Headteachers

I am quite often a member of a group of primary and nursery school headteachers. I've been thinking for a few years about some of the things that happen in these groups.

The group usually seems to open with a sense of performance. Most of us in the group seem to be pretty extrovert and used to having groups of people (children at assemblies, staff in meetings) looking at us and hanging on our words.

So a difficulty arises: there are a whole lot of us who are used to holding the floor. In a group there is only easy space for one person to take up this role. More than one - it becomes uneasy.

It seems to me, that a solution to this tension is that the group gangs up against whoever is talking to us. So there is persistent backchat and interruption. Mocking looks are exchanged. The speaker usually becomes unsettled.

Sometimes the speaker crumbles in the face of this. More usually, in my observation, the speaker will turn the subject either to a matter of statistics, or Ofsted inspection. As a group, we become quickly attentive when the speaker says something like "the local authority will collect these figures and monitor them quarterly, and funding decisions will be based on this monitoring". Even better, speakers try something like "and in your next Ofsted, a key part of the judgement you get will be based on your figures for this and evidence of what you are doing about it."

In my experience, the following matters are practically never discussed by us, groups of headteachers:

• Theories about how children learn, and how adults can best teach them;
• What we can learn from recent history in education;
• The sort of values which should inform education

Picking up time

Quick one ... a teenage aunt came to pick up her little niece; she was a little early but she didn't want to wait. So I asked if she would like to sit down and join in the end-of-session singing.

Her reply: "I think I'm a bit too old for that" - and then she realised, and laughed.

Being away

Just back from a holiday in Brittany out of range of the internet etc ... (and also, sadly, the sun).

Being abroad makes you think about your own country in different ways, and whilst I was on holiday in France I was especially struck by two scenes. First, on a campsite with lots of British families, I noticed how nice many of the parents were to their children. On the pitch next to us was a large family, and I couldn’t help but overhear the kind concern of the parents throughout the day. I heard the father asking their little girl if was enjoying spending a little time on her own gazing at the sea, or was she feeling sad and left out? The children’s mother managed to prepare meals on a small camping stove for all the children, taking account of their food preferences and hatreds, with exceptional patience. It was the same at the shops, on the beach, in the restaurants – people talking to their children, taking an interest, listening. All very different to what I remember from the 1970s, when I was growing up.

It’s always striking that children on the continent are out in cafes and restaurants and playing on the streets. But I noticed that this culture goes along with other things which are unfamiliar. I saw a family coming into a café one evening, their two year old crying and whining: all very familiar until the mother turned to the child and said, very firmly in French, that she must stop absolutely. She did. The same evening, as some children’s play got a little out of hand in front of the café, a number of adults sitting there – who weren’t the children’s parents – brought things to a halt and sent the children back inside.

So the children who are out in the evening are not really free, and nor do they get much attention – they are on adult territory and they have to cope with what’s expected.

I know that I couldn’t possibly have silenced my own child at that age like that French mother, and nor would I have wanted to. I would not feel comfortable telling other people’s children what to do in a public place. Yet my own, admittedly superficial, observation of those French children was that they were able to conform to what was expected. It was a struggle for the little girl to hold back her tears, but a struggle which she managed, and it enabled her to enjoy being out in the company of adults. Perhaps the children felt safe knowing that they were being watched over, and that there were absolute limits which they could not cross.

Thinking about it now I’m back home, it strikes me that the time, care and attention many parents in Britain give their children is precious. But perhaps with this positive change has come a loss. I wonder if sometimes we are leaving children at the mercy of their own impulses, and giving them the freedom to be unlikeable; whether in taking away restrictions, we have also taken away their opportunity to be part of society.