It has been 345 days since I wrote myself a letter as I sat in my back garden at the end of summer and contemplated the school year voyage which lay ahead. That journey is now 359 days old. And as we reach the final week, a speck has appeared on the horizon. Land has […]
With Richi firing the starting pistol of the next General Election on 4th July, the party for the Tories, literally and metaphorically, looks to be over. If it was a house party, the last revellers would be bringing the night to a chaotic close. Gillian Keegan and Esther McVey would be draining the last of […]
It has been, at time of writing, 2,241 days since an inspector last called. The first three years don’t count. The inspector rarely calls before their report’s third birthday. But, at time of writing, that is still 1145 days in the ‘OFSTED window’. 1145 days of waiting for the phone to ring on some idle […]
If you drop a frog into a pan of boiling water, it will yelp and struggle until it eventually dies. However, if you drop a frog into a pan of cold water and then gradually heat the water until boiling point, it won’t stir. It won’t notice the temperature gradually increasing around it until it […]
The text popped up at about 10am on a casual Tuesday in early October. Running a really long way was something I’d taken for granted, the thing that had (since giving up looking rakish and cool by smoking, aged 29) been my go-to stress-beater. Whatever else was going on, I could always go for a […]
22nd March 2020. The news had been talking about it for weeks. Real – yet unreal… theoretical. We were told we were ‘two weeks behind’. But it was like so much on the news: things that happened to other people. We’d starting preparing for it at school a fortnight earlier. But it was an inbox […]
CLICK FOR REMOTE LEARNING PLAN Like you all, the last 10 days have been a race to re-establish remote learning following what could only be described as a ‘less than ideal’ 48 hours of communications from our glorious leaders at the start of term. Like you all, we’ve looked to learn lessons from our first […]
The playground was eerily quiet. The parents collecting their children stood in shocked silence. We’d seen it on the TV, in other places, first far away. Then closer, as the storm blew in from the east. But when it arrived it caught us all off guard. As a staff we had begun planning for a […]
The reception children jigged to ‘Mr Bluesky’ booming out on the school PA, waving to friends that they’d not seen in months. One slipped the grip of her mother’s hand and ran over and (before I could stop her at a safe 2m) gave me a hug. But the parents stood in complete silence. To […]
“It’s not good Simon. Not Good at all!” She fired the words out like a Gatling gun; her eyes making no attempt to hide a mixture of disappointment and contempt. I had been a new Head at my struggling school for about ten months and this was the LA’s second ‘Teaching and Learning Review’ – […]
