I’m fascinated by the ‘Outstanding’ Michaela inspection. You can read it at http://mcsbrent.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Michaela-Community-School-OFSTED-report-final.pdf. 
 
The school is in Brent, a disadvantaged area of North London and has a high proportion of students from ethnic backgrounds.  
 
The school isn’t yet full (I think it has just years 7,8 and 9 at the moment), and when it is will be a small secondary school (that's got to be a good thing in itself), with about 120 pupils in each year group.  The fact that it’s not full means that no – or few -  external examinations have been sat and hence there is no comparative data for GCSE results.  My personal experience of Ofsted has been that if results are good, they focus less on the teaching, and that if teaching is outstanding, then results also have to be good to warrant an outstanding grade. So an ‘Outstanding’ result now may or may not augur well for the future, if an Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ is something to which a school or principal might aspire.     
 
So, apparently at Michaela there is less ‘marking’ by teachers and a lot of self-assessment.  That might, or might not be a good thing, depending.   And certainly from the school website it looks as if there is a good deal of responsibility put on parents to police, monitor and check homework. There may be some value in this, but it won't work for every child, and that may not be the child's fault.   Discipline seems to be strict, with punishments for attending class without a pencil, for lateness and so on.  Again, let's hope there are sensible exceptions made.   There also appears to be a lot less active, constructivist learning and much more whole-class instruction. While a move away from a prescriptive 'you must do active learning' Ofsted approach is indubitably welcome, if the move is to whole-class direct instruction, I welcome it not.  We should be developing critical thinkers, independent learners, not mini-encyclopaedias robotically reproducing what they've been taught. 
 
This combination of teaching activities and support for learning may of course produce 'results' in the short term.  And the school does put an emphasis on pastoral work, on caring and so on – for example, they have ‘family’ school lunches where students serve each other and the staff, pass items ‘politely’ and clear up after themselves and each other.  I wonder how important that really is? No doubt these are skills that it’s not a bad idea for children to have – what used to be known as ‘domestic’ skills for which I'd have got a Brownie hostess badge when I was a young girl.  But in the scheme of life events, is that this important?  Perhaps some form of critical pedagogy, teaching children about social justice, and its links to identity, and about concepts of equity and equality, would be of more value long term than learning which side the napkins should be placed when setting the table?

This morning there was a meme going round about how children who had survived the Grenfell fire disaster had been turned away from school by the headteacher.  This was allegedly reported by the Daily Mail.   It turns out, as far as I can tell, to be fake news and I can't find any trace of the story on the DM or other websites.

So what is that all about?  In fact, there are some true stories of a pupil turning up the morning after the fire to sit a GCSE Chemistry exam.   (It was a young women named Ines Alves, reported here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/15/grenfell-tower-fire-teenage-survivor-exam
)/  

It's interesting that 'being turned away from school for not having uniform despite tragedy'  is the kind of story that people would make up - and perhaps even more interesting that it is, in this current neoconservative climate, believable.  But of course the (probably fictional) headteacher and local authority were vilified on social media- which may be a measure of the current anti-establishment feeling which has been  engendered by the Corbyn election campaign and post - election events (the Prime Minister's supposed 'unfeelingness' in not meeting fire victims, Andrea Leadsom's support of her, and so on).  I'm not too sure what to make of all this, but certainly the 'Fake News' issue, which has been made so clear by Trump and his comments on the inauguration day crowd photographs, is one that needs to be held firmly in mind.    

A Montessori school in Sussex? In the early 1900s my grandmother trained as a Montessori teacher, so it is interesting to see the idea coming back 100 years on. The concept of alternative schooling for many is embodied in Summerhill school - as well as in various forms of alternative provision which exist for 'naughty' children or those for whom it is deemed that mainstream- or academy provision, (increasingly less mainstream) is not appropriate. I'll watch this development with interest- I like the idea of children, and adults, deciding what to learn based on a 'spark'.