HEADMASTERS’ BLOG NUMBER 33 – “PETROL, SIR?” - “NO TANKS.”

I felt like a lobotomised Neanderthal in the presence of Einstein when pupils of our Greenpower Engineering Team recently showed me around the electric car they had just built. How can children build (and race) full size cars? We didn’t build cars at School. We did woodwork. (Our creative summit was achieved by a friend who built an electric guitar in woodwork. It was a thing of beauty but, tragically, too heavy to pick up. To play it you had to stand next to it and strum it while it lay on a table. This did not make for a rockin’ stage show, and our band had to operate in a niche market of ourselves and whoever lent us the table). Anyway, the car is, I think, going to race at Rockingham and there are aspirations for Goodwood. Gone indeed are the days when to make an electric car faster you hitched it to a tow-truck.

*******************

Imagine going into the ring with Mike Tyson, lowering your guard and saying “Come on then big fella, hit me with your best shot.” This is akin to how I felt when sending out a parental survey via which all Prep and Senior parents have the opportunity not only to answer a bunch of questions but also comment on the School in any way they see fit. Now the results are in, however, I am not whimpering on the canvas for my mum, but rather undergoing Nietzschean invigoration. Sure, a very few people rained a flurry of merciless blows on the exposed Bromsgrove underbelly, but on the whole people were wonderfully positive and such criticism as there was seemed..... well, essentially Edwardian: a fact for which I am most grateful. Along the lines of: “Look, you’re a decent sort but sometimes even good eggs need a biffing. Now after I’ve thrashed you, I want you to learn your lesson, stand up and shake hands so we can get on with things. Righto?”

**************** 

Strange how Mr. Gove’s words work on the puerile mind: his love of tablets, for instance, still evokes in me images of children etching Latin onto stone. Now that he wants “I levels”, I am bound to recall the homonymous theme tune to Van der Valk which sat atop the pop charts for four weeks of my early childhood. (Only British oldies will understand .. some of you will have played it on the recorder in 1973). “I levels” will apparently be graded from 1 (inconceivably dreadful) to 8 (godlike), and the core subjects will be effectively free from coursework and modules. But why stop here? For example, perhaps people studying Environmental Studies could take C levels. And so on. Alas, all the fun seems to have gone from the examination hall. We had a teacher who wrote above the wall clock in my O level Physics exam:”Time will pass. Will you?” That’s jail today.

***************

Deep, deep down I’m all flowers and madrigals, but I admit it felt good to don the white hard hat recently and return to the bad, butch world of building sites. It’s he-man country at Housman Hall where two whopping new buildings are going up and two shockers are coming down. From the emerging first floor of the new build one can pose in a hi-vis jacket and hang around flexing a pec next to a pneumatic drill. At such times, I fancy cement dust is, to me, what sea-spray was to John Masefield. But then a real builder appears carrying bricks in his teeth, and I’m obliged to hand back my tough-guy outfit and slope quietly down the Kidderminster Road in a suit. As the now eponymous resident of Housman Hall once wrote:

And now the fancy passes by

  And nothing will remain,

And miles around they'll say that I

  Am quite myself again.

HEADMASTER'S BLOG NUMBER THIRTY-TWO – MC GLAMOUR AND THE FOURTH FORM MASSIVE

Bored with chicken drumsticks and keen to escape Gazebogate, I decided to have dinner on Monday night with The Princess Royal at St. James’ Palace. How lovely. Lord Adonis spoke most eloquently (why can’t we all be called Lord Adonis?) and the worth of boarding schools to under privileged children was espoused movingly by beneficiaries. After dinner we mingled over coffee and I found myself with a public figure. Looking to ingratiate myself within the corridors of power, I asked what particular issues were vexing him most at present. His reply was less than I’d hoped for: “Suarez: ten matches fair, do you think?”

*******************

Last week saw the annual “Ask the Headmaster Anything” session with the Fourth Forms. Frequently, this foolhardy exercise in pupil democracy gets bogged down in bizarre Sloughs of Despond such as “Why are teachers paid so much?” and “How come I get ripped off at the Tuck Shop?”, but I have to say this year witnessed a battery of mature and considered questions. “What is your favourite part of the School?” was a tester. My inclination was to say “Anywhere they can’t find me”, but I conceded that the green bounded by Thomas Cookes, Hazeldene and Old Chapel had a particular magic this time of year. A subsequent vox pops suggested my hazy Romanticism came a poor second to the Café.

*******************

We hosted eleven schools at the Ryland Centre last Saturday in what was surely the largest athletics meet since London 2012. Fed up with me swanning around like .. well like a swan, I suppose ..., the shining ones decided I should earn my keep and do some announcing over the tannoy. Wow! People, I have tasted power and found my destiny: it is standing next to a van in a field, barking instructions and watching hundreds of people from Britain’s most famous schools do precisely what you tell them to. Including their staff. I could barely contain myself. The temptation to start making hoax announcements or inviting everybody to do the hokey-cokey became too great, however, and I had to hand the mic back after an hour.

********************

I commented in Routh Hall last Friday on a very worrying incident. After the School photograph had been taken, a group of boys decided to take their blazers off without Mr. Bowen’s permission (at Bromsgrove this is up there with grand larceny), and then start throwing a ball around near a School building (which is our equivalent of a crime against humanity). The Gods were not smiling on the youngsters, however, because I walked around the corner and almost bumped into them. Like a herd of terrified impala before an advancing leopard, they fled for safety – not on the open savannah of course, but in their day house. All except one. My master class in stalking had panicked one boy and separated him from the herd. Terror was now overriding his sense of direction and so he ran behind a bush. A bush that was smaller than him. He looked at me in the hope I couldn’t see him. I could see most of him. I shook my head in pity and disbelief. But he still didn’t move. Had a Bromsgrove education really brought him to this? Sometimes even a leopard feels it’s just not a fair fight, and so I returned to my lair in dismay wondering if spatial awareness should be on our curriculum.

HEADMASTER’S BLOG NUMBER THIRTY-ONE - THE BABY’S NOT FOR TURNING

I’ve just been asked by a pupil whether I run this School “like Mrs. Thatcher ran the country.” I said I considered Suleiman the Magnificent to be a more accurate analogy. Unimpressed, the pupil then asked if I wanted a funeral like that afforded the Baroness. I said I’d settle for some shrieking, wailing and people throwing themselves to the ground in frenzies of despair, but other than that we could keep it simple. I chanced my arm and enquired of the political tyro whether she thought Headmasters should have a ceremonial funeral. Her “No Sir” was polite enough and very Bromsgrove, but the accompanying look of pity – something only a teenager can pull off properly – was as engaging as a pickled knee cap. Well, we brought it on ourselves. In Lucy Martin’s words: “The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.”

****************

Not wanting Kim Jong-un to have all the fun, I drove some staff to the cement works the other day. Oh yes, Good Time Chris was back in town. We actually visited the adjacent site where our builders had created one of the new Housman Hall bedrooms on their factory floor. And we brought a real live pupil with us to jump on the bed and test the design, fixtures and fittings. Anyhow, it was in that somewhat surreal environment that I was told there is a boy in this School who needs storage for his three sets of hair styling tongs. Three! For his hair! Am I the only man left who thinks all you need to get ready for the day is a bar of soap and a shower button marked “All Systems Go”?

*****************

While in the Prep School at the end of last term, I met a small group of Year 3s who said they preferred books to computers. I knelt and wept in their presence.

*****************
I’ve just come out of Chapel where the Senior School had been shown giant photographs on a drop down screen. Photographs of the academic staff when they were babies. I’m not sure what was going on but it certainly wasn’t the Sermon on the Mount in there. Indeed, I fear the School may be traumatised. Good grief, there were some sights. The fashion crimes perpetrated upon those children defy human compassion. It’s easy to see why many colleagues turned out the way they did, and I’ll certainly be more understanding in future. But then I recalled a picture of me as a toddler wearing ... a poncho. What happened to ponchos? And more importantly, what was my mother thinking? Anyway, those days are behind me now. The only fashion statement I ever make is if I miss a spot shaving.

HEADMASTER’S BLOG NUMBER 30 - WINDSOR CHANGE

The scary ladies and I were in the Prep School last week watching creative curriculum lessons. In one class, a little girl told me that the boy next to her was the “number one class genius.” The boy agreed this was the case but generously averred that the young lady was “number two class genius.” At this point another little girl said no, she herself was in fact the “number two class genius”. The original girl thought about this for a moment, acknowledged there might be some truth in the observation, and then cheerfully demoted herself. It struck me that Ban Ki-moon’s job would be considerably easier if we kept that attitude into adulthood.

******************

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the difference between a professional musician and a large pizza is that a large pizza can feed a family of four. Undaunted, our young vocal and instrumental heroes recently offered a gripping Senior School music competition, and then the School orchestra gave a cracking performance of the opening movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony in Routh Hall. It took me back to a conversation I witnessed during my school days when a friend of mine was arguing the toss with a teacher over homework. The boy’s argument was along the lines of “How come when Schubert doesn’t finish something he’s hailed as a genius but when I don’t finish my homework I get a detention?” I was waiting for a response worthy of Oscar Wilde but, alas, it wasn’t that kind of school. The teacher hit him over the head with a text book.

******************

Bigger and stonier than my gaff, Windsor Castle hosted our Chapel Choir last Wednesday. Evensong in St. George’s Chapel was sublime, and as the Choir pulled their “newsletter faces” for the photograph afterwards, I underwent a shameful moment of hubris. Poor show, I know. But how many schools, when they are one match away from Twickenham in the Daily Mail Cup, would have a choir singing Evensong at Windsor Castle just days before? It seemed to me, in the Windsor twilight, that some schools are so obsessed with specialisation for the sake of tables and charts that they ought to pause and reflect on Hillaire Belloc’s tongue in cheek advice to a young writer: “Concentrate on one subject. Let him, when he is twenty, write about the earthworm. Let him continue for forty years to write of nothing but the earthworm. When he is sixty, pilgrims will make a hollow path with their feet to the door of the world's great authority on the earthworm. They will knock at his door and humbly beg to be allowed to see the Master of the Earthworm.”


******************

One trench in to the new Housman Hall build and we’ve only gone and found King Arthur, the round table and all his knights under the car park. There they are, perfectly preserved in full armour with Galahad clutching the Holy Grail for good measure. An absolute nightmare. The Council would never let us continue if they knew, but parents will be pleased to hear we kicked dust over the find and then went back under cover of darkness to pour concrete foundations over the bejewelled Camelot floor. I pinched the Grail and stuck it in the Elmshurst trophy cabinet. Nobody’s any the wiser and the programme is back on schedule. Close one.

HEADMASTER’S BLOG NUMBER 29 - ONE MAN’S MEDE IS ANOTHER MAN’S PERSIAN

Michael Gove wants performance related pay for teachers. Speaking on behalf of my fellow whinging, stress-obsessed freeloaders, I would humbly point out that this might prove tricky. It’s not that I think idlers who fail to deliver shouldn’t be roasted alive in the ninth circle of hell – I absolutely do – it’s just that Bromsgrove can’t operate like the trading floor. For example ..... let’s say that at some point during my annual fifty three weeks of holiday I prepare a half decent lesson. Unlikely, I know, but bear with me. Under current practice, assuming I haven’t gone on strike, I rock up to School in September and cascade my inspiration over all and sundry that they might secure top results for their pupils. But no longer. Not under Mr. Gove. Now my colleague is the enemy. And, like Dick Dastardly in the much missed Whacky Races, my job is to stop anybody else doing better than me. More anon.

**************

So they’ve found Richard III. I had a hunch they would. Sorry. He isn’t the first man to leave a Leicester pub car park with a reconstructed face, but this whole business has left me bereft for other reasons. You see, my historical knowledge is based entirely on the old Ladybird Books. And in one of those books (I’m talking the proper Ladybird books with the text on one side and a colour picture on the facing page) there is the terrifying image of a man in black skulking into the room where the two little princes are asleep. I don’t care if it’s not true: it’s scared me witless for years. Haven’t slept since. Leave it alone. History should be like a piece of music that takes on its own life after the artist has left us. William Tell becomes the Lone Ranger and Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto is about a grey railway station and English repression. I’ve no issues with this. Richard has actually done very well out of being misrepresented, so why should scholarship and truth wreck that now? I demand my stories back. Soon they’ll be telling me Vlad the Impaler worked for the Samaritans.

**************

Fewer goodies than usual were found in the General Knowledge entrance examination answers this year. Nonetheless, I was gratified to learn from the 11+ papers that the timpani are in the “concussion” section of an orchestra and that “Covent Garden” is “where nuns go to pick flowers.” James Bond works for King Arthur (somebody please make that movie) and Ireland is ruled from the Kremlin. Otherwise, there’s little to report from the impressive 2013 batch. Except perhaps the charming observations that among the ten largest economies of the world is that of the Hebrides and that the late Sir Patrick Moore presented The Sky At Noon, which sounds to me like a wonderfully evocative black and white western.

**************

Back to my performance related pay. It’s all relative, so if I get better results than the other bloke, I’m flush. Next day I burn my resources (once I’ve used them) and start tampering with X’s whiteboard notes when I’m covering his lesson. Tee hee. I disseminate lies and misinformation when I encounter any pupil not in my class. (“Richard III, Lisa? Did for ‘em both he did, and no mistake.”) I sabotage a top language teacher’s cassette player, replacing a French oral with a dodgy Serge Gainsbourg number, thus getting my unsuspecting rival struck off. In the car park, I slash the tyres on the away team’s coach, ensuring there’ll be no evening revision for Harrow. Finally, I offer private tutors a cut if they help get 3W’s grades up. Ming the Merciless would blush.

But in doing all of this, I’ve forgotten to coach my Hockey 3rd team, who’ve just lost to a local rival for the first time. Aaarrgghh. Pay docked. I can hear Mutley laughing.

HEADMASTER’S BLOG NUMBER 28 – ICY THE FUTURE

So, Mr. Gove has spoken. I’ll summarise. From 2015, “Knowledge” will become the Everton of education. With a big fan base and a long history, it’s set to challenge the nouveau “Skills” (Chelsea?) for a Champions League place. Meanwhile, “Memory”, for so long languishing at the bottom of the lowest tier is set to do a Bradford and turn up at Wembley after years in the wilderness. “Coursework” and “Modules” are the Aston Villa and Newcastle of the new order (hanging on but it sure don’t look good). AS levels are QPR (they’ll still exist but won’t attract Premier League clientele). The option to switch allegiance to the IB (La Liga?) remains.

*************

My house backs onto the Prep School’s playing fields, and I have recently had the pleasure of watching carefree young Bromsgrovians gambol and pronk on the snow in scenes reminiscent of Breughel – assuming Breughel had moved to the Antarctic with a herd of springbok. Not really. To be honest, the view from my window looked more like something from Assassin’s Creed. People wary of Darwinism or prone to thinking Lord of the Flies was overly harsh on our little ones need only watch youngsters in the snow. The second a back is turned, the snowball onslaught begins: prolonged and ruthless. Some schools send parents twee Christmas cards of their pupils cheerfully enjoying the winter wonderland. No fear. All that’s missing with our lot is the Attenborough commentary as the pack takes down a fully grown adult.

*************

But the snow didn’t stop me getting in to work: I’m a trooper if nothing else. It’s a good ten metres from my front gate to the Mary Windsor entrance, which is more than enough for catastrophe to strike given that my performance on ice is not so much Torvill and Dean as a new born gnu. I wasn’t the only hero though. Let’s hear it for the Bromsgrove Support Staff who, with shovels and muscles, effected the biggest topographical clearance since Moses had a bash at the Red Sea. Note this, though. Last Friday, when Britain ceased to function, two sets of visitors turned up for full tours of the School. One from Budapest and the other from Berlin. All the Brits cancelled.

*************

I often feel compelled to remind myself how stupid I am. In such circumstances I read the late Christopher Hitchins. Barely a word the super brainy “Hitch” wrote or uttered failed to attract opprobrium and vitriol from some quarter or other. “You have to choose your future regrets” is one of his quieter meditations, however, and I was reminded of this as I looked at our architect’s drawings for the next phases of the Bromsgrove School site masterplan. At Easter we will start work on two new boarding facilities on the Housman campus, and then we will return to the main campus with all the verve of Donald Trump on Prozac. But one has to prioritise, and in doing so one knows that a particular year group will just miss out on this or that wonderful new facility. So, when looking ten years ahead (and that’s what we are doing), those future regrets amass strangely but inevitably beside the mountains of wonder and excitement.

HEADMASTER'S BLOG NUMBER 27 - VORSPRUNG DURCH NIGHTMARE

Happy new year to you all. Only one riff for the first blog of 2013, and don’t tell me some of you didn’t burn the turkey fretting about it.

Clearly the Bromsgrove Headmaster’s new car should have been a diesel Jaguar, shouldn’t it? Eco(ish) British trad, Indian wonga. A slosh of the hi-tech new world order with a twist of wistful yearning for briars and snuff-flecked lips. Elgar goes to Bollywood. In fact, let’s have that up in Latin above the South Gate.

“A little raga with your Finzi, Headmaster?” Don’t mind if I do.

But no. Oh no. You see, I don’t know anything about cars – absolute diddly, honestly - and I made the catastrophic mistake of reading reviews that dealt purely with quality as opposed to image. In other words, I did everything I’d want parents to do when choosing a School. I shunned the dinner party tittle tattle and did some hard core research. I also figured I had no need for a large car and duly looked at the next size down.

And instead of reading “Top Gear Magazine” (which, were it an educational guide, would say: “Oh I’m sure it’s a wonderful School, darling but, strictly entre nous, it’s not quite.. well you know, darling .. not quite .. how shall I say? .. Oh if only one could say “pleb”, darling, but one can’t anymore. More Taittinger, sweetie?”) I read “What Car.”

Never again. “What Car”. If “What Car” reviewed Bromsgrove School I believe it would say; “Brilliant. Go there.” But that honesty is not what one needs in a world where one’s self esteem is based entirely on the approval or otherwise of the chattering classes. I needed an image savvy lifestyle guru (i.e. a Fourth Former) to tell Mr. Laughing Stock point blank that slippered gents who are partial to a little Schubert while pootling down the motorway at 60 mph do NOT BUY...

A BMW 3 Series.

Dummkopf! Forget it’s an omnipresent motoring leitmotif (there are more of them on the roads than Mondeos, I’m told) that does 60 miles to the gallon. Forget too it’s a stolid, conservative staple back home in Munich. Forget even that it gets top marks in perishing “What Car” for just about everything. Remember only that in the UK it’s apparently been hijacked as the car of choice for every non-indicating, boy-racing, taste-bereft aspirational moron in the country. And now I’m one. How did this happen? Did all you BMW 3 series owners know this when you bought one? You thought you were getting Eton but let me tell you, chums, you’ve signed up for Grange Hill. (Apologies to younger readers for the arcane reference).

I discussed the matter with a Sixth Former who agreed the BMW was indeed a cracking car but was perceived in the UK as being the flash alternative for people who can’t afford genuine flash. He confirmed this was a PR catastrophe for a Headmaster on a moral crusade. So what should I do?

Well here’s the thing. Apparently, I wait. That’s right. I wait. Because, it seems, the BMW’s image is changing. The look-at-my-lifestyle aspirants are realising the car’s ubiquity has undermined their reason for buying it in the first place. And I am reliably informed by pupils who know these things that the next brand to be hijacked will be..... Audi. Oh yes. The auto-fashionistas tell me that if I can just hold on for a bit, Audis will start cutting me up on roundabouts and BMW drivers can get back to stopping for old ladies. So, if you’re smugly driving an Audi thinking you are the cuddly David Attenborough of motoring, you can wipe that smile off your face now. Troubled times ahead, my friends.

Anyway, since The Hobbit is on at the flicks, I’ll finish with a word from local lad JRR Tolkien, who said: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” Shame.

Happy New Year!