We need common sense, flair and imagination in our classrooms. We can’t keep crucifying teachers for indiscretions. We need to be realistic!
Lessons We Can Learn From the Rafe Esquith Suspension
Education – My book on Headship – A Passion for Education – you don’t have to be in education to love the rebelliousness of this book.
Education is fundamental to all of us, our children and the society we live in.
In this book I have given my views, anecdotes and feelings from an inside point of view. It is highly readable and you don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy it. It is controversial and real!
Here’s the foreword:
Foreword
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and killed by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is: help your students to be human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading and Writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students more human.
Leadership is about empowerment. If a leader doesn’t empower their staff to take risks and grow they aren’t worth their salt. For a leader to succeed all those working with them should reach their potential. That is good leadership.
A school is like an ocean liner. It builds up a head of steam and gets carried along by its own momentum. It cannot stop or change course abruptly. You have to guide it and plan each change of course well in advance. It takes all the sailors working as a team to run smoothly.
A Headship is like a race down a steep snow run on an old tin tray. You have limited control and your journey is perilously at the mercy of events and obstructions that cannot all be foreseen.
A Head sets the tone for everything that happens in the school.
The art of Headship is to sell your vision so that the whole community is pulling in the same direction.
Paradoxically a Head is largely impotent. As a Head you have far-reaching responsibilities and limited power. There are good things about this. Many Heads have proceeded to Headship out of a desire for power, control and money. They are ambitious and can be overbearing, ruthless, vicious and self-centred. At least the system prevents them exerting their regimes of fear and control to such a huge extent. The downside is that it stops you dealing properly with poor teaching. The kids deserve better but on the whole having restraints is better than tyranny.
You always find when you reach the top that you’re actually in the middle. A Head is in the middle of everything.
It is said that the fact that someone wants to be a politician should automatically ban them from standing; the same thing is true of Headships. Those that think they know what they are doing are usually the worst. If a Head starts their Headship by asking for more power or money they can be guaranteed to be doing the job for the wrong reasons.
The only reason to become a Head is that you have a passion for trying to make the world a better place, to make people happier and to see education as the only way of achieving this. After all, it has to be better than war, religious hatred and sectarian violence.
Then we approach the thorny subject of the purpose of ‘Education’. Education is all things to all men. To politicians it is a way of maintaining social order, reinforcing class or enabling mobility and addressing the economic needs of the country. To many it is purely about careers while to others it is about expanding minds, opening horizons and creating wonder. I’m very much in the wonder and awe camp. I am also of the repairing damaged kid’s persuasion. All my students were equally important and equally valuable. I hope I succeeded in making some of their lives better. That’s what I set out to do. Their chosen career and economic value was secondary to their self-esteem and happiness.
Before starting this I checked on ‘Rate my Teacher’, a scurrilous website that has given a voice to some rather dubious individuals, but one which reflects a series of views of how some others see you. It offers a modicum of objectivity. It was a little unsettling to see oneself described as an obese penguin from the CIA but on the other side there was the recognition of the care and respect. It showed a career that was not entirely wasted.
I worked in Education for thirty six years and prior to that I was largely a victim of it for twenty years. My experience of schooling gave me the impetus to get involved and work to change it. My disgust at Gove and the Tory attempt to belittle all the achievements of recent decades and drag education back to the appalling 1950s is my main reason for writing this. Children should be valued as human beings and not economic units. Education that is not developing all aspects of humanity and expanding minds is not only wrong it is disgusting. Most leading fascists have been highly educated after a fashion. It was their empathy, compassion and warmth of spirit that was allowed to atrophy. Any education system that fosters elitism and the smug arrogance that stems from it should be resisted by all caring people. A system that ignores the promotional of human feeling, sound moral and ethical values in order to focus on exam league tables and economic performance is flawed. The society created would be cold and bitter. It is a vision I have fought against all my life. I am for the warmth and light.
In my teaching experience I have known students with little intelligence, destined for poor grades, but possessing such a range of immense qualities that they are humbling. I have known highly intelligent individuals, destined for top jobs, who were vicious and mean spirited and likely to create misery. My job was to bring out the best in both and my hope that both types left school better equipped to make a positive contribution to society.
Education is a nebulous thing. We are building the future and the future is not only concerned with careers and wealth; it is also about families, societies, relationships and supporting those less fortunate. How to build a better world should be our curriculum. How we repair damaged children should be our imperative. How we foster positive human values should be our main aim. Teaching and Learning, Exam results and league tables are superfluous in the face of such paramount challenges.
This is why I believe the most important subject, and the most difficult to teach, is PSHE. All too often it is poorly taught, pushed to the shadows and taught by reluctant exponents who happen to have some free space in their timetable. This is a travesty. PSHE is about life, about preparing students for a better world, dealing with the big issues of responsibility, respect, tolerance and empathy. PSHE, like the Pastoral system, is about guidance, interaction and development of those qualities that raise the sensibilities. It should be given centre stage, pride of place and only taught by the very best of teachers with the most advanced skills. Anything less is short-changing the future.
The only way to address the world’s problems is good education.
As a probationary teacher I set about taking on the hierarchy of the school and changing the beast. I wanted a revolution. You don’t have to be in Senior Management to have a power base to promote positive change. I fought and managed to bring in a number of improvements. However, after twenty years of influential input from a lowly position, I realised that the best way of changing the beast was from the top and seized my opportunity to move into Senior Management.
I did things my way. I did not follow the rules. I was the grit in the Vaseline. The Senior Team found me a major problem. I refused to compromise. I did it the way I felt was right for the students and my own philosophy. Yet the method was highly successful. In the whole of my time in teaching I did not have a single report or inspection putting me below excellent. On the schools first Ofsted inspection, in which it achieved Satisfactory, all my areas were Outstanding. Over the next three Ofsted inspections, two as Deputy Head and one as Head, all my areas of responsibility were deemed outstanding. Being a maverick and not following the rules does not necessarily mean you cannot gain recognition. Risk Taking is a big part of the game. Covering your back is a weakness and a flaw. Doing what is right, even in defiance of the orders from above, is an imperative.
Duke Ellington supposedly first said that there were only two kinds of music: good and bad. The same is true of education. Bad education is destructive to minds, spirits and society. It should be banished even when it seemingly produces results. My Maths teacher always got 100% pass rate. I passed Maths from his class. Yet nobody was more successful at destroying a subject. To a man we came out of there hating Maths.
I have always questioned the education system. It seems crazy to put groups of people together grouped by age. That never happens in normal social interaction. It is asking for trouble, particularly during teenage years when hormones are rampant and brains are melting and becoming rewired. It reinforces lots of negative behaviour patterns. It is almost as bad as grouping people according to ability, but not quite. I think we need to bring our best minds to bear to find a better way forward. What Mr Gove proposes, a plunge back to the dark days of the 1950s emotionally challenged society would be a disaster. It has to be better than that.
I only served five years as a Head. It is something I regret. I was never personally ambitious and was severely lacking in self-confidence when it came to formal situations. One thing that was obvious was that there were going to be many formal situations and they came with the post. Consequently I came to Headship too late. I got used to the formal situations, overcame my anxiety attacks, and grew into them. One thing I have learned from life is that you should always push yourself and try to extend your reach. To not do so is to leave yourself with an unsatisfied life. You’d never know what you could have achieved. I guess I’ll never know. I would have liked to have served as a Head for longer and really got things going as I would have liked. The school was motoring. My cherished beliefs, that I had spent thirty six years establishing, were bearing fruit. The atmosphere inside the school was warm, friendly and buzzing with energy. We were a positive, can-do, all inclusive community. There was a lot of love.
If you review the full panoply of responsibilities involved with Headship, as with many other jobs, it becomes obvious that it is not possible to carry out the role successfully. You are responsible for everything twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You have to know every rule and regulation inside out. You are expected to represent yourself without legal representation. To achieve this you would need to be in ten places at once, have a myriad of skills, be super intelligent and be able to read and hold in your memory a mass of legal documentation sufficient to fill a library. As with all such roles you learn to prioritise, deal with the pressing, delegate and relax into the knowledge that you are always exposed and could flounder at any moment from circumstances largely beyond your control. The stress is enormous. I was threatened with prison three times during my short stint. You can go two ways. You can become anal and try to nail everything down, creating a bureaucratic mediocrity or you can hold on tight, guide the tin can over the bumps and away from the trees, experience a spectacular journey and enjoy the adrenaline rush.
Outstanding can only come as a result of going for it and reaching as far as your spirit will allow. All the checklists in the world cannot create a single spark of originality or flash of genius. Inspiration comes from passion.
Headship is a lonely place but it can be exhilarating when you have the support of the community you have helped create. Sometimes it all comes together and is transcendental. Those are the moments we live for.
As far as I was concerned mediocrity should never be an option.
What follows are my views on education and the mechanics of how the school came to become Outstanding while prospering as a friendly, supportive community in which everyone was loved and valued.
I believe with all my heart that we can mend broken kids, soften the arrogant and aggressive, and use education to change the world into a tolerant, peaceful place that works in harmony with nature.
When education is done properly it soars. It should work to take humanity out of the morass of war, poverty and religious intolerance into a new age.
I look forward to a new world, risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the old, where selfishness, greed and violence have been banished.
This is no idle dream of a helpless romantic idealist. This is the true product of education.
Chris Goodwin 16.11.2012
A Passion for Education – The Story of a Headteacher – My book on education from the inside!
This is not just a book for teachers. It tells the story of how I developed my education philosophy with anecdotes from my own education as illustration. It tells the story of how to educate and in what way and is a fascinating tale of what it is like behind the scenes.
I was the Headteacher of a British Secondary Comprehensive School. My philosophy created a school where there was happiness, fun and high achievement. We achieved three consecutive Outstanding Ofsted Inspections.
Find out how.
‘In this autobiographical account of his life as Head Teacher of Beverley Grammar School, Chris takes us through many of the failings of the post-war education system to the much superior, more flexible teaching of the twenty-first century. Along the way, he enthuses about rock music, leadership vs management, and – particularly – the kids. If you can make every lesson fun, every child feel cared for, and every staff member nurtured, attendance and results will pretty much look after themselves. You can pass every Ofsted inspection with flying colours, and your school can become best in class (no pun intended).
I was at college with Chris, and it didn’t seem to me then that he was destined to be a head teacher of a secondary school – a music critic, more like. He has done education a great service by showing you can be a rebel and get results too. I hadn’t expected to enjoy this book as much as I did; it has extraordinary energy and a lust for achievement. Every teacher should read it! 8/10 (October 2014).’
Wonder and Awe – Crystals under the microscope – unbelievable beauty and colour.
The greatest joy (well almost) is to see a bunch of kids looking through a microscope at a world they’ve never seen. They may be looking at hair, snot or soil but the wild-eyed delight is the sign that they are peering into a different universe.
Here’s some crystal delight. Aren’t they amazing? :
ailment, aches, allergy, back ache, chemistry, colorful, common cold, cold, crystals, cure, doctor, druggist, drugs, fever, flu, healing, health, healthcare, hurt, ill, illness, infection, influenza, injury, medical, medication, medicine, microscope, microscopic, misery, muscle relaxant, over the counter, pain, pain relief, patient, pharmacist, pharmacology, pharmacy, physician, pill, polarization, prescription, prescription medicine, rainbow, relief, remedy, runny nose, sick, sickness, sprain, symptons, therapy, treatment,
Stefan Eberhard
University of Georgia
Complex Carbohydrate Research Center
Athens, Georgia, USA
Caffeine crystal
Education – Ofsted – What an inspection should be.
Ofsted has been used as an arm to promote government dogma on education. It is far too limited, narrow in scope and prescriptive. It has become draconian and oppressive. Rather than encouraging excellence and outstanding teaching it has stifled it. It has created an unimaginative, stultifying, uncreative, restricted curriculum that is overly bureaucratic, too onerous on teachers and tries to fit everybody into the same mould.
Here’s what I think an Ofsted Inspection should be:
- It should be objective and feedback what it sees
- It should recognise that there are many ways to teach and the three part lesson is only one
- It should recognise relationship as the basis of good teaching.
- It should recognise that a teacher’s strengths are their personality and not merely their classroom organisation and lesson plan. Eccentricity can be good.
- It should recognise that exam results are not the most important aspect of education
- It should recognise that skills, discussion, self-esteem and attitudes are of equal, if not greater importance
- It should value creativity
- It should value social attitudes and equality as much as knowledge acquisition
- It should recognise that a lesson cannot be judged on student progress alone – sometimes there are more important things
- It should never tyrannise staff or schools
- It’s pronouncements should not so drastically affect a school’s reputation that it destroys the school
- It should work with staff to look for ways of improving rather than being coldly, cruelly judgemental
- It should value the happiness of students
- It should value the positive moral attitudes of students
- It should value self-esteem
- It should value skills
Schools are not factories turning out fodder for industry; they are education centres turning out well-adjusted citizens full of self-esteem and worth, interests, values and an enquiring mind.
Education should be fun, expanding, creative and varied. All subjects are of equal worth and the unquantifiable aspects are more important than the measurable.
Safeguarding has become out of all proportion. It is not about making children safer – it is about covering backs. It is impinging on good healthy education.
PSHE, Restorative Practice, Pastoral Care, Student Voice and SEAL are the most important aspects of education.
If caring is not at the centre of the school’s achievements it is failing.
Divisive strategies to raise (misguidedly) exam results through streaming or banding create arrogance and failure equally. Even if they did raise standards, which they don’t, the social fall-out is not worth it.
Ofsted inspections have to take all this into account and help schools progress rather than merely damning them.
Now that 40% of Ofsted staff have been sacked for incompetence perhaps it is time to have a rethink about its role, purpose and operation? It needs to become less dogmatic, political and cold and more useful, helpful and guiding.
Education is an art, not a science. It is not black and white and prescriptive. It is fluid and variable.
You cannot put teachers in strait-jackets and expect them to perform.
Ofsted Inspections fail our children! They are too narrow! They are too political!
Ofsted has become a vehicle for Tory Education dogma. They are too narrow and are failing our children. They are channelling schools into having to teach to the test, created a strait-jacket of teaching methods, downgraded all our creative subjects (Art, Music, Drama), reduced the curriculum to a skeleton, taken all the social skills out, reduced child-centred education, made teaching an overly bureaucratic nightmare and driven our best teachers out.
The international PISA tests are used as an excuse. The PISA tests are a disaster. They are narrow and pointless. Japan and Korea may cram their kids to the point of suicide in order to get to the top but they are not educating them. Education is so much more than knowledge. Proper education inspires students, enables them to think, encourages lateral thinking and problem solving, induces social skills, self-esteem and caring attitudes. Education should be child centred, nurturing and expansive.
You do not educate for the 21st century by returning to the 1950s.
You do not have schools run like businesses.
You do not pit school against school in competitive folly.
You do not create factories of learning with teachers performing like machines.
You do not drive the best, most inspired teachers out of the profession.
You do not work your staff into the ground, terrify and castigate them.
You do not treat students like consumer products, statistics in a table or gradees.
You don’t get a pig to put on weight by weighing it every minute.
You don’t do any of that if you want o create a good education system.
You replace Ofsted, who have failed, with an inspection system that is less draconian and ore supportive. You produce a broader, more varied and skill based education system.
Gove has created a nightmare – the fruits will damage our children for years to come.
Read more on how to do it right. I was a Headteacher who got it right! – Buy my book:
Ofsted – The horrendous truth!! They are not fit for purpose!!
Inspections are essential.
Inspections were crucial in raising standards in schools.
Ofsted is not fit for purpose! It needs replacing!
Ofsted has been used to promote government dogma!
Ofsted have passed their sell-by date and are not fit for purpose!!
Today 1200 inspectors were sacked because they were below standard. They were not good enough!!
That is terrible!!
40% of all inspectors were not good enough.
What does that mean?
I’ll tell you. Ofsted wade into schools and turn them over. A poor Ofsted report can close a school. The reputation goes down the sewer. The Headteacher and Senior Team can be sacked, students leave and so numbers and funding drop, teachers are made redundant. It spirals down into the abyss. It can be forced to become an academy. The governors are replaced. The school is stigmatised. The school can even be closed.
A school can go from flourishing to dismal on the basis of one poor report.
Now we find that 40% of the inspectors are incompetent. That means that nearly half of the schools in this country have been wrongly judged.
That means that people have lost their jobs, been put through hoops and driven mad, and students’ education has been badly affected, on false judgements.
That is appalling but it is only in line with what we have observed over time.
The truth is that Ofsted inspections are a lottery!! The government is playing politics with teachers’ lives and children’s’ futures.
Ofsted has failed. We need something a lot better.
Instead of the fear-stricken, judgemental gestapo coming into schools like storm-troopers, pushing government dogma, we need an inspection system that is there to work with schools in a less invasive manner to promote improvement. The people to do this are the Local Authorities.
The public can have no faith in Ofsted Inspections and their judgements are too limited and politically motivated.
DO AWAY WITH FAILING OFSTED!!!! Replace it with something better!!!
We need to value the whole child – not just knowledge-bound exam results.
One third of the world starves; one third of the world is obese!
I don’t want smaller divisions of countries, nations and blocs! I want bigger units.
I don’t want an independent Scotland, Wales and Ireland. I don’t want the United States or Russia to break up. I do not want Europe to break up.
I don’t care who makes the rules as long as the rules are fair.
I want bigger, not smaller! I want global policies.
The way we humans are running this planet is insane.
One third of the world starves while one third is obese. We have a world population explosion that is so out of control that it is threatening all the natural world and our own future. We have countries spending fortunes on better ways of frying other humans while the big issues are not being addressed and most of the world lives in poverty. We have pollution, logging, habitat destruction and the combustion of fossil fuels threatening the future of the planet and altering our climate. We have religious fanatics creating barbarous mayhem and claiming that God will solve it. We have wild animals being butchered for food and superstitious medical nonsense. We have inequality creating trillionaires while babies wither for lack of basic food and water.
The world is run on greed, selfishness, power and wealth.
The planet is finite.
If we let it continue like this we will destroy everything. The only hope is a world government who can tackle all these global issues and solve the problems.
I want bigger not smaller! I want the end of nations! I want a sensible way of running things with fairness, common sense and equality as its mandate.
I want us to mature and create a positive zeitgeist!
Education under the Tories – Tickbox heaven – Statistic nightmare!
Under the Tories it is teaching by numbers.
All that matters is the results, the league tables and the statistics.
Every lesson is slotted into the same mould.
Every teacher is battered into the routine of an automaton.
Heaven help you if you have a personality or flair.
One size fits all.
The children are drilled to become regurgitating zombies.
We must climb the league tables, remember the facts, pass the exams.
Every school has a big bonfire on which they pile the useless things to be burnt. Things like Fun, creativity, care, individuality, music, art, and culture.
This is the Tory concept of pass and fail. The bright ones are worthy; the rest are worthless.
Children are dumped on the rubbish heap.
This is the age of education on the cheap. We do not need qualified teachers. They are too expensive. The plebs can manage with anyone standing in front of a class.
This is education for free. Set up a ‘Free’ School – let the Creationists, Religious Right and Big Business pay to indoctrinate your kids. It won’t cost the State a penny.
We’ll get the big Academy groups in to cream off a profit off your kid.
And if your kid should complain that the stress is too much, the lessons are too boring, the curriculum is too narrow; we’ll get some soldiers in to keep discipline!
And if the teachers complain we’ll put them through a disciplinary and threaten them with capability.
And if the Management complain we’ll bring in Ofsted and have them kicked out.
This is the age of bullying, winners and losers.
Unless you are in the Public School system and can pay to send your child to a Private School – you can have teachers with flair, schools without bureaucracy, no ofsted breathing down your neck and lots of personal attention, interesting lessons, creativity and culture. Because you deserve it!
The Nightmare that Education is becoming! the PISA tables – what a farce!
Now that the Tories have latched on to the PISA tests as a level of achievement we are doomed.
The PISA tests are severely limited. They test a narrow spectrum of ability. In China, Japan and Korea they cram kids for the tests. The suicide rates soar. Childhood is destroyed.
In Britain our education has been so much better. It is more rounded, creative and child centred. We teach for creativity, lateral thinking and social responsibility. We teach skills, raise self-esteem and encourage qualities.
Knowledge is a small part of good education and certainly not the be-all and end-all.
Education should be FUN.
Now we have moved to statistics, check-lists, targets, league tables, exam tables and Maths and English being all that matters. Art and Music have been relegated to optional extras of little value.
We are churning out robots in pursuit of a silly PISA table place.
I say to hell with PISA – let’s teach children not statistics.
Ofsted can go stuff itself!! The Tory nightmare of education is making our schools into factories and our kids into automatons!