On the side of the Crow by Christien Gholson

This collection of “prose poems” is unsettling. (Prose poem is a description that makes me cringe a bit – perhaps calling them single page short stories might be better). 

They are stand alone pieces and yet gradually you pick up on the same names being mentioned – there is a thread that runs between them, but what exactly that thread is never comes completely into focus.  They are both gritty and surreal, are they of the past or of the future? you can’t pin them down, but there is a deep sense of the “real” about them.  They force the reader’s own imagination into work as you try to make sense of the world that is being sketched before you – and that is the real strength of the collection, they demand your input and so you are drawn in.

Vision and Values in Primary Education Edited by Kathleen Taylor and Richard Woolley

It was an unusual experience reading this book, the collected word of a number of authors, because for once I knew most of them - from the time I spend in the midst of Bishop Grosseteste University (nee College).  Not all of them are still at BG, but that would have been the place where most of the paths crossed that led to the creation of this book. I could hear they individual voices speaking through the text.

While I knew them at BG, mostly what I shared with the authors was the usual grumbles over coffee that will be heard in any staffroom and so it was really good to encounter them here with their profession hats on.  But I think it was also good to have that other insight and as such to ground what is often an idealistic book - that these ideals are not the product of super-humans but ordinary mortals acts to empowered the writing rather than detracting from it (and I think that they would be please to have that insight shared – these are, if we believe what they have written, educators who would see no value in maintaining a mystique around their presence).  

Among the chapters some were more directly practical; and perhaps I personally took less from those, but I am not a Primary School Teacher and therefore not really the target audience and so that is no criticism of the book.  It was instead with the more “philosophical” chapters that I personally found the greatest connection.  In part this was me reading as a School Governor, for whom the key question is mostly “What?” rather than “How?” a school should deliver.  But I think I was equally making connections as a “general reader” – so much of where is at steak here is about the kind of society you wish to live in not just the running of a primary classroom, and as such you don’t have to be an educationalist in order to take an interest.

I was recently at Local Authority session for School Governors where an HMI was forcefully asserting that Ofsted has no agenda on the “How” of what you do in school, as long as it works.  The difficultly comes in the definition of “works” – which for Ofsted has to be framed in the measurable standards as captured in SATs and other formalized assessment measures. What the HMI was sort of saying was the best education will result in high standards in SATs etc as an incidental result rather than as its sole focus.  If you take him at his word (and I am not sure how much Ofsted’s working practices bear witness to this belief…) Ofsted is entirely in tune with the message of this book – an idea which might both horrify and delight (and perhaps also mystify) its authors!

There are some fundamental skills which Primary Education needs to impart, such as moving children from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”, but actually a greater part of the curriculum should be there to inspire the life long desire and the habit of learning, rather than thinking it has delivered a package of knowledge (armed with which the child can go away and get on with life).  

I accept that my own Primary Education is from an era when facts were out of fashion, the National Curriculum arrived in my final years at Whitings Hill, but as far as I can tell it was yet to have any real impact in our classrooms by the time we left – and Literacy Hours were not yet even a twinkle in a Secretary of State’s eye.  I encountered SATs only at the end of year 9, and, having opted out of school for most of the preceding term, I ended up doing an English SAT on Romeo and Juliet without actually having read any of the play (it was not a complete disaster and for better or worse I have gone on to often deploy similar tactics in the rest of my educational career…).  As such I am naturally drawn to the “softer” side of education and away from “hard” facts (I got through my History A-Level without learning a single date – but without “flying colours” either…).

As the report “Every Child Matters” has now been superseded we are once again freed to say that we believe that every child matters without it being part of an “Agenda” or a hallow cliques.  Running throughout the book it an approach in which the starting point should be a delight in every child, the belief that they not only matter but are amazing.  This in not to say that they always (or in some cases even often) make that an easy thing to remember, but it is true. 

I am not sure how much the coming together of the authors at BG as an institution with a Christian identity will have impacted their thought, or how many of them personally own a Christian identity, but the valuing of the potential and the inherent gifts of each individual is surely an expression Christianity at its best. There is much that the Church could learn, healthy Churches will be learning communities built on individuals exploring their potential, not on rout learnt catechisms or buzzing with this week’s proof text.  

The following quote really spoke to me “Education should seek to produce learners that are curious, creative, imaginative, motivated, enthusiastic, and prepared to take ricks. It should develop aspirational, self-assured, flexible, and resilient human beings who not only can answer questions independently, but seek to raise their own questions and hypotheses as well.  It should be liberating and empowering … [It] should allow children to not only produce products, but also to luxuriate in and dwell on the process of the learning journey.”  You only have to substitute a couple of words to shift it from the context of school to church.

A Commonplace Killing By Siân Busby

To approach a novel where the foreword is a eulogy to the author from her grieving husband sets a degree of tension, will she, Siân Busby, overshadow, overpower, the narrative.  There is a caution in reading this, the final act of a literary life. I was thankful that in actual fact there was very little sense that this was the work of someone who knew they were terminally ill, only by over stretching the analogies would you make any of the characters a proxy for Siân.  It was only at the penultimate page that I experienced a moment of transference – as she wrote “It would be hard to die like that, he thought; knowing the precise moment. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. To have death steal up on you knowingly, expectantly.  He imagined that all you can do in such circumstance as that would be to deny that it is going to happen; believe that there will be a reprieve – even up to the last second…” you could not escape that fact that in writing it she was in her final days, ok Cancer does not give you quite the exact time and place in the way that the hangman did, but by that stage in the illness, for all intents and purposes, it as unavoidable a death sentence as in the novel.  There is a kind of arrogance almost to continue to write a novel, a long term project, against the backdrop of such a short term future – it is a declaration that you are in charge – that you can out run the hangman?.

Turning to the substance of the narrative; I found DDI Cooper a bit of a cliché, a mixture of Morse and Frost. There were a couple of moments when I could all too readily imagine the second rate TV adaptation, with Cooper and the plucky Policewomen Tring solving every murder under the sun despite the best, and well intentioned but Neanderthal, efforts of the rest of the Met.  But this is to Siân’s credit, it made me cringe exactly because her writing desires better. 

What was most interesting was the way in which Siân inverted the general narrative; this is of World War Two as a period of sacrifice and hardship followed by a great liberation with the coming of peace and the welfare state.  The common bond between the very different lives of Policewomen Tring and Lillian Frobisher was that the war years had been years of freedom and self-fulfillment which were not carried over into the peace.  The old rules were being reapplied but these women were not prepared to take the steps backwards which would have been needed to fit contentedly into old role models. Lillian is by far the strongest character in the novel – and her storyline is the captivating one, the parallel track of the police investigation, while not badly written, is definitely second fiddle, perhaps because it is centered on DDI Cooper rather than Tring.