Where did September go?

One of the things that getting older teaches you is that time speeds up. It only seems like a few days ago that I was enjoying the summer with three weeks away in Devon and thinking about moving into a new house. Suddenly I am well settled in and we are not that far away from half term. I must be getting old! How fast will time be going by the time I retire in a few years?

Summer Holiday

I am now well into the second week of an incredibly long 9 week holiday. I don't really feel as though I have relaxed yet because I have been into school most days so far in an effort to get everything sorted before moving house in the middle of the holiday. I am sure that I will be glad to get back to school after this in September!!!

Last term was amazingly hectic for me because I was acting headmaster but still kept quite a lot of my previous deputy head responsibilities, including doing the timetable. How I managed to juggle this with writing over 400 reports and spending about 15 hours each week recruiting new pupils I will never know? Actually there was more - we also had to recruit 2 new members of staff in the last couple of weeks of term!!!

The great thing about my move is that I have to move out of the current house 3 weeks before I move in to the new one. The plan is 3 weeks in a nice cottage on a farm in Devon. I wonder if this has wireless internet connection...

Half Term

Half term starts and with a bank holiday it is almost bound to be bad weather. I suspect that a lot of teachers won't really mind this because this is the season of marking and report writing for many!

With a bit of luck the weather won't be all bad so the challenge will be to time the work with the showers!

Thoughts on the first few weeks

After taking over as head for the term I can't believe that there is now just one week before half term. Where have the first 3 weeks gone? Quite an easy one, that. There have been endless meetings, parents with concerns to see, prospective parents to meet and show round the school. In fact the easiest thing about being head is that I don't really have to make any decisions about what to do - it all seems to be in my Outlook calendar sorted for me!

I must make a resolution in the coming week to be around the school more often. A number of staff are grumbling about boys being late for lessons and bumping into the head as they loiter will have the desired effect!

Taking over as acting head

One of the things that I have always thought about is what it would be like if I was in charge. I am sure that most deputies in any sphere of work have this thought regularly. If I was Vice President of the USA when Kennedy was in charge how would I have reacted in 1963?

For me it wasn't quite so dramatic. My head has been granted a sabbatical and I am in charge for the summer term. My first aim has to be to make sure that all runs smoothly but I also want to make sure that the school is not quite the same again. A key aim is to demonstrate that the school can actually run on a day-to-day basis in the absence of the head.

Like all good heads he is very much in touch with everything that is going on. Hopefully he will feel able to be a little more detached from the mundane routine and will give even more strategic direction when he returns. That has to be the aim.

Trip to the Rhine Valley

Why do school trips always seem to leave so early?

This morning I had to set the alarm for 03.15 to get in to school in time for our trip to the Rhine Valley. It must be early because as I write this from the back of the coach even the 30 Y7/8s are hardly awake - not normal for the start of a school trip! How long will this last?

Do we spoon feed our pupils too much?

I have been teaching pupils of upper primary and lower secondary age for many years. I see many absolutely first rate primary teachers who are very good at supporting individual children and helping them reach their full potential.

This all sounds like a perfect recipe for good education and, indeed, results in terms of tests suggest that this is so. At a recent inspection the enthusiasm for learning was something that was commented on by the inspection team as was the fact that they were very good about talking about their learning.

This all sounds like I am boasting about the school where I am fortunate to work. I certainly am not really meaning to and, in fact, I am more keen to talk about one of the unexpected consequences of this excellent education.

By supporting the pupils so much they become used to getting things right and they come to expect success. As things get harder in subjects such as maths and science as they move into the secondary years we often see previously successful pupils struggling when they find something difficult.

I would suggest that this is directly down to the fact that these same pupils were not allowed to get things wrong in earlier years. We now face the challenge of developing resilience in the pupils and we have developed a policy where we are regularly using a "language of learning" and we emphasise the following attributes:

• Resilience
• Curiosity
• Creativity
• Independence
• Participation
• Reflection
• Organisation

Things would be so much easier, and pupils would develop into better long term learners if only they were given more chances to fail at younger ages. There has been too much emphasis on the importance of success in the last few decades. What we really want is pupils who can cope with getting something wrong and who see this as a learning opportunity rather than a problem. This can only be achieved in a school where all stakeholders buy into this.

The Pleasures of Half Term

After a couple of days sitting in front of the computer making sure everything was working properly after an upgrade of our Intranet it is now time for pleasure. What is the first thing I do - update my blog!!! Can that be right?

What I am now planning to do is to get out in the garden and prune the roles. Jobs like this, on a nice sunny day, really do make it seem like Spring has arrived. I am sure that the rain and cold weather will return soon, but I am going to make the most of it today!!!

How to spend half term

One of the great things about teaching is the long holidays. Being married to a wife who has a proper job makes this very apparent. I now have a week off while she has to work although she may take one of her precious 20 days off. Whenever I hear teachers complaining about the workload I can't help thinking about the 100 days or so of holidays that we all have.

In the past I have tried to work out how may hours a week I work. It is quite frightening if you look at one of the busier term-time weeks - may 80 hours or more! This week in half term I have a few notes to write up from a meeting and a set of reports to write. There are a few other things I will need to do following an upgrade of our Intranet site to Sharepoint 2010 but in total I suspect I will work less than 10 hours this week. I will also manage to fit in a bit of reading, some nice walks and some trips to the gym.

Surely teaching can't be that bad a job!!!

Teaching with almost no voice!

Like many others at the moment, I am struggling to throw off a cold and cough which has left me with almost no voice. Knowing that we have several people off already I have been struggling on and it has been quite an interesting experience.

I have been forced to adopt quite a different teaching style in many lessons. There has been a lot less whole class interactive teaching with me at the centre. As a scientist it is quite easy to get pupils working in groups based on practical tasks and I have certainly been doing a lot of that. I have also had them working in groups on less practical tasks and it has really worked well with them having the opportunity of feeding back to the class.

Today with a Y8 class I did little more than take the register at the start and then letting them get on after sorting out suitable groups. It was quite interesting to see how some groups were quite confident at getting on whereas others seemed a little lost at first without me telling them what to do. They definitely need more practice at making decisions!

No post for some time

I started the year with great intentions of posting regularly. For a while I kept it up and I had hoped to make all sorts of interesting pronouncements on educational matters. Somehow that all seems so difficult now with all the routine planning and marking that is part of all teacher's lives.

At the moment I seem to have a few moments to spare as my Y7s are doing an assessment - won't I just love all the marking that follows because I am going to be marking the whole year group of just under 100 boys! This is our way of making sure that we get some sort of consistency in the marking. At least I won't have to do any Y8 marking!!!

Wickens’ Law

Am I alone in finding that there are always people in any environment who keep telling everyone how busy they are and that they really don’t have time for everything they have to do?

All schools are really busy places and some people just get on and do whatever they need to. We should expect to be really busy in term time because I am yet to meet the teacher who doesn’t manage to get a considerable amount of enjoyment out of the long holidays!

Wickens’ Law states that the amount of time someone spends talking about how busy they are is directly proportional to the amount of available time they have.

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? If you have please do comment on this post!!!

What is meant by pace in lessons?

A topic which I have thought a lot recently is what exactly is meant by pace in lessons. I have read a few inspection reports from schools judged good or outstanding recently and in the detail there has often been mention that a few lessons lacked pace.

This set me to thinking about exactly what the inspectors were looking for. We can all recognise a lesson which moves along at a high speed as pupils are experiencing a wide range of great activities. A lesson like this clearly has pace.

However, I have also seen a lot of really good lessons where pupils were being given the opportunity to reflect on their learning. A lesson like this may appear to lack pace at first sight but is just as essential to high quality learning over a series of lessons.

What I think inspectors should be looking for is whether lessons have the appropriate pace for the stage in the learning cycle that pupils are at. This is much harder to do than simply looking for the bells and whistles spectacular that some teachers are so good at producing for inspector visits.

Some of the really great teachers that I know think “to hell with the inspection game” and just concentrate on doing what they are really good at – teaching a series of high quality lessons that lead pupils to a really deep understanding by the end of the topic.

If the inspection regime is as good as it thinks it is then it needs to recognise this!

Why do so many pupils find science boring?

I have read a number of articles recently which have talked about the large number of pupils that find science boring.

As teachers of science we often assume that pupils find lessons interesting when there is practical work. I have had many lessons where pupils arrive (younger ones mainly) and they enthusiastically ask “What are we going to do today? Are we doing an experiment?”

I have increasingly come to think that a lot of practical work is done in science lessons simply to fill in the time. This will undoubtedly sound a bit cynical and I am not saying that practical work is a waste of time. What I am saying is that teachers really do need to think of what they are hoping to achieve by the practical activity.

This should be obvious because all good teachers should now be well up to speed on Assessment for Learning and making learning objectives clear to pupils. I am not convinced that this is always the case with practical work.

When I am getting pupils to do experiment, and this features a lot in my lessons, I always decide whether the results are important, is the experiment designed so that pupils get concrete experience of some abstract concept, or is there some other reason for the activity. This will affect how I organise things but I do think it is important for the teacher to let the pupil make mistakes.

Clearly safety cannot be ignored and it is sometimes necessary to step in. However, on most occasions pupils can safely make mistakes as long as I don’t interfere just so that they get good results. Rarely do the results really matter!

When observing science lessons in which there is practical work I am always keen to focus on whether the activity promotes thinking or, as sometimes happens, pupils just switch off and go onto auto-pilot as they start work. On many occasion like this I have gone round groups where things didn’t seem to be working and asked the question “Do you think this is going to work?” I often despair when I get the answer “No, sir.” only to see them carrying on in the same way!

Does parental choice really improve education?

Over the years of my working life I have gained quite a lot of experience of education. I have taught in well-resourced independent schools but also been on the governing board of two maintained schools. One of these was a primary school in an affluent area of the town. The other was a middle school in the most deprived area of the town and where over a quarter of pupils were eligible for free school meals. For a while I was chair of governors of this school.

Not surprisingly the primary school was more successful and was rated good with many areas outstanding at a recent Ofsted inspection whereas the middle school was given notice to improve. This decision did not come as a surprise to the governors or leadership of the school.

Plans are well established for a free school to be set up in the area in which the middle school was and one of the more active parent governors resigned to join the group involved with the planned new free school.

To be really successful any school needs:

• high quality teachers
• good leadership
• adequate resources
• supportive parents who are really engaged in the education of their children

When a school is not doing well it requires support. I had first hand experience of this from the school improvement services of the local authority. Even at a time when budgets are so obviously under pressure considerable and vital support was available.

In an area where a free school is set up it is highly likely that the parents that will be interested are just the ones that all schools need. We obviously would like all parents to be actively involved in the education of their children but, in the real world, this won’t happen. When a free school opens in an area this will mean that other schools have less than their quota of highly engaged parents and suffer as a result.

At the moment it seems to taken for granted in some circles that increasing parental choice is, by definition, a good thing. I would like to examine this. Can there ever really be choice for ALL parents? The free school concept is a good example of this. Clearly parents do have more schools to choose from in this situation. This cannot mean that all will get their first choice and if the quality of education for the less fortunate declines as a result of setting up the free school. If we want genuine choice for all there has to be a surplus of school places and this would be rather expensive in terms of resources.

I welcomed the opportunity to be involved with a school which was struggling and would like to see far more attention being given to improving standards in schools like this rather than putting such a high proportion of limited resources into the setting up of a free school which will benefit just a small proportion of children in its area.

New Blog

Having got a bit fed up with the reliability of a different blogging service which I was using for my Education Blog and having used Blogger for a little while for a personal blog I have decided to move the Blog.

"Geoff's Education Blog" will now be here on Blogger instead of on Wordpress.