The sight and sound of joy

On this, the last day of September, I look back to the first day.  Firstly, I recoil at the thought of how long ago that seems.  Then I take some time to consider what a good start that was, and how that in turn has led to a really good … start.

Back on (what seems an epoch ago) the opening day of the school year, when the staff all crawled back bleary eyed in to the hall for our opening inset day, we had our usual day of strategic craziness planned.  I took great delight in sharing the successes from last year for both centre and school, and discussed how I planned for us to grow more and more, and achieve more and more, all underpinned by our vision of aspire – achieve – enjoy.

So wide ranging is our organisation now that we do not spend the whole day together – we can be more strategic if we work in specific groups, and therefore this is what we did.  However, as the staff all know, I always like to put an aspect of teamwork and / or new learning into the proceedings – if teachers themselves are not real learners, how can we ever empathise with those we seek to instruct?  

Therefore, the afternoon opened with a sense of forbidding – what idea would he have this year? 

Those colleagues of mine who’ve been on this journey for a while will recall teamwork of insets past: the day I taught them all the ukulele, the group dance, and the radio adverts.  How does one top that?  You don’t, you just seek to develop it.

So, as the shadows grew longer in the hall and new staff a little more worried, I got them started.  Assigning our three new teachers the roles of team captains, I asked the staff to get themselves into teams and charged each group with designing a representation of either aspire, achieve or enjoy.  They had an hour.  Go!

For forty minutes, frenetic energy was all around, as creations took shape.  Odd music made a cameo, thankfully fleeting appearance, and a few minutes before our time the creations began to take the stage.  Aspire took the form of arrows and stars, photographs and positivity, all made from a cone, a rounders pole, and little love.  Achieve took on weightier metaphors, with hearts and brains balanced by maths scales, and surrounded by tempting presents or the rewards of your labours.  Enjoy was more of 2 dimension affair, taking the form of a character full of the wonders life has to offer, and looking like she had the time of her life.  “This is Joy”, her team announced. 

And I thought to myself, you know what, it is, actually. 

Since then, I have been a little overwhelmed with the quality of the start we have made this year, and extremely proud of the work already created.  Our wonderful children are back, and have been for four weeks, and all we’ve had is a really lovely time, thank you.  And there is no secret to it, it’s really quite simple: our children are having a super time because they’re being super – conscientious, friendly, fun, enthusiastic.  In fact, you can see the joy.  (And can I all remind you, I have on more than one occasion penned blogs about how much I want September over and done with…)

Our new staff have all contributed enormously to our school with their enormous work rates, and have already established themselves as super team members, evidenced not a little by today’s feast of a Macmillan coffee morning.  Thanks to Miss Beeks organisation, two tables in the staffroom were groaning beneath the weight of all the goodies.  It will come, I am sure, as no little surprise that joy was all around us. 

The governors have been in, working as hard as they always do, and they too noticed it: “it’s so calm” they told us, “so happy”.  When you’re sat in the meeting room trying to negotiate the minefields of the budget, it makes life so much easier when you can hear coming, from outside, the sound of dedicated, hard working children failing to allow any of the challenges they encounter to dampen their amazing spirits.

All of this means that you can literally see and hear the joy. 

And this is none of my usual hyperbole, no lily gilded to make a crass point – it’s scout’s honour.  Not that I was ever a scout, mind, I was in the Boys’ Brigade for an afternoon because their football team was short, and I had to tell everyone my name was Sunil Plaha, but anyhoo.  No, you can literally hear and see, sense the joy around the place.  It’s abundant, it’s everywhere, and it’s great.

Once again, I am left to ponder the true nature of what it is we do, and to consider are we actually looking in the right direction when we set off on the year’s journey.  We set of with laudable goals about targets and standards, about quality and about improvement.  We never set out with the target to make the school more joyful, but that’s what’s happened.

And the irony is, would we have actually achieved it so well if that’s what we’d had planned?

So, sat here at the desk in the corridor surrounded by too many pieces of stray paper and the remnants of a certain (secret recipe it will go with me to the grave) cheesecake, I have no feelings about September being over and done with.  Far from it – I’d do it all again given the chance. 

And its all down to a character called Joy – after all, that’s what we said right at the start – “This is joy” – and, boy, were we right.

Excited for the year ahead, and once again humbled by the efforts of the adults and children I get to spend my days with, that is all.  

It may be the wrong bus stop, but hey, that's cool

At this point in the last two years, having reached the eve of another year's conclusion, I have written what some might have considered whinge pieces, wherein I have decried the drop in our standards and generally bemoaned to anyone who will listen how we are so much more than that.  (I have noticed recently how some others, who clearly were not prepared for the joys this year had to hold, have taken up the baton.).  However, I am sure you will all be relieved / delighted / ecstatic to know that you will hear no such wailing or gnashing of teeth from yours truly this year. Oh no, no, no.

At the zenith of last year's leavers' assembly, with only minutes left on the year's clock, I told those still capable of listening that my plan next year was to put it all right, to do more than we've ever done before, to be everyone's "How did they do that???", as opposed to everyone's train wreck.  I even told the assembled throng, when they were all edging towards the door marked holiday, that I couldn't wait to get started.  How they must have dreaded that sentiment.

I sit here now, pondering how to bore the school community through tomorrow's leavers' shindiggery, and am delighted and, in all honesty not a little relieved, that tomorrow's message will be based on a different sentiment ... although may have a fairly familiar outcome.

It is with much joy and pride that I shall tell the assembled throng tomorrow a message of such importance delivered with such startling simplicity that they will wonder if they have misheard.  My message will be simply this:

We did it.

In the year where the powers that be threw the rule book out of the window and ramped the expectation up to a Spinal Tap like 11, we did it.  In a year where the school faced its most severe scrutiny in my entire time here, we did it.  And, in a year where once again the Education Gods decided that, if there were curve balls to be thrown, Badock's Wood should be the target, we did it.  We did it all.  Every key stage.  Every indicator.  Every set piece.  We did it.  And then some.

In the face of massive external pressure, when messages coming out of central government were getting more and more confusing, we did it.  At a time when schools could no longer cling to certain world-acknowledged truths, we did it.  And we did it well.

For those of you who have not followed all our mutterings too closely, you are perfectly entitled to ask, well what is it that you claim to have done?  And you have every right so to do.  Allow me to tell you.

We have improved our outcomes in every single indicator, including having improved outcomes at the end of key stage 2 even though the world has been told by now-deposed Secretary for Education Morgan that the tests were incomparable to last year.  We have moved from being the school people were glad they are not, to the school they phone up and say "Could you tell me how...?".  (I'm not joking - two such calls, and one in the utterly-startled flesh.  Their flesh, not mine.)

We faced highly uncertain challenges, believing passionately in our own brand of teaching and learning, even in the face of external (and one constant nagging source of internal) pressure, to do what we know instinctively to be best for our learners,   In the shadow of an ever looming inspection which never materialized, we did it.We took on a few nay-sayers who almost sounded as if they needed us to fail.  We saw off the advances of several academy chains, chatting us up to be part of their gang.  We did it all.

Most importantly of all, perhaps, is that we achieved all this by being us.  Not accepting this was our lot in academic life, but taking pride in who we are and what we do and what we know we can collaboratively achieve.  At a time when most schools become introspective, we worked even harder at our external partnerships, such as with our amazing friends in the Trym partnership, and our unbelievably talented colleagues at Elmfield School for the Deaf.  We didn't shrink from new projects, we embraced them, launching several whole school initiatives, all of which have borne fruit.
We did it being us.  Being Badock's.  We did it our way.

And that, I think, is the thing of which I am most proud.

And to all of my colleagues in the wider educational world who are either celebrating their results or, dare I say it, bemoaning their fate, I would invite them to look at it like this: we may have traveled this altogether, and we may have ended up at entirely a different bus stop to the one we set out for.  But either way, what a journey.

To my colleagues in the microcosm that is Badock's, may I offer my humble apologies for being a harbinger of doom and, let us not beat around the bush, a bit of a git at times, and can I offer my heartfelt thanks to you all for the unbelievable shift of work you have put in from the first second since 9.00 last September 1st.  I am proud of what we do, and I am proud of who we are, and I am proud of what we achieve as a team; more than anything, I am proud of the team I am fortunate to be a part of.  Thank you all so much.  Although I want you to do as little as is possible over the summer that is school related, feel free to spend some time on the beach / in the pool / up a hill rehearsing that sentence we're all enjoying so much: "Our school is above the national average".  Guess what I'm going to say to you all next...

To our governors and our community, you have put up with a lot, but you have given us your unswerving faith and support, and for this I cannot thank you enough.  If it is of any reassurance, I am now almost beginning to think that it might be time I grew up.  Almost.

To our wonderful, wonderful children.  Never stop being you, or who we are all so proud of.  I hope that, in turn, we have done you proud, and you can appreciate all that we have done for you this year.  To our year 6 leavers, spread the word - you were part of something special.  You did it.  My word, how you did it.

To all of those who wanted to see the public fall of Badock's, and took too much pleasure in our low points, we'll talk it over soon.  Very soon.

Finally, to my gorgeous wife and beautiful children, I am sorry.  For everything.  I promise to spend the next 5 weeks listening, watching, sharing in everything we do, and not silently rehearsing my next argument / pep talk / assembly. I love you all very much.  The pink book is staying at home.  Possibly.

Nothing is ever, ever straightforward. And isn't that what we all love so much?

From the soon to be unloved kitchen table where I have spent too many hours this year, with a heart bursting with pride and nothing but good wishes, for another year, that is very much all.

More of that homework no-one wants to read ... album of the year

The beginning of July finds me in a self-indulgent mood.  We have completed reports, we have 75% of a School Improvement Plan, and we are well on the way to looking something close to prepared for next year, whilst hopefully finishing this one off in some style.

The first of our results are beginning to hit the deck and I am pleased.  Still the big one to go on Tuesday, and I'm still, how does one put this politely, bricking it, but am more than ready for what comes along.  However, having blogged at exactly this point over for the last two year's bemoaning all of my woes, I am determined not to be that guy this time around.  To put it more simply, fir the first time in many years, I feel content, as opposed to let down.

So what's the topic this time?  How will I avoid the whole "Is it the world's biggest, or is it just standing on a box?" debacle?  Well, the blog I really want to write contains that many expletives and asterisks that my (rubber-band-and-a-calculator) laptop won't handle it without crashing at least twice.  What I'd really like to talk about is the utter futility, crass arrogance and selfish sadness of the actions of a certain teaching union this week, who still appear to think that 19th century industrial actions are effective in the 21st century.  However, for all my faults, I surround my self with people whose counsel I trust wholeheartedly, and one of them told me yesterday to "Man up".  She followed this with a "Suck it up Princess," and so, firmly back in my box, I will instead write about something far more ... pleasant.

A few months ago my late night twitter meanderings alerted me to some very exciting news.  A new Metronomy album was on its way - hurrah!  No, I know I am the last person in the world to say hurrah, but it seemed apposite at that moment.  Okay, I'll delete it.  It appeared that this new offering, Summer 08, would drop on 1st July.

If you have been unfortunate enough to suffer some of my indulgent mumblings before, you will know how much I love my electronica, and, in that field, how highly I esteem the work of Metronomy.  So, I did the only thing a true man would do: pre-ordered it on vinyl for myself, telling my wife it was a "Well done on SATs" present for our son.

It is awesome.  That's my three word review, and I mean every word of it.  What a joy.  Another three worder.  If I'm being honest, it was with a sense of relief that a little dram helped me enjoy the album at first listen last night much, much more than I was expecting to.

The critics have been saying it hails a return to the famous English Riviera Album.  I would agree, but it has huge dollops of Nights Out on there as well.  All in all, I think that it is a joy that someone from the southwest is unashamedly trying to bring disco back out of its faux-velvet lined box of shame in the corner, with several side helpings of it's okay to be a grown up and like this stuff.  And my 11 year old hair bear loves it too, in a very different way to me, which makes it even more special. (BTW, and this is one of many points of reference i this blog for a target audience, it is a joy to introduce the younger generation to vinyl - my son thinks it is, in his words, phat with a ph.)

I have not heard a band do so much so wisely with a bass since Queen, and let's all be honest, with Queen it was all about power struggle.  This is far more about melody, and about complimenting eternal samples that lead you up and up a spiral staircase leading to a loft full of all your greatest memories and darkest thoughts.

Several tracks on this album remind me of everything I love about electronica; a simple, almost hypnotic sample building and building until another synth, or a bass, or a haunting vocal comes in to point the songs direction.  Many of the songs point to disco; one or two of them flaunt it unembarrassingly.  Hovering over it all are a number of techs, spindals, samples and synth devices that would make technology students drool.

I know it's sycophantic (a Prefab Sprout lyric - never forget the sprouts, eh? Also close to a Pet Shop Boys lyric if I recall correctly...) but this really is the best and most complete album I have heard since Love Letters - the last Metronomy album.   It is a joy, from the melancholic lament of Love's Not an Obstacle to the beautifully aggressive Hang Me Out to Dry. I can honestly say, and this is going out to a target audience of blokes my age, but I have not been so mesmerized by side two of a piece of vinyl since I first heard the b side of Actually by the Pet Shop Boys on Christmas evening of 1988.

And no, I am not attempting to get a job as a music journalist.  Although, an occasional review might come in handy if Tuesday goes badly NOOO FATBOY, you promised to step back from that precipice.  And so I shall.  Suffice to say that, school is going well, the profession is once again about to spring a fissure on a tectonic scale, but music and our olive ribbons shall preserve us all.  And a certain album shall be playing on two laptops, two pieces of handheld and a record player for a long time to come.

From the self indulgent side of the keyboard, that is all.

Day four in the Big Exmouth house - the colours of our camp ...

Camp is a plethora of colours, a rainbow all of its own, distilled and refracted through its participants, its moods and its outcomes.  Some colours spring to mind and intensify, but some reveal themselves only as you walk away, and realisation dawns on you as the sun light ebbs.

Yes, I am feeling a tad poetic as I reflect on a super week.

The colours change and intensify as we go though our adventures.  What begin as bright, vibrant, almost in your face blocks of energy and excitement diversify and present as huge swathes of boldness with depth and energy.

Alright, I'll be more specific.  And a bit less flowery.

Mud is one strong colour.  Both in the lake into which the children leap fearlessly, and the colour of the boys' toilet floors.  It is the colour beneath us on so many occasions, sometimes turning to clay as we walk along the magnificent cliffs of Orcombe point, and surrounding areas of this beautiful part of the world that always welcomes and hosts us so well.

Brown was the colour of this evening's chocolate cake competition.  Two and a half slices.  Get in.  Lost to a boy in year 5.

White is another one that's important.  In the million smiles we see, down to the crash and turn of the surf.  It is also, of course, the colour that many of the children's clothes begin the week, but never, ever aspire to again.

Black can be seen in the wetsuits that we pour them into, the colour of many of the children after the low ropes course, but never the colour of the night down here, where the skies are wonderful but hardly ever dark.

The irony is that within the heavy storm haven tents we occupy, colours are all over the shop.  I looked in my bag the other day and wondered where that purple shirt had come from, only to discover it was my red and blue t-shirt.  We searched for hours the other day for one boy's blue jacket, only to discover it was the brown / purple / indescribable affair laying at out feet all along.  I tell you, the balck and blue / gold and white dress would be every colour of the rainbow in these tents.

Of course, the colours then become more abstract, and I will not apologise for the vagueness or the floweriness.  There is the sunbeam shine of successes made, challenges overcome, ambitions fulfilled, Camps as good as this one are redolent with the glow of fun had, new experiences enjoyed and hitherto unexperienced pleasures devoured.  Too much that last one?  I agree.

Above all, camp at Exmouth is the green and blue of my memory.  Although we have been slightly too cloudy to see it this week, the Exmouth I always see in my mind's eye is a sea of green - the grass, the tents and the tress, beneath a vast sheet of blue uninhabited by clouds or mist, the two bisected by the beautiful estuary snaking into the distance.  Some people talk about the place of their dreams; I have no need, for when I see and think of Exmouth this is what I think of because I have been fortunate enough to experience it so often.

This camp will always in my mind be the colour of fun.  We haven't laughed so much at camp in years, haven't had so much to celebrate, or so many records broken.  It will be bright and warm, and a rainbow of memories to share.  I sincerely hope all of the children feel the same way, and look back on their week with us in the same colours and light.  If pride had a colour, if determination had a colour, if collaboration had a colour, they would contribute to the final picture.  And what a picture.

From the final cheese board, from behind a very cold can of diet coke, with a face tingling partially from sunburn but predominantly from happiness, that is all.

Except to say, very well done everyone.  It was awesome.

Day three in the Big Exmouth house, and the new fashion is ...

You get to the point where various fashions and fads take over camp.  New cool words and phrases introduced by instructors, or invented by the gang.  Furthermore, the clothing goes through stages as well; neon clothing is big this year, as are fluffy socks.  Naturally, I am the only person here without a onesie.

Then there are those trends that have gone on so long that they have become traditions, rites of passage.  Newer, first time campers trying to wear every item of clothing before tea on day one.  The interminable questioning (see yesterday).  The disco ....

Then there are trends and fashions which only last for a single camp, so special and unique are they to the specific group running the show that year - by which I mean the children.  There are certain things / phrases / actions that are so specific to that particular group of children, from the dynamic often forged on the tentative but oh-so-excited coach trip down, which imprint themselves on the psyche and memory of that year's camp that that becomes the colour tint of the glasses through which you view it.

You will notice from the paragraph above that my unutterably appalling choice of phrases never seems to go out of fashion.  Or, indeed, enter it.

Anyhoo, what fashion are this group forging?  What trends are these guys using as their camp a la mode?  What is en vogue this year?  Well, here's the amazing thing.  It's something we could not hope to teach, something we have tried to weave into a thousand School Improvement Plans, but always manage to lose sight of.  Something intangible, but incredibly important.  Something wonderful.

It is (drum roll please) team work.

What we adults have commented upon repeatedly this week is how well they have worked together.  Wind surfing yesterday they had to do in pairs, one holding whilst the other got on.  They were immense, not only holding the surf but encouraging and supporting one another, reveling in their friends' successes and consoling failed attempts.

Yesterday afternoon the title of the activity was "team challenge", but, as we have discovered in years gone by, this does not always encourage working in that method.  However, we saw nothing but amazing group work - 9 children working together to write on a whiteboard with a pen attached to a gas bottle and several ropes - I'm not making it up.  My group worked on the notorious island challenge, set up for adults, for an hour and a quarter, and then shared in the achievements althogether, posing for shared photos of triumph.

Today, children have collaborated on building huge towers. Nothing special you may say, until I tell you that they were standing on top of it whilst trying to build it!  At the other end of the centre, teams were building, and then sailing and racing, huge rafts.  All four rafts built, with great teamwork and shared effort, floated for over 25 minutes.  Two groups actually managed to pull their rafts together and swap every member from one to the other (with two year 6 boys voluntarily in the freezing water holding them together for everyone else).  Most touching was how they encouraged one another to take the leap of faith, or run of a pontoon into a lake of faith.  One of the year 5 children braved it.  She emerged from the depths frozen, but ears ringing to the cheers of her friends from the group.

This evening, at the annual Willis quiz, the completely jumbled up groups all laughed and giggled their way through questions and tasks.  At the end I asked the teams to choose their most athletic year 5.  One group chose their smallest and possibly least athletic.  They all knew it was ironic.  They all knew it was a giggle.  They all joined in - little one included.

Some fashions are manufactured, predictable, even dull.  Some are priceless, and impossible to engineer without the goodwill of the models themselves.  Some just make you smile a little more, or a lot.

As the cheese board looms, for another day, that is all.