‘After Ripon; or “Hey, mister, I bet you’ve never seen a lesson like this before”?’
Written by John Morris.
At Ripon, I was one of the first group of twenty-four male students (1969 – 1972). I studied geography and was fortunate enough to have Mr. Stone as my Education tutor.
Early career
I began teaching in Bromborough, Cheshire, at a small, Merseyside, secondary school, with a friendly staff and a wonderfully progressive headteacher, Frank Bamforth, a member of the family of the saucy postcard manufacturers from Hebden Bridge. Many of his ideas and initiatives would still be seen as good practice, today. He encouraged my involvement in the Schools’ Council ‘Geography for the Young School Leaver’ project, which remained at the heart of my work throughout much of my career. After three years, Frank suggested that I was ready for promotion. During this time, Janet Preece and I married. She too was a former Ripon student (1968-1971), and we lived in a flat overlooking Liverpool Bay. Jan taught at Chatsworth Infants’ School, in Toxteth.
In my first year teaching (1972-3) a gender imbalance in the year group meant that my first tutor group was all male. Among these lads (now 65) was ‘Wacker’. This term is Liverpudlian slang for ‘the spirit of scouse’, a roguish behaviour. Indeed, he truanted every Friday to go fishing and despite every effort, I never managed to stop him!
We moved to Kent where our children were born. Living in Maidstone, we taught in Gillingham. Following a full HMI inspection, I was promoted to head of department. The successful department had over 120 pupils studying O-level and CSE each year. We introduced A-level, O-level geology, and fieldwork trips on the North Downs, to Margate and the North York Moors, where I sank the school’s minibus into a soft verge after spending an afternoon at Robin Hood’s Bay finding ammonites and belemnites in the lower Jurassic geology. Word of sinking got back to school before we did. As a member of the county’s examination consortium, I wrote questions, moderated coursework, and marked scripts for CSE.
From Hull to Birmingham
After five years, I was granted secondment to Hull University, where I undertook a BA (Education). My geography tutor was the brilliant Vincent Tidswell, whose book ‘Quantitative Methods’ had been a set book at Ripon. The other course modules were Educational Management, Curriculum Studies, and Educational Technology. After the secondment, we returned to Kent, but we were unsettled and felt a need to move on.
I was appointed head of humanities at Birmingham’s first community school. Meanwhile, Jan taught at a large (100 place) nursery, becoming its acting head. My school was an exciting place to teach. There was public access to many facilities, such as the library, swimming pool, fitness centre and community rooms. Challenging at first, pupils had no uniform and talked in first name terms.
The school had a large Afro-Caribbean population, with families coming from Africa and several of the Caribbean islands. It also had large Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Irish populations. The humanities team there contributed to an HMI enquiry into multi-cultural education. Its report acknowledged the work of sociologist, Maureen Stone (1981), who suggested that the pupils and their parents were not deprived but could be disadvantaged.
In fact, parents had high expectations of their youngsters doing well and of effective learning. They wanted high levels of achievement. The Commonwealth Institute were immensely helpful in supporting our multi-cultural enrichment and John Agard, the Caribbean poet, made a particularly valuable contribution. He enjoyed himself so much that he gave me the original draft of his poem, ‘What Er We Avin For Geography Miss’. Promoting fieldwork in this environment was not easy and much work had to be restricted to within the city and its suburbs.
Environmental issues
When the school system was re-organized, I was appointed to the senior team setting up the new inner-city sixth form college. As Head of Social and Business Studies, my responsibility was for teaching, learning and resources across about one third of the college. This included subjects as varied as Business Studies, Law, Sociology, Religious Education, Home Economics and Needlework. I taught geography and some vocational courses and introduced the new ‘Geography 16-19’ project with fieldwork on Cannock Chase. I was delighted when two of our students gained places to study urban planning at Oxford Brookes University. At this time, I was also part of the team writing one of the first GCSE syllabuses and with my friend and colleague, we wrote a course text and teachers’ folder, ‘Environmental Issues’.
Humanities Inspector and more education
In 1988, I was appointed Humanities Inspector, in Nottinghamshire’s Advisory and Inspection Service. I was responsible for history, geography, environmental education and later, religious education. I worked in schools and further education, field-centres and the agricultural college, where one always received a hearty meal.
One day, I went to monitor our field study in Sherwood Forest. I arrived at the centre, stopping the car outside. Suddenly, the car’s back doors opened, and two women got into the car! They began talking to me in German. The panic was massive. I speak French, but not German, but I knew that ‘nein’ meant ‘no’ and that probably taxi meant taxi. As I said ‘nein’ taxi, so the real taxi arrived. Then, they leapt out and got into the taxi and left. I was shocked and stunned by the experience!
Coping with such varied circumstances was a steep learning curve. In many primary schools, I promoted the creation and use of wildlife habitats on school sites. While my priority in secondary schools was to improve GCSE outcomes. Over several years, pass rates rose by around four percent each year. During this time, I was a local authority representative on the Midland Examining Group. Two more books followed (1994) and about a dozen articles in the magazine ‘Wide World’. These largely focused on Scandinavia, with articles as varied as the geography of Lego, Oslo’s traffic problems, volcanic eruptions in Iceland and the nomadic lives of the Sami. Into each article, I tried to slip a picture of Jan or our teenagers into the text.
Four articles from WideWorld. (1991, 1992, 1996, 1999.), including Jan and our children, in Oslo
In 1991, I undertook an M. Ed. by action research into how inspections could influence the teaching of history and geography in a small number of primary schools. Once again, I was fortunate to have great tutor, Emeritus Professor Michael Bassey, the one-time chair of the British Educational Research Association.
From OFSTED to Special Lecturer
When the LEA decided that it no longer wanted curriculum inspectors, I became the secondary inspector for Ashfield, a mining community alongside the M1, where one of my schools was the famous Sutton Centre, a successful school written about in ‘Success Against the Odds’. In this role, I supported governors in the appointment of headteachers and other senior staff. I supported senior leaders during the inspection process and in shaping their action plans, monitoring schools’ own evaluative processes.
When OFSTED required inspectors, I qualified as a registered inspector, being a team member on many inspections and leading five. I was privileged to see many excellent lessons, but there were some that were less good. On one occasion, a pupil commented, “Hey mister, I bet you have never seen a lesson like this before.” He was right.
When the authority withdrew from inspections, I undertook a responsibility for several initiatives, including collaborating with Professor David Hopkins at Nottingham University, as a Special Lecturer in Education, working on effective teaching, and learning and the development of leadership and management, and contributing to ’Improving the Quality of Education for All’. I also introduced the ‘Keele University Study of School Life’, which used the voices of pupils to target developments.
Working further afield
After a British Council visit to Edward de Bono’s team, in Malta, I became responsible for Gifted and Talented provision collaborating with other East Midlands LEAs. I benefited from two other study visits. First, to Bergen, where I joined an international team of headteachers, deputy heads, advisors and inspectors who investigated how students engaged in the co-determination of their learning in vocational studies. Norwegian hospitality was fantastic, with receptions taking place at both the start and finish of our visit.
During the visit, I was elected rapporteur for the group due to my experience of writing inspection reports. In the final meeting of the team, I rigorously applied Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ strategy, learnt in Malta, which enabled me to pull the report together very quickly. Each member of the team leaving Norway with a draft before they boarded planes from Bergen for Copenhagen and their connecting flights home. Soon after our return home, the report was published by the European Union.
Second was a visit to Toronto, attending lectures at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), and visiting schools across the city. Including the Mary Ward School, in the suburb of Scarborough. The city authority provided a school bus to take us between schools. This was an interesting experience as these vehicles are very basic. Toronto is a richly multi-cultural city where there are more Chinese than French speakers. On my return, I wrote an article about the city, published in the A-level magazine, ‘Geography Review’.
From airport security to school security
Towards the very end of my career, I had one further and very challenging experience. I became the inspector responsible for a secure unit, which had some seriously problematic students, some of which cannot be acknowledged for legal reasons. Entering the site was through a security bubble, pockets were emptied, and contents put into a locker. Doors were opened and locked when passing into corridors. Staff were not allowed to talk about their lives outside the establishment. Class sizes had a maximum of about five or six and pupils were searched going into and on leaving a classroom. It was said that some of the best rehabilitation of offenders occurred when students talked among themselves, challenged each other, and confronted their problems.
In short, I have always been committed to helping disadvantaged youngsters to succeed. My Education tutor, Mr. Stone offered some sound advice, “Don’t bore the children”. Hard to achieve, I realized the importance of that aim and always tried to live up to it. Along the way, it was a real privilege to have had such a wide variety of interesting experiences.
