Where will I do my pineapples? E-Book

Gill Kelly

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Imagine the scenario where a newly appointed Deputy Headteacher in charge of Curriculum is suddenly asked questions like How many RJ45 sockets would you like in your new classroom? What type of cabling would you like? Cat 4 or 5? Add this to the relentless drive to raise standards as well as organising the timetable, teaching, doing break duty and offering a friendly ear to staff... you get the picture. Written with the perspective of a senior leader, with many amusing and bizarre stories, this book describes how to keep sound educational principles at the heart of a Building Schools for the Future project. This book is not about the new building, it is about building a whole new school and the struggle, against all odds, to keep people and learning at the centre of the whole project. What came out of the process was a school that had a variety of learning spaces, fully trained staff, modern ICT and a bespoke year 7 transition curriculum. It was the only school building in the country to be delivered on time, within budget, with a ground breaking CPD programme. This is not to say that everything went smoothly. There was a lot of pain along the way, and many lessons learned about how to manage change. Perhaps more significantly, Where will I do my pineapples?' is about people and the potential to change thousands of lives.

Leseprobe

To Alan, without whom, I would not have got this far

Foreword

The first time I entered a new school funded by the Labour government’s ambitious Building Schools for the Future (BSF) scheme I was amazed. It was the most striking school building I had ever seen at a time when many schools were either Victorian factory-model buildings with high windows and an intractable sense of oppression or else 1960’s boxes with the smell of hopelessness growing as virulently as the moss on the leaking flat roofs of the mobile classrooms.

This school was different though. Gleaming, spacious, full of light, a great sweeping ark of a building that proclaimed loudly that learning was important, that children counted, that truly the very physical fabric of this thing called a ‘school’ had entered the twenty-first century.

‘The architect designed it so that the classrooms could be flexible but the teachers just rearranged everything to sit the students in rows facing the front,’ said my host for the visit.

I was gobsmacked.

Here was an opportunity on a very shiny award-winning plate to transform the nature of teaching and learning for the better and staff had recreated the old model in the skin of the new one. It was at this point that I realised the extent to which the BSF scheme was going to fail in so many cases, that the government was going to waste its money as the schools wasted their opportunities. It was on that afternoon that I realised that the whole multimillion pound project called BSF was in trouble and the phrase BSF:SOS was born – BSF: Same Old Shit.

But let me take you back to the turn of the eighteenth century and a Geography teacher from Scotland named James Pillans. He was credited with the idea of taking the slates that the children were using to write down their learning and putting them together on the wall. This, according to one particular view of history, is how the blackboard was born.

By writing in chalk the teacher was now able to put the knowledge stored in his or her head out there for all learners to see. And the seeing was important. With something to look at it now made sense to arrange the room in such a way that the learners could see, especially with mixed-aged classes, with the bigger children at the back, the smaller ones at the front and the teacher somewhere between the two depending on whether they were expounding or monitoring. The ‘gallery’ classroom model, developed by Samuel Wilderspin (who also invented the idea of the playground) supported the didactic model of teaching with the children as passive recipients of the teacher’s knowledge, putting questions to the teacher and answering questions posed by the teacher, all with the help of the new-fangled chalkboard.

Apart from the fact that the teacher doesn’t need to write anything these days and the information can be in video form, the interactive whiteboard is the direct descendent of Pillans’s invention and, although it can be used to go way beyond just being a twenty-first century black, green or white board, often it just isn’t.

The architecture of the classroom matched perfectly the paradigm of the teaching and learning and then very little changed, in either, for a hundred years or so and, as with the shining BSF school I visited, even when it could change, it didn’t.

Which is why we were delighted to be approached by Gill Kelly when she was at Nailsea to help her in the school’s project to use the new building as a lever by which she could try to create a new style of teaching and learning, to create a new paradigm that, if not doing away with the old one, would at least offer an element of choice and variety when it came to choosing what worked best.

And cancelling the multi-thousand pound order for interactive whiteboards in every classroom and encouraging them to move away from James Pillans’s model as the only way classrooms could look was the starting point.

This potential to make bold decisions was backed up by the research which underlined the tremendous opportunity that the BSF programme was giving schools:

There is no specific agreed definition of what constitutes educational transformation. However, schools going through the process have a clear understanding of the areas most important to them for assessing the extent to which BSF deliverseducational transformation. This includes more personalised teaching and learning and improving the life chances of children into their adult lives. Headteachers are confident that BSF can contribute to raising standards in school and beyond, by extending the benefits of their facilities to the wider community. In the case of the former, there was a recognised need to build capacity of staff to enable them to deliver a personalised teaching and learning experience to their pupils, though our research has indicated that schools, in particular, need a greater level of clarity on what educational transformation is.

(DCSF, 2010)

How many schools actually followed though on this opportunity and changed things fundamentally – or at least tried to change things like Gill Kelly and the other members of the team at Nailsea – is, I believe, a different thing altogether.

Of course, since those heady days when new schools cropped up like mushrooms, the current government has cancelled the future and its review into BSF talks of waste, inefficiency and costs out of control. We may never see such an ambitious programme again.

Because of that, what Gill has captured in this book, is a valuable once-in-a-lifetime insight into one ordinary school’s extraordinary approach to significant change that, while based around a BSF project, is actually relevant in any change management process. The way the school went about being brave, asking big questions, expecting answers from partners who would rather pull the wool over their eyes and sell them ‘kit’ that didn’t add any value to learning, the way they engaged the whole staff, the way they worked with hearts and minds and the way they followed through on their ambitions and made sure that their vision became as much of a reality as it possibly could – all of this means there is a great deal to be learned from what one school did in a sleepy backwater in the south-west of England.

Wherever there is change, significant change, there is significant opportunity. This is what this book is about. And where there is change, of course, there will be questions about pineapples …

Ian GilbertFranceJuly 2011

Acknowledgements

If I am living proof that having significant, supportive adults in your childhood creates successful confident people, then I have to acknowledge the part my parents played in this. Through their unwavering love and belief in my abilities, I have achieved more than I thought possible.

I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Independent Thinking ‘family’ of associates who have supported me in many ways throughout the journey, especially Jim Smith who acted as the main funnel between what the school needed and what Independent Thinking could offer. And, of course, my thanks and appreciation goes to all my colleagues at Nailsea School, especially David New, the head teacher.

I would also like to thank David New and Peter Scholey for permission to use ‘A Beautiful School’ in Appendix 1 and Trudy Jones and David New for permission to use ‘A Day in the Life of a Year 8 Student (2010)’, in Appendix 2.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Don’t Let the Bean Counters Take Over!

1. I’m the Tena Lady

2. Science Isn’t a Subject, It’s a Philosophy

3. Forming Relationships and Engendering Commitment

4. Conventional Toilets, Standard Classrooms

5. I Think It Went OK but Not Really Good

6. No, Really, Where Will I Do My Pineapples?

Appendix 1: A Beautiful School

Appendix 2: A Day in the Life of a Year 8 Student (2010)

Appendix 3: Summary of Building Schools for the Future ICT Consultation Sessions

Appendix 4: CPD Learning Loop

Appendix 5: Curriculum Design: Our Starting Point (September 2008)

Appendix 6: What If… ? by Ian Gilbert

Bibliography

Copyright

Introduction: Don’t Let the Bean Counters Take Over!

When I heard the news, I literally let out a scream of joy and hugged the nearest person. This happened to be the other deputy head, Steve Richards, but if it had been anyone else I would have done just the same.

Nailsea School had just been given the news that we had been allocated £32 million as part of the government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme to rebuild our ageing 1959 school. But don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t just about the money. For too long the buildings of this large secondary school in the south-west had dictated the teaching that went on in the classrooms, often with scant regard for the learning. The campus was made up of ‘boxes’ of a uniform nature of the sort you may well see if you are a teacher reading this at school and look out of your window. There was a regulation assembly hall, sports hall, school playing field and everything else you would expect from a late 1950’s school. As a result, a nineteenth century, broadly didactic form of pedagogy prevailed.

But now the school was being given the chance to transform learning, and we were going to grab it with both hands.

So began the three-year process that led to us moving into our shiny new building in September 2009; three years of hard work that resulted in a resounding success story in terms of academic achievement and community building and a rapturous response from staff, students and parents. What was our secret? In a nutshell, we had been radical in our vision, firm in demanding adherence to our moral purpose and quick on our feet when it came to problem solving.

Easy to say now, but a great deal harder to achieve when you are in the thick of it and the clock is ticking.

It is all too common, when faced with a build project, for schools to focus on details like the number of rooms needed, the length of cable required for ICT and the best furniture for the school canteen – and to do all of this before you have even considered the nature of learning and how it can be enhanced by a new environment and the technology in it.

Too many schools are still making this mistake. When we began our project in September 2006, Nailsea was in the second wave of the BSF roll-out. However, although we saw sparkling new schools in beautifully landscaped surroundings from the first wave, we did not witness a radical approach to learning being promoted through the build programme.

My challenge, as part of a team, was to transform learning and, as far as I was concerned, I would not settle for anything less. This required a great deal of input from all the key stakeholders – governors, teachers, students, parents, the education authority and, importantly, the leaders of the wider community. However, this was to be not a school designed by committee, but one that took the views of a wide range of people, turned them into a vision and used that as the backbone for the entire project.

If I had to identify one element that was the key to the success of the project – from the design and erection of the new building to the choice and installation of the ICT equipment – it was this: keep the human element uppermost in all discussions and at all times. This is very easy to lose sight of when you are discussing how many RJ45 sockets you want in the school and the perceived merits of either Cat 5 or Cat 6 cabling. Which is where I came in.

As deputy head in charge of curriculum and standards my role during the build project was not only to contribute to the design stages but also, more importantly, to represent the school’s vision for learning, especially in the ICT contract element of the project. As a self-confessed ‘non-techie’, this was no mean feat. Entering the world of ICT was a bit like being parachuted into a foreign country in the middle of a civil war, in the dark, with no torch, no map and no ability to speak the language. In fact, one of the very first things I had to do was to find an ‘interpreter’ who could translate the technospeak. Only then could I actually start the job of designing the school.