Experience hasn’t left me short of opinions about education. It has made me rather more suspicious of simple ones, though, and some of my colleagues might say I have adopted some quite wacky ones.
This website is going to contain opinions, maybe some that prove to be controversial.
I’m going to write about teaching, leadership and international schools. I’ll question things that schools do, defend some things that regularly get criticised, and probably suggest that a few widely accepted ideas don’t make quite as much sense as we think they do.
So, before all that, a little context might be useful.
I’ve worked in education for 21 years. I came to teaching relatively late and, if I’m honest, largely by accident. A friend called me at my office in London (I was programme funding manager for an international development charity). He had signed up for a CELTA and had bold plans to move to Italy to pursue an Italian girl he had met. He did the course and never left London, but it planted the seed in my mind. I trained in the UK before moving into international education, and since then I’ve taught different curricula, different age groups and in very different schools. I’ve been a classroom teacher, a middle leader and a senior leader.
I know vastly more about education now than I did when I started. I’m just less certain about some of it.
My teacher training, for example, was dominated by a fear of behaviour. Terrible admission: when I walked into Eggbuckland Secondary School in Plymouth for a week’s observation, it was the first time in my life I’d walked into a UK state secondary school. I have attempted to twist my privileged educational background to my advantage working internationally. Very few teachers have experienced private education from the student perspective, and I feel it has always made me more understanding of the motivation of parents.
I digress. I may do that here too. While training and then working in a UK school, I worried about what would happen if there were thirty seconds at the end of a lesson with nothing planned. Presumably anarchy. Every minute needed accounting for. Activities needed structuring. Students needed differentiating.
Then I moved into international schools and probably swung too far in the opposite direction; behaviour management wasn’t a priority. Different students, different schools and different experiences changed what I thought teaching could look like.
Over the years, I’ve become increasingly wary of universal prescriptions about good teaching.
In the UK I once spent hours constructing groups for a class. I considered ability, personality, friendship, confidence and who would work well with whom. There was probably less planning involved in some military operations, and, as you might imagine, it was a total disaster.
On another occasion, almost accidentally, several of the weakest students ended up together. Everything I’d absorbed about grouping told me this was probably a terrible idea. The students produced some of their best ever work because they had to raise their game.
Without a stronger student to defer to, they all had to contribute. They supported one another.
This doesn’t mean I’ve spent the years since deliberately putting weaker students together. Sometimes that would be a terrible idea too. There is really not a lot of certainty in education.
When I started teaching, learning styles were everywhere. We were expected to think about our visual learners, our auditory learners and, especially, our kinaesthetic learners.
What were we doing for the kinaesthetic learners?
There were questionnaires. Training sessions. Resources. Serious professional conversations. At one school we had a specialist teacher guru who would train us in all the methods he’d learnt. He was the one who had me thinking about learning styles, skills, abilities, friendships. He’s to blame for me spending hours in my NQT year putting my classes in new groupings.
I haven’t heard anyone mention a kinaesthetic learner in years.
Perhaps my favourite example of education’s relationship with ideas, though, is Sir Ken Robinson.
Over the years, I have sat in several school training sessions where a Head has shown staff one of his talks. It’s that TED talk we’ve probably all seen. It’s wonderfully presented and engaging.
Robinson spends ten or twenty minutes entertainingly explaining that the fundamental assumptions underpinning modern schooling were wrong. The curriculum was wrong. Our understanding of creativity was wrong. The way schools were organised was wrong.
The video would finish. The Head would stand up.
“Really thought-provoking.”
We would all nod.
“Lots for us to reflect on.”
More nodding.
And then we’d carry on doing exactly what we’d been doing before.
Nothing changed.
Schools can be extraordinarily enthusiastic about revolutionary ideas, provided they don’t require us to change anything.
None of this means 21 years have left me believing that everything is relative and nobody really knows anything.
Quite the opposite.
There are things about which I’ve become much more certain.
Relationships matter enormously. Students are more likely to work well with teachers they trust when they genuinely believe that teacher is interested in them and has taken the trouble to get to know them.
And honesty matters. I’ve got things wrong with students plenty of times, including occasions when I’ve lost my temper and shouted. It hasn’t happened often, thankfully, but when it has, I’ve always apologised afterwards.
And I mean an actual apology, not: I’m sorry I shouted, but you were being very difficult. I’ve told them plainly that I shouldn’t have shouted, that I was wrong and that I was sorry. There is no excuse for an adult losing control and shouting at a child.
I’ve never found that admitting I was wrong diminished my authority with students. If anything, the opposite happened.
I’m far more certain of that at 52 than I would have been as a new teacher desperately trying to establish himself in front of a class.
Experience has allowed me to challenge some of the assumptions people make about schools, particularly the labels they attach to them. I’ve become increasingly suspicious of those labels and the conclusions we make from them.
High ability. Low ability.
Traditional. Progressive.
For-profit. Non-profit.
Top-tier school. (This one I particularly hate, future article coming!)
Labels sometimes tell us something, but they rarely tell us enough.
Perhaps strangely, moving into leadership hasn’t overturned all my old teacher prejudices. Teachers frequently complain that leaders forget what it’s like to have a full teaching timetable and, having now experienced both sides, I’m afraid I largely agree with them.
Leadership brings pressures that classroom teachers don’t always see: staffing, parents, safeguarding, budgets, systems, meetings, and problems that appear from nowhere and immediately become your problem. But teaching has a relentless immediacy that is very easy to forget once your timetable becomes lighter. Twenty-seven students will be outside your classroom at 10.40 whether you’ve finished what you’re doing or not. Sometimes you’ve taught all morning and haven’t even had time to go to the toilet. The thing somebody wants by 4pm may be genuinely important, but so are the Year 11 essays and the lesson beginning in six minutes.
I’ve been on both sides of that particular argument. I’m still on the teachers’ side.
Which brings me back to Education, Actually.
This isn’t a website I’ve started because 21 years in education have left me thinking I’ve cracked all the answers.
Nor is it going to be a collection of inspirational reflections about the privilege of shaping young minds.
There will be opinions here. There will be arguments. I want to write about some of the things people working in schools talk about privately but are rather more cautious about saying publicly.
Sometimes I may be irritatingly contrarian, defending things most people criticise and daring to criticise those things we are all meant to think are great. I also reserve the right to change my mind when I hear a convincing retort.
I’d rather do that than pretend certainty.
Schools are complicated places. They are full of contradictions, absurdities, good intentions, bad decisions, excellent people, occasional idiots, some wonderful characters and an extraordinary number of acronyms. They are also very funny.
So, alongside the more substantial articles, there will be shorter stories about the everyday peculiarities of working in education. Some might make a serious point about leadership or teaching; others will involve photocopier codes.
After 21 years, I have plenty of opinions about education. I also have considerably more respect for the possibility that I might be wrong.
Both will appear here.