The school building programme

As the new government scrap the school building scheme, will it really affect our young people?

Now I have to say I am in two minds on this one. On one hand my husband, who works in the construction industry, tells me so much money is wasted on new schools and on the other, I know how important environment is and the impact it has on our young people.

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks a lot about what is called “Broken Window Syndrome” and how you can use this to turn communities around from high crime to low crime areas. Broken window syndrome basically works on the premise that youth who commit crime and get into trouble are highly susceptible to their environments and when small things are fixed straight away in a high crime area (such as windows) and the area is clean and looked after, this in turn affects those at risk of offending and the estates turn around. The objective of the Broken Window project was to have no broken windows, litters, graffiti, etc. on these estates and it worked a treat, bringing crime in these areas down.

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Teens and Exercise

Is P.E. Failing – by Maggie Ayre personal trainer for youth

Last weekend the Scottish Government was heavily criticised for not meeting its pledge to deliver two hours of physical education to school children, but are both the Scottish Government and its critics rather missing the point?

Hands up if you enjoyed PE at school.

Hands up if school PE lessons led to you living an active life after you left school.

Not many hands are being raised and although my career is dominated by physical activity I have to agree with you – school PE lessons left me cold too.

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Learning from Other schools – Jean Ramsey

Sharing Good Practice

I feel like it is a long time since I put finger to keyboard but hey, life is like that sometimes with just too much to squeeze in.

So where am I up to?

O yeah…I met a fantastic group of dedicated teachers when I took part in the directors’ training day for The Shakespeare for Schools Festival on 25th May the week before half term. What an inspirational bunch. We were from all over the South East and met up at The National Theatre’s rehearsal rooms near Waterloo. I was so excited to be out of school and learning something new. The day before, I consulted the very nice man at the station and he recommended I get the silly o’clock train (6:17 am from Bicester North to Waterloo) because I would not want to be late and I might have to let several tube trains go by because they would be so crowded. I arrived at 7:45 for a 9:00am kick off! But I had time to get a coffee and sit in the sunshine watching the Thames glide by; pinching myself with excitement…I am very easily pleased.

We had a fabulous time working with a professional actor and a director. The best part though was just sharing good practice with other colleagues because our school has never participated before and for some of the others this was their 6th or 7th year in succession. Some of the teachers were from special schools where the young people cannot speak far less remember lines by themselves. I am fortunate enough to work with a fantastic colleague, Louisa Hook at the special school behind us Bardwell. It is because of her encouragement that I have taken the plunge this year. We have a performance space with lights so for two years they have come to rehearse under our lights just so that it would not be so intimidating in the real thing. It did my year 10’s so much good to watch the young people from Bardwell performing their signed version of ‘Macbeth’. Some of the helpers stood behind the characters feeding them the lines and some just signed. They used soundscapes and musical instruments to great effect creating a truly spooky atmosphere. It was proper piece of theatre. We are doing ‘Macbeth’ too and Louisa is going to lend me her severed head!

Why is it so difficult to get out of school just for a day to learn so much from each other and other professionals from different fields? We now have this ‘rarely cover’ phenomenon which means your non contact lessons are hardly ever taken to cover absent colleagues and classes are taught by cover supervisors…we have two excellent supervisors. The downside though, is that if there are a lot of people away because of illness, insets have to be cancelled at short notice and tempers get VERY frayed. It does not just happen in our establishment all the wonderful people I met complained of the same things: hardly ever allowed out and too little time to rehearse because of the exam pressure…oh don’t get me started on that! That’s a whole new can of worms!

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Schools and the New Goverment

What the new coalition means for education – Jean Ramsey

I am sure all we teachers are sleeping more easily in our beds having been freed from the tyranny of the local education authorities by the new coalition government’s Department for Education led by Michael Gove. In our spare time, we can join together with a bunch of like minded parents and teachers and form small schools of our own. I have been in this game a long time, thirty years and counting, and it seems like only yesterday, that under a Conservative government, we were fighting to preserve small, rural schools from closure on the grounds that they were uneconomic.

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Inspirational Teaching

Youth are far more capable than we think

This video is amazing and very inspirational.

When it gets tough laugh!

‘We had to laugh in order not to cry.’by teacher Jean Ramsey

Last Monday, 10th May a colleague and I went to listen to Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu giving a lecture at the Sheldonian in Oxford. There was a huge waiting list for this event and we were lucky to get tickets.

He was every bit as inspirational as we thought he would be. He is a tiny man in stature with quite a small voice so we had to strain a little to catch what he was saying. What struck me immediately was his enormous presence and delightful sense of humour: he laughs easily. As he got into his address it soon became apparent why he laughs so readily…if you did not laugh in the apartheid regime as a non white you would cry…or worse.

He told us that when he became Bishop of Johannesburg it was actually illegal for him and his family to move into the Bishop’s palace as it was in a whites only part of town. He was not permitted a passport but had to rely on travel documents provided by the regime and in the space for nationality it said: Nationality undeterminable at present. He has since had his genome analysed, and on his mother’s side, he is descended from the San people or the Bushmen the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa they have lived there for over 20,000 years.

The test to see what category or racial group you belonged to was simply to run a comb through your hair. If it got tangled you were the lowest of the low: a Bantu, if the comb ran fairly smoothly: a coloured, if the comb passed through easily: no problem white. People committed suicide if they discovered they were to be classed as a Bantu. There were whites only ambulances and if they came across native involved in a road traffic accident they would drive away.

In 1962 he came to Britain to further his theological studies. He and his wife kept accosting British bobbies to ask for directions simply for the pleasure of being addressed by a person in uniform as ‘sir’ and ‘madam’. They would go round a corner and ask again just to experience the being regarded as a person. They had had ‘their dignity and humanity carelessly trodden underfoot’ so often at home in South Africa. He made lots of jokes one about road signs saying: Drive carefully natives cross here. One wag inserted: Drive carefully natives VERY cross here.

His great inspiration was Trevor Huddleston who was an anti apartheid activist and became his role model. Bishop Tutu constantly preached reconciliation between the races because ‘we are all children of God.’ On 27th April, 1994 ‘the world watched with awe’ as years of injustice and oppression were replaced by freedom and democracy and South Africa elected its first black president, Nelson Mandela. He promptly appointed his friend as Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What happened then was truly miraculous. People who had been deadly enemies had to apologise in front of the whole word and they did. People were quiet as they realised that they were in the presence of something holy. He stressed that we live in a moral universe where right and wrong matter; that human beings can be extraordinarily magnanimous.

He brought his address right up to date by discussing the situation in the Middle East and especially what is happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza. What is happening there is illegal. He explained that the best kind of security comes when the inalienable rights of all are respected. Why are we so blind and so stupid not to see this?

We must take courage though, as Arch Bishop Tutu explained, after what they have achieved in South Africa, nothing can ever be seen as intractable.

‘We must remember the past, the better to forget it.’

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