Monday: A governors’ meeting at our local village first school, where we engage in pathetic struggles to accommodate adult bottoms on tiny chairs. I am the new clerk to the governors, which strikes me as very Chaucerian. But instead of spawning ribald Canterbury Tales, my job is to keep the minutes (and be ready with guidance on legal and procedural matters).
Boys’ urinals and the school incinerator seem not to feature in the literature, although County regularly regale us with information on safety in the lab (which we don’t have) and courses in modern foreign languages (which we don’t teach). Why do they waste money by sending everything to all schools? It is small wonder that nearby Thetford Forest is being steadily razed to cope with the excess paper production.
Tuesday: To another school in neighbouring Suffolk to collect two granddaughters. The children burst forth, brandishing paintings and models. Younger Granddaughter, in year 1 but working with year 2 because, as she will tell you, she is “clever”, wants to bring Little Friend home to tea. We are duly joined by Elder Granddaughter from year 3. Back home, it transpires that Little Friend works with year 2, although chronologically the same age as Elder Granddaughter. Out of school, age rather than intelligence triumphs and it is not long before Younger Granddaughter, who had invited Little Friend in the first place, is wailing at being left out of the game. I seem to have stumbled on one of the social disadvantages of mixed age classes.
Wednesday: I drive 25 miles to a market town hotel for a meeting of governors’ clerks about inspection. I am the only man apart from the speaker a registered inspector from OFSTED, and the waiter who brings coffee at half-time. We come away feeling we are now the experts, able to tell our governing bodies all they ever wanted to know about inspection. In spite of this invaluable expertise, the county won’t pay our expenses and only the coffee was free.
Thursday: The local paper arrives with a report on a neighbouring school’s “collective worship within the regulations of its Church of England Voluntary Controlled Status”. We are also C of E VC, so I read with interest. It says “the school ensures that all pupils receive a daily act of worship”. Surely, even in the Anglican Church, it should be God, rather than the children, on the receiving end.
I wonder about a more suitable verb and remember a similar exercise in the grammar school where I once taught. What did we actually do with Religious Knowledge: teach it or impart it? One heathen demonstrated his contempt by suggesting that the adjective from RK should be archaic.
Friday: Our headteacher phones and I mentally don my village magazine editor’s hat (after taking off the clerk’s one). She wants me to thank everyone who contributed to the bazaar and to publish an appeal for more mums to hear reading and more dads to give football coaching.
It’s a glorious sunny afternoon, so my wife and I decide on impulse to go bird watching on the coastal marshes. We park and hang our binoculars round our necks just as a coach disgorges a gaggle of excited children and three harrassed teachers. The gaggle be-comes a crocodile and marches past us. I remark sotto voce: “Year 8, I should think.” One of the marchers overhears and looks surprised. “How on earth did he know that?” he hisses to his partner.
Michael J Smith is a retired teacher living in Norfolk
