Frankie and Benny — Popes, Profs and Pragmatics.

Hope springs eternal in Rome, with prayers and good wishes from around the world. I felt a big flutter of positive energy, watching Pope Francis’ first hour in his new job. He seemed immensely calm but warm, centred in the moment and modest. I can’t imagine him in Mister Punch Prada gear, a plus point for me and future Vatican tourists who might otherwise not be able to tell which man in a white cassock was which.

It looks as though there will be no confusing them. Circumstantially, people feel more at ease with an all-rounder. Historians may look out for signs of transition from the rule of an intellectual to that of a perfectly educated and intelligent man who seems confident, relaxed and centred in the moment.

Intellectual giants always, usually unintentionally, intimidate others. Nobody loves a Big Brain Alien. More significantly, Intellectuals inhabit a large room stocked with big ideas, that can become their primary reality.
To someone with a powerful electric screwdriver every protusion is a screw. This can deliver quick results with some protrusions, but others, like nails and boils, remain stubbornly resistant.

Intellectual giants see the progress of the world as the evolution of big ideas. A process of syllogism, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, drives their big brainy world, the one that really matters. Other people start from the other end and deal with their in-trays in more pedestrian but effective ways. Things move on because they were dealt with, and everyone else feels life is more than an eternal seminar group.

To intellectual giants, issues arising from changing sexual mores are challenges to sources of authority, revisionist mountains made of molehills, waves beating against the rocks of the eternal shore. The progress of civilisation is at stake. To a priest struggling with imposed celibacy, or a young lad contemplating hanging himself from very shame, all the Big Ideas around this mean nothing, nor to the millions whose gut instincts drive them, often unwittingly, one way or the other. Failure to see this whole picture holistically makes the puzzle impossible.

It would not surprise me if the new Pope's dogmatic beliefs were basically to the right in terms of issues, but I would expect him to be less imprisoned by them. A leader with a strong sense of pragmatic reality and faith that is concrete rather than abstract, shrewd rather than subtle, could do much good. The honeymoon will be over soon enough.

I’m trying to enjoy it hopefully, and the parallel process that is unfolding in the Church of England...

Jobs: He being dead yet speaketh

Ever since I went on telly suggesting Apple was in some sociological respects a religion, people have asked me about Steve Jobs as Messiah. So today’s sad news does call for some comment, perhaps.

This may be time to stop all the clocks and disconnect the telephone, but I do not anticipate a literal resurrection.

Howbeit, quite apart from anything of historic import Mr Jobs may have achieved in his garage with Woz back in the eighties, he did resurrect a corporation.

I sometimes encounter the idolisation of business leadership, even among those appointing vicars. I never quite want to drink this particular kool-aid. When I was a lad the UK had the third or fourth greatest trading economy in the world. Its slippage to the low twenties has to have something to do with the quality of its business leadership since the sixties, that has not always been stellar. The Church hath little need for more of the UK's often class-ridden, stale, vain, self-indulgent business leadership. It’s already riddled with that stuff.

Furthermore what passes for business leadership often turns out to be no more than grumpy old men sounding off about their control fantasies, or low grade Pelagian boasting about their deservings, or saying nice things about a religion that is no more than top dressing for their own greed and prejudices.

Not so Mr Jobs. As well as providing a creative context in which the world’s greatest designers, men like Jonathan Ive, could flourish he did provide genuine moral leadership on occasion, rooted in his own experience, and free for all. In the often murky world of business leadership it shines out, as a Monty Python character once said of Oscar Wilde’s wit and wisdom, like a stream of silver bats’ pee in a dark cave.

So here, in memoriam, are two passages for pondering from Mr Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement Address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart..

Not to labour the point, he went on to discuss his own diagnosis of terminal cancer and say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Don't pick the Fastest Lemming

A central part of my job is helping discern people's callings to particular jobs, with search groups. Very often “leadership” is high on the list of essentials. I uderstand why. Everyone is more or less disorientated in a fast-changing world. People look to clergy to help them through the shifting sands, fog, smoke and mirrors. What many busy people want much of the time is a messianic figure who will turn out and fix things for them. This is the age of the quick fix. Sadly some of the most intractable problems communities face didn’t arise like this and won’t go away without costly and potentially time-consuming social and personal transformation.

The temptation is to pick what seems the most obvious candidate — the competent performer to get things done. But what if the problems are not technical problems? One of the limitations of the Anglican Covenant, peace be upon it, is that it is basically a lawyer’s solution to a broader problem — an attempt to solve mutual incomprehension with aspirin — a quick fix to a chronic cultural issue. People would grow more if they engaged with it humanly and spiritually as well as trying to fix it legally; but maybe all we can manage for now is a bit of paper.

The best leader is the slowest, not the fastest lemming, the oddball who slows down, stands aside, and wonders why. She can be of far more value than the sleekest, zippiest rodent. Appointing to technical criteria is a good discipline for preliminary screening and showing up the issues to discuss at interview. Once that stage is reached, however, you need to look for the person's inner security, personally and spiritually, how well they know where they stop and others start, their sense of perspective, their eccentricities, and the factors that make them the slowest, not the fastest Lemming. Otherwise all you get is the greyest, sleekest überLemming who seems to lead the pack, and we all end up in the drink.

The race goes not to the fastest Lemming, but the one who comes back up the cliff. Discuss?

Mahler Nights: Excellence and Equality

The almost transcendent experience of this week’s Berliner Philharmoniker concerts in London has got me thinking. Yesterday I wondered how Church could be as engaging, spiritually alive and focussed a community, producing hope as well as music.

Among other really helpful comments, Ray Barnes was back with a searching and pertinent question:

Since at least 80% of the success of the very best performances owe their high standard to the conductor, and since Simon Rattle is arguably one of the very best, the question is perhaps - where is the Simon Rattle of the Church?

The orchestra is ready and waiting!

I am happy to use the word leadership in Church, but rather suspect outside Leadership models, some of which we haven’t caught up with yet in practice, don’t really capture the beadth and depth of what is required. I want to be as accountable as any leader has to be in an excellent outfit today, but know there are other people involved as well.

Enter Fergus McWilliam, since 1985 a horn player for the Berliner Philharmoniker. He gave an excellent and thought provoking talk at the Festival Hall before Wednesday’s concert on how the sound of the orchestra relates to its members.

Afterwards he answered questions with some ideas that relate directly to Ray’s crucial line of questioning.

The band begins with a profound value of equality founded on mutual respect. It is a working democracy, in that it elects its musical director, and auditions are carried out principally by prospective colleagues. In other words it rejects artifical hierarchy and embraces personal fit — auditions, said Fergus, could assume technical competence and were thus not beauty contests, but more like marriage partner decisions.

In such a society there is little or no place for deference, often the English default position. As brilliant as Simon Rattle’s tenure has been, extended by request of the players, it has not been uncontroversial, nor would he or the band expect it to be. The idea of a hierarch high and lifted up sneering at people with whom he disagrees rather than listening to them would be absolute anathema, and kill the sound.

Fergus also called into serious question the idea of the Titanic Conductor, which he had encountered the other side of the Atlantic a few years ago — players produce the dots and the conductor will produce the music. As someone who works daily with the best conductors in the world he wasn’t rubbishing their work, but suggesting it ran on creative tension and relationships. Both band members and conductor mattered as much as each other. Mutual respect and understanding produced the best performances.

He also suggested that decisions to hire people for the orchestra were invitations to join a shared adventure. Risks are involved. There has to be a shared maturity and radical equality,continuous openness to what might be, and willingness to pursue it in a focussed way; a passionate focus around the music itself, andradiucal mutuality.

Levels of virtuousity are climbing all the time, but could, unbridled, lead to a band of soloists playing ego games. People have to want to join the band enough to transcend pure ego, for which you need a capacity that has to be acquired, without losing their personalities. But the real distinctives he looks for in new colleagues, he said, were

• Passion (a capacity to feel in the present moment)
  
  
• Sensuality (sensual awareness, not necessarily in a narrow sexual sense the term is often used in English)
  
  
• Viscerality (Connectedness between head, heart and guts — radical groundedness)

That’s how Fergus’ orchestra, that many hold to be the best in the world, produces music. His experience is lived, not an abstract ideal. How arrogant would it be for to we think we can aspire to excellence and produce hope without prizing and expressing some at least of those values and attitudes?

Leadership Secrets of Alastair Campbell

I have some trepidation about the cult of leadership, because the effectiveness of any outfit really does depend on the systemics and context as much as a single leader's gifts and commitment. However, continuing the discussion begun here yesterday, my eye was taken last week by some principles about leadership from an unlikely source — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s great Spin Doctor in the Sky, whose diaries are now appearing in print.

These may well become the prime source for political historians of the Blair years in the way Alan Clark’s did for Thatcher. Some will like Mr Campbell more than others, indeed his partner says he’s been much nicer to live with since he finished work as a spin doctor, but he’s a perceptive information hound who observed world and goverment leaders closely for ten years. He pulls no punches. In a Times interview he concludes these are the qualities that make an effective leader in this day and age:

Clarity of objective and strategy. Only then go tactical.



The best team leaders are the best team players



Boldness



Adaptability



Staying calm in a crisis. Listen but lead, not listen and lead



Patience. Take your time if you have to.



Set the media agenda. Don’t let them set it for you.



Get your head above the parapet when the s***t’s flying



Encourage enterprise and ideas at all levels of your organisation in a non-blame culture.

Discuss?

Chicago 2010: Cleaning the Bean

August brings the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit; followed by a time back home of catching up with various jobs off the guilt list.

This year’s GL included another bit of cleaning — reconditioning the disshevelled fish tank in our front hallway, but that’s another story...

From GL to GLS —

Chicago was in fine fettle. Every year I think there cannot be a new angle to photograph on Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, and every year I come back with another thirty new angles! Look on the cleaning of the bean in glorious clean early morning light as a metaphor for the whole trip.

For a start I realise that learning about leadership is something worth giving a couple of days of regular sustained reflection to, among friends. I will comment separately on what I think I’ve learned this year in particular, but if life is a “school for the Lord’s service,” a period of structured reflection and learning helps, I find, to sharpen up the whole pattern of my work.

People this side of the pond sometimes seem to think it’s clever to be superior about US Evangelicals. Some of them, of course, are doubtless the most appalling people — but then so are some UK Anglicans, and others. Lay all that stuff aside, engage the irony over-ride, and there’s plenty to learn and to enjoy. The warmth, honesty, openness, empathy and positive faith of many US Evangelicals I meet refuses to be bound by all snotty stereotypes, and brings its own honest inspiration.

I found worship this year, especially on the Friday of the Leadership Summit, brought me directly to where my journey in faith began forty years ago — faith in Jesus Christ. I see I have 2.4 days of Bach in my iTunes library to enjoy back in Blighty, but at for a couple of days a year it does me nothing but good to learn and throw myself wholeheartedly into an American Evangelical environment. It’s also good, every year, to catch up with Anglican friends from the Diocese of Chicago. We are sometimes prey, this side of the pond, to a rather flat and stereotypical view of the Episcopal Church, and it’s good to be disabused of that by contact with real people. Real people, real faith, is the great reality checkpoint.

True Leadership: getting real

We Brits have a maddening love / hate relationship with the NHS. We know, frankly, we’re damned lucky to have the services of some of the world’s best medical carers freely available at the point of need. The past thirty years in the UK has seen neonatal death plummet and that most basic statistic of all, life expectancy, increase — all this at a significantly lower cost in relation to GDP of private systems.

In a peculiarly British way many of us seem to be saying that the whole thing is terrible but the people are wonderful. We often express profound admiration for the people who actually look after us, but frustration with the system — bureaucratic, Balkanised, political (in a bad sense). Of course medical carers are not infallible, and some degree of snafu occurs in all human endeavours, but it has to be minimised when lives are at stake, and community hospitals are public places. Healthcare leaders, with their own stresses and pressures, prone to cynicism and denial, are always on stage. If people screw up in most industry and commerce, earnings per share dip. Get it wrong in yours, and people die. This can lead to a paralysing fear of failure that hobbles all effective leadership; a kind of defensive pact with mediocrity.

Cue the most inspiring leadership day I have spent in a long time — not a course, but a day visit with colleagues from Milton Keynes (where chaplaincy is in need of a reboot) to Wexham Park Hospital, which serves Slough and East Berkshire. Peter Blackshire, co-ordinating chapain, and colleagues gave generously of their time, and involved leaders within the hospital from palliative care and nursing services, along with the chair and CEO of the Trust.

It’s no simple Polyanna-ish story.

Heatherwood and Wexham Park Foundation Trust has had struggles and serious public failures in the not-so-distant past, and has undergone its own sometimes painful reboot.

If you’re trying to lead in a recovering organisation with limited resources, how does hope arise, and the ability to turn things round?

1. The foundation of everything is realism about what’s amiss, but refusal to give in to it, blame others, or collude. It’s values not target driven, and works hard to connect people with the reasons they wanted to be practitioners in the first place, not synthetic goals. Again and again we were struck by openness and lack of management hype. At first this seemed weird, but as it became plain many people were interested in the unvarnished truth, everything came into focus. No boasting, no hype — just workmanlike pragmatism, and a dogged focus on values. We heard about the temptation to be driven by targets to the extent corners are cut. When you stop being target-driven, you actually take a hit — but the hit is an act of faith that if you stick with your values and resist cutting corners, in the end, you will do a better job. That takes real courage and, dare I say it, faith. I wish some churches felt freer to be honest about what’s not working, more rigorous in not cutting corners and tolerating crapada.
   
   
2. Hospital Chaplaincy is not running a Church in a hospital, but delivering siritual care across the board in collaboration with others. Healthcare systems are like water systems — everything affects everything else. If there’s poison in the system, everybody gets poisoned. If different trades take hierarchy or status more seriously than the over-riding point of the exercise, or their part of the action more serously than other practitioners’, attention is distracted, the practitioner community compromised, and patients harmed. Managing chaplaincy isn’t about being nice to chaplains, but everybody respecting everybody else, and honoring everyone’s role in the delivery of the service. Everyone is a practitioner, and the task of everyone else is to maximise their own performance in such a way that all practitioners can function in an integrated, aware and self-aware, way. If you’re angry, use the energy to raise your own game, don’t turn it against someone else. The unity and integration of the whole depends on respect, fuelled by open communication.
   
   
3. The most stressful and wearing place to work is somewhere where you can’t be yourself. In life, in healthcare, in Church, hypocrisy is like Japanese knotweed, or fire at sea. There is a continual drag towards it within the system (what Christians call “the fall”) and open communication with mutual accountability is the only medicine. Communication needs to be as clean as you can make it, remembering at all times that God gave human beings two ears and one mouth.
   

I came away with much to ponder, not only about hospitals, but about leadership and certainly about the ways we do Church. It also sowed real seeds of hope about a new kind of chaplaincy in MK.

Particular thanks to those who led us through the day; squirm and duck for the credits — It’s an unforgivable sin for some British to acknowledge other people’s work, especially in the public sector, without being cynical and/or nasty about them, but this is what I want to thank you for:

• Peter Blackshire (Co-ordinating chaplain) — There’s lots to work out, but you’ve got a real team, and it shows. Many ministers, and healthcare professionals, say they want to work as a team — few acually do. Insecurity and Ego compromises their best efforts. Your clarity of purpose and consistency shone through. May your trolley arrive soon!
  

• Clare Culpin (Director of Nursing) I found your awareness of everyone as a practitioner, courage and realism, refreshing and inspiring. I seldom meet anyone who has come through 20 years plus of leadership in medical care with such a focussed and lively sense of how things actually work together.

• Fiona Lisney (Palliative Care Consultant) showed me how soft and hard skills (to use conventional distinctions) actually can work together to help patients at what could be the most awful time of life, the journey home. You actually demonstrated how to get a system working for patients.

• Julie Burgess (Chief Executive) We were overwhemed by your realism, you will to listen and respond to anyone, your awareness of your context, along with your uncompromiseing commitment to your core values. The heart of your leadership seemed to be willingness to take risks in not cutting corners. I wish there were more of that kind of faith and courage around.
  

• Chris Langley (Trust Chairman) Perhaps it comes from the retail background, but your will to take the people the trust serves seriously came over clearly. Assertive loudmouth leadership like the Apprentice on TV gets organisations so far — but to excel you need something very different — passion and humility, openness and rigorous commitment to making the syetem coherent and effective.

Dignity at work: Systemics

A few things are becoming clear to me from the excellent discussions we have been having on clergy bullying (of and by):

1. The doctrine of original sin happens to be true, and reveals itself esoecially at work, like it does among drivers. Bad stuff goes on everywhere and at all times. I met a postie recently, who told me his Union took a less than laid-back Buddhist attitude to his refusal to join in a recent strike. One of the worst and most disturbing example of bullying I’ve encountered was of a member of the clergy by a journalist from a national newspaper. So we’re all in this thing together. There is none guiltless, no not one — why should we wish to be deceived?
   
   
2. Christianity is a social and personal means of redemption — a process of grace working through real people. Therefore this phenomenon does matter, and does, continuously, need to be addressed. Failing to engage with it denies dignity to the victim and the possibility of redemption to the perpetrator. G. K. Chesterton was right to say, in his quaint way, “we are sick and very sad who bring good news to all mankind,” but that can never be the last word. Jesus said “by this shall all know that you are my disciples, by the love you have... love one another as I have loved you.” That is the Gold Standard — not a discussion starter, but a way of life.
   
   
3. Whistleblowing and transparency are essential weapons against abuse. They can never, however be the whole answer, because making them so puts most, if not all, the responsibility on the victim, as though it was somehow their fault. This is morally wrong, because it leaves control (with diminished responsibility) in the hands of the institution, not the victim.
   
   
4. Therefore those who lead the institutional Church, fallen people that we are like everyone else, need to do serious intentional work to create a consistent culture of respect and justice within our own spheres of influence and authority. That defends the faith much more effectively than making snarky comments on atheist websites. Throughout the organisation, in every way, as far as lies in us, we have to express values that support human dignity. I have disussed this question carefully with some vastly able big hitters who have led particular UK public institutions through the transformation of their cultures of equality and diversity. This has convinced me that the only way we can transform ours is by producing and enforcing, in a publicly accountable way, routines that express these values. This will sometimes mean the organisation moving ahead of people. So be it. It’s only as this is done that decency becomes the shared norm in any organisation.
   
   
5. The basis for real Church life is not Instutionalism. It’s repentance and faith. As I read the NT I ask “what kind of attitude to relationships would you expect in a community which existed on this basis, and was trying to do it now as a way of life together?” the answer is mutual accountability — each to the other, all to each, each to all, corporately to God. This is the NT principle that is sometimes quaintly called “mutual submission.” We all have eccentricities. One of mine is that when I put a new priest in, and they make their declarations and oaths, I often express publicly my view that this ceremony marks me as being as accountable to them as they are promising to be to me. Ministry is fruitfully exercised with mutual accountability — anything less is a control game that leads easily to abuse.
   
   
6. Finally, please help me out. We are currently considering how to further the work of our Diocesan Committee for Racial Justice to advance Equality and Diversity best practice. The new Equalities Act will bring various strands together, and it’s important for our work to reflect reality and opportunity, and to be morally cogent and consistent with our values. This process of discernment makes me ask, “Prcatically speaking, what kind of a body, involving who, how, will best secure and advance in our diocese our accountability to values of equality, diversity and justice?” all answers, please, gratefully received...
   

Bishops roles in context

Studying, on S Cyprian’s Day, what bishops are for with colleagues, there’s a clear four fold pragmatic model emerging. Bishops seem to have four kinds of role:

• Priest — signifier — drawing people to a wider purpose in God, beyond themselves, mediating, feeding the good esate of the Christian community
  
  
• Prophet — disturber — raising expectancy, reframing perceptions, challenging assumptions
  
  
• Apostolic Leader — transformer — encouraging shifts in understanding and practice
  
  
• Theologian — reflector — attending to the moment, interpreting and applying in a bigger context
  

So far so good. I wondered, however, about the more than individual perspective on all this. Since I first came across them years ago when working on Edward White Benson’s biography of Cyprian, I have been very struck by these words of the North African 3rd Century saint:

Quam unitatem tenere firmiter et vindicare debemus maxime episcopi, qui in ecclesia praesidimus, ut episcopatum quoque ipsum unum atque indivisum probemus. Episcopatus unus est cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur
(Bishops who preside in Church should firmly to hold and assert this unity that we may also prove the episcopate one and undivided... The episcopate is one, of which each part is held by the individual for the whole)

For Benson this assertion expressed the purpose of episcopal minstry. What are the the gifts, qualities and habits that make someone a good steward of their share in something, the whole of which they bear on behalf of the whole, but locally?

Microfinance: trading Real Futures

One powerful moment in the Leadership Summit was an appeal by Andrew Rugasira, founder and CEO of Good African Coffee, social enterpreneur from Kampala, for Trade not Aid. He drew attention to the distorting effects of aid on economies with significant proportions drawn from overseas aid, that could unintentionally suppress the life and economic skills of poor people, whilst feeding a huge and sometimes corrupt panjandrum of dependency. We need a new paradigm that will read Africa in terms of potential as well as need and deficits.

This is not to say all aid is simply bad, but that it has to be applied for emergencies, short term or infrastuctural pump priming, not as a substitute for regular economic activity. By analogy, you can employ people in a social or vokuntary enterprise, but there is a law of diminishing returns about the benefit, and whatever you do, it is important to build, not kill off the voluntary capacity of the organisation.

This put a great context around the session with, IMHO, the most impressive entrepreneur at the summit, Jessica Jackley, founder of Kiva.org, a microfinance site that lets anyone with computer access invest small loan sums in a targeted way, mainly in the developing world. The clever bit is marshalling all the agents into a slick process that connects loaner and entrepreneur as directly as possible, making it easy for anyone with a credit/debit card or paypal to get involved at the click of a mouse.

This is not an entirely rose-tinted process — some have criticised Kiva’s recent inlusion of US small businesses in its portfolio, as well as some interest rates the other end (not astronomic by UK small finance standards, but high and largely dictated by the partners who make it happen, in a way that’s almost inevitable with microfinance). Potential collywobbles some feel about child sponsorship might apply; Microfinance investing from home may not be for everyone. That said, Kiva does boldly go to places conventional banks don’t and makes the connections. Kiva would be the first to say microfinance is not the magic bullet to end poverty — but some involvement in microfinance certainly seems as defensible as sitting around on your spotty behind, beefing up the bottom line of conventional banks to the tune of £3,000 a taxpayer, which is what we’re all compulsorily doing anyway.

In terms of Leadership learning, kiva.org shows how someone in their twenties can impact world development to the tune of 86 Million dollars in four years with a good idea, creative use of technology, and the guts and stickability to pursue her vision out of Sunday School, through Business School, and out onto the streets.

Living strategy for learning in Oakley

Whole School Planning sounds dreary, but I had a slightly transcendent experience of how it can be done in a really well led school when I went to Oakley last week, an ancient but scattered village best known to 20th century history as the place the Great Train Robbers hid their takings. Children at the Oakley C of E Combined School were brilliant, bubbly and tremendous fun. Questions included “Who made God?” and “how did Jesus come to life again?” as well as the usual ones about Max the Cat and our children.

This school is, humanly speaking, an ideal size of about 100. Everybody really knows everybody else and it feels as though people really do muck in together here to get the best out of each other. The school is wonderfully well in with the village, both historically, and in creative contemporary ways. I noticed the school had arranged with builders of some new houses locally for small groups of children to go and visit regularly and see how houses are built — brilliant! I’d love to have done that when I was 8/9/10!

I was impressed by the Christian learning going on. Year 5 children had been working on Chagall images of the Crucifixion, producing their own, countering the tendency in lesser schools to telescope holy week into an Easter Bunny thang.

The School Council has also been working and consulting on a school prayer for everyone, and there has been really good sustained work to build children’s environmental awarenss in an Eco-school. David Kaboleh, local Vicar, is a frequent and friendly visitor. I liked the kindness tree where various good deeds were recorded, shared and celebrated as leaves on a tree.

I did see something I’ve not seen before, however, behind the Staff room door, with its elegant Simian theme. Jo Garlick and colleagues work closely together, to deliver their school improvement plan. There’s nothing crypto about learning strategy — it's there for everyone to see in the hall. But the staff have a mini version of the School Improvement Plan on the staff room wall. People, including children, use post-its when they undertake work, different colours for different groups (children, staff, governors, parents) and stick them into the whole scheme of what’s going on.

By doing this everybody can relate what they’re doing in the here and now to the broader strategy.

• Everybody can see that they’re part of the whole work of the school, and how.
  
  
• Everybody can see where the gaps are, in any given term.
  

This may sound like some boring bureaucratic thing, but it’s a brilliantly simple idea, that might be effective in all sorts of places (Churches?), and it really seems to work. It shows you can tie everything together strategically without being heavy handed, to keep things moving forward in a really deightful but also highly effective small school.