Teaching Matters | Promotions, Attendance & Anthems

On Teaching Matters this week Paul Hazzard is joined by John Gibbs for an in-depth look at leadership, attendance and a genuinely strange proposal from Reform UK.The first story is inspired by John Severs piece in the TES on the handover between education secretaries Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell. The conversation asks what happens when someone new is promoted to a position of responsibility. Paul and John explore the idea that continuity in leadership is weak and that real courage means sweeping change. John is blunt about where that idea comes from, describing a culture borrowed from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs he refers to as the world of "gamblers and spivs”. Paul raises the idea of the "custodianship" model of headship described by a retired super head, John Tomsett, who has been a guest on a previous show. John reminds us of Chris Mullin's political memoir View from the Foothills and its unlikely lesson about Leylandii hedges and small, achievable change. Paul's advice to newly promoted staff is to make the job their own but treat change like climbing a mountain, "slow, slow, quick, quick, slow", pausing occasionally to look back at how far they have come rather than trying to prove themselves by tearing everything up.Today’s second conversation draws on a Guardian report by Alexandra Topping on teachers who disagree with hardline school attendance policies and the fines used to enforce them. Paul and John ask a harder question lying underneath the headline figures, ‘is every day of school absence equally significant, and what does relentless measurement of attendance actually protect?’ John shares a personal story about taking his daughters out of school for European art trips during his wife's work travel and a memory of snow days that taught him more than most lessons did. The pair are candid about over-testing, over-measuring and over-disciplining in English schools and how fear of falling numbers on a spreadsheet can crowd out any real thinking about why children disengage from school in the first place. It is a conversation that touches on curriculum reform, progress eight and the narrowing of the sixth form curriculum and asks whether attendance figures tell us anything meaningful about the quality of teaching and learning going on inside a school.The last conversation looks at Reform UK's suggestion, reported by John Dyson in Schools Week, that schools should face consequences from Ofsted for not singing the national anthem, with Suella Braverman leading the charge. Paul and John treat the idea with the seriousness it deserves, which is not much, working through the history of manufactured patriotism, the oddities of monarchy as a unifying symbol and a detour via the Likely Lads into just how narrow a shared national identity can become once you start defining who belongs and who does not belong. They discuss why teaching children to think critically rather than obediently is a significant aim of education. John argues for pupils who show "a decent disrespect" rather than blind loyalty, a phrase that sums up the episode's argument rather neatly and says something about the whole purpose of schooling, pedagogy and citizenship education.As always there is ‘a banana’ to finish, this week a look back at the game of conkers, its surprising history in wartime Britain when children were paid to collect them and the enduring myth of a health and safety ban that never actually existed. John shares his banana on the merits and benefits of school drama and plays.Whether your interest is teacher education, initial teacher training, CPD, school leadership, curriculum policy or classroom practice, Teaching Matters has something to make you think and probably something to make you laugh along the way.Subscribe to Teaching Matters and Education Matters wherever you get your podcasts, and keep sending your comments in, Paul and John read every one.