Richmond under Thames at 5am this morning

Not sure why I agreed to this but there was a very high tide (5.0m) in Richmond at 05:09 today and I agreed to be woken up by son 2 (aged 13) at 4am so that we could walk there to see it.

The walk started getting difficult just past Ham House as the water was beginning to come over the footpath and when we got to the water meadows at Petersham we had to walk along the wall as the footpath was completely covered.

Most of the path was covered in Richmond too as this view from the bridge shows. The path is submerged between the grassy bank on the right and the railings in the middle.

Nan at the Orange Tree is unmissable

I went to the Orange Tree Theatre last night to see Nan by John Masefield and it was a fantastic performance, even by the Orange Tree's high standards.

Nan is a drama set in 1810 on a small tenant farm in a village by the river Severn, where Nan (pictured) lives with her uncle and his wife.

I'll not spoil the plot as I hope that you'll go and see it for yourself but it's a very intense drama that revolves around the tensions between Nan and her Aunt, the amorous ambitions of a young man and the reflections of an old man, Gaffer Pearce, who still dotes on his wife who died 50 years ago.

There is a strong plot, and a dramatic finish, but the main drama is in the dialogue and in the contrasting styles of dialogue. There are scenes of high tension between Nan and her Aunt (I don't think I have ever hated a theatrical character as much) and periods of long reflection between Nan and Gaffer Pearce during which the story's direction is set.

The Orange Tree claims that Nan is "a discovery not to be missed" and they are absolutely right.

The Mount Governing Body

The third education meeting in three nights, this time it was the Governing Body of The Mount Primary School in New Malden. We had a wide ranging discussion over two and a half hours, which included:

• Delivering services through school clusters, the new Children's Centre and Extended School
• Revising the school prospectus
• Our budget for this year
• Process for reviewing and approving policies
• Assessing whether we should look at moving to Foundation/Trust status
• Building Schools for the Future capital programme
• Equalities and diversity
• etc. etc.

Unusually we seem to have won two of our minor battles against the Local Authority. The proposal to move us from the New Malden Cluster to the North Kingston Cluster appears to have been reversed (we are still waiting for written confirmation of this) and our new School Improvement Partner (whose role is to help us to raise standards) will not be the same person as our Link Inspector (whose role is to push the Local Authority agenda). These are minor victories but victories none the less and that's good news for our children and parents.

Willoughby Arms is worth a visit

After the Kingston Schools Forum meeting last night I went to the Willoughby Arms to meet some friends who were there watching the Derby v Southampton game.

I had not been there for some years for various reasons (including being banned from the place!) and was not particularly looking forward to going back. How wrong I was!

The pub is larger, brighter and livelier than it was and has good beer too. Definitely recommended.

Kingston Schools Forum (May 2007)

I spent rather longer than I expected at a meeting of the Kingston Schools Forum last night where we had a long debate on our response to the DfES consultation on school, early years and 14-16 funding for the years 2008-11. we discussed about 25 of the 38 questions before we ran out of time, but by then we were mired in some of the more detailed technical aspects.

I spoke rather more than I had expected to and found other committee members agreeing with me far more that I am used to! I hope that the greater understanding of the subject by my colleagues is in some part due to my contributions to the funding debate over the years, otherwise there is little point me being on committee like this.

My overall perception is that having painted itself into a corner on schools' funding a couple of years back (when some schools lost heavily under the revised funding scheme for which Local Authorities and the Government blamed each other) the Government is now trying to loosen some of the strings to allow more of the extra money that has undoubtedly gone into education to go to the places where it will do most good.

Funding for deprivation was again a large part of the discussion and the main problem is that we are being asked to identify the factors that should direct funding without first defining what precisely we mean by deprivation. In particular it is unclear if low-level Special Educational Needs should be included.

An issue with deprivation funding are that the main indicator used for this is entitlement to Free School Meals (FSM) but that only has two values (yes/no) whereas, clearly, deprivation is a wide range. Another factor is that the cost of meeting deprivation is exponential, 2+2=5.

We do seem to be making some progress on this issue and the next step is a workshop with Heads on 12 June.