Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

by Kate Clanchy

  ‘Turn around?’ I suggest.

  ‘Yes. And yesterday, he came back from school literally in tears, because the places went to two boys who are always rubbish, terrible behaviour, but who tried a bit harder in the last few weeks.’

  I sympathize with this. I sympathize with Miss F too. George is so perfect. So blond and neat and clever and balanced and comes from such a supportive home – of course Miss F wanted to give the place where it was needed, to the children to whom it would mean a lot. Except it meant a lot to George too.

  ‘And when he told his big sister,’ continued Jeannie, ‘Annie was just: welcome to my world. Get used to it, because that’s how it is, in secondary too. And she told George, you know, it’s because you’ve got everything already. But George just thinks it’s because Miss doesn’t like him.’

  Ping! Miss T chimes in. The trouble is, she texts, they think that because everyone knows that Phillip is best, he doesn’t need the prize. But that’s just why he has to have it. Because if they give it to someone else, they are actually positively taking it away from Phillip. They’re saying, the teachers don’t like you either. And we the teachers are also part of an anti-intellectual culture. This isn’t acceptable, and I am going to stop it.

  And so, in Miss T’s school, after everyone has enjoyed the always-epic spectacle of Miss T digging in her tiny sharp heels, the English prize goes to Phillip and not Tanya Turnaround. In Annie’s school, the Maths prize goes to a boy the staff seem to like better than Annie, a smilier, more charming student, and in fact she never wins a Maths prize, not ever, not until she gets to Cambridge, the only student from her school in a decade, and starts getting top marks in the Pure papers. In our school, there are two Maths prizes: one for Achievement, which goes to my son and his nerdy ilk, and one for Progress, which goes to Tanya Turnaround. This is probably as decent a compromise as can be arranged, but it still causes injustice and resentments which will be remembered for years.

  Because people do care about prizes, and children especially so. They accept their judgement, even if it is a strange, wildly outdated judgement – fastest one hundred yard dash, Cup for Character, Trophy for a Drop Kick – sometimes for their whole lives. In our school, I insisted on everyone entering the national poetry competitions for young people, over and over again, until we started winning, until poetry became our top sport. Something alchemical came from that – something similar to the thing that keeps Eton producing cabinet ministers. Which is why we can’t abolish prizes, even if the harm done to the disappointed may well be larger than the good done to the winner. To misquote Frank O’Hara, ‘these things do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.’

  About Selection: Sets and Streams, Grammars and Not

  Jez and Oldest One

  Jez’s Joke

  We were having a speaking competition. The hall was filled with unfamiliar uniforms, and an earnest girl in a kilt was just stepping down from the podium after a long address about climate change, linked, as it so often is, to littering.

  Then Jez and his team took the stage. They were from a country school with traditional blazers. Jez was busting out of his: a big lad with a strong wrist and heavy neck, an unbuttoned collar, a pushed-down kipper tie. He was further constrained by the conventions of the competition: the elderly, fussy format of the English-Speaking Union which requires one to have a chairman and voter of thanks, which encourages prissy jokes and empty praise.

  But Jez seemed determined to bust out of these, too. He leant back on his elbows, scowling, as his (small, anxious) chairman introduced him: ‘a popular character who goes over the top sometimes’. He waddled confidently forward and leaned over the lectern. ‘My speech,’ he said, ‘is about Mixed Ability.’ Miss Debility, he pronounced it, in his glottal, country accent, as if the concept were a particularly wearing teacher. ‘Miss Debility. I’m against it.’

  In front of me, the young teacher from the private school, whom we’d brought in to do the assessment, nodded sadly in agreement. He ticked his ‘intro’ boxes, ready to give Jez good marks. His school spent much time sub-dividing already highly selected pupils, until, like tiers of angels, the very cleverest spoke in their pure voices only to each other. Miss Debility in charge of a country comprehensive probably sounded horrifying to him.

  I shared a grin with Miss T. We were hoping for some gossip about Jez’s school; we’d heard they’d had Ofsted in, just last year. Miss T, I knew, was also suspicious of Mixed Ability. It messed up her marking schemes and militated against her pathological drive to push each child beyond their maximum.

  To be honest, the term made me brace my shoulders, too. Mixed Ability – and Jez in fact, with his rough and ready country demeanour – called to mind my first school, crowded classrooms of Mixed Ability eleven-year-olds, and the extremely elaborate rookie lesson plans I’d made in an attempt to differentiate. We’d been to outer space once, I recalled, in a six-week-long writing project in which they all designed rockets and kept logs and I had to mark them all over half term and . . . well, that was before I had children. I didn’t think I could do that, now.

  But Jez wasn’t a nice, keen Year 7 who wrote over-long logbooks about imagined galaxies. He was a rambunctious Year 9 in a mixed comprehensive which just this year, he told us, following that Ofsted visit, had switched from very strong setting in every subject, 1–4, to Miss Debility for everything. Jez didn’t know why this had occurred, but he was very clear it was a disaster. Now nothing was happening in his lessons. He was bored, he said, gazing up at us with ferocity and sorrow, bored till he could eat himself, arm first.

  At my elbow, Miss T murmured in sympathy. There was nothing she abhorred more than a bored, bright kid, because that was what she had been herself in a school not unlike Jez’s. The audience – swotty children and their keen parents, mostly – nodded too. Probably, most of them saw themselves in some version of a top set, perhaps even a school-sized top set, a grammar. The Weald of Kent Grammar School was in the news just then, battling to open an ‘extension’ school, and it was easy to see the congruence of vision: a light, happy classroom, where ideas were freely exchanged, behaviour was perfect, and the children, even those as sturdy as Jez, could ‘really fly’, freed from the dead weight of their peers.

  There were probably some ‘dead weight’ kids in the room too – ones with dyslexia, perhaps, or an inconvenient illness, or just nerves. But, showing true demagogic skill, Jez moved on before we could worry about them. The thing was, he said, it wasn’t just him! He’d been talking to – and here his chairman eyed him meaningfully, clearly wondering what term he might blurt out – some of the less academic kids in his year, and the ones who were the thickest – dark look from the chairman – they hated Miss Debility worse than he did! The lessons were going far too fast for them! They couldn’t keep up, and then they gave up! It was awful.

  Vocabulary faux pas or not, the audience was still nodding, even Miss T. Again, the point was a solid one: students with real difficulties aren’t usually loudest against sets, even if their own set is called 4. Kids with dyslexia, dyscalculia, ASD, or a whole range of general mild delays often have scalding experiences of mainstream classrooms and do much better in a small group moving at an easier pace, preferably with skilled teaching assistants. Set 4s in our school, certainly, were often surprisingly kindly places; there were several teachers who preferred and specialized in them.

  But then Jez hit the sticky patch in his speech. He was now supposed, according to the marking criteria, to expand his case and improve his point with examples. Data. Case studies. Twined in personal anecdote maybe, but you needed them: facts. But Jez havered. The young assessor’s hand moved down the marking sheet, and stopped, expectantly.

  Undaunted, Jez announced a ‘visual aid’. He’d done a survey of his class, ‘Miss Debility, for and against’, and his chairman was holding up a graph in marker pen of the result. The assessor put a question mark in the box.

  Jez, it was sadly clear,
hadn’t read much educational theory. But then, it might not have mattered if he had. Setting and grammar schools is overwhelmingly an emotional issue. A few years on, in September 2016, Justine Greening, Secretary of State for Education, wouldn’t be able to produce any strong data in support of grammar schools in parliament, and she had presumably been well briefed in educational research. Nor could the briefing paper on grammar schools produced for the House of Commons Library a few weeks later, because, however intuitively true it feels, creating Set 1, or isolating clever children, does not allow them to ‘fly’, or at least not sufficiently high to be statistically significant. At best, the briefing paper reckoned, the UK’s 163 grammars – schools that suck in remarkable amounts of parental energy, which are among the most socially selective in the country, which choose less than 3 per cent of their intake from those on free school meals – allow their students to gain about a third of a grade extra in each GCSE relative to their starting point than an average school. Many comprehensives also achieve this sort of differential, and others – ours – achieve much more, and achieve it across the board, for the limited as well as the clever, for the poor as well as the rich.

  Here in the debate hall, Jez’s material was getting thinner and thinner. He had very little to say, and no figures, about the kids in his class who were probably most affected by setting: not the clever ones, in fact, and not the ‘thick’ ones either, not even the middling and willing Set 2 ones, but the middle-to-low-ability ones – Set 3. Probably, Jez had good reasons to forget them. They may well have made paper darts of his survey or mocked his ambition in taking part in a speaking competition. Probably, Jez didn’t like them much.

  Because no one likes Set 3, not even other pupils, and certainly not teachers. Set 3 are no fun. Many of them have behavioural problems and poor concentration – otherwise they’d be in Set 2. A few of them don’t like your subject (and therefore you the teacher) in particular. A few more are in Set 2 elsewhere and let you know it. Some of them are just drearily mediocre. All of them know that the carrot you are dangling – a pass at GCSE, for instance – isn’t in their reach, because that is the way the UK education system was designed in the fifties and how it still operates: sheep to go one way to university, goats to go to work. There is a shibboleth, a gate, to divide them, and here Set 3 get stuck. But, unlike Set 4, they are not humble enough to accept this judgement. They do not agree that they are goats. They will not consent to want carrots such as a good D and improved spelling; they want a good life and good prospects, just like Sets 1 and 2. The psychic wound of exclusion falls heaviest on Set 3, because they are bright enough to see that the system exists and that they are the losers in it, but not organized enough to do anything about it. Set 3 are angry.

  So no one wants to teach Set 3, and, in weak schools, weak heads of department give in to the pressure and give Set 3 to the weakest teacher, or the temporary teacher, or the newly qualified one. In comprehensives, the problems of Set 3 are also often compounded by social class; into Set 2, disproportionately, are piled the middle-class kids whose decent attitude helped them through primary; into Set 3, disproportionately, are slid the working-class, surly but able kids whose manners and background did not help them at all. Even without across-the-board streaming, which is very rare these days, Set 3 often find themselves sitting next to each other in English, Maths, and Science, feeling helpless and angry; exhausting and enraging their teachers, destroying their best and most hopeful lessons, making sure they cannot be taught in any creative or relaxed way; having no fun. And so they feel more and more angry and multiply their own problems until one group of Set 3 Year 9 kids are disrupting an entire school.

  And this, though he did not know it, was what had happened in Jez’s school. Since the day it joined up its secondary modern and grammar buildings thirty years previously, it had streamed and setted ferociously, often echoing in the arrangement of its classes the social divisions of the market town around it. This, compounded in recent years by weak leadership and a high turnover of teachers (property prices in the town were terrifying), had resulted in a divided school where the top sets were shiny and everyone else ran feral: a school with a sort of internal grammar and secondary modern system. For a long time, though, the school still looked good on results day because the results were smoothed out into a decent average. Then government data started to reveal academic progress since primary rather than raw results, and the picture was not pretty. In this school, only the top sets learned as well as they should, and middle-ability children from disadvantaged backgrounds – Set 3 – did astonishingly badly; some learning less in five years of secondary education than in three of primary, some not moving forward at all, one or two actually going backwards.

  Jez’s school, in fact, was a neat example of the mathematical law of setting: that the good done to the selected minority is always smaller than the bad done to the rejected majority. There is a related mathematical law, the Formula of Grammars, which runs: because each grammar creates three secondary moderns, and because secondary moderns are giant, locked-down Set 3s – places where no one wants to teach because it is no fun; where achievement in the exam system is always just out of reach; where poor and badly behaved children are disproportionately piled; where problems breed and multiply – the good done by grammars is always less than the bad done by secondary moderns by a factor of at least three.

  But setting and grammars are, as we’ve said, emotional issues, not maths. Certainly, they are for Theresa May, Justine Greening’s boss. Her policy of expanding grammar schools, expounded from the time she came to power in 2016 until the election of 2017, seemed to be a passion project, because it flew in the face of all research, and opposition not just from Labour and the Lib Dems, but May’s own party – in the face of everyone, in fact, except the Daily Mail.

  But May went to a grammar school herself, one in a country town much like Jez’s: Holton Park. So perhaps her mission is a consequence of an even older law than the Formula of Grammars, the rule that everyone wants to reproduce the school they went to, however much they hated it themselves. While Theresa May was at school, the establishment changed from a girls’ grammar into the comprehensive it still is, Wheatley Park School. I once met a contemporary of May’s and he said the transition, like the sudden de-setting of Jez’s classes, was abrupt and terrible.

  Imagine it: a large country village in the early seventies, divided on class lines like Jez’s, but probably even more bitterly. On one side of town, a girls’ grammar headed by the vicar’s daughter, with a delicate hierarchy of World War II schoolmistresses and fifties-style prim discipline; on the other, a secondary modern dedicated to turning out ploughmen and their wives. And one bad day, without much preparation or kindness, they are amalgamated. The result is chaos and bitterness and numerous unrecorded acts of cruelty: a disaster. And ever after – whatever the evidence to the contrary – the prim, inflexible, cross Head Girl believes in her gut that a comprehensive means letting the bad boys in to spoil everything, and when she becomes Prime Minister, she sets out to recreate the school of her dreams for good girls everywhere. The ones who have passed their exams, of course. The ones who deserve it.

  Though to do so, she must face out Ofsted and their ilk, and Ofsted are on to the Formula of Grammars. They are watching progress now, not raw results, which was why, despite its very average overall performance, they had decided to inspect Jez’s school the year before his speech, and why their recommendations were so bald: Mixed Ability, now. Jez, said the experts, would be OK, even if he did eat his own fist. Jez would find his own resources – look, he had just signed himself up for a speaking competition, and he had, definitely, you could tell from his teacher’s aghast expression, written his own speech. Jez would pass his exams just fine, while his classmates would be freed from the shackles of inferiority, and flourish.

  But Jez himself wasn’t convinced. He hadn’t finished his speech either. As a final morsel, he leaned meaningfully over
the lectern. ‘I’m just going to leave you wiv a liddle joke,’ he said. ‘Mixed Ability.’ It took us a while to laugh.

  ‘Poor old Jez,’ said Miss T. ‘Shall we tap him and get him to move to us? He could get the bus.’ Because Miss H, finest and most liberal of all heads of English, insists on setting 1–4 from Year 7 on. And Miss T, who eats educational data for breakfast and has a long-time crush on Sir Michael Wilshaw, fully agrees with her; and so, probably, despite everything I have just said about Set 3, do I. We believe in setting the way we believe in democracy: the best worst system devised so far.

  Really, it comes down to practicalities. School funding allows for about twenty-five pupils in a set. In our school, the range of ability in any year group runs from those who are reading Jane Eyre to those with not a word of English. Teaching this range within a single class means many small groupings and individual projects, which takes hours of teacher time. Therefore, we set 1–4, cramming the top sets with thirty-plus pupils and giving the space, smaller groups, and teaching assistants to the lower sets. All teachers, including Miss H, take a turn at all sets, including the dreaded Set 3. No one is locked in; student movement between sets is frequent. Miss H regularly faces down Ofsted surveys with her own data. We are overwhelmingly successful; each year all our students make outstanding progress, much better than a grammar, and those in Set 3 do especially well. Statistics, thinks Miss H, should be as detailed and local and small scale as possible. What works, works.

  Though surely Miss H would baulk at Jez’s marker pen survey: she has standards. It cost Jez dear, too; the girl with the climate change speech took the cup. But funnily enough, three years later, Jez’s figures turned out to be right. Despite Ofsted intervention, his cohort would record the worst GCSE results their school had ever seen, terrible across the board, and catastrophic especially for bright, disadvantaged students – Jez.