Classroom teaching – Page 7 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

The value of forgetting

Many people undestimate the importance of forgetting time. I’m not talking about forgetting painful experiences here (although the ability to wipe those from one’s memory might also be considered rather useful); I’m talking about giving your brain time to “forget” what it has learned, purely so that you can force it to remember again. Think that sounds weird? Well, let me persuade you.

Memory, as cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham so famously defined it, is the residue of thought. Students will struggle to remember things which they have not thought deeply about and the best teachers use a combination of methods to get students to think actively about what they need to remember. There has been much welcome discussion in recent years about retrieval practice in the classroom, and alongside that the importance of spaced learning. Believe you me, this was not the focus during my teacher-training 21 years ago, indeed there was little to no interest shown by the lecturers in how memory works, little focus on the inescapable fact that a child’s success or failure in the education system is defined by their ability to use their memory effectively – both their working memory and their longterm memory.

In the simplest possible terms, a person’s working memory is what they use to process information and acts like a kind of holding pad. Memory expert Tracy Alloway describes the working memory as like a post-it note: capable of holding only a tiny amount of information temporarily, and not suitable as a system for longterm storage. For effective learning to take place in the classroom, it is crucial that a student’s working memory is not overloaded and a large part of that responsibility rests with the classroom teacher. However, students themselves (and those supporting them) can help too. The more a student can do to transfer knowledge into their longterm memory (which, unlike the working memory, is limitless) the better their capacity to learn will be. In my subject, this means that the student should endeavour to learn as much vocabulary as they can, as well as the important noun and verb endings; this will mean that they are not over-burdened in the classroom, enabling them to access more learning.

So there’s the rub. How exactly does one transfer knowledge reliably into one’s longterm memory? Well, the more I work one-to-one with students and advise their parents and guardians, the more I have come to understand that most of them really underestimate the importance of forgetting time.

Some students have been taught about spaced learning in school, as part of a drive towards empowering them with a knowledge of metacognition (which is thinking about thinking – a knowledge of how we learn – exactly what we’re talking about now). This is fantastic. In schools that are switched on to this, students are taught to repeat their self-testing processes regularly, leaving a gradually-increasing length of time between each revisit. Some schools teach a fixed process, helping students by advising them on exactly how long those varied gaps should be, but the truth is that it doesn’t necessarily matter. In principle, students should be regularly testing themselves on things they learnt that day, that week, that fortnight, that month, that year; the best and most effective kind of retrieval draws on a range of learning distances.

Students can actually exploit their brain’s capacity for forgetting and retrieval during very short spaces of time, and I make this happen within my 30-minute tutoring sessions. As one simple example, I might help a student commit the endings of the 1st declension to memory in the first few minutes of a session. I might then test them on a series of nouns which follow the first declension. I will then return to the endings of the 1st declension and test them on those again at the end of the session. That’s a typical 30-minute lesson arc and allows for “forgetting time”. However, even within that arc, I will further exploit the brain’s ability to switch from one focus to another and, as a result, to temporarily forget; during the process of testing a student on the 1st declension endings, once they reach a certain level of competence, I might suddenly ask them a couple of random questions to distract them from the table: do they know how many declenions there are? What gender are most nouns in the 1st declension? Can they think of any words that they know which follow the pattern of the 1st declension? Once their brain has been distracted for a minute or or so by this Q&A, I will then ask them to recall the endings of the 1st declension once again. The constant exploitation of forgetting time increases the impact of learning because it is forcing the brain to retrieve something which has briefly exited the working memory (i.e. the student has not spent the last minute actively thinking about it and holding it in their head).

Perhaps the most important thing that students need to know is that forgetting is crucial. Forgetting is therefore not the enemy; forgetting is part of the learning process. Once students gain confidence with this, what they begin to realise is that their brains take less and less time to recall what they have seemingly forgotten with each reboot. The process of recall in and of itself is what cements learning and is crucially important. I have written before about the dangers of the forgetting curve, as posited by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, when it comes to memorisation; but what the forgetting curve actually shows is that forgetting is not just inevitable, it is an integral part of the memorisation process. We cannot learn a large amount of information without allowing ourselves time to “forget” it prior to forcing ourselves to recall it again.

It is therefore important to reassure students that retrieval can and indeed should feel a little uncomfortable – you are forcing yourself to try and remember, and in these days of Google that is not something we do very much. Many a happy evening was spent back in the day when a friend might say “who wrote that song?” and one would spend several minutes (or several hours!) trying to remember collectively. Now we can just look up the answer, we’re perhaps less trusting of the fact that if we wait long enough, the answer will pop into our heads. As Daniel T. Willingham puts it, “people usually believe that forgetting happens over time; if you don’t use a memory, you lose it. This may be hard to believe, but sometimes the memory isn’t gone—it’s just hard to get to.” This is the most remarkable thing demonstrated in the whole process – you might think you’ve forgotten something, but the memory is actually there, lurking deep inside your brain. Retrieval teaches you how to access it.

So let’s hear it for forgetting. Forgetting is important. Forgetting should be exploited as part of the learning process. And let’s face it, forgetting is unavoidable. All we can do is work with it.

“Just one more thing, Sir …” Peter Faulk as the unforgettable *Columbo*,
who made the art of seeming to forget his trademark

Teaching to the Test

All schools will be analysing their Mock results in January, a process I am grateful to be detached from these days. Good or bad, encouraging or worrying, the results will be pored over and teachers will be challenged. This happens even more so in August. However good their results, teachers will be asked to explain the students that ended up below par. One student was one mark off a 7: what went wrong there? What could you have done differently? Until this stops happening (and I fail to envisage a future in which it does), then teachers will teach to the test.

Yet this is not the only reason that teachers do so, and I would argue that teaching to the test is only undesirable when it happens to the exclusion of all else. When teaching to the test becomes the sole purpose of education, of course we have a problem; but teaching to the test involves exam technique and is an essential part of a functioning education system; we’re doing the students a disservice if we pretend otherwise.

Examinations are a game – a sport, with complex rules. Students with privilege are taught how to play the game and are drilled over time for the match. They have parents that support them in their training and cheer from behind the touchline. They have coaches, experienced in honing their skills and their mindset. They have the right equipment. One of the most powerful things that we can do for our kids is to teach them the rules of the game; to send them onto the field without such preparation is setting them up for failure.

The notion that well-taught students will perform to the best of their ability without direct and explicit preparation for a particular examination is a ludicrous fantasy, and I am stunned at the number of high-ranking educationalists that seem wedded to it. Until we find a fair and robust way of testing students other than written examination (which hasn’t happened to date) what would we all prefer: a teacher who understands the examination process or a teacher who doesn’t?

One of the single most useful things that a teacher or a tutor can do is to mark for the relevant exam board. The training that you receive demystifies the examination process and the unhelpful mark-schemes filled with phrases such as “wide-ranging response” and “answer fully shaped for purpose”. Train as a marker and the chief examiner will enlighten you as to what on earth these statements actually mean (for example, with a ball-park figure on the number of points expected in a “wide-ranging” answer). Marking is a tedious and stressful responsibility to take on board on top of your teaching load and is certainly not worth it for the money – but the benefit to students is immense. This is most especially true for subjects with extended-answer questions and is also especially important at A level.

My core experience is in preparing students for the GCSE examination, for Common Entrance and for scholarship. No system encourages gaming more than this one, and I am unashamed in sharing my in-depth knowledge of the examiners’ habits and my understanding of what they are looking for. It’s essential to success. In my view, a student should walk into an examination feeling totally prepared for what will appear in front of them. There should be no surprises, no shocks. The process should be an opportunity for students to show what they can do: yes, under pressure, but not intolerable pressure. Enough to get the adrenaline pumping.

Latin has a reputation for being difficult, something which I have explored in other posts. It is offered in many schools as provision for academic stretch and challenge. Those who speak against teaching to the test accuse teachers of losing sight of the bigger picture, of failing to prepare their students for becoming future specialists in their subject in favour of a blinkered, exam-focused approach. But the notion that any teacher can guide their students to excel in an examination without furnishing them with skills that are transferable to A level is startling to me. Who is actually doing that?! This does not mean that students will find the switch to A level unchallenging – of course they will find it difficult, and so they should; but the analytical skills they have been taught at GCSE will transfer, as will the study skills, as will the method of approaching an exam with their eyes wide open, armed with the knowledge and know-how required to succeed.

If this is not the purpose of what we do, I’ve been getting it wrong for more than two decades.

Don’t mock the afflicted

Something which has struck me this year is the huge variation between schools when it comes to handling their mock examinations. Some schools have set them in November, some in December, some in January. Some schools have provided infinite details and guidance as to what the examinations will contain, some have not. Some of my tutees didn’t even know how many examinations they were due to have in each subject and on which topics, although I am hyper-aware that teenagers are not always the most reliable of sources! It is always interesting to ponder just how accurate a reflection of reality I am receiving from the outside …

Mock examinations are important to schools for a number of reasons. As a general rule, they are considered to be an indicator as to whether a student is on target to achieve their predicted grade, although the jury is still very much out on the accuracy of this process. Most schools put their staff through an agony of results analysis, with students being flagged or colour-coded as to whether they are on, above or below target. Sometimes this coding is even passed on to the students. I have heard of schools that hand out the results on colour-coded paper: green for on/above target, amber for close to but below target, red for well below. Apparently it can make for some very interesting reactions, when students who might otherwise have been pleased or distressed at their results were shown them in the context of how they were performing against their targets.

Personally, I don’t like target grades, as I feel that they categorise children unfairly and set up a mindset that is not always helpful. Students with very high targets can feel overwhelmed by the pressure, students with lower ones can feel like the system doesn’t believe in them. So in my eutopia we wouldn’t have them at all. I once met a Headtacher who worked in an outstanding school with outstanding results. They gave every child the same target – to get as far above the pass grade as they could.

One disadvantage of mock examinations is the amount of curriculum time that is eaten up by the very process of examining, 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 considered simply too costly. In Year 11, however, the mock examination period is mercifully short, with most schools cramming all of their examinations into a two-week or three-week window. The price is paid by the students and by the staff, who face a very intense time during that period.

But, despite the gruelling nature of the winter exam-sprint, mock examinations are truly essential for Year 11 students. In many schools this is 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; many 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 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 the above can create tension for 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.

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 working on exam-style questions if you 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.

But mock examinations are more than just an opportunity to experience “the real thing”. They 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 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.

So what of the worst case scenario? A student totally bombs in the mocks? Well, even that’s 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 real stinker of a 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.

So do not despair. We have around six months until the final examinations in the summer. That’s more than a quarter of the curriculum time remaining. Time to re-group and time to focus. Success may be closer than you think.

Reinventing the wheel?

This week I’ve been thinking about resources. On my never-ending list of Things To Do has been the project of sourcing or creating some more GCSE-style language practice papers that won’t risk wrecking a school’s assessment process. It is crucially important to me not to use actual past papers from the current specification, unless I know for a fact that the child I am working with has already been exposed to that particular paper in examination conditions. The risk of me inadvertantly showing them a paper that will then be used for in-class assessment or – even worse – for their Mock examination, is simply too high. Much as my students would I am sure be delighted to have an advance stab at their Mock paper with a tutor’s guidance, this would be unforgiveable and would entirely undermine the purpose of the Mock.

As a result of this personal rule, I use a bank of papers that I created from the old legacy GCSE to give my students more practice. Prior to the specification change in 2018, dozens of examination papers existed that could be made to fit the new specification with some relatively minor tweaks. I have around 10 or 12 of these already, which I made several years ago, but I have always wanted more.

As so often happens, once I put my mind to it, I found that I had a folder of stuff I had sourced from heaven knows where and saved into my “look at this at some point when you’ve got time” folder – a folder which is pretty enormous, as I never seemed to find said time. One folder in a folder in a sub-folder turned out to have a set of practice papers created by another teacher, all of them recognisably from papers from the dim and distant past or from relevant text books. So someone else had the same idea as me but used different sources to create them, and I’ve managed to get my hands on their work. Halle-blinking-lujah.

But this got me thinking. Something that friends and family find it hard to understand is that even though a huge amount of my time is spent working on resources, none of these can be monetised. I am grateful for my background in academia, a period during which a paranoia about plagiarism was drummed into me – and rightly so. There have been numerous cases of teachers monetising resources that have then turned out to be based on the work of others. Much of the time, I honestly believe that this may not even have been entirely deliberate. The way that we work means that it can become genuinely difficult to remember where your work ends and that of another begins. Teachers tend to be the curators of an ever-evolving bank of resources that many others have influenced in different ways over the years. I am acutely aware that pretty much everything I produce as a working resource for students started its life somewhere else – as a passage in an old text book, from a bank of files kindly shared by a colleague, on a dim and distant exam paper from days gone by. Very little of what I produce, therefore, can be claimed as entirely original and monetised. If you’re still not convinced, take a look at what happened on The Classics Library website, where resources being shared entirely for free fell foul of copyright laws and had to be taken down as requested by Cambridge University Press: anything which even relies on the ideas and concepts created by others is not entirely your own work.

Given how many times this issue has been raised in relation to the monetised resources on the TES website, I do worry about the number of teachers and tutors who are now monetising vast quantities of resources. I do hope that every single one of them can truthfully claim that every single word of what they have written is original to them and didn’t start life as part of a set of departmental resources or as a piece created by a colleague or a trainee. Personally, I can lay claim to very little that is entirely original to me, because I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel unless I have to. Much of my time is spent hunting for useful resources, then reimagining them in a format that I find most useful or compelling. To use a rather sickening phrase, I take a resource and “make it my own”. But it is not my own, in the sense that I can lay claim to its birth and monetise it as my own work. It simply isn’t. Even if it is barely recognisable from its original, it is still not mine to claim. And certainly not to sell.

A regular occurence for me throughout my career has been that I manage to get my hands on a bank of departmental resources only to find that they are using something that I wrote 15 years ago. There are numerous advantages to taking on a trainee teacher, and one very useful one is harvesting what they have brought from other schools; the number of times I have opened up a file with great excitement only to go … hang on … this looks familiar … oh yeah, I think I wrote that. Or did I just adapt it? Who knows?

So, while my resources are all available to the students I work with and I share them gladly, they are not something that I can actually charge for because they are the result of my work combined with that of others – sometimes another person that is known to me, sometimes a whole list of people whom I have never met. I’ve always known this and have always found it to be in stark contrast to how things work in academia, a world in which you have to footnote every giant’s shoulders on whom you stand. The trend of teachers and tutors monetising resources does give me pause for this reason; I only hope that they are aware of the rules, and can hand-on-heart swear that everything they are selling started life in their own head and came to fruition by their hand alone. If they can, then wow – they’re definitely a hell of a lot more original than I am.

INSETs I wish I’d walked out of

When I reflect on the hundreds, possibly thousands of hours I have spent sat on a plastic chair designed for children, listening to half-baked, poorly-researched, unevidenced clichés and banalities, it’s actually quite difficult not to be angry.

Like anything in life, you have to be detached from something to get it into perspective: and more perspective makes me more cross rather than less so. How much of my time was wasted at tax-payers’ expense? Even worse, how many children continue to be taught badly while undiscerning leaders pump out empty platitudes instead of making themselves aware of and sharing the wealth of information that we do have about how humans learn?

I wish I’d been braver. I wish I’d voted with my feet and walked out of some sessions, rather than saving my disapproval for the anonymous staff surveys. It’s easy to say now, I realise that, and when your salary is being paid by those presenting at INSET, it might seem a little foolhardy to make your feelings so apparent. But the SLT in the school in which I spent the last 13 years of my career were pretty good at taking things on board. They weren’t tyrants; they were humane, benevolent and willing to be challenged. Maybe if I’d been a little bolder I could have helped to drive them towards evidence-informed pedagogy a little sooner. As it was, I had to wait for some personnel changes at the top and for some of the figures at leadership level to start reading the right material. It took years. It was infuriating.

Even more than this, I regret not following my instincts in the early days of my career. In particular, the instinct that if something sounds, feels and smells like unscientific hokum … then that’s exactly what it is. I knew that “Brain Gym” was an unrelenting stream of hogwash. And yet I sat there and listened to it (eyebrows in my hairline, but still I sat there). Now I feel dirty and used. Fortunately for all of us exposed to this achingly bad presentation back in around 2006, on the next day, another colleague – one of the scientists, I suspect – pinned an article by Ben Goldacre onto the staff room noticeboard; the piece was a precursor to Goldacre’s book Bad Science, which I later read, exposing “Brain Gym” and its ilk as pseudo-scientific snake-oil. Thanks to that article, and to the teacher who anonymously shared it, the use of “Brain Gym” was quietly shelved by anyone in the school who was even borderline capable of critical evaluation.

“Brain Gym” wasn’t the only bad science that I had to endure. Within the last decade the school where I worked invited in an outside speaker (at I know not what grotesque expense) to tell us all that mind maps were the only way for children to learn because they look a bit like your brain does under a microscope. I kid you not, he showed us an image of neurons and pointed out how similar mind-maps look, like it was some kind of gotcha. He also espoused the “left-brain/right-brain” hypothesis, admitted that “neurologists think it’s a little bit more complicated than this” (they do?! It is?!) but then declared breezily that “for our purposes” it was “a good working model”. Right. Presumably his definition of “a good working model” was the fact that it enabled him to keep rolling out his useless PowerPoint rather than telling us anything that was actually true about the brain. The only thing that got me through that particular session was another colleague: every time this fraudulent salesman made a statement of about the brain, the biologist sitting next to me muttered “no, it doesn’t”. And thank heaven for her.

Bad science aside, the number of INSETs I wish I’d walked out of simply as a statement that SLT were wasting my time remain alarmingly high. Here are some further examples of some of what I have been made to endure and/or partake in over the years:

VAKing, now fortunately condemned to the bonfire by anyone who knows anything. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t agonising sitting through this claptrap at the time, then being made to interview children about what they felt their preferred “learning style” was (some schools put a sticker on the front of children’s exercise books, naming their “preferred style”. We got them to colour it in). The very concept of preferred learning styles is unscientific hogwash; unfortunately is still being peddled in some places, especially in the US.
It’s all about growth mindset. No it isn’t, nor was it ever, and now we have the evidence to prove that its impact in schools amounts to net zero. Next?
Drumming. Ah what an INSET that was. We each had to choose our own percussion instrument, and this in itself was made out to be some kind of personality test. We then all “learned” to perform a short percussive work. I believe that the message was something about working as a team for the greater good. Inspirational.
Juggling. Here the message was that it’s difficult to learn a new skill and we should remember that when we’re teaching. I am unclear as to why it took two hours of me attempting to catch small bean bags to drive this message home.
Guess what’s in the trainer’s head. I have a genuine issue with someone standing up at the front of the hall and asking me to guess the correct answer to a question they are then going to give me the answer to. How many cases of child neglect were reported in the Surrey area during the last academic year? I have no idea – why would anyone who hasn’t just checked the figures have any idea? I assume you’re planning to tell me, so can we just move on to the bit where you provide me with the actual information, rather than ask me to guess?
Death by PowerPoint. The trainer reads everything that’s on every slide then assures you that it will be on the shared drive for you to access, which begs the question why on earth you had to sit and listen to him reading it aloud.
Death by Ted Talk. No. Just no. If anyone is still in some kind of idealistic bubble in which they think that any Ted Talk is profound and worth hearing, then de-program yourself by watching this. “Let’s look at a picture of the planet for no reason” is I think my favourite moment.
Look at me and my big book. This was a recent lethal mutation from the welcome move towards schools becoming more research-informed. In this genre of INSET, a manager that you know full well rarely if ever opens a book puts the image of the front cover of one he’s been told to read on a projected slide so he can demonstrate how research-informed he is.
Mindfulness. Again, I’m afraid that the research on the impact of this in schools simply isn’t there. Until it is, I don’t want to hear about it and I certainly don’t want to do it with colleagues. Asking me to lie on the drama-room floor (seriously?!) while someone talks in a soothing voice is also a big no.
Bad quotations. Even if correctly attributed, there is nothing more cringe-worthy than an “inspiring” quotation on a PowerPoint slide. And I don’t know a single manager who hasn’t used a falsely-attibuted one at some point or another.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said, the trouble with quotes on the internet is you never really know whether they’re genuine.

in loco parentis

‘Until someone is held accountable for Jessica’s death we will never be able to process what happened to her. It simply can’t be the case, in those circumstances, that a young girl with her whole life ahead of her died and it’s no one’s fault.’
Hannah Davison, elder sister of Jessica Lawson.

In the Spring of 2015 I returned from my last school trip abroad. Before I even made it home, before the wheels of the aircraft had touched the tarmac, I had already decided: never again. I had run around 10-12 trips to the Bay of Naples in my time and I knew I couldn’t cope with it any more.

With hindsight – and certainly for the students – that final trip was no more eventful than any other. One child projectile-vomited across their hotel bed-blankets. Another sustained sunstroke. Lots of blisters. A few behavioural issues. The usual. But on the penultimate night of the trip, as a direct consequence of a bizarre sequence of events that no Risk Assessment could have predicted, one child slid to the floor and hit their head. On an Italian hotel floor. As anyone who has stayed in one will know, that means the floor is made of marble.

That night was a black vortex of terror. I consulted the laminated card issued to trip leaders with contact details to be used in the event of a life-threatening event or a life lost on a trip. The Senior Leader on call was calm and efficient and informed the parents that their child had been taken to hospital and was having a brain scan. It was the most horrifying few hours of my life.

He was fine. Completely fine. Joined us on the outings for the next day with no ill effects. Situation back to normal, everybody move on. Only I couldn’t. I was left in the grip of a fear I had always carried.

What if?

What if it happens on my watch?

On my return to the school I informed the Deputy Head – the same man who had taken my strained call on the night of the event in question – that I had decided against running any more school trips. He was kind but dismissive and clearly thought that I would change my mind. When I explained my fear, that if something were to happen to a child on my trip, not only would I struggle to deal with the guilt, I felt sure that I would be held accountable, blamed by everyone and most likely in the dock, he chuckled; he told me that I was being a little paranoid and said that so long as my Risk Assessment was robust I had nothing to worry about. I was convinced he was mistaken. Not only mistaken, but deeply naive. I have a huge amount of respect for most of the Senior Leaders I have worked for, but sometimes they are just plain wrong. He and I argued for a while about the way society had shifted towards a blame-culture, in which accidents could not happen and people always had to be held accountable. He remained convinced that a robust Risk Assessment was the answer. We parted on friendly terms, he in the hope that he had changed my mind, I even more convinced of my decision.

That very summer, July 2015, in the first week of the school holidays, my blood ran cold in my veins as I heard on the news that a little girl had drowned in an accident on a school trip in France. Senior Leaders from the school and other support-workers were flying out to Limoges where the accident had happened. It felt like my nightmares were being played out in front of me on screen and I wept for everyone involved: the child lost to us, her desperate family and every member of staff on that trip who had given up their time and their energy to give some children a memorable experience, only to find themselves trapped in a nightmare they would never wake up from. I knew that they would never forgive themselves. I knew that they would never recover. What I did not know is that they would see my imagined nightmare scenario all the way through to the dock, accused of “manslaughter through gross negligence” a full seven years later.

All three teachers and the lifeguard on duty at the beach faced these charges in a French court this year. Seven years of waiting through what was no doubt an agonising preparation process. Yet Marie-Sophie Waguette, head of jurisdiction at the Palais de Justice in Tulle, said there was “no evidence to show that they were negligent”. Nobody running the trip was to blame, nor was the lifeguard on the scene. Any suggestion that the staff could and should have carried out individual safety checks on the pontoon that capsized and caused Jessica’s death were dismissed as unreasonable.

Reporting has been varied and somewhat minimal given how long after the event the case has been brought. Reliably, the Daily Mail produces the nastiest of angles, using the line “teachers walk free” in its headline, suggesting that one of them had “panicked” when the child was missing (who wouldn’t?) and focusing mawkishly on the raw grief of Jessica’s bewildered family, compounded by a verdict they did not want in a trial that should never have happened. The family are now thinking of pursuing a civil case and my heart aches for them as well as for the teachers involved. For all of them, it seems, this nightmare will never be over.

For me, the case illustrates the terrifying responsibility carried by so many teachers every time they run a trip. One particularly anxious parent once cornered me and said, “I want your cast-iron guarantee that my daughter will be one hundred percent safe on your trip.” Maybe others would have patted and cajoled and comforted but I couldn’t lie to her. “I can’t promise that,” I said. “Nobody can. All I can promise you is that I will do everything in my power to keep your daughter safe. But there are lots of things I cannot control.” The child did not come with us.

One of the numerous reasons I feel glad to have moved on from my job in schools is that my ongoing refusal to run trips was becoming a problem. Covid obviously gave me a couple of years without the pressure, but many children asked me about it over the years, not least because the Bay of Naples trip had a reputation of being the very best of experiences. My successor loves running trips and made it clear in his interview that he expected to do so. I am thrilled for the children that will regain this opportunity now I’m out of the way. I genuinely mean that. Gripped by fear and horror as I was, I was no use to them. Of course I support school trips. Of course I remember how much the students gained from them. Of course they should continue to happen, so long as we have staff that are willing and able to run them. All I ask is that we show some compassion to those teachers when things do go wrong, as sometimes they inevitably will. We do our very best out there in loco parentis. I promise we do. Sometimes it just isn’t enough.

The three teachers who faced charges in a French court. All were acquitted.

WJEC or OCR GCSE specifications?

As a career-long devotee of the OCR specification, for various reasons it is time for me to get to grips with the Eduqas (WJEC) specification. I am aware that my successor at the large comprehensive I used to work in is going to switch to WJEC and given that A level Latin is no longer available in our area (unless you go private) I fully support his decision and would have taken it myself. For my own part I’d like to be able to offer support to students taking both specifications, plus a home-schooled boy I am working with now will – I believe – respond much better to the WJEC course.

Given my need to concentrate on the finer details of the differences between a specification that is new to me and one which I know like the back of my hand, I decided to focus my mind by writing up my findings in a blog post. There’s nothing like having to explain something in your own words to make one concentrate. This is, by the way, a recognised truth when it comes to learning: simply reading something or even taking notes from a source is unlikely to aid your understanding. Putting your source to one side and then trying to explain it in your own words has been proven to be a much more powerful way to ensure that you will remember what you are studying. This is because our memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive; memory works (and therefore improves) by continuously regenerating what it remembers, so forcing yourself to reproduce in your own words something you’ve read about is a challenging but effective way to ensure that your newfound knowledge will stick.

So, here are my findings. If you’re interested in the full range of qualifications available in all Classical subjects at all levels in the UK, Steven Hunt provides a really useful overview in a 2020 article for the CUCD, which is publicly available. He discusses the specifications available for A level, the IB and beyond.

General overview

A GCSE qualification in Latin and accredited by OfQual for use in English state schools is offered by OCR and by Eduqas, which is the examining body of WJEC accredited for use in England. AQA used to offer a GCSE in Latin but this was discontinued before the new GCSEs were launched in 2018. Both OCR and WJEC have shared criteria, which are dictated to them by OfQual: the number of examination papers (three) and the length of those papers, the minimum length of the literature that must be studied in the original Latin (around 200 lines), plus a choice between an element of prose composition or questions on grammar and syntax. There is no coursework or controlled assessment and the examination must be linear, not modular – in other words, it must be sat as a series of final examinations at the end of the course. Despite these prescriptions, the two examination boards still provide some considerable variation, which I examine below.

Compulsory language paper

The language paper, compulsory in both specifications, lasts for an hour and a half and makes up 50% of both qualfications. Both specifications have a set vocabulary list and both of them state that students will be tested through translation and comprehension, plus a choice between some grammar questiona and some short prose-composition sentences (for which there is a restricted vocabulary list and a restricted grammar list). Both boards test students’ knowledge of the accidence and syntax laid out in their specifications and this is where the differences lie: the demands placed on students by the WJEC language specification are notably lighter than those expected by OCR.

Both specifications call for a knowledge of all five declensions – in reality, this means a focus on declensions 1-3, as the words from the defined vocabulary list in the 4th and 5th declension are vanishingly few. Similarly, both specifications expect a knowledge of all forms of adjectives, including their comparatives and superlatives. However, there is considerable difference between the two boards when it comes to a knowledge of verbs and all their derivative forms: OCR theoretically demands the indicative forms of regular and deponent verbs in all voices and tenses except for the future perfect; in the subjunctive it requires the impefect and the pluperfect. WJEC, when it comes to the passive voice and deponents, demands only the present, imperfect and perfect passive and deponent verbs in the 3rd person indicative! I had to read this several times to make sure I was reading it right. So, no pluperfect passive and no passives of any kind in the subjunctive and they will only need to recognise passive and deponent verbs in the 3rd person. When it comes to the syntax, the basic uses of the subjunctive seem to be identical with the expectations of OCR.

Participles? OCR expect the lot, whereas WJEC do not list the future participle as an expectation. They also state – and brace yourself here, if you’re an advocate of the OCR syllabus – that the ablative absolute is not required. I am still reeling from this. No ablative absolute. I mean … wow. It goes on. Another shock came when I realised that WJEC only expect students to recognise the present active infinitive – no others. This means that their testing of the indirect statement will be very basic and the relevant rules for the sequence of tenses will be very easy to teach.

Other smaller differences in the expectations for the language paper remain, such as WJEC does not include malo in its list of irregular verbs, unlike OCR. Likewise, the verbs sum and possum are only required in the present and imperfect indicative, present infinitive and imperfect subjunctive for WJEC. These differences may seem minor but in reality it means that there is a massive stack of knowledge not required by WJEC. The fact that students end up with the same qualification does give me pause, and were I teaching with the aim of preparing students for A level then I would stick with OCR. However, with the removal of A level as an option in my local area then my successor’s decision to switch to WJEC is entirely correct: it would almost be madness to do otherwise.

Literature and culture: with options:

The boards differ further in the way they lay out their literature and culture papers. For OCR, candidates must be prepared for two out of the following three options, each worth 25%: prose set text, verse set text or Roman literature and culture in translation. This means that all candidates must study one text of around 200 lines in the original language, and many will study two. Personally, I always taught both set texts as I hated the vagaries of “just teach them some stuff about slavery/daily life”.

WJEC lays things out a little differently. Their “Latin literature: themes and sources” paper is compulsory and worth 20%. Teachers have a choice of theme but whichever they choose consists of a mix of both prose and verse texts in the original language. There is also some supporting material, which is designed to place the texts in their cultural context. For the final paper, worth 30%, teachers can choose to prepare their students for “Latin literature narratives”(basically more set text work, mostly in the original with some sections in translation), or they can choose the “Roman civilisation” element, in which students study some general themes and sources all in translation. Personally, I will be avoiding that for the same reasons as I avoided the cultural background paper with OCR.

A key difference in approach to the literature between the two boards is that OCR literature examinations are closed book, which means that the students need to know the texts really well – frankly, they need to know them off by heart. WJEC take a rather different approach by making their examinations open book, meaning that students are provided with a clean copy of the Latin text plus the vocabulary list. In terms of teacher preparation and school investment, the very fact that WJEC provide the the texts and the vocabulary online as a PDF download is in itself quite a revelation – OCR leave you to get on with it all by yourself. That said, there is no set translation provided, so teachers will still need to prepare their own working translation and/or one for their students.

I am keen to reach out to teachers who are more experienced in preparing their students for the WJEC literature as I am as yet unsure how much they feel their students should rely on the texts in the examination. Something I recall from doing open-book examinations back when I sat my A levels is that you really don’t have time to be looking too many things up, so in reality you still needed to know the text like the back of your hand. I am also not sure how much advantage it will give students when the text is all in Latin; surely they still need to know a translation really well, since none of them will be truly capable of translating real Latin on sight (especially if they haven’t studied the OCR language specification!)

So, my mission now is to do so and start making as many friends as I can with the WJEC advocates. I am looking forward to the process. I am also excited about the prospect of working with different texts and I like WJEC’s decision to include supporting material, which forces teachers to contenxtualise the texts for their students; OCR’s approach encourages robotic rote-learning, which always felt like something of a shame. So, calling all teachers of WJEC – where are you? I’d love to learn from you.

Happy New Year

tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

For those of us whose lives are tied up with education, the academic year can be a far more powerful marker of the changing times than the winter solstice.

I have always found the gateway to January a strange thing to celebrate, yet the pressure you’re under to party like it’s 1999 on December 31st is relentless. Fast-forward 24 hours and suddenly everyone is on a detox, which is even more depressing: count me out on that one – as if January weren’t miserable enough! January is – without a doubt – the most intolerable month of the year. Long. Cold. Dark. Simply awful. One of my oldest friends has a birthday in the first week of January and she tells me it’s agony. Quite literally, nobody wants to know; everyone battens down the hatches and goes into hibernation when it comes to socialising. It’s a month to be endured, not enjoyed.

September 1st is the New Year for me – always has been. As someone who has never left education, my year has been shaped by the academic calendar for as long as I can remember. I left school for university, stayed there far longer than is decent and then went into a PGCE followed by full-time teaching. I have quite literally never seen the world when it has not been shaped by academic term times and academic holidays. So as the days start to shorten at the end of August, quite strikingly in that final week, it’s as if the world is preparing itself: ah yes, I think, time to sharpen the pencils and prepare the rucksack. Season of lists and hello brutalness: it’s back to the chalkface again.

This year, of course, feels somewhat different for me, and today is particularly symbolic. Today the local school I used to work at opens its doors to staff and welcomes them back for two INSET days prior to students returning on Monday: many schools across the country are following a similar pattern. For the first time in 21 years I will not be there. So what will I be doing? I have a couple of clients in the morning, one child who – like most – is not yet back in school plus a regular adult client. After that – and just because I can – I’ll be going into London to meet an old friend for lunch. Cheers!

I won’t miss the hard plastic chairs and the “vision” for the next five years. I won’t miss the results analysis. I won’t miss the overwhelming feeling that my time could be better spent preparing my classroom and writing my seating plans. I will miss the people, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging. I knew it would be this way: the price we pay for opting out of any system, for jumping off the hamster wheel, is a slight sense of wistfulness as we watch the other hamsters do their scampering. It’s still worth it.

For many teachers, the start of September is marred by anxiety dreams. Many teachers love their job, but this does not make them immune to feelings of apprehension when it’s time to go back to school. Six weeks is a long time away from a job which relies so much on performance and – like any performer – teachers are often plagued with self-doubt prior to their return to the stage. My most common recurring dream is being in front of a class which will simply not listen; I stand impotently at the front, wringing my hands, snapping at the children who either talk over me or laugh. There have been times when I have woken myself up shouting. Strangely enough (or perhaps it’s not so strange) I have still had a couple of these anxiety dreams this year; my subconscious has clearly not absorbed the fact that I will not be returning to the chalkface and is still convinced that I will find myself in front of a class next week; given that I still occasionally have an anxiety dream about completing my PhD – something which I did in 1999 – I’m not holding my breath for when these dreams will stop.

Teaching is a wonderful job in a thousand ways and while the end of the summer holiday was always a bit of a drag (as my husband puts it: fundamentally, work sucks) I did still look forward to the start of the new year in September. There was something wonderful about the fresh start and the preparation for the return of old students and the welcoming of the new. Each year I strived to do a better job than the last and each year – in incremental ways – I believe I managed it.

This year for me brings greater excitement though, as I step into my new guise as professional Latin tutor and start shaping my business for the academic year. The summer is a tricky time for tutors, with many families choosing to take the whole holiday away from the books; despite this, I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of work that has come my way, with several new clients booking in for summer booster sessions and others wishing to make a head-start on their studies for the new academic year. I have an encouraging number of new clients booked in from next week and my weekend slots are already close to full for the year – something I could not have imagined happening so quickly.

So to mark the beginning of the academic year I shall be raising a glass to my colleagues and thinking of the scores of friends I have stepping back up to the chalkface once again. Like me, many of them truly love it, but also like me, many of them have found the last couple of years the toughest since the start of their career. I hope things get better for them. I hope the press and the government cut them some slack for once. I hope OfSted don’t come calling until they’ve at least got into the swing of things once more. I hope they’re able and allowed to turn the heating on when they need it. I hope the students know how lucky they are.