Class is the last great taboo in British political discourse. The left daren’t talk about it for fear of sounding envious; the right worry that doing so will draw attention to their largely privileged origins.
As a result we’ve ended up in a situation where New Labour bent over so far backwards to prove they were relaxed about people becoming filthy rich their spine had fragmented long before Northern Rock went to the wall. As for the Tories, the ever more desperate efforts of Citizen Dave and his chums to show us they’re ordinary blokes only serves to convince sceptical voters that if they do eat pasties then they probably have them served up on a silver salver.
Even though her comments about indulgent parents turning their children into ‘spoilt little Buddhas’ provided an easier quote for the media to hang its coverage on Dr Mary Boustead of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) deserves praise for raising the issue of class, in particular the ‘toxic’ effect it has on the education system.
Speaking to the ATL annual conference in Manchester this week she said the UK currently has ‘schools for the elite, schools for the middle class and schools for the working class’, what it doesn’t have, she went on to say, is schools with a mixed intake where children from all backgrounds can learn together ‘those intangible skills of aspiration, effort and perseverance from one another.’
This, Dr Boustead said, created a situation that was ‘toxic for the poorest and most dispossessed’ students. She hit out at the impact government ‘austerity’ policies were having on the educational chances for students from poorer families and the claim that schools weren’t doing enough to tackle underachievement.
It was, she said, ‘a lie that conveniently enables ministers to evade responsibility for the effects of their policies’ and that schools were ‘straining every sinew’ to help disadvantaged students get the best out of their time at school, but were fighting a losing battle against the effects of ill health, poverty and deprivation, problems she accused Education Secretary Michael Gove and the government as a whole of wilfully disregarding.
A spokesperson for the Department for Education told the BBC that although schools ‘couldn’t be expected to solve every problem’ related to deprivation they should do more to challenge poor performance rather than ‘defending a culture of failure.’
Issues of class, even though it makes us nervous to talk about them, are at the heart of the current chin stroking debate about what schools are for currently occupying so many people who, allegedly, are the owners of first class minds. The one thing they aren’t , Michael Gove tells us with finger wagging certainty, is engines of social engineering, even though he has had his own oily overalls on since taking office.
This, after all, is the Education Secretary who has driven the process of turning schools into academies at breakneck speed; downgraded vocational education to the fury of the business sector and only last week endorsed plans to hand over writing the A Level syllabus to the Russell Group universities. He has also backed endless inane plans to bring back Latin lessons and to make teachers dress up in gowns and mortar boards that serve no real purpose other than to get his name into the papers.
If all that isn’t social engineering then I’m the Easter Bunny.
It is certainly part of a plan to turn the educational clock back to some idealised vision of a Britain where everyone knew their place and the people who worked with their brains were kept separate from the people who got their hands dirty by a Berlin wall of prejudice and thinly veiled snobbery. If reversing at full speed is your plan for the future you’ve got serious problems.
To stand still never mind compete in the twenty first century the last thing Britain needs is to maintain the current situation where intellectuals look down on rude mechanicals; that way lies disaster. What we need is a society where whether they do so with their hands or their brains, or in many cases a bit of both, people work together for a shared aim.
One of the most powerful tools for creating such a society is the education system, the experiences people have at school like those they have in the family home shape the rest of their lives. If that means taxing the rich a little more to make sure children form poor families get an education that allows them to achieve their full potential so be it, in the long term even the people who complain about being squeezed until the pips squeak will benefit.
Being obsessed with class is as much a part of the experience of being British as queuing, warm beer and inventing sports the rest of the world is better than us at, we shouldn’t though hold back from doing all we can to minimise its effect. The most efficient way of doing so term is through schools policy, however for that to happen we need a more sensible engineer at the controls of the educational machinery.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 April 2012
Sunday, 18 March 2012
Declining levels of literacy threaten our future.
Levels of literacy amongst pupils leaving primary school in England have fallen sharply in recent years according to chief inspector of schools Michael Wilshaw. Reading standards showed steady improvement from 1995 to 2005, now though many pupils are going to secondary school without the skills they need to cope with the curriculum.
Speaking to the BBC this week Michael Wilshaw emphasised the link between literacy and academic success, saying, ‘our concern is that too many pupils fall behind in their literacy early on, in most cases if they can’t read at seven they struggle to catch up through their school career.’ As a result many of these students ‘find it difficult to access the curriculum’ and as adults ‘lack the functional skills to make their way in the modern world. They are more likely to be unemployed, unwell or supported by the state.’
In future OFSTEAD, the body that inspects schools in England, would, he said, focus ‘more sharply’ on monitoring how literacy is taught.
The reaction from the unions representing teachers to Michael Wilshaw’s comments was swift and somewhat defensive.
Chris Keates of the NASUWT said the ‘critical importance’ literacy to overall academic success was ‘beyond dispute’. However she challenged the figures cited by OFSTEAD saying the number of students reaching the required standard of literacy at eleven and later at GCSE had in fact risen since the 1990’s. It was right, she said, for OFSTEAD to ‘monitor provision in this vital subject’; but that it should not pick and choose the evidence it uses in order to support a ‘predetermined view.’
Mary Boustead of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers said that national tests were narrowing the curriculum and suggested this ‘may well be one of the major causes why children at primary school who’ve had an overemphasis on test items can’t access the secondary curriculum.’
Teachers have many justified reasons to feel antagonistic towards OFSTEAD and the government from an inspection regime that sometimes seems more interested in ticking boxes than improving delivery to the ever more fanciful ideas for what schools should teach dreamed up by the ambitious Michael Gove.
Then there is the small matter of the plan mooted this week to pay teachers, and other public servants, working in areas deemed to be poor less than those working in wealthy areas on the grounds that their cost of living is much lower. All of which sounds very sensible until you consider the not unlikely possibility of someone living in an area with a high cost of living but working in a ‘poor’ area. Perhaps whoever dreamed up this latest exercise in unfairness genuinely believes that all house masters live in cottages provided by the school and have a rosy cheeked wife on hand to provide bump suppers at a moments notice too.
The one area though where there cannot be room for dissent is when it comes to the importance of making sure every child leaves primary school not just able to read fluently, but that they read for pleasure too. Low levels of literacy are a disaster in waiting for the economy, inhibiting the development of new industries that could bring lasting prosperity.
Being able to read isn’t just about academic success, a skill to be drilled into the unwilling heads of students, it is one of the things that makes a person whole, shows him or her worlds and ways of life beyond their narrow personal experience and encourages empathy and tolerance. In short it is through learning the mechanics of literacy and the world books open up to us that we become civilised.
Instead of a dreary and mostly self serving argument between the government and the teaching unions over statistics what we need is a mature agreement that the problem of illiteracy needs to be addressed as a priority.
The government has to invest in good quality literacy teaching for both children and adults, a child who struggles to read often have parents with literacy problems of their own. It might be a good idea too to think about opening rather than closing public libraries, especially in disadvantaged areas where families struggling to survive on ever shrinking budgets can’t afford to buy books for their kids. Most of all the government must set teachers free of their bureaucratic shackles and let them get on with what they do best.
For its part the teaching profession will have to overcome its antipathy to synthetic phonics, as a means of teaching reading it isn’t a panacea, but those of us who learnt by that method in the 1970’s know from experience that it if often highly effective. There needs also to be a more structured and even, dare I say it, competitive atmosphere in classrooms; not least because this will help boys to focus and make use of the energy they otherwise expend on misbehaving.
Literacy is too important, bestows too many lifelong gifts that can illuminate otherwise troubled lives for anyone to miss out due to bad teaching and government interference.
And the winner is…..Paddington
Paddington Bear, the marmalade sandwich chomping creation of Michael Bond has been crowned as Britain’s best loved animated character at the British Animation Awards, beating off the likes of Super Ted, Wallace and Gromit and Alexandr Meerkat.
An awards ceremony for cartoon characters; that’s got to be more fun than the dreary old Oscars don’t you think?
I can just imagine Bagpuss snarling ****oles through a fixed grin as the mice on the mouse organ troop up to collect their prize and Super Ted (surely you’d have to be forty at least to even know who he was) sulking at the bar because he’s still big it’s the cartoon that have gotten small.
As for weepy podium speeches that seem to go on forever I’m sure the bear of the moment would fix the blubbering A lister with one of his famous ‘hard stares.’
Speaking to the BBC this week Michael Wilshaw emphasised the link between literacy and academic success, saying, ‘our concern is that too many pupils fall behind in their literacy early on, in most cases if they can’t read at seven they struggle to catch up through their school career.’ As a result many of these students ‘find it difficult to access the curriculum’ and as adults ‘lack the functional skills to make their way in the modern world. They are more likely to be unemployed, unwell or supported by the state.’
In future OFSTEAD, the body that inspects schools in England, would, he said, focus ‘more sharply’ on monitoring how literacy is taught.
The reaction from the unions representing teachers to Michael Wilshaw’s comments was swift and somewhat defensive.
Chris Keates of the NASUWT said the ‘critical importance’ literacy to overall academic success was ‘beyond dispute’. However she challenged the figures cited by OFSTEAD saying the number of students reaching the required standard of literacy at eleven and later at GCSE had in fact risen since the 1990’s. It was right, she said, for OFSTEAD to ‘monitor provision in this vital subject’; but that it should not pick and choose the evidence it uses in order to support a ‘predetermined view.’
Mary Boustead of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers said that national tests were narrowing the curriculum and suggested this ‘may well be one of the major causes why children at primary school who’ve had an overemphasis on test items can’t access the secondary curriculum.’
Teachers have many justified reasons to feel antagonistic towards OFSTEAD and the government from an inspection regime that sometimes seems more interested in ticking boxes than improving delivery to the ever more fanciful ideas for what schools should teach dreamed up by the ambitious Michael Gove.
Then there is the small matter of the plan mooted this week to pay teachers, and other public servants, working in areas deemed to be poor less than those working in wealthy areas on the grounds that their cost of living is much lower. All of which sounds very sensible until you consider the not unlikely possibility of someone living in an area with a high cost of living but working in a ‘poor’ area. Perhaps whoever dreamed up this latest exercise in unfairness genuinely believes that all house masters live in cottages provided by the school and have a rosy cheeked wife on hand to provide bump suppers at a moments notice too.
The one area though where there cannot be room for dissent is when it comes to the importance of making sure every child leaves primary school not just able to read fluently, but that they read for pleasure too. Low levels of literacy are a disaster in waiting for the economy, inhibiting the development of new industries that could bring lasting prosperity.
Being able to read isn’t just about academic success, a skill to be drilled into the unwilling heads of students, it is one of the things that makes a person whole, shows him or her worlds and ways of life beyond their narrow personal experience and encourages empathy and tolerance. In short it is through learning the mechanics of literacy and the world books open up to us that we become civilised.
Instead of a dreary and mostly self serving argument between the government and the teaching unions over statistics what we need is a mature agreement that the problem of illiteracy needs to be addressed as a priority.
The government has to invest in good quality literacy teaching for both children and adults, a child who struggles to read often have parents with literacy problems of their own. It might be a good idea too to think about opening rather than closing public libraries, especially in disadvantaged areas where families struggling to survive on ever shrinking budgets can’t afford to buy books for their kids. Most of all the government must set teachers free of their bureaucratic shackles and let them get on with what they do best.
For its part the teaching profession will have to overcome its antipathy to synthetic phonics, as a means of teaching reading it isn’t a panacea, but those of us who learnt by that method in the 1970’s know from experience that it if often highly effective. There needs also to be a more structured and even, dare I say it, competitive atmosphere in classrooms; not least because this will help boys to focus and make use of the energy they otherwise expend on misbehaving.
Literacy is too important, bestows too many lifelong gifts that can illuminate otherwise troubled lives for anyone to miss out due to bad teaching and government interference.
And the winner is…..Paddington
Paddington Bear, the marmalade sandwich chomping creation of Michael Bond has been crowned as Britain’s best loved animated character at the British Animation Awards, beating off the likes of Super Ted, Wallace and Gromit and Alexandr Meerkat.
An awards ceremony for cartoon characters; that’s got to be more fun than the dreary old Oscars don’t you think?
I can just imagine Bagpuss snarling ****oles through a fixed grin as the mice on the mouse organ troop up to collect their prize and Super Ted (surely you’d have to be forty at least to even know who he was) sulking at the bar because he’s still big it’s the cartoon that have gotten small.
As for weepy podium speeches that seem to go on forever I’m sure the bear of the moment would fix the blubbering A lister with one of his famous ‘hard stares.’
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Pray all you want but teaching RE still isn’t a ‘priority’.
It isn’t just the earnest young evangelists on the bus who want to talk to you about god these days, everyone from the government on down is getting in on the act.
Baroness Warsi flew to the Vatican this week to make a prissy little speech about how Britain was still a Christian country, but only just, because it was being attacked from within by ‘militant secularists’. The tabloids joined together in a collective moral panic because Bideford town council, have lost a legal case brought against them by the National Secular Society and would no longer be able to begin its meetings with prayers.
A new all party group of MPs has joined the debate or maybe that should be sermon, calling for the teaching of Religious Education to be a ‘priority’ in schools in England and Wales. Liberal Democrat chair of the new group Stephen Lloyd told the BBC that in ‘today’s world where our children can be open to an enormous amount of misleading information I believe it is absolutely essential they are taught about different cultures and religions by trained and experienced RE teachers’.
To do so, they claim, RE must be included alongside Maths, English, science and a humanities subject as part of the English Baccalaureate being touted as a replacement for A Levels. A position supported by several faith groups including the Religious Education Council of England, Chair John Keast told the BBC that coalition plans to change the school curriculum could ‘challenge’ how RE is taught and that as a result the ‘RE community’ feels ‘under fire’ and welcomes the new all party group as a means of giving ‘the subject a strong profile amongst parliamentarians.’
Responding a spokeswoman for the Department of Education said ‘RE remains a statutory part of the curriculum but it is up to schools themselves how it is taught.’ Quite so; I’d like to make the case that they shouldn’t be teaching it at all.
Not too long ago a report published by the Royal Society of Arts revealed that one in four people in England struggle with basic mathematics, standards of literacy have been in decline for decades; is teaching children a pasteurised version of the world’s major religions really a priority? Wouldn’t it be more useful to teach our kids to read, write and count properly? After all most religions are more than adept at educating their younger followers and hardly need the help of well meaning educators.
This is not, I hasten to add, an attack on religion even though I am not and never have been a believer myself. Unlike the National Secular Society I don’t choose to define my lack of belief by what I am against and so can sit through the mild mannered burbling of the Lord Mayor’s Chaplin before council meetings without being offended; but schools are a special case. They bring together young people from such a wide range of cultures, classes and communities that agreeing everyone, including atheists, should pack their beliefs away whilst within their walls is vital to maintaining harmony.
As for the assault on faith Baroness Warsi and the sillier columnists on the payroll of the Daily Mail seem to see lurking around every corner it seems to me like so much sound and fury about nothing. After all we give twenty three bishops a free seat for life in our legislature, they’ve been mostly on the side of the angels in the recent debates on welfare reform, but so long as they are there believers cannot seriously claim to be an oppressed minority.
An (almost) never ending story
Author Caroline Smailes has published a novel, 99 Reasons Why, that allows its readers to choose from eleven possible endings. Speaking The Independent Ms Smailes said this would allow her readers to have ‘different reactions, interpretations and feelings about the story depending on which ending they choose.’
Crumbs; is this the end of the novel as we know it? Hardly, it is, at best, a clever if not original game played with the form of the novel; at worst it is an annoying gimmick.
A good novel gives its readers endless scope for exploring how they feel about the characters and their fate, this isn’t a brilliant new discovery; it’s why we read them.
Space- the tidy new frontier
The Swiss have, so the BBC reported this week, developed a device for cleaning up the half a million items of ‘space junk’ orbiting the earth.
Right now the Chinese are looking up at the night sky and seeing the arena in which the people’s revolution can achieve its ultimate triumph. Americans have for years seen space as a pristine frontier where they can rediscover the pioneer spirit that made their nation great. The Swiss though look up at the limitless vastness of the heavens and think ‘we really must tidy this up’; don’t you just want to shake them?
The again maybe I shouldn’t be so smug. After all if Britain had a space programme we’d probably have to cancel the inaugural mission due to there being the wrong sort of leaves on the launch pad.
Baroness Warsi flew to the Vatican this week to make a prissy little speech about how Britain was still a Christian country, but only just, because it was being attacked from within by ‘militant secularists’. The tabloids joined together in a collective moral panic because Bideford town council, have lost a legal case brought against them by the National Secular Society and would no longer be able to begin its meetings with prayers.
A new all party group of MPs has joined the debate or maybe that should be sermon, calling for the teaching of Religious Education to be a ‘priority’ in schools in England and Wales. Liberal Democrat chair of the new group Stephen Lloyd told the BBC that in ‘today’s world where our children can be open to an enormous amount of misleading information I believe it is absolutely essential they are taught about different cultures and religions by trained and experienced RE teachers’.
To do so, they claim, RE must be included alongside Maths, English, science and a humanities subject as part of the English Baccalaureate being touted as a replacement for A Levels. A position supported by several faith groups including the Religious Education Council of England, Chair John Keast told the BBC that coalition plans to change the school curriculum could ‘challenge’ how RE is taught and that as a result the ‘RE community’ feels ‘under fire’ and welcomes the new all party group as a means of giving ‘the subject a strong profile amongst parliamentarians.’
Responding a spokeswoman for the Department of Education said ‘RE remains a statutory part of the curriculum but it is up to schools themselves how it is taught.’ Quite so; I’d like to make the case that they shouldn’t be teaching it at all.
Not too long ago a report published by the Royal Society of Arts revealed that one in four people in England struggle with basic mathematics, standards of literacy have been in decline for decades; is teaching children a pasteurised version of the world’s major religions really a priority? Wouldn’t it be more useful to teach our kids to read, write and count properly? After all most religions are more than adept at educating their younger followers and hardly need the help of well meaning educators.
This is not, I hasten to add, an attack on religion even though I am not and never have been a believer myself. Unlike the National Secular Society I don’t choose to define my lack of belief by what I am against and so can sit through the mild mannered burbling of the Lord Mayor’s Chaplin before council meetings without being offended; but schools are a special case. They bring together young people from such a wide range of cultures, classes and communities that agreeing everyone, including atheists, should pack their beliefs away whilst within their walls is vital to maintaining harmony.
As for the assault on faith Baroness Warsi and the sillier columnists on the payroll of the Daily Mail seem to see lurking around every corner it seems to me like so much sound and fury about nothing. After all we give twenty three bishops a free seat for life in our legislature, they’ve been mostly on the side of the angels in the recent debates on welfare reform, but so long as they are there believers cannot seriously claim to be an oppressed minority.
An (almost) never ending story
Author Caroline Smailes has published a novel, 99 Reasons Why, that allows its readers to choose from eleven possible endings. Speaking The Independent Ms Smailes said this would allow her readers to have ‘different reactions, interpretations and feelings about the story depending on which ending they choose.’
Crumbs; is this the end of the novel as we know it? Hardly, it is, at best, a clever if not original game played with the form of the novel; at worst it is an annoying gimmick.
A good novel gives its readers endless scope for exploring how they feel about the characters and their fate, this isn’t a brilliant new discovery; it’s why we read them.
Space- the tidy new frontier
The Swiss have, so the BBC reported this week, developed a device for cleaning up the half a million items of ‘space junk’ orbiting the earth.
Right now the Chinese are looking up at the night sky and seeing the arena in which the people’s revolution can achieve its ultimate triumph. Americans have for years seen space as a pristine frontier where they can rediscover the pioneer spirit that made their nation great. The Swiss though look up at the limitless vastness of the heavens and think ‘we really must tidy this up’; don’t you just want to shake them?
The again maybe I shouldn’t be so smug. After all if Britain had a space programme we’d probably have to cancel the inaugural mission due to there being the wrong sort of leaves on the launch pad.
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Gove wrong to downgrade vocational courses
At the risk of sounding like a latter day Mrs Dale I’m worried about Michael; Education Secretary Michael Gove that is.
Since he took office in 2010 he seems to have approached the project of reforming Britain’s schools at something like ramming speed. Free schools, bringing back Latin lessons and even sending a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the land all hovered up valuable publicity for the ambitious Mr Gove.
Perhaps this is all par for the course, education secretaries tend to flash across the political hemisphere like meteors, but now he has moved out of the realms of self publicising eccentricity into an area where he could cause lasting damage to the life chances of millions of students.
Michael Gove has given his support to downgrade the value of 3100 vocational courses, previously courses in horse care and hairdressing were counted as being equivalent to four GCSE’s, from 2014 though only around 70 vocational courses will be treated in this way.
The rationale behind the move prompted by a report on vocational education in the UK prepared by Professor Alison Wolfe is that the old system created ‘perverse incentives’ for schools to use vocational courses to boost heir position in the league tables. As a result many schools may well cut back on the number of vocational courses they offer even though take up has grown exponentially in recent years from around 15,000 in 2004 to575, 000 students in 2010.
Professor Wolfe told the BBC this week that too many students were taking qualifications that were ‘getting league points, but which when they went out into the labour market they found nobody actually valued’ schools were, she said, ‘essentially lying to kids and that’s a terrible thing to do.’ Revising the number of vocational courses that can be counted as equivalent to GCSE’s would, she went on to say, mean they would have exactly the same status as other more academic forms of study.
The report, according to Education Secretary Gove has ‘laid bare’ the ‘weaknesses of the current system. He goes on to say that ‘for far too long the system has been devalued by attempts to pretend all qualifications are the same.’ So with the sort of logic that deals with a chip pan fire by burning down the rest of the house Mr Gove has decided to ‘solve’ this problem by devaluing every vocational course; way to go Mikey.
The ink was hardly dry on the report before criticisms of its conclusions began to pour in, engineering employers were unhappy that the popular and well respected Engineering Diploma, previously worth five GCSE’s will now only be equivalent to one. Christine Blower of the NUT said the proposed reforms ‘are likely to exacerbate the vocational academic divide.’ Chris Keates of the NASUWT questioned the wisdom of downgrading qualifications taken by so many young people saying that doing so would ‘remove qualifications employers value, narrow the curriculum even more and lead to disaffection amongst young people.’
Even the Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg, not exactly a socialist firebrand, got in on the act saying that whilst he agreed with government attempts to improve the standard of vocational education on offer saying that ‘we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ Quite so, although in this case Michael Gove seems intent on throwing out the baby, then the bathwater before sending the bath itself clattering down the stairs after them both for good measure.
It would be unwise to suggest that all vocational courses are either perfect or equal, often when they are designed by educationalists with little experience of industry, but this assault on vocational education as a whole is nothing short of vandalism. Not least because it fails to address the real problem; the idea that schools can or should be ranked in a league table.
This week Michael Gove branded opponents of academies as ‘trots’, implying they put ideology ahead of common sense. I can’t help but feel there is more than a little projection going on here.
If anybody is gripped by an inflexible ideology it is Mr Gove, and like all ideologues he alternates between a smug conviction that he is always right and hysterically paranoid denunciations of anyone who dares to question him. Time and tide have moved on, vocational and academic learning aren’t opposed armed camps, they are parallel tracks to success with the connecting door between the two propped open.
That Michael Gove either can’t or won’t accept this and persists with an attempt to return Britain’s schools to some imagined golden age of mortar boards, Latin prep and Victorian hymns is a shocking dereliction of his ministerial duty.
Since he took office in 2010 he seems to have approached the project of reforming Britain’s schools at something like ramming speed. Free schools, bringing back Latin lessons and even sending a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the land all hovered up valuable publicity for the ambitious Mr Gove.
Perhaps this is all par for the course, education secretaries tend to flash across the political hemisphere like meteors, but now he has moved out of the realms of self publicising eccentricity into an area where he could cause lasting damage to the life chances of millions of students.
Michael Gove has given his support to downgrade the value of 3100 vocational courses, previously courses in horse care and hairdressing were counted as being equivalent to four GCSE’s, from 2014 though only around 70 vocational courses will be treated in this way.
The rationale behind the move prompted by a report on vocational education in the UK prepared by Professor Alison Wolfe is that the old system created ‘perverse incentives’ for schools to use vocational courses to boost heir position in the league tables. As a result many schools may well cut back on the number of vocational courses they offer even though take up has grown exponentially in recent years from around 15,000 in 2004 to575, 000 students in 2010.
Professor Wolfe told the BBC this week that too many students were taking qualifications that were ‘getting league points, but which when they went out into the labour market they found nobody actually valued’ schools were, she said, ‘essentially lying to kids and that’s a terrible thing to do.’ Revising the number of vocational courses that can be counted as equivalent to GCSE’s would, she went on to say, mean they would have exactly the same status as other more academic forms of study.
The report, according to Education Secretary Gove has ‘laid bare’ the ‘weaknesses of the current system. He goes on to say that ‘for far too long the system has been devalued by attempts to pretend all qualifications are the same.’ So with the sort of logic that deals with a chip pan fire by burning down the rest of the house Mr Gove has decided to ‘solve’ this problem by devaluing every vocational course; way to go Mikey.
The ink was hardly dry on the report before criticisms of its conclusions began to pour in, engineering employers were unhappy that the popular and well respected Engineering Diploma, previously worth five GCSE’s will now only be equivalent to one. Christine Blower of the NUT said the proposed reforms ‘are likely to exacerbate the vocational academic divide.’ Chris Keates of the NASUWT questioned the wisdom of downgrading qualifications taken by so many young people saying that doing so would ‘remove qualifications employers value, narrow the curriculum even more and lead to disaffection amongst young people.’
Even the Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg, not exactly a socialist firebrand, got in on the act saying that whilst he agreed with government attempts to improve the standard of vocational education on offer saying that ‘we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ Quite so, although in this case Michael Gove seems intent on throwing out the baby, then the bathwater before sending the bath itself clattering down the stairs after them both for good measure.
It would be unwise to suggest that all vocational courses are either perfect or equal, often when they are designed by educationalists with little experience of industry, but this assault on vocational education as a whole is nothing short of vandalism. Not least because it fails to address the real problem; the idea that schools can or should be ranked in a league table.
This week Michael Gove branded opponents of academies as ‘trots’, implying they put ideology ahead of common sense. I can’t help but feel there is more than a little projection going on here.
If anybody is gripped by an inflexible ideology it is Mr Gove, and like all ideologues he alternates between a smug conviction that he is always right and hysterically paranoid denunciations of anyone who dares to question him. Time and tide have moved on, vocational and academic learning aren’t opposed armed camps, they are parallel tracks to success with the connecting door between the two propped open.
That Michael Gove either can’t or won’t accept this and persists with an attempt to return Britain’s schools to some imagined golden age of mortar boards, Latin prep and Victorian hymns is a shocking dereliction of his ministerial duty.
Sunday, 24 July 2011
A tale of two countries with one big problem; lifting people out of poverty
A survey carried out for the universities and College Union (UCN) and reported by the BBC this week has highlighted huge local variations in educational achievement across the UK, making Britain, in educational and economic terms, two different countries.
In Glasgow East 35% of adults have no qualifications compared to just 1.9% in the north London constituency of Brent. There are more adults without qualifications in a single Birmingham constituency (Hodge Hill) than in Cambridge, Winchester, Wimbledon, Buckingham, Romsey, Leeds North West and four other constituencies put together.
The message is stark, in the north too many people are held back from finding paid work, let alone reaching their full potential by a lack of qualifications than in the south east with a certainty that the vicious circle of low achievement and low incomes will be handed on to their children. As Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the UCU told the BBC on Friday: ‘There is a real danger that children growing up in places where it is not unheard of to have no qualifications will have their ambition blunted and never realise their full potential.’
Although the survey finds that the areas with the best qualified workforce are generally in the south even here there are pockets of low achievement and correspondingly high levels of disadvantage. London is described as a ‘city of contrasts’ with many high achievers in wealthy areas, but significant pockets of low attainment in parts of the old east end such as Romford, Hornchurch and West Ham.
The deep regional divide in educational achievement, say the UCU, underlines the importance of improving access to education and foolishness of allowing universities to raise their tuition fees made by the coalition. In a reply reported by the BBC the Department of Education said it was using its reforms to target support towards the most disadvantaged children and was working to make qualifications more rigorous and compatible with the needs of employers.
The UCU are right to criticise the failure of a largely privately educated government to improve access to higher education for those people who don’t have the odd £9000 a year lying around to spend on putting their offspring through university. To this might be added the cruel and thoughtless decision to scrap the Educational Maintenance Allowance late last year.
It would also be fair to castigate the political establishment as a whole for its attitude to supporting the areas of the country that were his hardest when the old heavy industries collapsed in the seventies. For eighteen years the Tories largely ignored everywhere north of Watford gap because hardly anyone in the north votes Conservative; then under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the same areas were ignored again because that people there vote Labour could largely be taken for granted. Talk about a double whammy.
The blame for this sorry situation though shouldn’t just be laid at the door of the politicians; the educational establishment must take its share too. For years the focus has been on getting ever more people into university with the equally important task of providing decent vocational training has been largely ignored.
While we’re at it a large brickbat should be thrown at the nation’s employers who sing a gloomy chorus about the poor skills demonstrated by school leavers whilst being as quiet as church mice with laryngitis about their own failure to provide decent apprenticeships.
If we’re going to apportion blame though then a large slice has to land on the plate of the great British public too. We have all, to some extent, colluded in the culture of stupidity that seems to have the strongest grip on those areas of the country that most need to value education. Dim footballers are held up as role models for boys who think that reading a book makes you a geek and therefore beneath contempt; reality television force feeds girls the dangerous delusion that what they look like on the outside matters more than what is inside their heads.
In parts of the country that have been battered by the changes undergone by the economy over the past thirty years parents have to realise that education matters, however hard it may be to do so they have to drum into their children’s that being illiterate when you’re forty is way less cool than being thought a geek for trying hard at school.
Despite the best efforts of New Labour and now the coalition to persuade people otherwise education is best organised and delivered by the state because this is the only way of ensuring fairness; but the willingness to learn has to come from the participants and if it is missing the system fails. In the sort of working class communities that have been hit hardest by economic change in recent years there used to be a proud tradition of valuing education both as a way out of poverty and of broadening horizons the owners of capital would like to keep a narrow as possible, it is a tradition they must rediscover if they are to prosper again.
In Glasgow East 35% of adults have no qualifications compared to just 1.9% in the north London constituency of Brent. There are more adults without qualifications in a single Birmingham constituency (Hodge Hill) than in Cambridge, Winchester, Wimbledon, Buckingham, Romsey, Leeds North West and four other constituencies put together.
The message is stark, in the north too many people are held back from finding paid work, let alone reaching their full potential by a lack of qualifications than in the south east with a certainty that the vicious circle of low achievement and low incomes will be handed on to their children. As Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the UCU told the BBC on Friday: ‘There is a real danger that children growing up in places where it is not unheard of to have no qualifications will have their ambition blunted and never realise their full potential.’
Although the survey finds that the areas with the best qualified workforce are generally in the south even here there are pockets of low achievement and correspondingly high levels of disadvantage. London is described as a ‘city of contrasts’ with many high achievers in wealthy areas, but significant pockets of low attainment in parts of the old east end such as Romford, Hornchurch and West Ham.
The deep regional divide in educational achievement, say the UCU, underlines the importance of improving access to education and foolishness of allowing universities to raise their tuition fees made by the coalition. In a reply reported by the BBC the Department of Education said it was using its reforms to target support towards the most disadvantaged children and was working to make qualifications more rigorous and compatible with the needs of employers.
The UCU are right to criticise the failure of a largely privately educated government to improve access to higher education for those people who don’t have the odd £9000 a year lying around to spend on putting their offspring through university. To this might be added the cruel and thoughtless decision to scrap the Educational Maintenance Allowance late last year.
It would also be fair to castigate the political establishment as a whole for its attitude to supporting the areas of the country that were his hardest when the old heavy industries collapsed in the seventies. For eighteen years the Tories largely ignored everywhere north of Watford gap because hardly anyone in the north votes Conservative; then under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the same areas were ignored again because that people there vote Labour could largely be taken for granted. Talk about a double whammy.
The blame for this sorry situation though shouldn’t just be laid at the door of the politicians; the educational establishment must take its share too. For years the focus has been on getting ever more people into university with the equally important task of providing decent vocational training has been largely ignored.
While we’re at it a large brickbat should be thrown at the nation’s employers who sing a gloomy chorus about the poor skills demonstrated by school leavers whilst being as quiet as church mice with laryngitis about their own failure to provide decent apprenticeships.
If we’re going to apportion blame though then a large slice has to land on the plate of the great British public too. We have all, to some extent, colluded in the culture of stupidity that seems to have the strongest grip on those areas of the country that most need to value education. Dim footballers are held up as role models for boys who think that reading a book makes you a geek and therefore beneath contempt; reality television force feeds girls the dangerous delusion that what they look like on the outside matters more than what is inside their heads.
In parts of the country that have been battered by the changes undergone by the economy over the past thirty years parents have to realise that education matters, however hard it may be to do so they have to drum into their children’s that being illiterate when you’re forty is way less cool than being thought a geek for trying hard at school.
Despite the best efforts of New Labour and now the coalition to persuade people otherwise education is best organised and delivered by the state because this is the only way of ensuring fairness; but the willingness to learn has to come from the participants and if it is missing the system fails. In the sort of working class communities that have been hit hardest by economic change in recent years there used to be a proud tradition of valuing education both as a way out of poverty and of broadening horizons the owners of capital would like to keep a narrow as possible, it is a tradition they must rediscover if they are to prosper again.
Sunday, 17 July 2011
Poor spelling could cost the UK millions in lost online revenue.
According to Charles Duncombe, an internet entrepreneur and owner of the Just Say Please Group poor spelling and grammar could cost British companies millions of pounds in lost internet sales. Not exactly small potatoes, however you spell it, in a market where according to the Office for National Statistics sales to the value of £527 million taking place every week.
Speaking to the BBC this week Mr Duncombe said that he was ‘shocked by the poor quality of written English’ he encountered in applications when seeking to recruit new staff, many of which were peppered with spelling and grammar errors and even the use of text speak. Even university graduates, in his experience, were all at sea (or see as they might have put it) without a computer spellchecker to fall back on.
A single spelling mistake on a website could, he estimated, cut sales by half and caused and ‘if you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes.’
Charles Duncombe’s concerns are shared by Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute, he told the BBC that whilst some areas of the web, social networking sites for example, have a tolerant attitude towards spelling and grammar in other areas ‘such as a home page or commercial offering that are not amongst friends’ poor spelling could ‘raise concerns over trust and credibility.’ He added that in these circumstances where consumers might be wary of SPAM or phishing efforts, ‘a misspelt word could be a killer issue.’
James Fothergill of the Confederation of British Industry, also speaking to the BBC, expressed concern saying that the government ‘must make the improvement of the basic literacy skills of school and college leavers a top priority.’
At this point I could come over all funky and say that being concerned about declining standards of spelling and grammar is so last century; but I won’t because it is probably one of the most important issues facing the country. Partly for the splendid economic reason that, as Charles Duncombe pointed out trading online means that ‘cutting edge companies depend upon old fashioned skills,’ namely being able to express information accurately and in a easily readable form. Unless you’re under twenty five text speak does not come within a mile of doing so.
There is also the small matter of literacy being the key to lifting people up from the bottom rung of society, without it all other learning is impossible and however great it may be an individual’s potential will inevitably crumble into dust. Since politicians of all parties claim to be committed to giving the poor a hand up rather than a handout you’d think improving literacy would be at the top of the political agenda; but it isn’t.
Instead what seems to be the major concern of the political classes is endless fiddling with the curriculum, a testing regime that seems designed to produce statistics rather than test knowledge and picking fights with the teaching unions at every opportunity.
Add to this the expensive and unwanted imposition of academies when what most people want is decent community schools that educate their children in the skills they will need to make their way in the world and what you have is a disaster waiting to happen. As for the ‘Free Schools’ project favoured by ambitious Schools Minister Michael Gove along with lessons in Latin, and for all I know compulsory Quiddich, don’t even get me started.
This has been a good week for Labour leader Ed Milliband, he might not be ahead in the opinion polls but he has given a sufficiently assured performance over the phone hacking scandal to silence his critics within the party for now. If, however, he wants to turn a good week into a fighting chance at the next election then he needs to find an issue that will connect with the concerns of Middle England, education might just be that issue.
To do it though he will have to do two things that scare modern politicians witless, admit to being wrong and speak up for a policy because he believes in it not because a focus group told him it might resonate with whatever group of voters he’s triangulating on this week.
The admission is a simple one; he must admit that Labour got it wrong on education. Wrong on endorsing the trendy ‘child centred’ teaching methods of the seventies that removed discipline and rigour from education; and wrong that they compounded this in more recent times by endorsing the misguided and expensive academies project that conspires to bring back the divisiveness of the old grammar schools disguised by a shiny new atrium.
The policy he must speak up for is a little more complex and, at first will draw howls of mockery and displeasure from the tabloid press; he must speak up for comprehensive education. Not the failed experiment of the past, but the sound idea that underpins it, schools with strong discipline and rigorous standards that are open to all and that treat vocational and academic learning with equal respect.
In the short term that won’t be popular, in fact it will expose him and his party to ridicule as out of touch lefties, but politics, like golf, is all about being able to play the long game as well as the short one. The ‘Free Schools’ experiment will fail and many of the establishments set up by well meaning parents will be gobbled up by huge companies with more interest in benefiting their shareholders than their students. When that happens an education system that is run for the benefit of all not just those with sharp elbows or deep pockets will suddenly look very attractive, so too would whatever party had the guts to speak up for it when everyone else thought they were mad.
Speaking to the BBC this week Mr Duncombe said that he was ‘shocked by the poor quality of written English’ he encountered in applications when seeking to recruit new staff, many of which were peppered with spelling and grammar errors and even the use of text speak. Even university graduates, in his experience, were all at sea (or see as they might have put it) without a computer spellchecker to fall back on.
A single spelling mistake on a website could, he estimated, cut sales by half and caused and ‘if you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes.’
Charles Duncombe’s concerns are shared by Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute, he told the BBC that whilst some areas of the web, social networking sites for example, have a tolerant attitude towards spelling and grammar in other areas ‘such as a home page or commercial offering that are not amongst friends’ poor spelling could ‘raise concerns over trust and credibility.’ He added that in these circumstances where consumers might be wary of SPAM or phishing efforts, ‘a misspelt word could be a killer issue.’
James Fothergill of the Confederation of British Industry, also speaking to the BBC, expressed concern saying that the government ‘must make the improvement of the basic literacy skills of school and college leavers a top priority.’
At this point I could come over all funky and say that being concerned about declining standards of spelling and grammar is so last century; but I won’t because it is probably one of the most important issues facing the country. Partly for the splendid economic reason that, as Charles Duncombe pointed out trading online means that ‘cutting edge companies depend upon old fashioned skills,’ namely being able to express information accurately and in a easily readable form. Unless you’re under twenty five text speak does not come within a mile of doing so.
There is also the small matter of literacy being the key to lifting people up from the bottom rung of society, without it all other learning is impossible and however great it may be an individual’s potential will inevitably crumble into dust. Since politicians of all parties claim to be committed to giving the poor a hand up rather than a handout you’d think improving literacy would be at the top of the political agenda; but it isn’t.
Instead what seems to be the major concern of the political classes is endless fiddling with the curriculum, a testing regime that seems designed to produce statistics rather than test knowledge and picking fights with the teaching unions at every opportunity.
Add to this the expensive and unwanted imposition of academies when what most people want is decent community schools that educate their children in the skills they will need to make their way in the world and what you have is a disaster waiting to happen. As for the ‘Free Schools’ project favoured by ambitious Schools Minister Michael Gove along with lessons in Latin, and for all I know compulsory Quiddich, don’t even get me started.
This has been a good week for Labour leader Ed Milliband, he might not be ahead in the opinion polls but he has given a sufficiently assured performance over the phone hacking scandal to silence his critics within the party for now. If, however, he wants to turn a good week into a fighting chance at the next election then he needs to find an issue that will connect with the concerns of Middle England, education might just be that issue.
To do it though he will have to do two things that scare modern politicians witless, admit to being wrong and speak up for a policy because he believes in it not because a focus group told him it might resonate with whatever group of voters he’s triangulating on this week.
The admission is a simple one; he must admit that Labour got it wrong on education. Wrong on endorsing the trendy ‘child centred’ teaching methods of the seventies that removed discipline and rigour from education; and wrong that they compounded this in more recent times by endorsing the misguided and expensive academies project that conspires to bring back the divisiveness of the old grammar schools disguised by a shiny new atrium.
The policy he must speak up for is a little more complex and, at first will draw howls of mockery and displeasure from the tabloid press; he must speak up for comprehensive education. Not the failed experiment of the past, but the sound idea that underpins it, schools with strong discipline and rigorous standards that are open to all and that treat vocational and academic learning with equal respect.
In the short term that won’t be popular, in fact it will expose him and his party to ridicule as out of touch lefties, but politics, like golf, is all about being able to play the long game as well as the short one. The ‘Free Schools’ experiment will fail and many of the establishments set up by well meaning parents will be gobbled up by huge companies with more interest in benefiting their shareholders than their students. When that happens an education system that is run for the benefit of all not just those with sharp elbows or deep pockets will suddenly look very attractive, so too would whatever party had the guts to speak up for it when everyone else thought they were mad.
Sunday, 24 April 2011
No playing in the playground.
Remember the old schoolyard, the scabbed knees and rough games of a ‘free range childhood?’ Then you’re probably over thirty, anyone younger will have rather more tepid memories involving staying in a staring at a screen when they should have been outside having fun.
According to a survey conducted by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) childhood games such as conkers, British Bulldog and even, heaven help us leapfrog are rapidly vanishing from playgrounds in the UK. Out of the 653 teachers questioned 29% said that British Bulldog had been banned in their school, 14% said that conkers were playground contraband in their school and 9% that there was a moratorium on playing leapfrog.
‘Apparently the main problem with conkers is that nut allergy sufferers are increasingly allergic to them’, said one of the respondents. Really? Obviously they must play an extreme version of conkers in that particular school, one where the loser has to eat the shattered remains of his conker.
The survey highlights the extent to which risk averse policies have taken hold in British schools and how they are changing the nature of playground games as a result. According to the findings of the survey 57% of the teachers questioned said that the trend towards avoiding risk at all costs was growing and as a result 15% fewer traditional games were being played by the children in their care than just three years ago.
Forgive me if I sound like a warmed up editorial from the Daily Mail but it is hard not to connect this wholesale flight away from healthy activity with a corresponding decline on pupil behaviour. Another survey published this week claimed this week that in the experience of most teachers the behaviour of girls was now no better than that of the boys in their classes; meaning pretty bad alas.
Hardly a surprise really, when the boundless energy with which children are blessed is contained for too long without access to a suitably organised outlet it will inevitably translate itself into naughtiness or worse. Even the kids who don’t act out are liable to be diminished by being wrapped in cotton wool during their formative years. As one Welsh secondary school teacher who took part in the ATL survey put it ‘Pupils need to learn their own limitations, which they can’t in they don’t encounter risk.’
Surprisingly for a self confessed ‘pinko liberal’ I have never had a problem with children taking part in either informal playground games or properly organised competitive sports, in fact I’d say it’s a good thing. Not just because it provides a much needed release valve for youthful energy, it also teaches important lessons about life, such as that if everyone gets a prize then winning isn’t worth anything and that the best response to defeat is to try harder next time.
There is also the small matter of the risk averse culture that seems to have a death grip on the school system being grounded in a truly poisonous form of hypocrisy. The same people who worry themselves silly about little Johnny or Susie falling over and getting a scraped knee are happy to plonk them down in front of the TV or internet for hours on end, even though it means exposing them to a tsunami of violent and sexualised images in the name of commerce.
At the same time they hit the young in general with the double whammy of drilling their minds into dullness with endless testing only to tell them the ten GCSE’s they’ve gained aren’t worth anything because the exams keep getting easier. Is any of this better or healthier than letting them spend a little time climbing trees and playing British Bulldog?
The next couple of decades aren’t going to be easy for anyone, but they will be particularly hard for the young. They will need guts and intelligence just to make their way in the world, never mind trying to sort out a failed political and economic system; revolutions, even polite parliamentary ones aren’t led by milksops. If we really want to see a million flowers bloom, then it might be a good idea to let the kids climb a few trees first.
According to a survey conducted by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) childhood games such as conkers, British Bulldog and even, heaven help us leapfrog are rapidly vanishing from playgrounds in the UK. Out of the 653 teachers questioned 29% said that British Bulldog had been banned in their school, 14% said that conkers were playground contraband in their school and 9% that there was a moratorium on playing leapfrog.
‘Apparently the main problem with conkers is that nut allergy sufferers are increasingly allergic to them’, said one of the respondents. Really? Obviously they must play an extreme version of conkers in that particular school, one where the loser has to eat the shattered remains of his conker.
The survey highlights the extent to which risk averse policies have taken hold in British schools and how they are changing the nature of playground games as a result. According to the findings of the survey 57% of the teachers questioned said that the trend towards avoiding risk at all costs was growing and as a result 15% fewer traditional games were being played by the children in their care than just three years ago.
Forgive me if I sound like a warmed up editorial from the Daily Mail but it is hard not to connect this wholesale flight away from healthy activity with a corresponding decline on pupil behaviour. Another survey published this week claimed this week that in the experience of most teachers the behaviour of girls was now no better than that of the boys in their classes; meaning pretty bad alas.
Hardly a surprise really, when the boundless energy with which children are blessed is contained for too long without access to a suitably organised outlet it will inevitably translate itself into naughtiness or worse. Even the kids who don’t act out are liable to be diminished by being wrapped in cotton wool during their formative years. As one Welsh secondary school teacher who took part in the ATL survey put it ‘Pupils need to learn their own limitations, which they can’t in they don’t encounter risk.’
Surprisingly for a self confessed ‘pinko liberal’ I have never had a problem with children taking part in either informal playground games or properly organised competitive sports, in fact I’d say it’s a good thing. Not just because it provides a much needed release valve for youthful energy, it also teaches important lessons about life, such as that if everyone gets a prize then winning isn’t worth anything and that the best response to defeat is to try harder next time.
There is also the small matter of the risk averse culture that seems to have a death grip on the school system being grounded in a truly poisonous form of hypocrisy. The same people who worry themselves silly about little Johnny or Susie falling over and getting a scraped knee are happy to plonk them down in front of the TV or internet for hours on end, even though it means exposing them to a tsunami of violent and sexualised images in the name of commerce.
At the same time they hit the young in general with the double whammy of drilling their minds into dullness with endless testing only to tell them the ten GCSE’s they’ve gained aren’t worth anything because the exams keep getting easier. Is any of this better or healthier than letting them spend a little time climbing trees and playing British Bulldog?
The next couple of decades aren’t going to be easy for anyone, but they will be particularly hard for the young. They will need guts and intelligence just to make their way in the world, never mind trying to sort out a failed political and economic system; revolutions, even polite parliamentary ones aren’t led by milksops. If we really want to see a million flowers bloom, then it might be a good idea to let the kids climb a few trees first.
Monday, 27 December 2010
Can the government be trusted to protect Booktrust?
If you look out of the window you might just be able to spot on the frosty roads the strip of smoking rubber that is always a sign of a government that has made a rapid u-turn in the face of public protest.
The u-turn in question came about following the announcement by the UK government on 22nd December that it planned to withdraw the £13million grant given to Booktrust, a charity that provides free books and help with learning to read for children across England.
Within hours of the announcement being made leading voices from the literary world had rallied to the cause of protecting Booktrust from the dead hand of government cuts. Philip Pullman called plans to cut its funding ‘an unforgivable disgrace’; former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion called the plans ‘an act of gross cultural vandalism.’ There might have been more than a touch of hyperbole in their denunciations, but when the literary elite speak government listens, within days the plans had been put on hold, or at least it seems like they have.
In a statement released yesterday the Department for Education said that it would ‘continue to Booktrust’ and its book giving programmes. Although the funding for the current scheme runs out in April 2011 a spokesperson said they were working closely with Booktrust to ‘ensure every child can enjoy the gift of books’ and to develop an ‘even more effective way of supporting disadvantaged families to read together.’
It is hard not to agree with Philip Pullman when he says he is ‘relieved’ that the light of common sense seems to have penetrated the murky depths of government policy on this issue. As he so rightly says making sure children have access to books is an ‘important national responsibility’ easily equal to making sure they have adequate health care and enough to eat.
The problems arise when you stop feeling relieved and start asking practical questions about what happens next. Warm words, something the current government has a knack for producing, do not equate to useful action.
The first problem is the lack of a definite figure for how much funding will be available to Booktrust from April onwards. Chief Executive Viv Bird told the BBC that the charity has made ‘every possible saving’ and through support from the publishing industry has been able to generate £4 for every £1 provided by the government.
Sensible management is a bonus but the nagging question remains, just how much will the government hand over in cold hard cash? Less than the £13million previously given to Booktrust for certain, meaning painful cuts may still have to be made. Can a publishing industry being squeezed by shrinking profit margins make up the shortfall? Maybe; but I wouldn’t bet the bookshop on it.
There is also the small matter of what this tells you about the government’s approach to making cuts to public spending. Equating the abortive scrapping of the funding for Booktrust with the plans to stop funding school sports that caused a similar u-turn before Christmas Labour leader Ed Milliband called the plans a ‘mean minded decision made without consultation or regard for the consequences.’
There lies the rub, on this issue and so many others the government seems to have put a short term desire to balance the books and a misguided faith in change for its own sake ahead of the reasoned and long term approach that is the only sure foundation of good governance.
At a time when Britain is falling behind in educational terms many of its competitors in Europe and Asia giving the next generation the best quality education we can afford could well be the difference between prosperity and disaster. Developing literacy and then learning to value reading, not always the same thing as some of the outcomes from the last government’s troublesome literacy hour demonstrate, is the foundation of all educational achievement.
Letting an inexperienced government imperil the chances of our young people learning to read because they themselves only ever read the bottom line of a balance sheet isn’t just an act of ‘cultural vandalism’; it could be economic suicide.
Wikinut, Monday 27th December 2010.
The u-turn in question came about following the announcement by the UK government on 22nd December that it planned to withdraw the £13million grant given to Booktrust, a charity that provides free books and help with learning to read for children across England.
Within hours of the announcement being made leading voices from the literary world had rallied to the cause of protecting Booktrust from the dead hand of government cuts. Philip Pullman called plans to cut its funding ‘an unforgivable disgrace’; former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion called the plans ‘an act of gross cultural vandalism.’ There might have been more than a touch of hyperbole in their denunciations, but when the literary elite speak government listens, within days the plans had been put on hold, or at least it seems like they have.
In a statement released yesterday the Department for Education said that it would ‘continue to Booktrust’ and its book giving programmes. Although the funding for the current scheme runs out in April 2011 a spokesperson said they were working closely with Booktrust to ‘ensure every child can enjoy the gift of books’ and to develop an ‘even more effective way of supporting disadvantaged families to read together.’
It is hard not to agree with Philip Pullman when he says he is ‘relieved’ that the light of common sense seems to have penetrated the murky depths of government policy on this issue. As he so rightly says making sure children have access to books is an ‘important national responsibility’ easily equal to making sure they have adequate health care and enough to eat.
The problems arise when you stop feeling relieved and start asking practical questions about what happens next. Warm words, something the current government has a knack for producing, do not equate to useful action.
The first problem is the lack of a definite figure for how much funding will be available to Booktrust from April onwards. Chief Executive Viv Bird told the BBC that the charity has made ‘every possible saving’ and through support from the publishing industry has been able to generate £4 for every £1 provided by the government.
Sensible management is a bonus but the nagging question remains, just how much will the government hand over in cold hard cash? Less than the £13million previously given to Booktrust for certain, meaning painful cuts may still have to be made. Can a publishing industry being squeezed by shrinking profit margins make up the shortfall? Maybe; but I wouldn’t bet the bookshop on it.
There is also the small matter of what this tells you about the government’s approach to making cuts to public spending. Equating the abortive scrapping of the funding for Booktrust with the plans to stop funding school sports that caused a similar u-turn before Christmas Labour leader Ed Milliband called the plans a ‘mean minded decision made without consultation or regard for the consequences.’
There lies the rub, on this issue and so many others the government seems to have put a short term desire to balance the books and a misguided faith in change for its own sake ahead of the reasoned and long term approach that is the only sure foundation of good governance.
At a time when Britain is falling behind in educational terms many of its competitors in Europe and Asia giving the next generation the best quality education we can afford could well be the difference between prosperity and disaster. Developing literacy and then learning to value reading, not always the same thing as some of the outcomes from the last government’s troublesome literacy hour demonstrate, is the foundation of all educational achievement.
Letting an inexperienced government imperil the chances of our young people learning to read because they themselves only ever read the bottom line of a balance sheet isn’t just an act of ‘cultural vandalism’; it could be economic suicide.
Wikinut, Monday 27th December 2010.
Sunday, 17 October 2010
Britain’s big experiment begins.
This week Britain embarks on the biggest experiment in its post war political history. An experiment that will see Chancellor George Osborne attempt to cut the debt burden from 11% to 2% of GDP in the next five years, along the way making the biggest cuts in public spending seen since the war.
The gamble behind the experiment is that the private sector backed by the Bank of England will step in to rescue an economy that has become too dependant on government and that the ‘big society’ will do the same for communities across the county who have dependency issues of their own.
Gamblers, it should be remembered, tend more towards optimism than practicality, with a rise in VAT looming and the effect of mass redundancies in the public sector to be considered the outlook looks stormy to say the least. As shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson told the BBC on Sunday morning there is a risk of Britain experiencing something similar to Japan’s ‘lost decade’.
The situation is not improved by the emergence over the weekend as snippets of information about the negotiations between the Treasury and individual government departments that there is a distinct set of winners and losers when it comes to where the axe falls. Although ‘winning’ in this context is something of a relative concept.
The defence budget, it is believed, will only be cut by 8%, a significant victory for Defence Secretary Liam Fox who has pleased the military top brass by ‘going native’ more quickly and completely than most ministers. Even so the cuts that the military faces will still be severe and to some extent seem to lack common sense.
Reuters and other news agencies report that the Royal Navy will get the two new aircraft carriers they were promised by the last government, but it is by no means clear what planes will fly from their decks since the joint RAF/Fleet Air Arm Harrier jump jets look certain to be scrapped and funding for any replacement will be cut to the bone. The Army stands to lose 7,000 soldiers and its bases in Germany along with a large percentage of its artillery and armour.
A small morsel has been thrown to the wavering MP’s on the Liberal Democrat benches in the shape of a promise to save £750million on the cost of maintaining Trident, but nobody seems quite certain how this is to be done. The option of cancelling the country’s unusable nuclear deterrent altogether was whisked off the table before it could upset too many Tory backwoodsmen.
Whatever happens the cuts along with the ongoing pressures of the war in Afghanistan and other global commitments cannot help create, as Colonel Richard Kemp told the BBC over the weekend a sense of ‘corrosive’ uncertainty amongst members of the armed forces with the potential to cause ‘a real morale problem.’
Education or spending on schools anyway, also looks likely to escape a severe cut, although the wider education budget will not. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg announced in a speech in Derbyshire last week the creation of a ‘pupil premium’ to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds from pre-school to university saying that it is ‘the right thing to do to invest in the future, even if it makes things harder today.’
Labour’s Andy Burnham, along, I imagine, with many parents remains unconvinced by the virtues of the ‘pupil premium’, telling the BBC that ‘beyond the smoke and mirrors’ it is was a distinct possibility the plan would involve money that was ‘not additional to the schools budget but recycled from within it’ and, if the Institute for Fiscal Studies is correct could ‘widen inequalities in funding for deprived pupils.’
Welfare looks set to be the biggest loser of all when the axe falls with George Osborne threatening a new range of punishments for people who make fraudulent, or simply mistaken, benefits claims. This is to be backed up by the hiring of 200 Gangbusters type inspectors to roam the country seeking out cheats in a plan, he said, to show once and for all that ‘benefit fraud is a crime that just doesn’t pay.’ Boy George, it would seem fancies himself as a latter day Eliot Ness.
During the election and the protracted build up to the spending review ‘fairness’ was the buzz word of the moment, so much so that it seems to have lost any real meaning now the cuts are about to become a reality. In its place we have a sort of bizarre auction in which whoever shouts loudest wins and the people who were silenced by disadvantage are certain to lose.
As a result defence wins because a lot of Tory voters in the shires would be upset if Britannia admitted to no longer being in a position to rule the waves, even though the problems relation to accommodation, overwork and poor support when they get injured on active service that have plagued the services for years remain unaddressed.
Protection spending on schools and bringing in a ‘pupil premium’ might quiet the troublesome consciences of a few Liberal Democrats, but is, as looks likely, unrestricted tuition fees price poor students out of going to university our historic problems relating to social mobility will get worse instead of better.
The big experiment is, in reality, little more than a gamble and one with high stakes too. As Peter Dixon of Commerzbank told Reuters last week if the gamble doesn’t work ‘it isn’t the rating agencies the government has to fear; it’s the electorate.’
The gamble behind the experiment is that the private sector backed by the Bank of England will step in to rescue an economy that has become too dependant on government and that the ‘big society’ will do the same for communities across the county who have dependency issues of their own.
Gamblers, it should be remembered, tend more towards optimism than practicality, with a rise in VAT looming and the effect of mass redundancies in the public sector to be considered the outlook looks stormy to say the least. As shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson told the BBC on Sunday morning there is a risk of Britain experiencing something similar to Japan’s ‘lost decade’.
The situation is not improved by the emergence over the weekend as snippets of information about the negotiations between the Treasury and individual government departments that there is a distinct set of winners and losers when it comes to where the axe falls. Although ‘winning’ in this context is something of a relative concept.
The defence budget, it is believed, will only be cut by 8%, a significant victory for Defence Secretary Liam Fox who has pleased the military top brass by ‘going native’ more quickly and completely than most ministers. Even so the cuts that the military faces will still be severe and to some extent seem to lack common sense.
Reuters and other news agencies report that the Royal Navy will get the two new aircraft carriers they were promised by the last government, but it is by no means clear what planes will fly from their decks since the joint RAF/Fleet Air Arm Harrier jump jets look certain to be scrapped and funding for any replacement will be cut to the bone. The Army stands to lose 7,000 soldiers and its bases in Germany along with a large percentage of its artillery and armour.
A small morsel has been thrown to the wavering MP’s on the Liberal Democrat benches in the shape of a promise to save £750million on the cost of maintaining Trident, but nobody seems quite certain how this is to be done. The option of cancelling the country’s unusable nuclear deterrent altogether was whisked off the table before it could upset too many Tory backwoodsmen.
Whatever happens the cuts along with the ongoing pressures of the war in Afghanistan and other global commitments cannot help create, as Colonel Richard Kemp told the BBC over the weekend a sense of ‘corrosive’ uncertainty amongst members of the armed forces with the potential to cause ‘a real morale problem.’
Education or spending on schools anyway, also looks likely to escape a severe cut, although the wider education budget will not. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg announced in a speech in Derbyshire last week the creation of a ‘pupil premium’ to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds from pre-school to university saying that it is ‘the right thing to do to invest in the future, even if it makes things harder today.’
Labour’s Andy Burnham, along, I imagine, with many parents remains unconvinced by the virtues of the ‘pupil premium’, telling the BBC that ‘beyond the smoke and mirrors’ it is was a distinct possibility the plan would involve money that was ‘not additional to the schools budget but recycled from within it’ and, if the Institute for Fiscal Studies is correct could ‘widen inequalities in funding for deprived pupils.’
Welfare looks set to be the biggest loser of all when the axe falls with George Osborne threatening a new range of punishments for people who make fraudulent, or simply mistaken, benefits claims. This is to be backed up by the hiring of 200 Gangbusters type inspectors to roam the country seeking out cheats in a plan, he said, to show once and for all that ‘benefit fraud is a crime that just doesn’t pay.’ Boy George, it would seem fancies himself as a latter day Eliot Ness.
During the election and the protracted build up to the spending review ‘fairness’ was the buzz word of the moment, so much so that it seems to have lost any real meaning now the cuts are about to become a reality. In its place we have a sort of bizarre auction in which whoever shouts loudest wins and the people who were silenced by disadvantage are certain to lose.
As a result defence wins because a lot of Tory voters in the shires would be upset if Britannia admitted to no longer being in a position to rule the waves, even though the problems relation to accommodation, overwork and poor support when they get injured on active service that have plagued the services for years remain unaddressed.
Protection spending on schools and bringing in a ‘pupil premium’ might quiet the troublesome consciences of a few Liberal Democrats, but is, as looks likely, unrestricted tuition fees price poor students out of going to university our historic problems relating to social mobility will get worse instead of better.
The big experiment is, in reality, little more than a gamble and one with high stakes too. As Peter Dixon of Commerzbank told Reuters last week if the gamble doesn’t work ‘it isn’t the rating agencies the government has to fear; it’s the electorate.’
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Spare the rod to promote learning.
Sit up straight! Stop sniggering at the back of the room! Head teachers in England are to be given greater powers to search pupils suspected of bringing weapons into school and given clearer guidance on restraining disruptive students as part of a government drive to improve behaviour.
They’ve certainly got their work cut out, according to Ofstead behaviour in one in six schools is no better than ‘satisfactory’, last year 8130 students were permanently excluded from school, 2230 of those were excluded for violent assault on a teacher or another student. Bad behaviour, it seems, isn’t just a problem; it’s a full blown epidemic.
Announcing the plans Schools Minister Nick Gibb said there was too much ‘low level disruption’ in schools and that his aim was to ensure that parents were able to feel ‘the classroom to which they send their children is a safe place where that can learn.’
Alan Steer, a former education advisor to the Labour government, welcomed the proposals, including granting anonymity to teachers against whom allegations of assault have been made, but described elements of the programme such as the use of after school detentions as ‘fluff.’ The real way to improve student behaviour was, he said, ‘to continually raise the standards of teaching.’
Chris Keates of teaching union NASUWT also expressed concern about the use of ‘reasonable’ force to restrain disruptive students, saying it might put teachers at risk if malicious allegations made by students who ‘know their rights but not their responsibilities.’
There is no question that discipline is an important part of the learning process, but in what appears to be an attempt to play to the gallery of popular opinion, the government risks making the mistake of thinking a ‘tough’ teacher and a ‘good’ teacher are one and the same. They aren’t, as anyone who didn’t go to Eton knows only too well.
We can all remember the tough teachers, every school however liberal had at least one, from our schooldays, martinets who ruled with a rod of iron, but were they the teachers from whom we learnt the most? Probably not, as Alan Steer points out discipline can make a students stay in their seats, but only good, meaning engaging, teaching can make them learn and want to go on doing so throughout their lifetime.
Sadly the sort of teaching that engages students imagination, often because it strays from, but never entirely abandons, the set curriculum and even, horror of horrors, encourages them to think for themselves has been the biggest casualty of the slow collapse of our education system over the past quarter century. Schools long ago stopped being seats of learning and became instead vast machines dedicated to churning out statistics for bureaucrats.
Bad behaviour is the most noticeable price we pay for allowing this to happen, particularly amongst boys for whom sitting cooped up in a classroom is a form of torture when what they most want to do is be active. Even the well behaved students lose out under the current system because rather than learning how to value knowledge and use it as a buttress for independent thought they learn instead how to regurgitate key words and pre digested answers. Useful skills if you’re going to be a junior minister, but not in any other field.
By all means give teachers the power to impose discipline in their classrooms, but if we really want to solve the problem of low level disruption the government has to take the bigger step of setting them free to engage their students in something more than just preparing for an endless round of exams.
They’ve certainly got their work cut out, according to Ofstead behaviour in one in six schools is no better than ‘satisfactory’, last year 8130 students were permanently excluded from school, 2230 of those were excluded for violent assault on a teacher or another student. Bad behaviour, it seems, isn’t just a problem; it’s a full blown epidemic.
Announcing the plans Schools Minister Nick Gibb said there was too much ‘low level disruption’ in schools and that his aim was to ensure that parents were able to feel ‘the classroom to which they send their children is a safe place where that can learn.’
Alan Steer, a former education advisor to the Labour government, welcomed the proposals, including granting anonymity to teachers against whom allegations of assault have been made, but described elements of the programme such as the use of after school detentions as ‘fluff.’ The real way to improve student behaviour was, he said, ‘to continually raise the standards of teaching.’
Chris Keates of teaching union NASUWT also expressed concern about the use of ‘reasonable’ force to restrain disruptive students, saying it might put teachers at risk if malicious allegations made by students who ‘know their rights but not their responsibilities.’
There is no question that discipline is an important part of the learning process, but in what appears to be an attempt to play to the gallery of popular opinion, the government risks making the mistake of thinking a ‘tough’ teacher and a ‘good’ teacher are one and the same. They aren’t, as anyone who didn’t go to Eton knows only too well.
We can all remember the tough teachers, every school however liberal had at least one, from our schooldays, martinets who ruled with a rod of iron, but were they the teachers from whom we learnt the most? Probably not, as Alan Steer points out discipline can make a students stay in their seats, but only good, meaning engaging, teaching can make them learn and want to go on doing so throughout their lifetime.
Sadly the sort of teaching that engages students imagination, often because it strays from, but never entirely abandons, the set curriculum and even, horror of horrors, encourages them to think for themselves has been the biggest casualty of the slow collapse of our education system over the past quarter century. Schools long ago stopped being seats of learning and became instead vast machines dedicated to churning out statistics for bureaucrats.
Bad behaviour is the most noticeable price we pay for allowing this to happen, particularly amongst boys for whom sitting cooped up in a classroom is a form of torture when what they most want to do is be active. Even the well behaved students lose out under the current system because rather than learning how to value knowledge and use it as a buttress for independent thought they learn instead how to regurgitate key words and pre digested answers. Useful skills if you’re going to be a junior minister, but not in any other field.
By all means give teachers the power to impose discipline in their classrooms, but if we really want to solve the problem of low level disruption the government has to take the bigger step of setting them free to engage their students in something more than just preparing for an endless round of exams.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Learning the wrong lessons about adult education.
Britain is broken and it is all the fault of the baby boomers, the lucky generation born between the end of the war and the mid sixties. That’s the line most of the media and all three main political parties have taken and run with like a dog chasing sticks in a suburban park for the past couple of years.
I don’t usually give much in the way of credence to rumours of impending national decline, Britain has been going to the dogs since before Julius Cesar landed and things still seem to shake out ok most of the time, this week though a story floated onto my radar that gave me cause to feel a lot less sanguine.
According to the Association of Colleges (AOC) further education colleges across the UK could face cuts to their funding of up to 16% as the current government or the next grapples with spiralling public sector debt. The axe, if it falls, will see courses in construction and GCSE and A Level courses cut and the same blow will be dealt to the provision of courses for adults struggling to reach Level 2 in Maths or English.
AOC Chief Executive Martin Doel told the BBC this week that his members understood the challenge faced by the government as it struggles to balance the books and placate a nervous stock market but said that they feared the loss of ‘high quality courses that are essential to economic recovery.’
Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) took up the case saying ‘the government has rightly identified education as a key driver of social mobility, making cuts to adult learning now would be an outrageous affront to the millions of people it promised not to let down.’
What, you might ask, has all of this got to do with the baby boomers, the generation we love to hate for having every opportunity you can think of handed to them on a plate and wasting the lot? The answer is quite simple, further education colleges, along with the former polytechnics that later turned themselves into universities like so many bookish caterpillars, are the concrete symbol of all the generation that still provides most of our ruling elite stands for.
They are, depending on your political persuasion, the engines of egalitarianism, a means of transforming education into a common good rather than something people who are too rich to ever really need it enjoy amidst dreaming spires; or a hothouse for dangerously ‘progressive’ ideas that have brought about social and economic chaos. The most notable feature, of course, of the baby boomers is their unfailing ability to mistake one extreme position or another for the moral high ground.
Those of us living in a less rarefied, meaning anywhere outside Notting Hill or Islington, know that colleges are something much more prosaic and more important; they’re the difference between success and failure.
Colleges are where kids, many of them boys, the perennial underachievers in the educational steeplechase, who were bored rigid by school get the chance to discover that education can be something other than tedious; it can be useful and even inspiring. Many people don’t make this discovery until they have experienced the daily grind of having a dead end job or having no job at all, which is why adult education is more important now than ever. F Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, life does have a second act and education is the tool we use to write its script.
There is also another argument to be made in favour of adult education, one that many people in and out of politics in this country find troubling because it requires them to believe in something. Education is a force for good not just because it helps to produce an efficient workforce to power the country out of the economic doldrums, but because it has the power to create fully rounded citizens by exposing participants to new ideas and teaching them the value of questioning everything.
This used to be something the ambitious men (and not a few women too) who formed the backbone of British civic life and could be found in the ranks of every political party represented at Westminster understood implicitly. Their descendents, many of whom benefited from a free university education, have forgotten this vital truth, meaning that by failing to value the benefits of education, education, education, they risk creating economic and social problems for which future generations will pay a heavy price.
Source: bbc.co.uk
I don’t usually give much in the way of credence to rumours of impending national decline, Britain has been going to the dogs since before Julius Cesar landed and things still seem to shake out ok most of the time, this week though a story floated onto my radar that gave me cause to feel a lot less sanguine.
According to the Association of Colleges (AOC) further education colleges across the UK could face cuts to their funding of up to 16% as the current government or the next grapples with spiralling public sector debt. The axe, if it falls, will see courses in construction and GCSE and A Level courses cut and the same blow will be dealt to the provision of courses for adults struggling to reach Level 2 in Maths or English.
AOC Chief Executive Martin Doel told the BBC this week that his members understood the challenge faced by the government as it struggles to balance the books and placate a nervous stock market but said that they feared the loss of ‘high quality courses that are essential to economic recovery.’
Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) took up the case saying ‘the government has rightly identified education as a key driver of social mobility, making cuts to adult learning now would be an outrageous affront to the millions of people it promised not to let down.’
What, you might ask, has all of this got to do with the baby boomers, the generation we love to hate for having every opportunity you can think of handed to them on a plate and wasting the lot? The answer is quite simple, further education colleges, along with the former polytechnics that later turned themselves into universities like so many bookish caterpillars, are the concrete symbol of all the generation that still provides most of our ruling elite stands for.
They are, depending on your political persuasion, the engines of egalitarianism, a means of transforming education into a common good rather than something people who are too rich to ever really need it enjoy amidst dreaming spires; or a hothouse for dangerously ‘progressive’ ideas that have brought about social and economic chaos. The most notable feature, of course, of the baby boomers is their unfailing ability to mistake one extreme position or another for the moral high ground.
Those of us living in a less rarefied, meaning anywhere outside Notting Hill or Islington, know that colleges are something much more prosaic and more important; they’re the difference between success and failure.
Colleges are where kids, many of them boys, the perennial underachievers in the educational steeplechase, who were bored rigid by school get the chance to discover that education can be something other than tedious; it can be useful and even inspiring. Many people don’t make this discovery until they have experienced the daily grind of having a dead end job or having no job at all, which is why adult education is more important now than ever. F Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, life does have a second act and education is the tool we use to write its script.
There is also another argument to be made in favour of adult education, one that many people in and out of politics in this country find troubling because it requires them to believe in something. Education is a force for good not just because it helps to produce an efficient workforce to power the country out of the economic doldrums, but because it has the power to create fully rounded citizens by exposing participants to new ideas and teaching them the value of questioning everything.
This used to be something the ambitious men (and not a few women too) who formed the backbone of British civic life and could be found in the ranks of every political party represented at Westminster understood implicitly. Their descendents, many of whom benefited from a free university education, have forgotten this vital truth, meaning that by failing to value the benefits of education, education, education, they risk creating economic and social problems for which future generations will pay a heavy price.
Source: bbc.co.uk
Saturday, 22 August 2009
Tory education reforms are bottom of the common sense league.
Over the past week or so much has been made of the attitudes of David Cameron’s new model Tories to the dear old NHS. While he’s been at pains to distance himself from the comments made by publicity hungry MEP Daniel Hannan there is a lingering suspicion that outside its Notting Hill branch most of the party would happily see it consigned to the dustbin.
Naturally this is a cause for concern, however bureaucratic and wasteful it may be the NHS does at least ensure that people get medical treatment regardless of their ability to pay up front, not something that can be said for most of the alternatives on offer. Can the Tories be trusted with the NHS? Up to a point, if only for the reason that dismantling it would be a public relations disaster from which the party would be unlikely to recover.
Let’s ask ourselves another, equally important, question. Can the Tories be trusted with Britain’s education system? Based on their performance over the past week I doubt it.
The normally sensible Michael Gove this week announced that an incoming Conservative government would give schools extra league table points for steering students towards ‘hard’ A Level subjects such as maths and the sciences and knock points off for students enrolled to study ‘soft’ subjects such as media studies et al. Striking a resolutely populist note he told the BBC that the current A Level system had been ‘dumbed down’ and that league tables were largely to blame.
Too much pressure, he said, was being placed on students likely to get a C grade in hard subjects to take easier options in the hope of getting an A and thereby improving the school’s place in the league tables, as a result potential high achievers aren’t being stretched and students who are struggling were being pushed to one side.
This position is based on a report written by Richard Sykes, a former rector of Imperial College London and contains, as most muddled thinking does, a germ of common sense. League tables have gone from being a useful measure of a school’s performance to being an opaque public relations exercise that confuses parents, students and schools alike. A point highlighted in a report from the Teaching and Learning Programme this week, which called for school league tables to be published with a ‘health warning’ because they often have the potential to be so misleading
Handing out extra points to schools on the basis of pushing students into studying subjects that are perceived to be harder will do little to address the problems inherent within the system, and may even make things worse for schools if the drop out rate increases. The plan is also flawed because along with the government’s failed diplomas it ignores vocational courses altogether.
Unsurprisingly a group of Oxbridge educated conservative politicians has, yet again, made the mistake of believing the only test of educational success is whether or not a student makes it into university. While we do need more graduates we also need to educate the next generation of trades people, but if schools are actively discouraged from providing vocational courses because there are no ‘points’ to be gained from doing so that simply isn’t going to happen, much to our national cost.
Tinkering with league tables isn’t going to improve the life chances of the kids who won’t be amongst the 26.7% of students celebrating getting top marks at A Level; neither is downgrading the vocational training that offers them a chance to get ahead in a tough jobs market.
What might improve things is killing off the AS Level that has turned A Levels from a time when students can explore the world of learning and even read a few of those funny papery things called books that haven’t been cut into chunks to be regurgitated in an exam room into just another hurdle on the educational obstacle course, and having done so placing it on an equal footing with vocational courses so that the age old divide between academia and ‘trade’ is finally done away with.
So long as they continue to play to the gallery and perpetuate prejudices that should have been rejected long ago the Conservatives cannot do more that pretend to be equal to one of the greatest challenges that faces any government, educating the next generation of workers.
Naturally this is a cause for concern, however bureaucratic and wasteful it may be the NHS does at least ensure that people get medical treatment regardless of their ability to pay up front, not something that can be said for most of the alternatives on offer. Can the Tories be trusted with the NHS? Up to a point, if only for the reason that dismantling it would be a public relations disaster from which the party would be unlikely to recover.
Let’s ask ourselves another, equally important, question. Can the Tories be trusted with Britain’s education system? Based on their performance over the past week I doubt it.
The normally sensible Michael Gove this week announced that an incoming Conservative government would give schools extra league table points for steering students towards ‘hard’ A Level subjects such as maths and the sciences and knock points off for students enrolled to study ‘soft’ subjects such as media studies et al. Striking a resolutely populist note he told the BBC that the current A Level system had been ‘dumbed down’ and that league tables were largely to blame.
Too much pressure, he said, was being placed on students likely to get a C grade in hard subjects to take easier options in the hope of getting an A and thereby improving the school’s place in the league tables, as a result potential high achievers aren’t being stretched and students who are struggling were being pushed to one side.
This position is based on a report written by Richard Sykes, a former rector of Imperial College London and contains, as most muddled thinking does, a germ of common sense. League tables have gone from being a useful measure of a school’s performance to being an opaque public relations exercise that confuses parents, students and schools alike. A point highlighted in a report from the Teaching and Learning Programme this week, which called for school league tables to be published with a ‘health warning’ because they often have the potential to be so misleading
Handing out extra points to schools on the basis of pushing students into studying subjects that are perceived to be harder will do little to address the problems inherent within the system, and may even make things worse for schools if the drop out rate increases. The plan is also flawed because along with the government’s failed diplomas it ignores vocational courses altogether.
Unsurprisingly a group of Oxbridge educated conservative politicians has, yet again, made the mistake of believing the only test of educational success is whether or not a student makes it into university. While we do need more graduates we also need to educate the next generation of trades people, but if schools are actively discouraged from providing vocational courses because there are no ‘points’ to be gained from doing so that simply isn’t going to happen, much to our national cost.
Tinkering with league tables isn’t going to improve the life chances of the kids who won’t be amongst the 26.7% of students celebrating getting top marks at A Level; neither is downgrading the vocational training that offers them a chance to get ahead in a tough jobs market.
What might improve things is killing off the AS Level that has turned A Levels from a time when students can explore the world of learning and even read a few of those funny papery things called books that haven’t been cut into chunks to be regurgitated in an exam room into just another hurdle on the educational obstacle course, and having done so placing it on an equal footing with vocational courses so that the age old divide between academia and ‘trade’ is finally done away with.
So long as they continue to play to the gallery and perpetuate prejudices that should have been rejected long ago the Conservatives cannot do more that pretend to be equal to one of the greatest challenges that faces any government, educating the next generation of workers.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Time to break through the glass ceiling.
Social mobility in modern Britain has ground to a halt with professions such as the law, medicine and journalism increasingly closed to anyone unlucky enough not to be born with a silver spoon in their mouth. This was the sad conclusion drawn by a report chaired by former minister Alan Milburn published this week.
Children from poor backgrounds, it concluded, need more encouragement and better careers advice to help them realise their full potential. Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday morning Mr Milburn said of the government’s attempts to level the educational playing field over the past twelve years ‘We have raised the glass ceiling but I don’t think we’ve broken through it yet.’
Too many professions, he said, still operated a ‘closed shop’ mentality when it came to recruitment and what was needed was a ‘great wave of social mobility’ to match that of the 50’s and 60’s that would lift talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds into previously closed professions.
Critics of the report, unsurprisingly, cited the decline and fall of the grammar school system from the sixties onwards as the chief driver behind the stalling of social mobility. Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts spoke for the majority of people on this side of the argument when he said, also to the BBC, ‘if only you brought selection back into state schools and as a result had a decent education system’ people from poor families would be able to ‘power through’ the glass ceiling.
In response Alan Milburn said that selection had worked when there were 250,000 students studying at Britain’s universities, but was no longer applicable at a time when student numbers have swelled to 2.5million.
As ever in matters such as this both sides get some important things right whilst at the same time ignoring much that is important, but, from their respective standpoint, inconvenient.
Alan Milburn is right to point out the extent to which the professions are still stuffy, clannish and disposed towards looking backwards and that in a modern society they should be representative on the social mix of the country in the same way they should of the mix regarding race, gender and disability. This isn’t a radical departure, its just basic common sense.
Quentin Letts and the legions of people who support the reintroduction of grammar schools make a valid point, however much the idealists dislike it selection will always have a role to play in education. When we try to make everybody equal we inevitably end up rounding standards down and preventing talent from flourishing, a high price to pay for ideological purity.
Both sides of the argument seem to ignore though one major point, social mobility cannot simply be commanded from the centre, it depends to a large part on the behaviour of individuals, and, sad to say, too many people remain on the bottom rung of the ladder because they choose, consciously or not, to do so.
We are all, quite rightly, concerned by the chronic underachievement of many members of what used to be called the white working class, not least because it has been a major contributing factor in the rise and rise of the far right in some of Britain’s most disadvantaged areas. It can, I would guess, be attributed to one key factor, the near total collapse of aspiration amongst the same social group.
This can be seen in the unwillingness of white working class boys to engage with education for fear of seeming to have diminished their masculinity by doing so, and in the number of girls from similar backgrounds who would rather be ‘famous’, than clever. It is a shocking testament to the shrinking of horizons that has taken place over the past fifty years.
It wasn’t always so, within living memory education was prized highly by working class people, every mining village and mill town had its own institute and library filled with working people determined to better themselves through learning. It goes without saying that these people wanted their children to do even better than they had, and to their credit many of them did too.
This government and the next should take heed of Alan Milburn’s report, central government can do a great deal to improve careers advice and to make sure children leave school with the skills and qualifications to get good jobs, but it can’t act alone. Individuals must take more responsibility for their progress and that made by their children. Making room at the top is not enough on its own, people must be encouraged to make the sacrifices necessary to climb the ladder.
Children from poor backgrounds, it concluded, need more encouragement and better careers advice to help them realise their full potential. Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday morning Mr Milburn said of the government’s attempts to level the educational playing field over the past twelve years ‘We have raised the glass ceiling but I don’t think we’ve broken through it yet.’
Too many professions, he said, still operated a ‘closed shop’ mentality when it came to recruitment and what was needed was a ‘great wave of social mobility’ to match that of the 50’s and 60’s that would lift talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds into previously closed professions.
Critics of the report, unsurprisingly, cited the decline and fall of the grammar school system from the sixties onwards as the chief driver behind the stalling of social mobility. Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts spoke for the majority of people on this side of the argument when he said, also to the BBC, ‘if only you brought selection back into state schools and as a result had a decent education system’ people from poor families would be able to ‘power through’ the glass ceiling.
In response Alan Milburn said that selection had worked when there were 250,000 students studying at Britain’s universities, but was no longer applicable at a time when student numbers have swelled to 2.5million.
As ever in matters such as this both sides get some important things right whilst at the same time ignoring much that is important, but, from their respective standpoint, inconvenient.
Alan Milburn is right to point out the extent to which the professions are still stuffy, clannish and disposed towards looking backwards and that in a modern society they should be representative on the social mix of the country in the same way they should of the mix regarding race, gender and disability. This isn’t a radical departure, its just basic common sense.
Quentin Letts and the legions of people who support the reintroduction of grammar schools make a valid point, however much the idealists dislike it selection will always have a role to play in education. When we try to make everybody equal we inevitably end up rounding standards down and preventing talent from flourishing, a high price to pay for ideological purity.
Both sides of the argument seem to ignore though one major point, social mobility cannot simply be commanded from the centre, it depends to a large part on the behaviour of individuals, and, sad to say, too many people remain on the bottom rung of the ladder because they choose, consciously or not, to do so.
We are all, quite rightly, concerned by the chronic underachievement of many members of what used to be called the white working class, not least because it has been a major contributing factor in the rise and rise of the far right in some of Britain’s most disadvantaged areas. It can, I would guess, be attributed to one key factor, the near total collapse of aspiration amongst the same social group.
This can be seen in the unwillingness of white working class boys to engage with education for fear of seeming to have diminished their masculinity by doing so, and in the number of girls from similar backgrounds who would rather be ‘famous’, than clever. It is a shocking testament to the shrinking of horizons that has taken place over the past fifty years.
It wasn’t always so, within living memory education was prized highly by working class people, every mining village and mill town had its own institute and library filled with working people determined to better themselves through learning. It goes without saying that these people wanted their children to do even better than they had, and to their credit many of them did too.
This government and the next should take heed of Alan Milburn’s report, central government can do a great deal to improve careers advice and to make sure children leave school with the skills and qualifications to get good jobs, but it can’t act alone. Individuals must take more responsibility for their progress and that made by their children. Making room at the top is not enough on its own, people must be encouraged to make the sacrifices necessary to climb the ladder.
Thursday, 16 April 2009
Scrap SATS in favour of a more rounded education.
After last year’s marking fiasco it is almost impossible to think of an argument in favour of continuing to have SATS tests in Primary schools.
The whole testing regime currently employed in schools in England, the Scots and the Welsh, wisely, have the freedom to make their own decisions on many education matters, is increasingly being questioned. A growing body of anecdotal and research based evidence suggests that much of the joy is being ground out of learning for students when teachers are obliged to ‘teach to the test.’
For example the sensible, in principle, idea of having a ‘literacy hour’ to improve student’s reading skills is being undermined in practice by a testing regime that requires students to be drilled in analyzing a particular passage from a novel, but which fails, due to time pressures, to introduce them to the idea of reading for pleasure.
There is a good case to be made for following the Welsh example and scrapping SATS tests altogether and trusting teachers to use their firsthand experience in the classroom to assess the abilities of their students.
As for the all important, since it underpins all the other skills needed to succeed in education, work and life, business of teaching students to be literate and to read for pleasure better results might be achieved by embedding literacy skills in a range of subjects rather than using an endless round of testing that for all its capacity to produce statistics does little to give students a love for learning that will be with them for life.
The whole testing regime currently employed in schools in England, the Scots and the Welsh, wisely, have the freedom to make their own decisions on many education matters, is increasingly being questioned. A growing body of anecdotal and research based evidence suggests that much of the joy is being ground out of learning for students when teachers are obliged to ‘teach to the test.’
For example the sensible, in principle, idea of having a ‘literacy hour’ to improve student’s reading skills is being undermined in practice by a testing regime that requires students to be drilled in analyzing a particular passage from a novel, but which fails, due to time pressures, to introduce them to the idea of reading for pleasure.
There is a good case to be made for following the Welsh example and scrapping SATS tests altogether and trusting teachers to use their firsthand experience in the classroom to assess the abilities of their students.
As for the all important, since it underpins all the other skills needed to succeed in education, work and life, business of teaching students to be literate and to read for pleasure better results might be achieved by embedding literacy skills in a range of subjects rather than using an endless round of testing that for all its capacity to produce statistics does little to give students a love for learning that will be with them for life.
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