Category Archives: Education

Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave and other Affirmations

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Throughout time, catchphrases have dominated the spaces children inhabit, seeping into their subconscious – we hope – for the better: honesty is the best policy! The early bird catches the worm! More haste, less speed!

In the best schools I’ve visited and worked in, leaders have thought carefully about the messages we want children to internalise: “work hard, be nice;” “team beats individual;” “climbing the mountain to college.” One of my favourite primary schools sets a Christopher Logue poem to music and has the children sing this at every assembly:

Come to the edge

We might fall

Come to the edge

It’s too high!

COME TO THE EDGE!

And they came

And we pushed,

And they flew.

Short, snappy slogans or songs are memorable and seep into the subconscious; it is no wonder so many schools think carefully about their messaging.

I used to refer to this practice, with love, as “positive brainwashing.” As schools and societies, we have a duty to think through the messages we want our children to leave us believing.

I’ve written before about the omnipresence of the enchantingly bizarre Goodnight Moon. Well, a book has come in which has exploded bedtime. By which I mean, has superseded this absolute classic to be the book our son hears last thing every night before heading to sleep. That book is Jessica Hische’s Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave.

The entire work is a masterpiece, but more than that, it’s a parent’s entire compendium of the positive brainwashing you want to enact on your child. Did I say brainwashing? I meant affirmations.

Affirmations, apparently a child of ancient Eastern philosophy, are phrases that provoke a positive state of mind. Every night before he sleeps, my son now hears affirmations like: “it doesn’t matter if I win as long as I have fun”; “tomorrow I’ll be curious; please teach me something new”; “there’s nothing I can’t do” – among others. Who knows whether these affirmations will have an impact on his sense of self-worth for the long-term, but it definitely makes me mindful of the messages he is receiving every day from his family.

Schools which create a great culture for their young people have thought carefully about the messages children hear every day. We only have a few years with our young people, and there is so much to do and learn in those years. But a few well-chosen affirmations can both guide young people to be their best selves and push them to make their positive mark on the world. What are the affirmations we want to send children out into the world believing?

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Outsmart your Brain

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Like any fan of cognitive science in the classroom, Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? is one of the “must reads” I recommend to anyone interested in how children learn. These days, I come across fewer and fewer people who have not read it. Willingham’s latest offering, Outsmart your Brain, covers many of the same principles, but this time these are addressed directly to the learner.

Although this book is aimed at university students there is a lot that educators can take from it for the secondary classroom. I’ve also found parts highly applicable when thinking, as I currently am, a lot about adult education – how we train teachers, and support them to develop through their teaching career.

While parts of the book will feel familiar to fans of cognitive science everywhere, there are so many gems here. The entire section on how to take notes, for example, should be excerpted and taught to every sixth former in the land. Core aspects of learning like retrieval practice and the difference between performance and learning are explored in ways secondary students will really understand, and so could provide a useful prompt for educators seeking to help their charges understand how learning works. I’ve read about overlearning elsewhere, but Willingham’s explanation is typically no-nonsense and succinct:

First, overlearning works, just as you would expect it to. It protects against forgetting. Second, while you’re doing it, it feels as though it’s not working. It feels pointless, even foolish, to keep studying after you know something. You’re going through your flash card deck and getting every answer right, so you can’t help but wonder, “What good is this doing?” What it’s doing is strengthening the memories to shield them from forgetting.” Again, more gold dust to use when pupils claim to “already know this.

As well as the science of learning, Outsmart your Brain shades into aspects of how we work with young people, and it is in these sections we get a glimpse of Willingham the educator (can you imagine being a university student learning from him?): “If your students consistently do not ask questions, you should wonder about your relationship with them. They are not quiet because your explanations are so brilliant and clear. They’re quiet because they see asking a question as taking a risk. Ask yourself why that is.”

The final aspect of this book that I loved was Willingham’s exploration of what I’d term the problem of being human. How we learn is not quite the same as how to learn, and his understanding of the vagaries of human disposition comes into sharp focus here. Straplines such as “do not rely on willpower if you can change the environment instead” will be valuable to teachers everywhere. His explanation of the motivation to learn is clearly drawn, including here:

We are more likely to procrastinate if we think we can’t succeed at the task we ought to do. If your instructor assigns Bleak House, you not only have all of the usual reasons to procrastinate; you also notice that the book is more than nine hundred pages long. Feeling as though you can never finish such a long book makes starting it feel like buying a lottery ticket. ‘The prize—finishing the book—sounds appealing, but I don’t think I’ll get the prize. So why start the book?’… Ambitious goals are so intimidating that we won’t attempt them. The trick is to set a much smaller goal.

Finally, one for the edu-tweeters out there whose time is drained by social media, Willingham provides advice about procrastinating in this way that is aimed at students but really meant for all of us: “For one work session, give yourself permission to check your phone as often as you want, but commit to recording three things. When you pick up your phone, rate from 1 to 7 how much you want to check it. When you’re ready to return to work, record how long you were on your phone, and rate from 1 to 7 how much you enjoyed.” There are two further steps to this, but actually this was plenty for me.

Lastly, I’d advise UK readers to go ahead and buy the Kindle version. I spent a tense week patiently awaiting my paperback arrival, before realising the estimated dispatch date was in February 2024. It will of course be well worth the wait, but I wouldn’t if you can read it now.

Reasons to love Engelmann

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Superb headteacher and sensible Tweeter Nat Nabarro tweeted this over the Christmas holidays:

So, obviously, I went and bought my own copy.

Clear Teaching is great. It’s a pithy synopsis of Direct Instruction: the main ideas, the controversies, and why Engelmann himself is a master teacher. Reading it made me want to revisit the ideas in more depth, so I went back to my copy of Engelmann’s Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System and found myself all fired up again. There are so many reasons to love the late Engelmann; here are mine.

1. He believes every child can learn

For Engelmann, there is no such thing as a child who cannot be taught. This sounds obvious, but how many times are children written off or excluded from the system? I remember being told when given a bottom set exam class in my early years of teaching: “just make sure they behave – they’re not expected to get a C.” I’ve had teachers and sometimes SENCOs tell me of certain children that “they need to be in a special school.” It is wonderfully refreshing to hear someone who affirms the belief that all children can learn, and it is awe-inspiring to hear this from someone who actually wrote the programmes which proved in study after study that all those supposedly “needy” children could learn and catch up with their peers. Engelmann himself wrote in Theory of Instruction: “We begin with the obvious fact that the children we work with are perfectly capable of learning anything that we have to teach… We know that the intellectual crippling of children is caused overwhelmingly by faulty instruction—not by faulty children.” In Clear Teaching Engelmann is quoted as saying: “the problem was not that the children had dyslexia, but that the teacher had some form of dysteachia. Most of the schools we worked in were concerned with the children’s ‘readiness’ but not with providing instruction that would make them ready.”

2. He believes that the children furthest behind can learn the same curriculum

…They just need to go faster. This is refreshing, as even in the very best schools I’ve worked in which did great things for children despite low starting points, there was an acceptance that those children needed to only study part of the curriculum to be able to succeed, be that narrowing their subject options or reducing the content of the curriculum studied. The Engelmann way is to intensively use his programmes early on to ensure those children catch up, and again he put his money where his mouth was and created and tested these programmes to show what was possible for those furthest behind. Clear Teaching tells the story of one preschool he ran: “The Bereiter-Engelmann preschool, as it came to be called, was the first to show that the academic achievement gap between rich and poor could be closed, and that early intervention with an hour or two of well-designed instruction per day was the key to closing it… Open half-days and serving poor families, the preschool resembled others in that children were encouraged to play, sing songs, listen to stories and get along with each other. What made it unique was that for twenty to thirty minutes two or three times a day, they were taught skills in language, reading and math whose mastery Engelmann understood to be critical to their future academic success.”

3. He believes in teachers

But says they need a curriculum – you wouldn’t expect a pilot to construct the engine of his plane. Unlike many of his critics who allege he thinks teachers are too stupid to be trusted to work out how to teach, Engelmann repeatedly speaks warmly of all the teachers he trains in his methods, praises the gains their classes make, and asserts that absolutely anyone – with the right materials and the right training – can make all children learn. In Clear Teaching Barbash writes: “He found that, contrary to popular belief, kids enjoyed learning hard things from adults, and gained confidence as they gained skills. Most important, he found that the results did not depend on him or a few gifted colleagues: he could write programs that allowed most people to use his methods after some training.” This is important: particularly in a time of challenge in teacher recruitment, we certainly cannot rely on a magic pipeline of genius teachers to change the futures of all the children in this country. We need something at scale which works to support all teachers to have impact – Engelmann believes all teachers can do it, with the right programme.

4. He gets kids

It is rare to find an academic who so understands the human and emotional side of the classroom, but books on and by Engelmann clearly demonstrate his skills with children. One tried and tested adage is that we must catch children being good – easier said than done for the new teacher – and Engelmann provides a solid way to do this: “DI programs make it easier because they generate such high rates of correct responses. Off-task behaviour diminishes because children are kept busy with tasks they can succeed at, and because in the end, what kids really cling to is not the behaviour itself—good or bad—but the teacher’s attention and affection.” In Teaching Needy Kids Engelmann writes: “When we trained new teachers, we stressed the importance of their responses. If they treat something as if it’s very important, that’s the way children will respond to it.” Finally, his emphasis on the choral response reveals both his understanding of how young people learn and the way to a controlled but joyful classroom: Barbash writes: “The most visible efficiency features of DI programs are concise teacher scripts and choral student responses. The scripts eliminate extraneous teacher talk, which often unintentionally confuses students. The choral response maximizes the number of times individual children respond, per minute, per period.”

5. He made programmes which work, and which have been measured a thousand times and proved to work

Not only do children taught by Direct Instruction do well, they enjoy learning. Why? Because success motivates. Direct Instruction programmes are meticulously designed to “identify key skills and teach them first… [They] build mastery through practice and intervene early to prevent bad habits.” The longest chapter in Clear Teaching consists of the references to all the multiplicity of studies which show just how effective Direct Instruction is. The challenge remains for UK curriculum makers to adopt the lessons learned in all these many trials and meta-analyses and forge curriculums which have the same impact for the children who need them most.

Clear Teaching sums up the Engelmann legacy: “He showed that poor and disabled children can learn at reasonable rates using standard levels of funding, and that it is therefore fair that we hold ourselves accountable for their learning. He showed that student behaviour is inseparable from instruction: the better the instruction, the better students behave. He showed that teacher quality is inseparable from curriculum: the better the program, the better teachers teach.”

Reconnect

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There has been a growing recognition over the past number of years of the critical importance of school culture, and an accompanying wealth of books attempting to tackle this (I use this opportunity to meekly link to my own 2021 attempt, Culture Rules), but no book explores this more pertinently, in my view, than Reconnect.

The book begins with an outline of the problem, and in this section I felt a searing recognition of what schools feel like to me post-pandemic. According to the authors, not only did children fall behind academically and socially, but the pandemic also changed the nature of the relationship between home and school.

But authors also note that pandemic exacerbated an already present epidemic of mental health concerns in young people, chiefly driven by a rise in social media and particularly portable devices which infiltrate the minds of the young. One horrifying statistic cited is that during lockdown daily screen use for 8-12 year olds went from 5.5 hours a day on average to over 8.5 hours a day.

The book situates this within a context of communities losing trust in institutions and how this is played out in schools: “schools can no longer count of receiving the goodwill and trust of the parents they serve.” This resonated for me, and reminded me of this shocking blog post’s words:

“Education feels broken. As though we are cascading towards a watershed moment where school leadership becomes nothing but dark, confusing and unfulfilling. There was a time when being a school leader meant something. It’s harder to feel that right now. Post pandemic, as a school leader I feel more abused, more hated, less appreciated and generally less effective than at any other time during my 20 year tenure as a head teacher… My inbox is full of police notices, alerts for safeguarding concerns or behaviour logs, moans, resignations,  complaints about cost or resources, and general issues not about a good education.”

The Reconnect authors cite buckets of research data to support their analysis of the issues, and dig into the details and complexities more than a short blog post will do justice to. Typically for a Lemov work, though, he doesn’t spend too long dwelling on the issues. Most of the book is spent on ways we can fix it through building a great school culture.

This begins through exploring examples of the mindset leaders must have – largely, know what you believe about education and know what you think a great education should look like, and from that starting point genuinely listen to young people and the community you serve, open the dialogue, and evolve practices where you need to.

The book’s central thesis is that culture is all about connection, and the need for connection drives us. This is amply evidenced by findings from human psychology, and exemplified with classrooms across the US and UK. In one section, the authors say that we can rebuild faith in schools by being “really good at the core work of schooling” as well as by helping young people “feel a strong sense of purpose.” In the best schools I’ve worked in, this manifests itself in sky high expectations, consistently enforced by all members of staff, coupled with a rigorous academic curriculum which is well taught by teachers who are motivated and equipped (in terms of both time and resources) to do this well, and lessons which create a sense of accomplishment for young people, where they can clearly see they are learning and feel themselves knowing more, being able to do more.

In fact, what is so heartening is that so many of the suggestions to build school culture are really ways to get children to learn lots. Because that, of course, is the ultimate goal. It is rare, though not unheard of, for a child to be extremely successful at learning and to not buy into their school. It is the teacher in the classroom who can create the conditions for success to ensure all children can learn, and that’s the first and most important step in creating a great school culture.

Indeed, the authors write that once we have crystalised our values, we need to make all our classroom decisions in the light of these:

“If my fundamental belief is that each young person in my classroom is capable of excellence; if I believe that caring involves not just pushing each of my students to give their individual best every day but also pushing them to do their part to build a mutual culture where they bring the best out of each other – if I truly believe those things, what should my classroom then look like? How should students sit? How should they talk to each other? What should they do when someone else is talking? What should they do when I ask them a question and they are not sure of the answer?”

What young people need from schools, now more than ever, is to feel like they belong. We need to envision our classrooms and our buildings as places where young people are seen, where they are heard, where they are loved, and where all the interactions reinforce that.

Top reads of 2022

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Non-fiction

Adam Boxer Teaching Secondary Science: a complete guide: Much like Craig Barton’s How I Wish I’d Taught Maths, Boxer’s book is only ostensibly about teaching Science. What I loved about this was the way Boxer applies research to reality, and the use of science-specific examples enhances the ideas and makes clear their application in any classroom.

Marcus Buckingham Nine Lies About Work: Harry Fletcher-Wood recommended this, so I knew it would be excellent. The “lies” in the book have the joint benefits of feeling logically and experientially true, as well as having ample research evidence and data to support them. This book prompted a great deal of re-thinking for me – in a good way.

Alison Colwell No Excuses: turning around one of Britain’s toughest schools: I had the very great pleasure of working for Alison, and reading this felt like reliving all the best wisdom of our line management meetings. Colwell’s no-nonsense approach, combined with her deep love and respect for the community she serves, made me miss her and the school a great deal. On recruitment, Colwell says: “I look for only three things in my teachers: that you love children; that you are conscientious, committed and with a clear moral purpose; and that you are passionate and highly knowledgeable about your subject.” I couldn’t agree more.

Rachel Cusk A Life’s Work: I have long loved Cusk’s fiction, and this was the first non-fiction work of hers I have read. I loved the loosely chronological narrative from pregnancy to the early, wonderful, painful days of parenting. The entire experience of motherhood is captured best in similes like this: “this morning she won’t feed. Suddenly it is like trying to feed a kitchen appliance, or a shoe, bizarre and apparently inappropriate.”

Amy-May Forrester The Complete Guide to Pastoral Leadership: Normally you would expect adjectives like “complete” to be hyperbole, but with Forrester’s guide it most certainly is not. If you have a pastoral leadership role in a school, it is the only book you need to read. Forrester’s deep moral purpose, commitment to the children, and vast experience on the ground in schools walking the walk makes every page of this a critical “how to” manual for leaders.

Paul A. Kirschner & Carl Hendrick How Learning Happens: This is the most succinct compendium of all the best research squashed into one book. The authors write clearly and relevantly about how we should employ research evidence into our classroom practice, making this a must-read for educators at all levels.

Doug Lemov et al Reconnect: The only book you need to read about school culture. The authors write with their usual lens: how can we make schools work best for the pupils who most need the benefits of an excellent education? Honest and relatable about the challenges brought into schools by the pandemic and modern life, the book sets out clear guidance for how to reconnect our pupils with schooling, and how schools can reconnect with their communities.

Mary Myatt & John Tomsett Primary Huh 2: I loved Primary Huh as well, but if only one can make the list it is the follow up. The first is a great guide for Primary teachers; I found this to focus more on whole-school matters like assessment, curriculum and pastoral in the round. My favourite chapter was Jon Hutchinson’s, who made me dramatically rethink the best way to capitalise on an all-through model in terms of its curriculum, as well as the level of challenge we can expect in our primary classrooms.

Christopher Such The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: Definitely not just for primary teachers. Such’s astute interpretation of the science of reading is well-applied to the actual classroom, and he brilliantly balances decoding with knowledge acquisition and getting children to genuinely engage with what they are reading.

Fiction

Annie Ernaux The Years: incredible series of poetic vignettes, ranging from the personal to the national and international, capturing the march of the years through a lifetime. 

Susannah Dickey Tennis Lessons: I’m a sucker for a second person narrative. Almost painful to read the deeply awkward teenage years, partly due to this.

Daphne du Maurier Rebecca: my favourite re-read of the year. You lose the reveal on re-reading, but Maxim de Winter’s creepiness seems even more impressively drawn when you know the ending.

Joanna Glen All My Mothers: almost every book I love tells the story from early years through a lifetime and this is no exception. I also found the chapters portraying the impact of early teachers deeply moving.

Ashley Hickson-Lovence Your Show: I know nothing – nothing – about football, but you don’t need to to adore this. A fictionalized account of the life of Uriah Rennie, I found myself moved to tears by the final chapter. A real tour de force.

Caleb Azumah Nelson Open Water: a short and poignant love story, with powerfully poetic prose.

Curtis Sittenfeld Sisterland: I’ve loved all of Sittenfeld’s novels, but this one really stayed with me a very long time after finishing it. Fascinating portrayal of family and the things which tie us together.

Top Reads of 2021

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2021, like the year preceding it, was very much a year of reading and doing very little else. Shamefully for me, it was not a year of writing blog posts – this is my first post since last year’s round up of top reads. I did, however, edit my book, Culture Rules, during those several locked down holidays and weekends. Have a read!

Non-fiction

Doug Lemov Teach Like a Champion 3.0

A new edition of Teach Like a Champion is always an excellent excuse to revisit what I have come to feel are the markers of truly great classroom practice. I read this just as I reentered the classroom, having not taught for two full years – first when setting up a start-up school with no children, and then taking on a school through the second pandemic year (I was advised to not teach, and with good reason as almost every planned day last year was torpedoed by Covid in one way or another). Reading this, I found myself reflecting on how hard it is to automate the strategies that make a wonderful classroom, and how useful it is to revisit them time and time again. Lemov has provided such useful reflections and clarifications here, I challenge anyone to not find worth and expertise in this glorious tome.

Doug Lemov Teaching in the Online Classroom

I was so in denial of what was likely to happen at the start of the last academic year it took me far too long to read this. By the time I did, the incredible teaching and learning team at Ark John Keats were well into the swing of delivering CPD on remote teaching. My ardent hope for the new year is that there only needs to be one book on remote learning, and this is surely it.

Mike Schmoker Leading with Focus

This was recommended to me by not one but two of the Vice Principals at Ark John Keats. I found it particularly useful to read last year, when the sheer struggle to remain open as a school threatened to dominate. This book contains incredible clarity on curriculum and instruction, and if nothing else is a call to arms to stop focusing on anything else.

Musa Okwonga One of them: an Eton college memoir

I was fascinated by this account of attending the most prestigious school in the country – both the reality experienced on the ground, and the weight of expectation Okwonga details feeling throughout the rest of his adult life.

Lucy Kellaway Re-educated

Having followed Kellaway’s column detailing her move from successful Financial Times journalist to the classroom, I bought this for the writing style alone. The fuller picture – that of setting up a teaching charity from scratch, changing home and ending a marriage – was equally extraordinary. A compelling and inspiring account.

Joanna Rakoff My Salinger Year

A wonderful memoir of Rakoff’s work in the 1990s with a literary agency which happened to represent J.D. Salinger.

Fiction

Amor Towles Rules of Civility

This was my top fiction read of 2021, with characters I genuinely missed when I finished reading. Towles evokes an atmospheric 1930s New York as well as making the central relationship of the book – a female friendship – feel real and relevant.

Gemma Reeves Victoria Park

I spent many lockdown days in Victoria Park, Hackney, and bought this book because there is always something wonderful in reading about a familiar place. Though this book is made up of short narratives, the characters are loosely connected in what feels like a very current, almost anonymous London way; not through startling revelations but instead through minor coincidences.

Mateo Askaripour Black Buck

This satire made me laugh and cringe in equal measure. Despite its clear fable-like unreality, you really root for the main character throughout. Race is central to the book, and it also felt like a sharp critique of the empty hollow at the heart of modern start-ups.

Emily St John Mandel The Glass Hotel

This book swirls around a key line which echoes through its pages, its meaning becoming clearer and clearer as the story goes on. The parallel stories, which at first seem utterly disconnected, collide in a fascinating conclusion.

Lorrie Moore Self-Help

I cannot believe these short stories were published in 1985 – they felt utterly modern. Mainly around relationships and their messiness, the stark poetry of some phrases made stayed with me for days after reading them.

Esi Edugyan Washington Black

Though set in a time of slavery, this book resists being solely a slave narrative. A rich and complex novel, especially around the uneasy exploration of race relations at an individual level.

David Copperfield

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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

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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

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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.

Leading at Ark Soane Academy

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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.