Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  Soon afterwards I had an extraordinary opportunity to use this finding, employing the adage that if you can’t beat them you might as well join them. I set up a television network throughout the School so that every classroom had a wired-in receiver. There were transmission points in most departments and a central transmission point in a small ‘studio’. The system enabled a number of significant improvements in the life and activities of the School.

  First, talks to the whole School became vastly more personal than in the only space available for such communication - the Sports Hall. Once a week nigh on a thousand students flattened their bottoms on the floor to hear me speak like a political candidate on the hustings. But when any of us spoke to camera each person in the School felt they were being spoken to individually.

  Second, video recordings could be shown to the whole School or to a department, so visits, skiing trips, work experience, and video diaries on a host of activities were transmitted with ease. Third, visitors were able to put across information through the technique of being interviewed, with slides and video interspersed for illustration. Other variations were possible, limited only by imagination. Some bright sparks emulated TV programmes, such as the then popular Treasure Hunt, for lunch time transmission.

  The degree to which this grabbed attention is, perhaps, well illustrated by the speed with which members of a new intake to the School quickly related to anyone who spoke to camera. Three days into the September term, comments to teachers and me that ‘Cor, Sir/Miss, you’re the one I saw on the box this morning,’ revealed an undreamed of rapport development speed. The system conferred many benefits on the School, not least being the media skills many students acquired and put to use in their careers. It was even featured in the national press.

  Perhaps you belong to the generation that has known the personal computer since first consciousness. If so, did you realise that its appearance in schools produced a hitherto unknown scenario that inordinately worried teachers and senior managers? Indeed you may have been one of its manifestations. Quite simply roles were reversed. For the first time in history pupils had greater skills than their teachers.

  That’s a generalisation, of course. However it is the case that many teachers in mid to late career were faced with new technology for which skills had to be learned - and in the early days personal computer programs were not particularly user-friendly. It was embarrassing to find that even five year olds were appearing in schools with some keyboard skills. The first use of a computer for timetabling I experienced used a program written by a member of the Fourth Form - Year 10 in to-day’s nomenclature. I spent some thousands of pounds in purchasing computers for my School before I touched a keyboard myself - and when I did I sought a lesson from one of the students.

  I experienced the extent of the sub-surface shock waves when involved in taking a government initiative called the ‘Flexible Learning Project’ to schools. I saw the complete spectrum from teachers who rapidly and skilfully embraced the new technology to those who strongly resisted it. In one north Norfolk School I saw a History classroom set up with a range of Mac computers around the periphery, with a central store of varied materials, including computer programs produced by the teacher. I watched one that showed a site in Norwich with computerised sketches of buildings at various dates through the centuries - as you clicked on one date the scene dissolved and the appropriate changes appeared. He also produced a range of video recordings of visits to historical sites - often with classes in tow, so making them useful for revision. The true success of his work, as he very well knew, was revealed in the level of historical awareness shown by his students in their written work. Not surprisingly, their examination results were good, too.

  I tried to prise him out of his classroom to give talks to teacher groups - perhaps even to run training courses. He refused point blank to leave his students. He did, however, produce yet another video - for my use, explaining in his commentary that he was demonstrating how ‘One ole’ country boy behind the Norfolk reeds’ used modern technology to make students’ lessons significant experiences.

  The reverse side of the coin was seen on many occasions when I showed that video to groups of teachers. Those attending voluntarily were usually sympathetic, albeit staggered by the amount of time the man obviously put into creating his lesson material. But others, attending by dictat all too often made it very clear they had no use or time for such frills. Books and dictated notes had served them well for years and they saw no reason to jump on this latest bandwagon.

  Far from being such a vehicle the computer is a space ship, freeing students, teachers and indeed everyone from the cumbersome limitations of access to information. The technology and the software have increased immensely in quality and quantity; now, in the days of the national curriculum, many programs are commercially available to supplement courses. If teachers want to produce bespoke courses for their particular students they have a range of excellent programs and hardware to help them produce their own CDs and DVDs. In the ‘Flexible Learning Project’ at the beginning of the nineties, writeable CDs were beyond the resources of schools - machines cost around thirty thousand pounds and the operation was fairly complex. Now they are integral in PC systems.

  But, as you will be well aware, computers enable personal learning - anywhere, anytime, with user-friendly courses, user-friendly tests (as much as any test can be), with a vast range of teaching strategies and ease of access to even more vast amounts of information though the world wide web. They also enable easy links with other learners via the Internet - how much homework has been done with emails being interchanged between class members? More likely mobile phones are involved as well whilst two or more pals work on-screen at a particular task. Or they use a chat room. Much more recently Facebook and Twitter have appeared enhancing social interaction much further.

  The downside is that software is available in which, as a teacher sets a piece of homework, he/she enters the details for accessing by parents who use a gateway program to the school. Probably students see this as a step backwards because the truth of the time-honoured excuse that Mr Bloggs didn’t set any homework can now be checked instantly. It also prods Mr Bloggs into setting the homework in the first place. For the students that’s a double whammy!

  Social networking now is widespread. On one hand this enables communication across nations undreamt of in the past. Increasingly, however, the criticism is made that physical social interaction is likely to fade. But children are attracted to social network sites quite early in their school years and these extend now for thirteen years. There is no doubt that most of those are spent interacting in the real social world; then soon afterwards the school world gives way to that of higher education or employment. Certainly it is true there is a heightened chance of an individual fading into reclusiveness, but not the great majority. If you are still doubtful whether children interact fully in the real world during their formative years, ask to visit your local school for a day and undertake what is called ‘participant observation’.

  As widespread social networking alters society with world-wide power shifts, the loosening of political control and widespread availability of knowledge, it is interesting to speculate whether schools, also, will be radically changed. Or is the classroom model from antiquity so formidable that it will remain? The days of the schoolhouse may be far less long or hard but they haven’t been scrapped in 5,000 years.

  Chapter 8

  I left my seat on the top deck of the swaying tram as it sped noisily along its rails in the middle of the road leading into the city. With youthful agility born of long practice I clambered down the steep winding stairs on to the platform. The conductress smiled at me.

  ‘You want Spenser Street, duck?’

  I smiled back. ‘Yes, please.’

  I have no idea where the idea of ‘duck’ being an acceptable mode of address came from, but it was woven in
to the everyday speech of midland conductors, conductresses, street traders and shop assistants along with ‘luv’, ‘son’, ‘Ma’, ‘Pop’, and ‘our kid’, according to the age and sex of the person addressed. Only once did I hear anyone repulsed using such terms of endearment, when a conductor held the arm of an elderly lady as she stepped up on to the platform of his bus.

  ‘Come on, muther, ‘old tight!’ he encouraged.

  She straightened up, looked him full in the eye, and replied with perfect diction, ‘I am not aware of having given birth to you, young man.’ Whereupon she walked serenely to a vacant place inside amidst chuckles from her fellow passengers and a rueful grin from him.

  The tram ground to a stop with squealing brakes on metal wheelrims and I jumped down the two steps to the road. I dodged a passing grocery errand boy wobbling his delivery bike with the container over the small front wheel full of customer’s orders - and remembered riding one myself on Saturday mornings for pocket money. I walked a short distance along the pavement, then turned into Spenser Street. On one side a row of small terraced houses extended almost unbroken for its full length, though there was an open area on the corner with mounds of rubble covered with weeds revealing it as a bombed site. Two large hoardings had been erected on it; beneath the scaffolding was a cement mixer with piles of sand nearby that bore traces of children’s feet. The other gaps in the houses were the entries through which one walked to reach other rows of houses that had no street frontage.

  On the other side the houses flanked a large space which was the School site. There was the usual low wall surmounted by tall and very solid railings, painted green like every other school in the city. For safety reasons school railings had not been cut down to provide wartime factories with much needed metal, but they were alone in escaping the ubiquitous scythe. There were two gates spaced well apart; in front of these were the equally preserved silver crash barrier railings to prevent crowds of children bursting unchecked out of the playground and on to the road.

  Recently an historical television programme revealed the fact that despite railings being removed throughout the length and breadth of the land none of the resulting scrap was ever turned into shells and bombs. At the time, of course, we believed it implicitly. I wonder what mismanagement lay behind that particular exercise which must have involved many thousands of working hours at goodness knows what cost. No doubt it was just another item on the war bill for which we had to borrow from you-know-who on an extended loan, on which we made the last payment early in the twenty-first century.

  The two gates led into two playgrounds provided for the inevitable segregation of the sexes. School builders of the time when Spenser Street Junior and Infants was built had a fixation about the orgies that would be rampant amongst seven to eleven year old boys and girls during their playtime if they were allowed to mix in a communal playground. Infants, five to seven years, were allowed to play alongside older girls, but the older, rougher boys were segregated. Both areas were spacious; between them stood a typical late Victorian school with steeply pitched roofs and gables much in evidence. A few plane trees with their distinctive patchy bark around the edge of the playground contributed a welcome splash of green.

  I was visiting the School for a day’s preparation, prior to beginning my first period of block practice, in order to find out what work the children were doing and what I should be expected to teach. It was a normal day, so all classes were at work as I pushed open the brown inner doors and walked into a large and very lofty hall. Immediately above me an open framework iron staircase spiralled upwards, as did a second one at the other end. These served two complete galleries, one above the other, flanked on their outer sides by more open framework surmounted by a very solid and high handrail. On two sides of the middle and upper galleries, as on the ground floor, doors and windows were visible denoting classrooms. I walked to the centre of the floor, gazing upwards, the whole structure reminding me strongly of pictures I had seen of prisons.

  As I watched a diminutive figure emerged from a door on the top floor and furiously waggled a large handbell. He then walked to one staircase, clattered down it to the next level and waggled it again. He continued his descent until he reached my level, then he began walking across the floor holding the bell over his head and waving it with great relish. As he passed me I seized the opportunity for directions.

  ‘Will you show me where Mr Overton’s room is, please?’

  ‘Yeah, up ‘ere. C’mon, I’ll take yer,’ and he marched off up the second staircase with the bell slung like a rifle over his shoulder. He stopped on the first landing and indicated a door.

  ‘That’s it - that’s Mistroverton’s room.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said as he continued his climb back to his classroom. By this time streams of children were emerging from rooms on all levels. It became obvious that a strict one-way system was in operation, because all groups were walking in orderly files to one staircase or the other according to whether they were ascending or descending. I could see two teachers posted as traffic cops and I stood and watched for a moment, listening to the heavy tramping of many feet on the gallery floor a few feet above my head.

  Mr Overton emerged from his room as I was about to knock on the door. He was a small, bright featured man with thinning hair. I introduced myself and his face broke into a welcoming smile.

  ‘Ah yes, Mr Flaxton. Delighted to see you. You’ve arrived at an ideal time - playtime. Come and have a cup of coffee with us; you can meet the staff straightaway.’

  He led a few steps further along the short end of the gallery and beckoned me into the staffroom. After introductions I tasted my first drink as a quasi-adult amongst a group of teachers. I felt I was crossing a significant threshold. Many thousands of cups later I can still recall the feeling of pride that engulfed me.

  I had never seen a school building remotely like that of Spenser Street. I suppose it was whilst I was there that I first realised how varied the nation’s stock of school buildings must be because the original nucleus of 1870 had been added to over a period of seventy years. I was to remember Spenser Street particularly in the sixties when I was working in a Village College in Cambridgeshire which was full of children in the daytime and a lively mixture of adults of all ages every evening and weekend. One day one of the adult students, who was an architect, told me that his firm had decided to enter a competition to refurbish an old Victorian school in London. He then asked my wife and me if he could pick our brains. We told him we would be delighted to help, but warned him that in our experience teachers and architects frequently disagree.

  ‘Are the judges from your world or ours?’ we asked.

  ‘I’m not sure - probably both, since they mention a selection panel. I’ll try to find out more, but I’ll bring the plans to-morrow so you can borrow them and look at them at your leisure. I’m not saying we’ll use your ideas, of course, but none of us has actually designed a school, so we thought entering would add to our experience. Anything you have to suggest may help us to see problems we might otherwise overlook.’

  The next evening he spread the plans before us and there it was - almost a replica of Spenser Street. The same three levels, two spiral staircases, the large central hall, the spacious playgrounds. No doubt there were many other copies in the larger industrial cities throughout the Country, built towards the end of the nineteenth century and designed to house two age groups - infants on the ground floor and juniors on the upper floors. Perhaps a very few, like this one, were destined to survive. Most, I am sure, were to go the way of Spenser Street, beneath the bulldozer as its area was cleared for high rise flats.

  My wife and I argued for a week about what should go where, then had a session with our architect friend. He was very surprised at one of our suggestions. One of the competition requirements was the conversion of three rooms into a gymnasium, a name soon to change into physical activitie
s studio. Another was that the infants section, the five to seven year olds, should be kept to one floor though the sevens to elevens could be divided.

  We insisted the infants should occupy the ground floor, as originally intended, and as they did at Spenser Street, which would force the gymnasium on to the first floor. Our friend was dubious; what about getting equipment into the room via the spiral staircase? These had to remain; anyway they could be made into a most attractive feature with the resurgence of interest in Victoriana. More importantly, what would happen if they wanted to take physical education equipment out into the playground on hot summer days?

  We countered by suggesting a small store on the ground floor with duplicate equipment for such eventualities if that was considered an important proviso. Realistically we knew that hardly happens; games are played outdoors; PE indoors. Converting half the rooms on the ground floor would force the infants’ classes on to the first floor, leaving the juniors to be divided between the remaining rooms and the complete second floor at the top. Condemning infants to frequent stair climbs throughout the day was quite unacceptable, we asserted. Furthermore the loos were on the ground floor. But most of all it would mean all that lovely hall floor could only be reached via the stairs and, therefore, in the practical situation some classes just would not use this extra space for all the activities so necessary in modern infants’ teaching.