Welcome to Schooling.

This is a true story, happening even now. It is of a little 4 year old boy, bright, curious, with caring professional parents and a doting infant-teacher grandmother. He was really looking forward to his first day at school. Before lunch he had been sent to the head of year and shouted at, and before the headteacher when he was shouted at again. By the end of the day he had been sent out of class, and put in isolation for five minutes with a timer, no talking and no eye contact. He doesn't yet know what he had done wrong, and nor does he now, but he had breached some rules somewhere. He arrived home saying be was a bad boy (he isn't), a wicked boy (he certainly isn't but who spoke the word to him?). He cried himself to sleep. End of the first school day. Next morning he asked to stay at home because he is good at home and wicked at school. The teacher had never taught reception before, was not teacher trained but came via TEFL. The school website is very coy about what her qualifications actually are.
Does this ring any bells, anyone? Deep learning going on. A day to remember - indeed a day never to be forgotten.
A month later: He dislikes the school and he doesn’t want to go there! He says this every night, He gets the prospectus out,  marks it with a big cross and says this. He is just 4, from a curious bubbly child to an unhappy mess. Now a month after starting school he has lost his childhood enthusiasm and in trauma rejects friends who might get him into trouble. he has drawn right into himself. The parents are trying to negotiate  change of school.

Sue Cowley, The Artful Educator

The Artful Educator: Creative, Imaginative and Innovative Approaches to Teaching Crown House, 2017.


A book full of great advice about creating a learning culture to motivate pupils. It is affirming. When I started teaching in the 1970s, this is how I taught, first in secondary school and later in primary. Pupils would come to me years later and say "Do you remember when we ..." and recount some off the wall activity. Many creative teachers found the oppressive 1990s unappetizing and went off to do other things. I do hope the wheel is turning full circle again.


Educators don't do learning to other people, people have to do their learning for themselves. If children are nervous, pset, bored or disaffected, they might even go backwards in their learning, rather than forwards. But if we can inspire a love of learning, the children will carry on learning outside of school time and continue this when they become adults. Elsewhere Sue names the 'cardinal sins' - winding pupils up, being rude, being confrontational, being bad tempered and being negative.


Two different friends' daughters could read fluently before going to school. I tested one as having a reading level above 11. But she couldn't (for which read wouldn't) read at 6. Another friend's daughter was alert and creative at 6 with a two hour attention span, but a nervous wreck by 8 leading to a change of school. Why? In each case the influence of one teacher.


I don't remember learning anything either at primary school or secondary school. I passed the 11+ and was put in the top class, but that was not by being taught. I read before school, I read during school, I was proactive in my own learning. I made it to uni by organising my own learning, which served me well at uni. I have looked through the secondary school staff list and spotted the usual bullies, the headteacher who caned 40 boys in a single morning. One teacher taught me to listen to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with a score, and showed us the structure of a blues line. For that I am grateful. I learned in spite of the staff for the most part.


The Artful Educator is mainly about teaching art, making it approachable, accessible, fun, experience-based, broad, challenging and the many other useful epithets. All these are generalisable to other subjects. I explored this with some Oxford colleagues in Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education across the Curriculum (SMSC was the language of the day) how relevant and motivating teaching can improve learning in every subject.


After 8 years as a secondary teacher, I retrained in early years education, which in those days was play-based and experiential. My work thereafter crossed over primary and secondary education. My curriculum field (as was Sean's) was religious education. We differ only in that Sean is a Christian and I am of no religious allegiance, an observer rather than a participant. This does not mean i am part of the aggressive atheism that is fashionable today. My work with Viv Bartlett empowering disaffected pupils was motivated by Baha'i religious philosophy. I was fortunate to be asked in 1987 to organise and lead a week-long school project (year 5-6) on religious festivals and elsewhere a one-day project on Jewish Passover. These were essentially experiential, including art, drama, music, story and designing artefacts. I recall a group of the children rehearsing the divali story, and performing it at the end to the year-group. Lots of making and doing saw the classroom (actually an open-plan bay) filling up with models and displays. I have often quoted my question "what is wisdom, a wise person" (when telling the story of Hindu goddess Saraswati) which received the immediate response of an 8 year old girl, "a wise person is someone who knows a lot about a lot of things, but is humble and not proud and uses what they know to help other people". I asked the same question to teachers in in-service discussions and never received so clear an answer. The Passover day was tricky in that I was presented with 120 children in the hall and expected to "get on with it" as teachers melted away. I discovered I could organise a mass drama (about the Moses and the exodus) off the cuff with a veritable "children of Israel".. Fortunately, the teachers returned to help with art and craft activities. The school children greeted me ever after as "the Rabbi". Experience of the main world religions has been central to the subject since I started my career in 1973.


The subject focused a great deal on moral and social issues, especially "difficult topics" (sexuality, the Holocaust and genocide, ethics). Open discussion and debate were key strategies. It is easy to see how English, History and Geography could become similarly experiential. Maths and Science may bring different challenges but our 1999 SMSC book showed that it is worth making the effort.

Paul Dix

The school behaviour debate is fuelled with emotion and ignorance. It is framed by a system obsessed with control and punishment. From desperate politicians cracking down on discipline to the tabloids who openly attack damaged children, the wider public debate on behaviour is laced with aggression directed at young people. The search for more severe punishment to beat down the most resilient is something of which we should be ashamed. Calls for corporal punishment and more exclusion are a desperate consequence of a system bereft of ideas, one that blindly insists on pure punishment in preference to reparation and rehabilitation.

Paul Dix, When the Adults Change, Everything Changes, 2017, p.107.

Gert J J Biesta

Gert J J Biesta, The Rediscovery of Teaching, 2017:2

what is often (conveniently) forgotton in such discussions is that authority is fundamentally a relational matter and not something that one person can simply impose upon another person.

No shaming!

Debra Kidd writes this on shaming pupils as a control strategy - don't do it, it is harmful.

When schools decide that they will default to shaming as a strategy for good behaviour, they place themselves onto the most volatile battlefield they can – what Brown calls “The Swampland of the Soul.” They can be seemingly winning that battle – they may force compliance from children. Perhaps even test results (especially if they kick the most resistant out of school altogether).  But as Sarah-Jayne Blakemore points out, adolescence opens up many windows to mental health problems. It is in this period of intense brain activity, where the hippocampus and limbic systems (linked to memory and emotion) are growing and grey matter is being pruned, that seeds are sown for future emotional health. Stings here can settle and grow. So can kindnesses. We need to tread with care and compassion.
It doesn’t take much. When you’re considering an action in your school or classroom, simply think about whether or not it is likely to cause shame. If it is, don’t do it. Rank ordering pupils, hanging signs around their necks, having lists of wrongdoers – these are all acts of shaming. There’s no justification for it. None at all.

No excuses?

Raymond Soltysek @raymondsoltysek has blogged (snippets below):

... an approach to behaviour that is authoritarian, damaging and, potentially, supportive of bad, bad teaching.

... you should – must – ‘build relationships.’

... behaviourist strategies cannot do that; they aren’t designed to.  Behaviourism focusses only on behaviour, not on minds and certainly not on hearts.  Dogs are conditioned to respond in a particular way to a stimulus, but it has nothing to do with understanding, since we can elicit exactly the same response quite quickly if we change the stimulus.  Similarly, schools which use ‘no excuses’ policies are frequently lauded for their ‘respectful ethos’, yet we cannot know that a policy that sends children to detention for forgetting their homework or for dropping litter or for talking in the corridor builds respect; all we can with any certainty say is that they are behaving in a conditioned way to a stimulus, as if they respect us.  They may not – indeed, it’s absolutely certain that some won’t – and, if we changed the stimulus we use to encourage respectful behaviour, we’d get just the same result.

That’s why I think that we have to be much lighter on our feet in terms of behaviour management, that we have to utilise not just the blunt tool of behaviourism, but cognitive constructivist and social constructivist strategies too.  It’s the core of the way I’ve been getting student teachers to conceptualise behaviour management for years now, and it’s something I’ll return to in later posts, perhaps.

But in the meantime, ‘no excuses’ is a stony ground for our classrooms, and for anyone who wants to build relationships with pupils.  Just think about it; what other human relationship imposes such conditions?  Would you marry someone who said there was no excuse for not having the dinner ready on time, and who put you in a room until you’d learned your lesson? How would you react if you visited acquaintances and they sent their elderly mother to the garden shed because she’d lost her purse through a hole in her coat pocket?   The notion of there being no excuse for behaviour is to deny the very essence of humanity, people making their way in a universe which is at times capricious and unpredictable, a universe in which in the face of things we can’t control we all have the right to make judgements which at times will be flawed or judgments which at times might be unfathomable to others.

Victoria Derbyshire programme

Discussion on school discipline and the great Yarmouth Charter Academy on Victoria Derbyshire (#VictoriaDerbyshire ) this morning. It seemed to focus on getting balance between rules and expectations on the one hand and producing contented, curious and motivated pupils on the other.

Discussion emphasised that clear expectations are good, but shouting, disrespect and constant punishment are not. The case under discussion seemed to have punishments for everything. There were even punishments for being shy.

A headteacher said Get the rules clearly understood, in non-confrontational ways, and then learning can be happy, purposeful and effective.

In #LivingContradiction we argue for non-confrontation, looking elsewhere for solutions which enhance learning and motivation.



On this interesting debate, check out @warwickmansell @debrakidd @imagineinquiry.

Gert Biesta is ending BERA 2017 with the question is learning a human right in these days of control.

Gert Biesta (www.gertbiesta.com) is Professor of Education and Director of Research in the Department of Education of Brunel University London. In addition he holds the part-time NIVOZ Professorship for Education at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands and has visiting affiliations with ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, the Netherlands, and NLA University College, Bergen, Norway. Since 2015 he is a member of the Education Council of the Netherlands, the advisory body for the Dutch government and parliament. His work focuses on the theory of education and the theory and philosophy of educational and social research. In recent years he has published on such topics as curriculum, teaching, teacher agency, democratic education and lifelong learning. His 2014 book The Beautiful Risk of Education won the 2014 Outstanding Book Award of the American Educational Research Association (Division B). His latest book, The Rediscovery of Teaching, is due to be published by Routledge in 2017.

Some Thoughts.

Living Contradiction is about the gap between what a teacher thought he ought to do in contrast to what he felt deep down he wanted to do. The journey from the first to the second was not as easy as it sounds. We all build up a picture of what is expected of us and try to live up to it, feeling guilty if we fail. Teachers build into this what they think the headteacher wants, what OFSTED wants - but we don't get around to consider what we want. Sean sat down one day eight years ago to decide what kind of teacher he wanted to be. He was a senior teacher, in charge of school discipline, and was good at it. His inner contradiction was the feeling that there must be more to education and learning than using adult authority to control young people.

Stephen's journey (the blog writer here) was slightly different, hoping for a university teaching position but starting with secondary school teaching for eight years when university staff recruitment collapsed in the 1970s. He joined an education faculty in 1981, teaching religious studies and education. There he retrained as an early years educator which at that time was far from a subject focused curriculum. All this led him to an interest in the relationships developed in schools: much he saw in secondary schools was negative, whilst some primary schools had the glimmer of good practice. But not all. Teacher training took himto many schools between 1981 and 1998 and in teacher research till the present, that is forty-five years of teaching. He was once told he was too moral for his own good, and it is certainly easier to keep one's head down. A few readers might remember my NASUWT union days. When given an area of responsibility, he regarded it as a solemn duty to train up those coming after, occasionally resulting in redundancy. He was never good at being compliant, preferring to be creative, pushing boundaries.

The following are issues arising from our book to stimulate further discussion. They draw on what is called 'critical pedagogy', organising learning to encourage critical awareness of social and ethical issues. The first five draw together into a climax at issue 6.

1. Pupils' ownership of their schooling, pupils feeling that they are respected members of a learning community, learning with others (teachers and pupils) encouraging them to experiment and learn by doing, being proactive, setting their own agendas. This needs to happen throughout primary and secondary schooling or resistance will develop.

2. Self discipline, individual learning versus regimented learning. A reasonable aim in bringing up children is to encourage them to be self disciplined and respectful of others. It is reasonable therefore to judge an education system on the extent to which this is encouraged. Forcing children to  keep quiet and busy, and be fearful of consequences will have the opposite effect. Much poor discipline is caused by stubborn resistance against authoritarianism.

3. Social justice and personal responsibility. Social learning in schools encourages collaborating with others, seeing things from various points of view, and reaching joint agendas through compromise. Recognizing the need to contribute to the community.

4. Development of values. Upbringing and schooling both contribute to the values that children and young people develop. Their values can be positive or negative, helpful or unhelpful, pro-social or anti-social. Values good and bad are modelled by family, friends and teachers. Sometimes a teacher can overcome attitudes that have already become entrenched.

5. Ambiguity. Assessment has an obsession with right and wrong answers when in fact many answers are ambiguous. Science has the built-in goal of reappraisal and testing models and theories, accepting nothing as final fact. The school curriculum and assessment needs to have the same criticality built in and rewarded.

6. Motivation comes from everything above and embraces  intellectual curiosity and the courage to challenge. Motivation should be a central goal of all schooling because if learners are motivated, achievement and discipline will happen naturally. Any school practice which demotivates, such as over-authoritarian repression, has to be rooted out, much as physical punishment (caning) was in the 1980s. At the extreme, some army discipline has ended with death. In these internet days, the whole concept of a canon of knowledge to be learn has disappeared (except in the exam system) and how to interpret has become much more central.

We are not pretending that we are giving easy advice for the short term. Sean spent three years working out what else can work apart from shouting. Yet to resort to shouting or sarcasm has its own consequences,establishing resistance in aggressive pupils. Sean was concerned to change his and his pupils' habits, knowing that other teachers were not following suit, and neither had teachers in their earlier years of schooling. It was all therefore very new. In this book we have tried therefore to set a long-term agenda for change.