Educating Ruby (22 page)

If your exploration of blogs, websites, videos and wikis begins to become overwhelming, one simple self-protection strategy is to set up a Google Alert with a small number of key words in it. It will then prompt you by email when a chosen blogger has made a new post or something new has appeared on a particular topic. If you want to further screen out content then try Google Scholar which will take you to sites which start from a research context.

The simplest thing you can do is to join the debate on
www.educatingruby.org
. In doing so we can begin to see how many of us share a common view of what needs to change in schools. At a practical level you can also find out which other parents, grandparents and concerned citizens are active in your local area and join forces.

Let us finish by reminding you why your voice and your participation are so important. The changes that need to happen involve encouraging, connecting and celebrating the initiatives of the kind we illustrated in
Chapter 5
. There are many, but they are still in the minority. If we are to reach the tipping point that is needed, they have to scale up faster. In terms of Gleicher’s formula, we have to help people to articulate their dissatisfactions with the status quo, to be able to imagine a better future and to understand the small, practical steps that can help any school make progress firmly in the right direction. All of these are vital because resistance is still high in many places. Change takes energy, so people need reassurance and encouragement – and a bit of pressure – to put in the effort it takes. We need to keep reassuring everyone that the results go up, not down, if you do start to shift the school’s culture.

If change is to happen faster, though, we need not just brave school leaders but a change in the political weather. General elections are a competitive event that come round every four or so years. They are like the World Cup, but with only a small number of teams. Politicians’ lives are geared around these events, and the worst thing that can happen is to lose. The very worst thing that can happen for any individual politician is to do something that contributes to their side losing. This means that, for much of this five-year cycle, politicians are obliged to play defensively, at the same time as creating the impression of doing all kinds of things that are eye-catching and important. They have to look busy and decisive, while at the same time doing nothing that might upset the
Daily Mail
or the Murdoch press. This all means
that they cannot engage with anything that is subtle, complicated, hard to sell or long term. In other words, they are condemned, by the very nature of short-term, cyclical, competitive, two or three party politics, to fail to do what is necessary – especially as far as education is concerned. Politicians are bound to do too little, too late. It’s a miserable position to be in, and they deserve our sympathy.

Unless. Unless the mood of the populace changes, and they begin to fear that they will lose substantial numbers of votes if they don’t do what is required. Only the real fear of losing is strong enough to force them to overcome their natural caution. Only when it looked like the No Campaign might lose the Scottish referendum was the Westminster bubble galvanised into action. Only when UKIP threaten to drain substantial numbers of voters from the Conservative Party does the leadership respond – first by bullying and then, if that doesn’t work, by shifting policies to try to attract those perfidious voters back.

At the moment, the best chance of getting our educational movement heading in the right direction is for all of us to get off our backsides, stirring up our friends and relations, asking awkward questions of our MPs, signing online petitions, fighting for places on the governing bodies of our local schools and all the rest of it.

It’s not about party politics; it’s about how to get people in power to do the right thing. It’s about being able to speak confidently about our dissatisfactions: the amount of time wasting and real damage that too many schools still inflict on bright young minds. It’s about being able to talk passionately about the need, and the practicality, of focusing more intently and explicitly on the development of 21st century character strengths. It’s about sharing as widely and loudly as we can the stories of deep success that we come across
– not just crowing about A level results. If we can do that, policies will begin to change, the political wind will begin to fill the sails of change and teachers will feel support for finally being able to teach in the way that made them want to do the job in the first place. They will be truly able – as our friend Art Costa has put it – to prepare young people not just for a life of tests, but for the tests of life. And that will make millions of young people, and their families, very happy.

In many cases the offer of help (even if refused!) can stimulate thought on the part of the school and, once you have started you will never look back as you develop a more meaningful relationship with the school. You are likely to be asked to undergo a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check (which used to be called a CRB or Criminal Records Bureau check) to ensure that you are a suitable person to be working with children.

The following are just a few books that have made us think, including some of our own:

I’m Guy. I’m 67, and I don’t have any children of my own. I like most children and enjoy their company, but I worry about whether school is giving them the best possible preparation not just for further study but for life. I went to a primary school in North London. The headmaster (as they invariably were in those days) was a stern man (at least to a 5-year-old) called Mr Giles. I was so worried about making mistakes in my exercise book that I rubbed right through the paper and had to go to the head and be told off. Sewing made me really anxious – my grubby child’s hands sweated so profusely that they turned the cloth into a dirty rag. Mr Giles again. I went back there a couple of years ago to look around. They still had the register from 1953 and there I was! The current head was Mr Herring. He was much nicer. I found they are now using an educational approach my colleagues and I have developed called Building Learning Power (BLP). How things have changed.

When I was 8½ we moved to the West Midlands, and between the ages of 9 and 18 I went to King’s School Worcester. I had the potential to be a chorister, but my mum thought it would interfere with my lessons. She was educationally ambitious for me. Mum was a piano teacher and dad was a clerk in the Midland Bank (now HSBC). I did unexpectedly well at O level (the forerunners of GCSEs), and as a result consciously decided that ‘being bright’ was an option, so I studied harder and got into Cambridge. Before going to university, I taught chemistry for a few months and discovered a bent for explaining tricky things in engaging ways, which has never left me.

But Cambridge chemistry went too fast for me to understand properly so I got dispirited, my results plummeted and I switched (much to mum’s dismay) to psychology, which I took to like a duck to water. I found you could argue and theorise about evidence and
not just remember it. I went on to get married and do a doctorate in psychology at Oxford. In August 1973 my marriage broke down and my doctorate was failed. I discovered that my reserves of resilience and resourcefulness were massively unequal to the emotional turmoil I was experiencing. Out of this, with the help of a great counsellor, I evolved a lifelong interest in the personal side of learning, and have spent the rest of my life researching and writing about it. (I eventually gained my doctorate, and got very happily remarried, so all’s well that ends well!) In recent years, with the help of Bill and a host of adventurous colleagues and teachers, I have been designing small, smart, practical things that teachers can do that develop pupils’ confidence, independence and pleasure in wrestling with difficult things – and get better results in the process. That’s what Building Learning Power is.

And I’m Bill. My dad was a teacher. He became headmaster of a school called King’s School in Gloucester and then an HMI – one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. On a day soon after he became an HMI he proudly told my sister and me that he was going to be the eyes and ears of the Queen in schools and help them all to become better. So education has always been a big thing in my family – though a mixed blessing. I remember resolving at the age of 19 that the one career I would have nothing to do with was teaching! Four years later I found myself standing in front of a group of 12-year-olds about to explain the mysteries of English tenses to them – and discovered I loved teaching. I trained as a teacher, taught in some tough schools, and by the late 1980s I was a deputy head teacher in a large secondary school in West London, and Kenneth (now Lord) Baker (remember him?) was set on introducing something called the national curriculum. I decided that I’d take a sideways move and went to Winchester to set up a new charity called Learning through Landscapes, and then came back to London to be chief executive of the Campaign
for Learning. In 2008, with Guy, I created the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester.

I’ve got three children, 10-year-old twins (a boy and a girl) and an older son, who is 23. School didn’t seem to inspire my eldest son as much as he had hoped and consequently I don’t think his school days were the happiest of his life. I think he really found something that stimulated him when on an internship year as part of his university degree. My younger two have their ups and downs but are hungry to learn new things and often do seem to be stimulated by their current school. Things they do out of the classroom – sport, music, church and Cubs – are at least as important to them as lessons. Current passions are birds of prey, singing, rollerblading, ice hockey, piano and loom bands (a craze that may have been forgotten by the time you read this!).

These days, often in collaboration with Guy, I spend my time trying to puzzle out, from the perspective of a parent, researcher and ex-school leader, how we can make schools better places. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m 59, so I’ve got nearly a decade to go before I catch up with my co-author!