Readings

The first lesson is love one another

WHEN PANDORA LONGSTRETH goes back to school this Tuesday, she'll be wearing a uniform she helped to design. When she walks into her classroom, she'll greet her teacher as politely as any good schoolgirl, but she'll address him by his first name. If she's lucky, she'll look on the board and find out that she's the 'Special Person' that day. Then everyone has to make a special effort to be nice to her, and she can give stickers to the ones who try hardest. But if it's not her lucky day and she ends up alone at playtime, she can go to the Friendship Stop, where the child on duty will find her other playmates.

When she goes inside again, she and her classmates will spend the first five minutes discussing how playtime went. If something has gone very wrong, the teacher will let the discussion continue a little longer, so that the children can make a plan so that the next playtime goes better. 'First they get the truth out of us,' IS how Pandora explains it, 'Then we sort it.'

If she and her classmates all sit nicely in class and work hard and help each other, they get an extra playtime at the end of the week. If they do something especially well, notes will appear on the board to congratulate them. If they work hard all term, they get to go to Success Cinema.

The idea behind this and so many other traditions at Batheaston Primary in Somerset is that children who feel safe, noticed, understood and appreciated for the things they do well are not just happier, not just nicer to each other - they are also more attentive, more open to new ideas, and more willing to work.

This would seem to be common sense but in the world of education, where it goes under the grand banner of 'emotional literacy', it is still a radical concept. School, after all, is traditionally about discipline, competition and rigorous standards.

But there's a growing consensus that children never learn well unless they're safe and feel accepted. Tomorrow, at the launch of this year's Work-Life Balance Week, James Park of Antidote will present new research showing that schools perform better, even in the league tables, when they put emotional literacy first.

THE MOST IMPRESSIVE results are in schools in areas of high economic and social deprivation. At I Westborough High School in Yorkshire, where half the students are white working' class and ] the other half Indian or j Bangladeshi, where racial conflict was high and the school's academic performance poor, the percentage of students achieving five E grade A-C GCSEs rose from 8 per cent to 39 per cent after they made emotional literacy their priority. Racial tension also declined.

At the large, multi-racial, multi-faith Cotham School in inner-city Bristol, the number of students achieving five A-C grades rose from 60 to 80 per cent during the three years after they instituted their own tailored programme. These figures will be no surprise to the many hundreds of others schools in the country that have begun to take emotional literacy seriously, .or even to the DFES, which is so impressed by the mounting evidence in its favour that it's now launching a nationwide pilot scheme. ' Yet most people outside the profession still have no idea what emotional literacy means, where it comes from, what it looks like, or even if their children's schools subscribe to it.

IN FACT EMOTIONAL literacy is simply the latest name for something educators have been discussing for many decades. One of its most influential proponents was Howard Gardner of Harvard Education School, who proposed many decades ago that there were as many as seven types of Intelligence, two of which were emotional.

By the early Nineties, there was so much hard research linking emotions with intelligence that a science journalist named Daniel Goleman decided to write a book about it. Although Emotional Intelligence was intended for the layman and went on to be one of the bestsellers of the decade, it caused the biggest stir in the world of education.

Southampton was the first council in England to launch a flagship emotional literacy project in its schools, but many teachers were already practising what the new gurus were trying to teach:' Jenny Mosley was one of them. By the early Nineties, she'd developed an emotional literacy programme called Quality Circle Time.This is now in use throughout the state primary sector, and is slowly making its way into secondary and independent schools.

But Mosley is adamant that unless the programme is built into the culture of the school, and actively encouraged by the head, it achieves nothing. It's important, too, to keep your ambitions modest. Emotionally literate schools can boil over like any other; staff and students will argue, say terrible things, and lose interest in what they're doing.

'But when they do, the emotions that drive these situations can be acknowledged, talked about, dealt with and learned from,' explains Parks.

One simple way of doing this is to do a five minute 'talk-time' in classrooms at the start of every new session to allow students to discuss non-curriculum problems, like bullying in the playground or in the lunch queue.

Or schools can set up systems that encourage children to work together to resolve their own problems in their own way. This can be as simple as a Friendship Stop, or it can involve training older children to be peer mediators, or setting up a student council.
Some schools set up Quiet Rooms, so children who are feeling picked on can spend some time alone in a peaceful place.

Some teachers say that keeping the peace in class is miles easier if they spend the first few minutes of the hour taking their class through a relaxation exercise. But research is also beginning to show that teachers can't do much for their students unless they also have time to talk among themselves.

Harriet Goodman, who is Education Director at Antidote, talked about the changes she saw at Lister Secondary School in Plaistow, east London, after some members of staff attended three evening sessions in which they discussed their jobs, their students and why they were teachers in the first place. It emerged that many teachers understood intuitively that safe and happy' children were easier to teach and had developed their own ways of making this happen. But they were actually embarrassed to admit that they had done so because they were sure the head would tell them they were wasting time they should have been spending on the curriculum. The head then told them this was not so, invited them to continue meeting and exchanging their ideas.

But the most ardent supporters of schools like Batheaston are parents of children who got off to a bad start in less gentle schools. 'There was no emotional literacy in my son's first primary,' Rowena recalls.

'Ryan was a bright, well adjusted, affectionate child when he started school. Within a term he wouldn't even let me touch him, and he wasn't learning anything either. Within a week of being at Batheaston, he was thriving at his schoolwork and the happy, affectionate child I'd always known. That first school affected him academically and emotionally. I'm in no doubt that the two are linked.'

FRANCES TAKES THE same view. 'I wanted Christopher to have a school that would nurture him, bring out the very best in him,' she says. 'But her son's first teacher wouldn't let children use the sandpit, stood him in the corner for hours at a time, and subjected him to a steady tirade of verbal abuse.
'By the time she removed him, her son was sleepwalking and had developed a stammer. Five years on, she does not think he's fully recovered from the bullying, but at Batheaston she knows she can depend on a good support system.

'The teachers stay on top of things and if things go wrong they tell you right away. It's as simple as that, and that's why children do well here.' According to Martin Buck, the head of Lister School, emotional literacy isn't a new idea at all. 'If you ask anybody what sort of qualities you need to be an effective learner they'll say a sense of self, a sense pf self-worth, arid emotional security,' he says.
'It's essential that schools put a greater emphasis on these things if their students are to be successful.

The trick is to see if a school can create a whole tranche of effective teachers and change the way these institutions work.' But there's a larger question lurkIng behind all this, says Shirley Conran, president of the Work-Life Balance Trust. 'Let's face it, parents who slog out a nine to ten -hour day before coming home to face their families, are often just too exhausted to be there for their children,' she says.

'Young people need other solutions in the meantime, which is why schools need to get involved. By adopting emotional literacy schools' can help young people have the full lives they deserve.'

Observer 31st August, 2003