Principal's Blog

‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on...’

2010-07-12T16:32:00.000+01:00

The Finale and Curtain Call were so perfect, so full of warmth and so glorious, Mr Ray and the Tarleton family will forever treasure the memories.

It was done in such style, South Dartmoor style, with genuine fun, affection and the attention to detail that makes the College such a special place to work. From the assembly through to the Marquee Celebration, everything was in the true spirit of our (now your) wonderful school. In part it was like being an award winner at the Oscars for a film that's taken twenty-one years to make; and in part it resembled an out-of-body experience at my own funeral!

The staff gift, a painting by the local artist and former South Dartmoor teacher, Sarah Bell, is a delight. It's called The Journey Home... and those of you who travel the A38 Exeter-bound, will recognise the view from the top of the Haldon Hill. When my children were at the school, as we drove back from Ashburton at the end of the day, I used to tell them to look down on the sprawling lights of the city, aware that one of those twinkles of illumination was home, where their mother would be waiting for us. Sarah's painting, your gift, captures that memory from a daily journey over the years that adds up to thousands of miles- perhaps as far as the moon.

I was especially grateful to Steve for compèring the final section of the assembly- the next Jonathan Ross? And to everyone who contributed to the hilarious DVD- some X-Factor talent there to watch out for, especially the PE Swingers and Pete's new solo bid for fame- KENatra? The students' response was overwhelming- what a wonderful group of young people. No wonder none of us ever wants to leave.

The Recipe Book is an inspired idea: I loved reading it and will truly enjoy trying out every recipe in it- even TAP's Tea. The concept is a winner- congratulations for devising it, Jane; the design is so professional- thanks to Bea and also John, Katie, Adam and Lin, to all of you for creating it. A special thanks to Nick Stimson for his magical opening tribute which reminded me of the start of a novel; and to Paul McCormick for capturing the memory so well of a meal not eaten! The recipeists all bring their personalities to their food choices. With quality photographs, highly original lay-out and easy-wipe pages, it's set to become this summer's sure-fire Amazon best seller.

The staff comments in the tribute book were overwhelmingly powerful and a joy to read. If I ever feel low, that's the book I'll take out to inspire me again. Thank you all: you never really know what people think until they have an opportunity like this. You were all so generous.

The amazing photo montage includes many memorable events and sights from the South Dartmoor past South Dartmoor. Thank you, Governors, for this imaginative gift, and John Bradford and team for shooting and compiling.

I'm unsure who to thank for the Marquee Celebration because of the secrecy surrounding it, but nothing could have been more fitting: delicious canapés from Scoffers washed down with Pimms and bathed in that fine jazz playing. Thanks to the musicians - Rachel, Jonathan, Jo and the students and to Lin who looked to me to have the air of someone in charge.....

I really appreciated everyone’s attendance. How lovely to welcome former Leadership Team colleagues who did so much with me to make the school the place it now is: Andy Hamlyn, Heather Stimson, Rachel Hutchinson, Martin Burt, Graham Allen and Dave Mardall; and former colleague, Paul Cornish. To complement the current Governors, I was also delighted to see former governors James Long, Veronica Groom and Helen Cock.

Phil Norrey, Chief Executive of Devon County Council, paid me a great compliment in attending. It was so kind of him to stay to the end to show his appreciation, a mark of his quality as a leader.

Finally to great teams and what a Team Leadership are. If only England could have played as well they spoke! But I'm not going to continue this sporting analogy- and you all know why. Let me just say that every one of them made me so proud - all those years of coaching them for Presentation Evening finally paid off! Kate led the event with such sparkle and poise, striking just the right tone and remembering everything and everyone.

Many of you told me how much you appreciated what the school did for your children. Me too! I was touched to find mine there, both home from London where they work, Alice at Channel Four News and Ed at Imperial College. They had been smuggled in by my wife, another surprise guest, in on the conspiracy from the start. We left for the final ‘Journey Home ...’ with the car boot bursting with your gifts and cards.

Prospero, the ruler of an imaginary island in Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, relinquishes his authority by throwing down his staff. At just the moment a prop was needed, Allan brought forth his majestic, decorated pole and allowed me to make the comparison between an island built on dreams (‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on...’) and a school built on dreams that are now real. My thanks to everyone who made the celebration of that realised dream one of the memorable moments of my life. Now let the curtain fall.

Ray Tarleton
Principal (September 1989-August 2010)

In Praise of OfSTED

2010-06-09T16:59:00.001+01:00

Bus duty on day one of the new Inspection regime and the pupils are chatting about how it’s been. “What’s all this OFSTED stuff about?” asks one. “Oh I can tell you,” says another who has clearly already been through the process; “It’s dead simple. If you see a bloke wearing a smart suit and carrying a clipboard sitting at the back of your class, you are going to get a bloody good lesson!”

Eighteen years after Ken Clarke set up the system, OFSTED is still the most powerful force in education. What else will bring 120 teachers into work, at least for two days, before 6.00 am? The displays, even with only two days notice made me think I had walked into the wrong school, while lesson plans and my SEF were longer than a Victorian novel.

Whatever your role, if you know that OFSTED are going to measure it, you make sure it’s done. The Government wants to encourage diversity so the specialisms in secondary schools get plenty of attention. They want the public to believe in the re-branded comprehensive so the OFSTED agenda is to comment on how much the specialism has done to raise standards, support the community … fill in your own blanks. Schools have had both safety and health scares recently, so plenty of references to diet, lifestyle and safety conscious staff and pupils go down well.

Racist incidents? Show me your log. Bullying in the playground? Give me the records. If the Government decided it wanted all schools to serve unsalted pistachio nuts on Parents’ Evenings, test basket weaving skills and dress lollypop ladies in Union Jacks, it would only have to make these things inspection tick boxes and we’d obey.

I experienced my first OFSTED – “a training” inspection in 1992 before the full scale assault the following year. I am now through number five (just). So what’s changed on this latest, tougher framework and over the years? Short notice has been with us for some time but I can still remember a ruined Christmas holiday for the Leadership Team who were sworn to secrecy when we did hear weeks before. We broke the news to staff with a happy New Year greeting – and they still had four weeks’ notice.

The pre-inspection briefing has become as forensic as a murder investigation. Hypotheses are laid out with the misdirected fervour that comes of an ill spent career salivating over data charts. Crime suspects from the Leadership Team are wheeled in. “You wilfully, during the months of 2009-10, allowed attendance to drop.” My defence: “Actually, you’ve got the wrong bloke. Isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to get their offspring to school?”
The really big change is that the inspection is now done with you rather than to you. The Leadership Team double observed many of the lessons the inspectors went to. We were asked for our grades first to check our judgements. 'What did you think of the transitions? What was missing in the questioning? What's did your view about the pace?' These were the kind of questions posed to me by the HMI lead as we raced from class to class. This is a great way to influence classroom practice and probably the best professional development anyone could have.

Instead of us whispering in separate rooms, their meetings included me and some of the team so the judgements were transparent too. We were invited to comment but never to canvass: the criteria held firm. The student, parental and staff questionnaires were processed on the day and each section was checked against this data. One interesting student criticism was about the quality of supply. It's never cropped up before but I put it down to 'rarely cover' preventing us from using our own experienced and familiar teachers.

The Leadership Team emailed through the night and from dawn, sharing insights and heading off trouble. 'Will we ever sleep again?' mused my deputy at 5.00 am on day two. The final two hour discussion was all facts rather than opinions, each section scored as if filling up a Bingo card. We followed with absolutely no idea until the end whether we would have that winning 'full house'. But it was professional development of the best kind. Even if the number of areas inspected is reduced, as planned, this is a valuable process. Despite popular opinion, I come to praise of OFSTED and hope it won’t be buried.

The morning after the judgement I held up the TES in the staffroom to huge applause because the headline was that outstanding schools no longer faced inspection. I'm not convinced- there is always much to learn and the inspectors surely need to have the widest picture. Still- I’m off to consider academy status now.

Bonhomie is me

2010-05-24T16:51:00.002+01:00

The police don’t do it but headteachers and politicians do. Whilst we all pound the beat on our respective patches, the real law enforcers discreetly keep their distance, striding purposefully on with an expression that conveys decisiveness. You never catch them asking everyone what their state of health is as they walk by.

Aloofness might be a characteristic to get some training on. Does it come only with helmet wearing and a chunky mobile or can anyone do it? In contrast, I go around enquiring how it’s going of everyone I meet. I’m programmed, like soap powder in a washing machine, to inject brightness. Even on the most miserable of days, bonhomie is me.

‘All well?’ I cheerily ask a senior colleague at the end of a particularly difficult week. I soon realise it was a mistake. For there are times when optimism, that essential characteristic in school leaders, can look like naivety, lack of awareness or even folly.

He’s thinking: ‘What’s the head got to be so cheerful about? He can’t know the half of what’s going on or he’d be having a nervous breakdown in his office.’ And I’m thinking: ‘The leadership manual tells me I must be relentlessly positive in the face of all adversity.’ So the smile stays fixed. The Captain of the Titanic would have been proud of me.

The teacher had just finished bus duty and all was far from well. A day of truanting and possible substance abuse from a couple of boys had led to unavoidable confrontation. It may have been the mood-enhancing quality of the substance, the start of the weekend, or perhaps the ‘broken society’ but the response from the students to a polite request was loud, personal and laced with sexual innuendo of an exotic variety. The other youngsters and some parents listening must have thought they were at the premiere of an adults only film.

I sigh in sympathy, switch off the smile and replace it with a determined expression that’s supposed to convey weighty assurance of firm action. I’m signalling that they won’t get away with it. Consequences will follow as surely as the school bells ring on the hour. Fixed term exclusion is my conclusion. But with it comes the time-consuming, energy-sapping paraphernalia of phone calls, letters, meetings and support plans. And any thought of a quick after-school getaway vanishes as the process has to be started straightaway.

Who’s being punished here, I wonder, as we wait for the first parent to answer. Will it be an abusive complaint that it’s our fault for letting him leave the site or an understanding apology? Once, on such an occasion, a parent told me he was on his way to sort me out, casually adding that he was bringing his gun. Fortunately, by the time I’d been coaxed out of the locked store cupboard where I’d taken up residence, my deputy had got through to the police to be told the gunman had handed himself in.

Calls made, I feel in control again. There may be horror stories now on the street of indiscipline and extraordinary rudeness at the secondary school, but I’m sticking with unremitting optimism. It’s a mantra to memorise, like those lines teachers used to set their pupils as punishment. And it’s Friday night, after all. So you won’t catch me kicking the wall or screaming in protest, though I might give the Jacuzzi at my local health club some stick later. And I may just practise an aloof smile, ready for the next crisis.

Humpty Dumpty

2010-05-12T10:45:00.003+01:00

According to the psychologist, Dorothy Rowe, we’re now in a period when children are being listened to and their views taken into account. Apparently, it’s a by-product of the women’s movement. But, although society is changing, in schools pupil voice may struggle to drown out the discordant noises-off from teacher unions who want to press the mute button.

Pupils are accused of over-stepping the mark, sitting on selection panels, daring to express their views during appointments, and also commenting on what goes on in lessons. Pupil voice, we’re told, means young upstarts can even ask candidates what font they think they most resemble. Well, I’d pick forte. Some apparently even rejected a teacher for a post because they claimed he was like Humpy Dumpty.

This isn’t just an infringement of union rights: it’s an assault on the teacher-pupil relationship in which the adult knows better than the child and is always right. But wait. Substitute ‘men’ for ‘adult’ and ‘women’ for ‘child’ and you can see the tectonic plates shifting as Rowe suggests, leaving the Band of Brothers on the wrong side of the debate.

I first explored student voice when I asked my classes to try out experiments with language, recording and transcribing their responses. With the tape recorder to control them, they followed the protocols of speaking in turn and commenting on the text. Once the writing barrier was removed and techniques learned for spoken contributions, classes which I had imagined to be low in ability gained the capacity to surprise each other as well as me.

At South Dartmoor, we now have an expert Student Learning Forum, volunteers selected by interview, who are trained in classroom observational techniques, using Guy Claxton’s Building Learning Power methodology to analyse and report, subject by subject. For example, they look at the learning environment. ‘Why no number lines in Maths rooms?’ they asked last year. Well, there are now and you can see the impact today as children look across the walls, counting from negative to positive numbers.

‘Who can enjoy hockey when the bibs we have to wear are dirty and smelly?’ they quizzed us. We’d never noticed but now the washing machines whir away to make sure it’s no longer an issue. ‘Can we have more student work on the walls, please?’ they request, making it clear to us that the environment really does matter to them. It’s an easy fix.

Our own push now is on assessment for learning. The principles have been explained to the Learning Forum and their latest comments are illuminating: ‘In subject X, we saw 60% of the students offering to answer questions. We think the proportion should be over 80%.’

There are comments about levels of engagement and responses by students to teacher strategies of pausing to allow reflection before requesting answers. The mysteries of how teaching works have been revealed like a David Blaine magic trick and the students marvel at how easy the skilled teacher makes their craft look.

It’s all voluntary, of course. Departments request these student-led observations because they help them to improve the learning. They commission reports for their subject SEFs- student views without the effort of processing questionnaires. And there is strictly no comment on the teaching- it’s all student-centred. Even so, I can hear the agonised cries of union dinosaurs, snarling in the swamp.

As for appointments, it was a no-brainer to use the Student Council and Sixth Form Councils as interview panels in their own right when my successor was appointed. It means he has widespread and popular endorsement. One candidate unwisely remarked that teaching would not be part of the head’s role if appointed. ‘Why not?’ asked the students. ‘It’s not important enough,’ came the reply. The candidate may not have been called Humpty Dumpty but certainly couldn’t be put back together again after a fall like that, even if forte had been the chosen font.

Ray Tarleton

Election Editorial

2010-05-04T10:49:00.002+01:00

So, an invitation at last to join the Government of Great Britain. I thought they’d never ask. But this tricksy Tory attempt to get my vote reminds me of my feeble attempts in assembly to persuade the school that the Student Council are now part of the Leadership Team and have shares in the Governing Body.

‘You are the young leaders of the school and your voice will be heard in decisions we make,’ I proclaim in the Sports Hall, half believing my own rhetoric. It could be an election rally. Well, I know that it will look good in the SEF and be an OFSTED crowd pleaser. But, of course, the reality is that schools these days are so complex, even the heads barely understand them, never mind the governors. What chance does a bunch of well-meaning students, even if they are democratically elected, have to get their heads around curriculum, finance and buildings?

So the great Cameron Con (and that’s con as in ‘con’, not in ‘Conservative’) is to pretend that we can be partners in the Government of the Big Society. Their radical educational idea is an import, something from the European Union they can agree to. The Swedish model has been chosen because, we must assume, it’s the most successful educational system on the planet. Well, this is the country that gave us the music of the pop group, Abba, so perhaps the Tory theme tune should be: ‘Take a Chance on Me.’

The three parties are promising much that is similar in education. Test yourself. Who is offering pupil premiums to direct funding to the most disadvantaged schools? Definitely the Lib Dems who thought of it but now also Labour and probably the Tories as well. Who wants to create a form of national service for young people? It’s a great idea and hopefully will become a compulsory part of the curriculum but it’s Labour and Conservatives with likely Lib Dem support. Who is promising one- to-one tuition? Wasn’t that a Labour policy before the Lib Dems snatched it? Feel a coalition government coming on?

My SEF is as long as War and Peace. So the Conservative policy of reducing OFSTED’s brief from seventeen areas to four will appeal to every school, especially after the Alice in Wonderland adventures attempting to monitor safeguarding, happiness and even health.

But the free schools concept will have unexpected consequences. Parents and charitable groups have a strong record of establishing their own schools in this country. It’s not a new idea. It’s just that these schools have, until now, been outside the state system and funded privately. If they can be established through the state and without regulation, checks and controls, why would any parent continue to pay, for example, to send their child to a prep school? Why not start an alternative, using existing resources and get the state to pay for it? And the biggest irony is that the Tories, the Party of the free market, could be responsible for the decline of private education in this country. Now that’s something to cheer about.

The Labour Government has a proud record in education - as long as you’re not a graduate with a £20k debt to start your career. Results have improved dramatically, with practically half of all Year 11 students achieving the Government’s GCSE benchmark - a remarkable achievement and a tribute to teachers.
There is now an educational community of schools sharing ideas, curriculum practice and even leadership. Academies, Trusts and Federations have blossomed, based on British educational research and rooted in what works rather than what has been stolen from the shelf in a Swedish store. And the budgets for bowls to catch water from leaky roofs- high spending areas during the last Conservative Government- now register zero.

In a three party race, this time it looks as if Abba’s other hit lyric, ‘The Winner Takes it All’, might be a thing of the past where politics is concerned. We may find ourselves, after a long night on May 6, with both a parliament hung over and a personal hangover. That would get my vote.

Ray Tarleton - this editorial also appeared on page 6 of the May 6th edition of SecEd digital: http://bit.ly/9Cks8W

The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night

2010-04-01T11:54:00.004+01:00

I’m amazed to see that these regular columns have been running for nearly three years. The first blog I ever wrote was in June 07. It must have been three years ago because it was poking fun at OFSTED who had just been here on inspection. And now we’re waiting from them to return. I hope they don’t read my earlier jibes. That might be one entry to delete right now.

Since then there’s been a pretty constant stream of blogs, though for the last year or so I’ve been in TV review mode. For the statisticians out there, the total comes to 172, made up of 116 genuine blogs and 56 TES television columns that were blog-lite but badged up as the real thing. Each had to be 500 words in length which means I’ve devoted 28,000 words to the small screen- a sad indictment of my free time.

When asked to write blogs, I confess that I didn’t have a clue what they were. And the hawk-eyed amongst you will have realised that I still don’t, though there must be a definition somewhere. But I think we got there first and remain one of the few ‘blog-standard’ comprehensives around.

A blog is forever, not just for Christmas: looking back on the archives in their handy digital filing cabinet in the ether, the entries remind me of past highlights and the daily surprises that make running a school such a fascinating job. So I’m sure I’ll return to them in the future but as reader rather than writer. That’s unless I decide to use them as material and the starting point for some other writing. Perhaps not.

Now, as well as doing all the things that I hope help to make South Dartmoor successful, I’m also working closely with my successor, Hugh Bellamy. He and I were both at a Specialist Schools and Academies Celebration Dinner recently for schools achieving an increase in GCSE results since 2006 (pre-blog) of more than 15 percentage points. Both schools received certificates but Hugh’s school gained the Oscar of the evening for largest one year improvement in results- 57%. Wow.

And for me retirement appears to be a mirage as I prepare for a new role in September as Regional Director (SW) for the National College for Schools and Children’s Services. The College has a remit to provide leadership training for leaders and aspirant leaders in education and also now in children’s services and the role is one of three being trialled. Yes, I’ll be on trial- and may find myself returned to sender.

So the future should blog-free. And will anyone notice? In the Sherlock Holmes’s story, Silver Blaze, Holmes is mystified as to why the dog doesn’t bark in the night when you’d expect it to. Well blogs are an unexpected form of writing as well as allowing you to capture the unexpected. And that’s just what schools and the future are full of. Who would have imagined, for example, that we’d be embarking on an exciting new collaboration with Ilsington Primary School from next term? Or that our students would run a public Question Time debate, as they did last week that was so dynamic and interactive.

The curious incident of this set of blogs is that they ever came to be written and that they’ve survived so long. But now it’s time to put the night blogs to bed.

Tune in, switch off - Faith, hope and clarity

2010-03-08T10:02:00.000Z

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, once regarded as so dangerous that even his voice on television was dubbed by an actor, played truth seeker in The Bible: A History (Channel 4). As they couldn't get King Herod to present, I suppose he was next best choice.

He talked to experts about Jesus' core teachings from the cradle to the cross, beginning with a Bible scholar's view that Jesus was probably not born in Bethlehem or even in a manger. "You're ruining Christmas," muttered Adams in one of the few light moments.

This was Adams working again on the Irish peace process - but peace for Gerry, wanting forgiveness. He read his Bible aloud, including the injunctions to love your neighbour and not to kill. Did he agree? Well, it would depend on the day of the week and the cause itself. We would have got more truth from a Robert Mugabe documentary on Gandhi.

Did he have blood on his hands? Adams claimed to be just the leader of a struggle that had caused hurt to others. So it was all the fault of the movement. That is the kind of politician's dodge that gives the term dodgy a bad name (besides, we heard that at the Chilcot inquiry).

Some, whose relatives were murdered by the IRA, told Adams that the cause was not worth more than 3,000 lives lost. What about their forgiveness? They eloquently disappointed an unrepentant Adams: their suffering would never end.

New quiz show The Bubble (BBC Two), meanwhile, saw truth seeking of a lighter kind. Frank Skinner and Victoria Coren lived in a media-free vacuum for four days without even a mobile phone, so they wouldn't know if an election had been called or whether it was snowing. The aim? To sort real news from spoofs.

David Mitchell, the tweedy-twee quiz master, much mocked by third bubble member, louder-than-life Reginald D. Jones, sported his "women don't fancy me" persona, looking as if his hair had been parted by his mother, her lipstick hastily wiped from his cheek.

But the "true" stories he presented were so obscure that the panel could have skipped the bubble. Try this one: "What was found inside a tin this week? A cat's head, an image of the Virgin Mary or a chicken tikka masala?" Why go into hiding to miss that?

Well, it was a tin that got stuck on a cat's head. Proof was a photo from some obscure parish magazine. But before you ring the RSPCA, it was not so much Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as Cat in a Spot The Tin Spoof (I made that punch-line up).

A year of Tune In: Switch Off has allowed me to watch TV in my own bubble while pretending I'm working. Now all that is left is to wipe the hard-drive of all those unviewed, unreviewed programmes. I'm pressing the delete button. Now.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Tears and tugs to go

2010-03-01T10:47:00.000Z

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. Unless you watched Leaving Home at 8 (Channel 4) and saw for yourself the folly of Forces parents on the move, trying to create some security for their daughters by placing them in a boarding school. Ironically, these were the very families that should bring up their own children, unlike Mr and Mrs Alcoholic Asbo on the housing estate nearby whose children's life chances could be transformed by a bit of boarding.

It wasn't Dotheboys Hall. The new eight-year-olds were well looked after, offered decent meals, stimulating teaching and activities galore at Highfield in Hampshire, a top prep. But it wasn't home. Summoned to ease the pain, nurse told the little people there was no medicine for homesickness, advising them to keep busy and get really tired. My wife gives me the same advice.

Yet no amount of galloping about the stately grounds could compensate these tiny exiles who were grieving for their mothers. We used to threaten our kids with boarding school when they were particularly badly behaved. Nowadays we would be up before child protection for such cruelty.

Oddly, fathers were not mentioned in this mummy-centric yet mother-free universe. Back at home, meanwhile, the mothers moaned with that Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal look - pools of sorrow in limpid eyes. They had lost their offspring after only eight years. It's bad enough 10 years later when they clear off to university. Eight is a childhood gone.

Keeping busy, one mother briskly walked her dog. No threat of kennels: we are always kinder to animals. Brief reunions revealed mothers' hugs and fears; children's tugs and tears. And if the parents suffered more than their kids, we felt it served them right.

There were more tears on Piers Morgan's Life Stories: Gordon Brown (ITV1). Alastair Campbell was close to tears on the Andrew Marr Show because the playground bullies keep teasing his mate, Tony, about Iraq. So would old Growly Jowly copy the spin supremo's mix of sneers, tears and smears?

For this was I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Back in Here - here being Number 10. Every insult made about him was re-heated and served up by Morgan. "I've gotta get better," joked the Prime Minister as his mistakes and social ineptness were paraded like a game of pinning the tail on the donkey at a children's party. The audience laughed and the opinion polls remained obstinately static.

Time to show emotion; on cue, the Prime Minister revealed his agonies as a parent facing the death of his baby daughter, perhaps copying David Cameron who does the same routine about his son.

The camera repeatedly panned to Sarah Brown in the audience. Why was she not by his side? I may have forgotten how to teach drama, but I can remember this cheap trick heightens the focus.

If the Prime Minister was completing his self-evaluation form for Ofsted on his performance and his government's, too, I wonder what grades he would give. Now shed those tears.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - An age old battle

2010-02-22T11:55:00.000Z

I thought old age was the price paid for a long life. But longevity on the cheap was the pursuit in Horizon: Don't Grow Old (BBC Two). Apparently, the study of ageing is a young field and preventing it is probably the modern equivalent of alchemy. One scientist described growing old as like having multiple sticks of dynamite inside our bodies, all on different-length fuses. I have laid off the firey foods just in case.

Another scientist, determined to stick around for a century or two, discussed "telomere shortening". I couldn't tell my telomeres from my tonsils, but I just grasped the fact that you need long telomeres for longevity. If you need long hair as well, I'm done for.

Calorie reduction is supposed to keep mice young, so a couple of Peter Pan wannabes in their sixties, determined to clock up 120 years on earth, had been starving themselves for years. They weighed their portions and weighed in their torsos with the fierce attention to detail you usually only see at an airport check-in desk. They definitely had nothing to declare.

Their secret was a large breakfast and small lunch. Dinner was just a walk in the park. They could simply have chained themselves in a dungeon to make the torture authentic. I would rather desert the planet before dessert arrives than miss out on life's main course - a decent meal.

David Sinclair, with $270 million to invest in the search for eternal youth after selling his company, cunningly bypassed starvation pains by finding a drug to mimic the effects of not eating while still stuffing himself normally. He was taking something untested called resveratrol. I would volunteer to spread it on my fish and chips, too, if it meant avoiding radishes.

Anorexia was followed by tanorexia in The Truth about Tanning (BBC Three). If you want to forget youth and go straight for ageing, a daily sunbed will bring wrinkles and crinkles galore. Girls Aloud star Nicola Roberts, formerly tanned but now a whiter shade of pale, shone light on the pitfalls of sun exposure, urging addicts to break free.

We saw girls in Liverpool, the UK tanning capital, burning malignant melanomas into their skin in the many unregulated salons that promise beauty but deliver death. With 2,000 fatalities a year, melanomas are the fastest growing form of skin cancer. Nicola's alabaster hue was proof that, for the naturally light, white is right.

Hardcore tanner Tom dreamed of being olive skinned. Months of ultraviolet rays - 15 times stronger than the midday sun - had given him the complexion of a radioactive goldfish. Tom used injections to stay the colour of an amber traffic light. These had the side effect of causing erections. So it wasn't all pointless.

His challenge from Nicola, a sunbed-free month, sent him swigging the bottle in depression. His skin may have been in for repair but his liver was now in a toxic stew. As for his telomeres, it's probably better not to know.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, Switch off - Mandela and Mo make us take notice

2010-02-12T12:30:00.000Z

As a teacher in Zambia in the 1970s, I came to love Africa and its people, despite occasionally experiencing the discomforting hostility a few understandably felt for their "former colonial masters", as a message on the staffroom board once described us. South Africa remained out of bounds because of its racist regime, but the landscapes were memorably captured in the location shots in Mrs Mandela (BBC Two).

A lorry chugging along a dirt road, taking Winnie (Sophie Okonedo) from her home to a grim shanty town, reminded me of the dust, distances and danger. I once took the cast of a school play by truck on such roads to perform in a village miles away. I was into community cohesion even before it was invented.

Told in flashbacks from the magic moment of her husband's release after 27 years' imprisonment, Okonedo's compellingly physical performance took us inside the painful heart of Winnie's tortured life.

During visits to Nelson's Robben Island prison, she endured de-humanising conversations with him behind a glass screen. No wonder the marriage was doomed: she would have had more chance of a relationship with cashier number three in the Post Office. And the house search harassments by the petty police were more regular than trains on the Northern Line.

David Morrissey's Major Swanepoel, a spit-spraying torturer with turbo-charged saliva glands and face like a puff adder, was only just on the right side of deranged as he tried to break her indomitable spirit during her own 18 months in prison.

He taught her hatred; she believed it liberated her. In fact, it made her the monster - abused turned abuser - who later sanctioned the murder of Stompie Seipei.

There were symbolic victories such as a Rosa Parks moment when she insisted on buying and wearing a dress from a whites-only store. It was bright yellow - the colour of the African National Congress - and you could feel power shifting through the force of her personality. "When she walks into a room the sun comes with her," said Nelson Mandela. But years clouded by brutality led to her eclipse.

Like Winnie, Mo Mowlam also brought sun and fun into any room she entered, using her personality to change history. Julie Walters' triumphant portrayal in Mo (Channel 4), screened just as Northern Ireland politicians were again locked in negotiations, reminded us how Mowlam's fearless, no-nonsense passion helped secure the Good Friday Agreement while coping with a malignant brain tumour.

Alcohol, cigarettes, swearing and sex kept her going. "Disinhibition", a symptom of the illness, meant she just got stuck in, showing Lord Trimble her suitably coloured orange knickers and telling negotiators: "No cocks on the table."

To us, Tony Blair may have been Prime Minister, but to her he was "babe". Although as she was demoted he became an expletive-blasted bastard.

Julia Langdon, Mowlam's biographer, claims that Mo was part of the Durham University drug-taking and drinking scene in the late 1960s. As her contemporary at Durham, I'm disappointed I wasn't invited.

Ray Tarleton

Classy birds and culture to boot

2010-02-10T11:20:00.000Z

Since the demise of the South Bank Show, viewers with a taste for the arts may have struggled to find something in the schedules to whet their appetite

But new series The Review Show (BBC Two), promised "cultural comment of the highest order". It was so high, in fact, that I had to turn down the volume. Guests gathered to talk about Obama's first year in office and the Oscar-tipped film Precious. As American politics fascinate me, and I had already watched and marvelled at this must-see movie, I was raring to go.

Kirsty Wark had only four in her group, but it sounded like 40. Viewpoints by the volume and comments by the crate load were poured out in simultaneous transmission. I was worried the neighbours would complain about the noise. It was like one of those "rounds" in music where each singer comes in a few bars after the previous one and then sings on, ignoring everyone else.

The clips, though, would be great for teacher training. Kirsty displayed classic "how not to do it" classroom control and talked over everyone. She would have struggled to collect dinner money from them.

The panel analysed Obama as if he were a work of art. A grey-garbed Bonnie Greer sighed, almost cried over the "pointy-headed intellectual", the "first viral president" who was now "breaking people's hearts". Apparently he was never real - just "a construct". Well, he has had me fooled all along.

Novelist Harry Kunzu described the President as "a nerd" who only became human when he announced the troop surge in Afghanistan. Apparently this meant he was no longer in charge of his own destiny. The most powerful person on the planet barely human and not in control? Where does that leave the rest of us, just struggling to get through to half-term?

In between trying to keep order, Kirsty even offered her own commentary. To her, Obama was a "global counter-cultural icon". I'm waiting for the A-level sociologists to explain that to me.

Paddy McGuinness displayed marginally better classroom management in the new Saturday night "pre-pub" offering, Take Me Out (ITV1). He lined up 30 love-shorn ladies, searching for a fella in a cross between Blind Date and Fifteen to One. Lights on screens indicated female acceptance. Tom from Surrey pranced around scratching his crotch like a peacock on heat to the screams of the teams. One rejected him because his skin was too tight - a "wind tunnel" look. But his fiery saxophone performance enabled Paddy to use an extinguisher and a double entendre at the same time. Then, roles reversed, Tom turned off the lights of the girls he had just turned on. I think the show is a cultural phenomenon, too, or should that be counter-cultural? I had better check with Kirsty.

Ray Tarleton

Cameron's daft education speech is a bedtime story

2010-02-01T15:58:00.000Z

Let me check I've got this right. Her Majesty's Opposition says that when in power they would boost the status of teachers, squeeze waste out of the system and free schools from government interference. But testing these three policy positions against the statements in the Conservative Party's draft education manifesto, unveiled last week, I wondered if David Cameron had been handed the wrong speech.

Teacher status should have been an easy one for him, but his vision of a "new, noble profession" battling a "broken society" was more Harry Potter than Harry at Agincourt. Has he been reading too many fairytales to his children? Doesn't he know that the present generation of teachers is the best trained and most skilled we've ever had?

When observing lessons, I'm frequently inspired by the preparation, shared assessment with students, innovative use of technology and engagement in learning. The buzz lifts me for days. It's happening like this in schools around the country and it wasn't like this when I started teaching. I'd struggle now as a newly qualified teacher.

Like a playground bully, Cameron took a cheap shot at those with third-class degrees, promising to be "brazenly elitist" and stop our taxes from funding their training. While degree classification might influence the selection of candidates at appointment, I'm more likely to be swayed by A-level grades and the university they attended. But I know, to my shame, that this kind of elitism is deeply flawed: one of the finest teachers I ever appointed, who went on to transform the standards in the subject as head of department, had weak A-levels and a degree from the equivalent of Grimsby Polytechnic.

In any case, in 2006/07, 92.6 per cent of first-year trainee teachers had a 2:2 or above, so why the fuss? The best graduates have been coming into teaching for years, succeeding in the classroom and gaining leadership positions. Enhanced training in schools in partnership with universities, and entitlement to study for higher degrees, with opportunities for development and research, are the best guarantees of quality.

By highlighting future applicants, Cameron also ignored all current teachers and the thousands of valuable support staff. He couldn't bring himself to acknowledge their achievements. His view that "half of pupils do not get five good GCSEs including English and maths", while technically accurate - the figure is 49.7 per cent - was a miserly critique from Mr Sunshine. Moreover, the figure was 35.6 per cent when his party left office - a dramatic 14 per cent lower. We've had over a decade of remarkable progress, so why not tell the true story?

The second big policy, cutting waste, was a detail-free zone. The bold warrior chose not to say where his axe would fall. Instead of reducing waste, the Tory policy of creating a massive number of surplus places to meet parental choice would increase it. I challenge him to spice up his dull story by naming the cuts.

To be helpful, here's a proposal for him to reduce waste. Time is always a limiting factor, so why not double the number of training days each year? The savings to the supply budgets would be enormous as schools wouldn't pay twice, once for teachers and again for their cover. The cost to the Exchequer would be zero. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne could put that in his waste pipe and smoke it.

Freeing schools from Whitehall interference, the third policy, was reflected in his plan to give headteachers the "power to use their budgets to pay bonuses to the best teachers". Sound familiar? That's because we already have those powers: they're called recruitment and retention points. If teachers don't see them used very often, it's because of budgetary constraints. It's not the power heads lack; it's the funding. As for "Obama-style" financial incentives to attract more science graduates into teaching, we got there before the Americans with our "golden hellos" and bursaries for shortage subjects. It's already happening, Sunshine.

There was nothing new in the proposal to make it easier for heads to "fire poorly performing teachers". Welcome to the new Tory fantasy land. Even Ryan Bingham, George Clooney's character in the film Up in the Air, whose job is to tell employees that their company is "letting them go", doesn't ever use the "f" word. No head would want to do a Bingham or behave like Alan Sugar on The Apprentice. We can move quickly to help an under-performing colleague improve their teaching or, with the support of their union, reach a compromise agreement. Even Sir Alan fires only when he's been properly briefed and can prove that an apprentice has failed.

Maddest of all was Cameron's freedom-loving commitment to introduce Swedish-style self-assembly schools by allowing "anyone with a passion for giving children the best to set up a new school". Now, I can predict that's a tale that won't have a happy ending.

You know, I really do think it's David's bedtime now, everybody. So let's thank him for a lovely story and hope he has a credible script next time he gives a speech.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Have a wail of a time

2010-02-01T15:55:00.000Z

My subject is opera. I know, you are thinking dumpy divas, Wagnerian vibrato and staccato surtitles, or more probably by now, Match of the Day. But it may change your life: my wife was just like everyone else until she discovered opera.

So there was no fighting over the remote control when ITV1's new reality offering, Popstar to Operastar, an incestuous child of The X Factor, made its debut. And with mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins and tenor Rolando Villazon as mentors and judges, there seemed plenty to keep us both happy.

Eight chart-topping singers attempted to perform well-known operatic arias, accompanied by a live orchestra. The idea of extending people by developing new skills is admirable. It's called education and we do it every day.

Behind the scenes, we had glimpses of the coaching. "It's just like singing in a foreign language, really," observed one contestant, recognising an aria from the Stella advert. Even the presenters were out of their comfort zone. Alan Titchmarsh looked in need of his gardening gloves while Myleene Klass was squeezed into a dress so tight she gave the impression she'd had an out-of-body experience.

Blur's Alex James stuck the right note - his only one of the evening, though - when he described opera as the musical equivalent of the pyramids. Villazon, who at least knew what he was talking about, reminded us that opera is like being alive: "The souls of the performers touch the souls of the receivers." I sat back to wait for radio contact. Come in, Katherine Jenkins.

Jimmy Osmond's karaoke-kitsch performance was silk purse music turned into sow's ear singing. Vanessa White had potential but, despite Katherine's coaching, there was still plenty of woozy, whooshy breathing. She could have been performing in a force nine gale.

Meat Loaf, mercifully judging not singing, stood to offer corny comments, fuelled by his own pizzazz. He felt Bernie Nolan was singing to the sky, so he offered to be her sky. Marcella Detroit's song was a prayer so Mr Loaf was "gonna be there to answer it". He could write soundbites for politicians.

It was about as true to real opera as a cheap plastic cloth is to fine dining, as close to Covent Garden as table tennis is to Wimbledon. This was a party game with a studio audience, like a rowdy class without a teacher; opera as pop, rather than the other way round. Waiting for the winners to be announced had all the suspense of bingo and about as much logic. The loser was Alex, who had sung like a miscast lead in a school musical.

The next night I went to watch Carmen at the cinema, beamed live from the Met in New York, and finally I experienced what Villazon meant about souls touching. If you are still not convinced, perhaps you should go back to the football

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Blood, guts and bore

2010-01-25T09:35:00.000Z

I would rather my ghosts were Victorian scary strangers than modern-day, cheery mates to hang around with at the pub. I like Turn of the Screw-type supernatural - dark and dangerous like that chocolate which is nearly all cocoa, as mysterious as a bat flit in a graveyard, with all the cunning of a dispatch of demons. Such spirits, out to destroy a world they can no longer inhabit, have me hiding behind the curtains, screaming for my garlic tablets.

But the ghost, werewolf and vampire trio of flatmates in the return of Being Human (BBC3), are twenty-somethings, trying to live normal lives, despite struggling with their unusual afflictions. Their worries are about the next full moon, walking in parks after dark and just being dead, especially as they appear larger than life. They could be three NQTs realising what schools are like, exchanging notes on difficult classes.

Yet even off-the-wall classes seem desirable when the alternative is waking up naked in the woods with a half-eaten stag for company. Werewolf George (Russell Tovey) had a stag night to remember and he wasn't even getting married. Dancing with deer spiced up his day job as a hospital porter and there was plenty to eat. He also got to have "weresex" with a ghost, giving new meaning to the term transsexual. In today's supernatural society, even the boundaries of acceptable inhuman behaviour are shifting.

The ghost mocked George for keeping his bits covered. But George had no such modesty about revealing a fine set of werewolf teeth. I reckon he would need to get those gnashers fixed on the NHS though, as it would cost a mint to go private.

George's girlfriend, Nina, blamed him for turning her into a werewolf, too. He scratched her. That's all it took. She didn't even believe in homeopathy before her transformation. Suddenly she is bursting, more hog than wolf-like from her clothes, ready to tear out someone's throat. And she no longer wants to have sex with him. That's why the lady is a vamp.

If these were the good guys, the baddies were evangelical Christians, those clean-shaven, Sunday-suited enthusiasts that normally do door-to-door spiritual sales. Professor Jaggat and his sidekick, the cold-hearted Kemp, were determined to destroy all supernatural creatures. They engaged in violent experiments, using something that looked like the Large Hadron Collider to squeeze the blood out of their victims. I prefer the garlic cure.

As all this sounds like pantomime, I was expecting a sprinkling of vampire jokes. You know the kind of thing: "Don't let your soup get cold or it will clot." It didn't sink so low, but I rather wish it had. Where were the poltergeist punch lines, quick quips, with the sharpness of a bat bite to surprise? Supposedly a comedy drama with lots of fans, this may be "cult occult", but I found it not so much panto as pants

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Wrap up with Wallander

2010-01-19T10:57:00.000Z

There is something rather appealing about watching others battling snowy wastes when you have just been scraping ice off the car. So, safely warmed by a log fire, I shut out the weather by watching Wallander (BBC One), a gripping adaptation of Henning Mankell's novels.

The crumpled detective, played by Kenneth Branagh, spends most of his time crossing the flat, seemingly endless, Swedish landscape as if in a Volvo advert. Shot on location in Ystad, this gloom-filled morass is miles of tarmac and acres of sky - like Norfolk and the Fens. All that snow and not even a decent ski resort in sight.

But in truth, this new series is set in what passes there for summer. So that sky came with corn-filled fields, a real but symbolically slaughtered white horse and a sense of evil that oozed out of the TV set, almost extinguishing my fire.

Branagh, stubble-chinned and double-chinned, admits to feeling and looking a changed man at the end of filming, as the ghosts of the country get into his blood. If Wallander was one of your pupils, you would whisk him off for counselling at first sight of those large pleading eyes and that furrowed, burrowed grimace.

But once fixed - fixated even - on a crime, Wallander stays with his prey. "This is mine. It started with me. This is where it will end," he declaimed, with a determination matched only by his inner doubt. There was plenty of anguished questioning and slow exploration as he moved at the speed of the Eurostar in the wrong kind of snow. But when the shots were called, he fired them.

Perhaps there is something in the furniture varnish in this land of self-assembly flatpacks; or maybe it's having to repeatedly rescue his delusional dad (David Warner), who was dancing around a bonfire in his pyjamas. I reckon Wallander's special subjects on Mastermind would be misery and beating yourself up.

The double murder he was investigating was no health cure either. An elderly couple were attacked in their own home in a scene that could have been a Crimewatch reconstruction. Wallander was there in time to catch the old woman's denunciation of the culprits as "fs". He wondered if she had said "foreigners". I would have guessed differently. It sounded like the kind of language I would exclude for.

Disapproving of his daughter dating a Syrian (another f), he inadvertently triggered a racist media story that had the right-wing xenophobes reaching for their guns. Several murders later, including a dramatic killing by Wallander himself, the criminals were revealed as both foreigners and fairground workers. Did that make Wallander a racist or just good at crosswords?

This is what we might have to get used to if there is a change of government, as shadow education secretary Michael Gove plans to introduce elements of the Swedish education system here. We would soon know how easy his Ikea, do-it-yourself version of schools would be to assemble. But given the quality of the writing in Wallander, I think I would just stick to putting a Mankell novel on the literature syllabus.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - The doctor will see you

2010-01-08T15:59:00.000Z

The nation was transfixed by the promise of a virgin birth this Christmas. How we rejoiced in wondrous anticipation of a defining moment in history. Then, on New Year's Day, it came to pass just as foretold in the Radio Times: a new Dr Who was born. And he was called Matt Smith.

If William Hartnell, the first Dr Who, had stuck around, he would be 102 by now. Though I reckon that's still far too young to play a 900-year-old time lord. Half a human century has passed which, in Tardis time, is 10 galaxy-gallivanting Doctors.

Some things don't change though and his old enemy, the Master, was regenerated specially for the holiday double bill, The End of Time (BBC One). Disguised as a hoody, he had a raging hunger, devouring chicken and burgers at a rate that made those of us in Christmas dinner recovery position feel nauseous. But he burned the calories leaping over buildings as an expert free runner.

The Master transformed himself into everyone on the planet. "I'm everyone and everyone is me," he cackled, sounding like Lord Mandelson during a Cabinet reshuffle. Cloned, he was inside everyone's head.

Ironically, David Tennant was equally ubiquitous. There was no escaping him: in programme trailers riding reindeers, Tardis in tow; playing Hamlet; revealing limited musical taste on Desert Island Discs; appearing on Alan Carr: Chatty Man (Channel 4) and then on the Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Was he battling Simon Cowell for world domination?

By the new year finale, as well as thrilling space chases, we had a Darker Who, a melancholy figure, feeling the creep of death. He railed against unfairness, confessing to companion, Wilf (Bernard Cribbins), that his regeneration would mean: "A new man will go sauntering away".

The regally robed, pedantically plodding time lords turned up, like characters from a Royal Shakespeare Company history play, complete with the feared drumbeat of time. But the White Point Star Diamond they threw to Earth looked like a bargain from the new year sales.

And the Doctor's moral dilemma: would he murder the Master and re-make time or shoot the president of the time lords? He couldn't kill either - a "geekbump" moment for true Who fans.

Old friends and monsters made guest appearances in a 20-minute epilogue where the Doctor greeted his old sidekick Rose (Billie Piper), for example, in January 2005. She didn't recognise him. Either he had not yet met her for real, or perhaps he was Christopher Eccleston then. Finally, in the Tardis, Tennant was vapourised in a burst of flames. A coolly crazy but promising new Doctor was born. It was poignant for me, as I'll get my Dr Who moment in the summer when I rip off the mask and a new master takes over my school. But no virgin re-birth for me: I plan to be the one who saunters away.

Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - Shows are snow joke

2010-01-04T14:22:00.000Z

During my end-of-term clear out, I skimmed through a year of "Tune in" columns to find my favourites.

My drama pick would be The Street (ITV 1). Jimmy McGovern's ground-breaking series about the social problems in a single postcode made me worry about the catchment school. If the adults had troubling coping with handicaps, disfigurement, alcoholism and poverty, what about the children? For, as we know, there are no problem pupils, only problem parents.

The solution for youngsters in postcodes such as this is not to change their school, but, sadly, to find new homes. There is even a science to prove it, though it's called sociology.

Occupation (BBC One) was another of my highlights, conveying the horrors of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath-wrecked lives and broken bodies. Damnation for the politicians responsible might be to spend eternity watching it. And weeping.

Rap ringing, a kind of verbal skateboarding, took off in our school last term, based on Smithy's affectionate messages to his bosom friend in Gavin and Stacey (BBC One, pictured), one of my comedy highlights. But if I had Smithy stalking me, I would change my phone. The programme came back for a final series with Wales playing Essex at home and that contradiction in fiction, the credible stereotype. The two leads in love may be as boring as a bridal boutique during the new year sales, but the other characters were foible-filled and fallible.

Another comedy masterpiece, The Thick of It (BBC Two) kept me howling at insults that always seemed to involve surgical amputation and the re-stitching of organs in unsuitable places. That's if they had not been turned into decorative objects. Tucker may have lost it advising a collapsing Government, but he might yet find a post turning around failing schools. Imagine the scene in the staffroom next week if he turned up. Actually, he would never pass a safeguarding test.

My comedy favourite of 2009 was The Big Bang Theory (Channel 4). Super-geek Sheldon made even the aliens from Dr Who seem normal. He is such a phenomenal physicist, he would scoop all the points on University Challenge. In one episode he provided the scientific explanation for my anxiety at Christmas, explaining that presents were just obligations to be re-paid. Well I'm doing mine tomorrow at the exchange counter in M&S.

The best information programme last year was The Sex Education Show vs Pornography (Channel 4). I watched it every night for a week to write about it and so could even pretend I was working. Seriously, we need more bold campaigns like this to help us with health drives.

The Apprentice (BBC One) gets my vote for best TV reality show. Sir Alan looks soft compared with Tucker, especially now he is in Government. Still, my new year prediction is that the elevation of TV hosts won't catch on so Ant and Dec, Simon Cowell and the rest needn't hold their breath. Happy new season's viewing

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - An anus horribilis

2009-12-21T15:13:00.000Z

It was a choice between humiliation and humiliation: watching celebrities swallowing raw kangaroo anus or a Royal celebrity experiencing her "annus horribilis". I began with Ant and Dec in Australia who looked like a couple of convict throwbacks in the outback, inflicting tortures on jungle-hungry contestants in I'm a Celebrity... Get me Out of Here (ITV1).

Down to five with the ejection of Sabrina, Romeo (in this case, Stuart Manning) had lost his Juliet. The nation had voted to starve young love. For Sabrina there was the tempting prospect of a hot shower and a decent meal; for the rest the chance of a farewell fumble.

Interior designer Justin poured gallons of curdling, stinking yoghurt and buckets of mushy, maggoty strawberries over Chef (Gino) who was seated in a supermarket trolley. This was meals on wheels for dysentery lovers. As treasure seekers, they had to hunt for the hidden metal stars in the teeming rot and grot.

And that was just for hors d'oeuvres. The main course, hardly in Gino's repertoire, was fly-blown fish and offal, marinaded in E. coli sauce. And if the maggots didn't get Gino, the cockroaches would: "Somebody's nipping my willy," he cried.

I was more concerned about the appetite of the nation than about the state of Gino's genitals. By the final he was chewing crocodile tongue and downing worm stew. These were dishes straight from Macbeth's witches' cauldron. But Gino's reward was being crowned King of the Jungle. All that education and this is what we watch in our spare time.

Meanwhile, the Monarch experienced humiliation by the decade in a week of The Queen (Channel 4). Barbara Flynn portrayed the wounded woman behind the caricature when, in 1992, Princess Di leaked her story to Andrew Morton, turning the Royal Family into a living soap opera. We had believed the marriage was a fairytale. Ironically it was, but not one with a happy ending.

There was a lot of old footage, recent commentary and too-brief, dramatic re-constructions with delightful humiliations: Charles squirmed at the taped telephone conversations with Camilla in which his lurid tampon fantasies were exposed. He was in the wrong programme: Ant and Dec could have sorted it for him in the outback.

But Charles was brave enough to take an ice pick to his emotionally frozen "mummy", the glacial Queen, with the rebuke that Diana's redeeming feature was the amount of time she spent with her children, compared with his own mater.

Ten years on, in the final episode, Diana Quick played the present Queen, grieving for the loss of her sister and mother. They had gone, but Camilla hadn't. There was enough frost to prevent an ice cap melting; perhaps someone should tell the climate change campaigners.

Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Article originally published here: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6029952

Tune in, switch off - Getting physical

2009-12-14T11:03:00.000Z

How is this for a new concept: preventative policing? No, it's not setting up Neighbourhood Watch schemes or putting extra bobbies on the beat. This is about the perfect solution to any crime. You solve it before it happens and then try to change the course of events. Imagine that burglary you might have next Thursday. The good news is that they have caught the perpetrator.

Paradox (BBC One) is a new time shift drama that plays on our credulity about the endless possibilities of technology, based on the premise that images of the future can be downloaded. We can all think of events in the past that we would like to change. With this system, you sort them in advance. Nothing beats good planning.

The programme even has a real physicist consultant who claims that if fourth and third-dimensional space combined, events normally separated would occur simultaneously. I checked this out with an A-level science class, who politely told me where to go on the space-time continuum. The writer, who claims that it is all plausible, is called Lizzie Mickery. And that is what she is taking. Not to mention the fact that it has all been done before in Minority Report.

DI Rebecca Flint (Tamzin Outhwaite) was the detective investigating an explosion that had not happened yet. It would take place in 18 hours. Start the clock ticking and the adrenalin flowing. No chance to snooze either as the flashing red numbers on screen looked just like my alarm clock.

Dr Christian King, world-renowned astrophysicist, was the informer, either a mad terrorist or a future gazer. Despite his name, he rejected all talk of God, claiming mankind to be a planetary aberration. His frisson of flirtation with Flint was as sparky as a meteorite, as he dreamed openly of making delirious love to her. Still, she didn't make an arrest, though I think she would have relished putting him in handcuffs.

He showed her photographs of the devastation, but was it a hoax? It looked like a bomb so Flint had to convince others, including her Scottish slouch of a colleague, to get stuck in. But were they in a police drama or a sci-fi thriller? Was she Dr Watson or Dr Who? If "God created economists to make weather forecasters look good," as one character quipped, these sci-fi detectives must do the same for real police officers.

Like those accidents in Casualty that you can see coming even if you are not a fortune teller, a propane gas tanker trundled along with a sleepy driver whose sat-nav had failed. In this race against the clock, time won. Flint arrived at the scene seconds before the lorry hit a railway bridge, blowing up a stationary train on the tracks above, all as predicted. I will never complain about cows on the line holding up my journey again.

But space-time continuum theory is my new excuse for missing deadlines. If I could sort those time dimensions, I would get twice as much work done. And so would Year 11. Dream on.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Blyton blighted

2009-12-07T09:48:00.000Z

If, as a child, you enjoyed Enid Blyton's books and still have happy memories of what her publisher husband, Hugh, called "bunnies, picnics and talking bloody gollywogs", please look away now. Pour yourself a ginger beer and turn straight to the back page column, or close your eyes tight.

Blyton's hundreds of novels haven't made it to the screen - probably because the characters are too flat and the plots too thin. They may work on the printed page, in children's heads, but on film they would be like half-drawn cartoons. Her own life, however, was a dramatist's dream and a therapist's nightmare.

In Enid (BBC Four) we saw her as so spiteful, selfish and naughty that in one of her own stories she would have been scolded and sent to bed without any supper. Helena Bonham Carter, a touch too beautiful but otherwise pitch-perfect, revealed her icy heart. This was Blyton blighted.

Although Blyton genuinely believed she was the guardian of children's morals, she was, in fact, a liar and a hypocrite, pretending, for example, that her mother was dead and her father a saint. Her secrets would have turned her gollywogs grey and made Big Ears's giant appendages burn.

She began telling stories to comfort her younger brothers during their parents' rows. Her father's desertion left scars only a fantasy world could hide. Embarking on her big adventure in the far away tree where writers live, she had no family contact until her mother's death 30 years later.

For Enid's emotions were frozen in time, just like her undeveloped uterus, described by her doctor as that of a 12-year-old girl. She underwent hormone treatment so she could bear her own children, but instead she lavished affection on the dog she carried around, refusing to pick up her own howling infant when she finally became a mother.

Dorothy, the midwife, calmed the baby by holding her, while Enid cuddled her pet, really believing her week-old daughter was naughty and wilful. Peremptory in manner, she sounded like Margaret Thatcher without the kind side or Joyce Grenfell without the jokes.

Her hapless chauffeur was told to get rid of his cold by the end of the week or he would be fired.

While her own children were exiled to the nursery, she hosted parties for her little fans in which success was measured by the amount of raspberry jelly consumed. Her irrational, callous behaviour towards first husband, Hugh, drove him to drink while she unjustly claimed he was having "a fandango with a floozy". Who said her vocabulary was limited?

After her affair with Kenneth Waters, she offered Hugh unlimited access to the children in return for his playing the bad guy in divorce proceedings, but it was a double-crossing deal. Then she told her publisher to sack him or she would remove her books. That's how she treated chauffeurs and husbands.

But did they all live happily ever after like the Famous Five? Not likely. You can open your eyes now.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Big bang theory

2009-11-30T17:18:00.000Z

If you have a guilty secret, don't risk driving on a dual carriageway. In fact I would stay off the road altogether, if I were you. Part way through Collision (ITV1), a gripping five-night drama based on a multiple pile-up on the A12, I was ready to flog my car on eBay and shred my driving licence.

For this was some accident: tyres and metal spun at high velocity and with sickening impact. I watched it twice. Perhaps I am a sad rubberneck, but I wanted to check out the cause and chain reaction.

And that's just what Detective Inspector Tolin (Douglas Henshall) did, using photographs to reconstruct the accident. He even paced the road itself. By now I was certain: I would never drive again.

But this was more than a multiple motorway pile-up. There were colliding worlds as paths criss-crashed, with the fall-out that followed from secret lives exposed like physical wounds. Strip tease-like, each episode tantalised by revealing more of the moments that led to the big bang. One couple were smoking hash. High on weed and speed, they accelerated towards death.

White-van man Danny's Amsterdam trip wasn't a tulip tour either. Human cargo was his import. While Danny fled, an illegal East African immigrant was left trapped in the bottom of the transporter. As his wife worried, he lay dying, entombed in a white black hole.

Karen had copied her bosses' files about secret chemical weapons for an on-the-make, fake journalist before the fateful trip. She survived, only to be murdered, not bathing but drowning in a bubble bath of blood.

Tolin had that police officer intuition that screamed everything was wrong when all around were deaf to the problem. But he was hard of hearing when it came to personal relationships with his female colleague. All TV detectives seem to need personal counselling these days. No wonder police costs are rising.

But Tolin's wife had been killed by a drunk driver, leaving his daughter disabled too, on the very night he had been cheating on his wife. The driver's attempt at forgiveness almost led to Tolin throttling him to death. Restorative justice isn't meant to work like this.

The only apparent false note - the unlikely relationship between a wealthy property dealer and the service station waitress - was another deliberate twist, for we discovered he was really just a fantasist. She wanted to escape a dreary, dull future and dreamed of sitting above a foreign city listening to its beat. The Eurostar tickets he bought weren't wasted when, jilted, she decided to break free and flee.

There were more characters than in a Dickens novel and more plots than a Cabinet coup, all inter-connected. And the collision was caused by the swatting of a wasp. Roll on my free bus pass. Anyone want to buy a Mazda?

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Geeks with chic

2009-11-23T10:40:00.000Z

I last saw Peter Firth in the flesh, in pain and naked, on a sixth-form theatre trip in the 1970s. He was portraying Alan Strang, the deranged blinder of horses in Peter Shaffer's Equus. The pupils wondered how it passed the censor. Now here is Firth as Harry Pearce, the spy chief in Spooks (BBC One), where he again goes distressingly deep into the most painful areas of experience, testing moral boundaries. If there were a Bafta for long suffering, Firth would be unbeatable.

Spooks has the same formula that makes Stieg Larsson's novels best sellers: a convincing secret world, watched over by geeks using new tricks of surveillance to surprise. There are also ruthless young women like his heroine Lisbeth Salander - Ros and Jo are the blondes in black. Even the television newsreader was a bleached-haired, dark-dressed clone.

The flashback sequences in slow dream-time resembled those oddly coloured prints you get from the developers when you have bungled your camera settings. But there was no chance to get bored. In the first minutes of the new series we had a helicopter, handcuffings, fights, an execution and an amputated finger. All in the time it took for my kettle to boil. No wonder, as he faced a ruthless gunman, Harry tried to slow things down by asking to send a message to his family. I was ready for a break, too.

Expect the unexpected, and for it to be grim. His colleague Ruth was forced to watch - on a laptop - while her husband was murdered before pleading for her stepson's life to be spared. I always knew that computers were a pain - now they are weapons of torture as well.

Harry had the choice of allowing him to be shot or to tell their captors where the weapons-grade uranium was buried - a bomb that would kill not one but thousands of children. "I can only see mine in front of me," screamed Ruth, living every mother's nightmare.

His response to the kidnappers (he wouldn't say whether to kill the child or not) was super cool-callous, combined with a nifty goal-scoring kick to destroy the computer. Will Ruth ever forgive him? Actually, the computer he wrecked wasn't hers. But I'm watching mine now. It could be transmitting my every snooze.

Comedy Showcase: Campus (Channel 4) was also not for the squeamish. This wasn't so much A Very Peculiar Practice, the 1980s campus hit, as a series of peculiar practices from university vice-chancellor Jonty De Wolfe.

Towering over the campus - well, a model of it - De Wolfe contemplated making Kirke University so successful it would "gleam like a bleached anus in a line up of dirty arses". That could be a novel criterion to use when advising sixth formers on their Ucas applications.

Dreamer and schemer in academia, he mocked minorities that I thought had laws to protect them. He whinged and scoffed; I cringed and coughed. Depending on the censor, this could become a cult or a cut comedy.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Tucker is triumphant

2009-11-16T11:02:00.001Z

We are almost halfway through series three of The Thick of It (BBC Two), one of the few political satires on TV, and there is no mistaking that Malcolm Tucker is back in town.

Plotter, rotter and rottweiler, Peter Capaldi's legendary creation combines the evil intelligence of Iago with the verbal dexterity of Billy Connolly, striking fear in the eyes, agony in the heart and laughter deep in the stomach.

Satirists have their work cut out mocking today's politics, now in a place so absurd they resemble an Armando Iannucci script. You couldn't make it up but he has done. Life mirrors art; satire becomes reality and, as Tucker would say, "we're all ******".

If there is any difference between this comedy and Westminster, it is that these characters have more personality than our politicians, who are as diminished and disposable as those plastic figures we used to get free in cereal packets.

Nicola Murray MP (Rebecca Front) is now head of the ragbag department, Social Affairs and Citizenship (DoSAC). She is a real person with dyed roots, stretch marks and a fear of lifts that will rule out visits to constituents in tower blocks.

Tucker tells her that she is unsackable after only 12 days in post, but that is before she has been informed of the massive, irretrievable data loss of 170,000 immigration records. Remind you of anything? No, the postal strike is not a clue.

"Who primarily should I be shouting at?" she asks her terrified team. "Somebody has done a huge poo on my desk and I want it cleared up." Ollie Reader, fresh-faced policy wonker and special adviser, has been watching too many Attenborough programmes and favours an ostrich plan: keep it secret and hide. But if there has to be a victim, there is always the one who makes weak tea.

Ollie is like the bright young things I meet when I go to sessions at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, where future policies are road-tested on headteachers for their reactions.

The teeny boffins are all boosted brain and limited life experience, though they might be able to write satire well.

Communications director Terri Coverley was headhunted from Waitrose, and proves how bad the private sector can be at developing people. "My bum is clean," is her defence as she guzzles her fifth banana.

As grand inquisitor, Tucker's explosive expletives have all the force of a scatter bomb. He is the Cerberus that does bark in the night, a slime dog who reminds us of the dark underbelly of modern politics. Modelled on Blair's Campbell, Brown's McBride and Cameron's Coulson, he is in the comic tradition of bullies such as Basil Fawlty abusing Manuel or Blackadder insulting Baldrick.

He does invective with genius ingenuity. He is scarily nasty and belly-achingly funny. "Wear brown trousers and a shirt the colour of blood," he warns his potential victims. If this were typical of the bullying we have to deal with in school, at least we would have a good laugh in the staffroom at the end of each day.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - On another planet

2009-11-10T12:31:00.000Z

Fasten your seatbelts and hold on tight. For we are embarking on a six-year exploration of the solar system with a group of moonwalkers. They may not rock like Michael Jackson, but they do rocket into space pretty fast.

Our astronauts in the new sci-fi series, Defying Gravity (BBC Two), have names like Maddux Donner (Ron Livingston, pictured) and Zahf Paroo. Actually, I lied: Paroo is a real actor who plays Ajay Sharma. It is supposed to be 2052 but it feels like 2009 with gismos. Sex and snogging take precedence over science. They may be in space but they seem spaced out.

The astronauts are on a quest to fulfil their "dreams, desires and illusions". I remember at university our nickname for Newcastle Brown was "journey into outer space". It was pretty good for desires and illusions, too.

The plot resembles one of Baldrick's cunning plans and the dialogue is so dismal you feel it has been vacuum-packed in a spacesuit. Actually, it might have been better left in orbit.

Our first "Houston, we have a problem" moment comes when Zoe is blown out of the spacecraft. Her rescue depends on the force of her spit. There is a scientific explanation for her need to expel mucus, but do not ask me to explain it. The crew applauds and blesses the President as Zoe is reeled in like a beached whale. Clearly, we need to teach whales to spit.

Dr Who was never like this. Last week in assembly, I interviewed Amy, a drama trainee, about her last job as casting director on that programme. She amazed the school with tales of Kylie and David Tennant. So why did she leave? She was inspired by teaching and young people. She gave up the glamour to be with them.

As Donner looks at the earth from space, he too seeks inspiration: "There's an ache for the mountains and the sweet smell of fresh air. How the hell did I get here? Was it the hand of God?"

The dialogue is about as realistic as a Dalek taking the stairs rather than the lift. I predict a rocket-speed return to our planet for a programme that does not defy gravity.

In Horizon (BBC Two), mathematician Marcus du Sautoy was also soul searching while on a scientific mission to find out who he was. Purple-gloved, he tentatively sliced a human brain but could not find a soul inside, though it did contain a banker's bonus of neurons - a hundred million or so.

Brain scans predicted his responses six seconds before he made them. We are an elite group of self-conscious animals, he decided. At a memorial statue to Descartes, he pondered the relationship between body and soul. I remember grappling with Descartes' theories at university, especially when a worried friend asked our professor about human consciousness. "Do I exist?" The wily academic pondered for several minutes before replying: "Who wants to know?"

No wonder we drank so much Newcastle Brown.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Enjoy getting lost in Austen

2009-11-03T12:28:00.000Z

We know that the young will end up in love, but not until we have enjoyed their mistakes and mishaps. It's television comfort food

Come the autumn schedules, come the costume dramas. And Sunday evenings, those low points when we have lost the will to teach, are once again cheered by the donning of wigs and fancy dress, watching lives lived in National Trust properties in the timeless pursuit of love.

From the Brontes' broodings to confidences in Cranford, the formula is fixed. We know that the young will end up in love, but not until we have enjoyed their mistakes and mishaps. It's television comfort food, a national substitute for going to church.

We have only had two TV versions of Emma (BBC One) in recent years, so time for a third. Roll out Romola Garai in the lead role. Emma's a clucking, ducking manipulator with the emotional intelligence of a hat pin, misleading her puppet friend, Harriet, into expectations of a match with vicar of Highbury, Mr Elton. We are back to church again.

But Mr Elton is not back to church, and certainly not with Harriet. When he attempts to make passionate love to a soon distraught Emma during a carriage ride, the furnishings are the only soft thing he encounters. Rejected, he is off to Bath for a £20,000-a-year match. Charity, after all, doesn't begin in church, even if it does pay the salary.

Marriages are made in Jane Austen novels. The wealthy gossip and it takes ages for little to happen. A lady's stumble at the cliff edge is top news. A piano delivery is talk of the town for months. And, hold the front page, there is snow. It may be computer generated, but the flakes looked genuine.

Without the usual Andrew Davies script, there was no bonking or bonnet-bashing. So the surprises were in the real characters rather than the fictional ones. Was that Jonny Lee Miller from Trainspotting giving some bottle to the noble Mr Knightley - from Sick Boy to slick boy? Did you recognise Michael Gambon as Emma's weak-willed, weather-fearing father? Probably not as he was always swathed in scarves.

The final episodes were filled with ballrooms (useful if you missed Strictly), banqueting and Box Hill. Emma was sure footed on the dancefloor, but she sure put her foot in it on the romance score. Fast-forward 200 years and she could be running an internet dating agency.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Red, white and deeply blue

2009-11-03T12:27:00.000Z

If you have ever seen The Home Show on Channel 4, this was like the bit where presenter George Clarke sprays arctic white everywhere. But this was not a makeover programme, this was a week's worth of compelling, chilling tragedy in Criminal Justice (BBC One).

From the snow-bleached kitchen, a flight of oddly angled stairs leading to the front door gave controlling husband Joe (Matthew Macfadyen) a bird's spy view of his wife, Juliet (Maxine Peake), distorting his own face to giant grotesqueness.

Deep in the night, Juliet wandered from the kitchen to their sleep-starved bedroom carrying a jar of Vaseline to ease her marital pain and a 7" knife to end it forever. White turned to red: with bloodied hands and nightdress stained scarlet, this woman was so traumatised her only link with reality was the sight of her daughter, Ella (Alice Sykes).

Ella pulled the knife from her father's chest seconds before the emergency services told her not to, causing herself torment. The blood did not stop as Juliet went to prison, as her self-harming cellmate gouged gashes in her arm and picked the scabs in the night before eventually cutting her own throat. The other inmates' practical jokes did nothing to lighten her gloom. The tampon-flavoured tea made me determined to avoid strawberry fruit drinks in future.

At echoing volume, doors were unbolted, slammed or locked. Nerves jangled. No more complaints from me about the sound of my alarm clock. A morbidly gloomy Juliet concealed her secret murder motive along with the anti-depressants in her mattress. Birth followed death as Juliet gave birth to a sister for Ella, and gloom gave way to post-natal elation.

The baby gave Juliet a reason to confess the motive for her crime - Joe's abuse. Juliet described Joe's rapes and emotional control in that sterile house, her planned suicide and the sword in the bed when "something snapped".

The final twist of the knife was the revelation that the baby's father was her GP, another man who had taken advantage of Juliet's fragility. The last abuser was the judge whose senseless sentence meant years of separation from the children she loved, tearing the hearts of everyone watching.

At five hours over five nights, it was the length of a Shakespearean tragedy, with as many destroyed lives. My Fool's commentary will do little to lighten it. The white was a mocking, shocking distortion, just like the life Juliet was forced to live

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Infamy of Brits abroad

2009-10-19T09:51:00.001+01:00

A stint as publicity officer for Mel's Mobility Scooters involved Mick riding a 20ft high bike wearing tin foil.

It's Hi-De-Hi! crossed with Are You Being Served?, topped with dollops of Spanish sun. My hairdresser confessed that she couldn't bear to watch Benidorm (ITV1), because it showed Brits behaving so badly. For me this is a normal day at work, I thought, and tuned in to see for myself.

Martin's new girlfriend, Brandy (Sheridan Smith), reminded me of all those teenage girls we battle with to remove jewellery and make-up. Their offensive charm comes from the truths they tell that most of us choose to hide. Not surprisingly, Brandy had all the best lines. Dismayed by her hotel room, she announced that it made Anne Frank's attic look like Disneyland.

Praising a couple for their sexual orientation, she proclaimed her love for gay people even though their lives were filled with tragedy: "All your friends dying of the Aids an' that and you enduring a lifetime of persecution." It was so cringeworthy it could have been Borat.

Mick, played by Steve Pemberton without League of Gentlemen costumes or rubber bits, showed paternal affection in what now passes, I suppose, as the modern British family: "Ger in that pool, you're supposed to be on holiday." The repeated endearment from his daughter was "Dickhead", when she was not attending to a child we would once have described as illegitimate.

A stint as publicity officer for Mel's Mobility Scooters involved Mick riding a 20ft high bike wearing tin foil. Credibility and the imagination stretched in equal measure. Meanwhile, like a character in a Carry On film, Martin groped for language to describe female unmentionable bits. But "lady awning" and "flappage" might have made even Kenneth Williams blush.

The highlight was Johnny Vegas, delivering a stand-up stomp as champion of British values: playing by the rules, fighting to win, defending the dream, that sort of thing. Startled tourists hadn't a clue what he was shouting about. But isn't this what made Britain great? I just hope they don't show Benidorm in any country I might visit.

From adults behaving like children on the Costa Blanca to young actors playing oldies, Bugsy Malone-style, in School of Comedy (E4). A brief encounter with Brief Encounter was full of open vowels, wide eyes and lipstick-coated ladies proclaimed their breathy - "I love you, but I'm a woman" - love for each other. Children attempting adult parts for real can doom a school play, but parody works. They were like painted, polished nursery toys coming to life after dark. And not a drop of fake tan in sight.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - It's dead good viewing

2009-10-12T15:15:00.000+01:00

Now I know why Year 11 enjoy science so much. It's the forensics, stupid. The last class I went into had a body on the floor and crime scene levels of activity. I beat a hasty retreat to avoid being fingerprinted. The nation, like the science class, loves a good murder. In Watching the Dead (BBC Four), we were treated to a forensic examination of the TV crime series' enduring popularity.

First under the microscope were the early cop shows. Swab samples rescued from the archives proved that they were about people, conflict and social issues. No figures in white space suits dissecting lumps of butchers' flesh. Just old-fashioned detective intuition. And we all know how accurate that was.

Contributors described scientific methods, from DNA sampling to "vein patterning". I'm so squeamish I look away when Sherlock Holmes produces his magnifying glass.

There was plenty to be squeamish about in Waking the Dead (BBC One) as Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald) scientifically proved a suicide was a murder, identified the owner of a rotting finger and used something like a metal detector to locate a corpse. I was convinced she could unearth Anglo-Saxon treasure if asked.

But the person who really knew where the bodies were buried was Linda, the Hannibal Lecterish inmate of a high-security psychiatric unit, a mission-oriented killer who manipulated others to do her will. Watch out, Detective Boyd (Trevor Eve). She's not just behind you, she's everywhere around you and she's got a razor blade.

Anne Robinson was preventing crimes in Watchdog (BBC One). Look-alike successor to Esther Rantzen (they must share the same plastic surgeon), the Robinson-Rantzen morph hosed down a spokesman from First Choice holidays.

He faced studio guests complaining about poor hygiene in a Turkish holiday village. There was plenty of drama in the shouting and abuse. It was just like a parents' evening.

The sting for rogue gas fitters was the combination of secret cameras with practical jokes: a Victorian brass band reminded one he was operating to 19th-century rules; a billboard advertised another's lies and deception.

From cam scam to sham scam, it was finally the turn of the audience to be shamed. Fake fraudsters rang a sample of them, offering free TVs in return for delivery costs for which they requested credit card details. Trap snapped, half freely gave the information.

Earlier in the week, I received a similar request from someone pretending to be a colleague from our partner school in Thailand, claiming she'd had her credit card stolen and needing £1,500. So, in jest, I told my finance office to pay her from our international budget.

When finance replied that they'd arranged the transfer, I rushed in, panicking, to be greeted by guffaws. I've passed the details of that scam to Year 11 for forensics and they're on their way over to fingerprint me.

Ray Tarleton

Spare me the conference's PowerPoint pains

2009-10-05T11:39:00.000+01:00

After years as an education conference junkie, I'm clean at last. Addiction-free, I'm able to walk past a hotel without feeling the urge to rush in, pin on a shiny badge and network madly. So please don't make me attend another one - ever. This is the end. My conference days are done.

You see, conferring brings me out in a rash. I feel nauseous at the thought of the ubiquitous round table draped with white cloth and covered with bottled water, mints and slim pads of free paper. I have an irresistible urge to snatch one of the logo-inscripted pens and snap it at the first twist, or else become a doodling delegate - a zombie scribbler, drawing to ease the pain of another PowerPoint presentation.

Yes, I know. I've been spoilt. Wouldn't any teacher gladly sacrifice a day on the classroom floor for the chance of release? I suspect the reason I get so many applications from teachers to attend training events is because it's the nearest thing to a mini-break they can experience without showing their passport.

Their day out will feature a train ride, a smart luxury venue, a free meal that beats the normal pasta pot, and inspiring speeches about how to be, well, inspiring. It's all about vision. A conference without vision would be like Gypsy Rose Lee without her crystal ball. From Prime Minister to Education Secretary, from Ofsted chief to chief officer, the purveyors of platform wisdom proclaim moral purpose over canapes and passion with profiteroles.

But, ungrateful wretch that I am, I'm sick of it. Like Prufrock, I've had too many visions and revisions. Weary of downloading and uploading, I'm imploding and off-loading.

They're also about transformation: like poets, educationalists are now the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

"You will be in the vanguard of your own legacy," the speaker informed us at the last high-profile bash I attended. Just run that past me again - doesn't that mean we're all up our own backsides? Well, most presenters are, for sure.

"You can solve the national financial crisis!" he proclaimed, warming to his theme and glancing in my direction. Who, me? It's bad enough shovelling money into my offspring's bank accounts.

It's the school's ability to teach creativity, he went on to explain. So this will be the solution to all our debts: education, the panacea. I'm numbed into agreement. We can cure it, I mutter, holding coffee in one hand and fizzy water in the other. But, eyeing the cheesecake, the only cost I'm counting comes in calories.

Yet there is now a way of networking without the travel, time and expense. WebEx telephone conferences allow you to sit at your computer, see the presentations on screen, listen to the speeches and join in the discussion. And you can nip off to make a cup of tea while it's all going on and no one will find out.

You can put up your hand to make a comment with the click of your mouse, even sending messages in secret to other delegates. "What the hell's going on?" one late arrival asked me privately on screen. I didn't know either.

It's conferencing, but without the shiny trimmings and long-haul journeys. It takes a fraction of the time and money. It's my vision and I'm sticking to it. Now, pass the pasta pot ...

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Hooked on farm frolics

2009-10-05T11:37:00.000+01:00

'Been anywhere nice, then?' he offered as his best chat-up line. No wonder it's been lonely on the farm

The happy couple, at a wedding I attended last spring, met in a truly bizarre way. The bride's mother saw the groom-to-be on a reality TV programme and then just happened to recognise him in her local high street the next day. "You'd be perfect for my daughter," she declared, or words to that effect. So from reality to fairytale: they met, married and lived happily ever after. Well, for six months so far. And now Farmer Wants a Wife (Five) is back for a new series.

It's the agricultural version of internet dating, love on a farm by artificial dissemination, and goes like this. Our farmer ploughs his lonely furrow for fifteen hours every day with not a woman in sight. It could be a tragic Hardy novel with only one character. Then, just when he thinks he might have to do something to meet the opposite sex, like get a hobby or join a club, four flighty females drop in all together.

Farmer Derek told presenter Louise Redknapp (a footballer's, rather than a farmer's wife, left) he was so romantic that he expected to fall in love at first sight. Women tried to win him over with flirtatious flounces and saucy suggestions. Derek sized them up as if considering the purchase of his next prize bull. "It's a job to handle her," he whispered. "Been anywhere nice, then?" he offered as his best chat-up line. No wonder it's been lonely on the farm.

The first cull came when he had to dispatch two suitors back to civilisation and keep two, like farm pets, on trial for the week. Part of their prize was sharing the same bed - but without Derek. And they both got high on a tour of the farm when treated to a ride in a hot air balloon.

This was love at first sight for all three. And though dithering Derek eventually chose the wrong girl, the other one forgave him and returned to the nest.

Fortunately, such biological urges were fully explained in The Living Body, (More4) - and all at break-neck speed. Look: out popped a baby and then whoosh, courtesy of computer graphics, we were speeding back up inside the fallopian tubes. It was as psychedelically colourful as a Beatles film. When the budget bites and I can no longer afford science teachers, this will keep Year 9 going until their GCSEs.

We learnt that the world is noisy, bright and smelly for babies. It is for me too. We each have more cells than in the whole of the Milky Way. And we get the equivalent of a new body every 10 years. Well, I'd like my new one next week. But, unlike Derek, I'll stick with my pick on the wife scene.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, Switch off - X marks the spot

2009-10-02T09:38:00.000+01:00

Imagine the outcry if we did this to kids in assembly. Hugging followed the hanging. It was exploitative and sick. I'm calling Childline

I've changed my phone and broadband provider. The service is fine but I've now seen what it spends my rental on. I'm not paying it to sponsor television that's tacky, tawdry and tasteless. For The X Factor (ITV1) has to be the cruellest blood sport since the Romans threw Christians to lions.

Take Shanna, 18. We have to know their age. Her winning would move her family out of poverty and their council house, offering life chances to all her sisters. Hope in our hands. Still dry-eyed? As she sang, the watching family wept rain clouds, her sisters' faces contorted. By the end, Shanna looked as if she'd been hosed down during a performance of Singin' in the Rain.

Simon Cowell, 49, detected "raw talent". The 2,000-strong audience, proving Derren Brown's "wisdom of crowds" theory a myth, roared approval as this victim avoided being eaten by the lions. And the family hugged and cried some more, desperate for a lifeline to riches. ITV should at least get some well-known tissue manufacturer to be sponsors. It could then be called The Clean X Factor.

I'm really surprised there isn't some child protection legislation to stop us witnessing scenes like the plight of Demi, 17, who sparkily proclaimed that she didn't want to go through just on her character. No danger of that, m'dear. Even her perky personality cracked at the public humiliation of the brutal verdict: "Your voice isn't good enough."

A tragic figure standing alone on the stage, it seemed sweet innocence had been destroyed forever. Imagine the outcry if we did this to kids in assembly. Hugging followed the hanging. If this was fiction, I'd say it was sentimental. But it was real, exploitative and sick. I'm calling Childline.

There's a Ray Bradbury short story I used to teach, set in a future in which reality TV contestants play being hunted to the kill. The winner becomes rich; the rest are slaughtered to audience cheers. Remind you of anything?

The sheer awfulness of many contestants must explain why advertising revenues are down. Several would have been thrown off stage at an infants' karaoke concert. They really were tone deaf, off-key, discordant droners. And they gave Cowell a headache.

Duo Diana, 59, and Jazz, seven, had spent seven years practising for the big night. Diana couldn't sing and her other half stayed mute. Not surprising really as Jazz was a dog, cuddled and mauled around the stage. Now I'm phoning the RSPCA.

I switched on Record Review hoping for some late-night music to soothe. But I'd found the BBC Parliament channel where I discovered the "record" was continuous clips of our legislators passing laws. No wonder Bills have so many readings. MPs rise to speak and everyone laughs and jeers. It could be Comedy Club without the jokes. Or The X Factor audience.

I might form a Society for the Protection of Viewers. And if that original sponsor will back us, they can have my custom again.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Nothing super about Ted

2009-09-20T18:17:00.001+01:00

Turpin Ted has achieved for the Haworth tourist industry what the Taliban did for winter sun breaks in Afghanistan

It's called the Changegate Car Park in Haworth. But you won't get any change from the £75 you pay for clamp removal if you break their rules even a teeny bit, as we saw in The Yorkshire Clamper (Channel 4).

Leave your car for a couple of minutes to get some coins and you no longer need them. Just the big notes, please. Park across two bays, even if there's not another car in sight, and they'll demand the contents of your handbag. Baroness Betty Boothroyd was done for sticking her ticket in her car window upside down. It would have been cheaper to get her eyes tested at Specsavers.

Not surprisingly, the owner Ted has become a Dick Turpin hate figure. Turpin Ted has achieved for the Haworth tourist industry what the Taliban did for winter sun breaks in Afghanistan.

For Ted it's a matter of principle: "You can't have rules and then bend them," he says. It seems perfectly reasonable when he explains it, though he cheekily flogs Turpin T-shirts, even as the wheel torture screws are being fitted to cars. I call that turpitude.

He recited his four parking expectations as we do our class codes of behaviour. But what about leniency, Sir? Impossible - where would you draw the line? This was tough on crime and the causes of crime all at the same time. If Ted ever wants a job enforcing the wearing of our school uniform, he's my man. We might even get rich together on the fines.

Several rich men celebrated their talent - as well as their upcoming books, TV programmes or films - in the new series of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (BBC One).

Ross is a hyperactive host but quick quips and a compelling personality make for interesting conversation. For example, national cricket hero, Stuart Broad, told Ross that his fastest ball travelled at 93mph. Wow, that beats the last Virgin train I travelled on.

Ricky Gervais reminded us, as he always does, what a huge superstar he is. I spotted him patiently queuing behind my wife in a London bookshop recently and she hadn't even recognised him. But then he didn't recognise her either.

Jamie Oliver demonstrated how to cook "bullock's bollocks" and chop a cucumber in thin slices in less than seven seconds, a skill learnt when he was 10. I won't be risking that in my school. Now he's testing his kids on the names, smells and tastes of the 24 herbs in his garden.

Jamie would have had something to say about the freshness of food plundered from supermarket bins by "freegans", protesting about waste, in another new series, Tonight: From Bin to Banquet (ITV1). It was Antony Worrall Thompson's turn to do the cooking with free ingredients from skips. He fed hundreds - it was just like the parable of the loaves and fishes. But this really was a miracle because nobody got food poisoning. Just goes to show: what you lose on the clamp, you win from the bin.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Getting the hump

2009-09-14T18:33:00.000+01:00

How do you get 300 camels to travel in convoy when they are freaked by the camera crew? The answer came thanks to Kate Humble on The Frankincense Trail (BBC2).

Our eager explorer, costumed in yellow so bright that she resembled an ice lolly, was covering 2,000 miles over seven nations and delving into 3,000 years of history. Albert, the herdsman, had the answer to the camel problem, deploying mobile phones and a vehicle or two.

Meanwhile, Kate had her own challenges, having to model a full-length abaya, the traditional overgarment worn by women in the Islamic world. She was going to meet a prince, so naturally she had to wear her best frock. But in fact, the suffocating discomfort of the veil reduced her to tears - partly because of the physical strain, but mainly because women are compelled to wear it.

She also collected some resin, which has the power to cure depression, nose bleeds and wrinkles. And we discovered that frankincense used to be worth more than gold. Her 90 kilos at £300 would have been a year's salary for your average Roman. My theory is that they burnt it because they were desperate to conceal the camel pong.

In Yemen, Kate saw camel-jumping, which is used to keep young men at peak fitness. The winner managed a five-camel, two-metre-high leap. I can see us scrapping the long jump and spicing up our sports days with a similar event. Dartmoor pony-jumping, anyone?

Dr Adam Rutherford was also in hunting mode in The Cell (BBC4), trying to discover the secrets of life. His fossilised microbes were 1 billion years old. That makes me feel young, at least. We went into the toxic soup kitchen to watch scientists trying to create living cells from scratch. It looked to me like milkshake in a blender. If they succeed, it's going to be (drum roll) a "second Genesis". Professor George Church, from Harvard, explained the crucial process at the heart of all life - reading DNA code and carrying out its instructions. And I thought the most important job was bringing my wife her morning mug of tea.

To show how close we were to this miracle breakthrough, Rutherford took us to San Francisco, where we met scientists who had altered bacteria so that they ate sugar and excreted pure diesel. Looking like the mad inventor in his white coat, he used the liquid to power up his generator, proving the fuel was "ultra-pure". So just wait till this energy drink hits the supermarket shelves. No need to keep that jerrycan of reserve fuel in the boot. If only we could teach camels to do that with their food, even the price of frankincense would drop.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - The roast with the most

2009-09-07T14:48:00.001+01:00

Desperate Romantics (BBC2) - laudanum-laced, bonking-fuelled and with a little painting on the side - seemed like a six-hour trailer for a drama that only ever tantalised. Still, it could have been a PhD thesis compared with the prancing that passed as history in The Tudors (BBC2).

The strongest drama of the new season so far was ITV1's Gunrush, a topical portrayal of teenagers seduced by guns. Timothy Spall played Doug Becket, a too-good-to-believe husband and father until his daughter was senselessly gunned down after a childish argument in a supermarket. The loss drove a wedge between Doug and his wife ...

There were powerful images: a very realistic death; the young killer curled up on his bed, nursing the murder weapon as if it were his teddy bear; Doug's pain as he tried to scrub his daughter's blood from her sister's cello. And a violent teenage universe that no education system could put right.

Doug was tortured into finding the killer to regain his wife's respect. His only clues were the missing murder weapon and his memory of "a smile", the killer's facial scar, buried deep in his trauma.

Everybody's Everyman, Spall acted to perfection. He once joked that he didn't like his face but wasn't having a head transplant. Well, I say Spall is beautiful.

English food was pronounced beautiful - "the best on the plate in the world" - by Vito Cataffo in Dolce Vito - Dream Restaurant (Channel 4). A successful Italian restaurateur in the UK, Vito is setting up a new place in Benevento, near Naples, to bring English cuisine to his countrymen.

Does he mean our Indian, Chinese or French restaurants, I wonder? For a good English restaurant is as rare as raw beef in steak tartare. But after a Devon-drenched summer, watching this was my last hope of a sun tan.

The Italians interviewed defined English cooking as fast food. If only: when the recipe claims it will take 10 minutes to prepare, you can bet it will take me half an hour. And that's just finding the potato peeler.

Roast beef was on the menu, fillet the tastiest cut "because it's the laziest muscle". Searching for the best, Vito shivered in a butcher's cold room where the beef was hung to draw out the juices and sweeten the meat. What happened to the Italian sun?

Vito chose the four-week-hung Dexter cut from Lincolnshire and back in Benevento prepared a beef banquet for friends. He kept slapping something loudly when making his point. Or was he just tenderising those fillets? I could try this to get attention in the next staff meeting.

Sporting a sporran-sprung kilt, Vito dressed for dinner on the big night. Well, he was going for an English. But the fillet was toughened by being over-cooked. So no blood on the plates and his guests left dreaming of pizza.

And while we've only been back in school for a week, I was left dreaming of my next Italian holiday.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Jollity, jam and journeys

2009-09-03T13:19:00.001+01:00

Politicians are like supply teachers: the public is the class they have to control," mused Natalie Haynes in The Funny Side of Politics (BBC Two). Clive Anderson offered his class a video of the best political embarrassments - and how we laughed.

John Prescott's punch, as clumsy as his language, would have got him struck off the supply register before you could say "CRB check", but he remained deputy prime minister. So let's see it again shall we? This time in slow motion.

It looked as if John Redwood's rendition of the Welsh national anthem was in slow motion too and I'll bet he felt it was. Not knowing the words, the former Welsh secretary made them up with his eyebrows and lips dancing in time to the rhythm. First rule of supply teaching - look as if you know what you're doing.

Jam and Jerusalem (BBC One), a sort of comedy Archers, also had its embarrassing moments. Rosie (Dawn French) had some of the best lines delivered in the worst Devonian accent I've heard. Well, taxi drivers know everything and my last one, from Oakie (Okehampton) taught me how to pronounce some local words properly. So, for example, the nearby South Zeal is "Sow Zell". Rosie could do with him as a voice coach.

"This is Devon: a dinner party can take weeks to prepare," claimed Caroline, Jennifer Saunders' stiffly snooty creation, because "one can't just nip out to the local deli". Well Chagford, close by, has a very fine deli. In fact, I can personally recommend the freshly baked pies and tarts.
Rosie's dinner party slurping of "lemon soup", the finger bowl, was comic. Told the bowl was for prawns, she studiously dipped each one in the water before eating. Playing the game of Define British Values, Rosie topped "tolerance" with "cat food". But there was an affecting moment when watching a video message from Caroline's son in Afghanistan.

The modern world malapropped them by. Rosie "Wikipeed" Charles Dance to discover he's now single; Eileen "Goggled" to find information on her computer; and atheist Katy, the community support officer, asked: "Do you twitter, vicar?"

He had no idea. But he was having conscience trouble. "God's not looking after you is he?" she asked soothingly. So the vicar looked after himself instead, ravishing the unbeliever on the Dartmoor rocks.

There was more rural tranquillity in River Journeys with Griff Rhys Jones (BBC One) where we learnt why "nearly all towns were built on rivers". Geography lesson done, there was history too - particularly the fascinating clash of uses for the waterways, for transport or energy and sometimes both at once.

We were on the River Lea where the best barley in the world is grown. Apparently, it was safer to drink beer than water in the seventeenth century. I think it still is in some parts of the world. Griff took in a factory tour to see the malting process and cried out in delight at the damp barley.

Actually, I thought he rather overdid the delight but perhaps he'd not been risking the water either. If he ever wants a job as a supply teacher though, I'd snap him up.

Ray Tarleton

Streets ahead - Tune in, switch off

2009-08-23T12:12:00.000+01:00

What's it like for a young soldier to cope with facial disfigurement? Or for a parent to resort to prostitution to live in the catchment of the best school? And what about suddenly confronting the handicapped, 16-year- old son you never knew you had?

Well this is The Street, (BBC1) where these recent topics have proved so sensitive, so controversial, you wouldn't mention them in polite company. These one-off dramas are the TV equivalent of a trip to the theatre and reminiscent of the pioneering Play for Today. All that links the characters is their postal code and their profound social problems. This road must be Asbo hell.

Jimmy McGovern tutors new writers in a series as intoxicating as a fine wine. In a recent vintage, Kieran, apparently racist to his roots, was caught in a moral trap so profound it changed his self-belief. At the scene of a fire, he was literally left holding the baby his friend, who didn't want to risk losing his disability benefit, had rescued. Heroics are supposed to be for fit types after all.

Laptop love letters in the form of videos exchanged with the child's mother, now the Polish girl of his dreams, allowed Kieran and his lover to share secrets at the poignant press of a switch. Who said computers don't have feelings?

In this week's episode, alcohol was the fire burning the heart of central character, Shay Ryan, played by Stephen Graham, swilling vodka and spraying venom with incendiary verbal violence only softened by the poetry of his language.

The anger and emotion were so raw, it felt as though the characters had no skin to protect them. When Shay's ex, Madeleine, revealed his Down's syndrome son, she was brutally forthright: "I want nothing to do with you. He does." She reminded him why they split: "Sex with you was junk." And when she took their son, Otto, away she was equally frank: "Your dad loves alcohol more than he loves you." For once, I sipped only water.

Shay's view of Down's syndrome children was shocking. He shooed Otto away as if he were a stray dog, telling anyone who would listen: "They're not as intelligent or as athletic as us so let's stress their emotion, shall we? Well that's just gratitude." Embarrassed, I pretended to read the newspaper.

But Shay grew to love his son and leave the booze, just as racist Kieran learned he loved a Polish immigrant, and disfigured soldier, Nick, began to love the world again.

Safe to say that The Street is probably not on Phil and Kirsty's list of hot spots, now they're back helping hopeful couples find dream homes in Location, Location, Location (Channel 4). If houses are selling again, it must be good news for estate agents - knocked off bottom place in the public trust tables because we'd all forgotten they existed.

But this isn't really about houses: it's about the relationship between the home-seekers. "There's poor inter-marital communication between these two," whispers Phil as the search grows desperate. The wall that needs to come down isn't in the property at all. Maybe there is a McGovern plot line in there somewhere.

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - Service with a smile

2009-08-17T18:08:00.001+01:00

My wife describes the newly refurbished entrance to the hotel that houses our health club as now looking like: “a Parisian brothel”. Well, of course, I would not know. But hang on. How does she? And she tells me that the purple, ultraviolet lights we can dimly make out in the corridors are a drug dealers’ deterrent.

I think she’s been watching too many episodes of Hotel Babylon (BBC One). This week it featured a royal wedding. Or should have done, until the bride ran off with an Eastern European equerry. Don’t you just love the attention to detail?

There was also a philandering photo journalist, Gennaro Fazio, one shot away from paparazzi-dom; and a duped, teen-training Olympic swimmer, with parents from hell.

This was all in a day’s work on the reception desk. For Hotel Babylon is a fast-paced, rat-raced drama with more sub-plots than a Barratt Homes development.

Its owner and manager can’t afford to lose the money from a cancelled royal photo shoot so they plan the scam of a fake wedding. Well, the staff can play all the parts, can’t they? Receptionists, Emily (Alexandra Moen) and Ben (Michael Obiora) star as the bride and groom. Reminded that the wedding isn’t real, the bride swoons anyway: “It’s the fake wedding of my dreams.”

Disguised as an Austrian princess, she can even remember her GCSE German when challenged by the suspicious Fazio. For Ben, it’s an opportunity to fondle his bride’s bum. “Er, why are you doing that?” asks Emily. Even mid swoon, she’s aware that pretence has its limits.

Five-star honest concierge, Tony (Dexter Fletcher), is uneasy about the scam. Wise and totally trustworthy, he really runs the hotel. Just like the caretakers at my school.

Tony could mediate any hostile group. He manages warring parents and teenagers as our Olympic swimmer in training finally revolts against her pressurising parents. I’d like him in my student reception, please. He even appears in dog collar, officiating at the wedding. Perhaps he could even do assemblies.

We knew it would end in leers as Fazio the pap tried to have his wicked way with Juliet, the manager: “In another time, in another place, I would take what I want,” he told her. Some chat up line.

Even Aristotle would have applauded these script writers. For all the loose ends were neatly tucked in; everything fitted into place like one of Phil and Kirsty’s well-designed kitchens.

But should it all seem unbelievable, you’ve never worked in a hotel. In my student days I did: feuds and tricks were common. The head waiter regularly blitzed the beautiful food creations sent up by the chef, hoping to get him sacked.

I wonder what Alex Polizzi, the award-winning hotelier who puts proprietors through their paces in The Hotel Inspector (Five), would have thought of Babylon. She would have sacked the manager of the Rose and Crown, that’s for sure, in one recent episode. She expressed disbelief at the clutter clogging the communal areas. The boss used evasion tactics normally adopted by teenagers who won’t get up in the morning. But its eventual refurbishment brought the locals in for coffee. And there wasn’t a Parisian or purple light in sight.

Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - Press play, watch the slay

2009-08-11T10:09:00.000+01:00

Scenting plunder, dragons became pussycats, all wanting a slice of the action. This was the real poker game. Who would make the first move?

My first questions to the five multi-millionaires in their lairs (Dragons' Den, BBC2) would be: "Tell me about the numbers. What's your financial stake in this TV programme? How much profit will you realise in the next three years? And are you offering the licence payer any equity in the business?"

The fun, of course, comes from their forensic torching of would-be entrepreneurs. These venture capitalists polish their scales but get first pick of the next best investments for themselves.

Theo Paphitis and Duncan Bannatyne, the fiercest fire-breathers, always tell us how hard they've worked to earn their money, even in their best-selling autobiographies. Each is worth more than Pounds 40 million; the piles of cash by their sides prove it.

Peter Jones and James Caan, on the other hand, are smoothy dragons with hearts. Deborah Meaden, though, wouldn't invest in a fairground candyfloss stall, even if sugar grew on trees. She's just a window shopper. It was the dispiriting experience of working for idea-blocking senior colleagues like her that motivated me to become my own boss.

Evan Davis, voice-over to the dramatic music, provides platitudes, just in case we're too thick to understand what's going on. He'd be better doing plot prompts for The Wire.

JJ Hussan, "poker player not gambler", wanted an investment in his gaming business. So what was it exactly? He didn't want to declare his hand. But when the chips were finally down we saw that JJ was just bluff and bluster - a great poker player. Theo claimed to be a calculated-risk-taker rather than a gambler. It came as no surprise that Deborah pulled out early.

Dragon-slaying Sharon had a gadget to get cables easily threaded through house walls. Scenting plunder, dragons became pussycats, all wanting a slice of the action. This was the real poker game. Who would make the first move?

"You're fabulous," leered lizard-like Theo, ready to invest his children's hard-won inheritance, or at least a few thousand quid from his many millions, because "you deserve it". What altruism.

Would Meaden break the habit of a den-time and invest? She offered, but with such a miserly amount, she was left gazing in at the window. And the product was so good, the dragons were the ones who had to confer on the deal, breathing fire and bank notes in secret. Sharon and her gadget were swallowed up before you could snort "Treasure trove".

Elsewhere on the BBC, two other beasts, Cheshire cat, David Cameron, and cowardly lion, Alistair Darling, were lured on to the end of season Andrew Marr Show (BBC1).

Marr was bursting to tell us his news that women are growing more beautiful with each generation. It's a fact. So that means, as the dragons would say, I'm out

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Cakes on Sale? Call the Safeguarding Expert

2009-07-31T19:04:00.001+01:00

Success came late at night. Five hours of online toil on the National College for School Leadership's safeguarding website qualified my chair of governors for a celebratory 10pm Pimms. Tutorial and test completed, he now knows how to identify a paedophile.

So sighs of relief from the rest of us too busy to bother: our appointments will still be legal. For, without at least one "safeguarding expert" on any panel, interview decisions will have as much authority as ones made by the presidents of Iran or Zimbabwe.

I'm to be given the once-over as well: 35 years after teacher training, I'm having my first Criminal Records Bureau check. I'm hoping it won't hurt and there's a free Pimms at the end.

But it's Pounds 64 from the stretched school budget that could have bought some library books. In fact, the sums are worse than that. We've discovered that we have to do this CRB thing with every member of staff every three years. So with 250 people on the payroll, it's not just some library books I might be sacrificing - it could be the librarian as well.

A voice in my head tells me to ignore it all. Haven't good heads always exercised their judgment and done it their way? Local management of schools gave us freedom, after all. Ah, but Ofsted has a new torture called "a limiting judgment", which means a school can't score higher than "satisfactory" unless the "safeguarding checks" are in place.

That's why on the first day of term every employee at my school - from cooks, caretakers and cleaners to chemistry and clarinet teachers - will do child protection training. Hundreds of us in the sports hall. Welcome back, everyone.

It's the same in finance. We try to run our own budgets, but the auditors think they're in charge. There's that "limiting judgment" again, which means the fat financial controller rubs their hands and reminds me that Ofsted won't award grades one or two unless I have something to prove I'm trustworthy.

This time it's integrity, rather than morality, that's being sledgehammered. You have to pass your financial management standard in schools, the "fmsis" test. We call it "f ... ing sis", with the emphasis on the first syllable.

All this is designed to keep the staff and students safe. And happy too. But visiting Brazilian headteachers were amazed that physical affection, which they regularly show to children, is banned here. We can't sell cakes or biscuits either; they were astonished.

This is the mad world of Every Child Matters. Now we're going to be measured in wellbeing. They haven't worked out the happiness tests or even the curriculum yet, but there's still a month to go.

What a pity no one has told them that children won't actually be happy if that's the target. Working hard and achieving are the real ends. Happiness is just a by-product.

Still, I've set aside five hours for my safeguarding assessment and a day for my child protection training. I need to learn that odd behaviour and bruising are danger signs because I don't have the common sense to know that.

Then I might join my governor in a Pimms. I'm determined to be happy.

Ray Tarleton, Principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Flight of French Fancy - Tune in, switch off

2009-07-31T19:03:00.000+01:00

More religious in middle age, Louis XIV rejected a long-standing lover and took up with the governess instead. Well, we didn't expect him to stop being a three times a day man

So this is what hell must look like: a theme park in Argentina, complete with fire, flames and water, resembling the set of an end of war movie. Hope this isn't your summer holiday destination. Total Wipeout, BBC One, had adults dressed in red space suits tackling fiendishly cunning obstacles. But cheering and jeering kept the audience happy.

"Every muscle in his body must be hurting now," purred Richard Hammond, as Ricky "the hype" Martin embarked on the barrel run, monkey bars and the spinner - all tortures to keep contestants wet and wounded.

Olympic Les, the veteran athlete, battled valiantly but couldn't out-speed Ricky for the chance of a Pounds 10K prize. "I feel beautiful, baby, beautiful!" proclaimed victorious Ricky, showing off his hype.

There was even more spectacle and colourful clothing in Versailles: The Dream of a King, BBC Two. Sumptuous and opulent, this was the best excuse for actors to dress up since the last Jane Austen adaptation.

Louis XIV enjoyed hunting, council meetings and sex three times a day. According to informant Lady Antonia Fraser, who sounded like a court insider, he would take a turn with a lady's maid if his mistress was slow getting her dress off. But then he changed his mistress more often than I change my car.

More religious in middle age, he rejected a long-standing lover and took up with the pious governess instead. Well, we didn't expect him to stop being a three times a day man.

Since Louis sited his palace near a swamp with little water, the gardeners had to fiddle the fountains, which flowed only when the King walked past. Blame the bog.

Versailles outshines every other palace. Though it took weeks longer than planned and was well over budget. No change in builders then.

And he took his pain as completely as his pleasure, enduring a grisly procedure for an anal fistula, vainly instructing his surgeon to: "Treat me as you would the least of my subjects. Then your hand will not tremble."

Critic Paul Morley in How to be a Composer, BBC Four, was all trembling hands, learning how to compose at the Royal College of Music, but admitting he couldn't read a note: "I'm hesitant and I don't know where I'm going." Not likely to be a number one hit then, Paul.

Minims and crotchets were: "Simple dots but unbelievably profound." It turned out he was being shown Beethoven's Fifth. A music critic without a pen is like a violinist without a bow.

Abba represented "hell" to him even without crotchets. His composition would: "Create time as limbo but in a notated way." I would save that for the lyrics. And he wanted inspiration to "come from the swamp". Why not try Versailles?

But this was how to do one-to-one tuition, everybody. Strategies to model for the new one-on-one team in September.

My wife complained bitterly about the noise of his composition as she tried camouflage, by way of Chopin's nocturnes, on her iPod. There's just too much hell on TV these days; I think I'll join her with the Chopin

Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Is this meant to be a sick joke? - Tune in, switch off

2009-07-26T12:41:00.000+01:00

Can you laugh at death? Are jokes about the sick just sick jokes? Shakespeare used comedy in his bloodiest of plays. But are we ready for a drama set on a geriatric ward, a comedy Casualty?

BBC Four's Getting On was a brave exploration of the final taboos and last rites. Directed by Peter Capaldi - Malcolm Tucker of In the Loop - it used a documentary format. So I really thought the patients, piss and poo were real. Even a corpse looked genuine. Nurse Kim (played by Jo Brand) attempted to take out the corpse's teeth but couldn't, even with Vaseline. Clearly the old dear still had her own teeth - even at 87 years old.

Much of the humour was at the expense of NHS bureaucracy, the kind of silliness we laughed at in Yes Minister. So the faecal deposit found on a chair had to stay there until a nurse had done the paperwork on it. And then it had to go in a stool pot because the doctor was engaged in a "faecal research programme" to expand the British Stool Chart.

A terminally ill patient was off to Zurich, ostensibly on holiday. "Good disabled access there," commented the doctor, who we later heard privately telephoning the Dignitas clinic in broken German to check her patient had arrived. It was brutally painful, reminding us that tears and laughter are very close.

Extremes of bodily functions were also the subject of Born Survivor (Channel 4). Bear Grylls in Siberia reminded me of my old PE teachers trying to warm us up on cold days. Temperatures were so low here (-30C), that metal stuck to skin.

Bear showed us how to remove a knife blade "super glued" by the freezing temperature to his hand with a hot liquid burst from his bladder. He told of a colleague who tried to pull an ice screw from his mouth, losing skin and part of his tongue in the process. He should have phoned a friend.

Grylls gave us constant warnings about the dangerous terrain, as if we were planning a school camping trip in the world's biggest ice box: if you stand still you die. We'd never get this past the health and safety police. Even a trip to the nearest village requires a week of form filling now.

You burn twice the calories in Siberia so soya beetle bark scrapings, followed by deep-frozen roast venison with cave-cooled, crispy mosquitoes for pudding filled a gap or two. Raw squirrel brain tasted like "frozen pate". I'd have brought some Kendal mint cake myself.

And other than scaring me half to death, Bear's immersion in the deep water under the ice had me lighting the log fire. With a "serious risk of cardiac arrest" (mine as well as his), I was shouting: "Please don't go there!"

Survival depends on a person's "ingenuity and determination" and not just "skills and knowledge", and Grylls demonstrated this brilliantly by making a toboggan from willow and deer skin, noosing a rodent for tea and taking a deer leg as a walking stick.

They teach them well in the Scouts these days. I've since cancelled my Northern Wastes package holiday. And I've decided TV is a dangerous place to be.

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - Booze, Blunders and Brilliance

2009-07-17T15:55:00.001+01:00

TV's Believe it or Not (BBC Four) was a series of surprises, featuring real out-takes that no one bothered to take out at the time. This was television's lows that, over the years, have become tremendous highs.

Oliver Reed (pictured) was certainly on a high when he played the part of booze-sozzled celebrity on the sofa talk show, After Dark (1991). Except he wasn't acting. It really was live, late night and alcohol-infused. And we thought standards were going down.

Reed's lines included: "That's where the widges, the widges and the women all go 'Ooooooh' and the big old chopper and we're gonna go down there, lads." You can tell he was drunk just by reading it aloud. But don't try doing it in the staffroom - unless you're looking to get signed off before the end of term. Or risk losing your licence to teach.

Teachers, of course, know how to deal with difficult characters: they're called pupils. So we knew engaging Reed in serious conversation would just create more disruption - and it did. His sofa sophistry made the other normal guests seem oddities too. Perhaps they were.

By 12.30am, the middle of the night in those days, Reed tried a different tactic, refusing to speak anymore, with fingers over his lips like a naughty three-year-old. Then he removed them to force down another drink. After that, surprised that no one liked him, he upped and went. It was the cue for viewers to leave as well.

A snippet from Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo's late night sofa programme, This Week, was also featured, from 2004.

Their guest, Shane MacGowan, poured forth streams of noise while Janet Street-Porter, then presenter, tried to keep the conversation going. And she did - but Shane was the conversation - one long drivel of drivel.

Diane Abbot's eyes pointed to the heavens (or perhaps it was the studio ceiling). Michael Portillo first looked fascinated and then cross. He reminded me of a cat caught licking its bum who tries to cover up by appearing nonchalant. Cats do that - and so, it seems, do ex-politicians. Appear nonchalant, I mean.

In the section on TV chefs, we were reminded of where cookery began. Fanny Cradock, on Success Story, served her guest an assiette de fruits de mer. This was 1959 so he'd never seen such stuff before, never mind eaten it, but he couldn't help noticing his meal was moving. "It must be the quality of the champagne," whispered Craddock. She could have sorted out Oliver Reed.

Still, it was preferable to the young lady promising to cook placenta pate who admitted she wasn't quite sure of the recipe. Well if I were you, I'd miss out the main ingredient. An excuse for summer repeats of forgotten lowlights, TV's Believe it or Not also contained plenty of ingredients to make you choke, but all with laughter

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

My Old School Chum - Tune in, switch off

2009-07-10T19:02:00.000+01:00

"Sir, Sir. Please, me, Sir." Back in the Baby Boomer decade, Simon, one of my fellow pupils, repeatedly showed his urgent desire to read aloud by volunteering for parts in the plays in our English lessons. He brought the dullest scenes to life, reciting poetry where there was only prose.

These were really his first auditions and, had he not made it as an actor, I think he'd have still pretended he was one, such was his passion.

This is the sort of vision and ambition we try to instil every day in schools into our young charges. It must have worked with Simon because, more than 40 years later, he is now DCI Jack Meadows, star of The Bill (ITV), right.

I watched it to see how much I'd aged. Well in both cases there's a lot less hair and a load of wrinkles. That's before the make-up department does its stuff. But then he needs these to look the part. For me they're caused by the day job.

The Bill is so soapy you can see the suds. You could blow bubbles with the plot flimflam. After glitz-gilded dramas from American networks (and Hotel Babylon, of course) I felt I'd gone back in time. I get the same effect from reading West End theatre programmes: almost every actor has appeared in at least one episode.

There were none of those camera tricks at rapid-eye-movement speed like you get in US cop dramas. The dialogue was as realistic as a copper's notebook, but less exciting.

It was like visiting a car boot sale after a lifetime of shopping in Harrods. You felt as if you were there, on the set, in the scene. But you didn't want to be.

The plot turned around the illegal antics of Jack Meadows' son, Ben, just released from prison, and the integrity of our Chief Inspector in having his own flesh and blood sent down. Was he noble hero or father from hell? Well, don't worry: this wasn't the moral dilemma of a Greek tragedy - just the filler between advertising breaks before you put the kettle on.

By episode two it looked as if recalcitrant son versus obstinate dad would end in a scoreless draw. Young Ben's apparent death in a car burn-out finally got to Jack and his emotions cracked. But some of us had noticed there was a clue in the title "Prodigal Son".

Our distraught DCI sprang surprise hugs instead of handcuffs on his reunited boy. Policeman melted into parent. It was a prodigal, even prodigious reunion.

Then it was the tension of the chase and all bravo ones and bravo twos as the police did what they are best at - driving at speed with blue lights through red lights while keeping an "eyeball" on targets. And losing an eyeball isn't as bad as it sounds. Might even be a useful word for pupil tracking.

My verdict on Simon? Well, had I not been told he'd become an actor, I'd have believed he'd spent 40 years in the police force. It was a brave, bravo, even bravura performance. In a script of prose, he was still the poet.

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - Spot the Real Clowns

2009-07-03T13:07:00.001+01:00

Question: "Do you have a schedule of work?" Response: "Er, not exactly." That's just what the Year 10s say and we all know it means "no chance".

Sarah Beeny had to deal with just this sort of fudging in Property Snakes and Ladders (Channel 4), calling in the homework from this week's amateur fortune hunters. As the economy crashes, they're sinking their lifetime borrowings into home improvement. "Look behind you!" I cry out in horror.

Wannabe magnates, two singers and an artist were too busy making records and painting to manage their builder. Why didn't someone warn them that this would involve humping bricks and getting covered in navvy sweat?

The second couple, Shaun and Nicola, who got their homework in on time, explained that they resolved all their work disputes back at the "office". This turned out to be the under-the-duvet space most of us call a bed, the place they were not allowed to argue. Magically, it was also where all their problems just melted away. I'd love to try that at school.

The young developers never got the planning right. It's the little things they missed, like forgetting to include a bathroom, or putting the kitchen in the loft. What's wrong with a house that has no doors, if it cuts a few quid off the budget? Stubbornly, they never listen to wise Auntie Sarah, even though it could save them millions. Well, Ms Beeny has an invitation to play Snakes and Ladders in my "office" any time, and I promise not to argue.

Children's entertainer Mr Jelly in Psychoville (BBC Two), pictured below, sounded like a property developer himself when, on arriving at a party, he announced the need for "a sturdy table, a pair of pliers and WD40".

Midway through his set, he terrified the children by pulling off his fake hand to reveal the stump beneath. I have a few classes he can come and put the wind up.

Another character, a deranged midwife played by Dawn French, relished showing the video of a screaming mother in labour to her parenting class, urging them to "split the pod to get the peas out". Not one for our childcare course.

Then, clutching a bloodied meat cleaver and emerging from what looked like the set of an Andrew Davies adaptation of a Dickens novel, we saw debauched David, who announced that he had done "a bad murder".

We first met David reading A Complete History of Serial Killers with Mummy - a clue for any Morse viewers that it would end in tears. Shadow-lit scenes of smoke-strewn staircases were as dark as the comedy. The running joke was a hellish alternative universe. And I thought Year 10 was strange

Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune In, Switch Off: Monstrous Creations

2009-06-29T10:17:00.001+01:00

Is there a monster in Beverley Hills? We were invited to find out in a new series of US detective drama, Life, on ITV3. For sure, a monster left our first exhibit, corpse Max, "severely beaten to death". Every bone in his body was broken before he was tied to a bar stool and thrown into a swimming pool. Something monsters do all the time.

Strange though, that after being at the bottom for so many hours, his face was still covered in blood, as if he'd come off badly in a paintballing match. Lots of gore like Banquo's ghost. There must be a clue in there. Not enough chlorine in the water? Maybe the make-up department used the wrong gel. Or was there a simpler answer: sloppy direction?

This was stylised storytelling in which the slick, quick scene shifts and occasionally witty dialogue seemed out of synch with the cliched characters and situations - a steroid taking, terminator-pecked, gang banger; sex on a throbbing red bike; and a leggy therapist with a secret. All in a day's work.

"Is it normal not to feel normal?" asks our cheery cop, Charlie Crews, played by Damian Lewis, a kind of Hugh Laurie House character. Charlie was incarcerated for 12 years for a crime he didn't commit, which drove him insane and explains why he's now a detective behaving oddly. The Shrink would charge about $450 an hour. That's a fifty minute hour, by the way. (But then that's the same as you get with ITV, so don't feel short-changed.)

The Shrink was shocked into confession mode when she saw her photo on the crime board. That's all it took. I told you it was fast-moving, more Desperate Detectives than The Bill. And there were plenty more characters all connected to the monster; I think. But don't test me on the plot. Let's just say I needed the crime board as much as the cops to keep track of things.

It was middle-class monsters, rather than LA terrors, which were the focus in May Contain Nuts (ITV1), based on John O'Farrell's novel, exposing obsessions with class and education. This had some of the laugh-out-loud humour of a personal favourite read Things Can Only Get Better, O'Farrell's account of his miserable years as a 1980s Labour supporter.

Monster, Ffion - yes two fs - played by Elizabeth Berrington, believed the area served by the local state school was a drug dealers' paradise. Her solution? "Bulldoze the whole area and drive them over the border into Lambeth." Her child's prep school had diagnosed him as talented in a "dinosaur-based play". That's personalisation for you.

But for newcomer Alice, played by Shirley Henderson, the solution was to try to cheat the system by sitting the school entrance exam, disguised as her daughter: "All's fair in love, war and secondary transfer."

The secret of pulling it off as a teenage girl? Look ugly. Hers was the silliest disguise since Toad dressed as a washerwoman in The Wind in the Willows.

Parent-child reversals are the stuff of fantasy films. And this became an over-long comedy sketch, a monster best strangled at birth - or tied to a bar stool and left in the water to sink.

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune In, Switch Off: Leave an Impression

2009-06-29T10:13:00.002+01:00

"There's little we can do about the economy. We're only the Government and we've got obesity to worry about," declared the two Johns, playing the famed stereotypical civil servants they've made their trademark in a timely return of Bremner, Bird and Fortune on Channel 4.

This was politics masquerading as entertainment. Rory Bremner was on top form, especially in the uncanny impersonations of the Prime Minister. How does he do that with his face? Bremner's YouTube spoof was almost as funny as the Number 10 original.

Dispatches: Crash Gordon (also Channel 4) though a serious documentary, could have been another sketch from the show. "No return to boom and bust," Mr Brown has apparently intoned more than one hundred times. Presenter Andrew Rawnsley treated us to repeat clips to prove it.

These were from the days when macho Gordon, like his namesake celebrity chef, believed he had an economic recipe that wasn't cooking the books.

Labour MP Frank Field suggested to roars of laughter (in my house anyway) that we should introduce Asbo-style behaviour contracts for the rich. Just run that idea past me again, Frank. Or was he being Rory?

Bremner presented this year's TES Schools Awards and he's as good in the flesh: cartoon quality faces and voices so real you think he's brought the politicians with him. I wonder why he's not impersonated Sir Alan, now Lord Sugar, yet. A couple of weeks ago, we had either The Apprentice (BBC1) or one of its off-shoot programmes nearly every night. Why not just an Apprentice Channel devoted to the life histories of these young entrepreneurs?

But in schools, we'll all applaud Sugar if he creates more apprenticeships in his role as government adviser, even if they are in chocolate manufacture.

Here's what Rory Bremner's Sir Alan might say: "Listen. I don't give a boardroom bollocking which of 'em gets through. As long they ain't costing me money. Show business is still business. You don't get to be popular by being popular. Any good teacher can tell you that.

"So when people wonder why I throw the nice guys out and keep the steaming, screaming hysterics, they just don't get it, do they? It's bleedin' obvious why I chucked the likes of Sandhurst Ben, who thought making money was better than sex, or that mousy Mona. And all the other limp shadows. They was as dull as daytime TV."

Cock-ups and tantrums make great telly. That's why The Apprentice is the most talked about TV programme. Forget Britain's got Talented Amateurs with Piers, Amanda and Simon.

As Sir Alan (or Rory) might say: "As I tell everybody each week, there is no second prize. There's only one winner. Me. The rest is just entertainment."

Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - Choice cuts from meaty shows

2009-06-15T14:57:00.000+01:00

During The Operation: Surgery Live (Channel 4) in which we gawped at keyhole hernia repair, a Twitterer asked: "Is the yellow stuff fat?" Clearly, they had missed an earlier BBC programme, 10 Things You Need To Know About Losing Weight. In that show, we saw an illuminated depiction of the grease-lined internal organs of medical journalist Michael Mosley (pictured right). The camera never lies: Michael needed to lose weight on the inside, even though he looked slim on the outside.

But help was at hand. Did you know that bigger plates hold more food? Believe me, it's a scientific fact. So tip number one was: eat from smaller plates. Why have I never thought of that? Time to smash some crockery and dig out the dolls' tea set from the loft.

Then it got more scientific. Apparently our stomachs process a cup of water and plate of solids more quickly than the same meal splurged in the blender as soup. The sludge takes ages to go down. Just like the water in my bathroom sink. So I'm definitely buying smaller soup bowls now.

Apparently, my brain can also fool my stomach into thinking it's just had a Christmas dinner, even if the last meal I ate was three days ago, so long as I eat protein. Bring on the steaks.
So it was useful when in Come Dine With Me (Channel 4), amateur chef Sabrina demonstrated how to tell if a steak was properly cooked. You prod it. The greater the bounce, the rarer it is. She demonstrated on her face, jabbing nose and cheeks. No need to stick in a fork to release the juices. Leave that to the surgeons.

But her fellow contestant Greg, representing Everyman and gardeners, horrified effete Hugo - as privileged as the heather-fed lamb on his plate - by eating his protein-packed chop with his bare hands. Fine dining establishments would throw him out, opined Hugo. He used words I'd forgotten existed such as "Titicaca", while Greg could only describe the flavour of his pears and ice cream as "peary and ice creamy". It's another winning reality TV format.

But back to the hernia repair show. It was made up of some unlikely ingredients: an operation, a live audience and questions via Twitter. If watching food programmes is the next best thing to eating, then the same must apply to surgery a thousand times over. Viewers saw robotic claws and beaks chasing the deadly yellow gunge - once soup - around the oesophagus and stomach in search of a nerve.

"What could go wrong?" asked one member of the audience who, unlike me, was daring to look. In the end, everything was trussed up with wire as neatly as a Sunday joint. What would happen if it was done too tight? Simple, she wouldn't be able to eat - even from keyhole-sized plates, presumably. Another dieting opportunity though.

Luckily, the surgeon said he would "fiddle and diddle" to get it perfect. Sounded like Hugo again. But he did reassure me by announcing that, as you become more experienced your hands became steadier. His advice to novice surgeons? Practise in the kitchen.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Is poetry on TV Donne for?

2009-06-09T14:41:00.000+01:00

Where has all the poetry on our screens come from? I think the swirling surges of this stuff started when Andrew Motion - velvet voice like the rolling ocean - relinquished his 10-year tenure as Poet Laureate. I may just re-read that paragraph to check that it scans.
But Motion's real career can begin now: reading the voice-overs for cocoa adverts. So soporific are his vocal chords, I once slept through several of his answers in a seminar I chaired when he answered questions from our sixth form.

The start of the BBC poetry season had Griff Rhys Jones posing in a field of daffodils where he just looked silly. Well, comedy is what he's lived his life for. But forget poetry, Griff, and stick to Restoration, where you can defend derelict objects like Mel Smith.

In Poetry Please on BBC Four, we watched the scarlet-jumpered Roger McGough unveiling the secrets of the nation's favourite Radio 4 poetry request programme. Was it his red jersey? No, it was simply reading poems to the listeners without musical serenade, suggestive images or interference of any kind. BBC television, please note.

There was plenty of swirling suggestiveness in Simon Schama's John Donne on BBC Two. What gives Schama the right to claim ownership of Donne? But there were three of them in this programme: John Carey, Fiona Shaw and the great poet's keeper.

It began graphically. Our "most electrifying poet", announced Schama. Cue fluorescent ceiling lights. He's a metaphysical poet. Cue clouds. Tales of terror, racks and disembowelment: cue droplets of red liquid. Why the phoney photos? Poetry is meant to feed our imaginations. Perhaps the producer thought we had none.

But Schama is a compelling storyteller and Carey and Shaw made great props. It was time to read some Donne so the camera panned to anywhere in London that looked old.
To get inside these erotic poems we also had to get up close and magnified. Lazing on leather sofas with Fiona, Schama verbally wrestled, swapping lines and insights.

Red sofas, of course. She had the text ready annotated, dirty bits underlined: "License my roving hands and let them go" - the rudest line ever written, we were told. There was pounding music and poems that lived - "not left-over relics". Sorry, Mel Smith.

The full frontal shots shifted to Carey and the back of Schama's head, revealing magnificent, magnified red ears. The two held a private tutorial, the world watching, as they dissected the verbal strip tease of: "To His Mistress Going to Bed". Today's sixth form males recite it as chat up lines, my English teacher wife tells me.

So to the end and death was everywhere in shots of sunsets and blackened trees as Donne wrote the Holy Sonnets and Fiona got to jog on the beach out of breath, reciting verse that "throbs with physical force".

Meanwhile on Britain's Got Talent, the hyperbolic Piers Morgan described Susan Boyle's singing as "having inspired the world". But you have to be Obama or John Donne to achieve that. No matter how many YouTube hits you score, it's all exaggeration - something Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror, should know all about. Cue fake photos?

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - A bad case of the geeks

2009-06-09T14:38:00.000+01:00

Take a group of actors, all aged over 20, dress them in school uniforms to look 16 and have them pretend to be 18 to get served in a pub. No, it's not The History Boys, but the plot of the first episode of The Inbetweeners, the first series of which is now showing again on E4.
Topically, there was also the public schoolboy, Will, (pictured) whose daddy suddenly couldn't afford the fees, so he had to get acquainted with the low life at the local comprehensive.

A budding entrepreneur, Will calculated that purchase of a carvery meal would qualify him for the alcoholic beverage to accompany it. Mummy, driving an open-top sports car, looked like his wildly attractive younger sister, so was the subject of shagging fantasies by his new mates. If you think it sounds rather silly, that's because it was.

Deadly serious, in contrast, was Unreported World, the Channel 4 undercover investigative series. This episode featured Recife in northern Brazil. A glamorous beach resort, it's also home to 4,000 murders a year. By coincidence, when you read this I'll be there, unless I cancel the flight in fright.

In fact, it's my third visit. Schools there are safe havens where meals are provided and pupils thrive. The Brazilians are full of joy and generosity. They embrace, sing and dance without the politically correct child protection rules that tie us in knots. Their teachers touch the children affectionately, and the children hug them in return. Call me unadventurous, but I'm not going to try this in Devon. Why risk arrest?

While education liberates, Unreported World graphically showed how poverty and drugs are the universal villains that spawn death squads. These squads often consist of police who are instructed by senior officers whom they must target; one confessed to personally having shot 30 young people. The executions are sometimes requested by shopkeepers desperate for action to get rid of the "scumbag crooks" because the legal system is regarded as too slow.
The price varies, depending on the value of the individual. Much more expensive to remove a politician than a drug dealer. Given recent developments, I'm not sure we'd place much value on a UK politician's life. Scumbag crooks sounds about right to me.

This was brave journalism, filmed among the action in grim detail with first-hand witnesses. I'd heard about the high murder rate from the teachers in the schools I visited. The body in the school playground is an everyday event.

Equally harrowing was the portrayal of Lucy by Molly Windsor, who acted and looked 11 in The Unloved, part of Channel 4's Forgotten Children season. Directed by the actress Samantha Morton and seen through a child's eyes, we experienced the damage adults do. There are no problem children, only problem parents.

Ditch the bucket loads of child protection training the Government has planned for schools in the autumn. Show this extraordinary drama to teachers and governors everywhere and hearts will break.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - The art of spin wears thin

2009-06-09T14:33:00.002+01:00

"Don't mention the war." That's what Gordon Brown must have been muttering as he saw the shots of himself in that Lewisham school with Nazi swastikas on the wall behind him. As they ran the pictures on news broadcasts throughout the evening and for days afterwards, I thought only of the distress they would cause.

It was the school I was concerned about. Weeks of preparation, everything polished and gleaming. This was billed as the educational equivalent of a moon landing. It had to be perfect. Imagine the staff meeting inquest afterwards. "Right. Own up. Who forgot to take down the swastikas? You? Well you can kiss goodbye to your threshold progression, matey."

Then someone forgets to tidy up the wall displays. If Peter Capaldi's expletive-driven spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, from The Thick of It and In the Loop had turned up, the unfortunate member of staff would have had their career, reputation and the contents of their bag blown to pieces in front of them, along with the swastika.

I should know, as I was there. The swastikas were just the half of it. No one filmed the bizarre moment myself and the rest of the "room meat", as we would be called by political window dressers, witnessed just before the PM delivered his highly trailed speech about changing the educational world.

The TV broadcasters were all doing their sound checks and everyone was looking important. It was like waiting in church for the bride to arrive. Then an aide (or was it the head's PA?) suddenly noticed the water jug contained a sliced lemon. Mr Brown must be allergic to lemon because the aide furtively dipped her hand in the water and the lemon was removed as skilfully as if it were a dead fish.

In the week we had been campaigning for greater hygiene to prevent the spread of swine flu, it had us all covering our faces with hankies. Stifling giggles as the cameras from the news organisations rolled, we watched in horror when the PM poured a drink, unaware of the human touch.

If all this sounds like satire, that naturally brings me to Mark Lawson talks to Ian Hislop, BBC4. The ever-chirpy Private Eye editor defended his satirical art as "illuminating and informative" even if not powerful enough to topple the Government. It was fascinating to watch these giant brains, critic and satirist, interacting, distracted only by the photographic memorabilia and video clips that stopped me complaining it would work better on radio.

In the week we heard of the demise of The South Bank Show, it was reassuring to see that the talking head format still rocks.

Describing his battles against vested interests, Hislop defended his paper as "where you read the news".

Out to get him, muck-raking journalists once even asked his village vicar if he had any gossip. This was war, but without the swastikas.

Ray Tarleton

A write of passage for a year about to disperse

2009-06-02T09:19:00.001+01:00

"My response to anyone bringing alcohol on to this site will make the Taleban regime look soft!" A pause to let the implications sink in. I think Year 11 have got the message. As always, we want their last routine day of teaching - that great rite of passage before the exams blast away the timetable - to be special, but also comfortable for everyone.

Our great tradition, a folklore ceremony you'd imagine goes back centuries, is The Signing of the Shirts. I spell out the rules of this game with military precision. First, like opening presents at Christmas, nothing must happen until the declared hour when lunch begins. Second, the entire year group are shepherded into the sports hall away from gatecrashers. It's a party, after all.

Felt tips are produced and away they go. It's simplicity itself. And the remarkable thing is how long it takes, and how totally absorbed everyone is. The happy hour is filled with scribbled good wishes that cover every inch of shirts and fill the year books. No one is bored or wants to leave. Staff drop in to add their much coveted signatures, and cameras click throughout. Even though it's a blazing hot sunny day and the doors are open to the seating area outside, few choose to go there. The sports hall is where the action is. If only learning could be so focused!

Guy Claxton could use this to write a lecture demonstrating his principles of "resilience and reciprocity" in action. David Hargreaves, architect of "Deep Learning" (seven whole days of that here this year ...) could feature "Deep Signing" in his next pamphlet.

"Uniform is a symbol of your pride in your school and aspiration to achieve," I've told Year 11 often. But by the end of the afternoon, they resemble mobile wall graffiti. A passing Martian might wonder what anarchy five years of secondary education has taught them. One of the bus drivers gives me a sorrowful look that suggests I've either lost control or gone mad. There's no telling what the public must think.

As they've been such a great group of youngsters, I try to analyse the process. Why does it matter so much to them? Attendance figures on this day are the highest in the year. One absentee - playing professional football already - sends in his shirt to be signed and I watch the care with which the autographs are collected.

More than three-quarters of Year 11 will stay on in our sixth form, so the reality is that most are not actually leaving. But the year group itself is about to fragment, decisive personal choices are being made for the first time in their lives, and the comfort zone of compulsory education with guided options is now over. Uniform symbolises the past. Tomorrow they transmogrify into sixth formers-in-waiting with personal freedoms about many things, including what to wear.

So the signature trophy hunting, far from an act of desecration, is a way of binding memories, remembering this moment in their lives. The hugs, tears and fears are all part of the process: sadness and joy in equal measure.

Well, that's my story - but I doubt if that bus driver would agree, or even know what I'm talking about. Oh, and the day was incident free, so I didn't have to invoke the Taleban option.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - They're desperate and fruity

2009-05-15T15:28:00.001+01:00

I can't believe the thought police let Desperate Housewives through. Even the title puts the cause of women's liberation back a century. I mean, what is a housewife, for feminism's sake?
Gabrielle certainly has some ideas. In the episode called "A Spark. To Pierce the Dark" she rips off her clothes the moment weary husband, Carlos, returns from work, enticing him into the bedroom for some action. Only he tells her that "little Carlos" isn't ready. This is the wrong answer.

Big Carlos, desperate for a way out, pretends he wants "the spicy menu" after all and ties her to the bed. Once secured, he leaves, taking his shy little friend with him. Marriage counselling or murder have to follow.

Edie's death is even more dramatic. Half strangled by husband Dave, she drives off into the night, only to hit the proverbial tree. But strangulation and a major car crash aren't enough to knock out a Wisteria Lane resident.

As she steps out of the wreckage of the car into a flash flood, she's electrocuted by a fallen power cable. Cue lightning and dramatic music.

But you still can't put a desperate housewife down. In the next episodes, Dave has only his gun to cuddle and Edie appears larger than death as her five friends each recall a story from her life to fill in the time on the four-hour journey to scatter her ashes. Well, it's original. Actually, it's not - Chaucer used the technique more than 600 years ago in The Canterbury Tales. The only difference is that his plots were incredible. On reflection, make that no difference.

But Desperate Housewives is at least worth watching for the jibes. Even the Vicky Pollards in my school would find it hard to beat these taunts: "When you jump up and down the room moves more than your boobs." Ouch! And friend to apparent friend: "The upside of small boobs is that they're real." I'm making no comment.

Teachers of PSHE will find more moral issues here than in any set of curriculum guidelines. For example: "He's committing adultery; I'm getting laid." That's an ethical dilemma for an RS class. As is: "I love him enough to let him hate me." Discuss.

In assembly, you could look at the fact there are friends with a little f and friends with a big F. But they all screw you up in the end. That's screw with a big F by the way.
After three episodes, it was a relief to turn to something normal. In My Life as an Animal (BBC3), a group of intrepid volunteers learns more about animals by living as they do. This episode it was dogs.

Ed, on all fours, tucks into his meal, complaining that there is too much jelly on the meat that he has to eat to get to the biscuits. That's dog biscuits, not custard creams.

In his final day as a dog, his challenge is to sleep with the dogs. It's not what you think. Watch out for when they turn this surreal reality TV on its head, with My Life as a Human or even Desperate Dogs.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Don't mess with a classic

2009-05-11T14:27:00.000+01:00

Back for its 37th series, Have I got News for You is reassuringly familiar. There were three great jokes - two visual and one verbal - in this first episode hosted by Frank Skinner.

First, our dear Prime Minister (that's dear in the monetary sense) was shown grinning inanely on YouTube. It reminded me that just because you can see the tiger's teeth, it doesn't mean it's smiling at you.

Next he's following President Obama into Number 10. The President graciously shakes hands with the policeman guarding the entrance. Well the guy's there to single-handedly prevent terrorists from breaking down the door. He deserves a break. And he's a London tourist attraction after all. Mr Brown copies the Obama gesture, policeman holds out his hand, and the PM changes his mind at the last minute and goes inside. The timing is perfect Chaplin. Or should that be Mr Bean? It's definitely a clip for citizenship classes.

Best of all is Mr Brown's public apology for the Damian McBride email affair: "I take full responsibility for what happened; that's why the person responsible went immediately." Just run that past me again. With this logic I can stop sweating about the GCSE results this summer. "Yes, governors, I take full responsibility for what has happened and have sacked the teachers responsible." No more sleepless nights for me.

However, the show also illustrates that revamping a format that works is totally unnecessary.
I can remember the mesmerisingly mirth-inducing programme The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin starring Leonard Rossiter and weep that David Nobbs and Simon Nye have wasted their talent on a remake.

Instead of enjoying the comedy, I was furious about the alterations. Now I know why classes, especially exam groups, get so wound up about teacher changes.

In the original, Rossiter's Reggie, reminiscent of H.G. Wells' Mr Polly, flees his job at Sunshine Desserts where life is dull, in search of new experiences. "What shall I call myself?" he muses as he walks, a free man at last, down country lanes. "I know, the first thing I see when I look over this wall. Colin ... Colin ... Cowpat." So simple and so memorable. I saw it 30 years ago and still haven't forgotten.

The new Reggie, Martin Clunes, no longer works at Sunshine Desserts, but at a disposable razor company. It would be the equivalent of Steptoe and Son as removals men instead of rag-and-bone dealers. And we all know the running joke about the whoopee cushion on the seat in the boss's office that featured in the original. Gone. How dare they? The optical illusion of big and little chairs misses the auditory gag. Even Mr Brown could have told them that.
As for the audience, either the responses were canned and someone forgot to turn the volume down, or they'd been drugged with laughing gas. Pure cowpat.

Genius is another make-over from Radio 4. It was a switch-off then and is now. Members of the public offer zany inventions for comment, and this week Germaine Greer offers the feedback. Onion juice and women-only voting rights were the highlights, that's how bad it was. My Year 9s on an enterprise day this week came up with better: expanding shoes and a mobile telephone glove.

Memo to BBC bosses: "Take responsibility for these failed revamps and fire those responsible."

Ray Tarleton

Not nuts, that's the bankers

2009-05-05T14:05:00.001+01:00

Overheard in the staffroom: "Now he's pretending to be a television critic." Reply: "What's new? He's been fantasising that he's a headteacher for years." The critic's critic delivers the deadliest dart.

Though TV is often regarded as the lowest form of recreational life, there's plenty to learn out there. So this week's lessons are on economics with the affable Mr Hutton and history with that scary teacher, Mr Starkey.

But first, I got a lesson in dialogue in front of the Mark Lawson Talks to Mike Leigh show on BBC4. Recently, I saw Alison Steadman in the West End demonstrate perfect comic timing as an ageing could-have-been-but-never-was in the Alan Bennet play, Enjoy. In contrast, her youthful, guitar-playing Candice Marie in Leigh's Seventies play Nuts in May was a character out of time. She and her boyfriend were early Greens, appreciating nature on their camping trip, eating healthy vegetarian meals and following the Country Code (as it was then).

"Cigarette smoke it makes me choke, litter makes me shiver," Candice Marie warbles during the disastrous Dorset camping holiday when her husband, Keith, tries to get loutish fellow campers to show proper respect for the countryside. This could have been a series.

From things that flap (tents), to issues that make you flap. Money mystifies me. Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money explained that it doesn't really exist - it's only a load of promises. In anticipation of last week's Budget, I entered the economics class in befuddled state, awaiting illumination about these things from Will Hutton in his Dispatches programme Crash - How the Banks Went Bust on Channel 4.

Hutton's book, The State We're In, was a must-read in the Nineties and his recent work on China is gripping. In apocalyptic language, he proclaimed that the biggest financial catastrophe was all about "greed and ambition". This was the greatest story ever told.

The Western economy has been "taken to the point of collapse and then crippled". Lots of unrepentant money-grubbers were wheeled on as witnesses to prove it. One trader told us it felt as if civilisation got flushed down the toilet bowl. It was more like Casualty than economics.

Computer screens of financial projections could have been heart monitors, registering the weakening pulse of the patient, UK plc. Can the economy be saved from the banks? Watch this space.

Speaking of history-making moments, blood spread over the screen as David Starkey introduced one of the greatest love stories ever told - between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant on Channel 4.

It all happened a few centuries ago, so instead of living witnesses, Starkey used actors. Artificial and unnatural, they were a silly diversion. For who can beat Starkey the storyteller? Analytical, passionate and precise, he is one of television's joys. Framed in sepia on the staircase of a regal property, he might have been a painting of a historian or king. So which was the greatest story of them all, Hutton's or Starkey's? Which did I prefer?

Not history, nor economics because, important as they are, I think that it's the planet, stupid. For me, Mike Leigh's camping conservation lesson was the one to remember.

Ray Tarleton

Geeks scrub up well

2009-04-20T09:48:00.000+01:00

The formula of The Big Bang Theory is simple, but the science teachers among you should look away now, especially those trying to persuade the fairer sex to take their subject.

First take two nerds. You need one with a brain the size of the Large Hadron Collider. Physicists are best, "indoorsy and pale", because it's safest to mock what we can't comprehend, even though they've given us some of the best discoveries of the 20th century. Then, sprinkle in someone "normal" for reference, preferably of the opposite sex, to highlight the geeks' inadequacies.

Finally, watch our geek and super-geek trying to be human and cope with life on a planet - Earth, if you were wondering - in which behaviour rarely conforms to scientific principles. If you think you've seen it all before in Third Rock from the Sun or The IT Crowd, well the computer says you're wrong.

In fact, no formula can do justice to the quality of the writing in The Big Bang Theory on Channel 4. And the real targets of mockery are not the young Einsteins, but those of us who think we're normal.

In the episode called The Bath Item Gift Hypotheses, super-geek Sheldon reveals an obsession with gift-giving etiquette, which I bet most men secretly share.
When neighbour, Penny, the normal one, presents him with a seasonal present, his reaction is to go into paroxysms of worry about what to buy her in return: "The foundation of gift-giving is reciprocity," he moans. That being the case: "You haven't given me a gift; you've given me an obligation." Now I know why I've hated Christmas for years.
His not-quite-so-nerdy friends take Sheldon to a store selling lotions, bath oils and soaps that they claim is "the oestrogen hat-trick," though our physicist can see nothing there a woman would want.

Like my computer on one of its regular nervous seizures, he locks down trying to comprehend which size gift is appropriate to buy. Which bloke has not been there too? And so, with a logic that defies logic but is scientifically sound, he buys them all.
Why have I never thought of this? The cunning plan is to look up the price of his received gift on Google while "feigning digestive distress", choose the bath item gift to match the value and send the rest back to the store. Genius.

Meanwhile his friend, Leonard, sees Penny swept off her feet by the winner of the university's genius grant for his work on the existence of dark matter. "The guy was just in the right place at the right time with the right paradigm-shifting re-interpretation of the universe. He got lucky," says Leonard.

Well he gets so lucky with Penny that Leonard is forced to feign nonchalance: "Science is my lady." He's living proof of the old joke that physicists don't need to use contraception: the force of their personality is all they need.

So, will all this help persuade girls to study science? With characters so witty, sharply portrayed and loveable, you know I believe it may.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Wild things

2009-04-03T17:31:00.002+01:00

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'd stay there, if I were you. Stranded in Grizzly Country is a tale of extreme physical endurance that will keep you glued to your seat. You'll certainly think twice before booking your next weekend break in Alaska after watching this documentary - part of More4's Alive series.

"We were just gonna have fun," says Blake, as he reminisces about the wreckage that was his father Neil's 65th birthday expedition. All was planned by this foolishly stubborn youth.
"Do you really wanna share this with 10 strangers and a tour guide?" Blake asks his father as they set out. Prophetically wise, Dad admits he does. I'm with Neil every time.

It's a mad scheme: just the two of them, thousands of miles of Sarah Palin wilderness and a 90-mile float by raft, with no mobile phone or radio contact. Oh, and I nearly forgot - the grizzly bears. On this bargain break, the local inhabitants "tear your head off with one bite". That's if the hypothermia doesn't get you. Assuming you pull through after spending minutes under the ice floe, almost choking to death.

This is fun, because I love watching other people's mess-ups and then feeling less guilty about my own. But I'd never put young Blake in charge of my Duke of Edinburgh teams without trebling the insurance. And Neil would never have got Saga to cover him either.

As Blake goes off for help, the only question is whether he will be able to cross the river before his father's fire goes out. Well, everything that can go wrong does. The reconstruction is full of bubbling underwater shots and fast-paced music to make our hearts race like this duo on adrenalin.

The real Blake re-lives the agonies of the experience, as his tears movingly show. Rescue arrives, but only after I have had a second cup of cocoa and turned the central heating up ridiculously high.

I once got this close to nature on a tiny rowing boat on the Zambezi in Chobe National Park in Botswana. The hippos began coming up for air and snorting water. Afterwards the boatman prostrated himself and gave thanks to his god.

In The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe, Botswana's answer to Lewis, provides light relief. Forget Monday morning and the grizzly bears you have to teach and wallow instead in this sunny world of smiles, solutions and occasional sin.

It's Sunday evening children's TV for grown-ups, as sweet and colourful as the pick 'n' mix in Woolworths used to be - an imaginary world that never existed and never will. So, if you are sitting comfortably, let the plot unfold.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Playing with the fired

2009-03-31T11:22:00.001+01:00

This was The Apprentice (Comic Relief, BBC1, March 13), but not as we know it. We heard the usual theme music and the same disembodied "Sir Alan will see you now" voice. But the man in the chair was limp: sugar mouse rather than sourpuss.

The real Alan Sugar would have described his counterfeit as a bloody disaster. Jack Dee was spot on when he said that Britain's normally most belligerent businessman came across as a Thunderbird puppet.

Sugar's a single-shot sniper to the National College for School Leadership. You can be sure he'll never be invited to give their annual lecture.

Of course, we know in our hearts that it's wrong to abuse and humiliate your employees, but it doesn't half speed things up. And it's a lot more fun. While our teacher conferences are full of references to moral purpose, Sir Alan's M-word is money, making it.

The ladies may have won this contest to design a new toy for the five to eight-year-old market with Ruby Wax's ingenious idea of Velcro play suits, but I still think the adult party version is the one we'll see in the shops. Well, certain kinds of shop, anyway.
It goes like this: you throw the dice, touch the area of someone's body as directed and you find you stick to it. Are they serious? The toy manufacturers' reservation was that five-year-old boys don't like physical intimacy. Middle-aged men would be a whole new market, Ruby.
Although they lost, it was the male celebrities who stole the show. They were led by Gerald Ratner, whose comment about his jewellery being cheaper than a prawn sandwich and less durable cost him millions. So it's great that he still has a sense of humour.

Their concept was a belt on which children could collect, hang and then swap newly invented model space creatures. Ratner was responsible for the non-existent business plan that lost the team the contest in the face of Sugar's questioning about tools and margins. But the real leader was Jonathan Ross, whose compelling personality stole each scene.

That's why Alan Sugar was no longer cheeky chappy but cheeked chappy. It was like a class with a supply teacher who couldn't control them. Real apprentices would never dare to joke about the boss's suit and shirts: "Have you been working out, Sir Alan?" smirked Ross.
I'd have had the troublemaker out of the room and moved to another reality TV programme in a flash.

Even Margaret and Nick, the fiercely loyal duo who grass up the teams each week, were diminished. Was this the same Margaret whose comment in the last series about Edinburgh University "not being what it was" led to a 50 per cent reduction in Ucas applications?
For me there wasn't enough tension - just one argument between two ladies that looked a bit fake. The teams stayed in a smart hotel rather than the Big Brother-style house, so didn't have time to get on each other's nerves. We even missed those delightful dawn wake-up calls.

So next Comic Relief, I'd say: "Sir Alan, Margaret and Nick, you three form a team for a change. This is your task. And one of you will be fired."
Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Slime and Punishment

2009-03-23T12:32:00.002Z

This week a colleague found a six-minute video clip of me discussing a long-dead innovation on Teachers TV.

It set me thinking: who watches this stuff? I'd never seen it. And if it's a choice between watching me on the small screen and Desperate Housewives, I know where I'll be every time.
Perhaps the Government could consider creating a TV station for a profession with greater training needs than ours. Imagine what similar training might do for the financiers. Bankers' TV has a nice ring to it. Just think of the dramas about economics they could screen. We've heard a lot of fiction from the banks recently.

There are even ready-made titles for this toxic television channel, such as The Bill, Damages or Mad Men. And Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? might get them tuning in for pensions advice. They could have their own Crimewatch series, starring some of the more notorious City fat cats for a small price. They would have to cut those final bedtime words of comfort, "Don't have nightmares" that assure those crimes won't happen to us, because we all know they just did.

There was also plenty of crime in the highly-hyped Channel 4 drama, Red Riding. You know it's going to be complicated when you see that the cast list in the Radio Times has an accompanying labelled photograph to make sure you can do your own piece of detective work - identifying them all. The first episode was set in 1974. We deduced that by the lime green swirly wallpaper and the long sideburns on our chain-smoking, leather-jacketed journalist hero, Eddie, played by Andrew Garfield. How's that for detective work?

It was a bizarre world of extreme police brutality: savage, rabid, frothing at the mouth brutality, with distorted faces and hands squeezing personal bits that made me wince. And that was before Eddie's fingers were smashed with handcuffs. Why didn't he sue or at least run for cover every time he saw a blue siren coming towards him? Those truncheon blows looked painful. Naked and hooded in a dark cell ("Is he bleeding yet?"), this could have been a Guantanamo Bay documentary. There was even a mock execution. Z-Cars was never like this.

Mouths dripping with blood and full-vowelled northern accents, it reminded me of the Scottish play. All the grotesques in it, and there were lots, looked like those photographs of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. No wonder the North is a foreign country - and I was brought up there.

In the year this was set, the school where I taught was closed because the corrupt police and headteacher were running a prostitution racket with the Year 11 girls. The boys rioted. No, it wasn't Bradford, but an African state and a great start to my teaching career.

But given what writer David Peace believes the West Yorkshire police were up to back then, perhaps I had a lucky escape.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - This was history as soap

2009-03-16T11:15:00.002Z

I once almost asked Michael Portillo why he never became leader of the Tory party. I'd rehearsed my question carefully and thought I'd send down a bouncer and hit him for a six. Did he think the problem was to do with him or his party?

But my wife jumped in with her question first, just wanting some juicy gossip about his warm and cuddly relationship with Labour MP Diane Abbott on the sofa in BBC's late-night political review programme, This Week.

I may have missed out, but my wife now has a dinner party story to tell of Michael and Diane's unlikely partnership in the school play, Macbeth.

However, it was Portillo's absence in Margaret that was more conspicuous. Despite being mentioned by Lady Thatcher in her autobiography, The Downing Street Years, as being one of her strongest supporters during her resignation crisis, Portillo was, surprisingly, written out of the script in this drama about her fall from power. Perhaps that's what the party tried to do to him as well.
This was history as soap: so many famous actors pretending to be so many memorable politicians. Or perhaps it was the other way around. I think Geoffrey Howe was really impersonating John Sessions, and surely Heseltine played himself - or was it Rory Bremner again? I kept expecting John Bird and John Fortune to pop up; in fact, I think I did spot them in the background when Hurd and Major were plotting in the dark corners of the tea rooms. But then Margaret would only ever visit those male enclaves when there was garlic on the menu. I feel the same way about the staffroom.

Margaret contained more cricketing cliches than runs by the England batsmen in a test-match special. "No ducking the bouncers. The bowling's going to get hit all round the ground. That's my style," the great lady tells her team. Ah, but that was before her trusted Geoffrey came in to bowl and complained, in that electrifying speech of his in the Commons, that she'd "broken the bats".
The other star of this piece, apart from Denis (Ian McDiarmid) of course, was Strictly Come Dancing's John Sergeant. In his autobiography, Give Me Ten Seconds, he describes the farcical moment in history when the prime minister emerges from a meeting in Paris to deliver a news conference but finds she has no microphone.

"She's behind you," shouts the newsreader to man-with-the-mike Sergeant. But before our John can say "let's tango", she's snatched it from him and is making her speech about fighting on to win. The chaos of this scene came over in the remake but nothing beats the original, so why try?
There were lots of flashing cameras, slamming of car doors and walks at marathon speed down dingy corridors when her followers tried hard to keep up. You knew they were her team because they all wore over-large owl specs, dark suits and had paunches the size of Ken Clarke.
It was a good job we were told that the dialogue was all made up or I might have believed it was true. "I will change the soul of this country. Either you are with me or you are against me. We shall prevail," she said.

I think they nicked that from the Churchill documentary on the History channel. Or was it Portillo's infamous SAS speech? I can already hear the chuckles from Diane Abbott on that late-night couch

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - the porcupine and his prey

2009-03-10T09:45:00.002Z

Here's your starter for 10. Name the longest-running serious quiz programme on television. Yes, that's 10 points for University Challenge, which began life in 1962 with the sharing, caring Bamber Gascoigne. Kindly and don-like, Bamber used to spend his week reading around the questions, so he was able to deliver his answers without a glance at the cards.

Since 1994, Jeremy "Porcupine" Paxman has held court with trademark spiky shafts of disdainful disbelief. Last week's series final gleaned an extra two million viewers after finalist Gail Trimble of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, received a hammering on the internet when she was described as "the cleverest student ever to appear" on the programme.

The final involved Manchester University taking on Corpus Christi; redbrick versus old brick. It was Paxman the speed reader not Gascoigne the memory man in the quizmaster's seat, with Manchester 45 points ahead until the last four minutes, when Corpus went "like a train".

Paxman's sting punctures any sense of self worth a faltering team might have. He's used to political heavyweights on Newsnight, so students are easy pickings for the porcupine.

Do teachers such as Paxman still exist or have inspections drilled out the sadistic stream of questioning so beloved by pedants in my day? At the risk of a thousand letters of complaint, praise be to Ofsted if it has seen them off.

University Challenge is a kind of mental 300 metres. Just as I'd still be on the starting blocks after the gun was fired, trying to work out which way to run, I sat through the final simply trying to find words I recognised. The only thing more obscure than the answer was the question.

Trimble has a brain speed that beats my creaky laptop any day. By the time I'd typed "What is the answer to the most obscure question in the world?" into Google, she was on to the next round. Even when it was a question I recognised, I could feel the slow fuse of electrical impulses seeking out the relevant file buried deep in the dusty hard drive of my memory. I'd need a good 30 minutes to winkle it out, conferring or not, so Manchester, the near winners, beat me to it every time.

At least Corpus Christi's winning total was only 275 points. Last time a team managed to score more than 300, they were mocked: "You need to get out more."

Watching Have I Got News For You the same evening, it was clear Fern Britton, its guest presenter, had been watching the University Challenge final because her catchphrase was: "Fingers on buzzers, boys."

I still associate HIGNFY with Cheshire cat Angus Deayton. The fun these days is in guessing who the presenter will be and watching Paul Merton and Ian Hislop trip them up with their provocative jibes. It's founded on the chemistry between these two, teasing their victims with false satirists' smiles.

The class clowns lob punchlines back and forth. Hislop, all brain and beatific morality, ingests his victims then spits them out. Merton, cheeky schoolboy, swats gently, creating absorbing fantasies before the final deadly bite.

Each week, as I catch up on the show on comedy channel Dave, presenter after presenter gets the treatment. Perhaps Paxman could face these two baiting tormentors for a change? Take this as your starter for 10, Jeremy.

Tune in, switch off - Gore blimey, it's a ripper

2009-02-26T15:26:00.002Z

Tune in, Switch off - Ray writes a regular TV review column for TES which has become the blog entry for a while:

I am glad I ignored the Guardian preview on the first week of ITV's Whitechapel crime series and didn't go into a dark room with a pizza on my face, as advised. You see, we've had no cops on our telly for some time now - I didn't take to the snowy wastes of Wallander, the acclaimed Swedish detective series with Kenneth Branagh.
All those long drives through the ice reminded me of local weather programmes I watch when trying to decide whether I'll need to close the school. But Whitechapel's trails of blood, a Ripper copycat and London streets have me hooked.
Fresh from Spooks, Rupert Penry-Jones stars as novice detective inspector Joseph Chandler, who clashes with the Jack-the-lad old guard detective Ray Miles, played by Phil Davis.
Chandler is in for a hard time, as the team work him over. Don't we all love to see a new boy making mistakes? An obsessive compulsive, with much hand washing as well as wringing, his subordinates think they have the new boss sussed: "He's gay." How do they know? "I've got gaydar". Loud guffaws.
So Chandler has to face down the real enemy - his colleagues - before he can even contemplate catching the Ripper-esque murderer.
But our stumbling, fumbling senior officer has his own dark secret: he can't even look at a bloodied body without covering his mouth with his silk handkerchief and going off to vomit behind the bushes. I'm with Chandler when it comes to gore: I can't even have an injection without passing out, so this is scary stuff.
However, we know he's finally going to be at the scene during one of the murders because, if you've studied your Ripper history, the times and places are predictable; though we're fed enough false clues to create a Times crossword.
We viewers, however, always know when the flash of knife and outpourings of guts are about to appear on our screens. The eerie music and dark photography are such a giveaway. Why don't the victims ever notice, I wonder?
So this nice, clean detective has to work with those dirty, unruly policemen. Of course, that's the trigger he needs to assert himself. Holding a piece of chalk and using something we used to call a blackboard, he tells them to put on their ties, clear their desks each evening and stop belching and farting.
We could use this sequence on a staff training day with our NQTs. Self-discipline, self- respect and deodorant are the learning points. There's even a great punchline if you want to fast-track them out of teaching: "And you smell."
All the big, burly police officers go off quietly at this point for a shower. How does Chandler get away with it? It's like Alan Sugar in The Apprentice glibly mouthing: "You're fired."
Seriously? Surely he knows about the three stages of capability investigation, four years of evidence-gathering and thousands of pounds in damages just to suggest to an employee that, as they're not pulling their weight, their job might be at risk. I might go and lie down with that pizza now.
Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Original can be found here: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6009054

Curry.........Curry........Curry.........Curry....

2009-02-13T12:53:00.001Z

Some people will do anything for a tan and I’m no exception. Actually the weather in Delhi where I’m working for the British Council this week (they pay the school for me and I think it makes everyone happy!) is variable. And for most of the week I’ve been holed up in conferences and meetings. But Indian food is my favourite so it’s even been curry for breakfast. I wrote about food this week in the TES column below which I know some blog readers like me to quote. So here’s a snippet:

‘For food lovers and people watchers, the return of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares in a double two-hour feast was a taster’s delight. As in the best formula-driven programmes, there is an anticipated plot. First our hero, the rugged Ramsay, face like a lunar landscape, rides into town to clean up local kitchens. His target? The re-cycled, re-heated and re-volting food served up in restaurants that don’t deserve the name.

So Mick Martin’s Bistro in Okehampton is caught out serving up vacuum-sealed, shelf-stored lamb shanks bought in from the Cash and Carry. Mick clearly has never watched Ramsay in action or he’d have avoided serving him the duck a l’orange made with orange squash. Meanwhile, in Sheffield, Justin’s Spanish place is more tasteless than tapas, more gloop than gastronome.

All this is just for starters. Next it’s onto the main course which the viewer knows will be heavily spiced and served with lashings of vitriolic sauce. This is the ‘Gordon as Shrink’ phase but without the psychiatrist’s chair. Instead, our hero goes into destruct mode, exposing the tensions and deep emotions in the kitchen relationships. You can’t learn this from a recipe book. His kitchen skewer probes deep into what makes these people tick. Message: you can only turn around a failing business if you make individuals face up to their shortcomings.

It’s brilliant television and at this point you may have to turn down the volume because the noise from the box reminds me of those playground fights you wonder how you will ever break up. To Justin’s list of ‘things I’ve done right,’ Ramsay screams: ‘It’s lost you the fucking business! It’s gone!’

Yes there are more F words in this programme than I’d care to count. In fact, the F word is sprinkled like pepper on every sentence: Fresh, fresh, FRESH! That’s the mission: fresh produce or die. And we see Justin’s partner stroking the so fresh it’s still alive, so local it lives just round the corner, deer that will soon become his hit venison pie.

Would it work in school? I’d love to introduce him to that awkward Year 9 group that have given up on us. Go on, Gordon, tell ‘em how it is. What’s that? You think we’ve got the recipe wrong? We need to chuck out boil-in-the bag lesson plans? But surely in schools it’s always the kids’ fault isn’t it? ‘

And certainly the food in Delhi is as fresh as it comes so no f word need.

The Back-Burner Blog

2009-02-05T16:26:00.000Z

During my odd spare hour in the evening, when I generally write the blog, I’ve had to take up television watching. I’m not a great fan but perhaps a healthy scepticism is what they want. You see, the TES (‘Times Educational Supplement’) have asked me to write a weekly TV review column- as irreverent as I can make it.

Don’t worry- it’s going in the magazine so nobody will see it, never mind read it- but don’t tell them that. I’ve always wanted to be a real writer so who knows? From blog to broadsheet?

So here’s an edited (had to cut the adult jokes) version of week one, Gavin and Stacey. I’ll be doing autographed copies on parents’ evening!

‘Confession time: a terrible fidget like me desperately needs a decent TV fix to keep me in my chair. So, wearying of my Fawlty Towers and Alan Partridge videos, I have just discovered the delights of a new comedy, Gavin and Stacey on BBC 3.

New? How did I miss it the first time round? Was I such a snob that their very names sent me scuttling to switch channels for something uplifting like Simon Schama? Probably, but I also know I snored through every episode of that worthy history programme, much as I love the distinguished professor.

Now Monday nights are transformed. Dishwasher stacked and feet up by nine o’clock, I have to be on the sofa and ready for the charms of Alison Steadman, playing Gavin’s phoney vegetarian mum, whose overbearing bosoms match her bossiness.

I still remember Steadman as the pure, virginal, dandelion-eating, green prototype, Candice Marie in Mike Leigh’s 70’s TV play, Nuts in May. Candice was a vegetarian in the days when it was deeply unfashionable. The programme was even screened in black and white. How old does that make me? It pre-dated Abigail’s Party- in which she was the jarring hostess, Beverley, the part she now seems to be reprising.
.
I watched the stag night and wedding episodes with lap top in one hand and whisky glass (I have a bad head cold so you can feel sorry for me) in another, desperately trying to catch up on the three thousand emails in my in-box. I told you I was a fidget. But who said men can’t multi-task?

Smithy and his mates remind me of some of the teenagers in my school. In fact it’s the only way I can begin to understand what many of them are saying to me. It’s so useful to know, for example, that his use of ‘shit-faced’ is youth culture colloquial. Now I might not need to exclude so many students for swearing.

Stacey’s uncle, brilliantly portrayed by Bob Brydon, reminds me of my Chair of Governors. His childlike belief in the accuracy of his Sat Nav (‘Let me just show you how it works, Gavin’) reminds me of my Chair of Governors’ fixation with School Performance Tables. Sad, isn’t it?

So, I’m with Gavin and Stacey during the proposal, engagement and marriage. Who cares if I’ve accidently deleted all those emails? For this is television that will remain new, fresh and hold me in my seat. Fellow fidgets, come and join me in a toast to a great ‘new’ comedy.’

Next week it’s Gordon Rambo Ramsay and plenty of the ‘F’ word. Yes, you’ve guessed it, ‘Fresh!’

At the Touch of a Screen

2009-01-26T09:36:00.001Z

‘You can withdraw money from the new hole in the wall in Reception,’ I shout to one of our caretakers as I dash past him on my way to check out a class. He gives a look of surprise but genuine interest and I see him going in to see for himself. Ten minutes later we pass each other again and both laugh about the latest technology that looks like an ATM but is actually an interactive touch screen- a Parent Information Point.

Matt White, leading on Extended Schools for our Learning Community, has worked with Richard Penhale, ICT System Manager, to install the information points in all the local primary schools as well. Now we are all connected and so are parents across the 350 square miles of our catchment area.

Everyone can see, at the touch of the screen, what is on offer within their own school and across the Learning Community of nine primaries and South Dartmoor, the secondary. Information ranges from clubs to holiday activities, from childcare providers to local authority networks of support. And because it’s electronic, it can be constantly changed so is never out of date.

Best of all it has an amazing metal roller ball that feels like a cool stress ball and allows you to navigate the page without all the jumping and hopping about that my computer mouse does. Now I know why it’s called a mouse.

In the Sports Hall, the new screen projector gives us Odeon quality video clips. A member of staff comments on the total absorption of Years 7-9 as they watch a few minutes of America’s new President speaking to two million of his countrymen live in Washington and to hundreds of millions of others in America and around the world. This isn’t just the technical excellence of the picture- it’s the brilliance of his words, crafted and delivered with attention to rhythm and the occasion. They are watching history in the making and their response reflects the admiration and anticipation of the planet.

Later on Friday evening my all singing mobile phone vibrates with the message that there’s a message. Live from the national Indoor Hockey Finals in Birmingham, Steve Dinnie, Director of Sport, is texting me to give me the very latest match information. Some spectacular wins, some losses. I tap in some text on the screen and send it back to cheer the teams on.

I’ve had to go up to London for work with the British Council and Teacher Development Agency four times this term. With electricity in the carriages, I can keep batteries charged so I’m able to use my computer and send and receive emails via the phone whilst listening to music on the MP3. Who said men can’t multi task? I can get a lot of work done in relative peace, as long as I remember to unplug the wires before I stand up to get a coffee.

It’s all so much easier than the days when everything came on paper and I used to go through my red boxes where everything was filed and kept. I can and now do have email conversations with colleagues around the country and around the world. Given my levels of patience, immediacy and speed really appeal. I never want to lick another stamp. One aim, as a Trust, is to work with Capita Children’s Services to bring the school into the home electronically. So watch out parents. It’s coming to a screen near you.

And as the train pulls into Paddington, I remember that I do need some cash. This time I go to track down a real ATM. as my phone sends a message from school that someone’s left their lights on in the car park. How lovely to be in close and constant contact, and all at the touch of a screen.

Driven to Drink

2009-01-13T12:34:00.000Z

In one secondary school in the North West, one in three teenagers have admitted to drinking alcohol to cope with GCSE stress. Others smoke or use drugs to alleviate the pressure of coursework and looming exams.

New research carried out by educational psychologist, Dr Pamela Taylor, has found that more than a quarter of pupils approaching GCSEs experience high levels of school-related stress. The study questioned 172 year 11 students, aged 15 and 16, from a northern school about what they found stressful in the run-up to GCSEs and how they coped.

The students said the main pressures they experienced stemmed from the large volume of coursework they were given and clashing hand-in dates. Most of the teenagers said they managed to cope with school-related stress by listening to music, watching television, doing sport and exercise and even walking the dog. However, 30 per cent revealed that they drank alcohol to alleviate the pressure, while 16 per cent said they smoked cigarettes and six per cent used drugs.

This is a wake up call to schools who probably assume that alcohol, tobacco and even drugs are part of a youth culture of experimentation and friendship patterns rather than an aspect of stress relief. We’d assume their use is recreational or to do with image and peer expectations rather than coping with pressure.

I’d be interested in carrying out the survey with Year 11 at South Dartmoor to see if we have similar issues and acting on them where we can. We already publish coursework and exam deadlines and we try to space them.

But there is no doubt in my mind that we have the hardest working generation of young people and teachers in our schools at present, and that the pressure on a school’s Year 11 to perform has never been higher. As a Sports College, we make mental and physical health a priority- even offering Friday evening sport for the staff in case they face similar temptations at the end of a stressful week! Now… where did I put that corkscrew….

The Answer Told by Teachers

2009-01-05T11:35:00.000Z

As the new American President takes office, I’ve been watching him to learn about leadership from the greatest exponent of modern times. During the campaign he sent out lots of emails, so I’ve replied asking for tips. Oddly there’s been no response so far.

Oratorical brilliance is much admired, so I’ve started there. I’m keen to improve my assembly delivery and I’m even thinking of getting his Doric Pillars painted on the Sports Hall walls.

His most famous device is the old Ciceronian technique, the ‘tricolon’ which is using a series of three for emphasis. Why not copy the master? Should I begin my next assembly with an adaptation of: ‘I came; I saw; I conquered’ as a way of silencing the masses? Much clearing of throat and Obama-style cool delivery for: ‘I’m waiting; I’m still waiting; right… I’m going off on one!’ Would it sound more dignified in Latin, I wonder?

Then there’s ‘periphrasis’, the use of a roundabout phrase, ‘a young preacher from Georgia’, rather than the name itself - Martin Luther King. But I use this all the time: ‘I want to know the name of the student who vandalised bus 17 last night,’ I declaim, hoping that someone will heed my message and dob the culprit in. ‘Yes, I’m talking to you,’ is also powerfully rhetorical, if half the school think you are looking at them. But Obama never has trouble keeping the attention of his audience.

I’ve also tried his use of ‘praeteritio’, where you draw attention to a subject by saying you’re not going to talk about it. But the groans, glazed eyes and knowing looks (did you spot the tricolon?) are a giveaway to an adolescent audience: ‘I’m not going to mention litter, sloppy uniform or poor attendance.’ The looks on their faces send the echoing response, ‘Oh yes you are!’

I’m still trying to match the lyrical, soaring flow of rhetoric that is Obama’s trademark: ‘I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,’ but, ‘I am the son of an unemployed Irish wool sorter and a Bradford dinner lady,’ doesn’t have the same mystique.

Perhaps a bit of ‘anaphora’ is the answer, an Obama stock in trade, where a phrase is repeated at the start of successive sentences. There’s some inspiration - admit it - in this Obamaesque flight of fancy, as I muse on ways to improve examination performance, in preparation for the next staff meeting:

‘It’s the answer told by teachers in classrooms from school to shining school; it’s the answer spoken in staff rooms across the land from coast to gleaming coast; it’s the answer to the GCSE Maths problem that will get all students, from the backyards of Buckfastleigh to the front porches of Plymouth five high grade GCSEs.’ Lovely rhetoric! We may not have the solution, but it sounds as if we do. Even my Governors might fall for this one.

Or what about this, modelled on his 2004 Convention speech: ‘We’re entering a new post- SATs age in which there will be no Key Stage Three students or Key Stage Four students- only South Dartmoor students.’ That should wow them.

The new president has shown he can transform the attitudes of young people. My hope is that he will influence the young in this country and help us to encourage and lead in a new age of optimism. I’ll keep learning from the rhetoric, even though I know it can’t be matched. The best I can hope for is a well painted Doric column and an encouraging email from the United States.

Christmas Magic

2008-12-18T12:30:00.001Z

Apparently teachers ‘enjoy’ 1,500 interactions every day. That’s without the emails. Any other profession would be on a go slow but, strangely, we always think we are doing too little. We fill our days and work nights too.

At the end of a long term, just when we are the point of collapse, along comes Christmas, or whatever we are calling it this year, with its demand that we be of good cheer. The staff may be shattered but the students are increasingly hyped-up and turbo-charged.

The only answer is to join in the festive spirit and have some fun. So, this year’s staff and student Band Aid recordings were screened in the final assembly in the Sports Hall to popular acclaim- thanks to the Media Department.

There’s plenty of talent here and the The Sound of Music DVD highlights was also great to see- another assembly item on our big screen. If you ordered a copy, the full length version should be on television soon near you.

At the evening Carol Service, choir and orchestra performances reminded us that Christmas was about to start. I understand why so many of us enjoy working here: the wonderful young people and the remarkable standards they achieve. The Christmas message of joy and hope filled the hall, as it did again the next day for the repeat performances on the final morning of term. It was magnificent.

We’ve had our own parties as well. The staff event was a triumph with our very own College magician, Brian Hodge, performing magic tricks that involved doves and rabbits- live ones! Brian is a fantastic Trustee and Governor of the College- a real inspiration. And he brought some true Christmas magic.

At last it’s time for turkey and telly. My two children, both of whom attended South Dartmoor, will join us for a family Christmas. After five years of freelancing, Alice has finally got a proper job (annual leave and a pension at 85) as an online reporter at Channel Four News. She cheerfully wounds the politicians as she tells the truth where they bring only spin and falsehoods. Her regular beat, Factcheck, (http://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck) even gives them a score out of 5 for honesty. I can imagine Gordon Brown asking his speech writers: 'Will this get me good marks from Alice on Channel Four? Should we knock a couple of zeros off that optimistic income prediction or do you think she won't notice?' He knows by now…. she always does notice.

Ed is now at the end of his fourth year at Oxford which followed four years at Durham which followed thirteen years in school so he can probably add up for himself how long that is. As his declared ambition is to go straight into retirement, I don’t think he’s got long to wait. The DPhil is still around the corner but he’s managing to live on air and avoid even a Saturday job stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s. He has had some of his original research published; it’s in a scientific language that’s incomprehensible to the lay person, though he could probably hold a conversation with Dr Who.

Happy Christmas to all blog readers!

Nasty TV.com

2008-12-09T08:20:00.004Z

Last week I took a phone call from ITN. Yes- it does sound exciting, doesn’t it? We’re in the media a lot but a call from ITN to ask you to feature in a good news story piece for ITN News- well, that’s worth saying yes to. Or is it?

The reporter, David Best, began by reassuring me that this was a programme for the great and the good. Had I heard of Jim Knight, the Education Minister? Of, course. Liz Reid, Chief Executive of SSAT? Yes, indeed. Steve Grainger, Chief Executive of the Youth Sport Trust? Attend his annual dinners. Devon Local Authority? Know them well. All were on board with the programme and would be taking part. What good company we were in. And we had been recommended as a Lead School. So far it seemed like a normal request for an interview. We have quite a lot of those. Then the sales pitch started.

He said that the programme they were making would be fronted by Martin Lewis, a familiar figure in news circles, and that we were invited to contribute a case study which a film crew would come down to shoot. He then gave me all kinds of prepared lines about media opportunities – but by this time I had become suspicious.

Good news topics would range from Every Child Matters to curriculum reform; from personalised learning to sport in the community. How, I wondered could one short piece cover everything that was going on in education? After all, didn’t he know that in the last year alone, there have been 135 changes to the laws involving schools? That means hardly a work day goes by without a new requirement.

The final full-length film would be screened throughout the day at the Education Show in Birmingham and a three minute edit would be appearing on national ITN news. Three minutes was the longest they normally screened an item for. During this patter, which lasted about half an hour, he slipped in the fact that private companies were sponsoring the programme and that £12,500 would be required from each contributor. Did that mean me?

We’d gone from a guest appearance on News at Ten with a Government Minister and some Chief Executives to a sales con trick in thirty minutes. I’d been robbed of a valuable half hour and some distinguished people had had their names taken in vain.

Did he really believe I could persuade the Governors to spend so much money on what was little more than advertising? And why would I bother, given the amount of free news and media coverage we generate because of the genuine quality of the work we’re doing?

I made no commitment but asked him for his e-mail address which he said was niceTV. So where was ITN? He hurriedly pointed out that this was a partnership organisation of ITN Consulting. I checked it out and it is a private company now fronted by Martin Lewis. Shameful.

It all sounded like a scam. The Local Authority decided to pull out of any agreement with the company when I briefed them. One thing is for sure - if I do anything in the media it’s because I want to have the work of South Dartmoor students and staff celebrated. And only if it’s free.

The Moors and the Tors are Alive

2008-12-01T14:01:00.000Z

One of the things that makes mine the best job in the world is being able to see our students performing to the very limits of their potential- out of their comfort zone and sometimes making me boggle-eyed with amazement.

I’ve interviewed many charming and totally dedicated Year 11 students recently and their self-confidence and commitment to achievement left me genuinely elated. So many are on track not just for the benchmark five A*-C high grades but for ten or more. When I go through their subjects with them and hear them speak with knowledge and authority about the wide range of options and the numerous tasks and projects they have to complete, I’m left thinking I should tell the world.

Malcolm Lee from the Sixth From did exactly this with great skill in two assemblies this week when he told the school about his project with Teignbridge Youth Council to change the perceptions of older people about the young. He used some interesting photographs and thought-provoking statements. Watch out for the campaign.

Many of the Year 11s are heavily engaged in sport and several are elite performers in their discipline, travelling to venues around the country and meeting young people from other schools. The commitment and talent are remarkable.

On Saturday we reached the climax of a dazzling seven show Sound of Music run. It was certainly the largest and probably the most impressive array of talent ever assembled on the South Dartmoor stage. Words from me can’t describe the quality of the achievement but the applause could and did.

One of the teachers in the audience earlier in the week told me that she had cried through the first night. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It’s not such a sad story- there is a happy ending.’ Still clutching a tissue, she replied, ‘Oh no. It’s not that. I wasn’t crying because of the story. I was crying because so many of these students are in my lessons and tutor group. They’ve been coming to my classes, doing their work and their homework- and yet they’ve also achieved all this!’ She was right, of course. We expect so much of them and they constantly surprise and amaze.

At a time when there are so many pressures on schools to achieve ever improved performance, it’s also wise to remember why so many staff are willing to give time to activities such as this. These commitment levels, this quality could never come from management targets or imposed Government requirements whatever the national initiative.

What we saw in The Sound of Music, and is in the matches played, the Dartmoor Club walks and the care staff show for the students is that old fashioned, unquantifiable thing called ‘a vocation’. This is why we have such dedication and service to young people from staff without counting the hours- though it must have been over eighty last week. (I was counting). It’s that spirit of giving the best of yourself in order to bring out the best in others.

This week South Dartmoor students set the hills alive with the sound of their music. And those melodies, those soaring notes also filled the moors and the Tors, the towns and the villages, the homes and the families. So… definitely the best job in the world.

Reaching the Hard to Reach

2008-11-24T09:55:00.001Z

Sometimes I wonder if we have any students who are not part of a target group- just normal, ordinary, and getting on with their education. For everyone now seems to have a classification of some kind: accelerated, under-performing, high-performing, borderline, above target, below target, highly parked, challenging, gifted and talented (yes it’s not just Mozart), special needs, at risk, wobbly C, gradewatch- and now ‘hard to reach’.

Our latest brain teaser is how to define this last group and then how to make sure they are high achievers. Labels matter but whilst ‘G and T’ (gifted and talented) still has me thinking of crushed ice and lemon, the ‘hard to reach’ category reminds me of boggy parts of Dartmoor.

Like the moors it can be dangerous territory. Imagine a phone call to Mrs Smith: ‘Excuse me but I’m calling because we think you’re child is hard to reach and you certainly are.’ That could risk a court appearance. ‘Mind your own business,’ is the politest of replies. ‘My husband will be round there in ten minutes to sort you out,’ more likely. So how do you tell people what they don’t want to hear?

We know what these students look like in the abstract, even if we’re not sure who they are. Invisible, mysteriously shadowy and likely to underachieve, according to the universities, they are from families which don’t make education a priority. For these children, the research tells us, it’s better to change your family than your school if you want to get the best start in life. If I suggest that to Mrs Smith, the police will be in my office before I can say ‘educational research.’

But this week has been one long hard to reach trial- and not just families. Where oh where, for example are our missing table tops? This is the new outdoor eating facility- looking smart, spacious and attractive, we desperately need it during the production for lunches when the hall is out of use. It was due for completion in September but it’s still not ready. It seems they haven’t ordered enough. Someone couldn’t count. And of course it will be the fault of a school somewhere which didn’t teach the builders Mathematics- it always is.

I’m working with heads across the country on various projects and they’re the hardest to reach of all. The security system around many of them would keep them safe in Bagdad. Try to get through to one in a school and you’ll be directed to almost every member of staff before they’ll connect you. Now I keep that kind of distance for those nuisances from Mori and other polling organisations. I’ll usually talk to anyone else if I can help.

After several days of unreturned phone calls and emails, one eventually rings me sheepishly to explain that he has been ‘on the road.’ By Friday afternoon, we are trying hard to get replies from heads in two schools but to no avail. Do they all close early on Fridays or is it just their armed guards who go off duty when their security systems shut down?

Yet email has the power to bring me into instant contact with colleagues from anywhere in the world. Recently I’ve had daily contact with colleagues in South America and can return messages at the press of a button. No more sticking stamps on envelopes and waiting six weeks. Here’s instant reach and it does so much for my impatient streak. If the hour glass on my computer screen goes into over-drive, as it did this week, that’s another tick in a hard to reach column, while I curse the technology I love.

I want to reach everyone and know they’ve got the message whether it’s the builders, other schools, parents or students. Because there really is no excuse for being out of reach- not in the twenty first century when education is the priority and communication is easy. So if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll just risk that phone call to Mrs Smith.

Inspirational - and Cautionary - Tales: Gerald Haigh

2008-11-14T11:32:00.000Z

If you’re looking for policy advice, views on system re-configuration (I didn’t make it up) or academic research, this is not for you. Forget those yawn-inducing guides, remedies and reports we see so much of. Here is a true gem, the real thing: a distillation of wisdom and revelations that will bring Gerald Haigh into your school as a fun-driven, humane presence.

A former primary head, leadership adviser and popular TES columnist, he has a fund of stories you will remember, re-tell and apply. And he brings in quotes and references, from tales of lion tamers and ‘f-laws’ to time machines and chewing gum fences, to illuminate his many stories.

You don’t have to skim through long chapters seeking the buried treasure. The insights spill from every page, every paragraph. The chapter headings read like memos to yourself: ‘Just tell them what to do’, ’Things to do’ or ‘Make sure the message is clear’. Each is around newspaper column length. Many readers will recognise the pieces from the leadership pages of the TES and be glad to be re-united with old friends. The collection offers easy-to-dip-into reads we could give to any of our colleagues and watch the smiles.

For example, I loved the tale, in a piece on the art of delegation, of the executive who, anticipating a long power point, switched off the projector and said, ‘Let’s just talk about this.’ Wow - how many opportunities I’ve missed when I should have done just that! But you have to know where the actual switch is, warns Haig, or you could lose the impact.

Advice on ‘Managing the impossible staff member’ who just happens to be the ‘caretaker from hell’ will make everyone smile and cry out, ‘Yes!’ when they hear the solution. It won’t work in all cases but it will be a catalyst at least: you, ‘Put the dog on the porch’, leave written instructions, avoid arguments and are cold and distant. It’s a great tactic to use on the colleague who wants to manipulate you.

There are stories on topics as wide-ranging as performance-related pay and what really motivates teachers, through to embarrassing moments and team-building. His values inspire. Cynicism is crushed by his natural assertion that the term ‘teacher’: ‘is a lifetime badge of honour.’

He often sums up what we know but haven’t quite expressed: that the best measure of your own leadership is to judge how strong the other leaders are in your school: that the hallmark of the excellent leader is the uncanny ability to be everywhere at once. All will recognise walking around the corner into a crucial discussion just when it matters.

Instead of writing ‘to do’ lists, write into your diary the actual times when you will perform the tasks: that’s so simple but effective. Gerald Haigh credits his source for this advice as, ‘someone who understands real people’, the very quality that makes this little book such a compulsive read.

Inspiration – and Cautionary – Tales for Would-be School Leaders by Gerald Haigh (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group)

If it's Wednesday, it must be Mexico!

2008-10-31T10:16:00.000Z

I flew into Brasilia a week ago- the time change works in my favour this way and I gain three hours! I'm working on a new award for the British Council- the International Leaders' Award which I am piloting on behalf of the British Council.

Brasilia was built in 1956 to attract people to the inland, under-populated parts. So an unkind view might be describe it as a tropical Milton Keynes- all wide avenues, circular roads, artificial lake and concrete buildings mostly designed by Oscar Niemeyer. But it's on a grand scale and the separate zones work well. We went in a church which is all stained glass- blue to represent the blue tones of the Brazilian skies; the cathedral which is surrounded by water and you enter underground through a tunnel to give the effect of light and liberty; and the TV tower which has 75 metre high views of the city. There was a museum to JK, their former president and a modern design museum.

Refreshments stops were the famous cocoa nut which here they pour into cups or bottles though it's squeezed as you watch and a sugar cane juice, again squeezed from the long bamboo canes as you wait. Both delicious.

After a weekend acclimatising and sightseeing, it's into action first thing on Monday for two days with British Council staff and ministry officials from Brazil to train them in the application of the award. Great success with the movers and shakers- lots of productive work which I enjoyed.

And there's always so much food- I must have eaten a cow at a barbecue and have you ever tried chocolate pizza? I love the tropical fruits but disaster struck at breakfast: I took a delicious mango from the fruit bowl (only pineapple and paw paw in the dishes chopped) and tried to peel and eat it. The juice that spurted out was phenomenal! I think it showered the restaurant. They may even ask me to leave. Or sue me! Worst of all-one clean, ironed ready for work white shirt looked as if volcanic explosion had covered it in lava. The mango, needless to say was delicious.

By Tuesday evening I'm in the air again for an overnight flight to Mexico to repeat the process. An email tells me that things went well in Brazil: 'I would like to thank Ray for his patience, his outstanding contributions and above all his wonderful intercultural agility!'So there you go- I never knew I had intercultural agility and I will treasure that.

Arrived Mexico City at 8.00 am Wednesday after 10 hour over-night flight from Sao Paulo. They are six hours behind the UK and so I gain another three hours. How I'll pay though on the return flight. I'm taken to the British Council for a briefing as soon as I have breakfasted, and we work over the next few days on leadership standards with various ministry officials and under secretaries. It's a gigantic city- twenty million people and traffic jams that make London seem car free. When planning to go anywhere by car you can never predict how long it will take- 10 minutes or one or even two hours. We arrange to meet colleagues for dinner: they are two hours late because of traffic.

During a briefing the next day, I explain that the award is like the driving test- everyone has passed that haven't they? Perhaps I've blundered as they consider the state of the driving in Mexico. I may be lacking 'intercultural agility' after all. But after a final long day on Friday we are all signed up to the project. They eat late in Mexico- lunch starts at 3.00 and goes on till 5.00. It's the main meal of the day for most Mexicans. Exhausted by 6.00 after a final briefing, I'm free to enjoy half term in Mexico.

SATs go into Room 101 - Hurray!

2008-10-17T15:21:00.000+01:00

The big story this week is the end of KS3 SATs. For once the teachers are even happier than the students. This was always an unnatural and mis-timed set of tests- a false addition to the range of assessments used in schools. In recent years the SATs have increasingly been used to judge the performance of the school rather than support the learning of the children. We’ve had unreliable marking, disputed results and the recent fiasco with the company carry out the work. So now we can release the Sports Hall for a week for its proper purpose and let teachers do what they are best at as well. Relief all round. Mark Gale, Head of Science, summed it up for his department, brilliantly:

‘The news of the demise of the SATs came as an utter shock. We had no inkling that such a radical reform was about to be announced, and the fact that this is to come into immediate effect makes it truly surprising. I cannot recall anything as momentous in fifteen years of teaching – not that I’m complaining, however.

It’s only now that I am realising how focused we had become on teaching to the test. Yes, we set aside a few weeks during year nine for SATs preparation – perhaps less than colleagues in other schools – but we always tried to make sure that we provided a curriculum that was real and meaningful, not solely looking towards a single week in May.

Yet much of our thinking was SATs-centred. Booster classes, level 5 intervention, the level 6+ project: all of these things were to be measured through SATs results. Now how will we prove we are successful?

The answer is, of course, obvious: we will be able to see properly whether students have developed the skills, attributes and abilities that we hope they will during key stage 3. Because we don’t now have to rush through years 7, 8 and 9 at breakneck speed, we will have more breathing space to try out things that we have always wanted to, and which the revised curriculum is promoting. Things such as extended investigations, cross-curricular work, debates, open-ended tasks and getting out and about to see scientists in action will be possible without any nagging worries that students might be missing out being drilled for the tests.

We will also be able to use that strange post-SATs time rather more productively. No longer will it seem as if we are just treading water, waiting for GCSEs and trying to motivate students in the meantime. It will become a properly integrated part of the curriculum now that the artificial SATs divide has been removed.

Some schools and departments are considering starting GCSEs early, but whether or not this is a good idea, the removal of the SATs will help us to make sure that students are properly prepared for the start of their new courses in year 10.

Throughout key stage three we aim to lay the foundations to help students become scientists. We hope to inspire them and excite them about our subject. After all, it is during key stage three that many students make up their minds about what they would like to pursue during their working lives. This is the most important aspect of the curriculum and the removal of the tests means that we will be able to cherish key stage three for providing all these opportunities.’

English Schools through Brazilian Eyes

2008-10-02T15:06:00.008+01:00

The British Council are running a five year international project linking head teachers and schools in the UK with counterparts in South America. The SLANT Project (School Leadership and New Tools for Learning) is already in its middle stage. Brazil, the largest of the partner countries, has had two visits from the five UK head teachers recruited to work on leadership and self-evaluation with Brazilian heads. This week saw the first visit of 25 heads from Brazil who spent a week partly in London with the British Council for briefings and partly in the hosts’ schools in London, Devon and Scotland. In this week’s blog, the five Brazilian head teachers reflect on their thoughts about the UK education system and life in this country:

"Your country can be a scary place! When we arrived, I was asked if I could: ‘Give a hand’ to someone. I translated the request literally in my head, thinking, ‘Help. Are these English people crazy?’

Opportunities for head teachers in my country to work together are rare. So this British Council SLANT Project has been a dream for us. Not only have the five Brazilian heads visited each others’ schools, they have had two visits from the UK heads, two conferences and now a once in a life time view of the English education system.

We have looked at three secondary and two primary schools in south Devon, developing linked projects on the environment with one school (yes- Brazilian rain forests but local rain fall and temperatures as well); a health project with another and one on volunteering and citizenship with a third. These have the potential for long term relationships between teachers and children, though we have to work hard to overcome language barriers. The English teachers in our Brazilian schools are going to be kept busy!

What really intrigues us is the overarching educational structure in the UK. Within this you have complex but smooth running systems and there is an extraordinary amount of autonomy in English schools compared to ours. For example, your leadership teams, supported by Governing bodies (also an unfamiliar concept to us) are able to employ staff, make budgetary decisions, promote teachers and monitor overall staff performance.

In our state, Pernambucco in the north east of the country, head teachers are elected by the community (in and beyond the school) for a four year term and, if re-elected, can serve two terms only. It means they have massive authority as community leaders and can develop improvement projects with parents.

The students complete regular, published evaluations on their teachers, ranging from punctuality to teaching. The Student Council works alongside the head teacher in promoting learning. The overworked teachers have to do two shifts a day of four and half or five hours with full contact time apart from four hours a week for preparation. Some do evening shifts in addition.

We are most impressed by the discipline in the schools we have visited. In some ways we even wonder whether things are too strict- but that’s a Brazilian perspective. I’m sure you will be surprised to know we think this.

Everywhere we go, we are welcomed and enjoy your hospitality. We have sung for the staff in a morning briefing, for 500 parents at an open day and in one school’s Media Studio for recording purposes. Watch out Brazilian television! Oh- and we even went to BBC Radio Devon for a live breakfast interview when they heard about our fame.

We have learned so much. There are pages of notes to make sense of, many new friends to maintain contacts with and the joy of experiencing a whole new educational world. We are even hoping to take a quick look at London before we fly back to Brazil, taking memories and new knowledge that will never be forgotten. So thanks to everyone for lending a hand. Obrigada"

Jose Amaro Barbosa da Silva, Pernambuco State Education Ministry, Director of EducationBeatriz Brenner, British Council translator Maria Lucia de Souza Pereira, Escola Estadual Maciel Pinheiro
Valmira Maria de Amariz Coelho Cruz, Prof. Carlos Frederico Maciel do Rego Maria do Carmo de Freitas, Escola Dr. Luiz Cabral de MeloAntonio Fernando Santos Silva, Escola José Leite BarrosAlexandre de Arruda Ricardo, Escola Almirante Soares Dutra

The group visited the other five schools in the partnership- Coombeshead College, Teign School, Ashburton Primary School, St Catherine’s Primary School, Heathfield and Blackpool Primary School and were warmly welcomed. A highlight for them was having their photo taken after their radio broadcast (under the BBC sign as you do) when a passerby asked them if they were the Brazilians- she’d just heard them on the radio! ‘Famous,’ said Antonio in amazement.

Alexandre was attacked by a seagull outside Reception. It just swooped on him, causing a cut and bleeding to his head. It is extraordinary and we must see if Health and Safety can advise us on what to do about these birds if they are becoming aggressive. However, there were lots of jokes afterwards because our first aider, Debbie, kept him for half an hour when they were waiting to leave. ‘Must have been a deep cut,’ I said. ‘Oh no, just surface,’ she told me. So the story with the staff is how she enjoyed getting her hands on the attractive Brazilian- she’s looking for flights to Brazil now- one way! And I might have a case now for a seagull cull at last

All Fired Up

2008-09-19T10:29:00.000+01:00

I’m trying hard to keep my eyes open during a tedious Heads’ meeting. I blame the too weak coffee. The discussion about membership of the SLIG (or is SLAG?) Group doesn’t engage me. I can see why students start to become disruptive in class.

Now I understand why some say they don’t care when I challenge them. They’re telling me the truth. I’ve lost the will to live in half an hour. They have to cope with five hours a day. Do we give a C1 or go straight to a C3 for falling asleep in class?

The unexpected call from my PA is serious. She never rings unless it’s an emergency. I gather my papers and prepare to leave. ‘Got to go back,’ I call to the group as I rush through the door. ‘What’s the hurry? You look as if the school is on fire,’ jokes the Chair. ‘It is!’ I exclaim and run to the car.

We know there’s no smoke without fire, but the scene on my return is all smoke and no fire, thanks to the Fire Brigade’s swift action. However, there are twenty two classrooms out of use and over 600 students sitting in the Sports Hall whilst minutes of precious learning time tick away. It’s impressively orderly- no mere fire drill. This is for real and so everyone rises to the occasion, motivated by the drama of the event.

Senior staff are in total control and teachers are taking their roles seriously. Is this what they mean by distributed leadership? My deputy is making plans for re-rooming but it will involve class sizes of over 400.

The Fire Officer reports that the damage is confined to one female toilet now blackened with soot and the smoke given off by melting plastic fittings. It was deliberate. But the good news is that we can return immediately to the evacuated classrooms.

By the time my mobile rings an hour later, we’re almost back to normal and I’m able to tell the first of three newspapers who want a story how well the Fire Service and the staff and students have responded. The damage is confined and CCTV footage has already identified our suspect. Of course we’ll take appropriate action and, yes, arson is a particularly culpable crime. I can sense the disappointment in the reporter’s voice. Bad news sells more papers and maybe we actually have a good story to tell.

By the time paper number three contacts me at the end of the day, I risk taunting her with the information that the other papers are four hours ahead with their stories. Her false laughter is followed by a request to send a photographer. Not possible I reply, desperately wondering what reason to give. Then I remember that the toilet has been sealed off for the police.

Twenty four hours later with insurance claims lodged and renewal work contracted, we’re beginning the aftermath period when the stories are told and the dramas re-lived. No, I tell worried Year 7s, there were no children trapped in the toilet. Everyone was safe.

As I catch up by phone on the meeting I missed, I hear myself endorsing the Chair’s decision about membership of the Student Learning Assessment Group (so it was SLAG). ‘Great idea,’ I enthuse, whilst really pondering the colour of the new toilet fittings. But as I survey the wreckage and think of all the work that will go into the repair, I decide that there is only one word to describe the daily grind and surprises of life in school. Forget SLAG and SLIG. It’s got to be: SLOG.

Making History

2008-09-16T11:50:00.000+01:00

When I established my new Leadership Team, we believed we could make history- well local history at least. Such is the nature of self-delusion.

We began by reviewing everything the school does and considering its effectiveness. On our list was the annual Awards Evening which had remained unchanged for centuries.

How the heart sinks and the palms smart at the very thought of such ceremonies. So much applauding as figures shuffle nervously or parade triumphantly across the stage. Name after name with only the odd stumble, outlandish hairstyle or amazing number of A*s for relief.

So began an experiment in personalised Presentation Evenings. After all, personalisation is Government policy, so it must be good for us. Why not inflict it on parents as well?

My Big Idea was to speak about each award winner to fill the gap between their first steps onto the stage, the handshake with the speaker and their exit on the other side. Make it less like a conveyor belt, I suggested. Instead of the endless streams of applause, we’d hear something of individual achievements and character, showing how well we knew them and how much we cared. We might even blow some of the DCSF personalisation budget on the prizes. Genius.

First we needed to collect individual comments about the 350 students in Years 11 and 13 receiving certificates and prizes. Easy to wish; frustratingly hard to do. Scripts are finally ready just three hours before the start- no time to read or rehearse. Let’s go for it I say, with the firm smack of leadership. However, we’re like a team of chefs who have assembled all the ingredients but haven’t had time to read the recipe. Will it show?

The personalised comments are supposed to cover the walk across the stage. But as the first student returns to her seat, her Performance Leader is only part way through her eulogy to the audience. Several winners could have walked to the nearest village and back in the time taken to speak of their achievements. Like double Decker buses, they are soon all arriving at once.

Worse is to follow. As the next PL takes the microphone to introduce his students to the speaker, he’s aware that he is not just reading the Oscar nominations. With right delivery, our very own Jonathan Ross could be in the running for one.

My heart sinks as I look at my watch. I desperately mime speed up gestures to the others, only to find the spotlight shining suddenly on me. I pretend to scratch some obscure part at the back of my head.

The next announcer up has clearly never used a microphone before. Is he trying to eat it or just suck it? The effect is a strange underwater sound as Deep Throat, all bass and volume, blasts through his list.

Fortunately, the comments throughout the evening hold the attention: ‘Henry is the heart throb of the lower school. He shows real concern for other students- especially girls.’ The female guest speaker, a university professor, cautiously smiles at this Brad Pitt figure.

Next: ‘Alison is always polite… as long as you never tell her she’s wrong.’ The speaker avoids engaging her in conversation. On to: ‘Jack never let school get in the way of education.’ These tutor comments are superb. ‘Have the parents no control?’ whispers a Governor next to me as an inappropriately dressed figured swaggers past.

It’s long past my bedtime when the speaker finally has the floor and wows us with some genuinely personal comments. The next day all the talk is of success apart from needing to get the timing right.

That was Presentation Evening 07. So this year we planned and planned- or rather Judith Morgan, supported by Mary Hawkins did. What a formidable duo. Scripts were tightly edited and Performance Leaders were under strict instructions to keep to time. Deep Throat was given voice coaching and names were read out by Nat Parnell in his best BBC Radio 4 voice. The timing was almost perfect- a nine o’clock finish.

Peter Cloke, Director of Learning for Children and Young People in the South West, inspired us with his stories of his schooldays, early teaching and, more recently work with the 16 Education Secretaries he has known. A highlight: his David Blunkett tale which involved his dog, its poo, three local school truants and a very assertive Minister.

Who knows- perhaps we did make history after all.

Labels we can't Afford

2008-08-27T09:51:00.000+01:00

Imagine this. You’ve invested billions of pounds in a project, given it your best intellectual capital and- whisper it softly- you are having some success. Most ordinary mortals would quietly tiptoe out of the room at this point, give a loud cheer and let the magic continue to work.

But politicians are no mere mortals. Here they are, at the end of ten years of remarkable investment in education for which they deserve recognition. In addition, the benefits of their policies are now showing evidence of success in improved results. So why go and spoil it all?

One stealthy success has been the re-branding of comprehensives. Not sure? Well ask yourself when you last heard the term used. We’re all specialist now. It’s been a clever marketing exercise- change the status, change the name and move away from the education profession’s obsession with equality. After all, it doesn’t play well with the public.

But now the destruction. The DCSF have now created two new classifications by which all secondary schools will be judged. It can only lead to a new three tier system, far more damaging than any of the old myths around comprehensive schools.

First there is the now infamous 30% figure for the lowest tier to rise above, the newly named National Challenge Schools. This is the category of ‘failing schools’ but ministers will deny they ever used the term.

They argue that they have to raise standards but their premise is false. Many of the schools are truly special in their intakes- a high proportion with pupils for whom English is a second languages, with high levels of learning difficulties or even secondary modern schools with creamed off intakes. Would they expect a designated special school for pupils with learning difficulties to achieve these scores? Of course not: point made. The top category will be those schools designated as High Performing. Again the classification has simply been dreamt up by a policy wonk. Insultingly, it even moved mid year from 60% five A* to C to 65%, including the by now familiar English and Maths mantra.

They tell us that only 30% of schools will ever be allowed to reach this designation and so admit that the goal posts may shift again. The reason? They can’t actually afford to have more schools than this funded in this way! But there are, of course, funding implications for the schools themselves as they see their specialisms snatched away.

And if these goalposts can be shifted, then so can the ones at the lower end. Why stick at 30% for failure? Who will give me thirty five? Do I hear 40% from the north west? What about 45% from the south east? The effect of this will be to demoralize many of the schools in the middle category who will see the lower classification as fluid and also realise that the high performing standard is beyond their reach, a glass ceiling.

It’s a refinement of the League Table torture. Now schools will not only be ranked in the media but a handy label will tell the public if they are high performing, middle or failing. It’s neat and everyone can understand it. There’s nothing so complex about a school that you can’t sum it up in one word!

And that, of course is the real issue here. Behind every statistic published this summer, there are stories of many individual successes and also a few failures as well, sophisticated reasons for interpretations that need to be placed on raw scores.

There are also fairer and wiser ways of judging schools. A measure of the ‘within school variation’- the difference in performance between the highest and lowest achieving departments- would at least be a success criterion within the control of the school’s themselves, the leadership in particular, to influence.
Mere mortals are often wiser than politicians whose ignorance of schools never fails to amaze me. An MP, for example, once asked me how long I’d been head of my school, before offering me some confidential career advice: ‘So you’re now in a position to apply to be the head of a private school!’ Well at least I would be free of the political interference.
But for now let me get the story right. We’re a comprehensive school, though we try not to mention it, a specialist sports college and training school and, at the last count, we were high performing but now we will now drop into the middle tier because the money has run out. Confused? We mere mortals certainly are.

Level Peddling

2008-07-18T17:33:00.001+01:00

Four days level pedalling and we’ve clocked up 80 miles, an occasional ice cream, cakes from the seventeenth best cake shop in the country, and some Rick Stein fish and chips. Yes they were as good as it gets. Though staggeringly, Julian, our superb grounds man, ate his cold and still claimed they were delicious!

So that’s the Plym Valley, the Tarka Trail, the Camel Trail and the Granite Way. They are all fairly level, easy rides and lots of fun to do. There was only one broken bicycle and no accidents this year. We’ve had a great group of students whose only mildly annoying habit has been the mini bus chorus of: ‘Are we there yet?’ At least it shows they were keen!

One of Andy Hamlyn and Heather Stimson’s many legacies is the annual Enrichment Week Cycle Camp down in Princetown. Devised and run by them for many years it continues to thrive with Don Phipps at the helm and I’m sure it will go on for as long as cycling is popular. It’s a wonderful activity for keen off-road cyclists over the varied and spectacular moor, down to the bunk house at the Plume and Feathers.

Now there is another cycling activity that deserves annual billing: Level Peddling. That Andy and Heather have put this together and run it during their final week in post is another example of the professionalism that makes teachers so respected by the public.

We said our farewells to them last week with a power point of photos in assembly that featured Andy as never before seen at South Dartmoor in his entire 37 years- yes, beardless! Did anyone recognise him? Heather was a schoolgirl at Ashburton, displaying her prowess as a hurdler- though I’m told not in a team!

One of my many memories is the first time I met each of them. Andy was a scary figure at the Governors’ and staff tea party during my interview back in 1989. ‘Lovely school,’ I enthused politely, aware that I needed to make a good impression. ‘Do you think so?’ he enquired scathingly, before filling me in on all the changes that were needed. It was just the information I needed for the interview the next day!

Heather marched in to my office, a local parent at that time, after I had been in post only three weeks to tell me I was taking the school in the wrong direction and she was considering sending her child to a different school! Once a member of staff, she repeated the warnings every time it was felt I had got things wrong. So you can see how indebted I am to them both.

They have been at the sharp end of work in the school, dealing directly with all the problems thrown up by students and parents in a period of social upheaval and changing standards. They are supreme professionals, true friends of South Dartmoor, colleagues who have shaped the destiny of the school and the lives of thousands of youngsters.

Tough times, but they have been enormous fun to work with. At last, in retirement, for each of them it now really will be level peddling.

We wouldn't do it like this!

2008-07-10T09:52:00.002+01:00

On a shelf in my Office there are two neat rows of red box files that I haven’t used for over five years since I began doing everything electronically. Yet they were part of a major refurbishment to mark new styles of working. How the world moves on.

I realised how much when I started reading a newly published book called We did it Here! on the train to London last week. Confession time- I’m not a great reader of educational books: I leave that to the guru, Martin Burt. But I’d been asked to write a review of this one for the National College.

I began We did it Here! anticipating some inspirational new thinking but it’s as dated as the material in my red boxes. The opening study features work done at Settle High School back in the dark ages of the millennium. Whilst the DCSF has moved us on to consider community cohesion, this account describes community activities we all would recognise - a special activity day with photos and children’s (hand)writing copied as evidence. Deep Learning days are streets ahead.

There are quotes from OFSTED 2003 dotted about for no apparent purpose. There’s plenty of practical advice: ‘The newsletter was printed on the school’s risograph machine for about ten pence per unit’. And another innovation: ‘a different colour paper was chosen for each issue.’ Unbelievable!

A chapter on e-learning moves the OFSTED quotes on to 2005 but a turgid management plan from 1999 is quoted over several pages. Do we need to know that the servers at QES in Kirby Lonsdale were upgraded in 2002 and the strain on the technicians was evident by 2004? What about the strain on the reader?

These are not just tired old case studies: they’re full blown documentary dramas with all the tedium of the Big Brother House. The clichéd adjectives reminded me of a Mills and Boon novel: ‘Roger’s … eyes lit up at particular moments as he remembered key milestones along the way.’ Show me a milestone that’s not key or along the way. In a chapter on a Cheshire High School, we suffer two pages of reflections on the arrival of spring, the author’s exhaustion and the Manchester traffic on the M62 when: ‘the sun was shining and spring was breathing fresh life into the moors.’ By then I realised I was being unkind - to Mills and Boon.

The theory section takes us into ‘domains’ (posh word for factors) of successful schools. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll guess leadership is tops. But: “Head teachers are not always able to take the lead.’ That’s just an excuse for a neat diagram in which circles of ‘drivers’ push each other around a bigger circle like dodgems at the fair. The head teacher though is ‘lead driver.’ I should think so too.

The book concludes with the author’s manifesto, more pleasing platitudes. We’re called to swear allegiance to ‘creating happy, resourceful and well-educated students.’ If only I’d thought of that years ago. In fact, the DCSF is about to legislate on the school’s role in ‘promoting well being.’

There are numerous excellent, tightly written case studies on the NCSL and SSAT websites. They cover the latest innovative work on curriculum development. The illustrative material reflects the digital age. Everything can be accessed electronically. So this journey in the Tardis reminded me that those red boxes on my shelf do have a purpose after all. You’ll find We Did It Here! filed away in one of them.

Shopping or Teaching?

2008-06-30T14:37:00.000+01:00

Friday began with a telephone call from China. Professor David Reynolds is continuing his work on Within School Variation (making sure there is consistency of quality across all Departments and teachers in a school) and he invited me to continue some of the research we have done together.

In an article in this week’s Times Educational Supplement I’m quoted as saying that a good school should be like Marks and Spencers: you know you get the same quality whether buying shirts, sausages or shoes. Did I say that? No, M&S are not paying me a retainer. It’s just a way of explaining why we need consistency.

An hour later another call from the British Council asks if I’m free for a week in August to lead a Conference in South America. This time the invitation is from Susan Douglas who I know reads my blogs. Susan, you’re quoted at last. I’d love to go but I have a prior booking in France- another time perhaps.

Then I receive one of those emails that remind teachers they can make a difference. I’m always quoting examples from colleagues who’ve received similar letters so it’s nice to receive one again. I used to teach in Norfolk at North Walsham Girls’ High School. Recently the new Head of Sixth Form from nearby Reepham High School visited us with former deputy, Chris Hassell, on a fact finding tour. It seems that I had taught his sister back in 1979. Her email read:

“The Best English TeacherMy brother, John Randall, just returned from visiting you at South Dartmoor College. When he mentioned your name, I remembered you very clearly from North Walsham Girls' High School.My name was Jackie Randall then. You took over in September 1979 and taught us English in room 9 in the Huts
I really enjoyed your lessons, especially as you had some of my essays read out, one called "A Breakdown in Communications" from a past O level paper, as my strength was maths but you increased my confidence in English.We were also studying Julius Caesar and you really brought it alive. One day, you brought in a cryptic crossword clue - something like "tradesman in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" and I worked out the answer which was butcher, mainly because my parents always did the Telegraph crosswords on Saturdays and Sundays.Looking at your photo, you don't seem to have changed much.Like John, I recently moved from Head of Maths to Head of Sixth Form at Notre Dame High School in Norwich.
I can honestly say that I really had not enjoyed English lessons until you came along; thanks for being such a great teacher.”

Do head teachers have to have teaching experience? I certainly believe it’s essential. But there’s a debate now about whether it’s really necessary. I loved teaching and enjoyed getting to know classes and individuals well. Heads can do lots of things in their schools as well as working with distinguished professors of education or attending international conferences. But there’s nothing quite like the difference a teacher makes to an individual.

As Henry Adams wrote: “Teachers affect eternity; no one knows where their influence ends.” The quotation has been chosen to frame the certificates being given to our newly qualified teachers who are now about to have L plates removed.
However good the food and clothing at M&S, this is a claim they can never make, even if it seems to take an eternity at the check out. And that’s why we’re all in education and not retail!

Unauthorised Absence?

2008-06-23T08:29:00.003+01:00

Virgin Trains seem to grow shorter as well as more crowded. On the return journey from attending the annual National College for School Leadership Conference in Birmingham, I sit wedged between a family whose children want to reach Torquay: (do they have their holiday absence authorised? I wonder), and a young man listening to his MP3. My laptop is finally balanced on the folding shelf in front of me, with documents on my knee and hot Costa coffee on the floor by my side. Last night’s luxury in Malmaison Hotel seems a dream away, but the Snog me Senseless mouth spray freebee is proof I really was there, as a guest speaker on the subject of Within School Variation. South Dartmoor wouldn’t have paid for a luxury hotel! As I settle down to do some work, a man with an over-large dog and a giant suitcase tries to get past. I catch my coffee just in time, but the window seat MP3 listener also decides he wants to get out, to use the buffet car, so everything is chaos. The little boy has an electronic device and is resiliently trying to change the date, which means erasing his data. His parents respond brilliantly to all questions. I find myself scoring their teaching, OFSTED Grade 2 - Good, for learning and personalisation. That’s just the parental achievement!

Parents and their communities were very much the focus of the Secretary of State, Ed Balls’, speech to the Conference. I sat with over a thousand delegates and marvelled at his knowledge and fluency – a wide ranging 45 minutes which was delivered without notes or hesitation. The largest applause came when he told us he didn’t like selection, going on to outline plans to support Secondary Modern Schools. A million pounds per school seems to be the price. Why not just take the morally, educationally and socially correct decision and abolish selection?

His story about an English teacher’s work in motivating a disengaged group in a lesson about metaphors, using lemon sherbets, held us all fascinated. We have a Secretary of State that listens, is ambitious for schools and does not sound like a politician.

A small group of us watched the opening speech by the Chief Executive of the National College on closed-circuit television as we waited in a VIP room for a private audience with the Secretary of State. We had been asked to tell him about our roles and the frustrations and satisfactions. He is the third Education Secretary I have met, and he certainly listened and commented in ways that suggest he wanted to understand, to improve things, not just to impress or make a political point. He is totally focused on schools and raising standards. I told him about the Variation Projects I have carried out with NCSL and Professor David Reynolds, which have now been published. It is a simple idea: you take the very best aspect of the school and make sure that the same standards apply everywhere to everything. We can learn from our own best practice. This was the theme of the presentation we were asked to give at 8.00 am. In the programme it was described as a ‘fringe meeting’. Well, there wasn’t much comedy, but this was Birmingham not Edinburgh. Plenty of delegates missed breakfast to be there.

Disparity in society is a result of poverty or parents’ lack of interest in education. So I am pleased that the family taking their child to Torquay are helping him to learn. After all, learning is all about feeding curiosity. They seem to be parents who care and respond - even though they are prepared to sacrifice a week of school. Now I wonder what Mr Balls would make of that?

If it's Tuesday it must be the Secretary of State...

2008-06-13T14:31:00.000+01:00

We’ve been blitzed this week! It’s like hosting a twenty four hour party but when the guests leave another lot arrive.

On Monday Sharnbrook School, Bedford came to see our Trust work and look at our data and reporting systems. They are also a Trust School with Capita Children’s
Services so it was fascinating to see what their projects looked like. They met the BECTA Five- Student Council members who are brilliant at explaining how we use data. Lunch in CTC was as impressive as ever and ended with our superb students racing off to RS period 4 carrying doggy bags of left overs- profiteroles and cream. (Sh… we are a Healthy School really).

Next it was the turn of our SIP. This stands for School Improvement Partner- and Roger Fetherston, Head of Devon Education Services, is a great partner to have, so wide is his knowledge. During interview Tuesday, he approved our priorities for the coming year, gave stimulating feedback, drank copious amounts of coffee and survived the roller coaster ride of meetings with the South Dartmoor Leadership Team. They have to be the most dynamic team never to feature on The Apprentice. Eat your heart out, Sir Alan. No you can’t have them. I hired them first.

By Wednesday, we were in full party mode- just wheel in the next visitor. This was the new Director of Teaching and Learning from Devon LA. I always enjoy working with energetic, decisive professionals and Devon is fortunate to have recruited a whizz. But she was taught Geography as a pupil by the current Head of Coombeshead. As she thought she was at Dartmouth rather than Dartmoor, for the first ten minutes we had a surreal conversation. Who said teachers make a life-long difference!

Thursday and the paperwork and emails are mounting. I have a million things to do. My inbox is fuller than the College car park (never a space) and the partying goes on. A head from Dorset spends a morning talking Trusts and vertical pastoral systems. Again, we see how much what we are doing here is valued. Notes are taken. Maybe there’s a film deal in this one.

Friday and we host our local MP, Sir Anthony Steen. This is always a pleasure because I’m fascinated by politicians and love to hear about what is going on in the House of Commons from the members themselves. By coincidence I receive an invitation to a meeting next week with the Secretary of State, Ed Balls. I have to provide a résumé for him on the school and my role. Scary.

The party continues next week when Chris Hassell, Deputy here from 1990-1996 makes a return, fact-finding visit. Twenty four hour party people. Watch out Secretary of State.

Deep Drilling

2008-06-06T09:54:00.004+01:00

Check ups are reassuring- but only after you’ve had them. Whether it’s the doctor, dentist or car MOT, it’s fine after the event, as long as you don’t need that operation, filling, or new engine.

So we approach this month’s check up with the usual trepidation. After a three year period it is for the Investor in People Award which we’ve held for twelve years.

It’s a national standard, externally verified, and ensures that everyone who works here is being properly trained and supported. Over 50 members of staff, teaching and support, will be interviewed during a rigorous five day programme. There will be a written report- and it will be open for circulation to everyone. It’s a useful process, keeping us on track and giving us the views of staff about life at South Dartmoor. Do we look after colleagues? Are we a good employer? What do we neglect and how can we improve?

This time around, there are new areas the assessor can look at. We sit in front of the Plan in my Office and our assessor offers to ‘drill deep’-her term- into the leadership of the College. I’m grateful this is not my dentist speaking

A glint appears in the Chair of Governor’s eyes. “What does that mean?” he asks, with a feigned innocence that reminds me he is still an amateur actor. This is deadly serious. “Well, we can explore the deepest levels of successful leadership, penetrating right down to inspiration,” she responds. The glint has become a dazzling light of anticipation, and the Chair looks across for me to comment.

Am I feeling inspired? Well not just at that point. It feels like another bit of accountability to add to the existing burden of OFSTED, Performance Tables, School Improvement Partners, Governors…. The list is endless.

But it’s the role of schools to be open, scrutinised, analysed and compared. We can help solve the problems of society. Education is the great hope and changer of lives- if only we have the chance to provide the best for all.

In the 1980s, schools were secret gardens with no requirement to publish results or evaluate themselves. I can remember a deputy telling me to ignore a request for information from a local employer because what we did was none of their business. She believed it too. Parental choice? Hadn’t been invented yet. Some would say it never was.

As for training, that was something you did to domestic pets or babies. Teachers didn’t have any entitlement to the remarkable levels of professional support that schools now offer. A day on a course was a once in a life time event. My NQT year was a non-event. I blinked and missed it. No wonder staff rooms were often hot beds of cynicism, fed by isolation and lack of recognition.

We have a published set of priorities, a three year Development Plan, Performance Management, Learning Hubs, Learning Observations, mentoring, coaching, NQT programmes, induction for new staff, Training Days, teacher training….and we even find time to teach children in the hours that are left.

So I might as well enjoy it and go for the challenge. “Yes, inspiration would be great,” I hear myself saying, as if choosing an expensive meal from a restaurant menu. But I know who will have to foot the bill.

Christmas without the Presents

2008-05-22T16:03:00.001+01:00

Springtime- a new financial year and, eyes gleaming, I can’t wait to get my hands on the budget. Not only do we have next year’s spending to plan for, but there is also a reasonable carry forward to allocate to priority projects- new lap tops, lathes and a white board or two. It’s just like Christmas- but in May. Money drives all initiatives. This is how we make things happen.

Also, we’ve been carrying devolved capital for a couple of years to pay for some smart building projects which will total nearly £750K. So we’ll have new Photography, Media and Dining facilities in the autumn if all goes to plan. It’s a remarkable bang for our buck. And we have a dozen or more administrative changes to make where staff are changing roles, increasing or decreasing hours or filling entirely new posts.

There are complex decisions around each of these issues. To make everything happen, we need to have our Finance Team both physically available and mentally switched on to what we’re trying to achieve. They are ten seconds walk away from my Office and one of the four is always available unless they are on bursar training. I’m in and out of Finance, sometimes hourly.

Financial and strategic decisions are rarely separate. They are also sometimes pretty personal to the school, about staff pay and grades- not the sort of thing you want to discuss with a stranger. So when I was asked recently to think about the benefits of ‘outsourcing’- letting a private company do the work for us, I couldn’t think of any.

Whilst I have no problem, for example, with payroll running the salary cheques each month or the bank holding our accounts, I want to be in control of the decisions. These outsourcing companies do what we tell them because their remit is limited. I would never let my bank manager make decisions for me.

The South Dartmoor Finance Team are totally focussed on the project- our school. Three of them were in our Sixth Form! They are involved in everything we do- a constant source of advice, a check against error and part of the human face of South Dartmoor. But they can also be scarier than any auditor- and they have a direct line to the Chair of Governors who drops in each week. Dare anyone send a non-order invoice? Try using your credit card to buy something at the last minute and see the reaction.

Achieving value for money? It’s in their DNA. A Subject Leader has just been told that Finance can negotiate a 30% reduction on a large text book order, saving us £700. As for cheap rail deals, they could compete with any travel agents. Value added is not just about exam results. This is our money, our school, our students and it matters to us all.

We run our own catering and cleaning operations and have an expert ICT team. All the staff are our employees with a commitment to our values and aspirations. So, for example, our ICT technicians know how to grow our system and respond to site specific problems. Imagine if they were outsourced, the frustration in having to ring a help desk and be put on hold for twenty minutes.

The Finance Team cost just 1.14% of the total budget. To provide the same level of service, a private company would have to lease its employees to us. So could they do that and still make a profit? I can see them eyeing up that carry forward and funding for buildings. It would be Christmas in the spring- but we might find our stockings would be empty.

Footnote:
South Dartmoor Community College has 1650 students on roll, 250 employees (120 teachers) and an annual budget income of £8.02 million.

Deep Signing

2008-05-15T14:50:00.002+01:00

‘My response to anyone bringing alcohol onto this site will make any Islamic regime look soft!’ A pause to let the implications sink in. I think Year11 have got the message. As always, we want their last routine day of teaching, that great rite of passage, before the exams blast away the timetable, to be special but also comfortable for everyone.

Our great tradition, a folklore ceremony you’d imagine goes back centuries, is the Signing of the Shirts. I spell out the rules of this game with military precision. First, like Christmas present opening, nothing must happen until the declared hour when lunch begins. Second the entire year group are shepherded to the Sports Hall away from gatecrashers. It’s a party after all.

Felt tips are produced and away they go. It’s simplicity itself. And the remarkable thing is how long it takes and how totally absorbed everyone is. The happy hour is filled with scribbled good wishes that cover every inch of shirts and fill the Year Books. No one is bored or wanting to leave. Staff drop in to add their much coveted signatures and cameras click throughout. Even though it’s a blazing hot sunny day and the doors are open to the seating area outside, few choose to go there. The Sports Hall is where the action is.

If only learning could be so focussed! Guy Claxton could use this to write a lecture demonstrating his principles of ‘resilience and reciprocity’ in action. Hargreaves, architect of ‘Deep Learning’ (seven whole days of that here next year) could feature ‘Deep Signing’ in his next pamphlet.

‘Uniform is a symbol of your pride in your school and aspiration to achieve,’ I’ve told them often. But by the end of the afternoon, they resemble mobile wall graffiti. A passing Martian might wonder what anarchy five years of secondary education has taught them. One of the bus drivers gives me a sorrowful look that suggests I’ve either lost control or gone mad. There’s no telling what the public must think.

As they’ve been such a great group of youngsters, I try to analyse the process. Why does it matter so much to them? Attendance figures on this day are the highest in the year. One absentee - playing professional football already - sends in his shirt to be signed and I watch the care with which the autographs are collected.

Over three quarters stay on in our sixth form so the reality is that most are not actually leaving. But the year group itself is about to fragment, decisive personal choices are being made for the first time in their lives and the comfort zone of compulsory education with guided options is now over. Uniform symbolises the past. Tomorrow they transmogrify into sixth formers-in-waiting with personal freedoms about many things, including what to wear.

So the signature trophy hunting, far from an act of desecration, is actually a way of binding memories, fixing their lives in a moment to be remembered. The hugs, tears and fears are all part of the process: sadness and joy in equal measure.

Well, that’s my story- but I doubt if that bus driver would agree, or even know what I’m talking about. Oh, and the day was incident free, so I didn’t invoke the Islamic option.

Twenty Twenty Vision

2008-05-09T14:31:00.001+01:00

So how good is your memory? Can you visualise people you have spent only half an hour with- some weeks later? Be honest. Can you remember names, interests, characteristics? I ask because I’m feeling vulnerable.

You see we have an influx of new staff every year. It’s normal for us to make about twenty new teaching appointments in addition to support staff. South Dartmoor is unusual in having an extraordinarily young teaching staff whose energy levels are legendary. The average age of the teachers is around 32! (That makes me above average, but do I want to be on this count?).

We appoint early in the cycle and usually claim the best qualified and highest performing graduates around. They replace the staff who go on to promotions, retirements, maternity leave or even delayed ‘gap’ years. It’s a really healthy and virtuous cycle of development.

So far this year we have made twenty new appointments. And I’m feeling especially pleased because we have another bumper crop of really talented new teachers joining us. There are three in English and Maths, two in: History, Languages, Religious Studies and Science; one in Music, Health and Social Care, Psychology, Drama, Art and Technology. Yes, that makes twenty. And it’s probably not over yet.

So we will begin the new academic year in September with our new Sixth Formers and Year 7s but also a large number of teachers that I won’t recognise. How scary is that!

Each interview for a new post involves about six candidates, especially where we are interviewing for two jobs. If you do the sums, that’s about 120 candidates interviewed over the past few weeks for the twenty or so posts. I don’t even want to think about how many hours of interviews that has involved. My nightmare is always a dream that I have a staff that consists of all those applicants who were so weak we didn’t even interview. It’s the school from hell.

My job now is to go back to those applications and match them up against the photographs of new staff, alongside their profiles. When we ask them to send us a picture and brief comments for the on-line Connection, it’s really my way of reminding myself who everyone is. It’s no wonder I’m feeling hesitant about names and faces. But I do know that we have the best- that’s for sure.

Perhaps the most important role I have is to recruit, motivate and promote good staff. It’s the bedrock of a high achieving school. Fortunately, we are close to good universities training some of the best of the next generation of teachers. They are inspiring to interview. I am genuinely in awe of their skills, talent and university successes. No matter that I have forgotten names and faces. The good news is that for South Dartmoor students, the best is yet to come!

Destiny is Tea Bag Shaped

2008-05-02T15:25:00.003+01:00

‘I’m sorry but you were not successful today,’ I tell candidate four over the phone. I pause to sense how the news is taken before offering a few pointers and good wishes. I can remember the disappointment, if only at the thought of having to go through the whole wretched process yet again. Tired of rejections, I threw the application form for my present post in the kitchen bin. The next day I had second thoughts. Just one tea bag splat and I would have been forced to apply elsewhere. Such is destiny. In fact most of the applicants at this time of year are more than appointable. But by June it will be harder to find a Language teacher than a buyer for a Gateshead semi with a view of Northern Rock. So heads race to get their adverts in first, process them with the speed of a microwave ready meal and keep an eye on the competition. If my colleague at Kingsbridge, for example, is interviewing for an English teacher on Tuesday, I’ll do my best to call the applicants on Monday. And I justify it by telling myself I’m saving them from a dull life in the back of beyond.

At least the artificiality of the day is over by the time I make the calls- from the practised handshakes to suits so dark and sharp they can’t have been worn since the graduation ceremonies.

The first to arrive recently was unaware that I happened to be watching from my second floor window. He got out of the red sports car and carefully placed his files and notes on the roof. His girlfriend, driver and perhaps car owner, smoothed his hair and helped him fasten his tie. At that moment a gust of wind sent his notes around the tarmac and the next five minutes were spent in a hasty dance of retrieval. Predictably his interview was just as chaotic.

The teaching presentation causes the most concerns. I explain that it’s just one of the many ways we assess them. If it goes badly they can explain why in the interview. All factors will be taken into account- not just one aspect. We can understand if they can explain. If only schools had the same leeway. ‘Sorry, but results are down because we ran out of time.’

Towards the close of the interview comes the moment when we ask if they have any questions for us. I groan inwardly when they take out their little notebooks and prepare to take another ten minutes grilling us. Warning: ‘Can you account for the dip in your 2006 results?’ is not a great note to finish on.

Selection involves taking a wide range of factors into account from the application and reference through to performance on the day. A governor once confessed to me that he chose by imagining who would make the most interesting dinner companion. It’s not as silly as it sounds.

If only the Department for Creating Statistical Fatigue (DCSF) would use a wide range of measures when ranking schools, instead of one raw figure. That would be good news for the next generation of teachers.

Down in the Deeps

2008-04-25T15:12:00.001+01:00

There’s a superb international flavour to the home page this week with the much anticipated arrival of our delightful Thai colleagues and the extraordinary diary of her Namibia trip from Jane Thomas. After spending the second week of the ‘holiday’ writing a project design for the British Council, it seemed really fitting for South Dartmoor to go international.

I learned that we’re not the first ‘blog-standard’ comprehensive after all. Another local school may have beaten us to the title because they use blogs as a regular form of communication between staff- for lesson ideas, records of meetings, and even photos and videos. These are the real thing and not the alternative story of daily life that I like to portray. But ‘real time’ reporting of another kind is being developed by the Government and we are now one of three pilot schools in the south west.

Meanwhile the video technology continues to offer us new ways to our job effectively. A broken fire alarm early in the week brought an instant confession as the culprit realised that all would be revealed by the cameras. Students saw an example of group bullying in assembly today- a screen shot of an outdoor area. One student was threatening another. But the assembled crowd of on-lookers were also bullies. All the research shows that if bullies are confronted by their peers, then they stop. This group, by their very presence, were inciting the bully when they could have taken the civilised step of walking away and reporting what was going on.

It’s a relief to be back to a day of ‘shallow’ learning after the going through the deeps yesterday. The staff reported back in our morning briefing on the vast range of activities that took place from Thai and Dreams and Teams-led sports in Year 7 to The Apprentice-style outdoor challenges from Phil Atherton’s vivid imagination with Year 9. This year group amazingly, now all have ‘heart start’ certificates, thanks to the hard work and organisation of Richard Woodland and his team. We’ve already had offers to be on standby in case of collapse. So who wants to volunteer to give Mr Hamlyn the kiss of life?

For Year 8, The Deeps offered visitors to Religious Studies and Modern Languages. Students were engrossed in the personal stories of members of religious groups who had fascinating stories of faith to tell. They polished up their French in the afternoon and were busy in role when I went round the department. In Science Year 10 were experimenting with everything that could move, explode make a smell or create a surprise. What must Mark Gale’s living room look like! Balloons attached to CDs floated across the desks at one point and demonstrated the principles of the hovercraft. And Year 11 had a terrific day in English- working at the very depths to secure those top grades in only a few weeks time. Keep up the pressure, English Department.

I attended a dinner that evening with some other invited heads from the region hosted by the Chief Executive of the National College for School Leadership. There’s no such thing as a free lunch or dinner and our role was to brief him on some of the educational issues facing schools and their leaders at the moment. By midnight we had solved most of the world’s problems. But things looked different in the morning. Deep or shallow, the success of everything we do is rooted in how and what we learn.

DCSF: Department for Controlling Seagull Faeces?

2008-04-04T10:36:00.013+01:00

Wine and good food are great motivators! In London, at the imposing Institute of Directors in Pall Mall on Tuesday evening, the wine flowed freely and the conversation sparkled. So naturally I was happy to be as motivated as anyone could wish. As glass after glass was filled, I felt that there was plenty to be motivated about. The first 34 Trust Schools are coming to the end of their initial year of operation; there are now plans for a huge expansion of the scheme and we are involved in spreading the message. The dinner for Trust partners was about creating a national network- an exciting new source of expertise and energy.

We were represented at the dinner to develop a national network of Trust partners by our own partner, Capita Children’s Services. Both Phil Neale, Mr SIMS himself- the inventor of the data programmes that are now used in running the administration of most of the country’s schools, and Brian Hodge, our committed and hard working Trustee and Governor, attended in support. So did Mike Billington, our knowledgeable Chair of Governors who, I’m sure, could win on Mastermind on the topic, Trust Schools and how to become one.

I was almost late because I foolishly invited my wife into the Institute to admire the grandeur of the building which really is imposing. But instead of gazing respectfully at the chandeliers and portraits, she embarked on a thirty minute conversation with the receptionist about the current bizarre school holiday patterns and the meaning of the term DCSF- the new initials for the Education Department.

How to remember the order of the letters, never mind what they stand for? I use cows, sheep and frogs. I’ve heard less polite company refer to them as: ‘catching smelly farts.’ But in view of our recent hoax award my vote goes for: ‘controlling seagull faeces.’

But did the Institute of Directors’ receptionist need to know all this as I waited to be shown the meeting room? He thought so- more easily distracted than a Year 10 student in a Friday afternoon class.

By the end of an evening of networking and speeches, we had answered lots of questions about our Trust and the quality of the work Capita Children’s Services are doing with us. As we were about to leave- Brian and Mike for the overnight Paddington Sleeper train to Devon- we watched the amazing conjuring tricks of our Trustee who is also a registered children’s entertainer.

Blowing up and folding balloons into animal shapes with the dexterity of a Tesco shelf stacker, Brian amazed the (fortunately) tiny gathering left. Sir James, SSAT Chair and our host, had already gone and so the embarrassment was not too great! He literally missed a trick- thank goodness.

Clutching the compulsory freebie- a rather novel credit card-style memory stick, they dashed for their train, leaving a trail of burst balloons behind them, and I prepared for an early morning return to History interviews the next day. So far this week we have appointed five new teachers. At least the seagulls haven’t scared them off.

Blue Skies Day

2008-03-25T14:30:00.008Z

‘Busy day ahead?’ asks my wife, as I prepare to leave for work. ‘A big one,’ I announce proudly, for I’ve organised a complete day on strategic planning, doing what every good to great school leader is supposed to do. Leave the small problems to resolve themselves. I shall resist the urge to be out and about. Think vision: it’s a big picture day.

In my office the desk is cleared, the diary is appointments free - not a meeting in sight. My role is to reflect, to be a blue skies thinker. Outside my window there is only the Dartmoor sky to distract me.

I need to begin with my vision, explain the mission, articulate my aims, and state our values. Already it sounds like a Barack Obama speech. Then there are the self-evaluation forms to update, the priorities to list for the year ahead, the School Development Plan to write, the Performance Review and Training Schedule documents to include. Fortunately, I’ve already updated the specialist, training school and leading edge plans. Exhausted already I move from green tea to a large pot of coffee. The blue sky out there is turning grey.

Accidently, I press the wrong button on my computer and on the screen appear sixteen different live views of the site, all being digitally recorded. Video surveillance brings the school into my office like never before. As I watch, one of the toilets is visited by a suspicious youth, quickly followed by another. It’s only ten minutes since the start of the period. I can’t resist the urge to challenge, and I soon find myself over in the block, telling them to get back to class, taking their names and warning them that Maths is not to be missed. Remembering the recording, I return to the blue skies base.

Half way through the scribble that might become a priorities list, the phone goes and I’m asked to visit another boys’ toilet by our hardworking caretaker. This is a smart, motorway service level convenience with fittings that could be gold. It cost thousands to upgrade. Now it looks as if it’s been in a Bugsy Malone shoot out. Rolled up pellets of wet tissue stick to every surface, wall and ceiling. It’s definitely not a Jackson Pollock. A hand basin is full of a yellow liquid that tells me the offender either hates us or missed out on his potty training at an early age.
As the dedicated staff, going beyond the call of duty, prepare to clear the mess, I decide to play Inspector Lewis and hunt the culprits, using the new digital system. We go through the video and find the first to exit at around the time the loo was reported vandalised. The screen shot is emailed to the Sixth Form Centre and, within seconds, we have a name and soon confirmation that we have the correct time. It’s an innocent and totally reliable sixth form student. TV detectives never achieve results this quickly.

Speeding through the recordings we find the last students to go in who confirm all was well. Then we have our vandals - three year elevens who spent fifteen minutes in there - the last to come out before our sixth form witness. Now it’s just the interviews - more in sorrow than in anger. ‘Bring them in,’ I say, in my best Lewis voice.

They can’t explain why. Perhaps they really are just potty. Two caretakers have spent an hour restoring the room to normality. So all three toileteers agree to toil - twelve hours’ community service with the cleaners. Judgement passed, they are led away and parents informed.

However, it’s taken most of the afternoon and wrecked my blue skies day. I look again at the scribbled priorities. I cross out personalised learning, curriculum innovation and leading practice networks. Instead, I write in bold my first and only priority: extend security cameras to provide total coverage. It may not be visionary, but forget the blue skies - I’m on a real mission now.

Secrets of the Universe: Fifteen Hundred and Still Counting

2008-03-17T16:30:00.016Z

After a long flight from South America, I find myself alone, cold and shivering in Europe again, waiting for a connecting flight in Lisbon at 6.00am. From 35 degrees to near zero and a cold wind whistling through the coffee-free and Wi-Fi unfriendly waste that called itself a transit lounge.

The next day, and still jet lagged but protesting rude health, Judith Morgan (wisely) prevents me from attempting assembly. Nat Parnell is on top form with the remarkable statistic that teachers typically ‘enjoy’ 1,500 interactions every day. These are the live ones with students and he explains the need for them to be positive. Add in a similar number for emails and you can see why teachers never stop. Any other profession would be on a go slow but, strangely, we always think we are doing too little.

By Monday, though, the email system is down (no fault of the Thin Controller- some suspect internal sabotage) and we have a quiet day wondering what is building up in our out-of-reach in-boxes. But, of course, none of the staff can send emails or receive them so when the all clear comes and the bleeps return, it’s largely an anti-climax. We all wonder if an email-free day ought to be school policy- no email Friday, perhaps.

We try the electronic system to review budget papers at the Governors’ Meeting that night, rather than printing copies for everyone. It works well for text but we discover numbers are too tricky. With lights on or off, we are left squinting at rows of statistics that are too small to read. Back to the drawing board- literally the paper system. It’s my fault for trying to be too clever.

Science Week is here and from rockets to explosions, it’s all systems go. Phil Atherton proudly shows me his experiments in creating bio fuel. His group of lunch time scientists are busy boiling and stirring a yellow liquid that he tells me will fuel his car! And it will cost 12p a litre rather than £1.10. I can understand the economics and pretend to follow the Science. But the next day, my spies tell me the fuel has turned to jelly.

Then it’s on to Primary Body Language- an amazing array of dances and dancers from each of our link schools. They are colourful, energetic and great fun. Parents applaud enthusiastically and the children have a great introduction to their new secondary school. (These are the lucky ones- there are 54 on the waiting list for next year).

And whilst these performances are going on, in the Science labs (there are only eight instead of twelve so easy not to miss), Parent and Child Science Evening offers our students the chance to become teachers for the evening- with their parents as the pupils. Now how many interactions does that involve? It’s another very successful evening with a very tired team of Science teachers at the end of it who must have counted well beyond fifteen hundred that day. Perhaps the secret of the universe isn’t 42 after all!

Our Third Trust Board Meeting on Thursday reviews some great progress in research with Exeter University from Karl Husband (who is now a tutor there on Tuesday evenings) and from the Maths team- briefed from Yusof Othman. We have also made progress on our aspiration to take the school into the home electronically through our Capita partner.

The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust is planning a new national network of Trust partners. We’re delighted to be guests at the inaugural dinner in two weeks’ time and to be one of four schools invited to do a presentation. Our Capita partner will be represented- Brian Hodge, Trustee and Governor, and Phil Neal, Chief Executive of Capita Children’s Services.

By Friday, I’m realising how those 1,500 interactions can take their toll. And the week isn’t over at the end of the day. It’s back for the second night of an uplifting Body Language- over 200 students performing with live music for many pieces. With energy levels this high, they must be bio fuel injected. I’m reminded why so many of us enjoy working here and remain committed to South Dartmoor: the wonderful young people and the remarkable standards they achieve.
As we finish the evening, we’re told that some staff and students will be in all weekend for A level and GCSE practical examination preparation. Just describing it all is exhausting. But, however many interactions we have in an average week, it’s better than sitting shivering alone in an airport transit lounge. And more good news- the fuel is liquid again and it works! Science and Body Language Week end with bang.

Deep Learning to Change the World

2008-03-06T08:26:00.015Z

Head teachers in the SLANT Project from the UK and Brazil

I was sorry to miss the first Deep Learning Day that my Deputy, Kate, and her teams have invested so much time in. My email sweeps are keeping me up to date with everything but there is no substitute for being there on the day. All I can offer is my own deep learning in this final Brazil blog.

I’ve learned that the Brazilians really value education- my kind of people then. One head asks me, in a moment of self doubt; ‘Do you really think we can change the world?’

‘No doubt about it,’ I tell her. ‘You already are.’ And it’s true. The projects in these schools on health education, particularly sexual health and on the environment are making a difference.

Eight ways to change the world

In Recife, I’m told, there is a lot of violence. ‘What kind?’ I ask, innocently. ‘Well between twelve and fifteen murders a week.’ I gasp, making a mental note to avoid late night strolls on the beach.

But the school provides a safe haven for the youngsters, a place where they are given meals each day, cared for and taught. The senior and vocational school we visited today, despite the violence in the area, was inviting, purposeful, full of fun and warmth. The environment was attractive with plants and open areas- a rural feel within a very urban setting.

The project is much talked about over here. The wall posters and tea shirts have photos of our last visit, images everywhere. And we even made it onto national television on Saturday at lunchtime, following Globo TV interviews and recordings of our work the day before. I know, more TV appearances- but how could I say no?

I’ve learned that other countries value our educational thinking and that many of our ideas will transfer. The processes introduced in recent years in the UK and the South Dartmoor styles in particular are much admired. Our work on observation and teachers as learners is now getting the Brazilian make-over, ready for their visit over here in September.

I’ve seen again how impressive the human spirit can be in the face of poverty. We waited at three sets of red traffic lights yesterday and at each there were children, finding ways to earn money. At the first literally teams of youngsters with bottles of water and cloths began cleaning and polishing windscreens. But I didn’t see any money change hands as the lights turned green.

At the second set of lights, a young cyclist was clinging to the bendy bus in front, taking advantage of the free propulsion when it set off, as his bike was so laden with goods for sale. He didn’t let go.

At the third, a little boy emerged carrying a tray full of ripe tomatoes. He showed it to each car until one hooted and indicated he wanted to buy. But lights turned to green. Undaunted, the little boy raced across the road at the speed of the accelerating car to catch it on the other side, his face lit up with expectation of a sale. But the driver hooted again, waved his arms and drove off.

I’ve almost drunk from my last cocoa nut. It’s now my favourite drink. A new dessert today was made for us by the head teacher’s mother- manioc pudding with caramelised sugar on the top. And I quite like yams for breakfast.

The Brazilian sense of fun is what I like most. When I told a colleague that in England, on 29 February the woman can propose marriage to the man, his face broke into a broad smile as he began teasing the females in our group. ‘I’m expecting an offer,’ he said. My phone will be on till midnight.’

It’s been something of a campaign theme in the schools as we try to go below the surface and probe deeply. This project has huge expectations attached, both here and in South America as a whole. The British Council are doing a great job, though not helped by one of the UK heads having to leave in the middle because of OFSTED. You really would think that that organisation could show a little understanding and flexibility occasionally- or what about a dose of deep learning?

There are many ways to achieve deep learning and to change the world. I’ve been privileged to be a small contributor to one of them.

Second view from Brazil: Mr Ray, the Godfather, and his friend, Prince Charles

2008-03-03T14:08:00.007Z

I’ve decided there is absolutely no reason to persevere with the Portuguese. It’s not just that I’ve already lost the tutor guide to the audio I bought. ‘In flight Portuguese: learn by the time you land’ was the promise on the tin. But they hadn’t counted on my language skills. When the aircraft landed I was still muddling my ‘obrigados’ with my ‘obrigadas’. The first is the male 'thank you’ and the second the female? So as I’m a male, do I use the male or female version when speaking to a female? More importantly, why do we make life so complicated for ourselves!

But the real reason is that I have two beautiful ladies to interpret everything for me, everywhere I go. And, of course, it means I’m looked after superbly well. I love it. So where’s the incentive? Would I really want to risk losing their wonderful company? I can’t think of a better reason for ignorance.

Except….something tells me I’m setting a bad example. Two other UK heads have already become quite proficient, one advanced, in the language. So I may need to copy them and book some intensive language tuition over here. No expense spared- I’m worth it. It reminds me how difficult languages are for some of us and what a great job language teachers do. The learner is so dependent. Three cheers at this point for the South Dartmoor language teachers.

Portuguese would be useful just to know what I’m eating. I’ve been introduced by my Brazilian hosts to a new dessert: ‘cartola’, which is a truly fantastic mix of fried banana covered in a local cheese and grilled with a mix of cinnamon and sugar. Sadly, because we don’t have an equivalent cheese in the UK, I won’t be able to make it. Manioc, a root vegetable is a delicious alternative to potato. Then there are the lovely juices: mango today and guava. I also had my first goat sausage-delicious.

The shocking news came through this morning that a school night watchman had been murdered by three youths, two of them students from the school and one of those a minor. Apparently, he’d refused to let them into school to take more drugs. They beat him to death by throwing stones at him. It’s not one of my schools, but the ministry official with us had to leave us to calm things at the school. Lynch mobs might be a possibility in revenge.

I’ve been to three schools this week. There are such warm welcomes. It’s really quite overwhelming. Autograph requests, for example. Many of the students just want to shake hands, practice saying hello or hug. One asks, perfectly innocently, how often I see Prince Charles. So if any South Dartmoor students are bothering to read this, let’s have a little more of this awe and respect when I get back.

The head teacher of one school tells me that every day she works from 7.30 am until 10.00 pm. She has to be there to supervise the three four hour shifts that all the schools run. The younger children come for the morning (with some older ones who are still re-taking!), the senior students in the afternoon and the adults or more senior ones who have to work during the day, in the evening. Rooms are intensely hot with fans whirring away. Yet a history lesson at 4.30 pm on a hot afternoon was keeping the forty children in the class occupied.
Large external posters send out the message ‘Eight Ways to Change the World.’ Each represents an ambitious project in health, environmental education, relationships, and literacy. These and newly tree-lined street- holes dug by the community, trees planted by the students- represent massive progress, even since I was here last.
They share plans and I try to be constructive in my suggestions. They are doing so much already that is beyond the call of duty. Such are teachers the world over. The staff in one of the schools spend an afternoon discussing ways to raise standards, improve their teaching and help the students. The evaluation sheets that the students fill out on their teachers would be controversial here but are natural and accepted in Brazil. The students score their teachers’ punctuality, for example, and satisfaction with the teaching they are receiving.
We see colourful and energetic cultural dances, watch a play, address assemblies and have regular breaks for Brazilian snacks. Photo opportunities abound and a record of the visit will be displayed.

I’m called back after taking assemblies and going in classrooms by a class about to graduate this year. Many hope to go into higher education and perhaps become teachers. They ask me to be their Godfather- quite an honour, I’m told. How could I refuse? I explained that I would probably not be able to make it for their graduation but would a video do? They seemed happy with the suggestion- meanwhile I must find out what other responsibilities I’ve taken on.

Walking on the beach at the end of Saturday, I’m shocked by the amount of litter left. How can we be so contemptuous of the beautiful beach. There are no seagulls to eat the food, but a team of red-coated litter pickers is moving along the sand to scoop up the debris. Dave Morgan and team- you are not alone.

In fact, the children keep their schools beautifully clean. As is so often the case, it’s the adults who are at fault. So what is the Portuguese for ‘Don’t leave that litter’ and dare I use it? Now where have my translators gone?

The View from Brazil

2008-02-29T11:44:00.015Z

The new ring I’ve been invited to wear (not lost it yet) is made from an Amazonian palm tree. It’s a symbol of the ‘alliance with the indigenous people’s cause and the grass root’ causes.’ I’m told the ring is a sign of commitment to the cause. But I’m also warned that because of this commitment, many people have died! I try desperately to pull the thing off my finger before it’s too late. Spotted, I pretend to be scratching my finger gently and hope not too many people will notice.

Day five of my work in Reciffe, Brazil began, as always being woken at 5.00 am by the intensely bright sun sweeping into the room and sound of the sea swooshing twenty six floors below. Led by the British Council, twenty five Brazilian headteachers and five from the UK are here for a conference and school visits, building on the work that began on my first trip last June.

The setting is impressive: palm trees colour the coast and the fresh cocoa nut juice is a delicious natural drink. Served from tree to fridge, the sellers use a lethal looking giant blade to slash the tops. I keep my ring finger well hidden during this process! A straw is inserted into the clear, cooling liquid. In temperatures of 35 degrees (I’m on three showers a day and that’s not enough) it’s refreshing, pure nectar.

The Conference days are long and intense. We have headsets for simultaneous translation- a dream. Plans and powerpoints are shared. There are some fun group activities designed by the Brazilians. One involves tying all twenty five head teachers together and seeing what happens when presents are thrown into the centre of the circle. Chaos, of course. But you’re missing the point: that is the message. We shouldn’t be surprised.

I’ve been asked to run an hour-long session on school linking. My powerpoint was sent over weeks ago for translation into Portuguese but it’s 4.30 in the afternoon so I’m going to be a maverick and do something I hadn’t planned. I direct some spontaneous role plays and mimes- stories to illustrate various educational concepts and bring them to life. It’s the old drama teacher in me- actually I’m just a failed film director. But it works and we have ear-splitting laughs and a happy group.

To conclude I show the Top Talent DVD, a Luke Flegg/Lucy Mccance collaboration that mixes excerpts from past productions, activities and events. It’s clever stuff and the quality of the work by South Dartmoor students is a talking point.

Pernambucco umbrellas are used to illustrate leadership concepts. That’s one the NCSL hadn’t thought of! They’re also pretty effective against the sun when we walk to lunch. Best of all the group wave them wildly at the end of a four way video conference with Mexico, Argentina and Sao Paulo. The project is being done in South America with Brazil one country among many.

The video link gives the sense of how the work is valued and its importance in the region as well as to the UK. The waving goes on until the screen fades. This is how they do things in Latin America- a joy to work with.

The Conference ends with Bom dia, the ‘Good Morning’ song, and this time I make an audio recording and translation. After everyone in the room has been hugged, we finish with the compulsory picture shoot. A professional photographer has been clicking away throughout the event.

We have small gifts of beautifully wrapped parcels of soil and packets of sunflower seeds joined by a hand of cut out green felt. We’re asked to plant the seeds as a symbol of the growth of the project and its continuing success. Will I get them through the customs, I wonder. Are they classified as a drug! What with this and the death threats to ring wearers, I could get paranoid.

The group of Brazilian directors give the UK heads illustrated cards with the words:

‘Dear Friends:
You are unique…
But, there is something especially
Charming about you:
The belief in life,
The belief in people,
The will to change the world.
Such people are never erased
From our memories.’

The Brazilian people are every bit as beautiful as their country. As I return to the hotel to try and clear my in-box before dinner, I know that I have been inspired.
P.S Lost in translation: I asked about the deadly ring today. It turns out that this is a reference to the death of the relationship symbolised by the ring and not the death of a person! I can take my hand out of my pocket now.

Top Talent

2008-02-13T12:29:00.019Z

This week I approached some of the top creative and technical talent in South Dartmoor, if not the UK. You see I have a stack of DVDs with impressive recordings of quality events and performances- productions such as Starchild and Les Miserables; dance sequences from Body Language; recordings from Onside and the Futures Vision Award Ceremony.

I’m not good at juggling them around and wanted a way of selecting a medley of brief highlights to show at conferences: the best of South Dartmoor- or at least some it. I had in mind a sort of BAFTAs without the prizes- just the glitzy bits we all like to watch; like a promotional video for the next Sunday night BBC costume drama adaptation. Add in a stirring sound track of spine-tingling music, clips of confident students performing to perfection with audience ovations, smiling, polished faces, affectionate gazes and you can imagine the impact. I’m already planning the Hollywood promotion. Well why not? World class is our motto after all.

Lucy Mccance and Luke Flegg from Media came to my aid with a great offer to search through the material, load it onto the computer and edit it into a highlights promotional piece, complete with soundtrack and titles. Although this doesn’t mean the end of career for the six other staff who I thought might have helped (they know who they are because they have my begging email) I now realise who my friends are. So if they want to work again….

Of course if you want to see some stunning examples of work, just look under the subject section on the new website. Wow! The old site was described to me by someone from the DCSF (Department for cows, sheep and frogs- actually children, schools and families but easier to remember the first version) as like a Footsie 100 Index Company.

Well the new site is so impressive, we have already had requests for Nat Parnell’s head. To find out how he did it, of course. But we’re not letting him out. His whereabouts are a closely guarded secret. Actually we might be willing to exchange him on short term loan for air miles and some Tesco vouchers. In fact, he’s easy to contact- just look on the website. Lin Blackman is like an electronic decorator, wallpapering and painting the site each day in new colours and patterns. You can have any colour you like- even one mysteriously called ‘don’t like green’. What would Al Gore make of that?

The site is now the display board for the whole school- an ever-changing, uploaded interface of all that we do and beamed across the world. Candidates for posts (Psychology, Maths and Art already filled this year) speak in hushed, awed tones of what they discovered when they logged on: like entering Ali Baba’s cave and marvelling at the gemstones. The number of hits is extraordinary- 132,640 different individuals last year, each spending on average 166 seconds and viewing 4 pages. And they say Big Brother isn’t watching us! In the first week of this year there were almost 5,000 hits on the new site. Have they really nothing better to do?

Seriously, just stand and be amazed at the latest RS, Drama and ICT department sites- and all the others I have forgotten to mention, but they are just as good. Honest. Then there’s the new publication revealing John Bradford’s secret addiction to arson- but humour him when you see him and you won’t get your fingers burnt.

Look at that old Lightshifts clip again and you can see that it wasn’t pen torches at all. If you peer into the corner, I swear you can see our budding pyromaniac with a box of matches! He was playing with fire even then. So how safe is the Art Block? On second thoughts….

Those hands aflame belong to Heather Stimson and Richard Short- two of the other creative talents on the outstanding Soundbeams project. And Rachel Robinson’s musical inspiration really gets those creative juices flowing.

So by the time I get the new edited DVD, there will be another one to put together- more and more of the best of South Dartmoor. Coming to a website near you. But check out the Hollywood sites as well- ‘achieving world class standards’, after all.