Speech Night 2011

The School has now broken for half-term and we are beginning, as my friends who are not teachers would have it, yet another holiday. Well, yes, teachers do well in holidays, there is no denying, and we're unlikely to convince anyone that we slog through them, selflessly devoting ourselves to the interests of the children we teach, even when this is actually true. The holidays are needed not so much by the staff, as by the children, who can and do get tired and fractious towards the end of any term. There is an old argument about whether the present holiday structure is the best and most effective in fostering effective learning and I have some sympathy with those who argue that a four term year with a shorter summer break is the best configuration to sustain consistent freshness and vigour. The long summer break is, however, a wonderful luxury...

The last week of a term or half term is always the same. A looming deadline imposes a sense of urgency and the thought that everything must be finished and tidied up NOW. This was certainly the case in the last week, which began on Saturday (22 October) with our AQE orientation day. In our case, it passed off smoothly thanks to the impeccable organisation of Jonathan Todd, our Examinations Officer, and the willing, voluntary help of so many staff, teaching and non-teaching. We also had the assistance of our prefects and, for the first time, some of our Year 8 boys, who were drafted in to reassure the P7 children and help generally with the organisation. This they did wonderfully well.

Much of my time since then has been devoted to the writing of The Speech for Speech Night. Prize Distribution speeches are a genre sui generis. They are a mixture of an annual report and educational tour d'horizon with something of the state of the nation thrown in for good measure:  I take my time to do it. It's difficult to balance all the themes and weave them into a seamless whole, but, when completed, it is undeniably satisfying. It's not poetry and as prose it is little more than adequate, but it's a useful intellectual exercise to draw out what are the really important issues. Maybe some time in the far distant future, some poor, harmless drudge will write his PhD thesis on the great issues for Northern Irish voluntary grammar schools in the 21st century and will access my collected speeches and find them useful.

Then again, maybe not...

There is no recognised form, but there is the absolute restraint of timing, by which I mean the length of time taken to deliver the speech on the night. George F. Kaufman famously said that plays are not written, they are re-written. This is true of Speech Night speeches. My first draft is always execrably written and long beyond the ability of any listener to endure.   Once it's there, however, the real process of writing can begin and the first priority is to cut and cut again. The prose looks after itself as part of that process. My 'rehearsal' ran for 25 minutes; the performance, I am told, but not necessarily reliably, stood at 27 minutes. Some year, the winner of the staff's sweepstake, a suitably grateful punter, will cut me in on the winnings...

Fortunately, the star speech is given by the Guest of Honour and  we were excellently served this year by Jonathan Allison. Details of his biography may be found at the beginning of my speech and if you read it, you will understand how fortunate we were that he so kindly accepted our invitation. Jonathan flew from the USA especially to be with us, an astonishing compliment, and his speech was a small masterpiece of reminiscence, reflection, humour and graceful compliment, all delivered with disarming affection and warm wit. The guest always has the graveyard shift, speaking at the end of a long evening when the boys and parents might be said to have had quite enough, thank you. Once he began, however, one could feel the audience audibly relax, evident in the attention they gave and the depth and resonance of their laughter. Once that happened, the time ceases to be a factor. Thank you, Jonathan.

Any time there is a public event, when, as it were, we let an audience in, I try to see what we look like from outside. Almost every time, I feel proud; proud of our boys, whose relaxed and diffident charms are unselfconsciously apparent, and proud of our staff, even - especially - when I know they would rather be anywhere but the Clarke Hall on Speech Night...

Year 8

My goodness, it's a long time between entries. The excuse is to have found a mountain of work up with which to catch if you'll pardon the refinement, after the HMC conference. A large portion of the time was spent writing references for medical and Oxbridge applicants and ensuring that their UCAS forms were properly filled in. No matter how many references I write, how many forms I read, there is always just a little tremor before I click on the button which sends them out into cyber space. That click may be the moment that begins the rest of their lives, determines their fates, a virtual bungee jump into the future.

While I was away, it was a good time to be a Year 8 pupil. They all had two days doing vigorous things in Ardnabannon, getting soaked and smelly in the process. I wish I hadn't been away and had had the opportunity to visit them because the excitement was still palpable when I talked to my own Year 8 class. Stephen Robinson came back with a mountain of clothes left behind and I was there when he emptied them out on to the Assembly Hall floor for the perusal of the few boys who actually realised they had lost something. The smell lives with me.

And there was also a most exciting robotics day for a few classes, when they had the heady experience of writing computer programmes which gave life and movement to small robots. I think back to my time in first year and to a past which really was a foreign country.

Speaking of fateful moments, we will welcome 210 P7 pupils and their parents into the School on Saturday next for our orientation day in preparation for the AQE tests. I don't relish it and the first thing I say to the parents is "Sorry! Sorry that we've found ourselves in a stand-off with DE; sorry that we are sticking to our selective guns; sorry that we have to put you and your children through this." And, of course, much else they need to know. For the children, it's a chance to introduce ourselves and to say that it won't be as bad as you think and that we'll make it as easy as, in the circumstances, we can.

HMC

I'm writing this from the Headmasters' Conference in St. Andrews.
Of course, the School's, or more correctly my, membership of HMC is anomalous. HMC exists primarily for the independent, private and extremely expensive schools of the UK. In his very fine opening speech at the conference, the Chairman, Ken Durham, defined independence as, among other things, freedom in curriculum, admissions and finance. These are feedoms which do not apply to grammar schools, even voluntary grammar schools, such as BGS. Our curriculum is broadly, although flexibly, prescribed; our admissions are governed by a fairly tight regulatory system; and our finances depend almost entirely on the munificence of DE. Why then do we belong to such an elite independent outfit as HMC?

It's an accident of history. As far as I understand it, sometime in the middle sixties, membership of HMC was opened to direct grant grammar schools in England and Wales, and BGS, in company with a number of other Northern Irish schools, because of their voluntary status, qualified. The English system suffered the seismic impact of the move towards comprehensivisation (forgive the word!) and many of the old direct grants became independent. Northern Irish education stayed more or less as it was and the voluntary grammar schools were left as a state school 'rump'.

Why continue the membership? IN the UK, HMC is a quality mark, prestigious and highly regarded; not so in NI. Nevertheless, I think I can justify it in a number of ways:

HMC provides an unparalleled quality of training, admittedly more for principals, perhaps, than staff. It offers possibilities of networking and sharing, not least within the Irish Divsion, which is, in itself, enriching for me and, to an extent, through me, to the School. It also offers access to the highest levels of policy making in the UK as a whole and to valuable statistical information of various kinds. It has leverage with the examination boards and provides us with information about the examination system as a whole which we could not obtain elsewhere.

Finally, and most relevantly, it allows us to belong to a group of schools and principals, all of whom share our educational values, which are old-fashioned and unfashionable but nonetheless enduring. HMC tends to cut through faddish ideas and educational jargon to a bedrock of common sense. As a state school, and proud to be so, BGS is utterly different from most of the independent schools represented here; but our values about what education truly is, what its aims and objectives are, are very similar.

Yesterday morning alone made coming to the conference worthwhile. Presentations by A.C. Grayling, the philosopher, and Ed Smith, a kind of renaissance man, were both inspirational and reminded me why I came into teaching in the first place. Grayling talked about the liberal arts, about knowledge and learning and the role of higher education and about what schools and universities should be doing. The skills our boys need as they enter an exponentially changing world, he argued, are principally intellectual; he outlined a new currciulum for higher education which will be implemented from next year in a new college for the humanities, which draws its inspiration from three thousand years of historical example. Ed Smith is a most annoying person: a double first in history from Oxford, capped three times for the English cricket team, leader writer for The Times, broadcaster and writer. How many abilities can one man have? He reminded us about what leadership truly is, about the need for patience and resilience and above all, the absolute need for character in an ethical sense. He defined the financial crisis as "the victory of expertise over integrity", the result of constructing short-term financial models "with inadequate knowledge of history". Leadership is character rather than credentials, judgement and bravery rather than expertise. Between them and an equally challenging presentation by John Abbott, they made not only the journey to St Andrews worth it, but also membership of HMC as a whole.

I suspect that I may develop these thoughts in a slightly different way at Speech Night!

Minister of Education

The word ‘historic’ can only ever be applied after, sometimes long after, an event has occurred. We need the perspective of time to allow a proper judgement to be made. I wonder if, over the next decade in education we shall look back on last week’s statement by the Minister of Education and say, “That’s when it all started; that’s when the sea change in Northern Irish education really began”.

The Minister’s statement to the Assembly on Monday last was long and, although accessibly written, on the surface rather dull, as only ministerial statements can be. Through it all, however, I had the sense of a clear mind and a visionary strategy. I use the word ‘visionary’ neutrally, because there are visions which are hallucinatory and hellish, as well as those which show us how to reach the Promised Land.
For the first time in my memory, the Minister chose to speak  directly to teachers by means of a video sent via the internet, and this, I guess, was meant to be reassuring and friendly. Its effect was peculiarly unsettling. He spoke about ‘working together’ and I wondered how that applied to the possibly hundreds of teachers about to be made redundant; I also wondered what part in the ‘working together,’ schools and teachers would play and whether the relationship would be quite as collaborative as the words suggest. When politicians speak, sharpen your sceptical pencil, reach for the code book and translate as you transcribe.

One of the things the Minister said he was going to do was to give boards of governors more power to exercise the ‘challenge function’. If there is one thing of which we may be sure in the Grammar School, it is that our Board of Governors exercises that function very ably indeed. A good school needs good governance and that is derived from good governors. In this the School is well served.