also, paradoxically, how to compete.

Still more is expected. Formal schooling must yield an annual harvest of literate, numerate adults who understand the great principles of science and their application, who know the history and geography of the world, who speak a foreign language, who appreciate music and the arts and who have a complete mastery of information technology. They will have a spiritual awareness, know themselves and know what they want from life.

And just in case all this leaves some time over at the end of the school day our educational establishments will deliver just the right number of doctors, nurses, engineers, electricians, research scientists, entrepreneurs, industrialists and sporting heroes who win gold medals and hold up silver trophies. Fortunately when the day does end we are not obliged to deliver servants of the state who salute the flag or sing patriotic anthems.

This great collective educational mission is based, of course, on the millions of individual missions we have for the children in our care. It is with our individual pupils that we gain most satisfaction when we achieve success: when we develop a child's musical or sporting talent, when we help someone understand the mysteries of algebra, when we boost a pupil’s confidence and self-esteem.

With so much expected and such a huge range of tasks to accomplish is there any point in trying to set priorities for our many missions? They all have to be achieved one way or another. Can we decide whether one objective, perhaps on the academic side, can be more or less of a priority than another, perhaps on the social side?

I think we can and we need to. We need to for the obvious reason that the time and resources to do our job are finite. By keeping some of the key objectives in the forefront of our minds we remind ourselves constantly, on a daily basis, of the big missions to which we can allocate a suitable amount of time and energy. When we seem to be doing too much nagging about behaviour, or we keep children in at breaktime that is because aiming for high standards of behaviour is a high priority. When we allow children to mark their own work because football practice after school will leave little time for marking on that day then we have made a choice of priority. When in the evening we barely glance at the latest document to be circulated, because we want time to think about tomorrow’s science lesson, we have opted for what matters most.

What, then, out of all the missions we undertake for ourselves, for our schools, for society and for individual children is our first priority?

I know what mine is and I'm happy to share it. It is the highest mission for all of us, as high as the heavens, a celestial vision. It is central to most religions and belief systems. It did not originate two thousand years ago but was given authority by a humble man divinely inspired. As yet it has not fully succeeded in modifying human behaviour but when it does the world will be a better place.

Schools, for many reasons, are not the best of places for this mission but it must be their first priority and one which is central to every classroom, corridor and corner of the building. It is a mission which leads all of us towards that most sacred of visions: the vision of a loving world, where caring for each other, and kindness, and compassion shape our lives.

A timeless ideal, certainly, a spiritual vision in a material world. A vision where talents which we nurture in school, be they academic, practical, creative or sporting, are used to help others and not solely for personal gain or glory. A vision where success is measured by the life we lead, not by the qualifications we gain, the house we live in or the wealth we exhibit.

Mission impossible many may say, and they may be right. But then that has never been a reason not to start a journey, or even an

odyssey.

Edition 27

10th February 2006

JELLY PHONICS

Well actually it’s Jolly Phonics, as some of you may know. But I’m happy with jelly, and you’ll see the connection in a moment. Some of you – infant teachers or parents of four and five year old’s - know the strange movements children make when they say certain sounds. You see them cupping their hands over their ears when they say the long “a” sound as in rain, or saluting when they make the “ie” sound as in pie ( “ie, ie”’ sir). When they come to the “j” sound you see a large grin on their faces followed by a lot of wobbling and a spontaneous impersonation of a jelly.

It’s only in the past year or so, on my visits to reception and year 1 classes, that I’ve come across Jolly Phonics. It’s work the children enjoy. In fact they don’t see it as work at all, it’s a bit of fun. Teachers seem to enjoy it too but I’m relieved I don’t have to do it. Remembering the right action for the right sound would be rather a trial for me.

The whole approach seems to be successful. Young children happily engage in the first stage of the reading process as they look at, and say, their sounds.

I’m not entirely sure about the distinction between Jolly Phonics and any other sort of phonics but in the whole business of teaching children to read I’m in favour of what works, not what is fashionable. Back in the bad old days of primary education when teachers were not encouraged to teach and children were supposed to learn everything through experience there was a long and bitter battle over how children should learn to read, or in the technical, but appropriate, jargon, how they should learn to decode the printed word. It was a battle which engaged at least three sides.

On one side were the “real books” crusaders who believed that children would learn to read by immersing themselves in lots of good books and simply becoming familiar with words through constant exposure to them. Phonics and reading schemes were anathema to this band of zealots which was a pity as the word lends itself perfectly to phonic analysis. On the opposite side, quite vociferous on occasions, was the phonics brigade. They were committed to the belief that children should learn to read by breaking down words into their constituent sounds and blending them together. 

In this war of the words I was on the third side and I suspect that we outnumbered all the opposition put together. Our battalions did very little fighting. We marched on quietly, teaching children to read in our classrooms using all the methods and strategies we could muster and tailoring them to suit individual needs.

I made my own set of phonic flipover cards which I used with older children who were struggling. I have some in front of me now: a set of green cards with “eep” at the back and various consonants and consonant blends in front, and a set of yellow cards which make words ending in “ain”. Children enjoyed using them. They liked the feeling of success when they said the correct word. They liked to see them flipped over, or to flip them over themselves. I’m sure they were helpful.

But I also used reading schemes and reading series. Bangers and Mash and the Monster books I recall with great affection. I allowed plenty of free reading and I encouraged children to find information books which interested them. I insisted they should read at home to their parents at least three times a week, even when they were in Year 6.

I’ll go along with phonics first and fast. Jolly Phonics, synthetic phonics or any other form of phonics. But let’s have some real books as well: all those beautifully illustrated books with funny stories, traditional tales, animals and everything else which opens up exciting new worlds to children. And let’s have some reading schemes if children make progress with them, and IT, and card games, and workbooks and anything at all which gets them processing words and sentences.

We all agree that reading is a serious business. It’s the most essential subject on the curriculum. Maybe the lesson from Jolly Phonics is that we can give children success if we lighten up a bit and make those early encounters with the printed word a bit of fun and a good experience.