Head Teacher Andrew Ramanandi, from St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School, Blaydon, considers the reintroduction of accountability measures next academic year and what it will mean for his school.
As the Christmas holidays were coming to a close, I braced myself for what I knew would be a challenging two terms. OFSTED were coming to inspect St Joseph’s under the new(ish) framework and we were ready. The story of this academic year was clearly going to be ‘Climate Change’ and the Australian fires had painted a vivid and frightening reality that had visibly affected our children and, for me, this would be the true test of our curriculum, rather than OFSTED.
I had questions which were very much about the qualities we had developed in children. Did our older children have sufficient knowledge to begin to understand the myriad of complex and interconnected aspects of the situation? Had we given them a wide enough vocabulary to express their concerns and articulate their fears? Were we fostering creativity that might enable them to solve some of the problems we were facing? How far had we developed their values and ethics to engender a sense of belonging, of citizenship and of responsibility?
What I didn’t realise was that these queries would soon be truly tested and done so under the lens of a global pandemic.
The past four months have been the most challenging of my career. In late March, like schools across the country, I closed the gates for the majority of our families and did so with a heavy heart. We interpreted and implemented ever changing guidance and provided emergency childcare as safely as we could whilst supporting home learning. We expanded provision as soon as we could do so safely. Now all of our ‘bubbles’ are full and our thoughts have turned to how we will expand provision to all in September.
Curriculum design is going to be more important than ever and, in the desire to ‘catch up’, there is a risk schools will feel pressured to narrow the experiences children are given instead of seizing this opportunity to reset. This is especially so now, as we have been told all Primary accountability checks will still take place in the next academic year. The risk that this pressure is passed onto children is an all too real possibility.
I have experience of a bright and thoughtful 10-year old who cried this week. When asked why, the answer was simple and logical from his point of view. He knows he has SATs next year. He knows he’s missed a lot of year 5. He’s fearful he won’t do as well as he could have and that this will have consequences for his future. I hope our reassurances that SATs don’t matter and that they test us and not him worked.
I suspect they didn’t.
Previously, the whole country had been running timed races over set distances; fastest wins. For the convenience of the analogy, let’s pretend some aren’t cheating and using buses! We all stopped mid-race and had a huge pause. Children in schools were accessing childcare, and families – mine included – were bumbling through home learning. Many of our children will have moved further away from the finish line and have effectively now run less than they had when the race stopped. We can’t expect them to start the race now and, despite this pause, end the race when they would have had this not happened.
This a great time for renewal and it is necessary.
Having widened our provision and being as full as we can be, we are seeing huge variance in children’s experiences. We are having face-to-face socially distant meetings with all pupils and we anticipate increased attachment issues in September, especially with our youngest children. We will be assessing well-being in the first few weeks and we will revisit Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the Leuven scales with staff.
We will continue to prioritise developing a ‘Growth Mindset’ with a specific focus on both resilience and perseverance; many children have found these areas particularly challenging, during this period away from school.
We need to invest in meta-cognition and reteach children how they learn. We need to support staff and put great thought into how we teach and what we teach, especially in these restrictive environmental circumstances.
This awful situation gives us an unprecedented opportunity to really assess what we do and plan to do it better. We’re designing numerous systems, procedures and protocols and it’s all too easy to get hung up on the logistics of the ‘What? and the ‘How?’ and perhaps lose sight of the ‘Why?’.
If we get the learning conditions right, children will be in the position and in an environment that will enable them to make the rapid and sustained progress we all want them to. This learning needs to be deep-rooted and have substantive foundations in order for our children to thrive and to flourish.
We should be redesigning the whole system to create an environment where children love learning and are challenged to beat personal best after personal best instead of being asked to jump over hoops and through walls.
Like the majority of school leaders, I will continue working to enable my staff and school community to support children’s learning based on their age and stage, devising appropriate, broad curricula to enable them to move forward and become thoughtful, creative, articulate, healthy, happy and motivated citizens.
That’s what I intend OFSTED to see the next time they visit St Joseph’s.
The Schools North East Blog 
Superb, genuine writing from a professional who clearly cares about the children in his care.
There are so many points made in this blog that capture the moment and the issues that education faces.
As school leaders we have an opportunity if we are bold enough, to reach out to all those people who understand the reasons for needed change and cry out for it.
The statistical information that shows an ever increase in the number of children with mental health issues is enough to present a case for change. When we dig deeper, the flaws in the system are obvious, the years of under funding, the lack of trust in the profession and an unrelenting persistence to drive children in a direction that doesn’t consider their ability to flourish if given the nurture and time to find their true sense of who they are and what gifts they have.
The narrowing curriculum has been due to the system. The high stakes nature of judgement – the pressure for perceived success in a limited expression of what it means to be human and demonstrate success of being human.
In history the great artists, mathematicians, chemists, geographers, musicians etc developed their skills through time, time immersed in learning…our system is a target machine, a child factory and gives little thought to the human need for that essential state of flow.
There is a better way but we need professionals, parents and parliament to come together and see the alternative path. Education for the people by the people that know…Martin Seligman and Sir Ken Robinson speak such sense – all our futures depend on a rethink.
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