Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill

by Gervase Phinn

  The bell sounded for morning break. The first person to enter the room was a tall thin woman with a pale melancholy beaked face. Her prim white blouse was buttoned up to the neck and she wore a grey pencil skirt from which protruded skeletal legs. Thick white hair was twisted up untidily on her head and speared with what looked like wooden meat skewers. She stared at me for a moment before speaking. ‘Would you mind moving?’ she said. ‘You’re sitting in my chair.’

  ‘There are many chairs,’ I replied pleasantly.

  She bristled. ‘I am aware of that,’ she said, drawing in her breath, ‘but that is my chair. I always sit in it.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘I have been a teacher in the school for twenty years,’ she told me, ‘and I always sit in that chair.’ When I remained where I was, she fixed me with a piercing stare. ‘So will you move?’ she said, petulantly. I slowly got to my feet and sat in the adjacent chair. ‘And don’t set your books up on that table,’ she continued, sitting down. ‘We have our coffee on there.’

  ‘And who do you imagine I am?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re the book rep, aren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m the school inspector who will be observing lessons next week.’

  If she was surprised she didn’t show it, and she shuffled in her seat. ‘Well, I assume you know what sort of children we have in this school?’

  ‘I’ve read a little about them,’ I told her.

  ‘We have quite a number of council-estate children and travellers in our catchment area, and all the social problems they bring with them.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Council-estate children and travellers,’ she repeated. ‘You know what they can be like.’

  ‘Do I?’ I asked.

  She sighed. ‘Have you taught these sort of children?’ she asked, truculently.

  ‘I have,’ I told her. ‘And they are like any other group of children, aren’t they? They can be delightful, good-humoured and well behaved and sometimes can be difficult and challenging.’

  ‘You will find ours fall into the latter category,’ she said. Her tone was peevish. ‘We have a great many problems with the estate children and travellers. The standards of reading and number work are poor and their achievements very low. I hope you are not expecting a great deal of them.’

  ‘I am of the opinion that is exactly what teachers should do,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she asked, tight-lipped.

  ‘Expect a great deal of the children they teach,’ I told her, ‘however disadvantaged and demanding they might be.’

  She allowed herself a small smile. It was not a pleasant smile. ‘Really,’ she said and rose from her chair, like a queen from her throne, to make herself a cup of coffee.

  Had I had the power, I would have taken the woman and her chair and left her in the playground. No children, however ill-favoured, damaged or badly behaved, should be written off by a teacher. Children are too precious to be tarnished by such sour empty critics who expect little of their charges and tarnish them with a rusty cynicism. As Bishop William Temple wrote:

  Until education has done far more work than it has had an opportunity of doing, you cannot have society organised on the basis of justice . . . Are you going to treat a man as what he is, or as what he might be? Morality requires, I think, that you should treat him as what he might be, as what he has it in him to become . . . That is the whole work of education. Give him the full development of his powers; and there will no longer be that conflict between the claim of the man as he is and the claim of the man as he might become.

  The Point of Education

  One of my favourite quotes about the very purposes of education is contained in a letter which Haim Ginott, when he was principal in an American high school, sent to every new teacher to help him or her understand the school’s ethos:

  Dear Teacher

  I am the victim of a concentration camp. My eyes have seen what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot and burned by high school graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is this: help your students to become humane. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and mathematics are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.

  At a time when the Government seems obsessed with league tables and targets, SAT results and risk assessments, OFSTED inspections and ceaseless teacher evaluation, and intent on covering schools with a snowstorm of paperwork, it is good to know that some schools go beyond the statutory curriculum, involve the pupils in exciting and innovative projects and endeavour to do what Ginott exhorts – to help young people to become more compassionate and caring.

  I was asked to launch the splendid book Ending the Slave Trade with William Wilberforce of Hull at the Hull Street Life Museum. Supported throughout by the writer and lecturer John Haden, the children at St Nicholas Primary School researched, wrote and illustrated their own accounts of the slave trade, and narrated the story of the life and work of the city’s most famous son. In undertaking such a project, they gained a real insight into the dreadful trade and learnt about the part Wilberforce played in bringing it to an end. They also learnt that slavery is still big business around the world (there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic trade) and that slavery does not just exist in far-off places like Brazil, where children are sold into servitude, but that there is people-trafficking in this country.

  At the launch, teachers, parents, education officers and invited guests listened in silence as the children sang a selection of traditional slave songs and laments. They heard about the horrors of this shameful trade and of the courage, dedication and persistence of William Wilberforce, who spent his life working for its abolition. It was an immensely powerful and moving experience.

  ‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’

  Schooldays

  ‘George, Don’t Do That!’

  On a visit to the Doncaster Civic Theatre, my wife Christine and I lost ourselves in a wonderfully nostalgic evening filled with a gentle humour we so much enjoy. Caroline Fields, from the BBC Radio 2 programme, Friday Night is Music Night, delighted her audience with sketches and songs written and once performed by the inimitable Joyce Grenfell. There was the brilliantly written ‘A Terrible Worrier’ and the hilarious ‘Old Girls’ Reunion’, but the show-stopper for me was the unforgettable ‘Nursery School Sketches’, delivered superbly by Caroline.

  Joyce Grenfell’s perfectly observed nursery school teacher keeps a simmering control over her temper when trying to deal with the recalcitrant infants. As the children’s behaviour deteriorates, the teacher’s tone becomes jollier and falser, or, as Joyce herself writes: ‘the bright, bluffingly calm, cheerful encouraging manner becomes increasingly desperate.’ Those of us who have spent a lifetime in the company of children know only too well how she feels, faced with the little Shirleens and Chardonnays, the Georges and Sidneys of the world.

  Joyce Grenfell loved what she called ‘young children’s observations, discoveries and individualities’, and was fascinated by the way that ‘young children can invariably surprise, confound and delight’.

  I have met many an anarchic infant like Sidney and Chardonnay on my visits to schools. One rosy-faced little boy, called Duane, certainly surprised and confounded the teacher at Story Time, but ‘delight’ is not the word that immediately sprang to mind.

  ‘This morning’s story, children,’ began an infant teacher, ‘is the story of ‘‘The Three Little Pigs’’.’

  ‘I’ve ’eard it,’ said Duane, exploring his nostril with an index finger.

  ‘Really, Duane, that’s nice,’ said the teacher, in true Joyce Grenfell fashion.

  ‘It’s all abaat this wolf what gobbles up all these stupid pigs.’

  ‘Just lis
ten, Duane,’ said the teacher, smiling wanly.

  ‘Little pig, little pig,’ began the infant, in the voice of Tommy Cooper, ‘let me in or I’ll ’uff and I’ll puff an’ I’ll blow yer ’ouse in.’

  ‘Duane,’ interrupted the teacher, ‘I’m telling the story.’

  ‘But I’ve ’eard it.’

  The smile on the teacher’s face was fixed. ‘Well, now you are going to hear it again.’

  ‘Burr I know wor ’appens,’ the child told her.

  ‘So you said,’ observed the teacher, sotto voce.

  She continued with the age-old story of the foolish pigs that built their houses of straw and sticks and were then gobbled up by the wolf.

  ‘Then the Big Bad Wolf came to the house of bricks. He crept down the little path on his bristly grey legs and came to the door and scratched on it with his long sharp claws. “Little pig,” he growled, “little pig, let me in, or by the hair on my chinny, chin chin, I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.” ’

  ‘’E dunt gerrin,’ volunteered Duane.

  ‘Thank you, Duane,’ said the teacher trying to stay calm.

  ‘’E tries gerrin in t’winder burr ’e can’t gerrin.’

  ‘Duane,’ said the teacher sharply.

  ‘’E gus on t’roof,’ said the child.

  ‘DUANE! Listen to the story!’ snapped the teacher.

  ‘Burr I know wor ’appens,’ the child told her again.

  ‘If you are a really good boy,’ the teacher told him, ‘you can tell us all what happens, but you must be quiet until near the end. The wolf climbed on the roof . . .’ she continued.

  ‘I said that,’ added Duane.

  The teacher decided to ignore the interruption. ‘He looked down the chimney into the sooty darkness. “Little pig, little pig,” he growled, “I am coming down the chimney to gobble you up.” ’ The teacher paused. ‘Now, Duane, what would you do if a wolf came down your chimney?’

  ‘I’d shit myself,’ replied the infant.

  A Life in Rhymes

  I had another long letter from Liam recently. Liam, aged thirteen, is a student at a college for the blind, and he wrote in Braille (with a translation) that he is really enjoying life there and doing well in his studies. He sent me his first published collection of poems, My Life in Rhymes, an inspirational anthology which makes the reader smile, think and sometimes feel a little sad. It was two years ago that I received his first letter with some of his excellent poems. The poems were heartfelt and sincere and inspired by his experiences of living with blindness and deafness.

  In that first letter, he wrote: ‘I am not enjoying school because I am being separated in most of the lessons. My favourite subject is science but it’s impossible for me to learn. The experiments aren’t accessible for me where you have to use sight to determine so much and handle dangerous equipment. The teachers use gestures and pictures and signs on the whiteboard and I cannot see these so learn little. I am excluded from cricket and rounders – health and safety issues they say. At break and lunchtimes all I do is walk around the playground with a support assistant. I have not had a friend since I started mainstream school.’ Liam asked me if I could help realise his ambition to attend New College.

  Along with his determined parents, Liz and Dean, his doctor, his psychologist and many other supporters, I wrote with my backing and, eventually, Liam was successful. I knew that Liam would be happy and would thrive at New College because I had inspected the establishment some years before.

  I had visited New College with a team of HMI, and the OFSTED report we produced was excellent. Twenty years ago, blind students would no doubt would have been making lampshades and weaving baskets. Now they achieve as well, and often better, than their sighted peers, as a former Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Education from Yorkshire will vouch.

  I remember meeting Ruth. She, like Liam, had been desperately unhappy during her time in a mainstream girls’ high school. A clever, enthusiastic and good-humoured young woman, she had experienced a catalogue of indifference and unkindness from some of the other students. Chairs were deliberately placed in front of her so she would stumble into them, her greeting of ‘Good morning’ when she entered the classroom would be greeted by silence and few helped her as she went around the school. Ruth had no friends and led a lonely, unhappy life. Some of her teachers were sympathetic and the deputy head teacher frequently asked how she was getting along, but others were blatantly unfeeling and were irritable and lacked understanding. Someone suggested that Ruth really should not bother going on the Geography field trip because, she was told, ‘you won’t be able to see anything’. When her classmates were asked by the form tutor what were the most irritating things about being in the school one girl remarked, ‘the blind girl with her white stick’.

  At the college for the blind, Ruth had flourished, and was studying for four ‘A’ levels and hoping to study English at Cambridge. Her work was of a quite exceptional standard, as this poem, which I published in a collection, reveals:

  I see with my ears.

  I hear the leaves in the tall trees, whispering in the night.

  I hear the sea, dark and deep, and the splash of the dolphin’s leap.

  I hear the flames crackling and the window frames rattling in the wind.

  I see with my ears.

  I see with my nose.

  I smell the blossoms pearly-grey and hay new mown.

  I smell the ploughed earth, cows in the byre, the smoky fire.

  I smell Grandpa’s pipe, Gran’s lavender room and Mum’s faint perfume.

  I see with my nose.

  I see with my mouth.

  I taste the strong black coffee and the thick brown toffee between my teeth.

  I taste the yellow of the lemon, the green of the melon and the red of the tomato.

  I taste the orange of the carrot, the purple of the plum, the gold of the sun on my face.

  I see with my mouth.

  I see with my hands.

  I feel the sharp edges, slippery floors, smooth ledges.

  I feel lemonade in cold canisters, hard wooden banisters.

  I feel hands to hold, arms on shoulders, faces to touch.

  I see with my hands.

  On Report

  My mother was a hoarder, and I am so glad she was. After her death, I discovered a treasure chest of letters, postcards, swimming medals, badges and, to my delight, my school reports. I guess I share with many others the common experience of finding (with something of a shock) that my school reports were by no means exceptional, but pretty lacklustre. My leaving report from Broom Valley Juniors had the pithy and somewhat ambiguous comment from J Leslie Morgan, the headmaster: ‘Gervase is a little trier.’

  School reports of the past make much more interesting reading than present day examples. Modern school reports are often produced from a standard ‘Statement Bank’, with key words and phrases helpfully provided for the frazzled teacher, who has to complete a comprehensive booklet on each pupil’s attainment, progress, conduct, contribution to school activities and significant achievements, and fill in a whole grid of predicted grades. Such earnest and restrained documents are anodyne compared with those written in the past. Perhaps it is a good thing that the funny, acerbic and sometimes brutal judgements have gone, but they were much more entertaining.

  In this litigious age, no teacher would dare write in such an unprepossessing and sardonic manner as David Owen’s master at Bradfield College, who described the future political grandee as ‘a scruffy urchin’, or John Lennon’s teacher at Quarry Bank School in Liverpool, who predicted that one of the world’s most talented composers is ‘certainly on the road to failure . . . hopeless . . . rather a clown in class’. Eric Morecambe’s teacher at Lancaster Road Junior School forecast that the future great comedian ‘will never get anywhere in life’, and Jilly Cooper’s teacher at Goldophin School in Salisbury resorted to sarcasm, something which was often favoured by the t
eachers of the past, when she wrote that ‘Jilly sets herself an extremely low standard which she has failed to maintain’.

  Some teachers predicted their pupils’ future successes with great accuracy; others got it startlingly wrong. Winston Churchill’s teacher at St George’s, Ascot, asserted that the boy ‘has no ambition’ and the headmaster of Westminster, where Peter Ustinov spent his schooldays, remarked of his pupil: ‘He shows great originality, which must be curbed at all costs.’ Princess Diana’s teacher at West Heath School recommended that, ‘she must try to be less emotional in her dealings with others’, and Judi Dench’s teacher at The Mount School in York observed that she ‘would be a very good pupil if she lived in this world’.

  Recently, when I spoke at the Bradford Grammar School Old Bradfordians’ Dinner, the president’s wife said she well remembered the final, wonderfully terse comment on her school report: ‘Sally must bestir herself.’ An inspector colleague recalls his report for mathematics: ‘Exam result 4 per cent. Effortlessly achieved.’

  I was told the story of the housemaster at a Yorkshire public school who struggled to find something positive to say about a new boy on his end of term report. He wished to reassure the parents but felt he had to be honest in his assessment of his pupil, and it was proving very difficult. The boy had made no progress in any of his subjects, took no part in sports, lacked any musical ability and rarely contributed in class. The medical that all pupils underwent after the first term revealed that the boy, rather than shooting up in height like many of his adolescent peers, had in fact shrunk by an inch. This helped the housemaster out of his dilemma and he could truthfully report that: ‘Rupert appears to be settling down well.’