This much I know about…a great classroom explanation of genre theory

#blogsync – 30 June Blog.
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I have been a teacher of English and Media Studies for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about, a ‘great classroom explanation’ of genre theory.

I owe a lot to Ian Wall and Film Education. When I began teaching media studies in 1990 Film Education published a series of booklets called, I think, How to Read a Film; I nicked the idea behind what follows from the Genre booklet of that series. That Film Education has become another victim of our austere age seems very wrong.

Language has so many limitations. Most of the time we explain things through metaphor and simile; we use comparisons expressed in other words to explain something, rather than explain that something itself using its own terminology.

The commercial imperative which underpins film genre production is easily forgotten. The Baked Bean Theory of Genre, with Heinz, Crosse & Blackwell, Tesco’s and all, competing for the biggest share of the baked bean market is a great way of emphasising to students this aspect of film genre production. The powerpoint I use is here. What follows is just one way it can be used to explain the concept of genre in film production, but I am sure it could be used in a similar way to explain Gothic literature as a genre, for example.

For a film to be classified in a certain genre it has to contain a well-defined, familiar set of key features; the same with a tin of Baked Beans. And if we think of Baked Beans we automatically think of Heinz Baked Beanz. So, the key features of a tin of Baked Beans which form the definitive concept of baked beans are: the beans, the tomato sauce, and the pastel blue tin wrapper with the (later to develop the phonetic Beanz) strapline Heinz Baked Beans:

Mainstream film is all about industry profits. Imagine releasing the first ever tin of Heinz Baked Beans on an unsuspecting public! You’ve kept that product secret for months and suddenly, BOOM! it captures the whole of the Orange Teas market in hours. Commercial joy… (BTW, that’s what we called teas in the ’70s when you got home from school and your mum either couldn’t afford, or couldn’t be bothered, to serve up anything other than a tin of beans or spaghetti or ravioli on toast – the orange refers to the colour of the food). This mum here may look perfect, but I reckon it was just too much bother to cook the kids anything but an Orange Tea…

1950s Beanz Meanz Heinz ad

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Commercial competition drives innovation in film genre. Imagine you’re the head of R&D at Crosse & Blackwell. Your tinned ravioli sales plummet overnight. What to do, what to do? You change your production line so that it produces your own baked beans following the exact same formula as Heinz, except for the pastel blue tin wrapper and that irritatingly good phonetic strapline. And you recover a decent share of the Orange Teas market.

To keep a genre commercially viable and interesting to your audience you tweak the well-defined, familiar set of key features, adding something new to the next film whilst clearly maintaining the next film’s genre classification. The bosses at Heinz are gutted. With Crosse & Blackwell’s beans on the market profits have dropped. What to do, what to do? Answer: develop a new product which is still undeniably Heinz Baked Beanz, but with a twist on the original – Heinz Baked Beanz with Pork Sausages! Still Heinz, still baked beans, but with a difference which will attract new buyers. And, hey presto, profits rise again and you steal back most of the Orange Teas market you lost to Crosse & Blackwell.

Film genre production is cyclical. Bosses at Crosse and Blackwell respond with…their own Baked Beans with Pork Sausages. Heinz retaliates with Curried Baked Beans. And so it goes on until every variation on the original Heinz Baked Beanz has been developed…

Keeping within the limits of the genre is important. There are moments when the well-defined, familiar set of key features are tweaked so much that the new product is almost unrecognizable as Heinz Baked Beanz – Heinz Baked Beanz Pizza, for instance – but throughout the production cycle the definitive, pure concept of baked beans – the beans, the tomato sauce, and the pastel blue tin wrapper with the phonetic strapline Heinz Baked Beanz – is recognisable.

Film genre cycles tend to end where they began. As the product is exhausted, Heinz decide to promote the original product once again as there will be customers who have forgotten what plain old Heinz Baked Beanz tasted like; they re-establish the product which began the whole product cycle all those years ago. If the original bolsters sales again, the cycle will repeat itself.

Once students understand the metaphorical explanation of something, they find the real thing easy to understand. The Heist movie genre is a gift to teach. It is a sub-genre of the Gangster movie, something I have written about before here. The Heist movie genre is nicely demonstrated by the following eight films:

The Asphalt Jungle (dir: Huston, 1950) – the blueprint for all Heist movies;

Rififi (Dassin, 1954) – variation: the 28 minute dialogue-free safe-cracking scene;

The Killing (Kubrick, 1956) – variation: parallel narratives;

The Taking of Pelham 123 (Sargent, 1974) – variation: hold up on a tube train;

City on Fire (Lam, 1987) – variation: set in Japan with the Police insider;

Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1991) – variation: the heist movie without a heist, in real time;

Ocean’s 11 (Soderbergh, 2001) – variation: hi-tech trickery and a re-make;

Heist (Mamet, 2003) – as the title suggests, a definitive heist movie of the old school.

If you want to study one film, then make it Reservoir Dogs, as it steals from all that came before it: The Killing (parallel narratives); The Taking of Pelham 123 (the colour nicknames); High Noon (real time); City on Fire (insider Policeman and several iconic moments; Keitel’s eye-level double gunning down of the Police car is taken directly from Lam’s film, for instance). And it does the most audacious thing – it has no heist and yet is a heist movie. Tarantino shows that you can remove the main element of the genre’s recipe and still keep the movie rooted unmistakably within the genre. I think it’s the heist movie’s Heinz Baked Beanz with Red Hot Balls!

This much I know about…why we all need nourishment in challenging times

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about why we all need nourishment in challenging times.

We all need to be nourished. My first poetic nourishment was Seamus Heaney’s verse; when it comes to education I’m nourished by Sir Ken Robinson’s ideas. In their different ways, both have dared to be different…

The Choosing by Liz Lochhead is a great starter for a careers lesson. I ended up an English scholar by default. I’m a scientist but after two golfing years out of school I returned at eighteen to take A levels in mathematics (because I could), Economics (because you didn’t need the O level) and (scratching around for a third) English. Such seemingly inconsequential decisions determine our lives.

authors_live_with_liz_lochhead_the_choosing_youtube

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Poetry can transform lives. Marion Greene, my English teacher, identified Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est as the poem which made her believe that poetry had the power to affect things beyond the page. For me, as a country lad from an uneducated background who had been potato picking on his hands and knees for 65¹/₂ p a day, it was Heaney’s Digging.

Digging

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Studying Heaney’s poetry was truly life changing. His thoughts about finding a poetic voice seem to me completely true: Finding a voice means that you can get your own feeling into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them…How, then, do you find it? In practice, you hear it coming from somebody else, you hear something in another writer’s sounds that flows in through your ear and enters the echo-chamber of your head and delights your whole nervous system in such a way that your reaction will be, “Ah, I wish I had said that, in that particular way.” This other writer, in fact, has spoken something essential to you, something you recognise instinctively as a true sounding of aspects of yourself and your experience. And your first steps as a writer will be to imitate, consciously or unconsciously, those sounds that flowed in, that in-fluence. 

They f*** you up, your mum and dad. Heaney’s Follower explores his sometimes troubled relationship between his farming background and his academic life-path. One of my early awkward poems acknowledged my debt to Heaney, how my poetic voice mimicked his and on a deeper level how my study of his poetry led me away from my roots.

Breach of Copyright

Muffled in
the background
a record
of his voice.

I’m breaching
copyright,
taping his
soft Irish

tones, making
a sounding
of my own.
And that’s what

I do now,
this moment
captured with
borrowed words.

I’m Heaney’s
follower,
trapped in his
broad shadow.

Heaney’s sonnet series Clearances at the heart of The Haw Lantern sees him make the ordinary extraordinary. In the sonnet, When all the others were away… he holds the line between magnificence and mawkishness with lyric dignity.

When all the others were away…

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The only poem I’ve managed about my dad of any worth has Heaney’s influence woven throughout; it won the 1988 Robin Lee Memorial Poetry Prize at the University of Sussex.

Memorial

I
The dark of an
Anglo-Saxon
slide show – scrambling
to complete a

Milton essay
in the lecture
hall’s dimmed corner.
Undercover

operations
exposed by the
porter’s message –
Urgent: ’phone home.

I didn’t know,
(but really knew)
what was afoot.
Father’s minor

operation –
just routine, but
mother’s voice broke
cancerous news.

II
The fast train slows
softly into
London’s King’s Cross,
echoing its

entry into
York. Between the
two the journey
was smooth – contin-

uation ’til
destination
assured. The last
few miles are the

worst – knowing the
end is near but
not knowing when.
Suddenly it’s

over, ended
before it began.
Terminated.

III
Energetic
Jack Russells find
solemnity
impossible.

This canine shows
death scant respect,
resists my self-
imposed sorrow,

pulls me away
from the marble
memorial,
out the graveyard

gate, barking and
panting, alive
with riotous
celebration.

 
The theme for this year’s University of York’s Festival of Ideas is North and South, apposite for a Sussex boy living in York. And Famous Seamus is reading! Get your ticket here!

Authenticity is so important. When I last heard Heaney read he signed my brand new copy of his version of Beowulf. When I hear him in a couple of weeks, it’ll be my A level text of his poems –  scratch and sniff sticker, arrow in the side of the head and all – which I’ll give him to sign!

Sometimes you intuitively pursue an opportunity and it blossoms into something quite remarkable. Last August Sophie Coulombeau emailed me about a project called StrangeBedfellows: creativity vs analysis in the age of austerity. Ten months later and our students have an exhibition at the Festival along with Heaney. And if you haven’t read Sophie’s book Rites, you should!

PostScript: Defend Sir Ken!  My colleague Alex Quigley @HuntingEnglish and Tom Bennett @tombennett71 both had a right pop at Sir Ken Robinson last weekend! Of course they still love him, but if they planted any doubt about our man in your minds have a look at this video, What inspires Sir Ken?

What Inspires Sir Ken?

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This much I (don’t) know about…the future of ICT in schools

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I (don’t) know about the future of ICT in schools.

We all know the Wayne Gretzky quotation, Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is. The trouble is, I don’t know if we have the capacity to get ahead of the curve when it comes to the use of ICT in schools.

When I began teaching I had to use a Banda machine to repro hard-copies of poems we were studying. That puts into question whether I can ever really appreciate the potential of ICT to transform learning. (See below for an explanation of what a Banda machine was…)

Learning how to use software isn’t that hard anymore because it’s all so intuitive. I have only been on one proper ICT course – a whole weekend away somewhere in deepest Bognor Regis in 1989 learning how to word process on BBCs. It was a long weekend, but no Bank Holiday.

Programming and App creation are the future, apparently. I have no experience whatsoever of programming, except that our sixth form tutor group room was the sole computer room and I used to program on each computer: 10: The Clash; 20: go to 10; which pasted The Clash right across the monitors, much to my delight and my form tutor’s irritation. I feel like Peter Mannion in The Thick of It when it comes to Apps…

Peter Mannion bewildered by Apps

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We must resist going backwards when it comes to ICT. The elements of the proposed new National Curriculum which appear, at first glance, to be relatively traditional can easily encourage similarly traditional pedagogic approaches. We have to vary our pedagogy and that means engaging authentically with the new technologies. Whilst I feel like Peter Mannion, there are generations of young people who have known nothing but the sheer magic of Bluetooth.

I am constantly amazed at the creativity of youngsters. We spent a whole evening when we were in Scotland at Easter round the dinner table listening to my son Joe and his mates trying to invent the one App which would make them all millionaires. The best they came up with was the Ripoffter Scale ^TM App. You enter the name of the product and the price at which it is for sale and the App measures that price against all the other available prices for that product nationally. The more you are being ripped off, the more violently the phone shakes. I’d had a couple of single malts and was ready to ring the Intellectual Property Office there and then…

Twitter and Blogging have revolutionised my professional world, as they have for many people in education; Tom Sherrington feels similarly to me as do hordes of others. Michael Gove made a speech name-checking tens of educationalists, many of whom are known for their on-line presence. @oldandrewuk has never known such fame, ironically.

Chris Waugh @Edutronic_net is courage personified when it comes to encouraging students to engage with learning in their media. Visit his website and have a look around – it’s fabulous! Mark Anderson @ICTEvangelist and Martin Burrett @ICTmagic are similarly brilliant. And old friend Tony Parkin @tonyparkin stays as  young as ever on his diet of personable ICT conversation.

Sir Mark Grundy at Shirelands Academy seems to have got it right when it comes to ICT. If you ask him he’ll say that it there is no quick-fix when developing the effective use of ICT in schools; rather it is about creating a medium to long term plan and modifying the plan regularly as technology develops.

I am interested in Salman Khan’s notion of the flipped classroom, explained graphically here, as well as in the video below. On Newsnight this week they featured the Khan Academy and interviewed Anthony Seldon who said, I think we are just beginning to see in education the beginning of the biggest revolution since the printing press. And that’s my concern; we have the next three years of development at Huntington pretty well planned out, but we need to be planning for the generation of students beyond the next one, way after I’ve finished my work here.  

Khan on the Flipped Classroom

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I worry about schools which are buying i-Pads for everyone. If you have ever gone out to eat in a group including several teenagers, once the food has been eaten – and sometimes before it has even been served – they tend to default to a single screen each rather than converse.

I’m not a big fan of the Ready-Fire-Aim approach to implementing change. When our English and Media department wanted to implement an i-Pad strategy @HuntingEnglish and @KRE_ativity put together a compelling case for their proposal which is rooted in pedagogy. @HuntingEnglish has reflected several times on the success of the i-Pad initiative in the English Department at Huntington and there is reasonably good evidence to suggest that our students’ learning in English has benefitted from the technology. And, guess what? They bought just 18 i-Pads, which has meant the students have to share and subsequently talk to each other.

I love the increasing emphasis on evaluating impact on students’ learning through evidence-based research. We spend £170,000 p.a. on ICT at Huntington and I am determined to find evidence which will tell me whether that has resulted in £170,000 worth of impact on students’ learning.

We ban students’ mobiles on site, period. When our students cross the threshold into school at 8.30 am every Monday morning it must be like walking into a world from before they were born. During our last reduced-tariff inspection a temporary, highly-gifted Drama teacher was observed; he didn’t know the rules about mobiles, let the students film each other so they could discuss their acting skills whilst watching themselves replayed on their phones, and it was the only lesson of the eight observed which was graded outstanding. Funny.

Do we need a VLE/MLE, when we have Dropbox, WordPress, E-mail and remote access for parents to their children’s data? James Bowkett @James_Bowkett certainly doesn’t think so.

Get the right software/technology. We tried putting all Homework online via a Moodle VLE. It wasn’t very good, to be honest, and possibly had a detrimental effect on both the setting and completion of homework. After a year we took a vote as to whether we should continue to post homework on-line or not; we voted overwhelmingly to scrap it. Trouble is I think it was the right thing to do, but the wrong technology.

I know the key principle: ICT is a just another tool for learning and students need to have the option to use whatever ICT they might need in order to further their learning. It still doesn’t help me draw up a vision for ICT which I think we can deliver. But I bet I’m not the only Headteacher who feels like this. We have an ICT curriculum developer; we have a healthy looking audit of ICT usage across the curriculum; even I use Prezi, Tagxedo, blogging and Wordle in my own teaching. I still feel, however, we are not providing a modern learning experience for our young people.

I’m a good strategic thinker, but maybe not where ICT in schools is concerned. I feel like I am missing something. If our core purpose is to inspire confident learners who will thrive in a changing world, I feel we ought to get skating, fast!

Oh yes, the Banda machine: best read about it here. Note the emphasis upon the low quality of copying. They were functionally pretty useless, but the paper copies smelt heavenly!

This much I know about…bridging the independent-state school divide

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about bridging the independent-state school divide.

All our certainties seem to be crumbling away. In our complex, changing world hang on to your values and do what’s right for your students.

Headteachers like talking about themselves; what follows is relevant to my theme – promise! I played golf for Sussex against the Worthing Golf Club on 11 December 1982; on the way home, having changed from Farahs into drainpipes, my dad dropped me off outside the Brighton Centre. I touted a ticket and spent three glorious, sweaty hours in the mosh-pit at the Jam’s last ever concert. I have spent my life walking that line between vastly different cultures. They played Eton Rifles, of course…

         

The class divide is exemplified beautifully in golf. The Artisan Golf Association has 70 clubs on its membership list and is for working class golfers. Each Artisan club shares a golf course with the “parent” club; each one has a separate, modest changing room-cum-clubhouse, reduced fees and limited times to play at weekends. As a youth I was a member of the Artisan Triangle Golf Club based at Piltdown Golf Club in deepest Sussex. We got changed in a well-kitted out shed across the road from the spacious, rambling country house which is still the Piltdown Golf Club’s clubhouse:

The Artisan changing rooms are beyond the parked cars on the right

As a 12 year-old golf fanatic I was oblivious to the class apartheid of my golfing world. Only when I became good enough to play for Sussex did I realise what being an Artisan golfer meant; it meant I couldn’t play for Sussex. I couldn’t join the Piltdown parent club as I hadn’t been to private school (one of the main qualifying criteria for membership) so I joined Crowborough Golf Club, ten miles and a bus journey up the road. I went on to be the course record holder at Piltdown, to captain the Sussex U18s & U23s and play for the full Sussex team.

The true gentry amongst the Piltdown parent club in the late ’70s treated the Artisan members with the greatest courtesy. Captain Bartlett’s gin-filled eyes dripped with affection when he conversed with my dad; when dad died the parent club flew their club flag at half-mast. It was the bourgeois middle-class members who were snobby.

The impact of the class divide upon young people is indelible. Upon returning to Piltdown Golf Club fifteen years ago, as a 33 year-old Deputy Headteacher and father, I was still deeply reluctant to use the only available pay-phone – it was located just inside the front door of the parent clubhouse. And that experience crystallises for me the enormity of our students’ journey from the estate at the bottom of Huntington Road to a professional career.

You can’t aspire to something you don’t know about. Despite my three grade As at A level in the early ’80s, my comprehensive school teachers never once mentioned Oxbridge to me or my cleaner mother and postman father.

The difference between what you want to do and what you think you can do if you’re a working class kid is the key. We are all bound by our own self-imposed limits. The thing is, when I walked the hallowed corridors of the remarkable Whitgift School last Saturday I could imagine its students feeling that the world was theirs. Just look at the first team cricket pitch…

If the UK were more equal, we’d all be better off as a population. That’s the conclusion of Professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their seminal text on the socially corrosive effects of income inequality, The Spirit Level. If one of our boys I spoke to yesterday, who is talented, good-looking, charming, funny, but with a chaotic home life, is going to thrive in a socially immobile world we have to give boys like him personalised, aspirationally different experiences. Doing what we have always done is nowhere near enough any more.

The Independent-State School Partnership in York is thriving. Bootham, The Mount and St. Peter’s are great schools and I have not one single reservation about working with them in the York ISSP, because, as Wilkinson and Pickett make clear, we all benefit. Together we provide our students and staff with great experiences – educationally, culturally and socially – which break down any divisions that might exist between us. I reckon what we’re doing is pretty special – click our logo below and see the opportunities available to our youngsters.

Reach for the Michelin stars, not McSchools. Sir Ken Robinson’s piece in the TES  encapsulates the fundamental problem we have in state schools; his article in this morning’s Guardian is equally apposite. Our students’ futures depend upon us all being truly great teachers but the ridiculous sense that there is a formula to teaching we have to adhere to has crippled state school teaching for too long. Jonathan Taylor, Headteacher of Bootham School, said to me at Wednesday’s ISSP meeting that he spends his time encouraging his teachers to capture their students’ imaginations in whichever way they can, rejecting any notion that there is a standardised way to teach. Lesson objectives, smectives…

I wish my school, 35 years ago, had had HOAP. We have the Huntington Oxbridge Application Programme which encourages our Year 9s to begin thinking about which top university they would like to attend and supports them through to securing a place at their chosen HE institution. My only slight disappointment was being unable to find a name for the programme whose acronym is CERTAINTY.

Raising aspirations doesn’t cost anything. As the biggest school in York we used to receive £160,000 a year to maintain our premises; two years ago that was cut by 80% and £28,000 doesn’t go very far these days. Our students will never enjoy the quality of facilities their private school counterparts are used to, but they can have dreams. Working with our ISSP colleagues we have to do all we can to help keep our students’ dreams alive rather than let them be crippled by a sense of inferiority. That pay-phone still haunts me…

This much I know about…Performance-Related Pay for Teachers

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about performance-related pay for teachers.

Who brought politics into education? Last December I was asked by a BBC reporter whether I regretted bringing politics into education and my reply was, quite simply, that it was the politicians who brought politics into education, not me. Since then I have tried very hard to be a-political in these pages but I fear what follows might break my resolve.

We’re seeing the marketisation of education hidden in plain view. Whilst the rhetoric from Michael Gove is collaborate, collaborate, collaborate, DfE policy-making encourages competition at every level. Ask the bankers what happens when things are left to be determined by the market…

Teaching is a decently paid job. If you are a good classroom teacher and you reach the top of the Upper Pay Spine you will earn at least £36,756 p.a.. Finding a job with a similar salary without significant management responsibility is almost impossible nowadays. But…

…I didn’t go into education to make money and I don’t know any teacher who did. My profit is great examination results for our students. That’s what I’m required to provide and that is what motivates me, something the Coalition clearly does not understand.

Coalition policies seem to be ratified using a very simple Venn diagram:

Any new policy has to be cheap, if not cost-free; the new Teachers’ Pay Policy will allow schools to employ teachers more cheaply and supress pay progression. There has to be the political will to adopt the new policy; the public will be happy with the simple headline notion that only good teachers should receive pay increments. Any new policy has to be easy to implement; what could be easier than to let Headteachers and Governing Bodies make all the difficult decisions inherent in the implementation of the new Teachers’ Pay Policy? All three criteria met = POLICY!

Pay rises for all from an ever-decreasing pot is unsustainable and this policy allows Headteachers to find a way to survive during austerity by making relatively arbitrary decisions about pay progression so that schools remain solvent. This year I am expected to provide a better education for the same number of children as we had in our school in 2010 with £450,000 less funding - and so far we’ve been “ring-fenced”?

It is possible to pare my job down to one thing: to ensure that £6.5m a year is spent in a way which provides the best education possible for the students who attract the money in the first place. Consequently I cannot afford to reward poor teaching and never have done.

Highly effective Performance Management mechanisms negate the need for performance-related pay. If a teacher really isn’t performing well and all support mechanisms have been exhausted, they should be facing competency procedures in a fair and transparent way. Everyone else should be developing their practice and be at least good.

Our raw materials are not wood and steel. I was working with Dr Jonathan Sharples from the Institute of Effective Education and @HuntingEnglish yesterday shaping a research project into an element of pedagogy. What became clear from Jonathan is that it is almost impossible to isolate a single variable and eliminate all the other variables when conducting research in schools. Singling out teacher effectiveness as the variable solely responsible for student outcomes is a hugely complex business and way beyond the scope of even the best performance-related pay policy for teachers. The Sutton Trust’s Improving the impact of teachers on pupil achievement in the UK – interim findings, published in September 2011, states that overwhelming evidence [that] shows that there is almost no link between teachers’ prior education or experience and the achievement of their pupils. Steve Munby told the ASCL conference in 2012 that, if you are the longest serving Headteacher in the Hall you’re probably our best or our worst Headteacher. Like I said, judging teacher effectiveness is complex.

Attempts to make judgements about pay progression completely objective verge on the impossible. I’ve heard of one model where there are four elements which combine to provide a wholly objective numeric measure for making the pay progression decision: the grade for Lesson Observation 1; the grade for Lesson Observation 2; the quality of marking and assessment gleaned from a work scrutiny; student examination data. Each element constitutes 25% of the final figure which determines the decision and if the teacher gets 70% or above s/he progresses up the pay scale. An Outstanding observation grade gains a full 25%, a Good observation grade 17.5%…yes, it’s mad isn’t it? And it’s still based on a number of relatively subjective judgements!

Performance-related pay could induce competitiveness right down to teacher-to-teacher level: Why share my teaching resources with him if his students’ results improve and he will get a pay rise over me? Fullan and Hargreaves point out that, Trust and expertise work hand in hand to produce better results…social capital strategies are one of the cornerstones for transforming the profession. Behaviour is shaped by groups much more than by individuals…if you want positive change, then get the group to do the positive things that will achieve it.

Who will want to teach set 4 out of 5? The more you think about performance-related pay, the more the intricacies emerge. How will re-setting mid-year affect pay progression decisions? Timetabling difficulties mean you have to take on a Year 11 group in September – are you then held responsible for that group’s outcomes?

Job offers could be interesting…Headteacher: I would like to offer you the post. Candidate: Well, I have two more interviews later this week and they may well offer me M6 and you’re only offering M5 – I’ll let you know if I accept your offer on Friday evening. To use a Yorkshire term, we may see an epidemic of people giving backword…it will certainly make the whole package for new recuits to your school important: CPD opportunities; promotion opportunities; staff well-being strategies; general ethos, etc., etc..

As Fullan says, Never a tick box, always complexity. The reason the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) is a weighty tome is because how you pay people is a complex issue. The STPCD is the accumalation of years of experience and reflection by employment law experts; leaving Headteachers and Governing Bodies to construct individual pay policies may well result in them being embroiled in appeals against their pay progression decisions throughout November and December.

Headteachers have an opportunity to unite to reject the worst elements of the new Teachers’ Pay Policy proposals.  The more divided we are, the more divided our staff rooms will become. We have to live by our values like never before and crush the grain of truth at the root of this old joke: What’s the collective noun for school leaders? A lack of Principals.

The trouble is, Headteachers are a mixed ability group. I was at an ASCL meeting recently where a Headteacher shrieked with barely controlled joy when she realised she did not have to match new recruits’ existing pay grades, because she wanted to save a bit of money. On many levels it was a depressing moment.

Hold on to what matters. I am going to return to our three values – Respect; Honesty; Kindness – and use them as the anvil upon which we forge our new pay policy. We already have a Teachers’ Pay Policy Working Party, comprising teachers and governors, and we will use our features of Truly Great Teaching at Huntington School, drawn up collectively by our teaching staff last month, to define what we expect of teachers at our school. And we will use wisdom and judgement in spades…

This much I know about…”Progress in my classroom? How it is made and how I know it.”

#Blogsync post number 4.
http://share.edutronic.net/

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about, “Progress in my classroom? How it is made and how I know it.”

This much I know. My blog on how I taught disengaged 15 year old boys to write
http://wp.me/p2wufC-9X
 details quite nicely how Tom and his mates made progress, how I knew they made progress, the details of classroom action, my reflections and how we measured the impact. I have nothing better to offer this month’s Blogsync on Progress in my Classroom according to the rubric laid down by @Edutronic_net.

Students’ academic progress is a key concern when I interview teachers for posts at Huntington. I ask candidates to, Tell us about a student you have taught who made great progress. (How did you know they had made progress?). Every individual student candidates have referenced over the decade I have been asking that question has made progress because s/he has found a teacher who believes in her/him, connects with her/him, and has inspired her/him to break through the self-imposed glass ceiling of achievement.

You need a bit more than love, but without it you’ve little chance of your students making the progress they have the capacity to make. I ended my blog on teaching the boys with this, which I will always stand by: fundamentally students need to feel loved. It’s that simple and that complicated to convince colleagues of such a truth.

Sometimes you find nuggets of gold when panning the river of new recruits to teaching. This is the opening to a candidate’s letter of application which gleamed at me amongst the mud and gravel: I would not have studied ******** if it were not for the teachers that I had at school.  They were not amazingly cool or clever, but what really inspired me was how much they cared.  They cared about the subject, and they cared about their pupils.  They cared so much it was contagious, and we started caring too.  And now, there is nothing I would like more than to pass this on to the next generation. Did we appoint the author? What do you think…?

This much I know about…preparing for an OFSTED inspection

I have been a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about preparing from an OFSTED inspection.

In March 2012 I received a letter from OFSTED saying that the earliest we could be inspected was the summer term 2013, which begins tomorrow…

Don’t be naïve about OFSTED Inspections. A good report frees you for five years to develop your school; a bad report can, as Robbie Burns once wrote, Leave us nothing but grief and pain,/For promised joy!

A clear, intense and highly effective focus upon improving the quality of teaching is the only preparation for OFSTED that really matters, because the quality of teaching is the only thing that really matters in a school. You can have great data but if the teaching observed is ordinary you can be in trouble; you can have mediocre data but if the teaching observed is outstanding you can get a Good judgement; it’s true, I’ve read the reports. My Preparing for OFSTED training session for colleagues is, essentially, a focus on improving teaching and a whole load of common sense. A copy of the Preparing for OFSTED Teacher booklet and accompanying presentation is here:

Preparing for OFSTED booklet 2013

OFSTED Training Day 25-02-13

You and your SLT team get the school organised for the inspection.  You get as ready as possible whilst everyone else nails the day job and teaches their faces off, day in day out, OFSTED or no OFSTED. In the end, you need to be ready for inspection all the time.

Get to the point where an Inspection is a moment not an event. I would love to claim this aphorism as my own, but it comes from the ever brilliant Zoe Elder. She said, verbatim, in a recent Twitter conversation with me and @Gwenelope: Get to the point where you’re on the front foot: know your pupils and ensure this informs your learning design. All day, every day for all pupils. When it doesn’t work out, reflect, rethink, revisit and redesign. Designing learning is iterative. Planning lessons less flexible. Bit of a mindset thing I guess. Ask, What’s the story of the lesson? So that you can tell it as it happens to any visitor but importantly; students. Bit like advanced driving commentary. Values. Best (and only) compass I know in a land of uncertainty.

Have a preparation plan for your SLT. There’s so much you can do beforehand to help get the inspection right. Make sure you attend to everything under your control so that the only variable out of your control on the day is what happens in the classrooms. Our plan is here:

OFSTED Inspection Preparation Timeline 2013 Final blog version

Effective Governance is crucial. We had a full meeting dedicated to me briefing Governors on the story of the school for the past year. We focused on their role in setting the strategic direction of the school, our data story, the Performance Management process, the impact of our Pupil Premium spend, and the quality of teaching across the school and in departments.

Make the inspection as easy as possible for the inspectors. There is no point being anything other than fully cooperative. We have a page on our website for the Lead Inspector with hyperlinks to all the information we have to provide mandatorily on our website; it saves the Lead Inspector wasting time searching for it all. And set up a base room for the Inspection team with fresh cafetière coffee and fruit. I always think about the process from their point of view – it must be a pretty awful job at times.

The relationship with the Lead Inspector is crucial. We had a full inspection eight days into my first Headship; seventeen inspectors, all week. We had twelve weeks’ notice. The Lead Inspector was a really decent bloke. In his pre-inspection visit, eight weeks before the Inspection began, we gave him a guided tour of our vast catchment. During that car journey we worked out that from his days refereeing semi-professional football down in Sussex he knew Richard, my brother-in-law. In the following weeks leading up to the inspection he emailed me with reminiscences of his refereeing days for me to relay to Richard. On the Wednesday of the inspection after he had observed a shocking Music lesson he came to see me and said, I know you’re on top of what’s going on in Music, we won’t count that one. He agreed to every single amendment to the final draft of the report that I requested. Those were the days…

Listen to Michael Wilshaw and stop teachers performing tricks they have never used in lessons before. I have played my staff the video of Michael Wilshaw’s talk he gave to the RSA a year ago and given them the transcript.

Wilshaw final version

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After listening to the Chief Inspector’s words of wisdom, one of my colleagues remarked in front of all his peers, That’s the first time I’ve ever agreed with anything he’s said.

Know the Inspection documents inside out:
http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/schools/for-schools/inspecting-schools/inspecting-maintained-schools/main-inspection-documents-for-inspectors

Have a good look at the up-dates for Inspectors – they contain crucial gems of advice: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/advanced-resources-search/results/schools%20and%20inspection%20matters/2/all/any/202/any?solrsort=im_search_date_mktime%20desc

The Subject Inspection documents are useful too:
http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/generic-grade-descriptors-and-supplementary-subject-specific-guidance-for-inspectors-making-judgemen

Nail your SEF. I was aiming for four sides of A4 – I’ve got it down to ten and if you would like a copy just email me at j.tomsett@huntington-ed.org.uk.

Write your own Pre-Inspection Briefing. Since the Lead Inspector hasn’t the time to write a PIB any more, write your own based on your analysis of your RAISE. Mine begins: Having read our RAISEonline 2012 Summary Report, these are the questions I would ask about the school if I were the Lead Inspector… Keep it to one side of A4 and make sure you can answer every question the imaginary Lead Inspector will ask.

Determine why you are successful. Inspectors like success – it makes their job easier. And if you can provide them with really sharp evidence of your success which can fully support your judgements, your judgements will quickly become their judgements.

Counter the blunt Data Dashboard and know your data story in detail. The Data Dashboard is a shockingly crude tool whilst RAISE is much more nuanced. Looking at our Data Dashboard you wouldn’t guess for a moment that our RAISE ACPS and ATPS for GCSE only for FSM students was Sig+ and that our ACPS GCSE only figure of 279.7 for FSM is above the National ACPS GCSE only figure of 273.8 for all students, nor that in January 2013 we were named in the top 100 of all schools nationally for student progress from KS2 to GCSEs by David Laws, Schools Minister, calculated on the best 5 GCSEs including English and mathematics

Write to all your parents and invite them to complete the Parent View questionnaire. When I did I was pleasantly surprised by the responses, and it’s the only evidence of parental opinion available to inspectors.

Check your timetables. I know this sounds an odd piece of advice, but many teachers make room changes over the course of the year and don’t tell the MIS manager. The last thing you want is for an inspector to turn up to a room expecting to observe a lesson and there’s no-one there or a different class to the one s/he’s looking for is underway.

Focus upon getting the right teachers in front of the right students at the right time in the right rooms. Suspend ITT students teaching for the Inspection, and any other activity requiring cover which can be easily postponed; just be pragmatic and do everything you can to make every single lesson as good as it can possibly be.

Make sure everyone is following your school’s marking and feedback policy. And make sure every student knows how to improve in every subject. It’s a big ask, but it’s really crucial.

When the phone call comes write the details down; in the heightened pressure of the moment it is easy to get things wrong.

David Didau is great on how teachers can take control of the inspection lesson observation; his book, the Perfect OFSTED English lesson is superb!

The Perfect Ofsted English Lesson

If Day One goes badly dictate Day Two. Be assertive and present the inspectors with a revised programme which directs them towards all the really good stuff that’s going on in your school that they haven’t found yet.

Know your staff and have a convincing story about them, just in case one of your best teachers has a bad lesson. You need to be able to point to evidence of previous lesson observation records and student outcome data to prove to the inspector that the relatively poor one-off lesson s/he has just observed is not representative of that teacher’s performance generally. Tom Sherrington (@Headguruteacher) is excellent on knowing your staff.
http://headguruteacher.com/2012/12/04/how-do-i-know-how-good-my-teachers-are/

Engender confidence in your colleagues wherever you can. To use Mike Hughes’ line, the SLT need to erect a sheet of polaroid across the school gate and stop the climate of fear entering school. There is no point whatsoever in creating panic amongst colleagues through spot-check unannounced observations and other such draconian practice. That’s not the way to improve teacher performance, that’s the road to madness. Our school values are Respect; Honesty and Kindness, and that’s for everyone in our school.

Headteachers need to trust their colleagues more than ever. Seneca said, “The first step towards making people trustworthy is to trust them.” In the climate of fear which this government has so brilliantly cultivated it is too easy to threaten staff in response to being threatened oneself. Headteachers have to do the opposite. At our school we deliver over 2,000 lessons each week; I cannot teach them all, so what I have to do is develop my colleagues in a safe school environment which allows them to thrive professionally and personally. It’s the only way to a decent OFSTED inspection. It’s the only way I will keep my job.