As I sit on Sunday afternoon
among so many, young and old,
(so many old!) and listen
to the Mozart, Mendelssohn,
Louisa Staples, Finchley children,

I begin to feel the weight
of what has happened,
sense the pressing presence
of the silent listeners,
six million souls beside us;

quickly calculate
what all these souls had weighed,
move to metric from imperial,
from kilogrammes to tonnes:
five hundred thousand tonnes;

then every man and woman,
every frightened child
who couldn’t catch the train
looks down at us, remaining
Kinder, friends and families,

outsiders like myself
who fail to understand
why there’s still music,
why sorrow never stops,
why the partings carry on.

This poem came out this morning in response to a concert I attended on Sunday afternoon at the Camden Roundhouse, the London premier of Carl Davis’s ‘Last Train to Tomorrow’.

It seemed so appropriate that the composers in the first half – Mozart and Mendelssohn – had been child prodigies, as is the violinist, Louisa Staples. Time and again, speakers referred to the children in the audience.

Of course, an event at which many of the Kinderwere present would be dominated by the elderly. But that’s important: as I told my class, theirs is the last generation who will hear from the survivors of this depraved act.

While speakers spoke and musicians played, I felt as if we weren’t alone that afternoon and I actually sat and calculated what six million people would weigh – so macabre – as I looked up at the ceiling of the Roundhouse.

The last stanza came to me when I’d read Felix Mendelssohn’s musings on death. It also draws on what I heard Barbara Winton say, quoting her father Sir Nicholas Winton: that we never learn.

My thoughts on Robin Williams and his death.

I wrote this after hearing of a suicide on my tube line. This is what had happened that evening, perhaps even that moment, as I sat above the same line, half a mile further into London, at a Quaker meeting in Friends House. At a terrible point in my life, I’d looked down at the line on the same platform and had considered the same, desperate step, but I cling to my wonderful up-and-down life too jealously.

I heard afterwards from the sister of the person who’d died: she approved of what I’d written. That meant something, as it is difficult and dangerous to speak or write about another’s torment.

EUSTON TO FINCHLEY ROAD

They said you jumped, but not like that;
they made it so much more anonymous.
It hit you once, then rumbled to a halt.

As I’d listened to the rumble in the quietness,
five times it hit me: everything is meant to be.
Five times amongst my friends, I felt the stillness talk.

One time, one line; two lives, two spaces.
Now I’ll never know you but I know that place,
that platform edge; I will not join you yet.

* update – read this about a 12 year-old Little League baseball player *

SKY

A few years ago, I was ploughing up and down the pool. It was close to closing time and I was putting in my mile-a-night lengths.  As I turned, I saw a girl preparing to enter the lane next to me. She was around thirteen or fourteen, the same age as my daughter. She was at the neighbouring school, so we knew of her. And as I returned to my steady progress, the shock wave hit me. Sky Draper had just swum past me, with a power and determination that seemed impossible from a still slight body. She swims like a girl – and much more.

Sky is an inspirational triathlete, perhaps all the more so as she has, like my daughter, recently developed Type I diabetes. But she isn’t simply a symbol; there’s more to her than that. I like what she says about her comeback and about herself:

The most important message the narrative gives us is hope; which in my eyes is the most important concept we cling to as humans … I’ve made a heck of a lot of mistakes, and yet learned from them to an unquantifiable extent … I have no regrets about taking time for myself … Sport is what I do. It’s not who I am.

You can read more about her here.

JESS

I remember my daughter’s first parents evening at the very beginning of Year 7. A mother spoke up, asking how her daughter’s homework could fit around her exacting gymnastics regime.  The girl managed somehow, and walked on the stage last week, a little while before my own daughter, to receive her prize at their final Speech Day. But now she’s not just a gymnast: Jess Gordon Brown is also an inspiration, winning gold in her category in the national schools Judo championships. She fights like a girl.

AND TWO DAMES

Finally, on two occasions I have had to fight to regain my ability to walk, involving a long rehabilitation, painful physiotherapy and endless hours at the gym after rupturing my patellar tendon. I needed something to inspire me.

The first time round, I received it from Dame Ellen MacArthur who was, at the time, completing her amazing Vendee Globe success. Seeing her struggling against anything that nature could throw at her got me out of my chair and back on my feet.  She sails like a girl.

The second time round, hour after hour on the running machine and cross-trainer, I looked up at an enormous poster covering most of the wall of the gym: Dame Kelly Holmes, winner of two gold medals at the Athens Olympics.  And as the stupid, endorphin-triggered grin spread across my face, I kept my eyes up towards Kelly. She runs like a girl.

AND NOW A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS

If you’ve noticed the repetitive theme, you may be interested to watch this video, which (while produced for overtly commercial purposes) shows how and why the expression “like a girl” must mean no less and no more than “like a boy”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs

I am a swimming teacher, specialising in stroke development. I notice that in the squads of eight, nine, ten and eleven year-olds, the girls are powerful, fast, determined winners. Boys are often behind them.  Then something physiological happens: that’s natural. More importantly, something psychological can happen – or perhaps social. Some girls begin to doubt they can make it. They begin to question the power of their own bodies. They may worry about what exercise is doing to them. Our job, my coach told me, was to help them over that hump, to keep them believing in themselves until their bodies could confirm that they were as good as they could be.

I wince when I hear adults talking with concern about girls developing “swimmer’s shoulders” or getting too muscular. Girls don’t need to hear that. Speaking to Jane Gordon in 2007, Emma Watson expressed this powerfully:

It drives me nuts when friends say, ‘We can’t continue because sport gives you muscles and it’s so unattractive, and you get sweaty.’ For some reason girls seem to think it is unfeminine and they worry about being ‘pretty’. But I feel the most pretty when I come off the pitch after a hockey game and I have got pink cheeks and bright eyes. Sport really makes me feel good about myself.

I cringed when I heard Sports Minister Helen Grant suggest that women who feel “unfeminine” when playing sports such as hockey, tennis and athletics could take up other activities like “ballet, gymnastics, cheerleading and even roller-skating.” Just silly.  Tell Steven McRae or Edward Watson that ballet is feminine. Tell Jess Gordon Brown that gymnastics are uniquely feminine. There’s nothing particularly feminine about the bruising encounters on the roller derby track. And as for cheerleading: just Google a combination of “cheerleaders” and “exploitation”.

The last paragraph of the article by Hannah Betts on the England women’s rugby team says far more for equality and inspiration in sport:

These are not representations of women we see in magazines. Something powerful is happening here – to do with body image and body fact – and that rare thing: something truly beautiful for little girls to aspire to.

Sport is inspiring – and for all of us, not just the ‘stars’. Strong bodies are healthy. And being physically active is good. We mustn’t make half the populations of our classrooms feel as if it isn’t.

This is one of the most powerful and troubling works of art I have encountered. Take the time to watch the whole video (just over nine minutes).

The video is a good starting point: it allows Kara Walker to offer her point of view. This is important, because there is an article in the Huffington Post which, while it acknowledges that the sculpture “is successful in that it’s jarring”, laments Walker’s imprisonment in the dominant narrative and lack of imagination. Or, read in another way, the article illustrates the success of Walker’s art: it moves Jessica Ann Mitchell to imagine much more than is represented. Mitchell’s article seems to miss much of what Walker has thought, said and done, glancing off the dazzling white surface of the main sculpture.

There is also an article about the exhibition itself, and the unease created by viewers taking photographs of each other beside the sculpture. To the writer’s mind – and to mine – the sculpture has worked again.

Britain needs a work like this. We are vaguely aware that the wealth of many of our cities came from slave labour, but it all happened a long time ago, a long way away. The Caribbean is, for most of Britain’s population, a remote area; slavery a Bad Thing alongside others in the ‘1066 And All That’ of our history. Which is why I also believe that American literature is important in our young people’s liberal education: while Britain profited from a distance from our colonies, America has to lie on the soiled mattress of its exploitation of fellow human beings. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ couldn’t have been written here but marks a point in many children’s education where they begin to ‘get’ what we are capable of doing to each other, good and bad.

When I began my very first conversation with my very first class, I showed them a picture of my favourite mountain: Snowdon.  Or, to be precise, the part of the massif that forms one side of the Snowdon horseshoe. I’d taken the picture on an ascent just before I began at their school, a kind of pilgrimage to my muse.  I showed it to them, and later to their parents, as a metaphor: the children’s biggest challenge wasn’t the little bump in the foreground (aka SATs); it was the summit behind (preparation for secondary school) that would require a transformation.  Confidence, maturity, organisation, to name three requirements.  But most of all, self-belief.

This week, for the first time since then, I went to see my muse.  I set off from the Youth Hostel in Llanberis at just after half past five, taking advantage of the long daylight hours at this time of year.  At the outset of this ascent along the Llanberis Path, I felt my age.  My legs were stiff, my muscles burning with the effort of simply walking up the tarmac incline. I wondered how on Earth I could hope to reach the top.  It didn’t seem to get any easier: I frequently stopped for breath and to release the lactic acid from my complaining legs.

But once the tarmac gave way to stony path, at least I could look back at the misty town below, still sleeping beside the lake. I’d made some progress.  Not that my legs were going to admit it.  Finally I found the Halfway House: a landmark and a psychological boost. I was on familiar ground and felt I’d earned a proper rest.  The mist lay over the hills like a duvet on a restless sleeper, appearing to move up and down as I watched.  I caught sight of a halo in the mist: a rainbow around my long shadow.  It felt unearthly.  And quiet, so quiet.

Full of Jaffa cake bars, tea, apple and Emmental, I continued towards Clogwyn, my next milestone.  I was having to stop at increasingly short intervals as my legs and lungs struggled to cope.  I felt every year of fifty.  The path led under the railway: it was here that the pain began to feel worthwhile.  At this point, the view turns from the outer slopes of the massif to the inner, jagged glacial mouth of Snowdon.  Through the frame of the railway bridge, I saw the sea of sunny cloud over the valleys below.  This is what I’d come to see and be with.

I also knew that I was only a short, hard slog from the top.  Still far slower than I’d been on my first ascent, half my lifetime ago, I walked in one effort to just below the summit.  And I stopped to look and listen.  Never had I known the mountain to be so still, sunny and solitary.  We were alone, at least for that moment.  I walked to the very top and began to consider my next move.

Snowdon has many routes up and down: it was only nine and I had the rest of the day to fill.  I considered the easy route down to Pen-y-Pass: the Pyg track.  But I’d done it too often. I also considered the route along the arête of Crib Goch and Snowdon’s smaller neighbour, Crib-y-Ddysgl.  But this, the site of my first ever mountain walk, twenty-five years before, felt too dangerous for me on my own.  My left knee has been too often ruptured and repaired and my quadriceps didn’t seem trustworthy.

Instead, following the advice of my pocket guidebook, I chose the other side of the horseshoe, following the Watkin Path down to Bwlch y Saethau, and then along the ridge to the twin summits of Y Lliwedd.  My first steps were hesitant, traced and retraced as I tried to find a safe way down from the summit. Every way seemed to lead me to treacherous scree, on which my uncertain feet might slip and send me flying.  I found a way, eventually, using my backside as a fifth point of contact on many occasions.  My legs shook, my hands clutched at rocks and more than once I wondered if I should just turn back.

What kept me going was the guidebook’s assurance that this was easier than Crib Goch and offered as good a view – and the sight across the range of a path that led safely down to the Miners’ Track, if only I could reach it. I kept on.  Here, a quarter century ago, I had jumped and bounced through the uneven and mobile rocks underfoot; today I felt my mortality clinging closely to me. Eventually, the scree gave way to a path and I quickly found myself at the feet of Y Lliwedd’s first summit.

This was the point at which I remembered why I came to climb here so often.  It was a risky scramble, but I could gain height rapidly, using my swimmer’s superior upper body strength to haul me up rocks that the dry weather had made into a solid certainty against my boots.  I almost felt as if I were flying up the rocks, so quickly was I ascending.  It made me feel younger and alive.  I could have chosen the safer route to the rear of the arête, but I wanted to look over the edge, to see the sheer drop down.  Again and again, where the route offered safer choices, I kept close to the knife-edge.  Having worked so hard to get there, I wanted to experience it all.

After the second summit, dropping down to Cwm Dyli and looking down to the Miners’ Track below, I felt suddenly sad.  I didn’t want this feeling of freedom – from fear, from a preoccupation with ageing joints and aching muscles, from the day-to-day concerns – to end. But it does, it always does.  The gentle walk back to Pen-y-Pass, and then the six mile slog along the road to Capel Curig, gave me time to think about the day.  I’d come a lot further than the distance.  I had begun the day thinking that my pain and fatigue were insurmountable.  I’d faltered, believing myself no longer able to scramble across rock faces.  But finally I’d surrendered myself to the situation and the possibility that I was fitter and braver than I felt.

I didn’t do anything that might kill me; I had just regained my self-belief.

(a response to Michael Rosen)

There – in the low drone,
the high mosquito moan
of the trickling voices
– something catches me,

drags me from my windowed
daydream, pictureframed
in the skyblue, eyeblue
wasting day outside.

“Speed equals distance over time.”
Overtime. Distance. Speed equals.
Springs ease, levers click,
oiled gears begin to move.

Take time. Time takes ages,
giving each a different pace:
when young it dragged its feet;
now old, it sprints to end the race.

Then distance, that deceiver,
makes a mile seem very easy;
the last five steps before the bus
moves off become another mile.

And speed’s subjective,
feelings wrapped in risk:
sedate at fifty in a car;
at thirty, thrilling on a horse.

But all three came together
on the jetty where we jumped:
the inches to the edge, an age;
the speeding feet we fell, a moment.

Raindrops scatter on the glass,
spattered ink-blots mark the page:
they spread across the emptiness
as dreams escape the cage.

Earlier this year I attended the launch of a blueprint for a College of Teaching. I believe that its time has come and I will be signing up for it.

Here is why I feel this way, and what I expect from it.

SETTING OUT MY STALL

First of all, let me set out my credentials.

I have two degrees (a BA in History and a BA in English), a postgraduate diploma in marketing and a level one qualification as a swimming teacher.

I have a PGCE, achieved Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and successfully completed my probationary year.

I have also, in my time, been a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the Association for Project Management and Institute of Management Consultancy. I am a Certified Management Consultant as well as an accredited Leader of High Risk Gateway Reviews (licensed to poke my nose into the government’s most expensive and high profile projects).

Along the way, I have modelled competence, evaluated it, developed it and co-written learned papers on it. I was in at the birth of the Association for Project Management’s own accreditation scheme. And I assessed the competence of every project manager in London Underground (which made me feel something like Torquemada crossed with a school examiner).

WHY ASSOCIATE?

So what has this got to do with a College of Teaching? Because in each case – and in each profession – there was a need to reinforce credibility. That is a gross simplification: professional membership brings with it so much more. But credibility – corporately and assumed by its individual members – matters.

Now in such peripheral and obscure professions as project management, management consultancy and marketing, this is necessary and obvious. In a profession as ancient and – to most – as venerable as teaching, one might consider this unnecessary.

The difference here is the source of that credibility. Teachers gain their formal, externally judged credibility from institutions such as teacher training colleges, the TDA and Ofsted. We are judged capable and, subject to the occasional inspection, left to get on with it. The nascent College of Teaching aspires to some involvement in this external recognition, of which more later.

REASON ONE – BECAUSE WE KNOW WHAT MATTERS

Excellence can be subjective

We all have memories of teachers, whether they were our own or our children’s. Some will have had more credibility than others, for our own subjective reasons. Individual credibility matters a lot, and may be specific to a situation, or even a student.

Modelling Competence for Development

That is why some of the work I did with Dr Catherine Bailey, director of Cranfield University’s general management development programme, in the 1990s (she provided the brains; I did the donkey work) focused on very, very small-scale and specific models of competence: what it meant to a very small community of professionals. It worked well as an aid to development, as members could identify with and aspire to examples of higher competence.

One of the ways in which we developed these models was to ask our audience to picture a particular highly capable person they knew. Prompting them with categories – aspects of the job that they’d agreed were especially relevant – we asked them to give examples of how their role models behaved. We then collated the results – highly subjective descriptions of behaviour – and used our audience to determine, subjectively, the level of capability that a particular example of behaviour displayed. The trick was to retain the original language used to describe the behaviour, as this was most meaningful to the people who would be using the model.

We sometimes found, while correlating perceived excellence and the behaviour displayed by ‘excellent’ role models, that these role models demonstrated some pretty poor behaviour in one or two instances. This is, in some ways, reassuring: we are human, imperfect, and capable of development. You’d hope that these imperfections didn’t matter too much, of course. When a model like this is being used, it’s important that a weighting is applied: some capabilities matter more than others (safety in construction, life-saving technical expertise in surgery and a regard for child protection for teachers, for example).

I’d advocate, as a way of generating discussion and targeting and motivating personal development amongst teaching colleagues, a similar, small-scale exercise. Teachers in a school can generate their own examples of more or less capable behaviour for the Ofsted criteria that matter most in their school and can then say, “Here’s our unique situation and here are specific ways in which we aim to develop ourselves.”

I would like a College of Teaching to steer clear of an excessively detailed, ‘one size fits all’ model of teaching competence, to promote ways for teaching communities to articulate their own models (consistent with the College’s principles) and to support networks of professionals who are interested in learning about each other’s contexts and brilliant behaviours.

Beware Performance Appraisal

As a final note: keep the fox away from the chickens. If you’re going to adopt this approach, use it purely for development and don’t let performance appraisal anywhere near it. There’s nothing more likely to subvert one’s development than the annual round of appraisals. This, incidentally, is why I would advocate the abolition of performance appraisals. Read this book and see why appraisal perversely affects performance. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1576752003

REASON TWO – BECAUSE WE WANT TO BE TAKEN MORE SERIOUSLY

No one listens to us

As a profession, we are often seen as whiners. We know how noble we are, we know the pressure we’re under and the difference we can we make. And we, whether as members of ‘Marxist’ unions, ‘The Blob’ or those complacent so-and-so’s with secure jobs and protected pensions, aren’t taken as seriously as we’d like to be.

Why organisations listen to ‘suits’

I used to be taken seriously. When my fee rate was £1,500 a day (cheap by some standards), my CV packed with experience and my way into an organisation prepared with a JFDI from the respective chief executive or Secretary of State, I could speak with authority.

I have to admit here: my professional memberships did little to get me to my lofty position. I did what I needed and bought the badges. What mattered was my professional apprenticeship. I was fortunate enough to work for a gifted opportunist and wise advisor called Mike Nichols. He was my boss and professional stepfather for twenty years. He gave me confidence bordering on impertinence through opportunities that both terrified and developed me, brilliantly supportive and wise colleagues, lots of money and other forms of recognition.

I made my luck, to some extent: I sought out scary assignments, identified mentors and learnt all they offered me, and always tried to be better. I am a perfectionist, feel a strong sense of accountability and am obsessed with my personal development.

To begin with, I worked in teams, kept my mouth shut and ears and eyes open, and learnt my trade. Eventually I achieved all that I wanted to and gave it up to pursue something far harder: teaching.

Why ‘the power of suits’ won’t work in teaching

Management consultants (and other professions with a longer pedigree) have an aura about them. They are reassuringly expensive, have your boss’s say-so and know things you don’t. Their confident smiles, smooth faces and costly suits speak volumes.

This, incidentally, is why teachers in some schools may feel more valued than in others. Some parents’ culture or personal experience leads them to respect their children’s teachers; others think it’s money for old rope, read about how lazy, incompetent and complacent we are, remember their own days at school and can’t see how some teachers can be so useless. I count myself as fortunate not to have encountered the latter in my professional capacity.

We seem to lack that externally conferred credibility. Teachers in other countries have it; a College of Teaching might enable us to gain it.

I said that I learnt with the support of my boss and through my apprenticeship. Teachers, once we’re through our BEd or PGCE and our NQT year, are somehow considered to be fully fledged. We operate more or less on our own and may have little opportunity to learn on the job. I’m not going to opine on the many opportunities that teachers can grasp for development in their classrooms; I’d just add that it’s different. We may feel isolated, overwhelmed and just too knackered to develop.

I hope that because it speaks authoritatively and independently, a College of Teaching will give us greater corporate, professional credibility. But more than this, I hope that a College of Teaching will offer teachers a way of stepping out of our relative isolation and into a vibrant network of professionals who support one another’s development.

REASON THREE – BECAUSE SOME THINGS THAT MATTER CAN’T BE MEASURED

Most importantly for me, what really matters are the aspects of competence that are most difficult to measure and develop: our values and attitudes.

My former associate, Dr Catherine Bailey, saw a model of competence with various layers. It’s old hat now, but wasn’t then (and still isn’t widely recognised, in my experience).

When you look at a teacher at work, you see performance, which is behaviour within an environment. Below the surface, the teacher is applying skills, underpinned by knowledge and understanding. That’s the stuff we go to teacher training college to acquire.

It’s not all: college admissions tutors, supervisory tutors, mentors, head teachers and, occasionally, Ofsted inspectors will be looking for signs that teachers value what they do, their colleagues’ and parents’ contributions and, crucially, their students.

You see its presence, or absence, in all walks of life. A barista who genuinely likes and is interested in his coffee and his customers shines beside the adequate drinks, forced smiles and inauthentic repartee of some who have all the same skills but, at the heart of it, don’t care. The surgeon (and I have David Houlihan-Burne in mind) who treats patients as whole human beings rather than symptoms, clearly cares about their emotional wellbeing and values the part that colleagues such as physiotherapists have to play in a patient’s full recovery, stands head and shoulders above, well, I can’t be bothered to list the negative attributes of some. You see the values and attitudes shine from deep down in excellent managers, barristers, shop assistants, police officers… and teachers.

The danger is that these less measurable aspects are treated as hygiene factors. So long as we’re not overly cynical, not at colleagues’ throats, not openly rude to parents and not (you get the idea), we’re okay.

We may even have colleagues who shine in an intangible way, whose classes thrive happily and whose results reflect their personal saintliness. Damn them, they’re brilliant; you just can’t quite pin down why.

My experience of the young graduates who trained alongside me was of bright individuals, most of whom were imbued with these values. My experience of older teachers is that the years, the pressure to deliver results, the constant changes and fads, some management ineptitude, and a lack of spiritual or emotional renewal (please forgive my wooly way of expressing that) may take its toll on less resilient individuals. In short, unless we nurture these values, we may lose them.

Gareth Davis, the chair of the teaching committee tasked with devising a blueprint for the College of Teaching, summed up what is vital in a teacher. “Be interesting and be fair.” That’s what we chiefly remember, either because our teachers had it or lacked it.

I instantly remembered my English teacher, Adrian Barlow, who made us laugh, made us care, offered me English literature as if it were a series of choices I could make, and was a model of gentleness and fairness in a sometimes brutally unfair world. While he could become incandescently angry (for example he walked out of the classroom when I said that Shakespeare was boring) I was never belittled or made to feel like an inferior receptacle for knowledge. He also directed me in many plays, lending me his dinner suit in one (to my undying shame, I lost it). Before I took up my place to train as a teacher, I had lunch with him, thirty years after I’d left his class. I could tell him, with confidence, that I had been inspired to study for an English degree in my forties because of the love of the subject he’d given me in my four years in his classes. And I could tell him that I aspired to teach like him: he continues to be the model of excellence I carry around in my head.

I also had in mind Dame Alison Peacock, who embodies the values I respect. Her colleagues know how great they are and want to be even better (I mentioned Steve Davy, who epitomises values-driven teaching); she respects her students’ parents (she has a model of a crocodile on her desk to remind her to shut up and listen to her visitors, because they matter); and she has, at the centre of her practice, the students (find out about the Wroxham School and see for yourself).

I asked the teachers, amongst the august gathering of panellists on the stage, what values they would seek to nurture. “Respect for your students. Then you get to know them, and then you come to understand them, and you can help them. It helps if you stay at the school long enough to find out about them.” That sounds good to me.

In an age of change, of fads, of adversarial attitudes amongst politicians and professionals, I believe that a College of Teaching can identify, promote, embody and help to develop and nurture values and attitudes that transcend politics, mark us out as excellent and, above all, help to improve the lives of the children we teach.

post-script

At the end of yesterday’s event, as I remained seated and attempted to make sense of everything I had heard, a man sat down next to me. He smiled at me and eventually I recognised him. Adrian Barlow, still supporting the teaching profession through The English Association. Once again, I was able to tell him, to his face, how much he mattered. Many of us will have just such encounters with former pupils; it’s life-affirming but it’s not enough to ensure the recognition that our profession requires. That is why we need a College of Teaching.

Why read? To understand, to connect. Why read fiction? To imagine, to empathise.

My mantra is a pale reflection of the powerful messages in Steve Rifkin’s talk on building an empathic civilisation. With it, we have a future; without it, we’re doomed.

One of the pleasures of living where we used to live, which was just behind my daughter’s school, was the sound – and occasional sight – of the children playing.

The girls (there were only girls) were allowed to do what they wanted to – and if that meant climbing the trees that surrounded their playground, that was fine. So amidst the branches I would occasionally see the grey-blue of uniform or an excited head. Of course, all that had to stop.

But not in New Zealand, where a school has experimented with abandoning all rules at playtime. Children can do what they want: adults simply keep them safe. The results are as astonishing as they are (when you really think about it) obvious. Incidents of vandalism and bullying dramatically shelved off and time-outs became unnecessary: quite simply, children were engaged and not bored.

See for yourself.

I went along to my daughter’s school speech day a few years ago. The main speaker, an old girl, is a young pilot. She flies commercial jets, the kind most of us use routinely.

She described the response of one female passenger who, when she saw that the pilot was not only a woman but also blonde, asked to leave the plane before the doors were closed.

I hope for so much for the children I encounter – boys and girls. I hope that they will grow up to be who and what they want.

And interestingly, when – as a diplomat’s brat – I was jetting to and from boarding school, I aspired to be a member of the cabin crew. I liked the uniforms and the idea of looking after people. Flying seemed a glamorous life.

Here is an article from (you’ve guessed) the Guardian that focuses on female commercial pilots. It fills me with some hope as well as frustration.

The comments are interesting, including one ‘essentialist’ view:

I don’t think this is a sexism thing. Its just that girls and boys are different. The grow up wanting different things.

What do you think?