For every dubious claim in education, there’s a pyramid. Educationalists love them. Whether it be Bloom’s taxonomy, Maslow’s hierarcy of need or Dale’s cone of experience (otherwise known as the learning pyramid) it’s got to be presented in that shape, preferably one with a rainbow of colours. A pyramid diagram means it must be true.
Quite how anyone could ever be convinced by statements such as “we recall only 10% of what we read” is fascinating to me. Think about it. We recall only 10% of what we read?! That’s demonstrably ridiculous. This is not the only verifiably false claim I have had presented to me during my 21-year career in the classroom. I’ve listened to countless dubious assertions about how the brain works, made by people who probably struggled to pass their biology O level. I’ve sat through demonstrations of “Brain Gym”, during which I was told that waggling your head back and forward “oxygenates your frontal cortex”. I’ve been told that mind-map diagrams are the best and only way to present information to students because they look a bit like the branch-like structure of brain cells under a microscope. I’ve been told that some children’s brains work better on the left than they do on the right, and that whether they are “left-brained or right-brained” will influence their learning outcomes. These are the kinds of mind-bogglingly ridiculous assertions that were made in schools all over the country while exhausted teachers sat on plastic chairs in draughty halls and listened to them. The insult to our intelligence, never mind the sorry waste of taxpayers’ money on this drivel, makes me feel quite ill.
Yesterday I attended an online presentation given by John Nichols, the President of The Tutors’ Association and someone I worked with when I was a member of the Board of Directors of that Association a few years ago. John is an intelligent man of great integrity and has an excellent working knowledge of educational theory in all its glorious mutations, not all of them for the good. He took us on a whistlestop tour of some enduring ideas from psychologists in the 1950s, through the persistent neuromyths that have been debunked a thousand times but just won’t die, right up to the useful stuff at last being brought to us by neuroscientists about working memory, cognitive load and schema theory. It is truly heartening to know that this kind of information is being shared with tutors who are members of the Association and with luck it will start to filter through and influence the way people work.
Teachers are a cynical bunch and it would be easy for those of us who have been drowning in the tsunami of nonsense we’ve been swept away by over the years to be cynical about the more recent developments in educational theory. I am not and here’s why: they’re applicable to learning at a practical level and they work. When you apply the key principles of retrieval practice and spaced learning, you see an immediate and dramatic improvement in learning outcomes for your students. When you bear in mind cognitive load and attempt to reduce the pressure on students’ working memory in the classroom, you likewise see results. None of this was true of the old stuff, which caused nothing but obfuscation and distraction in the classroom. Even when I first joined the profession as a rookie and was regretably at my most susceptible, there was a little voice in my head telling me that this stuff was – to borrow the phrase of my old Classics master – a load of old hooey.
A part of me wishes that I’d listened to that voice sooner, but I should not be too hard on my former self, I think: it is difficult to stand against a tidal wave of so-called information when your bosses are telling you it’s all real and are also telling you that you’ll be marked down as a bad teacher if you don’t dance to their tune. When I think about the wasted hours I spent in my career trying to apply principles that were clearly nonsense because I was told to, I could weep. All of that time could have been so much better spent.
Happily, nobody now dictates to me how I work. I apply the principles that are evidence-based and work for my students. The overwhelming majority of them respond readily. For some, the simplest of techniques can feel like a revelation or a miracle, which only serves to show how far some schools have yet to go in distilling this information to their frontline teachers. To be honest, I am sympathetic to schools who remain suspicious about advice on how children learn. You can only try and sell people so many pyramid schemes before they develop a pretty cynical attitude towards any kind of salesmen.
As Tom Bennet OBE wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter this week, “Even qualified practitioners are bound to ‘do no harm’. But the desire to support children leads many schools to well-meant but potentially damaging mental health ‘interventions’.”
This week I have listened to a quite horrifying piece of investigative journalism by the Financial Timesinto Goenka mindfulness retreats, at which attendees are encouraged to practise an extreme kind of meditation known as Vipassana. People on the retreat are not allowed to speak and strongly discouraged from leaving for 10 days. They are awakened at 4.00am, deprived of food and taught to meditate for multiple hours per day. Anyone who struggles with the process or becomes confused or distressed is encouraged to keep meditating. For those of you with even the most basic grasp of mental health and wellbeing, it will not come as a massive shock to discover that some people are affected very negatively by this process. I recommend you listen to the podcast but please be aware that it does not shy away from some very difficult material: there are people who have lost their loved ones to this process.
Human beings are social animals. We have evolved to live in groups and we know that extreme social isolation and withdrawal has a very negative effect on mental health and wellbeing in an extremely short time. The dangerous impact of solitary confinement is well-documented and has caused neuroscientists to campaign against its prolonged use in the penal system. Even good old-fashioned and ever-familiar loneliness has been proved to have a significant impact on a person’s health and longevity, never mind their psychological well-being. It should not surprise us in the least to discover that a process which demands people shut themselves off from each other and concentrate entirely and exclusively on the what’s inside their own head carries the risk of a psychotic break.
As part of my studies during my degree in Classics I did a course on the rise of Christianity in the Roman world. I recall reading an account of the life of St Antony by the Bishop Athanasius and being particularly struck by a passage that reports upon his demeanour when leaving a fortress in which he had shut himself for 20 years in order to commune with God and battle his demons. It reads as follows:
“Antony, as from a shrine, came forth initiated in the mysteries and filled with the spirit of God. Then for the first time he was seen outside the fort by those who came to see him. And they, when they saw him, wondered at the sight, for he had the same habit of body as before … but his soul was free from blemish, for it was neither contracted as if by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor possessed by laughter or dejection. For he was not troubled when he beheld the crowd, nor overjoyed at being saluted by so many.”
While I do not wish to mock or offend anyone’s deeply-held beliefs, it seems pretty clear to me that this is a description of someone who has completely detached from other human beings and is suffering from the psychological effects of that process. While the religiously-minded among you may see this as an account of someone in touch with the holy spirit, I see it as an account of someone who is suffering from a psychotic break. Antony is described as being unmoved by and disconnected from the people around him, in possession of a strange kind of detachment. Given that he had spent 20 years in isolation while – in his mind – battling between good and evil, this is not greatly surprising.
During my final few years in mainstream education there was a big push on “mindfulness” for all students. This was what Tom Bennet was referring to in the Tweet I quoted at the start of this blog and I share his concerns about this growing trend. The mental health of young people is a painful and emotive issue and has been brought into sharp relief once again with calls from a grieving mother asking for mindfulness to be rolled out across all state schools (although it is already being promoted and practised in many). As Daniel Bundred wrote on the same platform as Tom a few months ago, “Schools probably shouldn’t do mindfulness, because most teachers are fundamentally unqualified to lead mindfulness, and entirely unequipped to deal with the potential outcomes of it.” As he puts it, “Mindfulness strikes me as being very similar to guided meditation in approach and potentially outcome; how many teachers could handle a student experiencing ego-death in their classroom? Ego-death is a potential outcome of successful meditation, it’s not desirable in tutor time.” Daniel here is referencing exactly the kind of experiences that the young people who underwent a psychotic break at the Goenka retreats have experienced. This is of course the worst-case scenario and while not widespread it is crucially important consider if we are to stick to the concept of “do no harm”; the advocates of the Goenka retreat point to the many people who say that meditation has helped them, as if the handful of attributable deaths are therefore irrelevant. It is essential to remember that teachers (like the volunteers at the Goenka retreats) are not mental health experts; fiddling about with something as potentially profound and intimate as mindfulness or meditation is profundly dangerous and goes way beyond the remit of educators.
Beyond the enormous risk of potential harm to a student who may have experienced past trauma or may simply not be an appropriate candidate for mindfulness for a variety of reasons, there is an increasing amount of evidence indicating that mindfulness in schools does no good for anybody. A recent study revealed no tangible positive outcomes, which places the profund risk of harm to some in an even more alarming context. Why are we doing something with risks attached to it when there are no estimable benefits anyway? Beyond this, why are we demanding that teachers expend their time and energy on something unnproven and valueless?
Tom Bennet is right. As he puts it: “The best way to support children’s mental health in a school environment? Provide a culture that is safe, calm and dignified. With purposeful activities.” In our desperation to support the most vulnerable of children, we must never forget the simple power of providing routine, stability and boundaries for those whose personal and emotional lives may well (for all we know) be dominated by chaos, trauma and distress. The more we acknowledge that some children face the most horrifying of circumstances, the more essential the security of our education system becomes. School and the reassurance that its stability provides is a lifeline for many of our children. This is what we should be providing for them.
No matter how many years I spent at the chalkface, I remained unconvinced as to the value of dissecting children’s Mock papers in class. While there was always an urge to pore over mistakes and demonstrate to students exactly what they should have written, I never felt that the process added as much value as I would have liked. Now that I am separated from the classroom, it is perhaps easier to reflect on why that might be.
Even if students have already received their overall grades (my old school used to dish them out in enevelopes to give them the “full experience” of receiving their results), the class in which students first gain sight of their papers in the one where they see how they performed in the separate papers of each exam. In most schools, they may also have just been told their overall grade by the teacher. This, to me, is the problem. Ever since Black and Wiliam first published their seminal work on assessment for learning (a concept they now wish they had named “responsive teaching”), the authors observed that students take significantly less notice of feedback if there is a grade attached to it, rendering the process of feedback close to pointless. This should not surprise us greatly: it is a natural response to be fixated on how you performed overall rather than the minutiae of why that result has come to pass, especially when the overall performance grade is high-stakes. It is very difficult for students to let go of their emotional response to their grade (whether it be good or bad) and concentrate on the feedback offered. This goes especially for students who are shocked and/or upset by their result, and thus calls into question the wisdom of the entire process.
It is difficult for classroom teachers to know what to do for the best. Every instinct drives any good teacher to provide detailed feedback to individual students and to the class, but to do this effectively can be close to impossible for a variety of reasons. Imagine a class in which some students have performed superbly, others have truly bombed. The inevitable emotional response from students to their performance will make the class in which feedback takes place highly-charged and potentially difficult to manage. Moreover, students who perform most poorly will probably benefit the least from the process, which leads me to conclude that there is little point in doing it at all. To not do so, on the other hand, can feel like letting those students down and failing to explain to them where they went wrong. It would take an immense amount of self-belief and confidence.
Yet let us consider the point of feedback. If students are not shown explicitly how they can improve their grade next time round, it is inherently pointless. This may well mean that the traditional “going through the paper” is close to irrelavant to those students who performed badly in it, since they will gain little to nothing from the process of being shown the correct answers. With my own tutees I am giving them headline information about their performance by telling them the areas they need to focus on and/or the types of questions we need to practise. We will then practise other questions of the same type. This is much more effective than smoking over the smouldering embers of their cataclysmic performance under pressure – a process which is simply too threatening and disheartening to be of value.
I am more and more coming to the conclusion that Mock exams should be there to inform the teacher what the students don’t know, affording them the opportunity to focus their teaching time on those particular areas in the remaining weeks of the academic year. Mocks are not something which most students can successfully analyse or diagnose their own problems. The pressure on teachers to “go through” the Mocks at a granular level is huge, but really the process has limited – if any – value to students. We need to trust teachers to provide and guide the learning curve that students should go through, based on how they performed.
There was an interesting discussion on Threads last week, which is not something I thought I’d write in a hurry. While the platform formerly known as Twitter is always a raging hotbed of edu-controversies, Threads has remained to date extremely civilised, largely because nobody is saying anything on there most of the time. Last week, however, an Assistant Principal whom I follow on both platforms made the following remark: “Talking to a friend about this the other day and didn’t realise there were such polarised views about this. Are pet names ok in school? As in, is it ok to saying ‘what’s happened, my lovely/darlin/poppet?’ to a pupil?”
The responses were diverse and sometimes extreme, with one teacher even suggesting that pet names “made their skin crawl” and claiming “it’s inappropriate and creepy. I’d be horrified if someone in a position of power used such a term to me so kids deserve the same respect.” Hmmmm, I thought. Are pet names really such a problem?
A more nuanced view followed: “I find it grates a bit for me when I hear it so I’m not keen but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a major issue. I do think it’s one of those things where the appropriateness probably depends on the member of staff/the pupil/ the context and those things aren’t always easy to judge.”
Always up for a debate, I waded in and pointed out (alongside others) that regional variations are without a doubt something to be considered before we form the view of “definitely unacceptable”. Pet names – and indeed, particular examples of pet names – are used far more in certain regions of the UK than in others. Personally, I cling to the idea that teachers, while they should always be professional, should also be themselves. If terms of endearment are part of a teacher’s vernacular then I would think it only natural for them to use them in certain contexts, wherever they live now. Students need to learn about such things after all; regional variations in vocabulary, accent and phraseology are a part of our diversity.
One of the many elephants in the room best to address head-on is what I say to a child in my position as a middle-aged woman is perhaps not what I would choose to say were I a man or perhaps even a younger woman. Once you’re in the same bracket as “mum” or (hideous to admit but increasingly undeniable) “nan” for the majority of students, most of your words are automatically assigned a kind of maternal, non-threatening tone. Something I have thought about considerably in recent years is that if I am going to use endearments then these should be shared out equally to the boys as well as the girls. It was pointed out to me a few years ago, to my considerable shock, how differently adults tend to speak to boys compared to girls and it is something I have worked on ever since. Both boys and girls seem to me to actually rather like terms of endearment, when used in the right context and in the right way.
Context is everything. Terms of endearment can of course be used to patronise and silence individuals, particularly women, and I am certainly not going to make a case for them being appropriate in all fields. It would not, for example, be appropriate for a male Member of Parliament to tell a female member to “call down, love”, although the tone of certain cabinet ministers has indeed got dangerously close to this threshold a number of times. In teaching, however, I do not believe that assuming a parental tone with children is inappropriate. In addition, my desire to remain sensitive to regional variations is more important to me than preaching any kind of universal language. Despite being a passionate feminist, I have never thought it appropriate or indeed desirable to kick off at every London cabbie that calls me “love” or every Geordie that calls me “pet” as – to be frank – I would argue that doing so would demonstrate more ignorance on my part than the use of such terms is claimed to indicate on theirs. We live in a rich and diverse society, where language means different things to different people, and we should all be thoughtful and grown up enough to deal with this without getting an attack of the vapours every time we venture outside our own close-knit social milieu.
As many people pointed out in the discussion, tone is crucially important. A term of endearment is, in my opinion, a nice thing. If endearments are a part of one particular teacher’s vernacular then I think that’s fine, so long as those endearments are used consistently with lots of different students and are not used to patronise, denigrate or control others. In my 21 years of teaching, I have never heard this to be the case. Teenagers, it seems to me, often stop being spoken to in such a way as they age, and it is actually something of a shame; adults tend to assume they don’t like affectionate terms (probably because so many teenagers do spend a lot of their time bristling and shrugging them off) but actually they crave our attention and our affection more than we know.
My view would be that if endearments come naturally to someone, I would not discourage them actively from using them in schools, so long as they are used fairly and genuinely. While professionalism and boundaries are crucially important, we should not be losing our individuality or indeed our humanity in the name of this.
A report published by a committee from the House of Lords this week says that our education system for 11- to 16-year-olds is “too focused on academic learning and written exams”, resulting in “too much learning by rote” and “not enough opportunity for pupils to pursue creative and technical subjects”. The report ultimately suggests that some students are being “stifled” by an “overloaded” curriculum.
I shall make no attempt to defend all existing curricula, not least because I am in no position to comment in depth on any subject area other than my own. I am aware that colleagues in the sciences in particular and also in the humanities have found the post-2018 curricula difficult to deliver and certainly it seems that there is a need for a reduction in the amount of material to be covered. Teachers report that there is too much information crammed into too little time in some subects, and that tweaks to the specifications in those areas would be of benefit. In my own subject, I have written before about how unwieldy the GCSE Latin curriculum is, with its burdensome requirement for students to study (which in reality means rote-learn) an enormous amount of original literature. The problem is so bad that it has put me off agreeing to take any independent students through the curriculum, since it is such an enormous (and frankly tedious) time-drain on top of their regular subjects.
All of this can remain true without arguing that there is a need for dramatic and sweeping reforms (for heavens sake please no, not again) and even more importantly without us turning against the very principle of a knowledge-rich curriculum or indeed the very concept of learning by rote.
Educationalists who rail against rote-learning do so, I think, for several reasons. Firstly, people who are disquieted by rote-learning usually associate it with an innate lack of understanding on the students’ part, as if learning by rote is inherently at odds with understanding. For these people, the concept of rote-learning immediately conjures up images of Victorian schoolchildren holding the book upside down while they “read aloud” to demonstrate to the dreaded School Board that they could read when in fact they couldn’t; instead of spending their time teaching reluctant readers how to read, some teachers purportedly made children learn a passage of literature by heart so that they could recite it when it came to inspection day. Whether these apocryphal stories are true or not is a question I should ask the inimitable Daisy Christodoulou and Elizabeth Wells, authors and presenters of the fantastic podcast Lessons from History. If you haven’t come across it yet, I recommend it highly. It is fantastic for myth-busting, demystifying and celebrating how far we have come.
I have two key criticisms of the assumption that rote-learning equates to a lack of understanding. Firstly, the two notions are not causally linked. Very obviously, one can teach to ensure understanding in addition to asking a student to learn some material off by heart. Secondly, even when a lack of understanding does remain, this does not negate the value of rote-learning; rather it does, if anything, make the process even more important. Students are capable of banking information even if they do not currently understand it; this means that they can then draw on that information at a later date. For example, students could learn a poem off by heart, which would then facilitate the process of studying it in class.
Much to my heathen husband’s chagrin, I recall all of the hymns and prayers that I absorbed in my very traditional school, which marched us to chapel every day. I remember being distinctly puzzled by the phrase “the panoply of God”. And surely anyone that hails from a similar educational experience found themselves wondering why there was “a green hill far away, without a city wall”? All of these sorts of phrases came back to me as an adult as I learnt the true meaning of them and was thus able to fit them into my existing schema of knowledge. The rote-learning did not detract from this, the information was merely sitting there waiting to be processed and filed. I do not see why there is a problem with this. While it would have been better had the concepts been demystified for me at the time, the brain’s capacity to absorb material for the longterm is so enormous that there really is no harm in it containing some bits of information that it does not yet fully understand. It’s not a floppy disc; it won’t fill up and start malfunctioning.
Another reason that some educationalists object to rote-learning is that they see it as a waste of time in this modern era of technology. What value is there in learning something off by heart when we can look things up at the touch of a button? I find this argument so facile that I struggle to argue against it with the gravitas required to refute it. Yet, I shall make an attempt to do so. First of all, rote-learning is not, in fact, excessively burdensome: quite the opposite. Rote-learning is remarkably easy to do once students are taught the right methodology. In return for a very small amount of effort, students can bank vast quantities of knowledge in their longterm memory, which then frees up their working memory to simply spectacular benefit. To take my own subject as an example, anyone who tries to grasp a complex grammar point such as the indirect statement without a rudimentary knowledge of the inflection and vocabulary being used will never manage to do so; if a student is constantly distracted by the need to check their noun or verb endings, or to look up the required vocabulary, their working memory will be over-burdened to the point of failure. Similarly, a student will struggle to understand the writer’s craft and discuss stylistic techniques (as required – for better or for worse – by the examiners) unless they understand the Latin that is in front of them; the easiest way for them to understand a complex chunk of material is for them to have rote-learned its meaning beforehand. Rote-learning a text is extremely easy once you know how and not only have I written about it before I have taught hundreds of students how to do it to great effect. The problem is not with rote-learning itself but with how few classroom teachers actively teach an appropriate methodology for rote-learning, leaving students to flounder when it comes to how to do it.
Yet it is not only the inherent benefits to academic learning that make me believe that rote-learning is a skill that students should be taught. In addition, I find it mystifying that so many educationalists fail to see the value and the joy in the process itself. Whether it be poetry or your favourite song-lyrics, the sheer joy in having a worthwhile piece of writing in your head is difficult to over-estimate. At school I learnt poems, songs, sonnets and speeches from Shakepseare and can still remember them to this day. Learning poetry by heart remains a hobby for me and I can, for example, recite the whole of The Highwayman, which takes around 13 minutes. Why? Well, why not? The process is as pleasurable and stimulating as doing a crossword, completing a Wordle puzzle or grappling with a challenging Sudoku. I regret that so many educationalists do not wish for young people to develop the ability to acquire such knowledge should they so choose. This is not to say that all of them will choose to adopt the process of learning poetry as a hobby in the way that I do, but I do not understand the determination to rob them of the option. How little we think of them that we decide on their behalf that they are not worthy of it.
The bulk of my time as a tutor is spent uncovering what it is that students don’t already know and helping them to rectify this. That goes both for the knowledge itself and for the methodology of how to acquire and sustain it. Knowledge is essential for students to thrive and I don’t think that I will ever understand the apparent desire of some to rob the next generation of their rightful inheritance.
If you want to witness polarised debate in the education world, then the platform formerly known as Twitter is where to find it. Teachers rarely argue in person, but will quite happily rage at each other in Elon Musk’s rapidly-disintegrating playground. There have been attempts to shift us all onto Threads, but so far the battleground remains in one place. X is where we shout at each other.
This week’s argument has raged around the concept of “silent corridors” – specifically, whether it is necessary, appropriate or desirable to ask students to move between lessons without talking. Schools which elect to do so usually have rules about the way in which students walk and space themselves too: for example, single file, a certain distance apart. Five days ago, Executive and Founding Principal Mouhssin Ismail shared this tweet about an unnamed school:
The moment I saw it, my heart sank. Not because I disagreed with it, but because I knew the response it would get from certain quarters. Despite this, nothing could have prepared me for the level of vitriol this tweet provoked, from the downright nasty to the genuinely unhinged.
“Unnatural, unnecessary and unkind” said Richard Clift, in a masterful tricolon. “I am hoping this is a spoof” said John Cosgrove. “Looks like some kind of dystopian nightmare scenario with cyborgs mechanically marching to hasten humanity’s doom. Hideous apparent absence of personality, life, joy ..” So many assumptions about the entire institution, its educational philosophy and the manner in which it asks its staff to teach, all on the basis of how students are told to move around the school between lessons. “This is seriously disturbing and unnatural”said Lin Holden. “It looks like a scene from Gilead. Under His Eye.” Others have no need of allusions to science fiction or dystopian literature to express their distaste – they find the school’s corridors reminiscent of real and existing totalitarian regimes: it’s “like something from North Korea” said Marc Davenant, who has evidently never been to North Korea.
More personal attacks lined up in the responses too. “This should fill you with shame. Why are you boasting about it?” said Helen Salmon. “Hey Google, show me a school that looks like a prison” said David Smith. More succinctly from Joao Arajuo, “this is SICK”. The comments went on and on, overwhelmingly filled with outrage and all assuming that anyone who asks children to be silent and ordered must hold them in contempt. Perhaps most interesting were the ones which did as we all do, which is draw on our own experiences: “unnecessary and frankly weird,” said Paul Lucas. “I went to a highly disciplined all boys grammar school and it didn’t feel like the army. Ever. Mostly turned out happy young men comfortable in their own skin, including a lot of real eccentrics.” Lucky Paul to have hailed from such privilege.
I too went to a school that many will see as privileged. It was only when the debate started raging about silent corridors that I remembered the fact that the school I attended had them. I had honestly forgotten. I spent seven years in my small, private secondary school for girls and remember all sorts of weird details about it (quite honestly, there are some seriously weird details to remember), but silent corridors was not something that had lodged in my mind. Only when I started to read how grossly oppressive they apparently are did I recall that this was the school rule. In actual fact, lessons were often quite noisy and discipline was not always effective (most of the staff had no training), but silent corridors was a given. Did I find it so terrifying that I have repressed the memory? I don’t think so. I think I didn’t remember it because it didn’t matter.
I would be the last person to defend the school I attended, which at the time (we’re talking the 1980s here) was horrendously old-fashioned and was indeed genuinely oppressive in some ways. The school was deeply religious and was unwilling to tolerate dissent from religious teachings, which was tough for a heathen like myself. There were a great deal of seriously stupid, unjustifiable and pointless rules, some of which detracted from effective learning. Not all staff were kind. Yet out of all of the things I would change about that place, silent corridors would not be one of them. Lesson changeover was, in fact, a blessed relief and an opportunity for down time; a little time in your own head before the next onslaught.
One of beliefs held by people who dislike the concept of silent corridors is that they are not only oppressive but they are unncessary. “The idea that children chatting to each other has to be bedlam or dangerous is ridculous” said Graham Chatterley, whom I engaged in a discussion for a while. He believed that silent corridors are an issue for neurodivergent students who, in his words “have been masking and holding everything in for an hour’s lesson” and “need to have the opportunity to relax for two minutes”. I do not disagree. My own experience, however, is that silent corridors enable this and my own experience of teaching neurodivergent children is that they are most exhausted by the noise and general sensory overwhelm of modern schools. Many of them go home and lie in a darkened room for two hours when they get home, so over-stimulated are they by the lights, the noise and the hubub. Graham told me that I had “an extremely narrow definition of neurodivergent” and maybe he’s right – there may be neurodivergent students that don’t find consistency, quiet and clarity more helpful than noise and excitement, but in 21 years of teaching I have not met one.
Here’s the thing. None of the schools I have worked in had silent corridors. They were rated at least “Good” for behaviour, were oversubscribed and were generally considered to be places where people wanted to send their children. Leadership did not believe in super-strict regimes so silence was not expected, nor was walking in single file. Corridors were, however, supposed to be calm and students were advised to move quietly, swiftly and purposefully between lessons. All sounds well and good, doesn’t it? The problem is, because students were not taught how to do things such as lining up and moving in single file, and because this was not consistently reinforced by all staff, lining up rarely was lining up and moving about the school was something of a rabble without a cause. Students also struggled with order when it mattered, for example during a fire drill.
Worse than this, when it comes to every day life working in a school, there were many times when I found the corridors an issue. The problem with loose, liberal guidelines like “move between lessons swiftly and quietly” is they are too vague. One person’s “quiet” is another’s “a little too noisy”. And what does “swift” mean? Racing along? Not dawdling? Both staff and students were unclear what the expectations were and staff (due to their lack of clarity and lack of confidence) were haphazard in enforcing them – you can’t enforce what you’re vague about. All of this leads to wasted time between lessons and sparks arguments between students and staff. Worse than this, however, in a large school where silence is not expected between lessons, the noise level from normal chatting and laughing and the movement created by large numbers of teenagers roaming about is so great that this often leads to exponential increases which can very quickly tip over into chaos. One student starts pushing, one student squeals and the next thing you know the corridor is a heaving, screaming mass of bodies pushing and shouting. I do not exaggerate. This happens regularly in small pockets in all schools at certain pinch points. Staff used to have various ways of managing this. One carried a whistle and used it rather effectively. Tall men with booming voices were useful. We used evasive action, by releasing classes in a staggered order, holding one class back while another was moving past. Finally, it was standard practice in the school that any child (or indeed staff member) with any kind of injury was allowed to leave lessons early “to avoid the hustle and bustle of the corridors”. The message seemed to be that potential chaos in the corridor was unavoidable, therefore evasive action should be taken if an individual was at heightened risk – never mind that the situation itself is risky for all.
My personal view is that order and silence in corridors is highly desirable. I believe that they keep students and staff safer than in the corridors I have experienced during my career. I believe that they prevent less time being wasted. I believe that they help students to prepare for later life, in which there are times when one must switch between silence and vocalisation at the drop of a hat. I do not believe that they are in any way oppressive and am genuinely at a loss to understand those who do. In some school environments, silent corridors are frankly essential and staff are failing in their duty of care if they do not provide them; this is something which Clare Sealy wrote about some time ago and for those of us who have only lived and worked in relatively privileged environments, this blog is essential reading. Please, if you think that the staff who work in these kinds of schools don’t care about the children they are working with, you definitely need to read it.
My hypothesis, for what it’s worth, is that my generation and those coming after us have consistently confused authority with authoritarianism. The worst thing that one can be accused of is being illiberal, and the best way to avoid this is to eschew all forms of authority. Ironically, in some quarters, this mindset is so entrenched it has become undeniably authoritarian – you must believe what I believe, and if you don’t you must be an oppressor. It would do us all good to remind ourselves that we are all on the same side: we all want children to be safe, supported and happy in school and for them to receive the best possible free education. What we differ on is how to achieve this.
Once again this year I am struck by the huge variation between schools when it comes to handling their Mock examinations. Most interesting perhaps is the variation in date, as some schools have set them in November, some in December, some in January. The timing of mocks is never ideal for anyone involved. A Mock period in November and/or December means that the examinations come rather too early, forcing teachers to cram content in or delay it until afterwards and not examine it; it also means that teachers will have the rather unpleasant Christmas gift of a whole load of exam-marking. Delay the exams until January, however, and the examinations are hanging over the students, potentially putting a strain on them and their family during the short Christmas break; it also means that the results of those Mock examinations will potentially not be circulated until February, which then leaves only three months to take action between the Mock results and the final exams.
One major problem with Mock examinations is the amount of curriculum time that is wiped out by the very process of examining a whole year group in formal conditions, a factor which led directly to the demise of the AS/A2 system at Key Stage 5 – losing most of the summer of Year 12 to an examination period was simply too costly. In Year 11, for practical reasons, the Mock examination period is kept very short (much shorter than the formal examination period in the summer), with schools cramming all of their examinations into a two-week or three-week window. This is absolutely necessary in order to minimise the disruption to the curriculum, but the price is paid by the students and by the staff, who face a very intense time sitting the exams, marking them and analysing the data – all at the darkest and most miserable time of year, when the likelihood of illness is high.
One of the main issues with Mock examinations is that they serve too many conflicting purposes. They are used by schools as an indicator as to whether a student is on target to achieve their predicted grade, and most schools ask their staff to perform some kind of results analysis, with students being flagged in some way as to whether they are on, above or below target. Sometimes this information is passed on to the students. In my experience both students and their families continue to be deeply confused about the difference between a target grade (which will be calculated using a complex algorithm and based on data that does not actually relate to your child’s own performance) and a predicted grade (which is what your teacher thinks you might achieve if you continue working as you are).
Personally, I don’t like either target grades or predictions, as I feel that they categorise children unfairly and set up a mindset that is not always helpful. Students with very high targets and/or predictions can feel overwhelmed by the pressure; students with lower ones can feel like the system doesn’t believe in them or that they have been labelled as incapable so what’s the point of trying? In an ideal world we wouldn’t need them at all. On a training course on raising standards for all, I once met a Headtacher who worked in an outstanding school with outstanding results. They gave every child the same target, which was to get as far above the pass grade as they could. I excitedly shared this radical and evidentially successful approach with my school leadership team and they roundly ignored it; ironic really, as they has sent me on the course and asked me for feedback! The approach jarred so much with what they believed was necessary that they couldn’t even entertain the notion as a way forward.
So, schools require Mock examinations in order to number-crunch and take a reading in terms of how a cohort is likely to perform that year. Like it or not, this is unlikely to stop happening when we are demanding that schools raise standards all the time and we base this judgement on exam performance. Yet there are other important reasons for the Mock examinations, and these do not always sit confortably with a school’s need to data-crunch and predict outcomes. In many schools, Mock examinations are the one and only time that students experience a practice run of what it will be like to sit their final papers in the summer. Most schools don’t have the physical space to facilitate formal examinations for all year groups, so it’s really important for Year 11 to get this one real chance at experiencing what it is like to line up as a year group according to a designated seating plan, file into the room in examination conditions (which begin outside the room) and sit a series of examinations, one after the other. Students experience what it’s like to receive formal instructions from the Examinations Officer, to be told to hand in their mobile phones and check their pockets for banned materials (pretty much everything), to have to have their equipment in an appropriate clear container and to surrender any equipment that is more modern than an analogue timepiece. All of these things can create tension for anxious students, but it is hugely important for them to experience the process so that they know what to expect in the summer. It can be a real balancing act for schools to create the right atmosphere – just the right amount of gravitas so that students experience the seriousness of the real thing, without sending the entire year group into a state of controlled (or, even worse, uncontrolled) panic.
Crucially, Mock examinations are (or should be) an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Teachers expect some students to read the paper wrong, to answer the wrong section, to tackle too many questions or not enough. The very point is that they get to experience the impact of this and learn how important it is to approach each paper in the right way. Beyond that, they also get to dissect their performance in detail and (in an ideal world) receive thorough, individualised feedback from their teacher. The mock examinations should highlight areas of weakness and shine a light on the skills which need honing and improvement. When students are very upset by their performance in a Mock examination, it can be particularly difficult; students may receive news of their mark in the same lesson as when they have to go through the paper and in my experience this means that they are not in a fit state to take anything in; as a tutor, I am grateful to schools who are happy to release the papers and let students take them home, as this means I can look at the paper myself and go through it again with the student when they are calmer.
One of the things which students struggle the most with when it comes to their first experience of examinations is timing, and this is indeed one of the many reasons why Mocks are so important. There’s nothing like the full experience of being in a large exam hall and having to work to timed conditions to make you realise that this is something that you need to practise, practise and practise again. There is no point in astudent working on exam-style questions if they are not doing so in timed conditions – in fact, I would argue that doing so could potentially be damaging in the long-run; if a student gets used to tackling a question over a longer period of time, they’re going to struggle to adjust their performance to what is required in the final paper. This is why it’s important to practise things under time pressure from the very beginning.
If a student truly bombs in their Mock it is not a disaster. I have seen students turn things around in a manner that I might not have believed possible had I not seen it with my own eyes; a really poor performance in an examination can even be the catalyst that some students need to get them focused – if no amount of their teachers or their parents telling them to buck their ideas up has worked, then sometimes totally crashing down to earth with truly disastrous grade can be the ticket. For the more anxiously minded, the important thing is to convince them that Mocks are quite literally there to be failed; their job is to defy the algorithm and smash it out of the park in May. Believe me, it can be done.
On my reading list for some time has been Alex Quigley’s Closing the Vocabulary Gap. Quigley is an English teacher, a blogger and the author of several books on how schools should go about closing the literacy gap between “word rich” and “word poor” students – those with high levels of literacy and a huge mental word bank compared to those without. His work ties in with other reading I have done about the literacy crisis in the USA and the debates that have raged in this country and in America about how we teach children to read.
I didn’t necessarily expect to find an empassioned defence of my subject embedded in a modern book about the wider and more fundamental issue of children’s literacy, but find it I did. Quigley, it seems, is a believer in Latin (and Greek!) for all. In the third chapter of his book he outlines precisely the ways in which children who already struggle with reading are further impoverished by the difficulties that they face when presented with texts of an increasingly academic nature. He explores the fact that technical and scientific terminology is so dominated by Latinate words that there really does become a case for teaching these word-patterns explicitly in the classroom: “teaching with etymology in mind is therefore a reliable and helpful tool, not just for English teachers, but also for every classroom teacher. In fact, it may prove more valuable for teachers of maths, science and geography, given the narrower roots of their subject specific language.” To find the case for this being made in such a book was exciting enough, but I nearly fell out of my chair when I read the next paragraph:
“You could rightly ask, why aren’t ancient languages like Latin on the curriculum for all? Why do we still perceive the powerful roots of our language as exclusive to the few who already prove word rich? Here, we could also speculate about how useful it would prove for English teachers to learn an ancient language as part of their professional development and enrichment.”
Not only is Quigley suggesting that ancient languages have a valuable place in a modern curriculum, he is even suggesting that teachers of English would all benefit from studying an ancient language. This is music to my ears and if I’m honest (sorry, English teachers) I have never understood how anyone goes on to study English literature at a higher level without such knowledge. I’ll take just one example: if you think you understand Milton, but you haven’t read Virgil in the original Latin, then – I hate to break this to you – but you don’t fully understand Milton; you’re missing out on the richness of what he is attempting to do, because you lack that frame of reference.
Quigley goes on to argue that children who are not taught explicitly about etymology are being shut out of “a wealth of intriguing knowledge”. He also points out that the kind of cultural capital afforded to children with a knowledge of Latin and Greek is one of the fundamental divides between the advantaged and the disadvantaged.
This is genuinely exciting. It is widely accepted (and not incorrect) that the traditional arguments from the past that “Latin makes you clever” are simply not evidence-based; studying Latin and Greek makes you good at Latin and Greek, it doesn’t necessarily gift you with transferrable skills beyond that knowledge-base. However, Quigley presents the case for ancient languages by highlighting the importance of the academic vocabulary which is required in order to access all subjects beyond the very basics; it is something of a clincher for those of us who still believe in the value of ancient languages, and really does make the case for the academic advantage that Latin and Greek affords its students.
Quigley explores further the fact that Latin remains the preserve of the elite and is still considered by many to be appropriate only for high-attaining students, despite the evidence gathered by Arlene Holmes-Henderson from Classics for All that an exposure to Latin in fact has a greater impact on students with low literacy levels than it does on those who are already highly literate. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Children who are already highly literate, who are exposed to a wide range of reading at home and who have articulate discussion modelled for them from a young age will always be fine; it is for those students for whom this is not the norm that we should be concerned, and the teaching of Latin absolutely has a place in our quest to close this advantage gap.
I picked up Quigley’s book with the intention of enriching and updating my knowledge of how children acquire vocabulary, and I still expect to learn much in this area as I work through the second half. It has been a lovely surprise and an added bonus to find the case for Latin as a subject made so clearly in a book that has been hailed as essential in education’s work towards opening the doors of opportunity for our most vulnerable and disadvantaged students. I am very glad to have spent 21 years in the state sector, building up the numbers of students for whom an exposure to this valuable subject was an opportunity and a right. Until Latin is a normalised part of the curriculum in a greater number of state schools than the current dismal figures, it and all of its advantages will remain the preserve of the elite.
