Why Touch Technology is what Mathematics Education has been Waiting for

For many years, mathematics education specialists have joined forces with software and hardware developers to create new tools for learning. But still, decades on, the mathematics classroom remains one largely about teacher exposition and bookwork practice. Technology has made little impact.

Yet, technology in mathematics can help to de-abstract-ise the subject. All those apparently meaningless processes that we have all been taught at some point in our lives can suddenly be made to come to life. Just watch a Gapminder animation or use a virtual manipulative and you will see what I mean. No longer does the mathematics teacher have to explain some new concept while drawing inadequate diagrams that contradict their words. Technology can solve this. So why hasn't it?

The answer is simple: the technology, although the solution, has also been the problem. Teachers, even those most adventurous and brave, will give up when the technology is a blocker, and until now it certainly has been – whether that be the unreliability of hardware, the sheer confusion of understanding the operations of a programme or the lack of logical pathways through a piece of software.

But touch technology, in the guise of an iPad or the like, brings with it what good design always should – an intrinsic understanding of how to operate it. There are no longer blockers. Through touch, interfaces suddenly make sense. They become natural when well written apps come to life.

The trouble, at the moment, is that no-one yet has taken the step of creating a truly difference-making, meaningful, student centered, pedagogically sound app for mathematics. But they are coming.

I have talked (ranted) for years now about the need for someone to create such an app and bemoaned the deluge of opportunistic, superficial apps that have flooded the market in anticipation of securing a slice of the enormous student/teacher/parent purchasing power cake. There are many apps for mathematics, but none that bring anything new to the equation. So I have been really excited recently by a group of developers that I have met who are creating a mathematics app that will up the ante and change the face of learning apps.

Through touch-tech, there is no longer the need to prelude the learning with lengthy instruction on using the technology or learning operating systems or the idiosyncrasies of a particular piece of software. The children in our schools are already at ease with using the devices and technology is a routine part of their lives.

So we can now take the step that was always the hope for technology in the classroom – to enhance active engagement, interaction, feedback, micro-teaching, analysis and problem-solving skills, make connections across and within subjects and contextualize and internalize the learning in a way that connects to students' own realities.

The tech can at last meet the curricular objectives.

Technology, and particularly hand-held technology, can create an environment where the teacher is effectively split into 30 individual teachers. With each student having access to information, prompts, reflections, guidance, challenges and support any time they need it. Students are no longer bounded by the need for a lesson to be timed for a group of children with wildly different abilities. The technology can take them on the learning journey, while teachers guide the experience like an orchestra conductor. The teacher is in turn freed up to actually teach – not just transmit information – they can work at the individual and group level. The student remains engaged in learning for a much greater proportion of the time because they have instant access to progression.

The relationship between student and teacher can be greatly enriched when technology is integrated effectively. This takes a shift-change in pedagogy, but teachers can take on the role of advisor, knowledgeable other, and mentor.  This shift-change will require investment in terms of time and money for teacher professional development - for every penny spent, I think the breakdown should be 20% on tech, 80% on teacher professional learning.  This is not just about how to use devices, but about what the pedagogical implications are for changing from the traditional transmitter of held knowledge to one of an artist creating the right environment for children to be knowledge creators.

And in mathematics, we can finally move towards what the subject is truly about. The technology can make school mathematics less focused on calculating and more on sythesising, modeling and interpreting. Students at any age can see visualisations of the most complex mathematics and draw inferences from them – mathematics is suddenly opened up as it should be.

With the internet, students are able to access any information that they need. Information is no longer the preserve of the teacher. So students can learn from external sources, or knowledgeable others, so that they themselves can become knowledge creators.

Unlike many technological devices of the past, touch-technology becomes simpler and more intrinsic as we move forward. In many aspects of life, touch-tech is now the interface that we meet. It is epitomised by its simplicity, by its universal approach of guiding the user through the process. This removes the apprehension that many people feel about technology. And this is a key point, for it is only those of us that are adults that feel this apprehension. To children in our schools it is simply part of their life. So through touch-tech, teachers are now able to feel comfortable about creating a tech-based learning envinronment, where they do not have to understand the technology or learn how to use a keyboard or mouse.

Touch technology is what mathematics education has been waiting for. It is the conduit that will allow the generations to come together and will remove teacher bias towards their comfort zone. We're not there yet, because appropriate apps have not yet been written, but they are just around the corner. Over the coming year, I believe that a product for mathematics will enter the market that will help us all to take the last steps to integrating technology in the classroom.

Michael Gove's speech, Conservative Party Conference 2011

Many people have asked me this week what I thought to the Secretary of State's speech at the Conservative Party Conference, and maybe at some point I will get round to writing up a response.

In the meantime, I thought that some of you might find it helpful to catch up with what was said if you were unable to attend the conference, so here is a transcript of Michael's speech.

(if there are spelling errors or such like, well tough, I was typing pretty damn fast!)

Note: Michael took to the stage immdiately following a speech by Quddus Akinwale, a pupil at Burlington Danes Academy.

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There are some moments in politics you never forget. And I'll never forget the first time that I heard Quddus speak. It was at a fundraising event for ARK, the fantastic charity that supports so many brilliant schools.

And when I heard his story, I was moved. As I know many of you will have been.

And I vowed then that many more people would hear his story because it is inspirational. Quddus reminds us of the real face or London's young people. Ambitious, aspirational, loving their parents, proud of their school, wanting to do well in the future. And I think if there's one image that we should carry away from this year of young London, it is Quddus and everything that he stands for.

There's another moment that stays in my mind, and that's a moment that occured when I was in China, last November on a trip with the Prime Minister. I was being shown around a school in Beijing and the headmaster handed over a book just as I crossed the threshold. I opened it and I saw lots of Chinese characters and then the odd word in English and the odd equation. "Thank you for showing me your text book," I said. He smiled pittingly at me. "It's not a textbook," he said, "this is actually a collection of all the papers in academic journals which have been published by people in this school." "That's amazing," I said, "the teachers, as well as having time to teach all the students also have time to do their own academic research. That's fantastic!" And he paused and smiled at me pittingly again and he said, "it's not the teachers who are writing the academic papers, it's the children."

Think about it. On the other side of the globe, there are15, 16 and 17 children educated so well that they can hold their own with the world's graduates and post-gradutes. If anyone asks why it is that our education system needs reform and change, remember that fact. In other countries, not just in east Asia, but in Canada, in the United States, in Australia and in New Zealand, education systems are being reformed because every single one of those nations knows that unless they are at the top of the education tree, unless they're making sure that more young people have the skills and the knowledge that they need to succeed, that their countries will fall further and further back in the global race for prosperity.

And one of the sad things about the last few years, is that under the last government we fell back in the global league tables for education.

We used to be 4th in the world for the quality of our science education and now we're 16th. We used to be 7th in the world for the quality of our children's literacy and we're now 25th. We used to be 8th in the world for the quality of their maths and now we're 28th. And it's not just our national pride that has knocked by this decline. What it means is that for millions of young people who've been through the education system under Labour they go in to a world economically more competitive than ever, where demands are more strenuous then ever, where jobs at the moment are scarcer than ever. And they are not as well equipped as children in other countries to succeed, to win those jobs, and to win those college places.

And that is why I am so angry about whay happened under the last government. Because I fear that they failed those whom they were elected to serve: the next generation.

And what makes it worse is that the big divide in education in England is not between us and other nations. The really big divide in education in England is between rich and poor. There are five schools that serve some of the richest children in England that get more children in to Oxford and Cambridge than 2000 of the schools that serve our poorest young people. No one can believe that that is either fair or just. From an economic point of view, it is an act of self harm to leave so many talented young people from poorer background in a position where they cannot use their talents. There are young men and women across this country, every bit as intelligent and bright and ambitious as Quddus, that are not getting the chance to become the engineers of the future because our education system hasn't equipped them as it should. And we are all losing out.

And that is why when people say what is this government doing for growth, I say the best long term growth strategy is a school reform strategy.

But it is not just about economics. It is also about social justice as well.

John Dunne once said that no man is an island entire unto itself. And we know what he meant. We know that I am my brother's keeper. We know that we have a responsibility to others in our society beyond simply paying our taxes and obeying the law. We know that the parable of the good Samaritan made the point that the Pharisee and the Levite, even though they obeyed the law, even though they were respectable figures, were found wanting because when someone was in need they walked by on the other side.

We're not going to walk by on the other side.

We are not going to leave those who have been languishing in poor schools and in poor schools for far too long to wait for another saviour. Children only have one childhood, it's the most precious time of anyone's life. And we want to be there to make sure that they are happy, fulfilled and that they are successful in the future.

And if we need to be reminded of the consequences of allowing children to grow up in poverty, not just material poverty but with a poverty of aspiration and a poverty of hope, then we were reminded this August of what it means to allow children to grow up without the right values.

The first and most important thing to say about the riots which scarred so many parts of urban Britain is that, when we look at them, we need to keep moral clarity. It's important to recognise that what we saw on our streets was a conflict between right and wrong. Between the police who were working so bravely to ensure that we were safe and a lawless, thuggish minority, amoral, contemptuous of the rules by which the rest of us live, intent only on the pleasure of the moment, people who had nothing to lose and were thumbing their nose at all the values that keep our society civilised.

But at the same time as we must maintain that moral clarity as our first response, we also have to recognise that a truly ordered society can't be kept peaceful by having every night thousands of uniformed officers policing our streets. Our streets will only really be safe when millions of individuals police themselves and make sure that they exercise self-restraint, self-discipline and self-respect.

And that's why it is so important that those values are instilled in the home and in school.

That's why, in the work that I do, with my colleagues in the Department for Education, I am so anxious that we should make that children have the best possible start in life. That's why we should emphasise that the most important job that any man can have is being a father. And that your responsibility to your child is life long. If you were there at your child's conception, you should be there for the rest of their life.

And schools have an important role to play as well because we all know that one of the sadnesses of our time has been that so many of those children who believed that they had nothing to lose were children who had been failed by our school system.

Let me repeat again the overwhelming majority of our young people do well at school. The overwhelming majority of our schools and teachers are doing a fantastic job. But it's still the case that far too many of our children are failed.

Sixty percent of white boys eligible for free school meals at the age of 14 are incapable of reading properly.

And there is an iron clad link between illiteracy and criminality. There are children who arrive at primary school from disorganised and dysfunctional homes, there is indiscipline in some schools, they are not taught properly to read at an early age. They arrive at secondary school incapable of following the rest of the curriculum. So they act up, they act tough, they cause disruption, they risk becoming excluded. Many of them will truant and as a result they become the recruits of the gangs of tomorrow.

Because it is so vital to break that link, it's one of my aims to do everything possible to eliminate illiteracy in England. If you can't read, then you are condemned forever to live in a prison house of ignorance. And for those children who can never read, they are all too often the recruits for our prisons of tomorrow. Because we know that more than three quarters of young men in prison are functionally illiterate. They've been failed by a system that didn't ensure that they had hope, that's the reason that so many of them went off the rails and that's why it's so important that we get reading right.

And that's why I'm so glad that my deputy Nick Gibb is a passionate crusader for better reading. He's the person who's been responsible for making sure that every school will receive additional funding so children are schooled in the best method of learning to read: systematic sythentic phonics. He's going to make sure that every child at the age of six is screened, so that any children who are falling behind, whether they are dyslexic or have been poorly taught can be identified and supported. And it's also why Nick is leading a campaign to make sure that children also learn to read for enjoyment. That the glories of English literature, the best that has been thought and written are passed on to the next generation. So that the heritage that is there for all of us, and which all of us in this hall can enjoy, becomes every child's inheritance. And for that crusading zeal, I'm so grateful to Nick.

Now, when we reflect on what happened this summer, there's one image which I know for many of us will sum up everything that went wrong. And that the image of the CarpetRight Warehouse in Tottenham, which was in flames. Torched by people who simply didn't have a respect for property, a respect for their community. And one of the many sadnesses about that image is that the person who owned that warehouse, the person who founded CarpetRight, the person who's given jobs to many young people is a great man, a great supporter of this party, Phil Harris, Lord Harris of Peckham. And the great thing about Phil is that as someone who has built his business by the sweat of his brow, he has ensured that now that he has time and a little bit of money on his hands, that time and that money is devoted to giving thousands of children a better start in life. He's set up a chain of academies across the whole of south London, taking schools out of Local Authority control when they were failing, given them great headteachers, like Greg and Sally and made sure that those schools embody what the best independent schools embody as well. So those schools have great discipline, a proper uniform, there's no bullying in the playground, and there's respect for teachers in the classroom. They teach traditional subjects in a rigorous way and they have uniformly high aspirations for all children whatever background they come from. And under Phil's leadership, those academy schools have made amazing strides forward. There's one school that he took over in Peckham, which when he took it over from the Local Authority had only five percent of children, one in twenty, getting five good GCSEs. In just a few years, thanks to his leadership and academy status, those numbers increased by ten, by a thousand percent, fifty percent of children getting five good GCSEs. And what's been achieved in the Harris Academy chains is being achieved in academies across the country. We heard a little bit about what's happening in Burlington Danes, but it's not just in London. In Leeds there is a an amazing woman called Ross McMullen, the principal of David Young Academy, who is transforming education for poor children in West Yorkshire. Just down the road, here in Manchester, in Moss Side, a school that used to be one of the worst in the country is now transformed thanks to a wonderful headteacher called Kathy August. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was in Nottingham, visiting the poorest part of that city and there's a school there, Nottingham Academy, led by another wonderful headteacher, Barry Day, which is now ensuring that every child learns a foreign language from the age of five and that every child regards themselves as university material. It's that level of aspiration and that commitment to excellence, which is the best of British education and I think that we should show that Conservatives are on the side of those hero and heroine headteachers who are fighting to give the next generation the best possible chance.

And we are on their side because those academy schools are essentially the children of the City Technology Colleges that were set up by Lord Baker, Ken Baker, one of the best education secretaries this country has ever seen, a visionary reformer who inspires us today.

So the schools are essentially a Tory invention. And it's thanks to the election of a Tory Prime Minister that we now have 1000 academies open. We inherited just 200 from Labour and we've increased the number massively and at the same time we now have 1.2 million children benefiting from academy status, academy education, real excellence in education. It's an achievement of which you should be proud.

And as we saw in the video earlier, these new schools are being joined by 24 new free schools and shortly they will be joined by new University Technical Colleges, schools which are devoted to giving children, from the age of 14, a superb training in vocational and technical education. Again, it's thanks to Lord Baker that these schools are being started, and I hope that when we announce them that we will be able to repair the historic gap in our education system that has existed since the second world war. Countries like Germany have had a superb technical education for children that want it, we haven't. For far too long the technical, the vocational, the craft skills, the apprenticeship route has been undervalued in our society. Now at last this coalition government is making sure that those who pursue a vocational or technical course can hold their head up high with the same degree of pride as anyone who pursues an academic course in life.

So new schools but also, and most important of all, a new attitude for the entire education system. This government is unambiguously on the side of teachers. And we know that there are three things that are critical if we are going to support teachers in the work that they do. The idealistic, inspiring, world changing work that they do. We need to back them on discipline, we need to give them a curriculum and set of exams which are fit for purpose, and we need to make sure that they can take pride in their profession.

So what are we doing on discipline? Well we're making sure that teachers have the powers they've been denied for too long. The powers to search children for items that might cause disruption, the power to impose detention on the same day that school rules are broken, the power to exclude disruptive children and know that that decision won't be overturned by bureaucrats outside the school, and the power to be protected from the sort of false and malicious allegations that undermine those teachers who are going the extra mile to keep order.

And on exams and the curriculum? Rigor is back. We know that people enter the classroom because they love their subject and they want other children to be inspired by it as well, so what we are doing is making sure that the dumbing down of our exam system ends. At GCSE level we're sweeping away modules, we're insisting that once again marks be given for spelling, punctuation and grammar. We're asking universities and academic experts to help us ensure that our exams are the best in the world. And we've already said that we're going to judge schools explicitly on whether or not they are teaching children more of the hard and rigorous subjects that universities and employers want and fewer of the sorts of soft subjects that were fashionable under the last government but condemned so many children to unemployment and poor prospects. And that's why, that's why, I'm so glad that in the last year as a result of those changes that we've made, we've seen the number of students studying history and geography and modern languages rise by 25 percent. And I'm so pleased, in particular, that we've seen the number of students studying physics, chemistry and biology rise by more than 80 percent.

And at the same time as making sure that we have exams and a curriculum that reward rigor and stress the importance of subject knowledge, it's also the case that we're doing everything possible to enhance the status and prestige of the teaching profession. Let me say it again, we have the best generation of young teachers entering the classroom now, we should be proud of what they're doing. But we should never stop asking ourselves what more we can do to support them. And that's why I'm so glad that teach first, a scheme that takes the best graduates from the top universities in to a classroom, is expanding under this government. It's why I'm so glad that we're moving teacher training out of the ivory towers of so many universities and back in to the classroom where practical teaching skills can be passed on from the best in their field. And it's also why I'm so glad that money has been made available so that we can give bursaries of up to £20,000 pounds to those graduates in mathematics and science who are going to give the next generation the skills that they need to succeed in the 21st century.

New schools and new attitude.

We're fortunate in this country that we have so many good schools. We're fortunate that we have so many great teachers. And we're fortunate that there are so many young people who are ambitious for the future and are doing well.

But I'm not going to rest until every school in this country is as good as the best. I'm not going to quit this job until I ensure that every new teacher is as well trained as the best. And I'm not going to leave until I make sure that every child from a poor home has the same opportunities that are currently enjoyed by the most fortunate in our society.

I'm a parent. I know that I would never accept second best for my child. I know you wouldn't either. And that's why I will never accept second best for this country

Thank you all very much. Thank you.

Teachermon

At lunch today will an old friend and colleague, we stumbled upon the memory of a game that we used to play at the school where we were both teachers in the 90s.

Teachermon was a straight forward rip off of one aspect of the incredibly popular (at the time at least) game Pokemon – in which cards containing information about little creatures are used to play a battle. Sort of Top Trumps on speed. It exploded out of Japan in 1996 and suddenly the kids of the world went Pokemon crazy.

So when a boy in Year 10 approached me and asked if it would be ok to create a version of the cards based on the teachers at the school, I thought it simply genius.

This is how it worked:

For each member of staff, a card was created on which was a photograph (usually a very bad photograph), their name, subject and a set of scores against five powers. This was the tricky part, and the funniest part, of creating the game: what would the powers be? The lads in Year 10 wanted to score teachers against things like "interestingness" and "coolness", but we decided that this was too subjective and likely to cheese some teachers off. They ventured "bad breath", "body odour" and the like, but only jokingly and immediately knew that this was not the spirit of the game. Eventually we arrived at powers such as "Years at Our School" – this meant that long servers scored well, and on the whole we liked this idea because some of the long servers were not keen on the idea of the game.

The kids handcrafted a Teachermon logo, and got to work creating the cards.

Once printed, each teacher was given a stack of their own cards and the students started a craze of playing Teachermon at break time. This meant that they had to collect the cards. You could only collect a card if the teacher chose to give it to you. So for example, I gave each member of my tutor set my card.

The craze took off immediately and with great excitement from the students. Kids would run up to you at break time and plead with you for a copy of your card (we carried a stash around in our pockets) and you would regularly hear phrases like "swap you McCourt for Baker."

In no time at all it became obvious that what we had accidentally stumbled upon here was an amazingly effective reward system. Teachers were handing out cards like merits in lessons. Students were knuckling down to work, being helpful beyond the norm and actually doing homework for the chance of getting your card. There was one chap, who'll we will just call Mr Smith, who had worked at the school for 42 years. To be frank, he was struggling with classroom discipline. Suddenly he was a star. He got in to the spirit of the game straightaway and milked it with tongue in cheek – it was notoriously difficult to get his card. If a student managed to coax one out of him there was an immediate buzz around the school. I once heard that someone swapped 20 "normal" teachers for "a Smith". Discipline issues were completely a thing of the past for Mr Smith. He used the renewed energy that good behaviour gave him, the sense of engagement that Teachermon brought and the interactions with students beyond the lesson to rebuild his relationships with them. Even when the game died out two years later, in the year that he would retire, his connection with the students was so strong that he had automatic respect whenever he spoke.

It was great to talk about that year again with my friend this afternoon. We both scratched our heads at what the next Pokemon craze might be and how we might hook in to it. Any ideas?

The Ingredients of a Great Lesson?

What are the necessary ingredients of a great lesson?

This morning, a Twitter post from @tesconnect, asked "Taught a great lesson lately? Upload it to TES resources..."

The inference being that a "great" lesson is something that can be committed to paper in some way.

I think that this is not true. And furthermore, I think that the notion that it is true is contributing to a de-professionalisation of the teaching profession as well as giving a false sense of security to bad teachers.

In 2008, I inspected a lesson in Manchester. The lesson was delivered to Year 10. And it was dire. Truly dire. At one point, sat beside a boy at the back of the room, I wrote down "uncritical use of resources".

The resources that the teacher was using for the maths lesson were lifted from the National Centre of Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (@NCETM) website. The teacher dryly waded through the tasks as though delivering the lines in a bad TV soap opera.

At the end of the lesson, I sat with the teacher and discussed my judgment ("inadequate" in Ofsted terms). She was most perturbed by this and told me sternly that the lesson was good or even outstanding. I asked her to justify this and she told me that she had taught an NCETM lesson and therefore the lesson must have been good.

What is a lesson?

I guess if you think back to school, or watch TV, or think about stereotypes, a lesson is when 30 children sit in a room, at desks, on chairs, in a school. A teacher imparts some information, which the children take notes of, then the children undertake some task from a book, writing their responses in another book, which they carry to and from school.

But that is not a lesson.

Reducing a lesson to its most basic form, we can do away with the books and the classroom and the resources, and the pens, and the paper, the desks and the chairs. At its most basic, a lesson is when one person learns something from another person. (Of course, learning can be reduced further to remove the teacher too).

A great lesson is when a heck of a lot of learning occurs. All that this requires is the teacher to be able to impart the knowledge or skill in such a way that the student is able to systhensise, understand, interpret and embed the knowledge or skill in their own reality.

To achieve this, the teacher must have the skill (the art) to understand both the student and the knowledge or skill. They must be able to empathise with the student's point of view. The teacher then uses this knowledge to select a method of communicating the new knowledge or skill. This could be through story-telling, or modeling, through discussion and debate, through exploration of examples. It is the teacher's art to critically select the method or methods most likely to achieve learning.

The trouble with the resources debate is that, and not enough people say this, there is no such thing as a great resource. There may be resources more likely to achieve the desired effect. But in the hands of a bad teacher, a so-called great resource isn't worth the paper (or interactive whiteboard!) its written on. Conversely, with a so-called terrible resource or indeed no resource at all, the great teacher can conjure up an amazing learning experience.

Sure, having bright airy rooms, modern equipment, numerous resources and the like can all help. But only in the hands of those that know what to do with them.

When the situation exists that some teachers believe that using a resource that has worked well for someone else, without having to think about how that resource relates to their students, then there is something terribly wrong.

Would it not be more helpful then, instead of a focus on resources, for the discussion to be around how to critically review and select appropriate tools from the arsenal of resources at hand? How to develop your own personal pedagogy? How to continue to learn as a professional? How to adapt and reflect?

The TES is a fantastic website and its resource bank, grown by teachers for teachers, is a fantastic tool. But if the TES wants to take a further step in truly improving the lessons that children experience in our schools, it could, without great difficulty, add to the resources section encouragement for professional learning by asking teachers to pause for a moment and think critically about the resources that they find and debate the pedagogy around embedding them in lessons.

Oh, and the answer to the question: The necessary ingredients of a great lesson? A great teacher.

What State Schools Should Learn From Private Schools

Every now and then something high profile will flag up the age old debate about the relative qualities of private versus state education. So when David Cameron asked a group of headteachers from leading independent schools to attend a meeting at Downing Street, the media pricked up its ears and went in to the usual over-reactive state that is its wont.

The Prime-Minister explored with the group the idea of private schools "helping" state schools to improve. After all, these great public schools all have great GCSE and A Level results, so they must be doing something right, right?

It is entirely wrong to think that this idea has suddenly appeared. Across the country, for as long as both have existed side by side, State and Public schools have been working together. There are countless examples of partnerships and collaboration.

But now that the debate has been focused upon once more, we might at least have the discussion about what should state schools learn from private schools?

Before addressing that question it is important to establish some knowns.

The quality of teaching in State schools is diverse. There are amazing teachers, there are crap ones.

The quality of teaching in Public schools is diverse. There are amazing teachers, there are crap ones.

A little talked about known is that individual teachers are sometimes great when teaching in the State system and terrible when teaching in the Public one and this is conversely true too. It is a misconception to believe that what works well in terms of pedagogy in the Public system can simply be transferred to the State system and vice-versa. The cultures are fundamentally different. This is the exact same mistake that many large scale, international education companies make when designing programmes for other countries: you simply cannot cut and paste a system from one country to the next. You must take account of the culture within that country or community or school. As a Director at Tribal, this was one of my mantras and something that we were obsessed with trying to achieve – for example, when designing education reform programmes in the Gulf nations, we went to great lengths to ensure an understanding of the native culture, shared values and living histories, incorporating Islamic viewpoints and learning from the teachers and community that we worked in.

This is also where the current Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, appears to be missing a crucial importance surrounding the adoption of the Swedish Free School model. But I digress.

Of course it is possible to experiment with pedagogies in both State and Public sectors, to learn and to adopt aspects that are effective. In doing so, the teachers are acting as knowledge creators and are building their own personal pedagogy. But it is absolutely not the case that you can say as a blanket statement: Public schools do X and are successful, so State schools must also do X.

This is why many teachers find they are unable to move between working in either of the two systems.

Collaboration, when it is truly such, between State and Public schools allows for this formative knowledge creation and pays dividends to all involved.

Are Public schools better than State schools? Well, no. Some are, some aren't. Yet, misguided, many politicians want to believe that Public schools are the more effective machine. In part, of course, this is due to the fact that the majority of politicians attended Public schools and are therefore bound by their personal experience – if it worked for them, then surely it would work for all.

But surely children who attend Public schools do better than those at State schools? Well, in some cases they do. But, importantly not all. And yet in these cases where students do worse or as well as their State school counterparts, they still have more success later in life. And here we are coming to what State schools really should learn from the private sector.

My home town of Oundle nestles on the Cambridgeshire / Northamptonshire border and has for many, many years been dominated by Oundle School. It is a fine Public school, which brings prosperity to the town.

Oundle take in a wide range of students, from across the country and overseas. Many of these students, bless them, are what I can only describe as nice-but-dim types. Thoroughly decent children, maybe superb at rugger, but not a great deal going on upstairs when it comes to "academic" ability.

Let's consider a nice-but-dim Oundle boy. What will become of him? Well, he'll pick up a bunch of GCSE grades around the national average, maybe a C in mathematics and English and a handful more. He then sits his A Levels, because that is what you do, gets a couple of OK grades, maybe one fail. And off he plods to university. Let's say he signs up to a Psychology degree at a half decent uni and has three terrific years having a jolly good time and picking up a run of the mill 2:2 in a subject that was neither here nor there to him. What happens to him?

Pause for a moment and consider another lad at Bog Standard Comp in a town somewhere in England. He gets the same grades and degree. What happens to him?

Flash forward 20 years. Now if each of these scenarios were a probability distribution, it would be very likely that our Mr Nice-But-Dim is now very successful in a field that interested him (maybe the media or politics or the city). He will be earning well above the national average, his work will typically consist of leading others, he will be a homeowner, he will be happy in his work-life balance.

Our other chap? He'll be doing ok too. But probably just ok. He'll be in a stable job, and it will pay slightly above national average, he will maybe have one or two people who report to him, but probably not. He will own his own home. His work-life balance will be unfulfilling.

Why does one child find more success?

Well, this is what State schools should learn from Public schools.

Academic ability and exam results are not the most important aspects of school. They are not the fundamental purpose of a good schooling system. What the Public schools have remembered, to their credit, is that schooling is about the child as a whole. And on the whole, Public schools will work tirelessly at ensuring that the young people who leave their doors have a sense of purpose and pride instilled in them. The boys that leave Oundle are confident. The can start up discussions and hold their own in debate. They have self-belief that they can achieve in the world. The celebrate success. Crucially, they know how to network.

Recently, at a large education conference, a friend of mine asked me how I managed to be involved in so many different projects. It was lunch time, there were companies showcasing their work at stands around a large room. I asked him what he wanted to be involved with and he told me about a couple of ideas and companies that he would like to be linked to. Some of them were in the room. Go and talk to them, I told him.

In these situations, you witness where our State system has gone so wrong.

What the State school system in England has done, particularly over the last 15 years, is forgotten its purpose. Now obsessed with measuring everything, with testing, with grades, with pitching schools against each other, the system has lost sight of what education is about.

What we can learn from the Public schools of England is that by giving children the ability to adapt, to challenge, to question; by instilling in them the belief that risk taking is a good thing; by helping them to follow their dreams; by ensuring that children understand how to network they can achieve.

Education, as Einstein once said, is what remains when you have forgotten all you learned at school.

It is not about content and grades, it is not about average point scores, or giving children meaningless national curriculum levels in each and every lesson. Education is about becoming a better person. About readying yourself for the world and knowing that you count and that your opinions are as valid as everyone else.

One of the reasons that social mobility has come to a grinding halt in England is because we have removed the aspirational aspects of the education system.

There are schools that buck the trend. A friend of mine runs three academies as an Executive Headteacher. I was really interested to visit his schools and see the emphasis placed on meal times. That all the students (and these are students from the very hardest of backgrounds) would eat at the table, using cutlery correctly and engaging in quiet chatter. I asked him about why so much focus has been placed on this and he told me that one day each of those children would go to a job interview. And each and every one of them would be judged on the way they spoke, their body language, their confidence and how they behaved at lunch. How true.

By focusing so heavily on subject content knowledge and pointless measures, the State system has neglected its duty in helping childing to grow in to purposeful and proud citizens who can lead fulfilling lives.

The ability, in Academies, to re-focus your priorities comes from the autonomy that the schools are given. It is this autonomy that allows private schools across the country to recognise the stupidity of much of the initiatives that come from central government and to ignore them, instead focusing on developing the whole child. Perhaps if school leaders were freed of initiative overload, they too would be able to re-focus.

Hidden Genius

It would appear that many mathematics teachers have forgotten (or worse still, never knew) that teaching mathematics does not have to mean transmitting lots of facts at a class full of silent children.

There has been a dumbing down in mathematics education. I see it in the UK, US, Australia, France, New Zealand, Germany and many other North-West cultures, but also in the Gulf Nations where they have fallen victim of allowing themselves to believe that companies from these North-West nations can arrive, unpack their education systems and impose them in a different society (many of the Gulf Nations have been fooled in to thinking the West knows best!)

The dumbing down is a result of a fundamental misunderstanding by policymakers of what mathematics actually is. So, more and more, mathematics is being reduced to calculations and using numbers ("numeracy" as it has been dubbed in several countries).

The main symptom of this dumbing down is that students expect to be spoon fed information and that solutions to mathematical problems should be immediate, obvious and algorithmic. But mathematics is not like that; never has been, and shouldn't be allowed to become. Mathematical problems can take a very long time to solve, or indeed remain unsolved, but along the way, through the head scratching, experimenting, errors, iterations and creative process a heck of a lot of mathematics can be learned. This learning through attempting a problem is age old in mathematics and leads to a much greater understanding of what is learned. There is no need to always tell students how to do something, instead give them a difficult problem and let them play with it.

I believe that there are many hidden geniuses out there (in fact, I believe everyone is a genius – just that we all have different fields of expertise). They are hidden because the education system that they are a part of does not provide opportunities for unlocking the genius.

Here are a few examples of moments that have warmed my heart over the years:

12 year old girl, England, 2008

I asked the child that very same question that the mathematician Guass is famed to have tackled (though whether he actually did or not is debatable to say the least!)

Add together all of the numbers from 1 to 100.

She looked at me with consternation, not best pleased about being asked to do something so apparently pointless. "I'll do 1 to 10" she told me matter-of-factly.

She wrote down the ten numbers in a column addition and then huffed and puffed as she tried to go through adding them mentally. After three attempts of losing count, she suddenly stopped and her eyes sparkled. "It's 55," she said with confidence and pride in her voice.

I beamed and asked her to tell me how she knew that.

"They're elevens, aren't they? Look."

The girl wrote down the numbers 1 to 10 again but this time in two columns:

1 10

2 9

3 8

4 7

5 6

"They always pair up to make 11. 1 and 10 is 11. 2 and 9 is 11." Her eyes were wide with delight. "And there are 5 pairs. So it's five elevens."

And this is what I mean by genius. Genius is about seeing the world differently, it is looking beyond what we have been taught, it is about breaking convention.

Adding the numbers from 1 to 10 together does not take genius. But ignoring all that you have been taught about methodology and seeing a problem in an entirely new light does.

I asked the little girl the original problem again; add together the numbers 1 to 100. She jotted down only three lines of working:

1+100= 101

2+99=101

50+51=101

"I think it's 5050," she said, a little unsure at first of her multiplication of 101 by 50. "Yep. Yep. It's 5050."

Most kids can solve this problem if given enough time and space to think. Most will need prompting to look for a different method, but occasionally you will come across a hidden genius in your class.

But to find them, you need to provide opportunities. How often do maths teachers give this space and time to just think? To create problems? Why has mathematics become so entrenched with a didactic approach? Space to see beyond the convential, to re-write a problem in a new way is incredibly important to truly learning mathematics. As Einstein said:

"The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill"

11 year old boy, England, 2007

The class teacher had posed the problem "How far can I get for £50?" The students had access to local bus timetables, maps and the infinite world of the internet.

This is an age old question in maths teaching. The kids enjoy it. The open-ended nature of the task allows them to experiment and play.

At the end of the lesson, the teacher asked for final destinations from the children. Eager hands shot up and a variety of exciting and interesting locations were happily announced.

At the back of the room, near to where I was sitting (I was observing), a small, pale, ginger haired boy sat with his faced pressed to his book still working. He had opted to work alone in the lesson (students were allowed to form teams) and had remained entirely silent throughout.

The teacher gently asked the boy to sit up and take part. "How far did you get?" he asked the shy lad. The rest of the class turned and stared. The boy gulped.

At the start of the lesson the teacher had promised a prize bounty of chocolate for the student or team that managed to get the furthest away. The routes given so far had been diverse and included bus and train fares, walking for days with the £50 used to buy food and drink, and a whole host of suggestions about hitch-hiking, which led to a great discussion about safety.

The red haired boy put down his pencil, gulped again, and then announced "Sydney. Austrailia."

The class erupted with laughter. The boy sat resolute. The teacher calmed the class and asked the boy to explain.

"I found a really nice bike in the free-ads," he started and the class burst in to laughter again. One child barked "you can't get to Australia on a bike!" Red head ignored the comment and ploughed on regardless.

"Then there was this advert in the paper," he held it up for effect, "looking for a paper boy in town. But you have to be 12. So I kept the bike until December – that's my birthday. Then I got the paper round job."

The class now were silent, the teacher grinning from ear to ear knowing what was coming.

"On the internet, Sir, you can book a flight all the way in to next year. And it's well cheap if you do. You can get an Australia flight with... er..." the boy consulted his notes, "Emirites," he said a little uncertain of the pronunciation, "and it's only £425."

The other children hung on every word.

"So. I did this paper round until June and saved up all my money. I got paid £18 per week. So I needed to work for 24 weeks and that gave me £432. I used £3.70 to get the bus to the Airport and then I even had £3.20 left to get something to eat."

The little red head won the chocolate as well as one heck of a round of applause from his fellow students.

The mathematics that the boy did was not complicated. It did not require any great mathematical skills. But I see this as a moment of genius because the boy ignored the conventional. He dared to think differently.

This is the sort of genius that we are all born with. Watch a young infant at play with some inanimate object and you will soon realise that they see more than you do. They will think of hundreds of different uses for a cardboard box, but to you it is just a cardboard box.

Somewhere along the line, this inventiveness, this genius leaves most of us. Perhaps part of the reason that we lose the ability to see a hundred possibilities, a unique approach, a different perspective in every day problems is that we all experience an education system that does not value genius. An education system that spoon feeds and gives no time to breath and create.

15 year old boy, Qatar, 2011

I sat with a boy as his class were being shown (for the nth time) how to find the area of fairly simple compound shapes, made up only of rectangles. He doodled in his book and made a show of being mindnumbingly bored by the whole experience.

"Do you have some graph paper?" I asked him, seemingly heading off on a tangent.

"Sure." He flipped open his level-arch file and unclipped a leaf of pristine paper.

"Draw a set of axes. First quadrant only." I told him with no further explanation.

He stared at the paper for a moment in thought, then produced a pencil and ruler from his case and neatly drew out the two lines required to form the x- and y-axis.

I took the paper from him and randomly drew a squiggle across the page going from left to right. He looked at me bemused.

"I want you to tell me exactly what the area under that curvey line is." I said.

Now this is a fairly standard investigation that I have done with hundreds of kids. They will start by counting the squares and realise that that is frustrating, then they will split the space in to blocks that they can calculate – imagine rectangles all over the place. Some will just estimate, some will be painstakingly accurate. Some will use square centimeters, some will invent their own units of measure.

The boy was no different. He faffed about with the problem for a while and became annoyed. "There has got to be a better way of doing this!" he laughed. After a few moments of experimenting further, he struck upon the notion of dividing the whole thing up in to vertical strips. "You can pretend each one is a trapezium," he said, justifying his approach, "and then find their areas"

He had made each vertical strip the same width. I asked him why he had chosen to do that and he explained that it was just because he was lazy, "that way they all have the same dimension, so you can do all the calculations at once."

After a few more minutes, he said to me in a conversational tone "It gets more accurate the smaller you make the strips, doesn't it?" I raised an eyebrow inquisitively. "Yes. Yes. I'm sure that's what it is. So if you could make them really small,"

"Really?" I interrupted.

"Yes. Infinitesimally?" I nodded. "Yes. If they were infinitesimally small then it would be very accurate."

"Just very?" I asked.

"No. No. It would be exact."

I have used this task countless times, and groups of children time and again will come to a similar conclusion. But it was the boy's ability to see through the structure, to imagine the abstract that makes him a genius in my eyes. Newton and Leibniz both came to the same conclusion. And this conclusion leads to the formation of The Calculus. Not bad for a 15 minute discussion on a hot May afternoon.

Britain is not Broken

Human beings are good, wonderful actually. There is an inbuilt programming that makes them be good and kind and respectful to one another. Stand back and watch any group of people in any given location and circumstance and it will be only moments that you will have to wait to see someone smiling and laughing. Complete strangers will go out of their way to accommodate the needs of others, workmates will form supportive groups, one hundred thousand concert goers will somehow manage to arrange themselves in a field without impinging on their fellow revelers. Human beings are lovely.

For reasons that stretch my imagination there is a movement in Britain that wish to promote the notion that the above is not true. It permeates the media and some irritating parts of politics. You will see news headlines designed to shock, telling us that Britain is broken. This is utter nonsense.

David Cameron has just spoken about the violence that has sprung up across England over the last few nights, and in a strong and passionate speech he made some excellent points. Unfortunately, the spin doctors have insisted on the use of the broken Britain rhetoric. And in questioning, he alluded to better discipline in schools as being a part of the solution.

Let's take a school. Let's say there are 1000 students aged 11 to 18. They need to conduct themselves in such a way that this micro-community can operate successfully. Squeezing down tight corridors in between lessons, gathering in large groups for assembly, waiting for long moments in lines to enter rooms. These are all opportunities for the students to act in this Broken Britain manner. Do they? No. They are patient, understanding, helpful, courteous and thoughtful. They conduct themselves with the same automatic, inbuilt system that the rest of us do. They are inherently good people.

So where does this myth come from and why is the movement so prevalent? I am absolutely aware that some reading this will be thinking I have completely lost the plot. That the school that you work in does not reflect this at all. There is chaos and unacceptable behaviour. So have I just managed to be incredibly lucky and only worked in fantasy schools? Absolutely not. Let's take our school again with the 1000 happy, smiley children. Sounds perfect, doesn't it? The thing is I am deliberately missing out one important fact. It isn't quite all of the 1000. In each school of 1000, there can be as few as five or six children who tip the balance of behaviour. To non-teachers, this might sound ridiculous, but as a teacher I have heard so many times about the one child in a year group who makes the difference and, if only the school could remove them from the mix, the year group would settle down. The dynamics of a group of human beings can be extraordinarily swayed by the influence of one.

Look at the streets on London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol over the last few nights. Combined their populations are in the many millions. And how many people are thieving and damaging property: a few hundred.

There are people in our society, a tiny fraction of a percentage, for whom the inbuilt programming is not operating. Unfortunately we can't just switch them off and switch them back on again like a computer. It is entirely wrong to think that these people are from a certain part of town, or that they are from socially deprived families or have divorced parents or any other of the numerous, ill informed beliefs held by some. The movement would like you to think they do, but it simply isn't true.

The influencing factor is parenting.

It is those early years of development and the norms that are laid down by parents then that make the difference in this tiny proportion of individuals. I'm not saying that these are the only people who will be naughty, of course that isn't the case. Plenty of good kids will do bad things or get mixed up in something terrible. But inside them, they retain the inbuilt instinct to be a good person and can be brought to see the wrong in what they have done.

For this small number of school students, the broken if you absolutely must, there is no recognition that the world could be any other way, that they could have the choice to become a good person.

Schools deploy countless strategies for addressing poor behaviour and teachers personalise their approach to dealing with situations to best suit their needs. As I have said above, almost entirely all human beings have the instinct to be good. So these strategies work and the school micro-society prevails. The problem with strategies though, is that they are designed around previous experience and the predictability of the response to the strategy. But when faced with an outlier, an event so beyond the conventional wisdom of the statistical model, strategies fall apart.

These exceptional children are outliers. The strategies do not work. This is why their influence can be so strong and devastating. So what should be done? Firstly, it is important to state that the education system should not be held responsible for the upbringing of the nation's children. It is not for teachers to fix these broken children, although we try our best to do so because we care greatly about each child that we work with. Outliers, in all circumstances, require unique solutions. Perhaps even draconian ones. For me, my overriding principles tell me that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. All across the country, these exceptional children are stealing away the education and life chances of other children. This cannot be right. This situation is reflected elsewhere in society and it is the reason that we are seeing the damage being caused by the scum on the streets.

These are the same few who are terrorising estates up and down the land, the same few who are striking fear in to other people's lives. This cannot be right. When looking at this problem some years back, the government resolved to create a unique solution – in that case, the response was the creation of the Anti-social Behaviour Order (ASBO). The situation is again reflected in the adult world, with the same miniscule number of thugs committing repeat offences and the most serious crimes. New York, famously, was the first to promote its zero tolerance policy as a unique solution to the problem. These people are the outliers and have been allowed to become a dominance in some circumstances. Because their behaviours are so outrageous, so beyond the norm, it is easy to write news articles that will draw in a readership and enhance profits for the media. It is not quite such a hot off the press topic to announce that the overwhelming majority of people are good, decent and law abiding. That almost everyone is simply getting on with their lives without hurting anyone else, with causing a fuss, with shouting from the roof tops "Look at me! Look at me!" So the media becomes populated with the scare stories, they gain momentum and without much provocation we end up with the ridiculous situation that we have now that people's perception of the number of crimes being committed and their fear of being a victim of crime far outweighs the actual amount of criminal behaviour.

What we are seeing on the streets has nothing to do with government cuts, it has nothing to do with poverty, it has nothing to do with youth services or schools. I grew up in what is now referred to as poverty. But my parents instilled in me a sense of purpose, a sense of self-respect. An understanding that I have responsibility. Those around me who were unemployed (many long term) did not use that as an excuse to steal from others or destroy peoples' livelihoods.

Many years now of a nanny state approach has removed the stigma of being a bad parent. Has numbed some people in to thinking that the State is responsibility for raising their children. Has propogated the notion that everyone has rights but no responsibilities.

And teachers in schools are fighting against this day after day.

For me, learning and growing as a person is far too important to be allowed to suffer because of the exceptions. I would remove these children from the system entirely and make specialist provision for them. There will be an outcry at that remark from the intellectual-left, but it has been shown time and again that exceptional situations call for exceptional responses. And I am absolutely open to being told that I am wrong, to being told that there is a better solution. But only from those who are actually proposing a solution that will work in practice and not from the wishy-washy types who, knowing it should offend their sensitivities, will simply say that removing the children is wrong on principal without ever having to face the real pain of working in a system where these children are beyond the capabilities of the strategies. These types would allow the rest to suffer because of this group of outliers and that is not the type of society that I would want to live in. These types would allow the violence on the streets to continue because their PC attitudes would not condone strong policing.

We should not, must not, allow the tiniest proportion of outlier children and adults to influence and dominate our schools and society. They are not the majority. They are not in control. Look at those on the streets tidying and sweeping, caring for each other, condemning the scumbags.

Britain is not broken. Young and old, blue collar and white collar, male and female, black and white, rich and poor, people are good.

Detentions Are Pointless

I had just started work at a new school. The first week had been really tiring and filled with the usual chaos of trying to get to know everyone and everything. So when the bell finally tolled 3:15pm on Friday afternoon, I plodded off to my office to take stock and relax for a while. I was sitting at my desk, idly checking emails and finishing off some odds and ends when a rap of knuckles across my office door brought me back from an enjoyable daze. I opened the door and was greeted by fifteen or so grumpy looking teenagers.

"Yes?" I enquired of the boy at the front of the queue.

He looked at me, puzzled by the question.

"What do you want?" I asked him slowly.

He looked at me still, "er..." he started in the customary manner for a 15 year old boy beginning a sentence, "it's Friday detention, Sir," he told me matter-of-factly.

The next few moments was like getting blood from a stone, but I finally managed to weed out of him that each Friday afternoon, the naughtiest of the naughty, those who had committed some indiscretion so horrendous that their classroom teacher or the Head of Department could not deal with it, were sent en masse to a specially extended two hour detention with the Senior Management. What a wonderful way to end my week, I thought. The students led me to the library where their detention always took place (it would appear that for many of this motley crew this was a weekly routine), and sat themselves at desks looking at me eagerly.

"Now what?" I asked them exhaustedly.

"You need to give us the questions, Sir," the nominated representative told me.

"What questions?" I was beginning to get bored of the whole malarkey.

"You need to give us maths questions, Sir. We always do maths questions."

My jaw dropped.

Not on my bloody watch. No siree.

It transpired that each week, as a punishment, the detention students were made to work through duller than dull mathematics text books. I was absolutely flabbergasted. Bad enough that the students were taking part in the whole pointless exercise of attending a two hour detention every week, bad enough that I had no warning about the onslaught of end of week kids, bad enough that the teachers who had set the detentions in the first place were not able to think of a more creative way of dealing with the problem. But to set mathematics as a punishment: that was taking the biscuit. As a mathematics teachers myself, I know that one of the key missions of the job is to battle against the constant droning of parents, the media, other teachers and society as a whole that mathematics is somehow a preserve of the geeks and the odd. What tosh! So here I found myself in a new school that clearly thought it appropriate to also associate mathematics with punishment. The damage that this would undoubtedly be doing to the subject within the school would have been significant.

Detentions are pointless. They achieve nothing at all. Where they might possibly have some positive impact is when they are used as an opportunity to address the underlying problem. Perhaps the teacher involved will talk to the student about the related incident, or perhaps the student will undertake some task of redemption – litter picking for dropping litter? Maybe the session will simply be a prep hour, with the student catching up on missed homework. I can almost see the point in some of these cases, but overwhelmingly detentions are simply pointless. I state this as a teacher and as a student.

When I was a teenager, each and every Tuesday for years at secondary school, I would have to attend a lunchtime detention. Religiously set by my Religious Studies teacher each and every Thursday afternoon for reasons I failed then and fail now to comprehend. I was no angel at school, far from it, but I was also no bad apple either. For whatever the reason, RS was always chaos and I seemed to have a face that asked for a detention. So there I would sit for 35 minutes during Tuesday lunch, copying out page after page from the Bible. I must admit that having done this for years I do now have a very good knowledge of the scripture and can hold my own in any ecumenical argument, but I am also pretty sure that these weekly detentions played at least some part in the fact that I am nowadays a fully paid up member of the Atheist Club. The sheer fact that the detentions continued week in, week out tells you a lot about their effectiveness. As a teenager, I was fairly reasonable and open to discussion and always thought it would have made infinitely more sense for the teacher to just have a conversation with me about whatever it was that was getting on his wick. Yes, detentions are pointless.

The week following my date with the Friday afternoon detention mob, I announced at staff briefing that the Friday detention would no longer be available as a sanction and asked for an open discussion as to the benefits and pitfalls of the current system and for solutions that would lead to a better system that addressed the underlying causes of poor behaviour.

Teaching can be an exhausting job and there are many people who leave the profession early because they feel demoralised and downtrodden. When surveyed, the teaching profession invariably quotes as the main reason for leaving teaching: the poor behaviour of students. It really is a horrid feeling deep in the pit of your stomach when a class full of students is openly defiant, rude and aggressive. The experience is belittling and humiliating in a way that is unmatched in any other workplace. So it is crucial that teachers find a way to ensure good behaviour in the classroom.

I have been blessed in my career to work with great kids and to have brilliant relationships with them that allowed for a feeling of mutual respect, fun and an understanding that learning is really important. On the whole, I believe that good behaviour is a byproduct of excellent teaching. As one student once said when asked why he had been messing about in a colleague's lesson, "but what if the lesson isn't worth behaving for?"

I often state that kids are kids are kids. No matter where you are, no matter what the economic circumstances, no matter what the culture. Kids are kids are kids. If the lesson is excellent, they will go on the journey with you. Kids are inherently interested in knowing new things.

But, I also know that sometimes all of the spiel, the best teaching, the greatest effort, the most interesting topic, vast amounts of passion and planning and thought can count for nothing at all. Sometimes you will just come across those rare children who are truly broken and hell bent on breaking every opportunity around them. So if detentions and sanctions are pointless, what do you do? When the students simply will not behave, when there is violence, intimidation and a sheer lack of understanding of right and wrong. What do you do?

As a young school manager, I arrived at a new school that I already knew to be in challenging circumstances – indeed that is why I chose the school. My second lesson of the day was with a middle set Year 11 class. The kids arrived and started to sit down. David was a scrawny, ugly boy who smelled unwashed and neglected. He entered the room, asked me "Who the fuck are you?" and then leaped up on to one of the tables. The desks were arranged in a U shape. He marched across the table tops, kicking bags and books of fellow students as he went and all the time staring at me. At the end of the U, he jumped down and walked straight at me until his face was against mine. "So where do I sit?" he demanded.

The lesson got progressively worse from that point in. David was not even the most outrageously behaved. By the end of the hour I felt destroyed. I felt that all of my years in teaching were worth nothing. All of the effort, all of the great lessons, all of the wonderful relationships counted for nil.

Later that evening I sat in my office at school feeling small and alone. I had tears in my eyes as I played out the humiliation time and time again in my head.

So what do you do?

Slowly I calmed down. I said out loud to myself "You either let this beat you, or you sort it." With that, I opened up the class file and, starting at the very beginning of the register I proceeded to call each and every parent of each and every student in the class.

With each phonecall, I would give an accurate, objective and unflinching account of the student's behaviour in the lesson that day. For many of the students this meant that their parents heard of how courteous, polite, friendly and welcoming of their new teacher they had been, how much effort they had tried to put in to learning, and from me a heartfelt apology that I had not been able to give them the type of lesson that they deserved. With this apology came a stern assurance that this would not happen again, an honest conversation outlining the difficulties I had had with some of the students and a description of the action that I would now take to ensure that their child was free to learn in a safe and engaging environment.

For other parents, the discussion was a no-holds-barred threat. Simply put, I told them that it was not the job of the State to raise their children. That the responsibility for their son or daughter's behaviour lay firmly with them. I gave detailed accounts of any disruption caused, any foul language used, any moments of rudeness, any lack of work.

With every parent the conversation ended with a promise that I would call them again following every maths lesson (three times per week). For those students whose behaviour fell below expectations, I would insist that the parent dealt with it urgently. For some, this would mean that I would call them during the lesson on their mobile phone (something I did on three or four occasions to great effect).

I expected, and got, a barrage of foul language and threats from some parents. But with each of these sentences that they spouted, I simply repeated "This is exactly why your child behaves badly. You are the influence. You are taking away their ability to learn. You will stop them being successful. You need to change." You can imagine how this went down!

Wednesday afternoon came round and I was to face the class again. The mood was very different. Most of the students that had been guilty of just getting involved with the spirit of bad behaviour in the last lesson could see that things were not going to be like that and they behaved fairly well. One or two of the students that I had praised, said thank you. But the hardcore of disruptive students were angry. Very angry. The lesson was once again a farce, but nowhere near as bad.

That evening, I sat in my office and made the calls again. Most students were praised. For the hardcore I was completely unrelenting in my insistence that the parent should ensure their child's standard of behaviour met my expectations. For many, the response had now turned to one of not knowing what to do. Parents would tell me how their child was out of control and that there was nothing that they could do to help. I could tell that for some, they really were at wits end. But I insisted further. I told them to enlist the help of their spouse, and other family, I told them to keep encouraging their child to do their best and to remove privileges when they did not. I know that this is incredibly difficult for some, but I was determined that they saw and understood that as a parent they had to play an active not passive role in their child's education. For my part, I deployed every technique and trick that I could muster in the classroom to improve their behaviour.

The phonecalls continued. It was exhausting.

I vividly remember sitting in my office just before the October half term, five weeks since I had first met the group, and preparing to start the phonecalls for that evening with my notebook open wide. There were no students to reprimand. That evening was a delight. Every single student was praised.

These calls were not easy, and the time that it consumed was a very big burden. But, with three conversations per week with each parent, I had built a really strong and, in all cases by October, positive relationship with the parents and students. Come November, Parents' Evening arrived and we met face to face feeling like we already knew each other. So many of the students (all bar two) thanked me for the help I was giving them and for all the praise that they were receiving from me. Many parents told me that their children talked a lot about my lessons and were enjoying them thoroughly.

The class, as it turned out, became one of the most rewarding to teach of my career. I am proud of what I did and happy that the amount of work paid dividends in the long run. There were times in those first few weeks when I thought that I should just throw in the towel. This was especially true when the Headteacher told me that I should not be talking to parents so sternly and that I could not tell them that they were responsible for the behaviour of their child at school. I cannot begin to tell you how sad that made, and makes, me feel.

Somewhere along the line something corrosive and horrid has happened to society. There are far too many people who now feel that the State should take care of all of those duties of family and parenting. It is not for the education system to raise children. We play our part, and we play it with dedication and compassion. But if this is not backed with good parenting, then we are at a loss.

Are you ashamed when your child misbehaves at school? You jolly well should be. Children reflect their parenting and parents must take responsibility. I know that it is not considered fashionable at the moment to think that people should ever have to feel shame, but I think that this is utter nonsense. There should be a stigma surrounding bad parenting, there should be a stigma about sending your child to school dirty or ill equipped. Society should not treat these things as though they are the fault of some external cause.