Good form.

I was given the chance to become a Form Tutor half-way through this year which is relatively unusual since it's customary for a teacher to get their form only once they have achieved QTS. At first I was worried that it might prove to be too much of a burden, since a teacher's first year on the job is notoriously hard work without the added responsibility of a form group.

But now I am extremely glad that I have taken it on. For two main reasons. Firstly, my class are also one of my Year 9 French groups and being their form tutor gives me a chance to get to know them better and to build up a relationship with them outside the classroom which will hopefully benefit both me and them when we step back into a French setting.

Secondly, tutoring and mentoring is a genuine pleasure for me and reminds me daily why I became a teacher in the first place. It's actually fun to lead a group of teenagers, listen to them, speak with them, teach them and learn from them. They come from very different backgrounds: some come from London and their parents went to this same school (albeit in the days before it became Blair's Baby/Adonis' Adornment). Others are from Somalia, the Congo, North Africa, the Caribbean or Central America. Among the languages spoken are French, Yorubo, Spanish, Creole, Somali, Pashtu, Portuguese and Arabic. Like a lot of groups of students in the school they are "lively" (read: ill-disciplined and loud) and so it is a struggle to impose any sort of constructive routine on their chaotic dynamic.

The Senior Management Team (SMT) in their Infinite Wisdom saw it Fit and Correct to remove a traditional 'form period' from the school timetable. Instead we have individual conversations with groups of 4 or 5 students at a time each day. Over the course of the week I spend one-on-one time with every member of my form. There is one huge benefit to this system but also one drawback. The positive, clearly, is that I am given the chance to forge a mentoring relationship with each individual pupil. However the glaring absence of structured 'form time' has left the school with a major problem: lack of assemblies.

There is no regular meeting of each year group and concurrently no real sense of community or positive group spirit as could be fostered by regular assemblies where rewards are given out for dramatic performance, academic achievement or sporting success, where a single, unified message could be transmitted to an entire year group in one go. Sometimes this is precisely what is needed: there is a lack of school buses so most students will take the regular public bus home. A scrum of loud and often rude students forms at each bus stop and they flood onto the buses with little heed for the 'general public'. This became quite a serious problem recently, and an assembly was called as an extreme measure to ensure that all the students received the same message! How much better if an assembly were to be a regular occurence and the transmission of important messages factored into the school day. Instead children had to be pulled out from lessons in order to be sat down in the gym and shouted at for crowding the buses.

I love the weekend. Time to enjoy the sunshine.