Remote learning: lessons learned

Posted on May 24, 2020 by Jo Facer

My central aim today is to avoid using the word “unprecedented”. It is clear teachers find themselves in… Unusual circumstances. None of us signed up to a career spent sitting at a desk all day and communicating by email and phone. My overriding feeling right now is complete confusion as to why anyone would choose this kind of sedentary life, and I, along with many others, am very much looking forward to being physically present in a school again, ideally with some children and colleagues at a safe and social distance.

Much as I would like to pretend otherwise, distance learning looks to be with us for the long term – most educators consider that a significant number of children will have to stay at home with shielding relatives, as well as potentially having two weeks off school should they or a classmate show symptoms – at least deep into the next academic year. I’ve been excited to get to be a part of Oak National Academy, the UK’s online school, on its curriculum team, to learn more about best practice in this brave new world of remote learning, and I’d like to share some lessons learned along the way.

“Assessment for learning” (AfL) looks very different

Even where schools are providing online lessons for their own children, there are some strong arguments for these being pre-recorded rather than live – safeguarding concerns abound with live lessons along with childcare and related demands on teachers’ time making it tough to run lessons according to a set timetable.

Even in live teaching, traditional methods of AfL aren’t foolproof: it’s hard to raise your hand when you’re stuck in a classroom; harder still to do the waving required to make this visible across the internet in front of your peers. It’s easy to read faces in a classroom or hear that low mutter of dissent or see heads shaking when something isn’t clear; again, this is much harder with video conferencing.

Moreover, when students look at a screen, any screen, the default position is to be passive, and breaking the association is a challenge. Students could easily sit through hours of online learning and learn nothing, just as many teachers will have experienced lengthy online meetings they can’t quite recall at this point, along with the multiple TV box sets that have faded into the mists of time.

Online learning must repeatedly fight this passivity. At Oak, teachers have amassed a range of strategies to get children to do something with what they are learning. In primary, this is displayed most cutely through children shouting the answer at the screen.

In secondary, it seems less clear that adolescents would be willing to do this. All Oak teachers use “pause points”: following every new piece of information, a check for understanding – a quick “everyone writes” or multiple choice question to check they have understood.

The lesson is: any time you’d check for understanding with a class, make it a quick task online.

Less is more

The amazing Josie Mingay running form-time reading aside, it is challenging to get children reading a lot when they’re not in the classroom. Oak runs on the assumption that many children access lessons through a mobile phone, and they need to be as accessible as possible for all learners. In the flow of a lesson, it is certainly a challenge to student attention and to teacher delivery to read swathes of text. That is why, though it kills the English teacher in me, I’d advise that less is more when delivering online lessons. Having a large amount of text on slides is a sure fire way to alienate some children. Keep slides clean and keep wording minimal.

In an ideal world, every child would have their own laptop or tablet device from which online learning would be easily accessible. It seems likely that the funding and logistics of this mean it’s not a quick and easy answer. Our best bet – the one that is fastest as well – is to make use of the fact that almost every child will have a mobile phone. With this in mind, use slides judiciously to chunk new knowledge and present it cleanly and clearly, and deliver extended reading separately to new learning to ensure maximum pupil access to lessons.

Digital simplicity

Technology offers limitless solutions to the problem of educating children remotely, but that doesn’t mean we have to take advantage of all of them. The more complicated we make our lessons, the more hurdles we place in front of our children. Oak’s Head of History, Ben Arscott, described this approach recently saying: “every click is an opportunity for a kid to check out of a lesson.” Adding login details is another hurdle that could cause confusion and prevent access. Whatever you do, make it as easy as possible to access, removing every barrier that might prevent children engaging with the learning.

Be “pantomime”

One of my favourite pieces of advice on teaching was given to me by Barry Smith, who describes the process by which a teacher becomes larger than life, firing up the pupils through sheer force of personality, as “be pantomime”. This is good advice in the classroom, though it doesn’t work for everyone – we must also ensure we remain true to our teacher personas, as children see right through inauthenticity.

Normally I’m a fan of clear and simple delivery and no fan of gimmicks, but while we are delivering lessons on the very device kids are most often distracted by, a little gimmick goes a long way. I find the entirety of Oak’s primary team enchanting, but one of my favourite moments was watching the year 6 teacher add some jazz to a spelling test with his quizmaster jacket (see minutes 1:45 to 2:30 for the transformation).

Oak National Academy is completely free to all students and teachers and exists to support teachers focus on the things a tech platform cannot do: the pastoral support of pupils. When professionals return to school, it’s a great resource to allow teachers to plan for the children in front of them, while being sure that the ones at home have something of quality to learn with. We’re improving all the time, and looking for new ways to integrate with existing systems so teachers can monitor the work their students are completing on Oak. With that in mind, do leave any feedback on how we could make the platform most helpful for teachers in the comments of this post.

Finally, some of Oak’s team of superstar teachers will be leading a Research Ed Home talk on 2nd June at 11am to share their own lessons learned, so tune in then to find out more.

David Copperfield

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Jo Facer

I did not like Dickens until I was 28 years old. When I joined a new school, the whole of the Autumn term for year 7 was spent reading Dickens, which I thought I hated, so I decided I really had to read some. The good news was that I was totally wrong. Dickens is great, once you get past the excruciating syntax and accept that these are not, in fact, capital “S” Serious books.

In fact, David Copperfield may be the greatest comic novel ever written. It is a thinly veiled autobiography, and full of the most genuinely humorous scenes in all of literature – not just Victorian literature, all of literature. It is a masterpiece and you must read it if you have not already. (You’re welcome.)

What is good but in a different way is the recent film, The Personal History of David Copperfield. Like the novel, it is hilarious. Unlike the novel, which usually comes in at around a thousand pages of printed text, the film delivers the most vital storylines in under two hours. A recipe for disaster, some may say. Luckily, Armando Iannucci wrote and directed it, so it is a work of pure genius.

And what happens in the film, when you squash up all those thousand pages, is you see more clearly the peaks and troughs of David Copperfield’s life. The vista is one of extreme success and extreme failure, cycling around. An idyllic early childhood gives way to the entry of an abusive stepfather; poverty and drudgery give way to fame and fortune. This is repeated several times.

I found this film incredibly profound. For me, no other film has quite captured the essence of reality so well as this sometimes surreal piece.

In March 2019, I was reeling from a spectacular failure. I’d applied for a headship and arrogantly assumed I was a shoe-in. I’d done heaps of preparation, redrafted my application several times, and conducted three mock interviews with three different, very kind individuals. I was absolutely ready. This was my school.

I didn’t even get through to day two of the interview. I was crushed.

Reading back over my diary at that time, I laughed at how crushed I had been. I wanted to tell that sad, pathetic woman: “don’t you worry! In a couple of months time, you’re going to see the dream headship – a new start school in London with your favourite academy trust – and they’re going to be mad enough to give it to you!”

Deflated and humbled by my earlier failure, instead of putting in hard hours and preparation for this second attempt, I rushed an application to get it in by the deadline and repeatedly believed I wasn’t going to get called to the next stage of the interview.

Reading my diary in the months after my appointment is a whirlwind of disbelief: how did I get to do this job? How did I get to work with these incredible people? What had I done in life to deserve such riches? Once the interviews for our founding staff began, my disbelief doubled: never had I ever turned away so many extraordinary professionals. We hired a dream team. For each post, we would worry we hadn’t shortlisted the right people, and then at the interview day they would just gleam like gems. Every member of that team was a star player.

And then, when we had recruited our entire team, COVID-19 struck.

One evening early on in the crisis a very close friend had sent me a text message: “your school’s not going to open!” I laughed then, as they were joking and we have that kind of relationship.

But as the weeks crept on, and schools closed, and shops closed, and we were all sent home, and the children came in twos and threes instead of hundreds; and our building slowed and slowed, and the supply chain was disrupted, and the contractor for the second half of our building wouldn’t sign until after the virus was “over,” and the Department for Education couldn’t sign the funding agreement without a building, it began to sink in. Our school wasn’t going to open.

While personally hugely disappointing, the decision makes perfect sense. The DfE’s understandable priority is existing schools: the logistical challenges of reopening schools is immense; time and resources are limited; of course they want to place those limited resources into current schools rather than opening new ones. The DfE are supportive of a new secondary school in Ealing, which is desperately needed in years to come due to the large numbers of children going through the primaries right now: they, and we, are confident that Ark Soane will open – in 2021. While a deferral is disappointing, our founding team are committed to coming back next year stronger than ever – a year spent working in one of our other Ark schools, thinking carefully about Soane, is a privilege in many ways.

It is nonetheless desperately sad for all of us – “our” year 6s who will go to other schools, as well as our founding teachers who were excited to build something brilliant in September.

And so I turn to David Copperfield. I’m not working in a blacking factory (or a bottle factory, as the thinly veiled autobiography has it); it’s not so bleak as life for my furloughed friends and family. But there is, after all, no hierarchy of pain.

The hope I draw from Copperfield is this: this life will be full of tragedy and joy. These will cycle around, and we should always be wary of our highest points because they will not last. As I read back in my diary, I want to warn that joyous woman that her dream school will remain just that – a dream – for longer than she can imagine.

Yet at this very low time, where we are all united in fear for our families and our lives and our jobs and our world as we know it, I know that more positive times will come. I can’t wait to see where the next joy enters.

Chicago Charter Schools

Posted on April 25, 2020 by Jo Facer

I wrote this blog post back in February, but before I managed to post it the world changed rather dramatically. Now we begin to settle into our new normal, I’m revisiting what has formed the way I think about education. We will return to our schools (whenever that may be) I hope with a renewed vigour to improve the educational chances of our students. We should always be asking: what does great look like? This post is about a time when I was sure I was seeing “great”.

In 2012, I was granted a week’s leave by a kind Headteacher to be able to take part in a visit to see Chicago’s Charter schools with the charity Teach For All. It’s a visit I come back to again and again, often with the sad corollary question: why can’t we replicate the extraordinary success of the US Charter schools?

I started to teach in 2010, the same year that the documentary “Waiting for Superman” came out. As such, I was exposed from the early days of my teaching career to the incredible feats of learning happening in schools like the KIPP schools; I was exposed to the thinking of the short-lived but much-lauded chancellor of DC public schools, Michelle Rhee, and I was introduced to the British version of this in my training weeks with Teach First: King Solomon Academy.

I’ve frequently heard educators say that America is always five or ten years ahead of the UK in terms of education, and so a visit to their leading schools was likely to become a formative event.

An attitude that all the schools we visited seemed imbued with was success at all costs. We visited three schools – one elementary, and two high schools – all of which massively outperformed the local public schools, all of which had incredibly deprived in takes.

At the elementary school, in the middle of an estate strewn with boarded up and broken windows, an intake which was 96% free or reduced lunches moved around the building silently and were taught traditionally. Flags celebrating their teachers’ universities adorned the hallways, a feature notable across all the Charter schools we visited. Even the Maths examples were linked to university (“if you have a college degree, you earn 20% more than someone who does not. Work out what your take home salary would be with or without a degree for the average state salaries of these ten states”).

Yet I also witnessed heart breaking bullying of a child with clear special educational needs, who on the particular day I visited appeared to receive no specialised support at any point – not even a teacher giving her extra help in the lesson. When the teacher in one class asked the children to choose their partner, she tried in vain to get someone to work with her as her peers pretended she didn’t exist, before turning to me – the observer – and saying: “can I work with you please?” In terms of the ethos and culture of the school, the messaging seemed to begin and end with: we’re going to get to university.

Of course, it is unfair to judge a school on a one-day visit, but school culture inevitably pervades. This culture was evident in our next visit, to a high school where 75% of students received free or reduced lunches. The mission of university for all pervaded the school – though students were “tracked” into three streams, the expectation was that all would make it to university. One student told me that they were learning to be more independent (for example, students picked up work from a central area to complete if they had missed any school) because: “in college no-one will hold your hand.” What shone through most at this school, though, was love – the children we met absolutely loved their school. They proudly showed us their “anti-bullying pledge wall,” and were incredibly loving and accepting towards one another. This was most touchingly revealed when we saw lockers that were covered in wrapping paper, sometimes with balloons tied to them – a tradition that happened for student birthdays (we even, sweetly, found they had “wrapped” a teacher’s door having found out it was her birthday).

The final school we visited had an intake where 84% of students had free meals, 10% reduced lunches. The school mascot was this big cat, which they coloured in every time someone won their university place along with posting a copy of the acceptance letter.

Incredibly, on our visit day our staff orientation was interrupted to announce that the final member of the senior class had won their university acceptance: the cat was complete. 100% of that class had been accepted to a four-year university course, the most prestigious kind in America.

At this school, they didn’t just talk the talk of university – they also managed the practicalities. Students had three hours of classes a week on university: how to apply, how to get funding, how to study, how to live independently, how to balance work and university.

The students described incredibly tough discipline, starting with demerits and detentions, and escalating to Saturday detentions. If a student received more than four Saturday detentions, they would be held back a year in school. As you can imagine, this was quite a deterrent.

It is clear that the challenge for schools in England is tough: our system necessitates some children leaving our institutions at the age of 16, so we have more limited control over university acceptances. We can’t hold students back a year for poor behaviour. In other ways, of course, Americans face a far steeper challenge: excessive university fees, as well as access to healthcare and other benefits being more challenging.

This trip was formative for me though. Until you actually see it, you don’t truly believe it is possible – or else, I didn’t. I thought I had high expectations, but what I saw in the Charter school classrooms exposed these as frighteningly low.

And while the details differ, this visit taught me some overarching eternal truths about schools.

For example: the building doesn’t matter. Charter schools often open in the actual building of a failing school. Technology doesn’t matter. These schools all used blackboards and the occasional overhead projector (I might be the last generation of teacher who remembers these in their childhood classrooms!). Class size doesn’t matter. These schools are often widely oversubscribed, and classes were much larger than the state averages.

But culture matters. Parental support matters. Quality teaching – and all the attendant concerns like teacher development – matters. Curriculum matters. And belief matters. That core belief: it is possible, it is being done, we can do it too.

Why can’t we replicate the extraordinary success of the Charter schools? We can, we just haven’t yet.

King Solomon Academy: the original dream school

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Jo Facer

I trained to teach with Teach First in 2010, and I will always consider that to have been a fortunate year because of one two hour, voluntary session held in a lecture hall at Warwick University. In that session, a Principal named Max Haimendorf introduced the pupils of King Solomon Academy to us, and explained what his school stood for.

Looking back, it is clear to me that this was a defining moment in education. Schools like KSA simply did not exist back in 2010. It’s hard, having experienced the best part of ten years of free schools trailblazing innovative practice, to remember a time when no children in England did “two claps on three” and chanted “you’ve got to read, people read.”. Back when schools were just schools – they didn’t grow from nothing; they occasionally changed their name or tragically closed – but that was that.

In 2010, as KSA’s founding cohort were finishing their first year, the simplicity and scope of Max’s vision was ground breaking: if 97% of privately educated children go to university, why not 97% of the children we serve? If we accept 97% as a benchmark, why not make it 100%? At that time, only 16% of children in receipt of free school meals were going on to university. The contrast of these figures could not be more stark.

That session in 2010 marked the first time someone had put it to me in those terms. I honestly think before that moment I had somewhere thought that some children were smart, and some children were not, and schools had to do the best they could with that. Max and his team’s beliefs completely changed mine.

What is so humbling about the KSA story is its sustained excellence. That first cohort of children came out with stunning results – 93% of children gained five GCSEs at A*-C including English and Maths. But as the years have gone on, the school has continued to wildly exceed expectations, and put its children on a path to university and genuine life choices: in six years of GCSE results, five of the cohorts have achieved progress in the top 1% of all schools.

I’ve been privileged to visit the original dream school four times since that day, and every time I’ve felt moved by what that team does – day in, day out. The belief and the vision are strong as ever; the behaviour and the respect for adults from the children is clear; the copious amounts of work in every lesson and the focus on an academic core of subjects are still strong. After 10 years the results are still impressive. And after 10 years, Max is still there. In a sector where people often move on rapidly, or see success as running many schools over a career, to stay with the ever changing and ever challenging school you first founded seems to me the most admirable choice one could make, and illustrates the total commitment to mission that founded the school in the first place.

I remember leaving that meeting in 2010 buoyed with the infectious enthusiasm of the KSA team. I remember my shock that not all my Teach First colleagues felt the same.

“The clapping was weird.” “I didn’t like the chanting.” “I don’t think they’re right – university isn’t for everyone.”

The clapping is weird. So is the clicking. So is the chanting. But for me it is weird in the way Shakespeare is weird: it creates a new world –one of endless possibility.

School is, at its heart, a place for reinvention. School is the place where children come, independent of their families and their backgrounds – they leave whatever home they have come from, and whatever troubles or issues might be present there, and they sit side by side with their peers and learn from the same teacher. At school, a child can be anything they want to be.

KSA taught me that the job of a school is to believe the impossible is possible, and to know that getting there will look different and feel, at times, different or even uncomfortable. The promise of university necessitates difficult choices on curriculum, on pedagogy and on ethos. But for the schools that make that promise, the results are extraordinary.

Teaching at Ark Soane Academy

Posted on January 11, 2020 by Jo Facer

As part of the Ark network, Ark Soane Academy will benefit from a wealth of expertise on teaching and learning. Ark provides central professional development that is second to none, as well as facilitating teachers to study for professional qualifications like the NPQML or NPQSL.

But we all know that professional development of teaching is about so much more than professional qualifications.

Teaching and learning at Soane will centre on a spirit of continuous improvement. Teachers at Soane will always seek to get better at the most important thing they do: teaching.

We’ll work in the context of cognitive science: we believe that something is only learned when it is committed to long-term memory. We believe in frequent, low-stakes testing to support learning. We believe in clear teacher-instruction, and teacher-led questioning and discussion. We believe in extended practice focused on the core aspects of the subject. We believe in frequent, subject-specific, feedback; not onerous marking.

Excellent teaching will be ensured by two central concepts: impeccable behaviour and coaching.

Impeccable behaviour will be ensured from day one at Soane, with children inducted into the school’s behaviour policy for one whole week at the start of year 7. A centralised detention system will support teachers to enforce high standards. Plenty of whole-staff training will ensure that teachers are as consistent as possible when applying sanctions, to ensure we can be completely fair to those in our care. Impeccable behaviour means teachers can focus on the most important thing: teaching their subject to children.

Our coaching model will support and stretch teachers at all stages of their career. We know that one-size-fits-all professional development alone will not deliver world-class teaching. At Soane, all teachers will teach with their doors open; a signal to their fellow professionals to come and look at what’s going on. Teachers will provide feedback on teaching to all members of staff, regardless of the supposed school hierarchies. Every teacher will observe another teacher weekly – a short observation, just 10-15 minutes – and give feedback and an action step to improve teaching.

We can all always get better at what we’re doing. If the idea of continuously improving, while supported by strong school systems, appeals to you, we’re hiring now.

Leading at Ark Soane Academy

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Jo Facer

Starting a school from scratch is the opportunity of a lifetime. You have a blank slate on which to project your every hope of what a child’s education might be. While those limitless choices might seem daunting, we are lucky to be surrounded by a group of highly successful schools with Ark, including a number of successful new-start schools. There are no shortage of smart, experienced educators to guide Soane’s way.

What would you do if you could start a school with only year 7? What would the ideal behaviour policy, curriculum, lesson look like? What systems would need to be in place to make that happen? Which parts of all the best schools you know of would you take with you?

We already have a clear idea of the kind of school Soane will be: a rigorous curriculum delivered by subject experts who plan lessons with the lessons of cognitive science in mind, high expectations of behaviour, and opportunities to build cultural capital through enrichment. The large-scale values are in place.

What is not yet in place is the fine detail.

We are looking for exceptional teachers and leaders to lead at Soane. Every teacher we hire for September 2020 will be a leader: unlike a long-established school, the founding teachers always have a special place in a new start school. Whether they choose to pursue promotion or to stay in the classroom, no other teachers who join us later will have created the founding systems of the school. No one else will have as strong a sense of the school. No one after will have made the school from its foundations up.

If you believe strongly that every child is capable of academic success, that every child has the innate potential to be an upstanding citizen, and that the highest expectations of behaviour allow children the freedom to learn, leading at Soane may be the right place for you.

Over the coming weeks, we are welcoming applications from motivated teachers at all stages in their careers to join the founding team to begin our school. It will be a rigorous process, because there will never be a more important team than those who found our school. You will need to be an excellent classroom practitioner, have a strong understanding of the science of how children learn, have a mind for detail and a wish to create and perfect new systems at all levels of school life. Most importantly, we are looking for people who love their subject and who love children.

Please see the ‘vacancies’ tab on our webpage to explore current opportunities with Soane.

“Radical Candour” and staff culture

Posted on November 30, 2019 by Jo Facer

As we start preparing to hire our founding teaching team at Ark Soane Academy, I’ve been thinking a lot about staff culture. Speaking to a wise headteacher colleague recently, I was struck by her advice: “when you get that founding team together, there will be zero trust in the room.” She advised me to think deeply about how to build that trust so they can become a team that executes excellence. And she told me to read Kim Scott’s Radical Candour.

The combination of my colleague’s wisdom and reading Scott’s book have given me a clear steer on staff culture. Radical Candour is essentially about how to set up strong team relationships so you can hold each other to account and continually improve. In Scott’s latest introduction, she notes that she almost called the book “Compassionate Candour”, which I far prefer. What this means for Scott is that you need to both “care deeply” about each team member and “challenge directly.”

The book opens with the all-too recognisable story of the anonymised “Bob.” Bob came to her company with great references, but his first piece of work was sub-par. Rather than challenging him on it, Scott insincerely told him the work was great. This meant Bob assumed that this standard of work was acceptable, and continued with it. Which meant the team kept having to cover for him, and then they themselves stopped seeing why they should put so much effort in when Bob was praised for so little. Eventually, having avoided Bob in the office, Scott finally built up the courage to talk directly – and fired him.

Bob’s reaction? “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

It is easier to care deeply than it is to challenge directly – I’ve often fallen into the trap of what Scott calls “ruinous empathy”: “I won’t have that difficult conversation today because this person is feeling under the weather/has just come back from being ill/is having relationship problems.” And of course, sometimes it’s right to put off a conversation (in fact, Scott says picking people up on every little thing, in work as in relationships, is not advised: she suggests leaving “three things unsaid” each day). But ultimately, there are some hinge points where you do need to hold others to account.

A large part of this book explores the concept that you as the leader need to model welcoming feedback. In fact, if you are constantly seeking, inviting, relishing and (crucially) acting on feedback, you encourage this culture in your organization. People might not have to steel themselves for the “difficult conversation” if everyone is constantly saying: ‘what do you think? What could I change? How could I improve this?” It becomes part of the natural dialogue. Scott describes a culture at Google and Apple where the top leaders – CEOs, founders – would relish being shouted down by others, and thank them for being so direct. She cites Steve Jobs: “I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”

So as leaders, we have a huge responsibility to always seek feedback, and then to genuinely act on it and show we have taken that feedback seriously to build that culture of constant improvement. This culture is especially crucial to an organization that is growing.

Scott talks of the particular nature of start-ups, which of course resonates strongly with me at this point: with a tiny team, everyone knows each other extremely well. You tend to find it easy to have radically candid conversations, because you know each other well and the care is evidently there. But as a start-up begins to grow, this does not scale. You can’t deeply know one hundred people in a genuine way. You can’t go around “just being honest” with people you haven’t built relationships with. That, Scott advises, makes you an “a**hole.” The trap is that people actually prefer a competent boss who is a “jerk” to an incompetent boss who is nice to them. The danger of this is that the jerks begin to flourish, and all of a sudden you have an organisational culture that becomes pretty toxic.

How do we guard against this? How do we safeguard the culture, while still being honest with each other about how we’re doing?

The first step, as above, is to model from above. Scott notes that for CEOs (headteachers), the way you line manage others will be mimicked by them: you influence your organization much more than you are ever aware (she tells the memorable story of a hold-up in making a shuttle bus for workers at one company because the team in charge looked at the CEO’s car and chose the same colours for the bus, which then took longer to make. The CEO hadn’t mentioned this and didn’t care what colour the bus was, but for those he managed they added weight to his every visible movement).

Secondly, perhaps having a dialogue of compassionate candour between line manager and managee, i.e. those who have formed a trusting relationship, is the best place for candour to remain. A positive culture focused on excellence can only be built when feedback is freely given and underpinned by the understanding that the person giving feedback genuinely cares about the person receiving it – and relationships do not scale in the way we imagine they do. But if everyone is continually seeking to improve with the support, guidance and challenge of those who know them the best – I think that’s a staff culture I’d want to be a part of.

If you like the sound of a staff culture focused on continual improvement, founded on genuine care for others, we’re starting to hire our founding team in December. Stay in touch!

Curriculum and enrichment

Posted on November 9, 2019 by Jo Facer

It goes without saying that the curriculum is the education preoccupation of the moment. As a profession, we’ve come to recognise the limits of a focus on pedagogy alone, and we’ve moved towards a debate on what children study, what their entitlement is, and what that looks like in a school.

In creating the curriculum entitlement for Ark Soane Academy, I’ve had to do some soul-searching. It became rapidly clear, staring at those 29 squares of lesson time, that there was no way we could do everything we wanted to. My own dream curriculum would have 7 lessons of English a week, 8 of Maths, 3 History, 3 Geography, 2 Religious Education, 5 MFL, 7 Science, 2 Art, 2 Music, 2 PE, 2 Drama… we’d have to either find 14 additional hours, or compromise. It came to me early on that we couldn’t do everything, and we certainly couldn’t do everything well.

So, moving away from the boxes, I went back to first principles. We want to ensure that students can achieve great results in academic subjects, not only because academic subjects open doors, but so they can be introduced to the academic conversation, participate in cultural debate and discussion, and have a broad awareness of human thought that is the entitlement of every child. With that in mind, the curriculum at Soane will be highly academic. We make no apologies for wanting every child to learn core academic subjects, and expect all Soane students to study the following to GCSE level: English, Maths, Science, History or Geography, and a foreign language.

That is not to say that we only care about academic subjects at Soane; far from it. After all, we take our name from the most famous architect in British history: Sir John Soane. Soane, born the son of a bricklayer, made his legacy through his art: in his case, designing innovative, enduring buildings like the Bank of England and the Dulwich Picture Gallery. We absolutely recognise and celebrate the importance of the arts. In fact, to designate the arts “non-academic” is clearly inadequate. The arts can be taught as “academically” as any other subject, and they will be at Soane.

Another thought I could not shake was the importance of enrichment. I was inspired hearing Lizzie Bowling’s speech at New Voices last year on enrichment, where she lamented how few children came to her wonderfully planned, hugely inspiring lunchtime clubs. Her rallying cry: “enrichment for all!” rang in my ears. We had to ensure every child had an enriched experience of school, not only those who chose it. So we have built enrichment into the school timetable, to ensure every child who attends Soane gets to choose something extra-curricular to pursue. Our aim with enrichment is to provide students with a broader educational experience, and to enable them to have an aspect of choice in their education: students will have free choice over a myriad of possibilities, and the opportunity to change each term to try something different. What these possibilities look like will be shaped by the passions and expertise of the teachers we hire in January and February next year.

At all open events, the children want to hear about school trips. I’ve worked at schools where teachers ran trips every week, taking a handful of children to some new and exciting place. This ultimately left behind cover work and all its attendant difficulties for the teacher’s classes, and scores of children crying “unfair” – it was often seen that the same students got lots of opportunities, and others very few. In other schools I’ve worked at, we would run trip days or “academy days”, like I know a lot of schools do now. Taking a whole year group out on an enriching trip means no cover left behind, and no children left behind. This will be our approach to trips at Soane.

If you like the sound of an academic curriculum full of cultural capital with enrichment as an entitlement for all, please stay in touch – we will be accepting applications from December 2019.

Jerusalem

Posted on October 27, 2019 by Jo Facer

I didn’t want to go to Israel. I know that’s a terribly spoiled child point of view, but that’s the truth. When I looked it up the first search hit was “terrorist threat” (which, if you’re interested, was not considered zero). In fact, it was a chance conversation with my friend Lia who told me she was considering going there at Christmas that made me think again.

My Israel trip coincided with discovering Ann Patchett. Readers will be familiar with the “reading rut”: you’ve exhausted all your go-to reads, and nothing on your shelves seems appealing. All of a sudden, a writer emerges – an odd article mentions them in passing, and you’re away. How had I never read Ann Patchett before? Wonderfully, you discover their large back-catalogue, and suddenly the reading vista seems plentiful again; the reading world infinite once more.

So much about This is the Story of a Happy Marriage spoke to me. In “Do not Disturb” Patchett writes:

“what we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached… later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans… Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home.”

As a full-time, main scale teacher, I went on holiday to do two things: 1. To read books; 2. To sit still. The daily life of a teacher is energetic to say the least, and so all I really wanted to do was sit down. (I always want to read, so that is always my number one aim of anything I’m doing or anywhere I’m going.) My partner, by contrast, has a job that involves a lot of desk-sitting, so his ideal holiday consists of moving and doing. We are not, sadly, ideal holiday companions. This time, we took the advice an Israeli colleague and headed for Tel Aviv, which seemed to have it all: beaches for me to sit on, and no end of things to see and do.

On the penultimate day, we took a small group tour to visit Jerusalem. I want to write about Jerusalem while it is fresh in my mind, and I want to write about it when it is not. I want to find out what stays with me and what melts away, though I suppose writing about anything will also change the experience.

In my ignorance, I’d not known that Jerusalem is a city of three religions: I knew, of course, that the city was disputed by Jews and Muslims; I had been less aware of the Christian elements of the city (and the Armenian presence was a mystery to me). Friends had warned me that I might find disapproving looks from the ultra-religious in the different “quarters”, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, the only location where anyone glanced at our group with anything approaching distaste was during prayers at King David’s tomb, when, perhaps understandably, a man trying to focus on his prayer in the space (which is also a synagogue) was unhappy at our looming, encroaching presence.

At site after site, our tour guide spoke honestly of the reality of what we were seeing: “this is where they say Jesus died… but we don’t really know. This is meant to be King David’s tomb, but it probably isn’t. This is where some Christians believe the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven… But some Christians think it’s somewhere else.” For my scientific other half, this served to strengthen his view that religion is “made up”. But what came through for me was the power of tradition to help us connect to something bigger than ourselves. I don’t think I have ever felt the power of belonging quite so strongly as standing side by side with the women on the ladies’ side of the Western wall, or watching a boy read his Bar Mitzvah Torah as his joyous relatives celebrated his coming of age in the streets, or seeing large groups of Muslim worshippers outside the Dome of the Rock eating a shared picnic and holding out bread for us to join them. Religion connects us, and that’s not nothing.

And though the city has had a fractured past (to say the least), and though I can’t speak for those who live there, there was something astonishing about people of such extremely diverse backgrounds living so closely and so, apparently, peacefully (I asked my tour guide if the city was “safe” and she unhesitatingly said “of course!” before adding: “but I am from South America, so,” and shrugging). I’d been warned before visiting Israel to be ready to see the military walking the streets armed with terrifyingly visible weapons, but found that to be vanishingly rare. In fact, I saw this only twice, by those guarding the most sacred places in Jerusalem.

Who are the Jews who live in Jerusalem, who pray three times a day, who dress in the ultra-orthodox manner? Our guide explained that many devote their lives to studying the Torah – they don’t have what we’d consider traditional employment. The depth of the knowledge they must have of this sacred script seemed awesome to me, and reminded me that we need all focuses to make up the intellectual world: the polymath is just as crucial as the post-doc. Why is Judaism the oldest surviving world religion, asked our guide? Because of these people, who devote their lives to fully living this tradition. Without them, she posited, the religion and culture could have died out long ago. So from the Jewish quarter, I felt the value of tradition and the value of deep knowledge.

We learn more from travelling than we would have learned from a textbook not because of our own physical presence somewhere foreign, but because of the people we encounter. Our tour was made up of kind and fascinating people: a couple from Turkey and their colleague, who sold smart fridges and were passionate about their technology. An Italian couple, living in London; one of whom taught Maths, one of whom worked at the Wellcome Collection. A couple and their daughter from Hong Kong, who talked about the protests they were currently living through with great fortitude and occasional humour. And a final couple, who I didn’t manage to talk to until lunch. We had two options, lamb and falafel. I ordered the latter. “My daughter’s a vegetarian as well,” said the gentleman. I was pained to admit that I was not a vegetarian, I just loved falafel.

As we walked together after lunch, I found out he was from Athens and had studied Computer Science in Scotland in the 80s, where he was “part of this incredible revolution.” As we moved on to our next stop, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he said to me: “this is the dream of my life. It is the dream of my life to see where Jesus was buried and resurrected, and now I get to be here.”

“The dream of my life.”

His words haunt me. I feel honoured to have been there at the moment where this man accomplished his life’s dream, but I also feel deeply troubled by his words. To me, there is something infinitely admirable about having such a dream. What, I immediately worried, is the dream of my life? To run a school? To own a dog? To have a child? To read some books? To write some books?

These are ambitions; they are actions I can do, and when they happen, what will be the outcome? Will I say “well, that’s the dream of my life. Onto a new dream.” Beside this man’s enduring faith, all my dreams seemed suddenly stripped of meaning. This man’s faith taught me that we need to seek something more in life than milestones and accomplishments.

I don’t like to think of myself as a superstitious person, but I probably am. When I lose an eyelash, I blow on it and make a wish. For years, I wished for the next rung on the promotion ladder. (I don’t wish for that anymore.) I used to wish I would have children, but for reasons too complex for this essay I don’t wish for that anymore either. On the times that I would pray, I would wish for these two things. I would also pray for friends who were in physical or mental or spiritual pain, or I would ask for those closest to me to be protected, or, embarrassingly occasionally, I would express my gratitude for what I have.

A couple of weeks ago, my step-father’s cancer was given the “terminal” diagnosis. It was very unexpected, and deeply troubling with how rapidly “some tests, nothing to worry about” had become “weeks, maybe months.” When I got to the world’s most holy place, it struck me that the thing I would most wish for, the object I would most want to pray for, is for him. But for what? A miraculous recovery? It seemed so unlikely, so small a wish to put up against the forces of nature that are ravaging his body.

And it came to me as I stood by the Western wall, surrounded by those for whom faith forms a central part of their lives, that prayers are not wishes. That I had misunderstood. Instead, I turned my thoughts to the inner life. I prayed that my stepfather would have the mental strength to die with dignity and to overcome the suffering that was now inevitable, and that I and my family would find the strength to let him go thirty years before anyone expected that to happen. And instead of praying to become a Headteacher (thank you, God), I prayed that I would have the strength to do the job well, and the moral compass to add to the world’s good in my small sphere.

Reading Patchett’s thoughts on dogs, death, divorce and marriage, I reflected that I have written too little about too little. I have stayed in a small sphere, not seeking to contribute elsewhere. I resolved to give more time to more areas of my life, and to reflect that time in the things and in the way I wrote. Because how can I answer the question: what is the dream of my life? It will take much more time, knowledge and experience.

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Reading all the Books

Author Archives: Jo Facer