Dr Acheson's Commemoration 2008 Speech

President, Chairman, Governors, Reverend Canon, Headmaster, Headmistress, Parents, Guests and Friends,

An RE teacher spent a term with rather a difficult class trying to teach them the Book of Joshua. He decided to make the end of term test easy given the circumstances, and so he asked the simple question “Who destroyed the walls of Jericho?” Immediately there was uproar in the room as the children began to argue amongst themselves until eventually one child shouted from the back “Well, it wasn’t me!” Utterly fed up, the teacher caught the boy’s mother after school and complained to her that for a whole term he had tried to teach her son about Joshua and all he could come up with when asked who destroyed the walls of Jericho was that it wasn’t him. The following day, the teacher received a letter from the boy’s father which stated angrily, “If my son says that it wasn’t him then that’s good enough for me”, copied to the Headmaster and the Chairman of Governors. At breaktime, the teacher was button-holed by the Bursar who was concerned as to whether or not the teacher had undertaken a risk assessment of the said walls, and this was followed by a summons to the Heads’ study where the teacher was told in no uncertain terms that he was over-reacting and that the walls in question had been in need of repair for sometime. Finally the Chairman of Governors rang the teacher in the evening to suggest that this was all a complete misunderstanding, that there was provision in next year’s budget for new walls thanks to the generosity of the Old Boys Association, and that he would be most grateful if the teacher would apologise to the boy and his parents, assuring them that such a disaster would never happen again.

Bringing up children, the relationship between home and school, and the whole question of values and discipline is something to which I will return later, but first of all there is a year to consider and, as befitting Commemoration, some reflection perhaps over the recent past for reasons which do not require over-elaboration here and today. In fact, I hope you will forgive me if, on this occasion, I wrap up these two together in one theme and that is a theme of thanks and gratitude.

The development of a successful school is fundamentally reliant on a partnership between Trustees, staff, parents and children, and it is the dynamic that exists between these groups that will determine the nature and quality of the education that a school provides. You will note perhaps that I have left Government out of the equation – and I shall return to this a little later. So the first people to whom I would like to pay tribute today are the Governors. Governors may appear often to be remote and unconnected with the school entrusted to their care yet the unpaid work they do in the background lies at the heart of a school’s successful development. When I look back at the state of the Pre in terms of fabric and facilities 15 years ago and look at it now, the comparison is stark. The support that the Governors have given us all here in the Pre has been immense and the quality of our education provision which was commented upon so favourably in the recent ISI Inspection Report owes much to their ambition and the trust that they have invested in successive development plans. And what is true for the Pre is true for the College as a whole. Some years ago, external assessors of Clifton called the place a sleeping giant that, if awoken, would have a significant impact upon education in this corner of England. Well, to judge by the Inspection reports for the whole College last year, and the fact that our registration books are full for September at a time when other schools around us are struggling for numbers suggest that the giant is well and truly awake. A cause for complacency this most certainly is not – there is still much to do. But you and your children are with us at an exciting time and the fact that the College in general, and the Pre in particular, flourish as they do is eloquent testimony to the often considerable commitment made by our Governing Body or Council. In this respect, as this is the last time I shall have an opportunity to say these things in public, I would like to add my personal thanks to them all and in particular to John Cottrell and Louis Sherwood. It is no secret that things were not always as rosy as they are today in terms of the business side of running a large educational institution such as this. Future historians of the College will rightly acknowledge the enormous role played by John and Louis in helping the management to turn things around so successfully so that we have the resources to give your children the best possible start in life. To them I would add the name of Andrew Thornhill whose enthusiasm and love for Clifton has only been matched by his personal generosity and acumen which have played a vital role in helping the College to meet with confidence the challenges and opportunities facing us in today’s highly competitive and ever-shifting world. Their support, along with that of Alison Streatfeild-James, Chair of the Pre General Purposes Committee, has been immense and I hope that they feel that what we do here has been worth the time and effort they have put in on our behalf.

The next group of people to whom a debt of gratitude is owed is the staff both teaching and non-teaching. Over the past 15 years there have been many changes, some successful, some less so, as the school has striven to succeed and grow. Change is never easy to face, especially in today’s world which moves at pace and seems so often to have left perspective behind in its insatiable quest for novelty. Those responsible for the management of change are always liable to be viewed with suspicion by Staff whose very raison d’etre is the maintenance of stability that a good school needs and that makes children feel secure. I can recall my first day at Clifton following a pre-term Staff meeting where I had begun to outline the sort of changes I felt were needed in the Pre. Stopping a member of Staff in the corridor, I asked him “What time is lunch?” A brief moment of panic flashed in his eyes as he replied defensively “It’s at one o clock, Headmaster. It’s always been at one o clock. We like it at one o clock.” This is a strong and talented Common Room – again the ISI Report leaves us in no doubt about that. But a strong and talented group of dedicated professionals are not easy to manage and there have been times when I have felt that I have been chariot- racing in the Colosseum trying to pull a team of thoroughbreds into going in the same direction. But I can also tell you from my experience of speaking to other Heads and inspecting other schools, the Pre’s Staff are as a collective whole a pretty exceptional group of people and you only have to spend a short time in the Common Room at breaktimes to appreciate that. Firm of view they may be, but they have always rallied round when the chips have been down and their support not only for the management, but for each other, has made this school what it is. Like all Headmasters, I have dreamt of having the perfect team – a Common Room full of inspirational teachers, with not a weakness between them. The reality is that it is no more likely in a school to find a perfect Common Room than it is for the Staff in a school to have a perfect Headmaster. What I shall remember and value about this group of individuals is not their strengths and weaknesses but their willingness to undertake a wide variety of roles that a good Prep school depends upon from its teachers and which lies at the heart of children’s happiness and success. There have in my experience been very few who have not regarded it as perfectly normal to work long hours, cover for absent colleagues, take on extra loads, plug gaps when needed or support each other in times of stress. I can only echo what the late John Rae wrote about his Staff at Westminster for it sums up also the men and women who serve the Pre:

Teaching was not a job they went to in the morning and left behind at the end of the working day. It was their life. Though it may sound trite or even hypocritical in view of the battles I have fought with some of them, I think myself fortunate to have worked with men and women for whom teaching was a true vocation and for whom the needs and welfare of the children, for right or wrong, were always their priority.

I cannot mention them all today, but it would be wrong not to observe with thanks the moving out of Hartnell’s of David and Liz Pafford, both of whom have made an immense contribution to the quality of pastoral care at the school and whose civilizing influence has literally changed the lives of many children during their time at the helm. Chris Cox leaves us at the end of this term to take up a new and challenging post in Sussex. From kite-flying to horse-riding, skiing to science, he has given much and we wish him well. In some schools, the Deputy Head is often characterised as the crook at the head of the Staff – this cannot be further from the truth as far as Alex McComas is concerned. He has been an immense support to me, has never shrunk from giving me unpalatable advice when it has been needed, has always exhibited that one priceless quality treasured by all Heads, loyalty, and has also on occasions allowed me to behave like a 12 year old. We have spent a lot of our time together worrying about things, but we have also spent a lot of our time together laughing about things and I owe him a considerable debt which it will be impossible to repay.

The next group in the batting order is the parents. It is not easy bringing up children today, of which more anon. Neither is it a small matter when it comes to the question of their education. Jill and I have been very conscious during our time here of the fact that we have received tremendous encouragement and support from hundreds and hundreds of families and for that we both thank you and for that we shall both always think of you with affection. That said, some of you have had your moments. I particularly enjoyed the rushed e-mail from one harassed mother recently:

"I am sorry for Johnny’s being. It was his father’s fault."

Equally, another letter which went something like this:

"Nicholas has had chicken pox. He is now fully recovered and so I am returning him to your care although why you should want him all day long is beyond me since he has driven me to distraction."

Finally, there are always times when parents complain. My favourite complaint came recently when we received a note stating that a member of the Modern Languages Department had called her son a “retard” and what action did we propose to take. A careful investigation ensued which revealed that the member of staff in question had upbraided the boy concerned for being late to his lesson or, as they say in France, “en retard”.

Matches, concerts, plays, Preamble, Chapel, exhibitions, recitals, questionnaires from Inspectors, Parents Evenings, putting up visiting teams from abroad, fund-raising, lost property (well, ok, perhaps not that one but you can’t have everything), helping out at functions – all these are characteristics of Pre parents and I thank you for them and, most of all, I thank you for being civilized and for trusting the system and I know you will give John and Helen Milne just the start they need as they take up the reins of this school and move it forward into the next chapter of its story.

Last but not least, the children. Of course we owe them thanks. They are the reason we are all here and they have given us all so much pleasure and joy over the years. True, Year 8 can be challenging and I am sometimes reminded of my late father when dealing with them since one of his favourite statements was

It is important for the young to have opinions on everything, but please remember that you are not required to express them.

Their key contribution to those of us working here is that they keep us young with their enthusiasm, optimism, inability to hold a grudge, constant ability to delight and surprise and above all to make us laugh. The teaching of history over the years here has proved fertile ground for this, one recent test answer revealing that

The important thing about the Magna Carta was that it stated that no man could be hanged twice

Or, one of my favourites,

Queen Elizabeth was a success. As the Armada approached she exposed herself to her troops at Tilbury and they all shouted “Hurrah”.

From a Geography Exam some years ago the slightly desperate answer:

I don’t know how clouds are formed, but clouds know how to do it and that’s the important thing.

And so it goes on. I have recently been asked to write 300 words for a book about Clifton describing what a typical Pre pupil is. I don’t think there is such a creature, but what I would say is that the vast majority of the children here with whom we have had the privilege of coming into contact are polite, courteous, friendly, positive, affable and a pleasure to be with. There is so much that Jill and I shall miss about them – this year alone has given us such genuine pleasure whether it has been some stunning concerts and especially the quality shown by Julia Hwang, Ollie Gittings, Lana Trimmer and Bobby Longman, or some tremendous sporting feats – Coronation Cup winners, regional hockey runners-up both boys and girls, defeats of Millfield and Colstons on the rugby pitch being just some of them – or performances at the highest level by large numbers on the stage of the Redgrave Theatre, or exceptional Art as can be seen today in the Hornby Centre or moving readings and choral performances in Chapel. For all of these moments and so many others, thank you.

And since we are talking of children, now would be the appropriate time to ask our President, Professor Barron, to present the Twelves with a small token of thanks for all that they have done this year especially in their respective Houses.

If Commemoration is a time for gratitude for past and present, then it is also a time for reflection about where we are and where we ought to be. Great civilizations do not collapse as a result of pressures from without but rather from forces within. You need an army to defend a country, but to defend a civilization or a culture you need schools because, in the long run, battles are won by ideas, values and the way they are handed on from generation to generation. These battles, which are probably the only ones really worth fighting in life, will not be won as long as we allow Governments to treat schoolchildren as if they were business products. When education is conceived in terms of inputs leading to measurable outputs, or targets which constitute the performance indicators against which learning can be audited, or when teachers are seen as curriculum deliverers, or when misplaced resourcing is characterised as efficiency gains, then the true spirit of education flickers and dies. Or as Einstein put it rather more pithily –

It is a wonder that curiosity survives formal education.

To ensure that this does not happen here demands an effort from us all and that, perhaps, is what Commemoration actually represents. We need to set aside time on a regular basis to celebrate our families and our school and the collective achievement arising therefrom and if we did that more often as a society as opposed to lingering on the supposed failings of teachers and the shortcomings of pupils we might actually see education in this country take wings. As I look back over nearly 40 years in this trade, it seems to me that we have misconceived our schools. The whole business of education is riddled with obsessive measuring and attention-grabbing initiatives pouring forth from the corridors of Westminster which sometimes makes it seem that the lunatics really have taken over the asylum. When a culture forgets its own values, when it fails to teach its children who they are and why, it is a culture doomed to extinction, for the world we build tomorrow is born in the lessons we teach today.

You have every cause to be proud of this your school. There will always be those who will snipe at its academic profile or the quality of what we do here. This is a distraction at best born of envy, at worst born of a lack of faith or understanding in what really matters. Academic quality here is a given; what this school and this College cares about are things of far greater importance, and that is to stand upright and strong against the lessons which are being taught nationally in this country at this time.

So, what are these lessons? Our obsession with testing merely reflects the national obsession which defines everything in terms of productivity, and where relentless productivity is over-valued we begin to undervalue the so-called unproductive and vulnerable in our society – the young and the old – and thus forget what is needed to produce functioning human beings. I am tired of listening to a succession of Ministers telling us what they need to do to solve society’s issues – they have been in power for 10 years now. I will tell you what they and we need to do. We need to spend far less time on such ephemera and far more time on helping children to be literate in the way they communicate. The global market applauds the florescence of media and information technology both of which opens the world to all its citizens, especially children. But there is a side to this which is increasingly deplorable. Soap operas and total lack of control over television programming for young people present them with a world in which every moment is packed with drama or confrontation. Reality TV? I don’t think so. This is a dystopian vision. We all know that life on the whole is a fairly mundane affair punctuated by the occasional moments of great sadness or great joy. But the mundane, the ordinary are death-knells to the advertisers and ratings counters and thus are children brought up to perceive an alternative reality and their increasing exposure to, and dependence upon, the influences that come out of their screens divorces them from the actual reality of everyday living. I weep when I come across a child in the Pre who is embarrassed about his or her mobile phone because it is not the latest model. I weep when I hear of a girl in the Pre who has had her hair cut in a particular way and then spends a sleepless night worrying about how her peers will react. At school, I was in the same football side as Alan Winterbottom, the son of the erstwhile England manager. He, as a result, was the only player in the team that had a pair of Adidas boots – I think my mother bought mine at Woolworths – and he got his leg pulled as a result. What an inversion. How on earth have we allowed this to happen? It certainly doesn’t come from school and I imagine it doesn’t come from home. These entirely meaningless criteria for judgement concerning looks and possessions have only one author – the remorseless targeting of the young by the media and the admen who have excessive freedoms because successive governments have forgotten that morality means more than markets. This has been with us for some time now and we are beginning to reap the whirlwind. In 1992, in his book Kids as Consumers, James McNeal wrote

Kids are the most unsophisticated of all consumers; they have the least and therefore want the most. Consequently, they are in a perfect position to be taken. Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. You open up emotional vulnerabilities and it is very easy to do with kids because they are most emotionally vulnerable.

To which the heartfelt response of one Professor at New York University was

It’s part of the official advertising world that your parents are creeps, teachers are idiots, authority figures are laughable and that no-one really understands kids except the corporate sponsor.

Lack of respect in our schools and in our streets? Look no further for a reason. This economic paedophilia is a critical battle therefore that together we must fight if we are going to build that new Jerusalem with and for your children, if we are to achieve that wholly noble aspiration laid down long ago by Henry Newbolt in his poem on the College Chapel – for what you are the race will be.

And there is another insidious aspect to all of this. Children, increasingly isolated in their rooms or on their Face Book page partly as a result of irrational fears concerning the actual world out there, run the risk of being drawn into an alternative society dependent upon information technology. The feeble protestations in the Press about Grand Auto Theft IV are but the tip of the iceberg. Now I know we cannot put the genie back in the bottle but we ought to listen more carefully to people like Professor Susan Greenfield, an expert in brain degeneration and cognitive development, when she predicts that this and future generations are heading for a mass loss of personal identity as a result of the blurring of the cyber world with reality. By spending so much time in the interactive, two-dimensional, alternative reality of the cyber world, she suggests that children are being increasingly deprived of authentic dialogue and interaction which deprives them of moral imperatives, imagination and an awareness of the consequences of their actions. She sees this as a real threat to cognitive development, that is, an understanding of who and what we are in relation to the people and things about us, and she concludes:

When teenagers kicked that Goth girl to death in the park recently was it like a computer game for them? The buzz of the moment? Were they thinking of her as a person with feelings, with parents and siblings? Were they thinking of the implications for themselves the next day? The young attain unique and enriched identities through the world of focused conversation, of reading and working interspersed with bouts of physical activity in the real world, where there are first-hand and unique adventures to provide personal narratives, personalized neural connections. This is education.

She sits in the House of Lords but don’t expect the Government to listen if the latest lunacy to emanate from the eponymous Mr Balls is anything to go by. This is the Early Years Foundation Stage which has a whole series of ICT targets for little children. I quote

By 36 months a child should acquire basic skills in turning on and operating some ICT equipment and use the photocopier to copy their own pictures and other equipment such as karaoke machines.

By 60 months, children should be able to complete a simple computer programme, select a channel using the TV remote control, use a mouse and keyboard to interact with software and click on to icons to cause things to happen in a computer programme.

Lunatics running the asylum? M’Lud, I rest my case.

No of course I am not advocating a halt to progress. We cannot reverse history and re-create a childhood of cycling, lemonade, ginger biscuits, tree huts and blue-remembered hills. But there is an antidote to this, and it lies here as far as you and we working at this school are concerned, and that is by signing up to an agreed set of values which are lasting and timeless and which we can share together at home or in the classroom. The decision to have children, to create a family, to educate them is not a lifestyle choice whatever models the media or political correctness may choose to put in front of us. It is not a biological imperative or a consumer right. It is a profoundly moral decision with a fundamentally moral purpose, and we devalue that profound act if we spend too much time worrying about children’s material poverty and not enough about their spiritual poverty by failing to have that moral conversation with them that helps them to see that the real world functions only thanks to authentic dialogue and an unselfish awareness of perspective. The battles of the 21st Century are going to be not about ideology but about identity. We have to help children develop theirs, both individually and collectively, and not be afraid to lose ours as adults. One of the most ludicrous examples I have come across recently of political correctness was when a parent was criticized by local social services for only allowing their child one hour of television a day on the grounds that they were violating the child’s human right to participate fully in contemporary culture. We must get back the confidence as adults to stand up against this sort of drivel, working together here to maintain discipline, develop respect, understand perspective and open the eyes of our children to the infinite possibilities of a moral existence and a moral purpose.

At this school, with its great tradition of service to the community which was laid down with the foundation stones of our magnificent Chapel, we must continue to educate in a moral tradition. We cannot do the job, you and I, of a whole society, but we can make a difference to the people that really matter, these children sitting this morning in this Marquee. It is, quite frankly, no use looking to Government for moral leadership – remember ethical foreign policy? It is up to us as parents at home or as Heads trying to develop the school or as Staff working here to take on that role for the children by setting an example of being open and honest with each other and by treating each other with the respect owed to all in a civilized society. There are plenty of examples of leadership for children around at the moment but few of them are moral; it is this gaping hole that we must attempt to plug both for your children’s present and future happiness and for the well-being of society as a whole.

Pandora’s Box is open. There is little we can do about that. But the last escapee from the box, you may recall, was Hope. It is in these young people and their achievements and development year in year out that hope for the future lies and that is why moral purpose and agreed values matter both in education and in this community of Clifton, and they will not survive unless all of the adults concerned both at home and at school take full responsibility for them. It is not what we want as individuals that matters. What matters is our collective vision of a shared humanity, of what we think we are rather than what we think we should possess. We need to help children to understand that there is no profit in gaining everything at the expense of one’s soul and that substance not style is what really matters when it comes to defining our humanity. The historic role of this school since its inception has been to make space available where the voice of humanity can be heard and where all concerned – children and adults – can share a certain language, tell a certain story and bear witness to certain non-negotiable things about what it is to be human. This is our mission; to articulate this with energy, with confidence, with imagination and with faith, and I count it today a real privilege to have been given the chance to be a small footnote in this grand and splendid story.

There is another way. For the sake of your children, their children, and the future health of our culture and civilization, may we all embrace it. To you – parents, children, staff, governors and Heads – falls the task of writing the next chapter, picking up and running with the torch of life. To you falls the opportunity of creating a community based on courtesy not churlishness, co-operation rather than confrontation, compassion rather than competition.

It is a mission worthy of the effort.

It is a mission that has always been at the centre of this school’s philosophy.

It is a mission that can and will make a profound difference to the lives of your children and thus the world in which they are going to inhabit and influence.

It is a mission that will, in the end, achieve the only target that matters for us all here today, which is to put our hearts, our minds, our words, our actions and our souls into ensuring together that Clifton indeed becomes that field which the Lord hath blessed.

Thank you for listening.