In Praise of Roy Samson
In Praise of Roy Samson
In Praise of Roy Samson
My latest column in the Bury Free Press (18/1/13):
As one pantomime season tiptoes off into the wings, another prepares to take a bow.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, get ready for shrieks of side-splitting laughter and for sniffing back those tears. It’s almost time for the publication of (drum roll, please) the annual school performance tables.
This year’s statistics will have at their heart last summer’s appalling GCSE fiasco – when 50,000 young people in England and Wales didn’t get the grade they should have received. It was the year when the examination boards didn’t moderate and the regulator failed to regulate.
And it has been an almighty mess ever since, finally dragged into the High Court in an attempt to gain some justice for our students.
Suffolk has been especially badly hit by the blunder, and when the tables are published we’ll see schools that are usually among the most successful in the County taking an undignified tumble.
That wouldn’t matter quite so much if it was a situation of their making. But it isn’t. It’s a reminder that league tables and Ofsted reports will only ever tell us so much about a school.
The best way to know if it’s the right place for your child is to visit during the working day, to note the relationships between pupils and teachers, to see if the head knows pupils’ names, and to check that there’s soap in the toilets.
Small details can tell us a lot.
Because the heart of any good school will be about relationships. Of course some systems will be important: a good school will run efficiently so that teachers can focus on their main job - teaching.
I was thinking about this the other day when I reminisced about the man who led me to becoming a teacher all those years ago.
Mr Samson was an English teacher with unorthodox methods. It would be a brave school who would employ him today without a paper-chase of risk assessments.
He helped pupils to visualise the Spanish Armada by taking them to the school’s biology pond, placing toy boats in the water, and then setting a surface sheen of oil on fire. I remember a lesson exploring the power of the five senses in which he asked a blindfolded fellow student to smell and then taste a succession of foodstuffs. It ended in catfood.
I’m not of course suggesting that schools should be packed with Mr Samsons. But I hope that the current vogue for systems and uniformity doesn’t mean that the memorable teachers, the mavericks, those who dare to surprise us, are squeezed out of the profession.
Because when Mr Samson taught me Shakespeare, a new world opened up, and an aimless teenager suddenly knew what he wanted to do and what he wanted to be. Roy Samson achieved that apparently effortlessly. It was undiluted inspiration.
It’s something no league tables could capture and quantify. It was simply the magic of a great teacher. In Suffolk, we need more magic like that, more than ever.
Geoff Barton
Saturday, 19 January 2013