Scenes From The Battleground

In my experience most schools have one or two competent members of SMT. In a good school this is the Head and the Deputy Head. In a bad school it will be the Assistant Head in charge of PSHE and the Assistant Head responsible for The Sixth Form.

There are a few things that make a good member of SMT:

1) They walk the talk. They enforce the rules they expect you to enforce. They teach the way they expect you to teach. They don’t mind you observing their lessons. They don’t ignore trouble in the corridors, hide in their offices or ignore students who aren’t obeying rules concerning uniform or behaviour around school.

2) They are honest. They keep their promises. If they say they will support you in a lesson then they are there. If they say they will sort something they will sort it. If they don’t know the answer to a question they will tell you and get back to you. If they can’t get something done they say, instead of failing to do it and looking for somebody else to blame. They don’t use euphemisms, if a kid is out of order they will say so. If a job they give you is difficult they will tell you that. If a school is difficult they will tell you that, with no weasel words about how it will be better once you “build relationships”.

3) They are on the teachers’ side. They remember what it is like to teach. They don’t waste time trying to see teachers’ problems from “the other side”, whether that’s the students or management. They have a sincere conversation with the teacher about what can be done. Most importantly of all they are like this with parents. In their book a parent who is unsatisfied with the school needs to find a new school. There are no “personality clashes” and no undermining of staff.

4) They’ll get the kid. If you report a disciplinary incident they deal with it without trying to refer it elsewhere or to pretend it isn’t serious. They assume that if you have gone to them it is because it is serious, and because nobody else will deal with it.

5) They take responsibility. If they are there, then they are in charge. This is particularly important for things like supervising the canteen, or children on sportsday or a trip. There is no need to ask them for help in such a situation, they are looking for the problems and dealing with them.

Few schools have nobody like this, although some schools have so few that they end up overworked. What is rare is the situation where such a person is the headteacher. I have only encountered this briefly, but it is a joy. In particular there are some other qualities that the competent headteacher has:

1) They lead. Almost everything they do is their own idea, and they don’t care for consultation or debate. They will also make it clear what they want or expect at all times. You never have to ask what they want as they have already made it clear. Their aims are clear and non-negotiable.

2) They look for trouble. You find them in the corridors at lesson change over. They ask what the matter is if you look stressed. They intervene in as many incidents as possible, particularly if awkward parents are involved. They will take on new projects if they are likely to make a difference. They are never satisfied with the status quo even when accepting it would make their life easier in the short term.

3) They fight The Powers That Be. They will fight the Local Authority. They will ignore targets for exclusion. They will not ask what other schools are doing before taking on a new idea. They will pick a fight with anybody that interferes, and will rely on the school’s exam relults to let them get away with it. Not only that, but they do get those results. As long as they are in place the school’s results keep going up.

There’s a naïve idea that the best headteachers are the nicest ones. While I know that an evil backstabbing swine makes a poor head, a weak one is even worse. The best headteachers are ruthless bastards, but they are on your side and they are ruthless with dealing with problems, rather than in covering them up. We owe them a lot. I’d like to buy a drink for all the good secondary headteachers in England. (After all I’d probably get change from a tenner).

If you are the headteacher of a Battleground School the following types of behaviour will be normal for you:

1) The Strategic Euphemism. When interviewing suckers, sorry, candidates for teaching positions, and talking to parents and governors it becomes important to be able to avoid explaining what the school is actually like, but too blatant a lie is likely to be found out. The best way to avoid being caught out is to describe the phenomena of the school in certain glossy phrases:

“Our students aren’t afraid to say what they think” means “our students are rude to everybody”.

“Our students often have a difficult home-life” means “our parents are scum”

“We will expect you to cater for a variety of different learning styles” means “let the kids sit and chat in your lessons, it’s safest that way”.

2) The Bad Reference. There’s nothing like keeping hold of staff by stopping them from leaving. Unless you actively want shot of somebody and have a replacement lined up then you make sure you write a hatchet job. If you haven’t said anything critical of them to their face then it might take a year for them to realise what’s happening. Even if they do find out then they have very limited options.to do anything about it. If you become known for your bad references then they might not even try to leave in the first place. The great thing is that in a bad school, you can paint any teacher as bad. They will have had problems with bad behaviour. (Bill Rogers, Mr Chips and Coach Carter combined would have problems with bad behaviour in your school). So make out it is their fault. If they don’t like you, and they probably don’t as they want to leave, then say they have trouble getting on with their colleagues.

3) The Fortress Of Solitude. Nothing reduces a headteacher’s authority more than being seen with children. If they are rude to your face in front of staff then the staff may realise you are not in control of the school. The solution to this problem is to create your own Fortress of Solitude, otherwise known as your office. If it is safely placed away from classrooms and you never leave it, except to go on Local Authority junkets, then you may never have to deal with a student directly at all. It can be embarrassing if you are showing somebody around the school and some of the students say “who the hell are you?” but it beats being called names by the little scrotes.

4) Delegating Responsibility. It is well known that great managers delegate. Great headteachers delegate so much that nobody quite knows what they do at all. If anyone asks what you are doing mumble something about paperwork and attending meetings. Some headteachers warn staff in briefings if they are going to be unavailable that day. This is a mistake as it just becomes noticeable that this makes no difference to anything that happens in the school. The rule of delegating is: If it’s important to you (i.e. things that you might be asked about by the local authority) give it to another member of SMT, if it’s not important (i.e. it’s to do with behaviour, or with the kids) give it to middle managers.

5) Blame People To Their Faces. Everything will go wrong eventually. The important thing is that it was in no way your fault. You need to invite every member of staff into your office at some point and blame them for something. Make it sound official, it looks good if you have some paperwork about it that you aren’t allowed to show them. If they apologise despite having done nothing wrong then you know that they will never stand up to you, and that you can blame them for other things in the future. If they do stand up to you, perhaps by leaving or going to their union rep then at least you have uncovered a troublemaker.

6) Blame People Behind Their Back. Some people are too indispensable, or too well-connected to be confronted directly. Therefore it becomes important not to talk to them directly about whatever you are blaming them for. The important thing is that you have an excuse for what’s going on. People can go for six months to a year thinking that they have done an excellent job, with only management incompetence to slow them down, and then later discover that they have been given no credit for anything they’ve done but have been held personally responsible for the failings of everyone above them in the hierachy. Discipline is the worst area for this. A teacher may ruthlessly enforce the rules despite a complete lack of support, only to discover that the people who were meant to be supporting them held them personally at fault for having to enforce the rules in the first place. Teachers often object to being told “we are not going to do our jobs in following up bad behaviour, because we think you are to blame for every bit of bad behaviour you tell us about” but if you say it behind their back then it could take months before they notice their referrals are being delinerately ignored (rather than just accidentally like everyone else’s).

7) Fake Concern about Staff Well-Being. Given that so many of the miseries of teaching result directly from bad management it is very easy for teachers to suspect that headteachers don’t care about them at all. The easiest way to deal with this complaint is to buy into initiatives that are meant to help with staff well-being. These consist of an INSET explaining that in future there will be greater concern about staff well-being, followed by a questionnaire that asks people how unhappy they are and why. This questionnaire is then ignored (usually by claiming not enough staff filled it in). Coincidentally all the answers that were filled in were from respondents who said they were very unhappy and you are the reason why. If that doesn’t convince staff that you care then offer free aromatherapy sessions after school.

I discussed previously the rise of comprehensive schooling and the deteriorating position of the teaching profession. I didn’t explain the phenomena that followed on from this. The Battleground School is the type of school I have been writing about.

To be precise I am using the term to refer to schools of the following type:

• They are large, usually secular, mixed (or boys’) comprehensives.
• They have a limited or ineffective discipline system, in particular, referrals of serious incidents regularly result in no action against the student responsible and such incidents are common.
• School management explicitly avoid endorsing punishment as part of the school discipline system.
• The ethos of the school prioritises socialisation, but not socialisation into academic, religious or (conventional) moral values.
• Management deny the existence of the behaviour problems identified by staff, and see behaviour as primarily the responsibility of the teaching staff.

No figures exist for what proportion of schools are like this. My personal experience suggests that it has become the norm. I have direct experience of schools of this sort being praised by OFSTED as if nothing was awry. They form the overwhelming majority of schools in the Local Authorities where I have worked and I know from the reaction to this blog that a large number of teachers in other parts of this country are in such schools. The question I am interested in is not “how common are such schools?” I know that I am unlikely to get a more precise answer than “very common”. What intrigues me is how long such schools have been a feature of our education system.

The first point is that they have existed since at least the early sixties, before comprehensives had even became widespread. The first reference I can find to such a school is that of Risinghill which was established in 1960. Berg (1968) writes a glowing review of a school serving the deprived based on principles she finds agreeable. The headmaster, Michael Duane:

• announced to the children there would be no more corporal punishment
• claimed “I personally have no time for punishment at all”
• concluded the discipline problems were the fault of “second-raters” on the teaching staff who “did not know how to deal with children who are uninhibited and therefore a threat to the authoritarian standard”
• refused to expel any child
• did not support staff with disciplining the students

To him good teachers were the ones who “treat people [children] with respect, as friends”. “Humanist assemblies” and “child centred lessons” were introduced. Sex education became X-rated in its language and explicitness. A School Council was introduced.

In prize day speeches Duane declared:

“To measure a school by exam results is like estimating the quality of a man’s life by the number of calories he burns … They bear no relation to the real purposes of living… vigour.. spontaneity.. and a zest for life. These are important.”

and

“You cannot educate against the climate of opinion or attitude in the family, or neighbourhood or society.”

Despite the writer’s spin (apparently traditionalist teachers and unprincipled politicians are to be blamed for everything that went wrong at the school) it soon becomes clear that violent gangs formed among the pupils. Staff wouldn’t stay at the school and were often off sick. Inspectors found obscene graffiti, internal truancy, and unruly and uninterested children. Staff complained of having been attacked (including with a gun) and were often sworn at. One teacher, of the most liberal variety, describes a boy pulling a knife on her and a girl in a class being molested by a boy, with no punishment given (apparently this approach shows you are “a special kind of teacher”).

It is hard to read Berg’s account without concluding that she is describing the archetype for modern British schooling. However, this was not when such schools became normal. Risinghill became a national scandal and was closed down. Other comprehensives did not follow suit. Some schools that became comprehensives made a virtue of retaining a grammar school ethos, such as Highbury Grove Boy’s School. But over time things changed. Francis Gilbert’s two books (Gilbert 2004 and 2005) describe Battleground Schools in the early 1990s which, although not named, are easily identifiable. McNulty (2005) describes something similar, again dating back to the early nineties.

The creation of OFSTED led to the identification of failing schools, some, such as Hackney Downs and The Ridings became infamous. Others became infamous for other reasons, such as St Geroge’s in Westminster where the headmaster Philip Lawrence was murdered at the school gates before entering Special measures (I include St George’s despite it being a Catholic school as Stubbs (2003) suggests that at its low point it lost any Catholic ethos). These schools are, however, the extreme cases and can no more be considered to be representative of a wider class of schools than Risinghill was. What’s more indicative is Blum (1998) and Johnson (1999).

Paul Blum’s book is an excellent survival guide for teachers in Battleground Schools, or in his phrase “difficult classrooms”. In his introduction he describes the problems faced by teachers:

“There will often be situations in which they will be faced with defiance, aggression and verbal abuse… [and] low-level energy-sapping daily routines in which they struggle to get the pupils to stop talking and actually listening to what they are saying.”

The success of this book (I recently saw large numbers of copies in the library of a university well know for its teacher training, far more than any other behaviour book) suggests his advice is widely applicable and that challenging classrooms are very common indeed, but he nevertheless writes as if the “rough schools” he’s describing are only those schools “which [are] bottom or near the bottom of the examination league table in [their] local area”.

Martin Johnson’s book has a similar viewpoint, despite being written as a polemic rather than as advice. He describes perfectly life in a Battleground School, including the anarchy in the corridors and the hostility faced in the classrooms. Like Blum he condemns those who suggest that “good teaching” is a panacea to classroom chaos and claims that he is talking about a minority of schools. He identifies these as “schools for the underclass” and assumes they exist only as a result of deprivation.

So as I’ve said the battleground schools have existed for, five decades. However, for most of that time they seemed exceptional. By the nineties they were easily found and by the late nineties and this decade they were common enough for people to write books about them as if they were an unavoidable widespread feature of UK education system. All the tough schools I’ve worked in have had a history, passed on by the old hands, that explains when they become tough. The nineties and the turn of the twenty-first century figure prominently in those stories.

As I said, I am convinced that they have become the norm, that they are actually the bog standard, at least in England. A short scan of the British education blogosphere and teacher forums seems to confirm this impression. Many of the books I mentioned carefully tried to explain the exceptional nature of the experiences described, and carefully and sympathetically explained the plight of the urban poor. By 2006 no such niceties were necessary, teachers were willingly buying a book, with a cover that stated:

“The kids are thick, the parents are scum, there’s drugs everywhere and half the girls are giving birth.”

Chalk (2006)

The Battleground school has now taken over.

References

Berg, Leila, Risinghill:Death of a Comprehensive School, 1968, Penguin Books

Chalk, Frank, It’s Your Time You’re Wasting, 2006, Monday Books.

Gilbert, Francis, I’m a Teacher Get Me Out Of Here, 2004, Short Books

Gilbert, Francis, Teacher On The Run, 2005, Short books.

Johnson, Martin, Failing Schools, Failing City 1999, Jon Carpenter

McNulty, Phil, Extreme Headship, 2005, Trafford

Stubbs, Marie A Head of The Class, 2003, John Murray

Almost every book ever written about behaviour management will include this piece of advice: “Be consistent”. Now in practice there are some members of SMT who will give the opposite advice (“be flexible”,) but it is generally accepted that consistency is a key part of managing behaviour. Kids should know the rules and that the rules should always apply.
There is, unfortunately, a commonly made exception. Common sense will always retreat in front of tradition and many schools have developed the tradition of having a day where – for charity – some of the school rules, namely the ones related to school uniform, are suspended. On these Non-Discipline Days (more often known as “Non-Uniform Days”) teachers are no longer able to object to the gang colours, short skirts, expensive trainers, sexually explicit t-shirts and identity concealing head gear that a teenager is forced to wear by their peers when not protected by adults. And who could possibly object? It’s for charity.
Well I could object for the following reasons.

1. Rules are not something that can be switched on and off. It makes no more sense to have a day when the uniform rules are relaxed than it would be to have a day where students are encouraged to skip lessons, break windows or burn down the canteen.
2. School uniforms are one of the most important weapons against truancy. Simply put, if a parent makes sure their teenage child is in uniform and locked out of the house there is a more than reasonable chance they will end up in school eventually. Take the uniforms out of the equation and they are far more likely to race to the nearest amusement arcade, shopping mall or crack house. At Woodrow Wilson School SMT brought an end to the recurring cycle of Non-Discipline Days when it was noted that it reduced attendance in years 10 and 11 by over ten percent.
3. Discipline is worse on these days. Children believe they won’t have to work as it is a special occasion. Caps and hoodies provide greater anonymity for truants and trouble makers. At my current school (which has a little bit of an internal truancy problem) I actually caught 14 different children out of lessons in a single afternoon on Non-Discipline day. (Well I say caught, a more accurate observation would be that in most cases I observed them pulling their hoods over their heads and running off.) And this is without mentioning the two girls in Year 9 who don’t do a thing all day because they have decided to do a sponsored silence to raise £1.63 in sponsorship money between them.
4. You have to constantly explain which rules are still in place and which aren’t:“No, you can’t dye your hair in the toilets”; “You can’t wear hats indoors”; “Balaclavas and gimp masks are not acceptable”; “Yes, you still have to bring in a pen to write with”.
5. Compassion inflation sets in. If the school could abandon the rules for Children In Need then they should do it for Comic Relief, and Jeans for Genes Day, and any emergency in the news, and for the local dogs home, and to fund the school’s awards day. It doesn’t take long before it’s one day a month and there’s still resentment from any teacher with a new good cause if they don’t get a day too.
6. It’s a pain to collect the money in.

Of course part of the problem is that with schools failing to carry out their core function of educating children in an orderly environment then there is an abnormally strong desire to get them to carry out secondary functions, such as charitable fundraising, community work or school productions. All these things would be highly desirable if schools were doing the basics right, but seem utterly unnecessary when there is anarchy in the classrooms not being dealt with. I sometimes fear that if given a choice between achieving a 100% literacy rate among students and appearing in the local paper handing over a cheque for £137.50 to a donkey sanctuary, most headteachers would choose the latter. Nobody wants to be seen as uncharitable. Running a rubbish school is however entirely socially acceptable.