Posted By Steve Smethurst at 11/02/2010 13:24:22
The Leadership Focus office – at a magazine company in central London – has mirrored the country in being split today over the case of Andrea Charman, who has stepped down as headteacher at Lydd Primary School in Kent.
If you don’t recognise the names of the headteacher or the school, then all I probably need to do is mention ‘Marcus the lamb’.
The school became embroiled in an ethical controversy following the decision to have a lamb sent for slaughter. The controversy centred around the fact that pupils had raised, and even bottle-fed, Marcus and some were said to be ‘traumatised’ by its death.
The background to the story is that the headteacher had sought to teach pupils about where meat comes from – and that the slaughter was planned from the outset. It is also important to note that she had sought governor and pupil approval for the plan.
The decision to slaughter the lamb was approved by the pupil’s school council, with a 13-to-1 majority. It was also approved by the board of school governors.
Now, following personal threats to her safety, a Facebook page that called for her to be banned from teaching and internet comments that called for the school to be burnt down, Ms Charman has resigned, citing ‘personal reasons’.
Opinion is completely divided on this one. For every Facebook protester and member of the ‘save Marcus’ lynch mob, there is someone equally angry at the headteacher’s demise.
“The thought of a good headteacher who has improved the standards of education for these kids then being the victim of a witchhunt. It makes my blood boil,” wrote one person on the Times forum.
Another was equally unsympathetic to the protesters: “What happens when [the pupils] find out about the Tooth Fairy, Armageddon?”
The rights and wrongs of what happened to Marcus in Lydd can be debated to death, if you’ll excuse the pun. But what strikes me about this whole saga, is that no-one saw this coming.
Why couldn’t anyone see that this was a massive news story waiting to happen? However good the intentions, it was always going to cause upset, be controversial and have serious consequences.
It might not be what anyone would wish for, but the fact of the matter is that as a school leader your actions are under the microscope. If you choose to do something controversial, it will be picked up by the press and your world may come crashing down as a result.
Tread carefully. There are wolves out there.
Posted By Steve Smethurst at 27/01/2010 11:46:26
How would you respond to this letter from a parent? It was sent during the recent snowy weather.
“I heard the NAHT’s General Secretary’s comments regarding the current weather issues around London with some dismay.
“Specifically, he said: ‘Schools are places of learning, not crèches for children,’ and ‘Parents have to make arrangements for when their child is ill to be looked after and I think this comes in the same category.’
“My wife and I have two children of school age in Kent and both of us have been at work throughout this week. Our local school being closed has caused us considerable inconvenience and cost.
“Your General Secretary appears to be blissfully unaware of the UK’s economic state and his comments do teachers a disservice. This is no time for such belligerence; the country is in recession.”
Ignore for a minute that this particular parent works for a major bank and as such can be held partially responsible for the harsh (economic) climate that we’re all having to endure.
Does he have a point? If one or two teachers can make it in to school, then why not have them doing basic crowd control rather than teaching. With a bit of prior warning (which there usually is), there can be activities planned for such situations. If a school is turned into a crèche for a day or two, what’s the problem?
It would, after all, allow working parents to avoid the inconvenience and cost of finding other childcare arrangements at short notice.
But this is a simplistic argument. Unfortunately it’s one that many parents will see as common sense.
They forget that while children may be able to get into school, conditions may worsen during the day. Buses could well stop running. Also, teachers often have longer journeys than pupils and may need to drive long distances each way.
Plus, how angry would parents be if their beloved slipped on a school path and broke their leg? Negligence litigation, anyone?
Also, with technology, many schools can set work through their VLE for pupils to complete from home, giving them an education rather than being shut in a room with a supervisor.
One teacher summed it up quite nicely on the BBC website...
“As a deputy head of a primary school, I was party to the discussions and planning that goes into the decision to close the school. We have to take a huge amount of factors into consideration, whether the children can get to school, whether the staff can get to school (some who live 45 minutes away on a good day!) and if it is actually safe.
“I am not someone who appreciates some of the mad health and safety things we see day to day, but having gone for a short walk to the shop this morning and seen five cars smash into pavements and one into the back of a parked car - I think that asking our children to walk to school, with people still driving on un-gritted roads, is just daft.”
It seems that there is much education still to be done with parents in convincing them that school closures are a last resort – it’s not done because you fancy a day off by the fire reading the Guardian, gazing out at the lovely snow-covered fields.
But is there much likelihood they’ll listen?
A snowball's chance in hell?
Posted By Site Administrator at 18/01/2010 11:57:39
What makes you really ANGRY – is it infuriating, pushy parents? What about Ofsted inspections that won’t take into account things that are relevant to your situation? Or is it simply people WRITING WITH THE CAPS LOCK ON?
Whatever the cause of your annoyance and frustrations, we want to hear from you.
That’s because to combat rising stress levels among school leaders we have decided to institute a ‘rant-line’. If you want to vent your frustrations, give it a call. You don’t need to leave your name or that of your school. Just dial in and start shouting, swearing or even arguing coherently about the injustices you are facing.
It won’t be like the Sun newspaper and Higgy the Human Sponge*, as calls will go straight to voicemail.
Any particularly cogent arguments will be passed onto the NAHT leadership to inform their thinking. They may also be typed up and reproduced in Leadership Focus – but if this happens it will be used anonymously (unless you tell us otherwise) and no-one will ever know it’s you.
So give it a go – get those frustrations off your chest.
Call us on 020 7880 7663 and let it all out.
*PS, for those of you who want to know more about Higgy the Human Sponge...
Back in the early 1990s, Stuart Higgins, a future editor of the Sun, was still working his way up the greasy pole in Wapping. As tended to happen to most of the newspaper’s staff, he incurred the wrath of the paper’s famously volatile editor, Kelvin MacKenzie.
He did this by always remaining calm in the face of full throttle rants by the editor. But, one day, as MacKenzie was midway through throwing his toys out of the pram, he was struck by a bright idea.
"Higgy, you take it all, don't you?" he screamed across his desk. "You just sit there soaking it all up. You're like a sponge..."
And so, the next morning, ‘Higgy the Human Sponge’ made his debut as MacKenzie published Higgins’ direct telephone line in the Sun, with a tempting incentive to readers to call him: "Higgy can't live without a tongue-lashing!"
And while Higgins valiantly attempted to perform his normal newsdesk duties, he was bombarded by thousands of spectacularly abusive calls, many of them from mischievous work mates. And, apparently, he stayed very calm throughout.
Posted By Steve Smethurst at 15/01/2010 09:05:17
Some things are just hard to do. Entering the kingdom of heaven if you’re rich is reported to be quite tricky. Not chewing a fruit pastille is another toughie. And, as I found out last night, getting back into exercise after the excesses of Christmas is intensely difficult. Not to mention painful, even 24 hours after the event.
But if you’re an education journalist, seemingly the most difficult thing of all to undertake is to write about school meals without mentioning ‘Turkey Twizzlers’.
So, while I have fallen at the second paragraph (damn!), many others don’t even get this far. In reporting that junk food is alive and well in pupils’ lunchboxes, Bernard Matthew’s turkey treat (discontinued back in 2005, incidentally) is regularly regurgitated as a symbol of all that is wrong with school food.
Take the current fuss in the news about packed lunches, for example, which has got journalists’ knickers in a twizzle. Apparently, British children eat five and a half billion packed lunches each year, but research shows that only 1% of said lunchboxes meet the tough nutritional standards that have been set for their classmates on school meals.
The Food Standards Agency, which carried out the study, found that 82% of lunchboxes contained foods high in saturated fat, salt and sugar, with items (chosen by parents) including crisps, sweets and biscuits. Only one in five packed lunches contained any vegetables or salad.
But what to do about it? Ofsted may insist that schools have a policy on packed lunches, but it’s a policy with little bite. As reported in Leadership Focus recently, when one school leader tried to ban crisps from lunchboxes, she found that she was faced with a petition from outraged parents and a legal notice from crisp manufacturer Walker’s stating that crisps are actually healthy and that she was wrong to ban them.
Makes you wonder why you bother, doesn’t it? The same feeling was no doubt shared by John Waszek, headteacher at St Edward's College in Liverpool. He has been criticised by Liverpool Council for breaching a new audit system that aims to help schools in the region meet national guidelines that ban junk food.
What was his crime? Keeping a box of KitKats at the school. He explained: “During two or three break times a week, I invite Year 7, Year 12 and Year 9 pupils into my office for what is very valuable pastoral time. It’s something we like to do, and it has very positive feedback from the parents. I ask the students would they like a tea, coffee or hot chocolate and they can have a little KitKat if they want one.”
Fortunately, Mr Waszek said he “just laughed” at the reprimand, adding that the school had previously been warned that it was breaching rules by handing out a sausage roll to members of a sports team after a game during the winter.
It seems to me that getting the balance right between encouraging healthy eating and having to comply with ridiculous regulations is easily the equal to not chewing fruit pastilles.
And it’s not just education too – just look at the police scolded for sledging on their riot shields and the medical students almost sacked for taking pictures of each other lying down for a second or two at work. While there are clearly terrible problems in the world, eradicating every small moment of pleasure isn’t going to solve them.
So, I urge everyone to go out today and see if they can eat a fruit pastille without chewing.
And if you’re feeling really rebellious, see if your pupils can do it too.
Posted By Steve Smethurst at 13/11/2009 11:35:30
Sigh.
Big sigh, in fact.
Don’t you just hate it when people interfere in your work?
You know best. It’s your job after all. So why can’t people just let you get on with it instead of putting barriers in your way and doubt into your mind?
No, it’s not Ofsted, it’s the journalistic equivalent – the signing-off process.
Sometimes, if you’re writing an article about something particularly sensitive, complex or legally dubious, you might email a draft of the article to the interviewee so that they can check it over and make sure you haven’t completely messed things up.
On other occasions, it will be a necessary evil in order to secure an interview with a bigwig who is all too well aware of the extreme lengths you’re prepared to go to in order get their name into your publication.
But whatever the reason, copy approval is a fraught process. Few journalists submit to it with any degree of enthusiasm. And when they do they will usually stress quite forcefully that the reviewer is to check for “factual inaccuracies” only. You’re the writer, after all.
But do interviewees do this? Do they heck.
Take a recent article which quoted a school leader at length about his work. Out of the goodness of my heart – and possibly with just a small element of fear that I’d got my wires crossed in the writing – I sent him a draft. Along with the usual proviso.
Then came the call. “Just a few little things,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
What did he want to change? Only four things, A comma to be changed to a semi-colon. That his job title should read Head Teacher (with capitals and a space) not headteacher. That ‘teaching’ really should be ‘pedagogy’ in the fifth paragraph. And that where he’d referred to ‘kids’, what he really meant was ‘children’. “They’re not baby goats,” he laughed, a little nervously.
Now, to my mind, none of these are factual inaccuracies. And before you say it, especially not ‘kids’.
Commas/semi-colons…. that’s something for the sub-editors to argue over and it’s hardly life or death. Head or headteacher? That is governed by a publication’s ‘style guide’ and is kept the same in every article for consistency, and definitely not changed on the whim of the interviewee. Pedagogy? If this was an academic tome, fine. But it’s a plain-English magazine, so no. Sorry.
Then the one that got me. Kids. His reasoning for wanting the change was that people would think he was being patronising if he was seen to be calling children ‘kids’. Really? I said.
Yes, he said.
I agreed to the change for his sake, but it does depress me that he felt the need to amend his phrasing like that. Is it so bad to call kids ‘kids’? Surely not?
As a journalist I’m well aware of the power of words, yet it amazes me that a headteacher would worry about something as minor (to my mind) as that.
The episode has given me an insight into just how risk-averse, politically sensitive and fearful our teaching profession has become. And that’s not a good thing.
It also now means I’ll think twice before calling a kid a kid, which depresses me too.
Sigh.
