It is nearly forty years ago that, as a newly appointed Head, an older colleague gave me a piece of priceless advice.  “Divide the morning’s mail into two piles, the urgent and the important.  Immediately deal with the important and leave the urgent until later in the day when you will probably find that somebody else has sorted it out.”

That advice has guided me ever since.  It has never been easy.  Too often people in authority, including Prime Ministers and Headteachers, crave the publicity of the gallant trouble-shooter rescuing a venture at the last moment, while most often the problem would not have arisen if he or she had earlier concentrated on rectifying the root causes of the difficulty.

At first the telephone, then the fax, and now emails give us a continuous flood of messages and it is hard to put them in some kind of order.  The ability to decide what is important and what is merely urgent becomes an ever more pressing problem.  Not just for teachers, of course, but even more so for politicians as we get closer to the Election.

In August of last year the Initiative published a Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the design faults at the heart of English education, as a means of testing politicians’ policies in advance.  The Paper concluded with Ten Actions that would need to be taken.  They were:

One Parliament must take the lead in showing the country that the task of education involves far more than producing pupils able to pass exams.

Two Under too much pressure to improve examination results schools tend to develop superficial “quick wits” rather than the more robust, long-term “hard wits” which breed flexibility and adaptability.

Three How we are treated as babies and toddlers determines the way in which what we were born with can turn us into men and women capable of doing new things well, not simply repeating what earlier generations have already done.

Four Legislators must appreciate the evolutionary significance of adolescence, and provide opportunities for young people to extend their learning in a hands-on manner.

Five A far less content-prescriptive curriculum emphasising such skills as the ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions is required.

Six Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.

Seven While Britain prides itself on being a democracy it frequently forgets that such a fragile concept cannot flourish unless each new generation is well-nurtured in the affairs of the mind, and appropriately inducted into the responsibilities of adulthood, and the maintenance of the common good.

Eight It is not more money that is needed to transform English education, rather it is to reallocate those funds that are being spent now in ways that should go with the grain of the brain so as to radically enhance the quality of education, the life of children, and national well-being.

Nine All-through schools from 5-16 should be based on an extension of present primary school practice so as to restore the balance between school, home and community.

Ten For a democracy to be fully functional, the state cannot simply be defined in terms of a government that makes and administers laws in which individuals are then free to do their own thing.  Just to live within the law means very little; but to live within the law and have a sense of civil society, is to create a great place in which to live.

Do the candidates in your constituency recognise that these are the important issues, on which future policies have to be based?

No related posts.

Long before emails were invented, and before the days of the fax and 24/7 news,  in fact the year I first became a headmaster, an older and wiser man gave me an excellent piece of advice.  “Every morning divide the contents of your in-tray into two piles… one for the important items, and the other for the urgent.  Deal first with the important, and by the evening most of the urgent problems will have been solved by somebody else.”  What wise advice, but oh so hard to follow now that the in-tray has been replaced by emails arriving at any hour, and with a media hyping-up every issue to create a sense of crisis.

Most people are neither super-human, nor work-dodgers.  We each want to do a reasonable job whilst most have never heard of the poet W.M. Davis they would readily agree “What is life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare.”  In the world we have built around us “to stand and stare” suggests to many that we aren’t working hard enough and so have spare capacity to undertake something else.  That is a dangerous assumption, for if we don’t regularly take stock of where we are, we get into enormous muddles.

Four important documents have recently landed on my desk; the White Paper, “Your Child, your Schools and our Future;” the Nuffield Foundation’s Report on Education for 14-19-year-olds entitle  “Education for All”; “Every Family Matters” from the Centre for Social Justice, and most recently, Alan Milburn’s “Unlocking Aspiration”.  With a total of some 750 pages of text, h  How do I stop myself being drowned in such an ocean of information?  How do I decide which parts of these carefully nuanced words may be important for the long-term, and what are only of passing significance?  Long ago I had to escape from my English A Level teacher’s insistence that I start at the beginning and read carefully through to the end of every text.  I still do that, of course, with a novel, but such reports are different – in essence they are setting out the case for a particular course of action which they wanted to pursuade me to adopt.

Here my knowledge of the human brain is handy.  At its most basic the brain is a survival mechanism; it takes in all kinds of information, analysises it to see whether or not this means that I need to change my thinking, and then decides what action to take.  Further, as a survival mechanism, the brain is quick to alert me to when someone is trying to manipulate me.  But I have to be careful; the brain is loaded with ‘crap detectors’ that automatically disregard anything it thinks I’m not interested in.  I have to watch this carefully because my assumptions of time passed can all too easily block out things that I now need to think about.

I won’t study any of those reports line-by-line.  Early in the morning, when my brain is fresh (and refusing to accept incoming phone calls or read new faxes), I will analysis each in turn to see how such ideas challenge, or reinforce, my present thinking.  That’s hard.  Having just written the Parliamentary Paper I will obviously see how these new ideas fit within the framework that I have already created to hold such a parcel of ideas together.

Time to stand and stare is a necessity, not a luxury.  The moment you find yourself doing something (which could be done by somebody else) instead of thinking through a difficult issue, you know you should backtrack.  Thinking is often not immediately as interesting or attractive as doing something, so always give thinking the priority it needs.

See Parts Seven and Eight of Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Occasional Pieces: Too Busy to Think
2. Curious Teenagers, Busy Parents and Market Forces: Changing the face of education in the 21st Century