Diary of an NQT Getting to know you


THIS YEAR I have been lumbered with a year 7 form. Thirty little midgets in oversized uniforms filed into my classroom first thing Monday morning, all plastered with a look nothing short of abject terror. It seems an eternity since I sat in their seats but I can imagine the questions running through their heads. What is going on? Can I handle this change? Which way is the tech block? And who is this giant man wearing tweed and swanning around the front? Are all my teachers going to be like this madman? First form period I had me a


crier. In between the blubbering and yelps I managed to ascertain he was “anxious and overwhelmed”. After a rousing speech in the hallway about how everything will be fine once you find your way around, I patted him on the back and plonked his puffy-eyed little frame back in the mêlée. To be honest I was more impressed with his use of vocabulary than anything. Another took great delight in


proudly declaring, while I was reading out the school rules, that they had a brother in year 10 and already knew “exactly how the school works”. I calmly asked the petulant youngster if they also knew that as a late amendment to the school charter you could now get a detention for being a little know-it- all. She fell oddly quiet after that. Then as a “getting to know you” activity I


broke them into groups and asked them to do a class survey and feedback with a presentation on a range of crucially important topics such as favourite football team, favourite food and favourite human being. I was slightly won over by my form when in


Teach it like Torno! My family


“I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich.” Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford, M*A*S*H


Wow! I don’t know about you, but this week has been manic! Exam analysis, meeting new classes, filling out class lists, learning new names and lesson planning. Already the pressure is on to get the results for next year. The inquisition has also begun. Students who didn’t quite achieve


what they potentially could have been identified and the rallying cry has gone out as to why this was the case. Questions are being asked of teachers. Why did this student only achieve an A when their FFT (Fischer Family Trust) grade was an A*? Why didn’t this or that student work hard enough? The emphasis seems to be


mostly on the teacher nowadays with little on the student. Some students are clearly more self-motivated, organised and hard-working than others and therefore are in a stronger position to achieve the higher grades. In other cases, students begin GCSE not having made the required progress previously so not only do they have to strive for their FFT target grade, but catch up beforehand. In some cases a tall order! Admittedly, as professionals,


we should hold a mirror up to ourselves and reflect on both successes and areas to work on, but it does appear that FFT grades are no longer being used as a guide to a student’s potential grade, but a stick to beat teachers with. Other avenues need to be explored


in this respect. The role of the parent, the peer group the student is part of, and putting responsibility firmly in the hands of the student themselves. We must be careful not to turn this into a blame game and avoid football manager syndrome in which if the student fails to achieve all eyes turn to blaming the teacher. However, amid all of the madness there has


been a ray of bright sunshine. This week our school introduced vertical tutoring whereby pupils are placed in mixed age tutor groups and, although it is only early days, the signs are good. On the first day we only had year 7 and 11 pupils


in. This enabled my co-tutor and I to get to know these individuals and discuss their hopes and aspirations. It


also meant that the older ones could tell the younger ones what it is actually like starting school, hopefully allaying any fears they may have had. It provided time, too, for staff to sit down with


the year 11s and emphasise the importance of the year ahead. Having three or four pupils in any one year group to coach rather than 30 will make a huge difference and having 6th-formers in the group will mean that there will be a wealth of experience to draw upon. Similarly, when the year 9s come to choose their options they will be able to receive guidance from the year 10s. At the end of the week, I asked the form how they thought the new system had gone. The response was overwhelmingly positive with all agreeing it had been far better than expected. The most rewarding aspect, however, was the “family” atmosphere that


it engendered. Clearly, stretching the


most able and giving them increasing opportunities to excel must be a priority and exploring strategies to reach this


goal has to be our next step. Nevertheless, let’s not forget the underlying reason why we became teachers – to change lives. The adoption of vertical tutoring gives us a far greater chance of getting through to our youngsters


than previously. Though relationships are already at the heart of the school this makes it even more so. Schools solely based on learning would not indeed be schools, for it is in the community


aspect of the institution that we find the purpose for the school. All success is based on deep and meaningful relationships and we may well have


found a new way of encouraging our youngsters to strive for the very top. Whatever the outcome I myself will be richer for the experience as I would have found a new and welcoming family. Happy planning!


• David Torn is a professional tutor at St Edward’s School in Essex. He is a former Teacher of the Year for London and co-author of Brilliant Secondary School Teacher. He is passionate that the purpose of education is to change lives. He returns in two weeks.


the latter category I narrowly lost out to Justin Beiber by a single vote. At first I was suspicious that they were trying to butter me up but I was then assured by one of the midgets that he has much better hair than me, which seemed fair. If I am truthful, I was a little wary of taking on my first form and even more so by embracing a year 7. I have always seen myself leaning on the academic side of education as opposed to the pastoral and in my training year I shadowed a year 7 form of devil children who seemed to go through more dramatic storylines in a week than the cast of Hollyoaks. But that said, I am already warming to my little mites. Their eagerness to impress, the


enthusiastic sea of hands that await my every question, the perfect uniform supporting enormous rucksacks, and most of all, genuine silence when I ask for it. They are so eager and so keen that already it is impossible not to feel attached. In a matter of days, I have developed an almost paternal defensiveness of them and utter sentences I thought I would never say like, “I want you to be the best behaved form in the whole school”, and “how do you think I feel when I


hear bad things about you”. It would appear that I have turned into the person I used to hate, and I quite like it.


So, forget feeling like I have been lumbered with my year 7 form, now I am just sad that they have to grow up.


• Tomas Duckling is a history NQT at Queens’ School in Hertfordshire. He returns next week.


HISTORY The forgot


Alistair Urquhart’s tale of survival in Japan in the Second


World War is remarkable. The 91-year-old highlander recently recounted his story to pupils in Perth and told Sam Phipps that he wants to offer a ‘lesson in perseverance’ to younger generations


and pupils. The 91-year-old has a rare affinity with young


people. To this day he reckons he owes that survival at least partly to the “vim and humour” of a teenage boy who would himself succumb tragically young to the legacy of Japanese brutality. Captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942 as


W


a young Gordon Highlander, Alistair was tasked with looking after three lads – bandsmen from the same regiment – for the duration of the war. One of them, Freddie Brind, was just 14. “They were a handful,” Alistair said. But Freddie,


full of mischief and encouragement, was also an inspiration, particularly when the pair were reunited in a vast hospital camp after a year’s separation. “I admit he was probably more responsible for my


recovery (from torture and cholera) than the medics were.” Alistair is still proud to have guided them all to


success in their British Army General Certificate of Education in the relative calm of their first prison camp, where dysentery was rife but wanton cruelty from their captors still rare. After the war, Freddie would ring Alistair every


night to talk about the camps. The younger man “drank heavily to forget” and died of cirrhosis of the liver while still in his 20s. It is but one strand of Alistair’s harrowing and


astonishing tale. “Boys and girls, for three and a half years I never


had a wash,” he tells the P6 and P7 children during his visit to Viewlands Primary in Perth. “Maybe the boys think that’s great – I don’t think the girls do.” Laughter breaks out but this is a rare moment


of levity. For 65 years, Alistair kept quiet about his experiences, even among his own family, but the reticence is over. His aim is twofold: to pay tribute to the tens of


thousands of fellow prisoners and slave labourers who did not make it home, and to offer a lesson in perseverance to younger generations. First came his book The Forgotten Highlander, a


gripping and upsetting account that includes time on the notorious Bridge over the River Kwai, but also government indifference on the men’s return to Britain in 1945. Alistair also survived the torpedoing of a so-called


hellship, floating alone on a raft for days before being recaptured. From his last prison camp, 10 miles from Nagasaki,


he saw a US plane fly overhead, and a few minutes afterwards he felt a gale-force blast of hot air. “I didn’t know at the time it was an atomic bomb,” he tells the pupils. Since the success of his memoir, published last year,


Alistair has given dozens of talks throughout the UK, including in libraries and schools. There is something of the old music hall about his entrance at Viewlands, a wave and a grin, then he walks with a stick to take his seat facing the audience. Evelyn Brockbank, the headteacher, says he is going


to tell them “an amazing story, a true story about what happened to him in World War Two”.


8 Pupils, teachers and parents are rapt as he talks –


steadily, coherently, without self-pity but sometimes with an edge of anger – about those distant days. He goes from his call-up in Aberdeen in September 1939 to the shambolic fall of Singapore, where a decadent British officer class contributed to defeat, and then the numerous sufferings inflicted by the Japanese. “I was part of a draft of 600 men who were told


we were going to a holiday camp. We were taken to Singapore railway station and put into steel-sided trucks. They were so hot you could not put your hands on the side. “We were herded tightly together, the doors were


closed and we had a five-day journey, with a few stops for half a cup of rice and half a cup of boiled water. Men were suffering from malaria, dysentery, all sorts of diseases.” A 30-mile march at night through dense jungle


followed. Those that fell by the wayside were left to die. “It turned out we were going to build a railway between Thailand and Burma. Often the temperature was 120 in the shade and we had to work like slaves.” Some 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied


prisoners of war died on the Death Railway. Alistair worked on the infamous Hellfire Pass, with the most basic tools. Among the many ailments were tropical ulcers.


Some in the school audience, adults and children alike, wince as Alistair describes the treatment. “Captain Mathieson, the medical officer, said ‘just go down to the latrines and pick up some maggots, put them on your ulcer and let them eat away the rotten flesh’. “Even to this day I can still feel them nibbling away


but at least you knew that while they were busy, they were doing good for you. But for other diseases you just had to hang on, carry on as you could.” Alistair, previously a sociable young man, decided


early on not to make any friends. “If you lose a friend in those conditions, it is the most harrowing sight you can ever imagine and I wasn’t prepared to go through that again. “Every morning I had to psyche myself up to get


through that day only, not the next day. The Japanese were brutal in their punishments – if you died there was plenty more to take your place. It is believed one man died for every sleeper laid on that railway. I reckon it’s far more than that.” In the “holiday camp”, he was once forced to spend


a week in the “black hole”, a caged area too small to stand, sit upright or kneel, and without food or water. Absurd though it sounds, he was lucky. “Normally they’d be in there for a month and never


get out alive.” When he was put into the hold of a rusting “hellship”,


the Kachidoki Maru, with hundreds of other men, he feared the Japanese were going to scuttle the vessel.


SecEd • September 22 2011


HEN ALISTAIR Urquhart tells a packed hall of school children about his remarkable survival in the Second World War, it is a living history lesson where 80 years separate teacher


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