Pipe boy

This all happened along time ago, and, media hysteria not withstanding, social services are loads better these days. And I’ve changed a few facts to disguise events and personages, but what follows sort of did really happen, once upon a time.

When I first became a teacher, I rather romantically imagined myself as being able to save vulnerable children from the terrible things in their lives. 20 years later, I know that very occasionally that happens – but far more often you are merely a powerless witness who knows that something bad is happening but without enough concrete evidence for anyone to actually do anything about it.

The Christmas holidays were fast approaching. Two weeks away from school may be a cause for celebration for most children, but not for pipe boy. Five days of safety left, five days or warmth, respect, of company.

Nine year olds from trouble backgrounds who are dispatched to my office for swearing do not usually have the emotional literacy to explain that they have been rude and aggressive because they are terrified. Eventually we decoded his behaviour. He had found a piece of work too hard, and, to cover his shame, had sworn at the teacher. As a school we try hard to make the classroom a safe place, where it’s ok to make mistakes, to take risks and to fail without ridicule, indeed, with applause. This was, however lost on him.

He wasn’t exactly the most academically gifted student ever to walk through our doors. It transpired that at home, his family, led by his father would taunt him about how thick he was and get his younger siblings to jeer at him and call him ‘mental’. And ‘mental’ he would become, lashing out violently, until his dad restrained him with a rope and, on one occasion, threatened him with a knife. After these occasions, he would run away for the day, lie low. I asked him where he went. To a friend’s house, he said, but sometimes their mum would get tired of him and chuck him out, and then he would wander around the estate. But he told me not to worry, he knew a special place where he could keep warm. There was this place with a pipe, and he’d sit by the pipe all alone until he judged it safe to return home.

After I rang social services, I expected the cavalry to turn up at school and whisk him to safety. Instead, I got a message that his case would be assessed after Christmas. With the end of term galloping towards us, I tried to find some sort of lifeline to get him through the holidays. I gave him the childline number. ‘If things get really bad, ring that number, ask for help’. His face lit up. ‘Will they send me a grown up to talk to me when I’m lonely?’ I had to concede that probably not, but they would talk to him on the phone and get him help if he really needed it. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll be alright, after all, I’ve got my pipe’.

Epiphany Assembly Ideas

Yes, it’s not yet Christmas and here I am thinking about next term’s assemblies! I love doing Epiphany in school. I always buy some frankincense and myrrh to use from http://www.incense-man.co.uk/ and make sure the smell has pervaded the hall before assembly starts (it hasn’t set the smoke alarms of yet…) and Sheila Redman’s ‘we have travelled’ from Hosanna Rock is terrifically funky is a primary school kind of way. http://www.redheadmusic.co.uk/musical.asp?userid=433969&musical=HR . I ask the children these sort of questions:
• The wise men gave gold because gold is precious. What is precious to you? If you had something precious to give away, who would you give it to and why? If you wanted to give God a present, what is the most precious thing you could give him?
• The wise men gave frankincense because it helped them to imagine what heaven smelt like. What do you think heaven is like?
• The wise men gave myrrh because it is used on people who are hurting? Who do you know who is hurting? If you could give a gift to someone who was hurting, what would you give them?


After all this jollity, the next day we would tackle the slaughter of the innocents and the flight into Egypt. I am sure many of us in our schools have children who have had to flee unfettered violence and who are seeking refuge in our country.
Were I a teacher in a secondary school I might dare to show the extract from the wonderful Xhosa film ‘Son of Man’ http://www.sonofmanmovie.com/ where the slaughter of the innocents is shockingly portrayed – but too graphic for primaries.
Certainly I will take the opportunity to talk about how the holy family were asylum seekers. Mary Hoffman’s wonderful book, ‘the Colour of Home’ would be a good choice. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Colour-Home-Mary-Hoffman/dp/0711219915 in linking this to contemporary reality. In this story, a Somali refugee child draws a disturbing picture reflecting the violence he has witnessed, and is then helped by his teacher and friends to reach a place of healing. Perhaps we could use this to discuss how it is possible to slowly move on from being deeply sad or frightened? In any event, I feel a play coming on where the fleeing Mary and Joseph face rejection by some and welcome by others. The play will culminate in Egyptians waving banners saying ‘asylum seekers welcome here’; banners that will then form part of a display about Epiphany in the entrance lobby. Then in time the display will come down to be replaced by Candlemass, but maybe the banners will remain.

God of the stranger and the host
Provide welcome and succour to the stranger
Disturb the comfort of the host to welcome the stranger
So that together they continue life’s journey with the peace, security and rootedness of people who share a common humanity.

Admission policies

Once there was a child, who got beaten up by life. No one can say for sure who the bandits were, maybe it was poverty or abuse or having to flee from a war-torn country, maybe it was having the wrong colour skin or wrong religion, maybe it was the emotional and cultural poverty of his parents, but on thing is certain, here he lay, in pain, suffering, in need.

As he lay there, his chances of a different future dying, there passed by a church school. When it saw him lying there it felt sorry for the child. But it did not stop to help, because it was late for a meeting of the admissions committee.

And then a diocesan board for schools walked passed. It too wished there were something it could do, but needed to be at an important press briefing, to share the latest statistics that proved that church schools were not socially divisive.

Finally, along came a county school. When it saw the child, it was full of compassion. It picked up the child, carried him to safety and paid above and beyond to enable his hurts to be healed.

Apart form being a head teacher, one of the things I get to do is inspect church schools. So far, I have only come across church schools that were Samaritan schools – schools that provide safe and healing places for damaged, hurting children. In fact, it is an amazing privilege to bear witness to the deep compassion, the going the extra mile, the sacrificial giving of self for others that is evident. I haven’t yet come across a school that walks by on the other side.

But, despite that, even though clearly many church schools are places where God’s creative, liberating and empowering love is made flesh in practical, down-to-earth ways that touch peoples’ lives, need we be afraid of asking ourselves tough questions? Do we not all need to hold up our admissions policies and view them through the lens of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Should we not desire eagerly to be held accountable for our social impact?

Without this, it would be very easy to delude ourselves that we were serving our neighbours in need when the reality is we are doing so only superficially. Unless we have hard data that tells us that we are taking more children on free schools meals than our county school neighbours, more children with parents in prison, more on the at risk register, with emotional and behavioural difficulties, with parents with chaotic lifestyles, more who find academic success a challenge, then all our inclusive words are so much rhetoric. Do parents who are drug addicts or prostitutes send their children to our schools? And how much more so or less so than our neighbouring schools? If our admission policies, in giving preferential admission to Christians, mean that are intake is less vulnerable than those in neighbouring schools, then that policy has failed in its role as a sign and instrument of the gospel. Of course it is perfectly possible that preferential Christian admission produces a more vulnerable intake, but, in the jargon of the day, where is our evidence? After all, admissions policies are also exclusion policies, since they define who is less likely to be offered a place..

We do not have this data. We need this data. How can we self evaluate our mission without it? The toolkit [the self evaluation document used in section 48 Anglican church school inspections] does not ask the question. When all church schools squarely looks themselves in the face and ask themselves these types of question, and publish their data and their plans to remedy any shortcomings, then we will be able to answer our critics with authority.

Every child matters

Flattery usually works. ‘You’ve got such a good reputation for being inclusive so I’m sure you’d be willing to give him a go.’  ‘He’ had been expelled from primary school aged six and had spent the last four years in a special school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties.  Where he had done really well, by all accounts, and was now considered ready to make it back to mainstream the following September, when he started secondary school.  The thing was, they said, could he spend a bit of time at our school each week, so ease the transition into full time mainstream education?

 Of course I had to say yes.  If a church school can’t offer welcome to reformed reprobates, then we might as well shut up shop.  The year 6 teacher wasn’t thrilled, but he was only going to come for one afternoon a week -with his own minder- and do art, his favourite subject. The special school would watch the whole thing very carefully and pull the plug if necessary.

 And it all went very well. He was no problem, did some good art, made friends, and we were provided with opportunities to bask in the glory of our wonderful inclusiveness. Until, that it, the people who administer the sats tests rang. Why, they wanted to know, hadn’t we submitted any results for this child?  We patiently explained that while he was, technically, on our register, he was in fact dual registered with a special school where he spent four and  a half days a week and that therefore, they had submitted his results. After all, the sats test English, maths and science and he had not attended a such class here ever.  Just art – for two hours a week.

 The authorities were not impressed. As he was on our register, his results had to be included in our statistics. Children like him sometimes find learning that little bit harder, what with their devoting lots of energy to sorting out chaotic emotions. He missed the level four gold standard by a wide margin and his ‘value added progress rating’ was risible. He’d been too busy transforming to learn sums and stuff as well.

 But, and here’s the rub, when it comes to statistics, every child matters.  He was worth 5%. 5% can represent the difference between the local authority leaving you in peace and sending in a SWAT team to find out why you are failing.

 It was still the right thing to do.

 

 

 

Beyond Bigotry

‘Why’, she wanted to know, in a Church of England school, were we studying Bangladesh?’  I confess that it was with a touch of smugness that I explained to her that Christians believed that God made Bangladesh as well as England.   And in that smug superiority lost a moment where I could have tried to communicate something of the gospel.

 Teachers who choose to work in multicultural inner cities tend to be Guardiansista lefty types who view white working class racism with the disdain that the first century Jews felt towards Samaritans.  I certainly could not wait to rush to the staff room to amuse and horrify my colleagues with the tail of her bigoted ignorance.   But gradually, over the years, I’ve realised that I am no stranger to ignorance nor bigotry. I’m just racist about white working class people, which seems to be more socially acceptable.

 She felt that her country had betrayed her and her kind.  She lived in rubbish housing, her children had no jobs and no prospects and the familiar culture she had grown up in was dying. All her neighbours were Bangladeshi, the butchers were all halal, the shops run by Asians, her street had been renamed with some foreign Muslim name, surely the Church of England for heaven sake, would be the one safe place where her identity would be safe? And here we were teaching her children all about ‘their’ country.  If we had to teach about somewhere foreign, couldn’t it be about somewhere ‘neutral’, somewhere less close to home’?

 It is, after all, quite natural to feel confused and bewildered if your familiar surroundings suddenly change dramatically in ways that are not of your choosing.  Not that that condones racism, but it does begin to explain her fear.  She wanted the church to be a totem of white working class cultural values, with god on her side, protecting her.

 And isn’t that more or less where we all start, with a little tribal god looking after you and yours.  And then, like the Israelites, over a very long time we make the journey from ‘my god’s better than your god’ to simply God, the God of everyone and beyond everyone, the cultural property of none of us.

 So I could have had a conversation with her about what she thought the church was for and what I thought it was for, and I could have suggested we look at how Jesus changes how we think about God, but I took cheap shots at her instead.

 

 

I've resisted starting a blog for ages -one because I'm middle aged and don't really 'get' the whole web2 or whatever its called thingy, and two because I've always though that they were only written by self-important people who were overly impressed by how interesting their thoughts were.  But hey - I  am  overly impressed by how interesting my thoughts are - who am I trying to kid!

Anyway, here in England the whole 'faith school' debate is raging. On one side, faith schools are evil, brainwashing, socially divisive promulgators of racial bigotry, on the other, they are an oasis of Christian values, a beacon shining out truth and love in a divided, materialistic and spiritually bankrupt society.  The first sides denies that any church school is socially and ethnically inclusive, the second that they all are.  The first side is uncritically critical, the second just uncritical.  Reality lies somewhere inbetween these two.

Why mission shaped schools?  Well, I am sure if you are reading this you already know all about the Church of England's 'Mission shaped church' agenda - all about bringing the church to the people rather than expecting the people to just come to the church - and therefore about changing - sometimes radically - how and where things are done.  It calls these 'fresh expressions' of what it is to be 'church'.  Somewhere in the original document is a little bit about church schools as 'fresh expressions' but its a very small section.  Yet church schools, at their best, embody everything that the 'mission shaped' agenda cherishes.  They take the church out into the community, to where people are, they work with families, they proclaim the gospel to people who would otherwise never encounter it, they are praying and worshipping communities, they provide a range of practical support for people above and beyond their basic remit of educating children.  This was recognised in the Dearing report where he said that 'church schools are at the heart of mission'.  But neither in the church itself nor in the schools is this much talked about - what a waste.  Clergy see church schools as a diversion from their 'real' work and church schools are too occupied with being a  school to reflect overmuch on what being a church  school might  - should - look like.  Let alone to think about that in terms of mission.  Especially if they are at the more liberal end of the spectrum - then the word 'mission' is seen as an embarrassment, making claims not appropriate in a multi cultural, multi faith environment.  But is doesn't have to be like this.

I am passionately committed to church schools as places where God’s creative, liberating and empowering love is made flesh in practical, down-to-earth ways that touch peoples’ lives.  I believe that church schools should be both signs and instruments of the gospel – distinctive and effective; serving, enriching and transforming communities.  I believe that church schools are at the heart of the church’s mission to this nation and I long to help church schools realise their vocation to live out both  aspects of their mission – effectively delivering the five outcomes of ‘Every Child Matters’ and also sharing the good news that every one of us matters to God.  I believe in church schools as places where valuing cultural diversity and promoting racial and social justice are absolutely integral to what they do.  That's what I want to talk about in this blog -most of the time.  I might wander.