Education 101

What is Education in a fast changing world? How do we really develop people, including ourselves? In church and school, and church school, I came up with this for today’s keynote for the Board of Education: a picture that’s worth a thousand words!

Christian Aid: A Bigger Splash

Everything in India is bigger. Driving through Hyderabad assaults the senses with its seemingly endless miles of heaving humanity in all its expressions, diversity and colour. How small it makes the field on which I play out most regular work seem. In 42 degree heat a small group of us hone a development plan for a school based on Jesus’ principle that the child is greatest in the Kingdom and only the best is good enough for the poor. 

This is no time for half measures or empty gestures. World citizens clever enough for the social and technical way we’re evolving but morally grounded enough to make it worth living in do not grow in trees. Each child gets one opportunity to grow and learn, and there are no dress rehearsals. Here, beyond gestures, for some of the poorest people int he world, We are trying to capture Jesus’ vision of life in all its fulness. Nothing less is worthy of our highest endeavours, even if it means being real but also radical about everything, including ourselves. 

But how?

The question brings me back a particular conversation with a City trader. He’s a good and decent man, who well understands the virtues of capitalism and has pursued them. He is no fool. He knows that our present system, worked by autopilot, has no long-term future. It has produced wealth, but also tremendous debt. It relies on half a billion partying in first class whilst everybody else lives a less enriched life. The arrival at the ball of another two billion aspirant middle class partygoers from Brazil, India, Russia, and China (to name but a few)has to change everything radically. It calls for a new kind of ingenuity. Finally the rape of the pant has consequences.

So what we need, he says, is beyond economics. 

Economics is often treated as a science but in fact it is no such thing. It manages inequalities according to a set of assumptions about worth that go beyond its own capacity to examine them. 

Economics draws its basic premises from choices we make about what we see as a good life. Questions about those bring the doctor and the priest in their long coats, running over the fields. 

What we need, my trader friend and I say, is beyond the secular principle — life pursued pragmatically, free from the imposition of particular religious dogma in its narrowest sense. It’s a precious hygiene factor in any free society, but does not exhaust the possibilities of being alive. Without is we cannot run a decent and humane society, and it has serious comment to offer on how the ship is running, but can have no idea of where the ship is going.

I wonder about a slogan I saw a few years ago, painted on the side of the South Karnataka State Legislature in Bangalore — “Government business is God’s business.” They don’t mean any particular god among the thousands India holds. But they do means what they say. Not only is the ultimate subject matter the stuff people engage with in community by faith, but these things that really count can only be pursued radically with courage and confidence. Pure pragmatists are only tinkering, and more is being demanded of us all than mere tinkering.

How is God calling us to do this? By grace through faith that is committed enough to

• be Real and open to what is — not to tart things up, because faith is beyond pretending
• be Positive about what might be — because what proceeds from faith is faith, and Anglicans above all should know that all you get from fear is paltry squabbling, however worthy and genteel
• Get Engaged — to get right out of its comfy seat and engage, remembering that because of the incarnation the only bass for true and fruitful engagement is equality
• be Honest — taking every thought captive to Christ because otherwise we are stuck in no more than a religious hall of mirrors

That’s enough down and dirty agenda for a lifetime, is it?

We have work to do. Over the next three days the newly honed school development plan needs to go back to its originators in the school, and we work with them to make it happen. 

The jeep calls at 11.00. 

School Admissions: Tears and Fears

“Why, Oh Why?” whines the Mail about school admissions. Stephen Glover excoriates opening faith schools to all and sundry as “death wish.” However our C of E schools’ title deeds say that “all and sundry” is exactly whom they were founded for — like the Kingdom of Heaven, the way Jesus taught it.

The Church is there to spread the teaching of Jesus, not sectarianism and bigotry. We are in the business of growing faith, not paranoia about “secularism.” We are non-sectarian whenever possible, not because we have lost our nerve, or as a marketing gimmick, but because Jesus taught a bigger conception of God and humanity than any sect can take in. He addressed everyone, not just the religious, and his harshest words were for those who ghettoised faith.

Bishop John’s TES interview (as Chair of the National Society) suggested that the standard aim of Church School admissions ought to be 10% of places for Churchgoers, the rest for fringe and everybody. Interestingly, looking around, as Chairof our Dicoesan Board of Education, at our 289 schools, the vast majority of them are primaries, and the proportion he’s talking about is actually what usually happens. It doesn’t kill anyone off. Our schools face major challenges, but they are generally doing their job, serving the communities they were founded to serve incredibly well.

Different contexts need appropriate policies, though. In some places there is a desperate shortage of Church School secondary places. It takes me back to my time as admissions governor for Ranelagh, a pioneering and excellent Comprehensive school in Bracknell.

If the frequently repeated figures for churchgoing in England reflected reality in any simple way, we would have had no admissions problem. Given the size of the local population of parents of 11 year olds, the school would only need about 30 places a year for them, leaving another 94 for fringe and non Church families.

In fact the assumption of a post-Christian secularised population was, quite honestly, complete tosh in our area. Our school used to receive at least 120 fully documented applications every year from regular Churchgoing families, and a good 50 others from families with a strong claim to places. That’s the simple fact. Not 30. 179.

One way to address the real problem would have been to increase the number of places available in Church secondaries in the area to allow for a more balanced intake, with a larger number of places for fringe and outside families. Sadly it was not in our power, as governors, to build a bunch of new secondaries at 30 million a pop; nor to expand numbers in a school on a cramped urban site. So we soldiered on, trying to be as fair as we could in applying our published admissions policy. And in the meanwhile there was a school to run.

I expect Bishop John meant exactly what he said. He wasn’t laying down some new iron law about admissions, which the National Society couldn’t anyway. He was talking about the good things Church schools have being made available to as many people who want them as possible; which is something, surely, we would all wish for, although the way to achieve it will be more obscure and trixical in some local contexts.

Finally, I was interested to meet last week a friend and colleague just back from the States who pointed out that inEngland there is a lot of twitchiness about Faith and politics, and in the States about Faith and Public Schools (in the American sense of the term). Is it, he wondered, the same cultural twitchiness? I wonder...

Truly Free Schools?

Freedom is a lovely thing, and HM government is trailing “Free Schools,” to be set up by groups of parents or others. We don’t yet know what this actually means — an almost inevitable state of affairs with a new project at this stage. I know many educational professionals remain far from convinced that the answer to English Education is yet another scheme for school ownership and governance — that makes 11 different geometries for this in the maintained sector. Will an 11th be the silver bullet?

The Board of Education I chair works in close partnership with all our 280 schools to support them as they seek out and apply what they believe is the best route through the whitewater rapids of today’s Education. We know various set-ups within our family of Church schools from the inside, warts and all, and one size does not fit all. We also have considerable experience of capacity building for schools moving from Controlled to Aided status, as well as an innovative way with academies.

Given the joy and privilege of delivering a keynote for the Fourth Oxford Education Debate at Oxford Brookes University the other day, the terminology got me wondering what a truly free school wold be like. With compelling loaded terms like “free” you have to ask “from?”“to?”“who’s free?” “for what?” and “how?” otherwise they just float off into orbit.

However as a start I came up with four things I’d love to see all English schools free from:

1. Indifference: We have a very strange attitude to children in England. We vigorously defend them against harm. But look at what happens when you take a child into a restaurant. Distraction bags abound, because it’s literally inconceivable that a child could be part of a dinner party on an equal basis, like they would in most European countries. Many children experience life as embarrassing walk-on extras in their homes, not engaged with, confined to a world called childhood which is not quite normal and attracts an extra helping of criticism and cynicism. Oft patronised, ignored, belittled, told to shut up, sometimes even hit, bribed, packed off to school. It all goes together, and until someone can come up with a school that’s really sets children free from the British Adore/ Patronise/ Ignore / Thump approach to children, I don’t see radical transformation in children’s chances.
   
   
2. Process Obsession. Some schools try so hard to get it right they get it wrong. The whole gubbins of measuring and assessment somehow swallows everything else. We need accountabilities and routines and measurements, standards, predictive grades, attainment targets and frameworks. But all these things are greedy concepts. They seem to tell us more about children than they actually do. You can spend a lot of time on them. They need to be treated as servants of the learning, not masters.
   
   Any truly free kind of education has to contain its own process, and tame it, allow for flexibility, and make it accessible. It has to avoid the temptation simply to pile initiative on initiative to impress the voters every five years. Building great schools takes longer than the standard political cycle, and school improvement is a very subtle and time-consuming process.
   
   
3. Third Freedom and, I speak as a Hungarian Scot, I’ve never quite understood why the English are so obsessed about Class. Why does our whole Education system predicate itself on elitism about the acme of everything, including polytechnic education. My French and German friends are delighted when their children land an engineering apprenticeship. Not so in England. Why, oh why? Back in 1944, why were the grammar schools not flooded out with parents complaining that their children had been allocated to the grammar stream when their real interests and passions lay in technology and the future so they needed a place at the Technical High School. I don’t know, but they didn’t.
   
   Ancient schools to serve the poor were somehow hi-jacked by the middle classes in the nineteenth century, and it’s been downhill ever since, for a sizable proportion of our children. When are we going to learn from other European systems that do not require fear of failing schools to drive attainment in all the others, for example.
   
   
4. Obsession with output targets. This is the assumption that All that really matters is the subject, and the job afterwards. As young people face a world where they will need to acquire eight or ten jobs in a working lifetime, we still ask schools to educate to the notion that they will go into a single career. The broadening lateral thinking learning that might enable people to make personal choices that will be fruitful, is treated as a sideshow as horizons contract and every school has to fight the temptation to become a crammer’s.
   
   I think there must be some sort of national curriculum, and I’ve come across great examples of it being used creatively, but I am disturbed to meet good students who are simply crammed for exams, with little hinterland or capacity to look beyond the answers expected of them. Associated with this, some schools are tempted to play the system by fiddling around with targets and other dark arts which I won’t go into but are well-known to all. This approach generally recalls that of the electronics goods warehouse in the Midwest that managed to achieve 100% success at the target of getting all orders out by close of business by yanking the phone socket out of the wall
   

Anyway that’s my big four. I come across excellent schools of all kinds, but these are some of the big systemic wonkinesses that make English education harder work for everyone, and less effective. Any more out there?

Born-again Terrapin in Chesham Bois

Many schools used to have a 1960’s terrapin — It was a temporary building designed to accommodate a class, often without a toilet, in conditions that guaranteed cold in winter and sweltering heat in the summer.

Carrying water across the playground to supply it was an additional task for the milk monitor. In such places many people were said to be having the happiest days of their lives.

But all good things come to an end, and I was delighted to go to Chesham Bois C of E Combined School on Saturday to open a new classroom for reception children, repacing such a structure. Fundraising for it was all local, and the project to have it built has been running for a long time. Although the wait was tedious, the result is a building whose time has come — a superb suite of teaching and ancillary facilities, including a kitchen area, loos, storage and outdoor play area.

Best of all, this scheme combines various technologies to provide insulation and reduce power consumption to a point where there will be times at which it is self powering — PV / solar cells for hot water and electricity, with an air-source heatpump that extracts heat from air on its way in and out of the building. By jumping in early in the microgeneration cycle, the school will gain maximum benefit from its investment, and was able to secure a 50% grant to install the PV / solar cells. By monitoring use, awareness grows, and the school has very much got itself a reception classroom for tomorrow as well as today. Other schools who wish to have the benefit of such tasty worms need to be early birds...

The Sweet Taste of India

India for a few days, with all its beauty, colour, warmth (31 degrees!), need and vibrancy. I’m travelling with friends and colleagues from Chalfont St Peter, Charles the local Vicar, John the Head of our School, and Chris the school secretary. Chalfont has responded in a really exciting way to the schools development and networking project we went to Andhra Pradesh to inaugurate in 2007.

This isn’t just a money thing — although when floods struck Kurnool last winter I was thrilled by the almost instantaneous way our network was able to get thousands of pounds of aid straight out and onto the streets where it was needed. It reminded me of the way I was told many in Milton Keynes were able to throw themselves into support for Haiti with the help of RC nuns at Thornton College, who have working sisters there.

That kind of direct two-way relationship is really important. Of course we need big NGO’s and government agencies, but the guts of giving isn’t money, but a giving attitude, a focussed will, the good samaritan thing. The local Church is the hope of the world, in various ways, including the fact we have people on the ground. It’s a real joy to be hands-on in this work with Chalfont St Peter taking the lead.

There are four purposes in this very brief visit

1. to meet some of the people caught up in the floods, encourage them in the work of reconstructon and, if we can, to see if we can design a scheme for small school to school basic infrastructural support packages for which we hope to drum up support among our own 288 schools in the Thames Valley.
   
   
2. to scope the future of our Oxford/ Nandyal relationship, and see how it can be developed in the fields of sharing technology, passion and vision together with Bishop Lawrence and his colleagues.
   
   
3. to share an assembly, if we can manage it, between two schools, one in Nandyal and one in Chalfont — Chris has a bag of gubbins! It’s not only a dry run for the kinds of linkages we think could open up all sorts of possibilities for students in the UK and India, but it will bring the whole relationship to life,w e hope, on both ends.
   
   
4. to spend a very short, but I hope quality time praying and studying with clergy in Nandyal.
   
   
5. I hope we can really grow in ways that are mutually beneficial, and am much looking forward to renewing friendships and sharing visions with sisters and brothers in India.

As a colleague was asking me tentatively whether he could be excused from his parish to minster abroad as part of a parish link, I want to reiterate that I believe it’s a really good thing for clergy to commit a few days ministry regularly to the majority word Church. I know Bucks colleagues who are ministering in Nigeria, South Africa, Sweden, India, China, the Middle East, Germany, Sudan, Uganda, Pakistan and South America. If 150 Bucks clergy want do this kind of thing, I’m delighted. The growth of such activity among my colleagues really excites me. There are various ways of wiring up this kind of service, and for any PCC’s wondering what they will lose if their vicar commits to a regular element of this kind of ministry, I want to say there is no down side. It refreshes and renews people as well as giving tangible expression to the Catholicity of the Church. It takes a whole world to know Christ!

Seer Green: Global story, Local school

Back to Seer Green Church of England Combined School where I had great fun with music a couple of years ago, for their 150th Anniversary celebration. Singing was great, and Olwyn Oakley, children, staff and friends seem to be enjoying life. Good to share the assembly with Gaenor Hockey, the local Vicar, who is well known and loved in school.

150 is a great age to be, along with Big Ben, the Red Cross, the Suez Canal, the Liberal Party, and the Royal Albert Bridge of the Great Western Railway. It was also the year John Brown was hanged at Harper’s Ferry, and the year of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush, when people began seriously to use oil from the ground rather than whale oil for their domestic lighting.

Well that’s enough history — how was school?
My eye was taken by some colourful Story Bags. These contain stories and all the gear you need to bring them to life with very young children. There was an interesting display of photos and records from the school, which has a very full set of logbooks, admissions registers and inspection reports. I loved a 1905 exercise book by a girl called Maude, describing the British Empire, the reign of King Josiah, and Queen Alexandra.

Attendance in those days was much worse than today, as children were often required to help their parents at work, specially at harvest. Reading through the records shows how innocent in some ways children were, but also how young they sometimes were when they first encountered death, poverty and disease. The logbooks lovingly record the joys and sorrows of school life, and circumstances of thier lives.

I was thrilled to see how this school and its Church are building links between Seer Green and Kisiizi in Western Uganda. Staff and friends, including a local doctor, have been out to Uganda to help in the hospital and school. The display of children's profiles and materials from Kisiizi was very moving, including some home made footballs and skipping ropes.

In an increasingly globalised world, the Christian Church is the greatest network on earth, and building relationships across it is something Church schools are wonderfully well placed to do. There’s an immediacy and closeness across cultures we feel in belonging together in one world, whether giving or receiving hospitality. It takes a whole world to know Christ. There is no down side, and I hope all our 281 schools will work in increasingly focussed ways to create and sustain these kinds of link, as they are doing at Seer Green.

Building the future at Frieth School

Good to open a new classroom extension at Frieth School. Nice to see how well the Revd Jeremy Mais is settling into the valley, and to go round with John Wigram, the highly effective local vicar. An excellent staff, led by Lindsay Phillips, is backed by superb parental support, numbers have been growing. The computer suite had become a kind of Piccadilly Circus. Now there’s a new extension every learning group has its own work space, and it was good to see how naturally the new build fitted in with the rest of the school buildings. There was real craftsmanship in the new knapped flint work. Real care had gone into moving the old gable and window rather than junking it.


Children were full of life, and had been working on various projects and displays, including some spectacular fireworks that seemed to fizz away in the wall. There was a great assembly, telling the story from Genesis of God building the world, singing building songs, sharing poems and reactions to the school environment. It was fun to be in an assembly where every child in the room took part.

“Half form per year” entry makes for a school size of about 130 children. This allows for a degree of natural vertical streaming in all sorts of learning groups, and staff had some really elegant ways of leading busy small groups where children enjoy learning together from everyone of different sizes. Perhaps we stack children too firmly in notional year groups, rather than helping them access the different levels of experience and imagination you get with mixed ages. The staff were making handling the potential differentiation issues arising really well, and the children seemed delighted with the result.

Even after 14o years, Frieth has a vibrant, bustling school community. It draws together children from various villages in the Hambleden valley. It’s not PC to go on about the buildings, but the excellence of the new work that’s been done, underwritten by real generosity from the parents and friends of the school, is part of a really creative and committed approach to managing the school buildings. Tom Nixey, chair of governors, showed me a staff room cunningly clawed back from a roof space, and shared plans to enhance the hall and to cover outdoor play facilities for foundation stage children.

It’s always good to find really vibrant village schools. There is some degree of anxietiy around the place about numbers and rolls. The key strategy has to be to build a really strong school community, invest for the future, and look to sensible alliances and communities of interest.

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.