So there it was. 2007. A decision to stop! To make a life change. After 20 years in charge of schools and many more as part of school senior teams, enough was enough.

Everyone said “You won’t be able to stop…” I thought I knew differently. I was wrong.

So I thought I might write up the story. A book might be a bit presumptuous so perhaps a personal record and reflection might be better.  Something that captured my learning, my mistakes so that others might also enjoy the fun and the challenges, the achievement and disappointments. I wanted it to be more than just a personal summary but more a reflection of how we run education and  the inherent values and principles we should live.

Ironically, I have been so busy since the decision to stop, this monologue has only moved to be jottings in a moleskin book. So this is a way of making it happen. 

I trust it won’t be too self-indulgent, but it has been and still is a rich and varied working life. I have been privileged to work with and meet some amazing people, be supported by an incredible family and be surprised every day by brilliant young people. So firstly thanks to all of you.

From Africa

Nearing the end of this African journey now- two days at the sumptuous  Crater Lodge at Ngorogoru Crater. As we come back from the first safari drive, dusty and jolted sore, we enter the chalet to find a full warm roll-top bath strewn with petals. As you lay there you look out over this scene – there can be little that is more beautiful. Another dilemma. It’s great to be spoilt, but as we journeyed up the crater ring we passed a team of Masai herdsmen with a team of donkeys bringing water up to the rim for their families. Don’t think I can do this again. It felt much more appropriate to have been in the tent camp out on the plains in the Serengeti.

Values aren’t really worth much if you don’t live them. All the time!  This requires resilience as well.

The popular educational  debate at the moment is about the need to have knowledge. How is it possible to develop a value system without knowledge. This Africa trip has not just given me knowledge it has made me feel it! So just as those theorists would espouse the importance of knowledge before values, so can you also see that knowledge itself is useless unless you can apply it and from a value system to guide one’s life. And just as you need to engage young people in getting knowledge, and then applying it, you also need to clarify personal values and characteristics.

In the York province of Toronto, the whole area decided that they should build a community where ‘Character Matters’. They identified ten characteristics that they felt if developed by every individual, by every school, by every institution and business, it would lead to a cohesive and successful community. The characteristics were

• respect,
• responsibility,
• honesty,
• empathy,
• fairness,
• initiative,
• perseverance,
• courage,
• integrity, and
• optimism.

Did it make a difference? They said this:

” In recent years, character education principles have been adopted in countries throughout the world, including Denmark, Korea, Japan, England and the United States. While research into the effects of character education is still in its early stages, the potential and impact of character education has been widely affirmed by schools that have adopted a character education focus. Where it has been implemented, character education has been associated with:

• Fewer discipline problems;
• Fewer suspensions;
• Reduced lateness and absenteeism;
• Decreased school violence;
• Higher scores on achievement tests;
• Higher reading scores;
• Better morale among school staff.

A piece of research only published this week found that if you get all students in a class to commit to three random acts of kindness to their fellow pupils each week, the impact is astounding.

But creating a list won’t do it. Educators, business leaders and parents need to model it and unpick how you can demonstrate that characteristic. That is what good schools and parents do!

Then I suppose there is a more difficult aspect to consider spirituality. This whole African experience was if anything spiritual. You cannot be there without at times challenging your own place in this bigger space. Personally the faith thing is easy; I know the power of faith in helping frame my life. Whilst here in Africa I wondered about the diversity of life, the beauty and grandeur of the landscape, and the challenge to my lifestyle these experiences were making. Whatever your personal code or faith, you certainly would feel a sense of being a small part of something much bigger.

Part of my holiday reading for this trip was a “Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking. It was part of an attempt to make my non physicist brain around the cosmos- black holes, string theory etcetera. It ends one chapter asking us to consider a different way of thinking about the world’s beginning. The ‘Big Bang’ represents a point of discontinuity at which all physical theories collapse. If we thought that there was no beginning and no end and the world just is, where is the need for a ‘creator’. Whatever you think about these ideas, are they not the level of thinking we should be encouraging in our young people at some point in their education.

Much of the late twentieth century education in the UK became obsessed with content and assessment. Skills were seen as important but often only in the context of subject learning. Ask yourself how much subject fact from school days you actually remember. Of what you can remember how important has it been? Of course there has to be a core of knowledge for any real understanding of our world. ( as implied by E.D Hirsch) but have I really  needed to know the names of the towns in East Germany that were important centres in the 60s for lignite. Do I really need to be able and to justify a regional subdivision of France. Did I really need to spend the whole of my second year at grammar school charting the day by day calendar of the Pilgrimage of Grace?  Today we are able to draw on a collective reservoir of factual knowledge that fills in the detail around our own  core knowledge and understanding. Having the skills then to find facts, to understand them and to verify them , is as important.

However, developing a thirst for learning does often happen through fascination around a particular subject. My six-year-old grandson can tell you everything you need to know about planets and space. he is encyclopedic. For me it was Geography. Why it was Geography is an interesting tale in itself…but that’s for later. Allowing young people to specialise around their interests is not  a bad thing. Having a ready reckoner of knowledge in some areas can be satisfying – as in Mastermind. And wouldn’t a totally skills based curriculum be incredibly dull and meaningless without knowledge and context anyway.

No, there is a real place for the work of quality and inspirational subject-based teachers. They are often who we can remember from  our school days. But it has to go further.

‘After Monet’ is an expensive but incredibly interesting book by Barrie Bennett and Carol Rolheiser. In it they try to analyse the combination of art and science required to become a great teacher. Good teachers certainly understand the science of how young people learn and how to apply tools to exploit that, but they also have a compelling presence and make students feel they can become powerful learners. They are empathetic artists that enable them to respond to the many changes in  a lesson and adapt it to the needs of individual students. That deployment of science and the ‘art of teaching’ creates an environment when young people can question, can philosophise and in so doing  really understand more effectively the works about them.

You’ll be pleased to know that this is the end of the initial reflection from Africa. Being there seems to encourage you to think out the purposes of what we do and how the world works for good or bad. I have reached the last evening there in a hotel in Dar es Salaam  and by chance watched my first television programme in three weeks. It was about a young inexperienced American teacher- Erin Gruwell –  given a class of students who had been told they were a failure and outside of school were affected and involved in inner city gang culture including some close and personal tragedies. Her commitment to these students through English and Literature changed their lives. They read Ann Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Zlata’s Diary: A child’s life in Sarajevo and many oher books. They were then encouraged then to start writing their own diaries and to discuss them and their feeling with the group. I’ll leave you to read the story of what became the Freedom Writers’ Diary.

It was inspirational and just emphasised what great teachers can do. Teachers should more understand the power they have to be a vital ingredient in young people’s lives.

So there we are. The end of this three-part African introduction. These are the  thoughts nearly six years ago that  made me decide to reflect on the last 42 years in teaching, and if you count my own school days and university 58 years in learning. In many ways it is a personal journey, but I also hope to make it point to some critical elements that make for great teachers and outstanding leaders. I have met many super-heroes in this work. Super-heroes who have made a difference even when policy and professional leaders got it and continue to get it spectacularly wrong. Being able to hold true to the basic pedagogical and personal sets of practice through the noise of inconsequential change is and has been a notable skill amongst so many great educationalist I have met  and continue to meet.

So let’s make the 58 year journey more slowly and go back to the beginning…….

Next Blog: “A Lincolnshire Childhood”