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Editorial
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Tom Wheare
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Jonathan Barnes
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Gerry Cookson Email: gcookson@johncatt.com Conference & Common Room is published three times a year, in January, May and September. ISSN 0265 4458 Subscriptions: £25 for a two-year subscription, post paid; discounts for bulk orders available. Advertising and Subscription enquiries to the publishers: John Catt Educational Ltd, 15 Riduna Park, Melton, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 1QT. Tel: (01394) 389850. Fax: (01394) 386893. Email: enquiries@johncatt.com
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Alex Sharratt
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Summer 2019
HMC’s Autumn Conference later this month will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its foundation. On 21st December 1869, twelve Heads ‘traversed the dreary, sodden, mistclad country’ to join their convenor, Edward Thring, at Uppingham.
The twenty-one volumes of the Taunton Commission had been published in February 1868, and, to quote Nigel Richardson’s fine biography of Thring, ‘the report proposed a complete overhaul of English secondary education, backed by greatly increased central government oversight. Each school’s charitable endowments would be reviewed, with some being re-assigned to create new schools.’
Following the report, with its striking pre-echo of recent government initiatives in this field, the process of drafting legislation was set in motion by the education secretary, WE Forster. In the first fortnight of March 1869, a group of Headmasters met at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London to discuss the Bill, successfully sought a meeting with Forster, and met again to consider his response. Boosted by the experience, Thring suggested a further meeting at Uppingham at the end of the year. Thirty-seven schools were invited, but these did not include the nine ‘Clarendon schools’, which had been specifically exempted from the Taunton Report, and which Thring felt relied upon ‘their prestige and false glory’. Then as now, Eton was used as a shorthand synonym for exclusivity and elitism.
Mitchinson, convener of the first meeting at the Freemasons’ Tavern, said, ‘I think that if I may fairly claim to have laid the egg which developed into the present Headmasters’ Conference, Thring did all the clucking necessary’. Thring’s clucking has been transformed into an epidemic of headmagisterial twittering. Their thoughts are freely available, their experiences generously shared, and all this is in addition to the maintenance of regular letters to parents, former pupils and, if need be, the papers.
It is perhaps ironic, therefore, that Heads should be amongst the most frequent fliers in the cyber sky, since some of the problems currently most concerning schools stem from the proliferation of social media. Whereas once the telephone was a stationary medium for conversation, the written word and the pictorial image are now the dominant form on devices that are mobile and part of a vast network of services and possibilities. Managing the use of mobile phones is a challenge for teachers as well as parents, and attempts to restrict their use can be seen in school as well as at home. In addition to informing and educating their pupils about the wonders and potential of modern information technology, schools have to protect them from its harmful side, teach them how to cope with its infinite capacity for good and ill and, finally, prevent them from wasting too much time in this seductive virtual world.
Verba volant, scripta manent. The written word, either in the newspapers or on the smartphone screen, seems to possess authority and authenticity. ‘It must be true, I read it in the papers’ has now become ‘It must be true, I saw it on the internet’, or, worse still, ‘It must be true, I read it on the side of a campaign bus’. Headlines are very powerful and appear to convey simple, unarguable truths. Even when they are demonstrably false or nonsensical, they leave a parasitic message in the mind. Their spurious authority is exposed in Michael Frayn’s riff on Universal Headline Language in his wonderfully funny novel The Tin Men.
Politicians have never been very trustworthy with words, but the present generation of journalist politicians is blatant in its use of verbal smoke and mirrors. In their original profession they acquired the skill of mastering enough of any brief or argument to make use of it as a means towards their word count end. With the new-found authority of office, this technique has become the basis for establishing governmental policy. Meanwhile, in America, a president who does not even bother to pay that much attention to detail, unleashes a stream of bees from his teaming bonnet, whilst outmanoeuvring his opponents by simply ignoring the rules of the game.
Since words are the currency we use to transact thought processes, it would be as well to have a clear idea of what they mean and how to use them with some degree of precision.
Editorial
For instance, it would probably be more accurate to describe state schools as ‘controlled’, since ‘maintained’ is all too often the last thing that they are. Schools are specifically required to take responsibility for an enormous range of social problems and issues, whilst they may find themselves providing meals for children who are going without. Starved of funds and stripped of resources, it is appalling to see clothing banks outside primary schools, put there in the hope of raising extra money, however little, to provide some of the things no longer affordable on reduced budgets. The loss of local government involvement in state schools is a disaster and the current central government approach to funding them is destructive. For all the debate about charitable status, schools are surely best run on a not-for-profit basis, not on an as-cheaply-as possible basis. This, however, does not suit a government dedicated to austerity nor a governing body answerable to shareholders. For all its alleged faults, the independent sector keeps the money inside the school and uses it solely for the benefit of the pupils.
There are very few single sex, boarding only, independent schools in the UK. Most of the children in the independent sector are day pupils at schools with strong and valuable links to their local community. Governors, parents and former pupils maintain this link, which can be seen in the sharing of resources and the provision of bursaries that may well have a positive local effect. Schools have always offered fee reductions in the form of scholarships to attract talented children, and bursaries have historically been used to ease the fee burden on existing parents or to help families that would traditionally have sent children to the school to do so. The expansion of bursary funding, partly brought about by successive Governments linking the continuation of charitable status with wider access, means that more than one in three pupils in HMC schools now receive help with their fees, and this is matched by the fact that every school in HMC is involved in partnerships with state schools and local communities.
But, with the 54 international members of HMC and the 500 organisations in membership of COBIS, the independent sector also looks beyond this country and, indeed, Europe. Louise Simpson changes the focus of the regular Letter from America from North to South, describing the Head’s view from her office at St Paul’s School, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and regretting that she hasn’t made more progress in Portuguese. Independent schools are at the increasingly lonely forefront of MFL provision, so, at a time when this country is facing withdrawal from Europe, it is of some comfort that independent schools are working to maintain international links. One of the most important of these is the simple ability to be able to communicate. As Helen Wood writes, English is not enough.
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