One of the strangest stories from back when Michaela first began accepting visitors was the theft of knowledge organisers. While those that worked there were – of course – offended I also remember them being really confused.
The knowledge organisers were drawn from Michaela’s curriculum.
What possible use could they be to a school that didn’t teach the same things they did?
I’m pretty sure the explanation for these thefts is around a common confusion of surface features and deeper structures. Surface features are the things you see as soon as you walk into a school building; signage, the way the school day begins, the way lessons start and the resources children use.
These artefacts are the products of much deeper and less obvious thought – the purpose of and reasons for these things are much more important than what’s visible on the surface. If you’ll forgive a very tired metaphor what is seen is only the tip of the iceberg.
The aping of practice without understanding of why it exists is only logical if you don’t have any rationale for anything yourself. My bet would be those stealing Michaela’s knowledge organisers didn’t have strong curricula themselves and so simply did not know what they were taking was just icing on a very rich cake.
This also happens when schools adopt the surface features of cultures alien to their own. And as with curriculum those most vulnerable to this are those least sure of who they are and what they stand for.
Michaelmas. Straw boaters as a requirement for the summer term uniform. Chanting Invictus. Lacrosse. Prayers in the chapel. Prep after school. Clicking to show appreciation of a good point made by a classmate – although there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things insisting upon them just because other successful schools do them does no good at all and is a confusion of form over substance.
Schools absolutely should be weird, odd places that have routines and practices completely indecipherable to outsiders. Some should have school farms for reasons nobody can remember. Schools in Scotland (and Corby) should make a big deal about Burns’ Night. Others should make their new Year 7s walk the boundary on their first day and recite a poem under The Oak Tree in Godwin’’s Field. These things are how schools become distinct, unique places that are identifiable things people can belong to and be proud of.
Schools that understand this are tapping into the same power even if the way it is expressed may appear very different – they know that frivolity is foam on the ocean – that beneath it lies years of tradition which gives a sense of permanence and a sense of belonging to something that matters.
Private schools are good at this. They should be. They have lots of advantages – long histories, track records of academic success, famous alumni and the self-confidence that comes as a product of it all. They know that although the outside world might laugh at their silly summer shorts this binds those behind their gates together. Perhaps this is why struggling schools in disadvantaged areas seem to most prone to aping the surface features of private schools – maybe, I think the feeling goes, if we behave like them we will come to be like them in more substantive ways too.
But it doesn’t work like that.
Grafting rituals and routines from alien contexts often just looks silly. We don’t wear gowns. We don’t call our teachers masters and we don’t present the best scholar of the year with a gold-plated fountain pen. When we do these things we don’t feel like our supposed betters at all. We just feel ridiculous.
This sort of thought demonstrates a depressing lack of confidence in our communities too – a tacit admission what we have to offer is too meagre to bother celebrating and the best we can hope for is metamorphosis into ‘better’ sorts of people.
There is no reason any schools should be this insecure. We are all parts of communities of which we can be proud. If we feel we can’t be we should look hard until we are. If we can’t find anything to love about where we work we should get out. All areas have histories and schools should celebrate these – whether it is a theatrical tradition or a culture of hard work in industry.
Schools should be expressions of the communities they serve – they should not be shining castles on the tops of dreamy hills. They should be rooted. They should have ways of doing things which proudly express who they are.
This is hardest in the most hopeless of places where many – understandably but wrongly – feel they have no heritage at all. Schools with huge staff turnover which have had ten different ‘mission statements’ in almost as many years. Schools in places where the jobs dried up years and years ago. In these places traditions may have to be started from scratch but when this is necessary these should come from inside the school and local community not imported from elsewhere.
Schools seeking to build a true culture – what James Handscombe would call an ethos – need to be clear on their values and then exemplify them in ways that fit the people who learn and work in them. Trying to corporatise your way into this through branding and businessy sounding soundbites never works because as much as they try convince us differently we all know corporations don’t love us and that we’ll never really belong to them.
We need to be schools – different to every other institution and different to each other.
We must be ambitious and proud and silly. We must be hardworking and weird. We want children to go to our schools to be surprised when they leave school and find that not every school had a rota for who fed the parrots and not every school finished the term with a performance of the school dance.
All of this is something Michaela understands very well. People ask a lot of questions about MCS but not enough people ask about who it’s named after and why.
It’s something we at Lodge Park Academy understand well too – which is why as much as we admire any other school we’ll never try to be anyone else.
Ben Newmark 