How to Make a Difference
The 30 Year Reunion
I went to a reunion last night. This cohort of year 11 left 30 years ago. They taught me how to teach - quite literally, because I trained on the job, straight off the street - no reduced timetable, no course I had to follow, just trial by fire.
I was the only teacher to attend. But, how else would I find out if I’d made a difference.
P. had organised it. He was in my bottom set, and I got him two C grades - his highest. He’s now a builder in London, which probably puts him in the top 10% of builders with an income that doesn’t bear thinking about. His partner is a well known actress. I last saw him in 1998, when he moved me into my current house, 100 meters from our old school.
N. had helped organise it. I didn’t teach her, but she was in the netball team I helped coach (I was a figure head, and helper, allowing a club coach to do the actual coaching). Anyway, we went to the nationals, losing by one goal in the semi-final when N threw a lazy pass to our 6’5’’ shooter. N was hung over, having sneaked out the night before. N still plays at 46, and is now a coach. She made me attend the reunion, a successful corporate woman who never takes no for an answer and defeats you with her enthusiasm and joy.
C. the 6’5” shooter was also there. Still playing. N and C and I cross paths once every couple of years - Swindon is a small town. They are both amazing characters who have overcome very difficult teenage years. C is finishing a degree to become a social worker, and she told me her spelling is still awful, and its all my fault, so I owe her a proofread of her dissertation. C. is the life and soul, a coping mechanism for the ACEs of her childhood, which she refused to disclose at school. At 46, she is forced to have supervisions in her social work training, but refuses to abandon the coping mechanisms which served her so well.
J. went to Oxford, and is now in finance. London. I had both his siblings in my tutor groups. He had a bone to pick with me about his GCSE, (he wrote some brilliant poetry in the style of John Hegley) but he never picked it because N2 joined us. N2 was also in the netball team. She was just drunk enough to remind J. that she had had a crush on him, and was desperate to have sex with him on a night they both remembered. His band were gigging. All was proceeding to N’s plan until she threw up everywhere. Sadly, she was rewarded by W, who she settled for on the night (G. was also at the reunion - another builder from my top set). L., J’s year 11 girlfriend, was also there. She had a bone to pick with me too.
W was the best mate of N, from another school. N had trained as an English teacher with me when I was head of English. He was brilliant and we snapped him up. He committed suicide a year later. When I left, W sought me out. We held each other’s handshake much too long and, in a sadly male fashion, let these moments and our eyes do the talking.
N., now 46, and just drunk enough, was making a move (but not making a move - plausible deniability). J. let us know that his wife had actually come to Swindon and was, at that moment, in a restaurant 100m away, and would be joining him at about 9:30 to take a look at his ex girlfriend and check out the competition from 30 years ago. Or 30 seconds ago. N. was spurred on, while her best friend C. watched on. I told her this conversation was too good for her to miss, and I went to refuel her with a Prosecco.
L. told me she was still furious with me. I’d handed back an essay with no name on it, assuming it was hers, with a mark lower than A. She had told me the essay wasn’t hers. I found the other with no name, a grade A, and handed it back to her with a smile: “If I’d known it was yours, I wouldn’t have marked it so high!”
My humour was an acquired taste, and I can imagine myself saying it. I would have been staggered to think that she would remember this after a year, and surely then only with a smile. Somehow my students put with me. L did. She would have to put up with a little more when N returned much later and grabbed a selfie with her.
J2, also on ‘my’ netball team, now a social worker, said they put up with me because they knew I cared. S. reminded me that I had given him extra lessons after school, because his EAL hadn’t kept up with his intellect, and he’d got the grades he needed.
Most of them have teenagers or children who have gone through schools. They told me it is difficult for teachers to show they cared now. It was a different world back then, they said. Which in some ways it was.
P. reminded me of A who had pulled out a Kukri, a Ghurka knife, about 18 inches long, during one lesson. He’d arrived on a managed move.
“Oooh,” I’d said, “what an amazing knife. Let’s have a look.”
A. brandished it in what I hoped was a only a theatrical way. I tested my assumption by asking to hold it. A. handed it over and my reputation as a legend amongst year 11 boys was cemented.
All my students had a story about me, and I had a story about each of them. T was the only name I didn’t remember, until she told me she too had come on a managed move, at risk of expulsion from a much worse school down the hill. A managed move, straight into a top set. Those were the days.
She forgave my poor memory. Two Bs she told me. She now oversees financial services for a chain with over 500 premises across the UK. She has a 12 year old child, still in nappies, non verbal, a rare chromosomal problem. He is the joy of her life, and she showed me a video of them together. We reminisced about the mental health of M. also here, who had left for nearly a year to be educated by CAMHS (yes, they used to have time and resources then). She got two Bs, still one of my proudest memories.
K had sung at my wedding, as part of the school choir. She is now a consultant training leaders on leadership. (We laughed because I don’t believe in leadership, and when I train head teachers to be school improvement partners, I show them the evidence on school leadership training). She asked to add me on Facebook.
By the time they took their GCSE exam, I had been teaching only 3 years. I didn’t really know what I was doing. But I was trying my best to make a difference.
They were the first year group to have sit exams instead of 100% coursework. I sat the exam with them, to find out how to teach it better next time. 7 A*s, 8 counting mine. If only I knew what I know now.
Please Right Back
In the afternoon, I’d been to Oxford to watch a play, Please Right Back. It is billed as “part social realism, part science fiction, with a healthy dose of mischief and a dash of dystopia … a eulogy to the power of the imagination, storytelling and make believe”.
It was all of these things. The stage set involved 3 screens, on which a huge animation played out, each character interacting with it live, in brilliantly timed ways. It was a genius way of casting a 9 year old boy, always played by an animation. All the other humans were played by humans.
The plot involved a mother, son and daughter, coping with a father in jail for a crime we assume is non violent and prompted by poverty and bad choices. He writes a fantasy explaining why he is away.
The childlike fantasy is, of course, animated, and comic. But a chorus of automatons in costume part pierrot, part dunce, part scribble boy chant the kind of mantras we are used to from the Charter school movement and wannabe Michaelas: “one, two three, eyes on me” … “one, two, eyes on you”, a call and response played out as sinister brain washing.
A main character is a blend of Katherine Birbalsingh and Delores Umbridge, who is determined to make a difference.
In the play, she sees her school as a saviour, taking the disadvantaged students, making them obey social rules, learn how to pass exams and transform their lives. The play treats this as patronising oppression, with the poor denied their identities and creativity, their strengths dismissed as weaknesses.
The statistic, that 65% of sons of fathers who are in prison also end up in the criminal justice system is not questioned. It is in the script and accepted as a fact, but dismissed as irrelevant. The ends do not justify the means. Identify is everything. Conformity is violence. Being made to memorise, and chant out Invictus, is a metaphor for the horror, the horror.
Imagination and creativity will make the difference. The irony that the actors have been forced to learn their lines by rote, and chant them out in song and parody is, well, lost in translation.
How Do We Make a Difference
How do we show we care? We have to make a difference. I’m still obsessed with creativity, giving students worthwhile tasks, that bring our subjects to life.
I don’t believe in silent corridors, but I do believe in silent work. I believe in inspiring, but also believe in practice and long term memory. I still believe that writing poetry is a joy we should give all our children. I’d happily get them to write a poem in the exam - nothing in the creative writing question prevents a poem in response.
And I also believe in keeping score. You can’t just say you are making a difference because you are passionate about doing so. You have to find ways to measure it. You have to show up to the reunion and see what they really made of you.
Keeping the Score
I am usually called in to schools because they have an Ofsted problem. Leaders want a better grade.
Me too. But I’m even more motivated by progress. Luckily, improving the curriculum to improve progress will also get you the Ofsted grade.
I show schools a range of research informed ways to improve the progress of their students. They are free to pick the ones that work for their context. And I hope my skill is in making the research fit these contexts - something that research schools fail to do.
So far, every school I have worked with has improved their Ofsted grade. (I’m waiting for regression to the mean, but still fighting statistical inevitability).
It’s rewarding, and I love it.
Nearly as much as I loved teaching 30 years ago.
If you want to know how to create a brilliant curriculum that gets results, you might like this book.
If you want to know how to manage an Ofsted inspection, then you might like this.
