I’m a teacher get me out of this classroom

This month, I found a grey, well technically white, patch in my beard. With that one discovery, I have convinced myself that I am now officially a wise old man. My youth is slowly ebbing away like blood being sucked by a vampire. Education, sadly,  has an issue with ageism and management. 

I haven’t always been an English teacher. In fact, I worked in the building trade and insurance before I even stepped before a white board. By my late twenties, I had experienced numerous leaders and working contexts. Then, I started working in schools and, to be honest, that’s where I found things different. Instead of working to be the best at your job, there was a constant narrative about promotion to leave the classroom. Promotion was viewed as spending less time in the classroom. The classroom was seen as toxic. I even had a fellow student teacher telling me on my PGCE course how they only wanted to spend three years teaching and then after that they’d consult for schools.

From the beginning of my career, the narrative was that to survive in schools you needed to reduce the amount of teaching on your timetable. That alone created this thread of promotion or ‘stagnation’. Yet, alongside this, ran this other problem: what happens to the teachers who were weak? Simple answer: occasionally they were promoted to roles where there were less teaching hours. All roads lead away from the classroom. 

We have a massive problem in education. Those that can teach… are subconsciously and consciously told to move out of the classroom. 

The classroom, the beating heart of all schools, is the one aspect of schools people are clambering to get away from. Clambering away from it if you are good at teaching. Clambering away from it if you are bad at teaching. Surely, we have to ask ourselves why the classroom is such a problem.

If we want to address teaching retention numbers and the number of teachers joining the profession, we need to change the narrative. We need to stop the idea that the classroom is the stepping stone for headship, consultancy or a three-year book deal. This ephemeral nature to education, and the role, is damaging. It gives this idea that things can be obtained quickly. Things can be improved suddenly. That schools can change in a heartbeat. The speed and immediacy of this approach means that ‘crafting’ and ‘refining’ the art of teaching is lost. The emphasis on quick fixes and ‘identikit’ teaching methods is a problem. Instead of schools honing experience and skills, we are looking for quick fixes. 

Look at how all adverts for teaching training feature a young teacher supposedly inspiring young minds because he / she is young. The narrative is that  ‘young blood’’ in the classroom is good and ‘old blood’ in the classroom is bad. It’s a damaging narrative because it conveys that you have to be young to be engaging in the classroom. Somehow, a whiff of Ariana Grande perfume or a Superdry top is going to inspire people for life. Something more is needed. Youth doesn’t mean a natural passion for the subject. It just means their trousers or skirts might fit a bit better. 

Mr Llewlllyn was my equivalent in my school. He was a DT teacher, but he had a perm and he played rugby. That was catnip to students in a Welsh secondary school in my day. There wasn’t a whiff of grey in that chemically permed hair- it wasn’t natural and I wonder if he is paying for it now with baldness. Anyway, the teachers that I enjoyed were greying. Mr Bic who made us write stories in lessons. Mrs Keeling who read the Guardian and was enthused about reading all the time. Mr Ross who loved literature and shared it. They all made me the English teacher I am. They stoked the fire without a whiff of Lynx Africa, a perm or Adidas - it was the 90s! 

We need a massive change in how the classroom is viewed. The narrative is broken. Our structures are broken. The management of schools is broken.  The SLT office is the pivot in which schools move around. The classroom should be the pivot. It should be the beating heart. It should be the centre of what we do. If it isn’t working in that classroom, it doesn’t matter how silent or noisy your classroom is, it doesn’t matter what uniform they wear, it doesn’t matter what structure you have in the lesson, it simply doesn’t matter. Everything boils down to that experience. Too much of the time in education is focused on ‘the outside looking in’ on the classroom when we should be looking at the ‘inside looking out’ of the classroom. The people. The teachers. The experience. The crafting. The skills. Their value. 

You can paint or rename schools as much as you like, but we are not going to retain teachers or attract teachers if we build negativity around the classroom experience. Now, I am not talking about the behaviour of pupils (but that also doesn’t help), but I mean the experience. We paint such a bad picture of classroom life. We equate success in teaching in terms of leadership roles, but we don’t equate it to time spent in the classroom. That is where the problem lies. We view success as being something outside the classroom. Not in it. 

I am not anti-leadership (in fact, I work with a great team), but I feel we have such a problem around this narrative.  I have been on leadership courses, led things across schools, participated in leadership teams, but, at the moment, I haven’t committed to moving to senior leadership because it will move me out of the classroom. Therein lies another issue. The disjoint between leadership and teaching in the classroom. Yes, we have teaching leaders, but you cannot deny that it is hard to straddle both camps.  You are, generally, either a classroom teacher or a leader. Rarely can you be both. Therein lies another problem. Why can’t we have both? I am not prepared to have the platitude ‘I might not be teaching a class, but I am having an impact on all students’ as the one thing that excuses why I am in a role, when I could be teaching a whole class. I teach full time as an English teacher and a curriculum leader. I don’t have a desire to run a consultancy firm, run off into the sunset and write teaching books or anything else that takes me out of the classroom. Change happens in the classroom. I want to be where that happens. Not in a meeting talking about it. I want to see and experience it with my own eyes. 

We need to work on making the classroom a better experience and form a better narrative around the classroom. Being in the classroom shouldn’t be the equivalent of Boxer waiting for his time to be sold by the farmer to the glue factor. The classroom is the beating heart of schools. 

We are in danger of becoming a profession of people who talk the talk and not walk the walk. We must never lose sight of the classroom or the classroom teacher's role in improvement. People improve schools. Systems and strategies don’t work without people. 

I salute all the teachers working the classroom full time.

I salute all the teachers who haven’t taken on promotion.

I salute all the teachers that want to stay in the classroom. 

For they have experience, knowledge and skills that everyone should learn from.

Have a good holiday, 

Xris 

P.S. An alternative title to this blog was 'The Crystal Maze'; however, I felt that might be showing my age. Well, at least, highlighting the white patch.

Mock marking: we have a problem.

When you place the GCSE papers next to each other, you cannot help but notice that students have to write pages and pages of answers for the English GCSE papers. Occasionally, I have heard many subjects talk about how the 6 mark question is tricky because students have to write a lengthy paragraph. At times, for English, it feels like an endurance test rather than a test of knowledge and skill. The papers equate to several essays. GCSE English Language equates to four essays in one hour and forty five minutes a paper. Literature has two essays on one paper and three on the other paper.

But the exams are not only an endurance test for students,  they are also an endurance test for teachers. I’d love to say things are nice and fair in the world of mocking marking, but I can’t. Things are far from fair. English teachers would kill for a quick one word answer question or a table to mark. The only ‘joy’ teachers get is the four mark question and that is a short lived joy, when you have four essays to mark after that question. As a curriculum leader, I will often present leaders and governors with a copy of the exam paper, because I have to clarify what the paper covers and expects. All too often, the common thought about English is ‘write an essay about a story and write a pretty story’. It is gruelling. Gruelling to do. Gruelling to mark. You can see the penny drop on their faces as I turn page after page before leadership teams.  And, then students have to…. and then they have to … and then next they have to… and finally they… You can see that look on disbelief on their faces as they equate the amount of writing a students does with the pain and anguish it takes them to send one simple email to staff.

Yes, I might not have to clean the sinks after a lesson, go out in the cold, rain and snow or even have to explain the complexities of sexual intercourse to young giggling people, but I have to read lots and lots of work and that is considerably time consuming. I’d love to say that the opportunity to read a book in a lesson or watch a DVD version of the set text balances things out. It doesn’t and I think leadership teams need to look at what their English departments do in their schools, because there is a big problem with the marking of English mocks in schools. Many schools are getting teachers to mark four English papers in one exam period. That’s the equivalent of teachers marking thirteen essays per student in a class. Oh, don’t forget to mark KS3 books every fortnight and write some reports.  

I am a big fan of the new style of GCSEs – yes, there is one fan- but I think that they have caused a pressure point in schools. The knock-on effect of binning coursework in English has created a focal point of marking. If you are married to an English teacher, don’t expect to see them in the annual mock months of November and December. There are weeks of marking, in some cases.

The government and exam boards are not helping with the process as the emphasis has always been on students taking the exams in Year 11 and not Year 10, which compounds the problem. The majority of Year 10 is teaching and Year 11 becomes the preparation for the skills. Ultimately, the problem is that English teachers teach two GCSE courses and not one, like most subjects. Oh, and they are double weighted so they are really, really important to the whole school. We are marking double the amount of mock papers.

We need to address the inequality somehow. We are compelled to teach two GCSEs moral and educationally, but we need to shout about how the system needs to support English teachers. Honestly, I would have left my NQT year if I was faced with level of marking I have now for the GCSE papers. It is unsustainable and we need to acknowledge this.

I am in a lucky position that I am supported by the leaders in my school. They understand the marking situation and so we’ll have one paper marked before Christmas and one after. This sadly isn’t the case everywhere and we need to shout out about it. We need to be talking to leaders and teams and see what they can do to help. A shrug of the shoulder is not enough. A ‘well that is how it is’ smile is not enough. We need support and actions. We need schools to acknowledge the level of work involved and support teachers with the workload.

A long, long time ago English departments were given time off the timetable to moderate coursework folders. I want English departments to have that day off timetable again to mark exam papers. This then would start to address the imbalance. Teachers shouldn’t have to work Saturday and Sunday to mark mock papers in time. That’s what is happening. And, I think some teachers are thinking this is normal.   

Workload is a paramount issue in schools and a thorn in the teacher retention’s side. I feel that we need to speak up about it. We have a situation here that is damaging.

I want leaders to engage with English departments and see what you can do to help. Yes, you may want the results, but you’ll not get them when the team is burnt out by the exam marking. The papers might be marked, but the teaching will be mediocre because the teachers are tired and exhausted.  What would your teaching be like if you had to mark thirty sets of thirteen essays in-between lessons?

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Fake news: I care more than you do.

There is one thing about teaching that never changes. Teachers care. In fact, they care a lot. They care so much they listen to a lot of crap, attend pointless meetings and do things that neglect their own health, family and friends to make things better for students. I have yet to meet a teacher that didn’t care on some level. That caring might take the form of detailed marking, several unique handshakes with students as they enter the classroom, a Pi shaped cake it has taken the teacher all Sunday to make or just a silent smile.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot of ways to show people and students you care. Some visible. Some invisible.

Being a tutor is an interesting experience. I have been a tutor several times and saying goodbye to your students is an interesting one. Occasionally, it became a competition of who cares for my students the most. One teacher makes an award for each student made from a wooden spoon spray painted gold. Another teacher makes each student a keyring with a picture of themselves and the whole class. Another tutor writes a personal card to each student with a lengthy paragraph about their hopes and dreams for them. Not to be out beaten by the others, one teacher does all of these for their group. They don’t want to be accused of not caring enough. Or, for them to think they don’t care. So, they buy them an Easter egg too.

We get ourselves in knots over the ‘caring’ aspect of teaching. We channel it into some bizarre things like displays, worksheets and physical goods. We can easily forget that you turning up to school is caring. For some students that never see members of their family daily, seeing one person consistently in their week is great. Our stability is caring. Our friendliness is caring. Our conversation is caring. Our interest in their work is caring. Our pushing students is caring.   

Twitter has disappointed me over the last few months. I enjoy the symposium of ideas yet it has, lately, become a menagerie of emotions. Ideas and emotions have been twisted together and spat out in different directions. People have attached particular negative emotions on to ideas, so if you think one particular thought you are meant to feel bad. I have seen shaming for thinking a particular way. There have even been names for the different sides of an idea and people have been labelled as being on one side or another, without even consulting with the person in question.

Then, people have added ‘caring’ into the debate. If you care, then you would see X as wrong? Then, we have had people shoving their own children into their arguments. Would you want your own child to have to suffer X? What started as a conversation about writing the date in full has become a full-blown tribal war where teacher’s offspring are being sacrificed to appease the masses? A five minute trawl through Twitter becomes an educational version of ‘Les Miserables’.

The problem is that ideas and people have been fused together. People are not separating the idea from the person. If you think isolation booths / chairs in rows / knowledge aren’t bad, then you are a bad person. Instead of making rational cases why something is good or bad, we get ideas personified as twittering people. I can quite happily dislike an idea, but I like the person on Twitter. This sadly isn’t the case. It seems that people can see past the idea.

We all care and are passionate about things. That’s why we are on Twitter and reading tweets about education. However, that passion and care can be all consuming and controlling. Accusing a teacher of not caring is like accusing a fish of not swimming. We are emotional beings. We are often trying to keep those emotions repressed in the classroom. The output for these emotions are either a partner or Twitter / Facebook. And, growingly I am seeing an output of emotions on Twitter. Things are getting a little bit emotional.

The thing that disappointed me most was the ‘isolation booth’ discussion recently. There were some interesting points made, but added to them was some remarkable emotional vitriol. Instead of an exploration of the concept and the strengths, problems and weaknesses, we got finger pointing and shaming and arguing. I am one of those people who, like most, want to be convinced through reasoned arguments. I am open-minded about things and happy to have my mind changed. However, in that case we didn’t get reasoned and exploratory discussion. We got emotions thrown out left, right and centre. And, the biggest of these was that I must care less because I don’t fully (note the word ‘fully’) agree that they should be banned.  I, like others, was made to feel like an educational Scrooge (Stave 1- wink, wink) and it was shameful.  

English teachers know about the three key aspects of persuasive writing. Logos. Pathos. Ethos. You need all three when persuading people. Sadly, in recent debates we have concentrated on the emotions (Pathos) and forgotten about the logical reasons (Logos) and credibility (Ethos). One thing I spotted was a company offering their services on managing their behaviour was retweeting messages favouring the banning of booths. This, of course, is problematic as they serve to profit from the banning of the booths.  Plus, we had primary school teachers commenting on their use in secondary context and not their use in a primary context. This for me was problematic because it was viewed from an outsider’s perspective.  Yes, we are all teachers, parents, children at some point, but I couldn’t tell you of the educational value of stickle bricks because I don’t use them to teach in a primary school. I certainly could offer a point – and that’s fair in democracy – but I think the credibility of my argument should be transparent. I don’t have experience of stickle bricks but I can have an opinion but it probably isn’t a credible as a teacher who uses stickle bricks. Listen to the primary teacher about stickle bricks.

We need to go back to logical and credible reasoning and move away from the emotional ‘ I care more than you’ arguments. In the classroom, we know we can manipulate emotions. We can make students feel guilty, shame and embarrassment in our classroom, but in the same room we can make them feel pride, joy and encouragement. We are the emotional puppeteers in the classroom. We know that the way we behave, speak and act impacts on the emotional state of the people in our classroom. We can also control how others feel around us. We have a duty to deal with emotions sensibly, humanely and appropriately.    

I don’t care more than you do. In fact, I care as much as you do, so let’s not use that as an argument in education debates. Maybe my caring might not be A3 sized, laminated and photocopied in colour, but be assured my caring is of the same value.

So, let’s not question whether people are caring or not caring. Let’s focus on making people change their minds and not their hearts.

Thanks for reading,  

Xris

The stench of failure and the sweet aroma of success

There’s one thing we don’t speak enough about in the world of education. Failure. Mistakes. Errors of judgement made by adults. 

The classroom is the place where students can practise, experiment, fail and succeed, yet the school isn’t the workplace to fail, experiment and make errors. Now, before you start thinking I have had a telling off this week for making a mistake and this is a thinly veiled attack at the hand that feeds me, let me assure you that hasn’t happened. No, really, it hasn’t happened. I promise.

As an NQT, I was sold a lie. It wasn’t a deliberate lie, but it was a lie nonetheless.

My youthful self sat and observed lessons and was often presented with perfection. I was taught in university what perfection looked like in the classroom. I watched experienced teachers teach perfect lessons. I heard from students on the PGCE course telling me about their perfect lessons and how their mentor said their lesson on writing as a slug was sublime and ‘clearly outstanding’. I think that same student also informed me that another teacher told her she should be an Ofsted inspector because her lessons were so good. She was the same girl who told me her plan was to teach for two years and become an education consultant and write books.

That one experience highlighted to me from the start that there is a subconscious conflict in education. We strive for perfection, but some of us think and feel that we are the physical embodiment of perfection.

On a personal level, I think that is a dangerous place to be because it is incredibly stressful being perfect. I should know – joke!  ‘Working to achieve perfection’ is a much calmer and less stressful place than ‘holding on to perfection’. Let’s call it the ‘Perfection Problem’.

I admit I am part of this problem. I feed the ‘Perfection Problem’. I talk about more about the ‘perfect’ solutions than the problems. Teachmeets are people sharing their solutions. Books are written about solutions. Blogs are written about solutions. Nobody really talks about the opposite. The mistakes. Imagine a teachmeet about people sharing their problems. Imagine a book written about the mistakes teachers make.  There are businesses and organisations that feed on this ‘perfect solution’ to our problems. We are always one step away from being perfect, if only we had this or this tool. You can see we have an absence of discussion of the mistakes we make and continue to make. We look too much at the solutions and shy away from discussing the mistakes.

We are all guilty of it at some level. But, we do some easy ways to avoid taking ownership of the mistakes.  Errors are usually one of these in the teaching world.

1. The teacher’s [who used to work here] mistake
2. The other department’s mistake
3. The children’s mistake
4. The parents’ mistake
5. The head teacher's / SLT’s mistake 

 We displace the ownership of the mistake to someone else. It happened to me. A teacher left one of my previous schools and they got the blame for some inflated coursework marks, when it came to moderation. I left that school and during coursework moderation came up my name was mentioned. Last out of the door gets blamed for a number of things. I was the scapegoat.

The problem is that it is so easy to divorce ourselves from mistakes. How could I possibly control things? They are out of my control so therefore I cannot be held accountable for the mistake. We are dealing with teenagers and they are unpredictable.  The situation allows us to be free from imperfection and stops us from actually talking about mistakes. Then, things transform by the power of semantics and mistakes become issues. ‘What are the mistakes we are making with the boys?’ becomes ‘what are the issues with boys and underperformance?’ I have an ‘issue’ is so much better sounding that ‘mistake’ because there’s nothing personal. And, that’s the crux of the problem.

A mistake is a mistake. It isn’t a person. Yet, mistakes are seen as being so personal. It is somehow a reflection on me. A mistake equals me. We don’t just personalise mistakes; we give them emotions. Mistakes become emotional and personal. Issues are impersonal and unemotional. They are easier to deal with.  But, issues aren’t one person’s responsibility, whereas a mistake is.  

To make us better, we need to be less personal and less emotional about mistakes and take ownership and control of things in the classroom. And, probably talk about them. After all, that’s what we do in the classroom.

With students, we talk about and highlight the mistakes.

With students, we discuss with them how they made a mistake and they can prevent them in the future.

With students, we look for patterns of errors across the group.

With students, we remind them of previous mistakes so they commit them to memory so they don’t repeat them.

With students, we show examples of work with errors and work with less errors.

With NQTs, we let them make mistakes and then afterwards we say to them it was a mistake to do it that way in the first place. Isn’t it a wonder NQTs don’t last long in teaching when we are expecting them to learn all those mistakes on their own. Why don’t we list the mistakes NQT should avoid? We don’t. Teaching isn’t a natural process. It is one that we learn to do. Wouldn’t it be helpful and less stressful if we support others with how they learn to teach? The best thing a teacher can do to help an NQT is talk about mistakes and mistakes to avoid.

‘The Perfection Problem’ is everywhere and to create real change we need to address the balance between solutions and mistakes. And, this will take some shifting of perspective, because we don’t have help from other camps.  One organisation uses words like ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’, which encodes that a school is almost perfect, just perfect or nowhere near perfect.   

My hope is that we can have some grown-up conversations about mistakes and avoid the ‘I’m perfect and don’t make mistakes’ attitude. The new wave of ‘research’ I hope will help support that. My big concern is that it doesn’t become about finding the magic solution.

Yesterday at the Teaching Learning Leeds Conference 2018, I spent 40 minutes talking about loads of mistakes I have made as a human, teacher, middle-leader and beyond and it was full of my mistakes. And it was juicy and full of salacious gossip. So juicy that the people attending have all signed non-disclosure forms.  However, I thought I’d try to categorise the mistakes I have made over the years in the classroom to start the ball rolling.  

1. Combination mistake

Human’s don’t come with instruction manuals, so when you put Sam and Sally together you don’t realise you are putting dynamite next to a flame. These can take a number of forms like the combination of PE period 4 and English period 5.

2.       The first time experiencing it mistake

We don’t talk about this one enough. The first time I teach anything I make loads of goofs. The next time, I teach it better. We are working on the process for the first time so you can’t see the shortcuts or the problem areas.

3. Pitching the level mistake

Finding the level of work for a class takes lots of trial and error. I’d say that we are constantly working on this and getting it wrong and right sporadically.

4. The comfortable mistake

We are sometimes too familiar with material that it clouds are judgement. It worked with classes for five years previously, so it must work well with this class.

5. The situation mistake

Giving students an assessment in the last week of term isn’t always the best time to get the best from a student. They will be tired and not working at their best. Period 5 on a Friday is a danger point for this too.

I have made loads of mistakes and I work hard to avoid repeating them, but we need to talk about the mistakes we make and why we make them. We need a collective effort to share mistakes in addition to solutions. The solution only really works we have understood the mistake. Our insistence in distancing ourselves from the choices we make in the classroom leads us to try to solve bigger issues in schools with solutions.

It’s all about that classroom.

When that door is closed, it is down to us to make the difference.

And you don’t make a difference without making mistakes.

But, schools need to give permission and support to staff to make mistakes and learn from them.

We won’t get to the real problem unless people can talk about they make mistakes and admit them.

Then, act on them.   

So come on, if you think you are hard enough, talk about your mistakes.

Xris

Success is 5-6-7-3-2-0

When I was a child, I had a bike and because I lived in a dubious part of town I had one of those combination locks. A green plastic coated thing. Three numbers could simply unlock that bike. Turn the cogs round to 4, 7 and then 2 and I could use the lock.  Thankfully, when the lock was purchased for the bike, the combination was provided for me. I didn’t have to scroll, for hours, through each combination with the hope of using the bike. It was done for me.

Recently I have been asked to support teaching and learning in my school. There’s been some reshuffling and I am filling a void for the moment. And, it is quite interesting, from my point of view. I have always thought from an English point of view. In fact, all my discussions and thoughts have always been about the teaching of English. When I have been talking about French or Geography, I have secretly been thinking about English and dressing it up as another subject. Now, I have to think about every subject and, boy, does it makes my brain hurt. I am having difficult questions and arguments in my brain: How can you show progress in Science books? How can you convince students that teachers are not fooled by large handwriting masking a lack of work? What do you do if a student has started a new book in a subject and the evidence of progress is in his old/new book? These and other questions are floating around in my brain.

However, education is paradoxically both simple and hard. The solutions to the problems are relatively easy, but the journey to those solutions is difficult and tough. You have to sift and sift through things to get the right solutions. It is as if each school has a combination lock and it is the leadership’s job to work out the right combination. They should sift through each dial on the lock until the barrel clicks. Then they should move onto the next one. They might have to revisit an old dial because it wasn’t the right combination for the school and they didn’t realise it at the time. It is a long journey, but is a journey.

Things are not helped by looking at other schools because ‘other’ schools are clearly ‘other’ schools. They are different. They have different students. They have different parents. They have lots of differences. One thing that people have yet to learn in schools is that other schools are different. Schools are not the same thing repeated hundreds of times over with different names and uniforms. Ofsted and Twitter haven’t helped with this myth. Ofsted deems a school is outstanding and everybody rushes to replicate the success. The school has a combination of 7-8-1-2-5-6. Everybody tries to emulate them. People visit the schools and attempt to bottle the success. Some go whole hog and change their combination from 2-1-4-9-0-0 to 7-8-1-2-5-6. Others do it in bits so they might change the first two dials.

Schools should spend more time reflecting and thinking about their contexts. Rushing to emulate another school means you are probably barking up the wrong tree. You don’t copy success; you work out the steps that lead it success. Those steps are often not visible to the human eye. That’s why I think intervention is the single most dangerous word in schools. What interventions have you used? How do you know it has worked? If you think one single action is going to be reflected in a piece of data then you might need to think a little bit more. Yes, my intervention was to paint the room green and look Tim made three levels of progress. Really? That one act was the miracle cure for the student? There’s a lot of things going on in schools and classrooms and we are naïve to think we teach students in isolation separated from factors like emotional state, family life and interest in the topic. The word ‘intervention’ is just a lazy attempt to reduce teaching to simple components. It would be much easy to say ‘stuff you do or have done’.  

I am interested in the Michaela Community School model. Their code of 1-2-0-4-5-2 seems to cause unrest, but what they are doing are exploring the different components that ensure success. They might be using numbers that people are cautious about using, but at least they exploring the components. How many times have I seen people just copy what a successful school does without thinking about the steps? I am interested to see what they do so I can look at my school’s combination. We are all trying to work out what the numbers mean and what the correct position for the numbers should be. I think it is important for schools to reflect and not copy, and schools like Michaela are mirrors to our own. We see ourselves better when we compare ourselves to others.  

Each school has a unique number. My school’s code is  5-6-7-3-2-0.  It’s now my job, for the moment, to work out what each number represents and then twist the dial to the number. I just know that my first number is something to do with the students, so I am off to think with my fingers in my ears. I am looking at my own school and I am not listening to anybody else until I am ready to. Lah…lah…lah!

Thanks for reading,

Xris