David's diary |
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post(s) 1-2 of 6
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Two days as a teaching assistant
15/05/2007
After two days living with a Muslim family in Birmingham – two days as a teaching assistant in a Hull secondary school.
Two English classes, some playground duty, and helping supervise lunch are the main elements of my day. Remembering how to analyse and write about poems, without getting my metaphors confused with personification, oxymorons or enjoinment is one of the main challenges. Tomorrow I'll be helping the history department, which I hope will be more familiar territory.
I'm at a recovering school serving a pretty tough housing estate on the outskirts of the city. A few years ago this school had one of the lowest GCSE pass rates in the country – now it's above the national average with 62 per cent getting 5 A-Cs at GCSE. But when you look at the percentage getting these grades in core subjects like English and maths, the percentage falls to 7%.
The day starts badly, for me at least. Helping register a class of 13 year olds, no-one – and I mean literally no one – has even heard of the Conservative Party. Using “hangman” on the smart new interactive whiteboard we get to “Conser_ati_e party” before any one gets it. As the point of me being here is to observe and to learn – and not get the usual “here's a visiting politician” treatment - maybe this is a good thing.
I'm not the only one with a bad start to the day. I meet a 16 year old boy loitering outside the hall where he's supposed to be sitting an important GCSE and he tells me he feels rotten - “got pissed last night” - and isn't looking forward to the exam. A timely reminder that improving schools is as much a matter for parents as it is for teachers.
Impressions?
The skill that some teachers have in maintaining order, using their natural authority, while making the subject interesting is a wonder to behold. Given that they are doing this at a time – during GCSEs - of maximum “teaching for the test” it's even more impressive.
But the overwhelming impression I get is of the importance of good behaviour and discipline. It's what the teachers talk about most – and it was the thing that most exercised a small group of kids I had lunch with. And in every class you can see the potential, and often the reality, of poor behaviour by a few wrecking the chances of the rest. And this is in a school that has made huge strides; as the deputy head said to me, before recent changes they were “just glorified baby sitters” looking after children who often behaved appallingly. Truancy – or “twagging” in the Hull slang - is still a problem but here it's getting a little better.
Two teachers I have coffee with in a small staff room would favour a zero tolerance of poor language and behaviour – and I think they're right. In the run up to GCSEs you feel so clearly that these kids only get one chance – and for too many it's simply missed.
Of course there's more to say about teaching methods, the madness of closing special schools (including those for children with behavioural problems), the paramount importance of the basics and the dangers of new teaching fads (I am still to be convinced by the mania for “personalised learning”), and I will say more about these things tomorrow. But order, discipline and behaviour absolutely have to come first.
The current system makes it harder to enforce discipline. Like all schools, the one I'm at is fined for every pupil they exclude, so it's not surprising that they try and avoid excluding disruptive pupils even when they want to do just that. The result is that language and behaviour that simply would not have been tolerated in the past is put up with. What's more, the kids know it.
Change in our society – big, long term, substantial cultural change - is needed. And we should start by making every school head the absolute captain of their ship, able to maintain discipline and exclude poorly behaving pupils without being second-guessed or penalised for doing it.
Of course we need to think hard about how to turn excluded kids around – the current system based around Pupil Referral Units is a bit of a disaster. In the last few months I've visited a couple of fantastic social enterprises that do a brilliant job with excluded kids, and we're working on plans to enable them and similar organisations to be able to offer their expertise to more and more kids who need it.
But I've seen today how much teachers and pupils suffer from and resent the bad behaviour of a minority ruining the chances of the majority and we've been far too soft on this. Teachers want to teach and most kids want to learn – it's pathetic that our education system makes it harder, not easier for them to do that.
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Day two in Birmingham
11/05/2007
Spent the night staying with Abdullah and his family in Birmingham. His children are a lot better behaved than mine (and older) so my sleep was blissfully uninterrupted.
Breakfast with the family, before taking the children to school. Here’s the interesting part – his three Muslim children go to a local faith school - a Jewish faith school. King David Primary school, which is massively oversubscribed, has a mixed roll with some 60 per cent of pupils from Muslim families, around a third from Birmingham’s Jewish community and the rest a mixture of Christians and Sikhs. The day starts with some prayers in Hebrew, led by the head of Jewish religious studies.
My obvious question to Abdullah – why do you, a practising Muslim, send your kids to a Jewish school? – does not get just the obvious answer: good discipline and good results. On top of that, the very fact that the school has a faith and a strong ethos is seen, at least by Abdullah and his family, as a positive advantage.
To those who think that faith schools are part of the problem and prevent us from building a more cohesive society this tale has a powerful message – far from being part of the problem, schools like King David’s are actually part of the solution. They can promote integration and cohesion, instil discipline, teach the basics, inspire young minds and raise their aspirations – all at the same time.
Later in the day I visit a private Muslim school, the Al-Hira school. Again, some Muslim schools, particularly private ones, have been criticised for encouraging separateness, rather than shared values. I quiz the head about this issue. She accepts that this is a problem in some schools, but in her current job her answer is straightforward and encouraging – her whole philosophy is about opening up the school to the whole community, to dispel any suspicions there may be about “what goes on there.” The school teaches the National Curriculum, and as I walked round, meeting pupils and teachers, it was obvious – from the wall charts about Shakespeare and Richard III to the confident and outward-going manner of the kids – that this is a school that’s helping to strengthen community cohesion, not undermine it.
In fact, the head teacher is totally committed to getting this school into the state sector where it can expand, take more non-Muslim pupils and have access to more resources The current fees are much lower than usual for a private school, £1,500 a year, and that’s many thousands less than the cost of a state school place.
Today Al-Hira’s pass rate at GCSE is 25 per cent. While that’s better than the worst state schools it is still quite poor. The head is confident that she can get it up to 50 and then 75 per cent. If she is right then a new Muslim faith school in the state sector in this part of Birmingham could, along with King David, play a valuable role in tacking the acute shortage of good school places.
As for the rest of the day it’s made up of a number of visits, a few meetings, filming a clip for webcameron about Tony Blair’s announcement (finally!) of his departure timetable - and quite a bit of work.
The work includes cleaning up a city council owned car park with members of the Balshall Heath Forum and volunteers, and helping take the moss and grass off what ought to be a red dirt, all weather football pitch. I also spend some more time behind the cash till in a neighbourhood shop.
Cleaning the car park I come across a discarded syringe and needle. While helping clear the football pitch I chat with an ex-con who’s now living above a crack house which he says the police still haven’t closed. But the story of how the Forum and its neighbourhood patrols cleared a lot of the drug dealers and prostitutes off the streets is an inspiring one. They literally refused to put up with them, picketing the streets, posting the names of kerb crawlers to their wives and offices and forcing the council to evict the drug dealers.
The ex-con (who is white) is still unconvinced, telling me the Forum is just “Asians looking after their own.” I point out that the team clearing the football pitch includes white people, British Asians and Afro-Caribbeans working together, but he simply won’t listen to anything that challenges his bone-headed racial stereotype. Depressing.
The nature of the community work raises an interesting question.
Where you have great community groups like the Forum doing things in and for their local community, why is it so hard for them to get more responsibility and more money?
Real devolution should mean giving them the right to say to the council: “we’re carrying out useful work on behalf of the community that we are doing in your place, and we’d like the resources that should go with it.”
Put more simply, the last Conservative government gave council tenants the right to own their council house; shouldn’t the next one give local people, through such local forums, the right to own and run their parks, community centres and public spaces?
It’s been a fascinating couple of days.
Saying goodbye to Abdullah at Birmingham New Street I’m embarrassed with his gifts of T-shirts, shoes and a traditional robe which he says will be perfect for any visit I make to Pakistan.
It’s yet another reminder that, as I blogged yesterday, integration is a two way street and if we want to remind ourselves of British values – hospitality, tolerance and generosity to name just three - there are plenty of British Muslims ready to show us what those things really mean.
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