Comment on topical education issues from NAHT and associated authorsDuring the past week &8211; and especially the past few hours &8211; I&8217;ve read huge chunks of the debates on the Government&8217;s academy bill. I&8217;ve done so partly to keep myself up-to-date on education matters, and partly so you don&8217;t have to do the same. To nobody&8217;s surprise, the Bill has passed with very few changes. Not only is it a flagship bit of legislation (although certainly not part of the LibDem manifesto), shoved rudely through Parliament on an accelerated schedule, but there&8217;s also been some ruthless whipping going on to ensure the Coalition all voted for the official line, vetoing some fairly sensible amendments. Or, let&8217;s listen to one of the few Lib Dems who did break out of line, John Pugh. &8220;When were elected this May- God, it seems years ago- we all knew that there was some prospect that politics in this place might never be quite the same again. &8220;What do we have with amendments to the Bill, however? We have the spectacle of Ministers who have already told us that they will accept no amendment, period, and the sight of Whips new and old cracking their knuckles off-stage and perfecting basilisk-like stares in the mirror, persuading people not to vote for amendments such as amendment 8 and others that, it could be argued, align with the spirit and improve the detail of the Bill. Paradoxically, they are doing that because they assume that is how coalition politics work. I say paradoxically, because the amendment-denying Ministers in front of us, whose agents the Whips are, seem to be the most mature, civilised and benign advocates of the new politics.&8221; So what amendment was Mr Pugh supporting? An obligation on schools to hold a ballot if there was a disagreement among the governing body over an application for academy status. Rather surprisingly, he continued: &8220;You might recall that under Mrs Thatcher, in the Education Reform Act 1988, a parental ballot was an essential precondition of the change to grant-maintained status in any school. There were votes across the country on those matters. Sadly, subsequent Governments seem to have lost interests in the views of parents and, in my view, have disempowered parents, with one exception.&8221; That exception, he went on to say, was grammar-school ballots. A LibDem colleague then joined the fray: &8220;Does my hon. Friend accept the suggestion that there are to be no ballots because most of them might be lost if parents knew all the facts? That situation is being avoided simply by not making provision for a ballot in the first place,&8221; said Mike Hancock. Mr Pugh thought this might suggest a &8220;cynical intention&8221; on the part of Ministers, which he &8220;hesitated to endorse&8221; &8211; at least, during this early stage of the evening. He added: &8220;I am arguing simply that we should be at least as permissive as Baroness Thatcher was in 1988. My hon. Friend argues that we should be more permissive, but the Government are arguing, and anyone who votes against my amendment will clearly be convinced by that argument, that we should be less permissive.&8221; Less permissive than the Iron Lady? Good grief. Mr Pugh&8217;s arguments became even more interesting as he continued, reminding the House that the last time schools were given &8220;greater financial freedoms&8221;&8230;&8221;nearly every governing body was presented with a paper from the headmaster showing that his salary should go up because the headmaster down the road would be getting a significant increase. We saw salary inflation across the headmaster class, so headmasters may have something to look forward to from new academy status.&8221; Caroline Lucas, Brighton&8217;s new Green MP was also vocal in the debates, tabling several amendments of which one would provide for academy status to be reversed. &8220;The Government want academies to be like private schools funded by the state, yet if things go wrong at a private school, parents have more recourse than parents of children at an academy as envisaged in the Bill. For example, if a private school behaves in a way that a parent does not like, the parent can stop paying the fees, withdraw their child or pay for their child to go somewhere else. There is no comparable control in the Bill for parents of children in academies.&8221; Veteran Tory John Redwood was sniffy about this. &8220;I think hon. Members are making obstacles where none need occur. Changes will go speedily only if the local community is happy. As soon as it gets out that a school is considering academy status, the local community will be engaged. There are local newspapers, local websites and all sorts of ways to do so, and the usual school grapevines will be in operation. &8220;Surely it is high time that we set free the schools that wish to be set free. I can assure the Committee that should groups of parents not wish a change to academy status to happen, they will mobilise quickly and democracy will work. It is still alive and kicking.&8221; Well, I think I&8217;ve given you a flavour of some of the arguments, which were largely good-humoured to the extent that Nick Gibb, the new Schools minister, referred to his opposite number at &8220;the minister&8221; and then apologised with the phrase &8220;It is all so new&8221;. I may come back another time to some of the more extraordinary Conservative explanations on why parental consultation doesn&8217;t need to be explicitly written into the Act, and doesn&8217;t need to happen until after the decision has been made, and Mr Redwood&8217;s grasp of precisely how schools might consult parents during the holidays. I am pretty sure that the Bill is so skeletal that Ministers are going to have to do a fair bit of firefighting further down the line, but that in most cases the debate was formed purely down party lines. Conservative = freedom is good; trust heads and governors. Labour = this Bill is unfair and will further disadvantage the disadvantaged. Further explanation on either side was not really forthcoming: it&8217;s simply a tenet of political faith. A rare exception was Barry Sheerman, former Chair of the Education Select Committee, who actually articulated why he thought Labour academies were more egalitarian than the Gove version may prove to be. &8220;Under the last Government, Building Schools for the Future and academies were not just about improving schools, but about transforming the communities in which they sat. That was at the heart of what the last Government were doing, and that is what the present Government seem to be missing. Transforming the community is what a great school does.&8221; So did anything change during the hours of rather well-attended debate? (It&8217;s notable that around 500 MPs took part in each of the votes on this Bill: when I tuned into live debate of the Labour government&8217;s final education bill there seemed to be a handful of MPs slugging it out over home education in an empty chamber). But summing up, Nick Gibb, the schools minister, was able to run through some changes which have been made in the Lords and the Commons. Here are his explanations: &8220;The noble Lords were concerned about schools changing their age range and the Bill was amended to allay those concerns. Subsection (4) of clause 9 makes it clear than when a maintained school becomes an academy under the current school closure processes, further to the Education and Inspections Act 2006 and not further to an academy order, when the age range is not like-for-like, the school would be classed as an additional school, so the Secretary of State would be required to evaluate the impact. That would include, for example, an academy created as a result of the amalgamation of two or more schools or an 11-to-18 academy that replaced an 11-to-16 maintained school, if that involved a closure rather than a conversion. Any school wishing to add a sixth form would need to follow the relevant statutory provisions. &8220;The answer to the question whether the admissions code and the appeals code will apply to free schools, too, is yes, it will. &8220;The problem with the shadow Minister's speech in moving the amendment was that it was written, I think, before he heard of the Government's intention to put in the funding agreement an explicit requirement to promote community cohesion. On top of that, it already requires academies to be at the heart of the community. &8220;Amendments in the other place have given children with special educational needs greater rights to admission to academies than existed in previous academies legislation, and new requirements for funding for low-incidence special needs have been added. New duties to consult have been included in clauses 5 and 10, and the Secretary of State will now be obliged by statute to take into account the impact on other schools of any new school established under the Bill. That is now in clause 9. &8220;My noble Friends have added greater parliamentary accountability through an annual report to Parliament, which will also enable us to analyse issues of concern to my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), such as the viability of primary schools that opt for academy status. He made a compelling case for increasing the number of parent governors, so as I mentioned earlier, the model funding agreement will be changed to increase the number from one to two. Opposition Members have successfully ensured that the funding agreement includes a requirement for looked-after children to have a designated member of staff.&8221; He concluded: &8220;The Bill is about trusting the professionalism of teachers and head teachers. It is about innovation and excellence, about giving parents a genuine choice and children the opportunity for a better future. It is a short Bill, but its impact will be long lasting. I commend it to the House.&8221; What happens now, I suspect, is going to be interesting. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=347Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:30:43 GMT20100728123043Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:30:43 GMT20100728123043Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:31:48 GMT20100728123148How reliable was the marking of last year&8217;s key stage 2 tests? If you read the official review of the quality of the 2009 marking process by Ofqual, published earlier this month, you are likely to come out confused. This is because, in my view, the central questions - did pupils and schools get the results they deserved? - are not answered in this report. This is despite Ofqual&8217;s homepage listing as among its priorities ensuring that &8220;all learners get the results they deserve&8221;. The findings of Ofqual&8217;s monitoring report are broken into three, under &8220;key successes of the 2009 cycle&8221;; &8220;key concerns...&8221;; and &8220;conclusions&8221;. Under &8220;key successes&8221;, the report says that the tests yielded results which were consistent across the country and that &8220;the low number of changes to results after schools had requested reviews could be interpreted as evidence of the reliability of the tests&8221;. Yet under &8220;key concerns&8221;, many difficulties are listed with the system by which markers were trained in the use of the mark scheme, particularly in the English tests, and with the content of that mark scheme. In English, the report says, the amount of time spent training markers on the interpretation of the mark scheme for writing was less than that for reading, and generally was &8220;rushed&8221;. Some questions were framed with a &8220;lack of precision&8221;, which forced the mark scheme into becoming complex &8211; in one case 23 bullet points were needed to convey instructions helping examiners mark a two-mark question - and &8220;ambiguous&8221;. Extra guidance on interpreting the mark scheme had to be sent out mid-way through the marking process. Some marking personnel were not trained in how to mark all the questions, and overall there were inconsistencies in the way markers were trained, which &8220;may have led to dissemination of incomplete, confusing and inconsistent messages about the application of the mark scheme &8211; particularly for new markers&8221;. The report also identifies some &8220;bias&8221; in some of the questions, going into particular detail about the notorious longer writing task in which pupils were asked to write about a pair of trainers. This was biased towards those with an interest in sport, said the report. Some 30 per cent of teachers complained about it after the test was trialled with them, reveals the report, and pupils&8217; average scores on it during the real tests were the lowest for any task set over the past four years. Overall, the report provides evidence to back up what a marking source told me last year about the difficulties marking colleagues had in interpreting the mark scheme and so awarding consistent scores to pupils, although the marker said it only &8220;skimmed the surface&8221; of these problems. In conclusion, then, under &8220;reliability&8221;, Ofqual&8217;s report says that, in the reading test, it was &8220;difficult for consistency to be achieved&8221;. In other words, it was not clear that a paper marked by one marker, using the mark scheme as best they could, would receive the same mark as if graded by another marker. But problems of inconsistency were not confined to English; difficulties with the training of maths markers were also mentioned. &8220;The extensive use of additional guidance to supplement and even correct the mark schemes inevitably leads to inconsistency in marking,&8221; says the report. It concludes that the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, the soon-to-be-defunct organisation which has overseen the tests, should ensure that any late changes to the mark scheme are kept to a minimum, and that, when needed, changes are communicated consistently to markers. To be fair to Ofqual, it is useful to have an independent authority looking at how the marking process worked, and pronouncing on any failings publicly. This report may well lead to improvements in future. However, overall I can understand why heads have been reported in the TES as being frustrated by this report. For it fails to follow up on its conclusion that there were serious problems with the marking process with the logical next questions: did pupils and schools lose out as a result? And were the marks generally accurate at the end of this process, or not? Reading the report, it is unclear whether the problems with the mark scheme and training are likely to have led to a few wrong marks here and there for children, or wider inaccuracy. And the seeming acceptance that the low number of successful reviews in itself was evidence that marks were generally acceptable seems remarkably uncurious: did Ofqual do anything to investigate some schools&8217; suspicions that the marking agency was institutionally reluctant to admit that it had got marking decisions wrong? If there were such systematic problems with the mark scheme, why was this not reflected in many more markers&8217; judgements being over-ruled at appeal? And you can only conclude that if they are reading the report, those conducting the reviews process might now have an incentive to let fewer appeals through in future, if this will be taken as evidence by the regulator that the original marking was accurate. Implicit in the report is a sense, I think, that problems with the marking process are just that &8211; problems of process to be sorted out the next time the tests are sat. The difficulty is that the test results carry real consequences, in this case particularly for schools and potentially for the careers of those who lead them in light of one bad set of scores. If the 2009 tests did result in inaccuracies, Ofqual should be doing more to try to identify the scale of any potential injustice, and ensuring more is done not just to improve the consistency of marking in future, but to protect pupils (for whom the results are medium-stakes) and particularly schools (very high stakes) when things go wrong, as they seem to virtually every year. In passing, I wonder if the current system would stand up if it were ever challenged legally by a head who lost his or her job because of a poor set of test results they thought had been inaccurately marked. I personally think there may well be a case now for an extra stage in the appeals process, with schools given the chance to take their case to a third party, if they are unsuccessful at initial review stage. Otherwise, the suspicion must remain that, while this system is used to hold schools to account with huge consequences when results slip, meaningful counter-balances protecting them when it is the marking system, rather than the school&8217;s teaching, which is at fault are less than adequate. - I have written another blog about the possible effect of the boycott on what can be read into next week&8217;s national KS2 test results. You can view it at: http://www.educationbynumbers.org.uk/2010/07/26/sats-boycott-how-were-national-results-affected/ Interestingly, in its own report on the marking reviews process last year, the QCDA itself said: &8220;QCDA does not believe that the outcomes of marking reviews are a reflection of the quality of marking in any particular year because many other factors can influence the number of reviews and the outcome.&8221;http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=346Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:31:41 GMT20100727113141Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:31:41 GMT20100727113141Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:31:53 GMT20100727113153Today, it was going to be all about the Academies Bill, and I&8217;ve been spending a lot of time mugging up on Hansard accounts of the debate as the week has worn on. But despite the Government&8217;s desperation to get the thing onto the statute books and schools away from their local authorities, the parliamentary action doesn&8217;t conclude till Monday. So let&8217;s do it then instead. Which brings me to a much happier subject, and one I have a feeling that most Government ministers haven&8217;t got a clue about. I&8217;ve just been to my daughter&8217;s junior school leavers assembly, which was just brilliant. Not always technically brilliant, which I have a feeling might upset Michael Gove and his ilk. Not playing Grade 5 piano? Not performing ballet, or reading poetry, or putting on Shakespeare? What kind of school show is that then? We got something much better, and something that I guess is replicated in state primary schools up and down the country. It was enthusiastic, committed, inspired, sometimes extraordinarily talented, and good humoured. And that&8217;s not to mention the teamwork the pupils used to get their acts together, and the way in which each kid or group of kids created something unique, all by themselves. Teacher managed it wasn&8217;t. As the MC, one of the year 6 teachers said, they were looking for parental applause when it was deserved and parental indulgence at other times. What followed was a big musical number for each class, in which there was clearly adult input, and then a plethora of sketches, dances and some stunning musical performances, which the kids had done all by themselves. And the running theme: their teachers and the head. Probably half the acts were about the staff as babies, as children, as pensioners or as gameshow contestants. There was clearly a lot of affection and a certain amount of folk knowledge, with constant references to the &8220;clubbing&8221; antics of a couple of respectable staff members. There were also a motif of the Head&8217;s assemblies (note-perfect, from what I could tell) as well as rather a fine example of him doing a robot dance. Possibly slightly less likely, but who knows? The affection they displayed for their teachers was almost breathtaking: the TDA could almost have used it in a recruitment campaign. Have those teachers all got higher level degrees, which the pre-election Conservatives thought so important? No idea: clearly completely unimportant. And then, at the end, that slide show of pupil photos which showed them as babyish-looking Year 3s, older kids growing in confidence and awareness, and then finally as Year 6s on their adventure week last month. A handful of them showed so much talent that I&8217;ll be looking out for their names in lights a few years on. But all of them have now got what it takes to function with good sense and poise in a world in which they will be increasingly independent operators. They may have done brilliantly in their SATs, but what the school has done for them is what all parents hope for but can&8217;t be measured in a test: helping kids to find their potential as funny, well-informed and self-aware 11-year-olds with the potential to fly with the extra freedoms of secondary school. Brilliant stuff: thank you.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=345Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:57:46 GMT20100723025746Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:57:46 GMT20100723025746Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:57:46 GMT20100723025746How did support for the Sats boycott vary across the country? I have carried out an analysis of government information provided last week on the schools which decided to follow the advice of the NAHT and the National Union of Teachers and refuse to take part in the administration of the tests this year. It reveals variations in the take-up of the boycott in different areas of England. Scrutiny of this information by local authority shows that in 24 local council areas, at least 50 per cent of schools joined the boycott. This represents almost one in six local authorities overall, and will mean that league table results, to be published early next year, will be almost unusable if based on test data alone in these areas. Performance tables, then, will rely especially heavily in these areas on teacher assessment judgements. The North East appears to have shown the strongest support for the boycott, having four of the top 10 authorities ranked on the percentage of their schools backing the action. Hartlepool tops the list overall, with all of its schools taking part in the boycott, and with North Tyneside; Redcar and Cleveland; and Middlesbrough all having more than three quarters of their schools boycotting the Sats. Schools in this region tend to have higher-than-average numbers of children eligible for free school meals, government figures show. However, more prosperous areas are also represented in the higher echelons of this table. Rutland, for example, which official data suggest has the smallest proportion of primary children eligible for free meals in England, had 15 of its 17 schools taking part in the boycott. At 88 per cent, this was the second highest level of support for the action of any authority. At the bottom of the table, 10 local authorities appear, from the government&8217;s list, to have had none of their schools joining the boycott. I find the contrast between local authorities in nearby areas particularly interesting. In Islington, in north London, for example, none of the 44 schools is listed as boycotting the tests, though in each of nearby Haringey, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest, more than half of schools joined the action. Other reasonably large authorities with no schools joining the boycott included the Wirral, Knowsley and St Helens. If there is a pattern, it is one of a slight North-South contrast. The North East; Yorkshire and the Humber; and the North West had the highest percentages of schools taking part in the boycott, while the East Midlands; South East; and East of England, had the fewest. Also, despite the exceptions in individual authorities described above, the regions of the country with relatively high numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals tended to have more schools joining the boycott, while the four districts with the lowest proportions of free school meals pupils &8211; the South East, the East of England, the South West and the East Midlands &8211; saw the lowest take-up of the boycott. Overall, the national proportion of 26 per cent of schools taking part in the boycott represented, I think, a strong vote of no-confidence in the current high-stakes testing regime from a constituency which, as you know, takes industrial action very reluctantly. I wrote a reaction to the national boycott figures last week. It can be viewed here I would also be interested in comments from anyone with any observations, perhaps from a local perspective, about these figures. Please either comment below or email me at warwickmansell@gmail.com Local authorities taking part in the boycott, with the percentage of schools joining the NAHT/NUT action: Top 10: Hartlepool (100 per cent); Rutland (88 per cent); North Tyneside (84 per cent); Sefton (82 per cent); Middlesbrough (81 per cent); Redcar and Cleveland (78 per cent); Stoke-on-Trent (70 per cent); Torbay (68 per cent); Dudley (67 per cent); Calderdale (67 per cent). Bottom 10: Islington; Halton; Knowsley; Wirral; St Helens; Isle of Wight; Bournemouth; Thurrock; Kingston upon Thames; Bracknell Forest, all of which had no schools boycotting the tests. Government regions, with percentage of schools joining the boycott: North East (39 per cent); Yorks and Humber (35); North West (31); Outer London (28); Inner London (27); West Midlands (26); South West (20); East Midlands (18); South East (15); East of England (12) The analysis is based on information stating which schools boycotted the Sats from the Department for Education. I&8217;ve not included data from England&8217;s two smallest local authorities &8211; City of London and the Scilly Isles &8211; which only have one primary school each. I compared the total number of schools taking part in the boycott for each LA with the department&8217;s records of the number of primary schools in each local authority. This may slightly underestimate the support for the boycott in some authorities, as the department&8217;s total for the number of primary schools in each local authority is slightly higher than the number it said last week should have administered the tests. This may be because of the presence of infants&8217; schools in the department&8217;s figures for total number of of &8220;primary&8221; schools in each authority.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=342Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:28:16 GMT20100713102816Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:28:16 GMT20100713102816Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:29:32 GMT20100713102932I had my very own Dutch moment this weekend, and it didn&8217;t involve football. I found myself sitting next to a headteacher from Amsterdam at a conference dinner on Saturday night, and had one of those unexpected encounters when you learn a lot more than anticipated. (I have to declare an interest here: it was the annual conference of the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS), whose members &8211; practising heads and academics -- research leadership. And they&8217;d asked me to publicise it for them. Which I&8217;m doing right now&8230; but that&8217;s not my motivation for writing this piece, I promise.) Anyway, knowing probably more about Dutch strikers than Dutch education, my initial polite conversation with Karin turned into a bit of an eye-opener. Her school, just outside Amsterdam, has 2,000 pupils who leave at 16 for vocational education, 17 for higher vocational training or at 18 for university. The Dutch government does like to change education about, as here, and is currently issuing edicts on sex ed and very frequent national testing. &8220;Oh, it changes about every four years&8221;, she said. However, as head of an outstanding school, Karin can simply ignore them. And, as she explained with a big grin, she does. What about inspections, I asked? Another big grin. &8220;We&8217;re an high-performing school and so we don&8217;t get inspected. We haven&8217;t been inspected for eight years,&8221; she said. OK, I said, putting my fork down and picking my notebook up, we&8217;re talking about similar developments in the UK: where&8217;s the accountability in your system? The answer was not what I expected. The compulsory national exams have two elements: one part marked externally, and one part internal assessment. If the deviation between the two sets of marks is less than 0.19 the school is excellent: 0.2 to 0.45 is normal and 0.46 and above is &8220;poor&8221; and will trigger an inspection. Parents, says Karin, know all the marks, how everyone is performing. And teachers are subject to 360 degree feedback which includes anonymous comments from pupils. &8220;The unions are quite worried about that here,&8221; I said. &8220;We find the pupils tend to pull their punches,&8221; replied Karin. She talks about &8220;horizontal accountability&8221; to parents, pupils and the school&8217;s board, and the openness of everybody knowing exactly what is happening and how it is performing. If parents don&8217;t like what&8217;s going on in their child&8217;s school, they have the right to move them although finding another place may not be straightforward. Popular schools can expand to meet the need. &8220;I don&8217;t believe in balloting so my school is growing and growing. If people choose to come to my school I will not refuse them. I don&8217;t think I&8217;ve got the right to do that,&8221; she said. How does she accommodate the extra pupils? &8220;Extra temporary rooms,&8221; came the reply. The conversation moves on to her school building which is situated on a lake, at which point Karin says &8211; to British ears -- the most surprising thing of the evening. &8220;Oh, it&8217;s lovely. The children like to skate on it. Everybody gets on the ice.&8221; Good Lord. Haven&8217;t they heard of health and safety? Karin hadn&8217;t, so at that point we spent some time explaining the current UK safety culture to her almost frank disbelief. So, if schools really are going to be encouraged to go it alone as academies, it might be a jolly good idea to look at the Dutch system for tips on accountability. And possibly elf &8216;n&8217; safety, too. Susan Young is an educational journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=341Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:01:28 GMT20100712020128Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:01:28 GMT20100712020128Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:01:28 GMT20100712020128There is increasing concern about the Coalition government&8217;s commitment to ICT in schools. The case for the prosecution was presented succinctly by Mike Baker in a piece posted on the BBC Education website entitled, &8216;Technology in schools: Is the clock being turned back?&8217; (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/10495726.stm) Points supporting this view include the absence of ministerial responsibility for ICT, the abolition of BECTA, diverting Harnessing Technology funding to areas deemed more important, not implementing the Rose primary curriculum and abandoning BSF. In an article posted on &8216;Merlinjohnonline&8217; , Miles Berry, from &8216;Open Source Schools&8217; , draws attention to this evidence and suggests that ICT in schools will be further hit by spending cuts to come. (http://www.agent4change.net/grapevine/platform/645-an-open-source-manifesto-to-help-cope-with-ict-cuts.html) Berry&8217;s article explores how schools can anticipate this by exploiting open source solutions. It offers ten money saving tips. It is probably fair to say that the jury is out over open source and the extent to which it is a panacea. However, Berry&8217;s piece is well worth exploring not only a part of a value-for-money review but also as part of a strategic ICT review in schools.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=339Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:57:50 GMT20100709125750Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:57:50 GMT20100709125750Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:57:50 GMT20100709125750The following statement has been released concerning future support for the Diploma. 14-19 Workforce Support update The centrally funded 14-19 support programme is coming to an end in its current form from the end of August 2010. Remaining provision is now limited and bookings for some elements of face-to-face support are now closed. The closure of the programme also means that the services that have been provided by the regional field forces, such as the consortium....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=340Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:30:56 GMT20100709013056Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:30:56 GMT20100709013056Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:31:21 GMT20100709013121Never has one man apologised so much in such a short space of time. Michael Gove makes Tiger Woods look like an amateur. Women? Pah! If you&8217;re going to apologise, clearly the best work is to be done when you&8217;ve somehow produced a list of schools explaining which are going to be able to get the builders in&8230; which turns out to be wrong. Exactly how they managed to do that was not explained, though someone who&8217;s been in the Department for Education a couple of times recently suggests that it&8217;s just all a bit chaotic in there because they&8217;re determined to do so much so fast. By the end of Day 1 all the old rainbow signs were down, and things have apparently continued at the same manic pace ever since. Anyway, not only was Mr Gove sorry for the &8220;distress&8221; caused to MPs and schools by the raising false hopes, he was also sorry for putting the list in the wrong place. Yes, His biggest crime appears to have been putting his little list (on which some of them were missed) in the House of Commons library at the end of his original announcement rather than on the table of the House and the vote office at the start. Which he&8217;d now done. Were I involved with a school in the thick of all this, I&8217;d have been incredulous by now. But to be fair to Mr Gove, I&8217;m pretty incredulous about the whole thing. As far as I can see, Building Schools for the Future has not been the best-organised venture from the start. If Mr Gove is to be believed on this, his little departmental hiccup is as nothing compared to the whole saga of BSF. According to his original speech in Parliament, it was a kind of bureaucratic obstacle course of nine substages, each of which had meta-stages (do try to keep up at the back) &8220;It is perhaps no surprise that it can take almost three years to negotiate the bureaucratic process of BSF before a single builder is engaged or brick is laid. &8220;There are some councils which entered the process six years ago which have only just started building new schools. Another project starting this year is three years behind schedule,&8221; he said. Given all this, it is perhaps a little rich of Mr Balls to complain that most of the projects are being pulled, since with a less complicated system more of them might actually have been built during the past years. But then, the terms of reference outlined by Mr Gove for how school buildings projects might be handled under this government make interesting reading as well. Here &8211; cherry picked, admittedly &8211; are some choice bits of the document which the new review group will consider: &183; To consider how to generate sufficient places to allow new providers to enter the state school system in response to parental demand &183; To review current methods of allocating capital (for example, by formula to local authorities); &183; To enable the establishment of new schools. &183; To consider the relationship between schools, local government and central government; &183; To increase choice locally determined by parental demand; &183; To review and reform the requirements on schools including the building/School Premises Regulations, design requirements and playing field regulations If I&8217;m reading this correctly, it does start to look as though they&8217;re intending most of the available big project funding to head in the direction of free schools (or possibly, to be charitable, build new primaries where necessary). And that seems totally potty, where there are school buildings which could be nicely refurbished for a lot less money. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=337Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:27:55 GMT20100708122755Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:27:55 GMT20100708122755Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:27:55 GMT20100708122755Mick Brookes discusses teaching assistants, the recent Panorama broadcast on barred teachers and NAHT's return to the Social Partnershiphttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretary-roundup-30/Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:42:13 GMT20100706044213Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:40:23 GMT20100706044023Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:42:13 GMT2010070604421320628NAHT receives requests from the local and national media for reaction to public examination results every August. A national press release is prepared and is released on A level and GCSE results release days. It is anticipated that there may be even more media attention than usual this year caused by such factors as the first award of the A at A level and the results released for the first phase of diploma lines of learning. The excess of demand for over supply of Higher education....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=335Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:35:18 GMT20100705063518Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:35:18 GMT20100705063518Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:35:18 GMT20100705063518The Conservatives made no secret of the high regard it holds for Teach First whilst in opposition. This is now reflected in the announcement of a &163;4m grant to the organisation to expand its recruitment for 2011 to over 1000. It will be placing some 560 trainees in schools in September 2010. It is expected that this will enable Teach First to expand geographically whilst maintaining its core purpose of serving areas of deprivation. The organisation has a growth strategy but the award of the....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=334Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:09:03 GMT20100705030903Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:09:03 GMT20100705030903Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:33:57 GMT20100705033357It was announce dlast week that UCAS is launching a two-year review of the currents points based system. The rationale for this is the perceptio that the system no longer reflects the growing diverity of points-bearing qualifications. In 2009, for example, 50% of applicants had non A level qualifications contribtting to their points total. UCAS has stressed that the Review will not impact on the HE entry process in 2010 and 2011. A full account of the terms of the review may be found at the....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=333Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:35:25 GMT20100705023525Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:35:25 GMT20100705023525Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:35:25 GMT20100705023525Even in retirement, if someone important in your former field of work comes up with a particularly dotty or authoritarian plan, you are no less sanguine about it and it makes you as sad and cross as it ever did. Who could forget the skirmishes and battles of the Education Reform Act; the passion engendered as the National Curriculum was centralised and backed up by the most manic and extensive system of testing overkill the world has ever seen; and, just in case that wasn&8217;t enough, veritable armies of Ofsted Inspectors were unleashed upon schools. Not only that, the schools themselves and the Local Authorities which ran them were thrown into disarray by the establishment of Grant Maintained Schools and City Technologies which the government either wilfully or through ignorance, likened to the old Direct Grant Schools. How could one comprehend a few years later, when a government of a different hue (and cry!) kept the National Curriculum, kept testing and kept Ofsted and pressed on with pernicious and damaging performance tables. Not only that! This same government created &8216;academies&8217; whilst still claiming to believe in equality for all and rejecting charges of creating a two-tier system. Obviously these new academies, freed from the stifling bureaucracy and general incompetence of Local Education authorities we were told, would be much improved, bound to be. School has poor Ofsted (the word has now become a neologism) what do we do? Call it an academy and it will transform overnight. At least, however damaging an academy might be to other schools in the area, the intention was to improve the lot of pupils who found themselves in some sort of category of failing school. Not any more! We can&8217;t say we weren&8217;t warned. What was thought to be a ridiculous bee in Mr Gove&8217;s bonnet has actually turned into a policy, apparently with Lib-Dem support. The Free School! Free from local control, free from curriculum shackles, free to pit teacher against teacher in a battle of salaries and conditions. Free for every dictatorial person or group to ride roughshod over the wishes of the community, the same community, presumably flexing its own freedom in the Big Society. But just a moment, are free schools really as free as all that because two bastions of freedom, religious schools and grammar schools have pronounced caution and doubt, ironically because of the freedoms they might lose. One man&8217;s freedom and all that..My poor old brain is starting to struggle with the contradictions of it all. So, how are these schools being sold to the nation? They will, apparently, enable excellent teachers to create schools and improve standards for all children, regardless of their background. What, pray, to use an archaic term, are those excellent teachers doing now? The whole thing smacks of an ideological crusade with more than a hint of &8216;you will have a free school and like it.&8217; You know when something is more than a whim because, at a time when quangoes (sorry non-departmental something or others) are being abolished to save money, a brand new one is being created to help people set up a free school. &8216;For those interested in having a new school in their area, but without the time or experience to set one up, there will be advice available from the New Schools Network, an independent charity.&8217; For goodness sake, if these people haven&8217;t got the time and experience to do it why on earth are they being allowed anywhere near a school! The undemocratic nature of this exercise is quite breathtaking. The draft legislation seeks to dispense with parents' and teachers' legal right to oppose such plans and removes local authorities' powers to veto a school's attempt to switch status. No longer will there be an independent adjudicator. The Secretary of State needs only to make a "discontinuance order," no consultation need take place and a school can be handed over to whoever wants to steal it. Do we take any consolation from the spokesman for the Department for Education who said that, although it was not in the legislation, it was important for schools to discuss their intention to change with parents and pupils? So why, if it is important, isn&8217;t it in the legislation? And there remains the biggest question of all, from where will the money be wrested? Oh dear, now I am starting to get sad and cross.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=332Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:44:54 GMT20100630104454Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:44:54 GMT20100630104454Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:45:32 GMT20100630104532It was one of the most dispiriting examples of how the political process can get in the way of carefully-considered decisions on education policy that I have witnessed. In early 2005, with an election looming, Tony Blair decided to overrule the advice of the Tomlinson committee, which had investigated qualifications reform, by deciding that GCSEs and A-levels would be staying more or less as they were, without becoming part of a larger, overarching qualification called the diploma. Fair enough, some might say. Except that Mr Blair&8217;s government had given Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former chief schools inspector, two years to come up with a blueprint for reform which, while far from perfect and potentially very complicated, had managed to win support from most within education. Why, if the intention had always been to keep the system they had, had the inquiry ever started? These thoughts came flooding back this morning as I read that David Miliband, the former foreign secretary and now Labour leadership front-runner, had called for another rethink of the entire 14-19 qualifications system. Pupils, he said, were spending too much of their latter years of secondary school locked in to an &8220;obstacle course&8221; of exams. &8220;Success is often being achieved despite the testing system and not because of it,&8221; he told the Guardian newspaper. Education, he added, still had to be Labour&8217;s top priority. David Miliband is no newcomer to qualifications reform. Way back in 1990, as a young research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), he was one of six authors of an IPPR pamphlet called &8220;A British &8216;Baccalaureate&8217;&8221;, which put forward the idea &8211; which was never taken up but appears to have retained some attraction among more radically-inclined thinkers on qualifications reform - of replacing A-levels with a continental-style qualification offering a broader framework for study than the traditional three-subject A-level experience. Then as schools minister from 2002, he joined his boss, the education secretary Charles Clarke, in seemingly supporting the Tomlinson vision in behind-the-scenes negotiations with Downing Street. However, with the Government about to respond to Tomlinson, both ministers were moved away from education by Mr Blair, with Ruth Kelly becoming secretary of state. Miliband now says: &8220;I had been working for two years on this historic English problem of the 14-19 curriculum. I think it was a historic error really that we did not follow through on the vision of a unified world class academic and vocational framework for curriculum and testing.&8221; Like all four former Labour ministers who are now contesting the party&8217;s leadership, Mr Miliband will have to face the question as to why he did not speak out on this when in office. But the more important point, for schools, is the substance of what he is saying. He is right, of course, to criticise the &8220;obstacle course&8221; of exams. It is extraordinary that, towards the end of secondary school, teenagers can now find themselves faced with four years, from year 10 onwards, dominated by preparation for public exams. You would struggle to find any other country where this happens. Perhaps more pertinently, is this what anyone connected with education would have come up with, if they were designing a system from scratch? I find that hard to believe. It has come about because individual reforms such as the Curriculum 2000 changes, which split the A-level into two, and the move towards modular GCSEs, have happened without anyone taking an overarching look at what this would mean, in educational terms, from a student&8217;s viewpoint. Tomlinson was an attempt at just such an approach. The only debate is the extent to which his reforms are more or less completely buried now, with the more vocationally-orientated diploma which eventually emerged under Labour gradually being marginalised by the Tories. A fresh look at this problem, which should also not ignore the central issue of how exam results are used to hold schools to account, is urgently needed.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=331Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:43:23 GMT20100629044323Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:43:23 GMT20100629044323Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:43:55 GMT20100629044355Single Level Tests and Secondary Transition Secondary members may be aware that some primary schools have been part of a KS2 SATS pilot project involving Single Level Testing. In 2010 the Mathematics level attained by pupils will count as the &8216;test&8217; level. The main difference between a Single Level Test and a conventional SAT is that the SLT consists of questions that are all pitched at a particular level. Therefore, a child attaining a Level 5 will have taken a....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=329Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:20:58 GMT20100628102058Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:20:58 GMT20100628102058Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:20:58 GMT20100628102058Well, I&8217;ve looked at the list. Have you? It&8217;s the one that&8217;s tucked away behind several different links on the DfE website and tells you the names of the schools which have &8220;expressed an interest&8221; in going for academy status. I&8217;d guess many school leaders have gone through the list to see what neighbouring schools and colleagues are up to, in the same way that people used to read the TES jobs pages to work out who was moving on. My perusal was for both professional and personal interest. It&8217;s good to keep an eye on the schools which are more than just interested in the idea, as the trailblazers who will set the tone for what happens next. And I had a strong hunch that my daughter&8217;s secondary school would be on there. I&8217;d heard the local authority were laying bets on how long it would take them to apply, too. Sure enough, tucked away towards the bottom, the only one in our local authority, there it was. I rang a friend, also a parent of the school and former governor of another. She too was unsurprised, but asked: &8220;What does it mean, then?&8221; I ran through the basics: possibility of more cash, different T and Cs for teachers, ability to modify the curriculum or school hours and terms, but being outside the LA and therefore not part of any democratic process. &8220;What do you think about it?&8221; was my friend&8217;s final question. And the truthful answer is that I really don&8217;t know. The major con is the &8220;local democratic control&8221; part of it. But I&8217;m just not that sure what that means. I&8217;ve never gone to vote in a local election with schools uppermost in my mind, as most prospective councillors don&8217;t raise the subject. My LA is a trailblazer for a particular admissions system, which has not, as far as I am aware, ever been part of anyone&8217;s election campaign or raised as an issue by anyone seeking votes. There are some acute problems with primary school places locally, which may have helped to swing it for a councillor in one by-election. But -- to play devil&8217;s advocate -- that meant a group of irate parents elected a councillor on a single issue, ignoring the rest of the manifesto and outvoting people with perhaps broader concerns. Might it not have been a better use of democracy for them to campaign for a Free School, whilst voting for the best representative on a broad range of issues? I&8217;m not sure what the answer should be. I&8217;m also troubled by the lack of any requirement to consult with parents and staff before going for academy status. For various reasons, I&8217;m not really surprised that my daughter&8217;s school hasn&8217;t posted anything on its website. It is presumably early days and unless the governing body has discussed it there would be little to say. And yet&8230; it would be a fundamental change, and if the school has actually expressed an interest with the DfE, that is actually fairly significant. It shouldn&8217;t be a secret. And I am fairly aghast that the DfE thought it could get away with keeping the names quiet, only publishing the list after it was forced to. And what a mess it is: it starts with a school in York, then has a chunk in alphabetic order by authority, before reverting to randomness in the final third. My guess is that the randomly ordered schools are the most recent entrants to the list, which also makes for interesting reading. The number of primary schools on there was a bit of a surprise, though may well be explained by Mick Brookes&8217;s theory that many have had such a hard time over the SATs boycott from their LA that they would prefer to go it alone. As for the secondaries &8211; well, I didn&8217;t spot many names of former GM schools that might have spent the last decade or so gagging to go it alone once more. Not many of the usual suspects there. The teacher unions are playing down the numbers of those schools on the list as a tiny minority. Taken in context of total school numbers they are right &8211; but out of the pool of schools which are currently eligible for academy status, that&8217;s a fairly high percentage. So on limited evidence, it is beginning to look as though quite a few schools may go for this, and that it might be a popular offer when opened up to those which don&8217;t hit the magic Outstanding status. And as the new history curriculum arrives, and the funding cuts, it may become an attractive option for even more school leaders. But do I think it&8217;s a good idea? I wish I knew. Susan Young Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=330Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:35:51 GMT20100628023551Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:35:51 GMT20100628023551Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:25:41 GMT20100629042541Perhaps I&8217;m missing something, but we still don&8217;t know just how bad it&8217;s going to get, do we? We&8217;ve had the Budget, after weeks of warning that we we&8217;re all doomed. And while we know the household stuff, many of the big ticket items are still sitting in the shadows. The Treasury is warning that the only departments which will be ring-fenced come the spending review announcements in the autumn will be health and international development. Education, we&8217;re promised, will enjoy some protection, but there is no word on what degree of cushioning there will be. And for everyone else, cuts of 25 per cent are promised. And there are extra things on which the Government wants to spend its education cash, particularly the pupil premium (as yet a mystery in all its details) free schools (currently funded to the tune of just &163;50m) and academies. Something is going to give, somewhere &8211; and my guess is that many schools which are currently ambivalent about going for academy status will jump because they need the money. It&8217;s not going to be much fun for heads, teachers and public sector workers when their pay is frozen, particularly as the pensions issue has been kicked only temporarily into the long grass. And the timing may be particularly grim for heads and teachers who will get the agreed rise this September &8211; but whose freeze begins thereafter. Very few private sector workers have had pay rises for the past couple of years, but if we continue to creep out of recession they may once more be able to improve their earnings while teachers can only look on in envy. Similarly, the rate of job losses in the private sector may reverse at precisely the same time that education starts looking like a dodgy career choice. Leading a school under these circumstances is going to require, I&8217;d guess, a whole new skill set from what we may come to regard as the years of plenty. Will Ofsted and the Government be expecting more as resources disappear, staff may be cut and those remaining feel less than chirpy about their working lives? And I suspect it&8217;s going to be more important than ever before to belong to an organisation like the NAHT in these times, as school leaders need to draw on collective support and group wisdom. But on the other hand, schools and public services have been unusually well funded in the past decade. Think about more than a century of state education: how often have schools had large numbers of colourful new textbooks and equipment, often in brand new or refurbished buildings? Rather, making do and mending has usually been the story. Or perhaps help will come from another direction. Several local authorities have been experimenting with a scheme called Total Place, in which the idea is to look at all the public money going into an area, and try to work out where it really needs to be spent. Another couple of organisations, the Institute of Government and the Public Chairs&8217; Forum &8211; the heads of 40 government agencies &8211; have formed a coalition suggesting ways of improving services whilst making efficiency savings. It could be sensible to start taking a real interest in these kinds of initiatives. To take my mind off the football, I&8217;ve been musing about what its managers have to teach about leadership. It&8217;s instructive just watching them on the World Cup touchline: Sven Goran Eriksson, late of this parish, allowing no expression more than mild perturbation. The French coach, looking ready to murder most of his team. And our very own Fabio Capello, muttering grimly in his designer specs and neatly shafting his team canary, John Terry, by dismissing his solo press conference as &8220;a mistake&8221;. If that wasn&8217;t menacing, I don&8217;t know what is. Apparently the England players have been bored senseless by Capello&8217;s insistence that they spend days off as a team on safari and playing table tennis. Remember the Wags handbag shopping, and the drunken shenanigans? Yet they got to the quarter-finals twice in those days. For a while, the Winnie the Pooh interpretation of staffroom dynamics was a popular training course for heads. If England manages to stay in South Africa beyond Wednesday, I predict a rash of consultants promising to teach the Capello method (menacing comments, a staffroom tiddlywinks tournament, lots of clean living and that famous glower). But on the bright (ish) side, you may have an opt-out from tedious training courses: no money. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=327Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:26:01 GMT20100622112601Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:26:01 GMT20100622112601Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:27:17 GMT20100622112717Do those responsible for co-ordinating the marking of Sats tests have a death wish for these assessments? The thought does occasionally come to mind as I contemplate yet more confusion surrounding the marking of the key stage 2 tests and what looks to this observer like a brewing public relations problem connected to the release of information to schools. As I reported in Friday&8217;s TES, this year&8217;s KS2 English tests have been affected by behind-the-scenes difficulties with the way examiners tot up the marks they award to pupils. For reasons seemingly best known to itself, the Edexcel exam board, which runs the marking of Sats for the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA), changed the rules this year governing the system by which markers transfer the marks they award from individual scripts onto a summary document to be sent to the board. The new system makes this process more complicated, meaning that &8220;double-counting&8221; errors, in which pupils&8217; marks in one section of the paper may be counted twice, appear to have crept in, in relation to some pupils&8217; results. The board has been so concerned that it has asked marking &8220;team leaders&8221; to telephone markers to double-check their work. But perhaps a bigger furore may be about to break with the frankly quite puzzling news that the schools whose pupils completed the Sats this year will, from later this week, start getting marked scripts back without full information on how their charges have done. In the past, as most readers of this blog will probably need no telling, schools have received marked scripts back complete with a marksheet providing a level for each pupil on each section of the test, provided by the marker. They would, then, have full &8211; if provisional &8211; results for each pupil. Teachers would also use this information to calculate the overall results for the school. This will not happen this year, it seems. In 2010, for the first time, markers were not given any information on the level thresholds &8211; the minimum number of marks needed to gain a level in each part of the test. They simply marked the work, sent each pupil&8217;s results in each section of the test on to Edexcel and, from this Wednesday, June 23rd, will be sending marked papers back to schools. But, because the markers this year did not have to assign a level for each child, (Edexcel now does this bit by computer), the scripts are going back to schools with the pupil&8217;s numerical marks for each section included, but with no indication of the overall level the child has achieved. Schools will not find out the overall provisional level of each child, and of the school itself, until results are published online on Tuesday July 6th. This is the same date on which the national &8220;level threshold&8221; information &8211; the number of marks pupils needed to reach each level &8211; is released, which is two weeks later than last year, when it came out on June 22nd. How will this go down in schools? Well, I am not a fortune teller or mind reader. But I would not mind betting that there will be a fair amount of unhappiness. If I were a child, I would be frustrated to learn from my teacher, for example, that I could be told the number of marks I had scored on a test, but I would have to wait perhaps 10 days to be told the overall grade or outcome. The QCDA told me that schools are being informed, via the June test &8220;circular&8221; which is now available on its website and includes a single sentence on this aspect, that mark sheets with level information are not being included with scripts this year. But I feel that, perhaps, more communication was needed setting out this fact and why the change is being introduced. I am still seeking more information from the agency as to the thinking behind it. Where these tests are concerned, it seems, controversy is never far away. This must be exasperating, even for the supporters of high-stakes testing. Postscript: Philip Blaker, director of test delivery operations for the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, told me on Tuesday that the changes had come about to &8220;reduce the administrative load on markers&8221; and to increase consistency for schools. The fact that markers no longer have to work out pupils&8217; levels had cut the demand on them, he said. And schools now had just one source of information on their pupils&8217; levels, in the form of the online results site, rather than the two they had had in the past (one from the marked scripts; the other when their results were released by the marking agency). He said the change to this system had been put to a &8220;reference group&8221; of head teachers, local authorities and other stakeholders. &8220;They do not see a problem with what we are proposing,&8221; he said. &8220;Fundamentally, we are trying to improve the quality of the processes and make sure that schools get the right result,&8221; he added.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=326Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:02:52 GMT20100621010252Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:02:52 GMT20100621010252Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:35:59 GMT20100623113559Last week, the new Department for Education published a notice on its website which included what looked like an uncompromising statement on the future of key stage 2 testing. The message was posted mainly to update teachers on the state of the primary curriculum, following the government&8217;s rejection of the Rose Review. Ministers wanted, it suggested, to ensure that the curriculum would promote a &8220;relentless focus on the basics and give teachers more flexibility than the proposed new Rose primary curriculum offered&8221;. I will leave aside, at this stage, the debate about this, or the worrying implications of using a word such as &8220;relentless&8221; to describe anything educational. My point is to bring to your attention a question posed at the end of the notice, and the response. The question was: &8220;Will this also mean the end of Key Stage 2 tests?&8221; The answer: &8220;No, Key Stage 2 results are a robust and consistent source of information for parents at a crucial transition point for their child as they move on to secondary school. Tests at 11 mark the end of primary school for each pupil, and it is right that we have a consistent and externally validated view of individual pupils&8217; progress at that time.&8221; That looks to me like a more hardline position on testing than any of the parties were taking in the run-up to the general election. Last year, the former government&8217;s &8220;expert group&8221; on assessment recommended that ministers should &8220;continue to invest in, strengthen and monitor the reliability of teacher assessment to judge whether a move away from externally marked national tests might be viable at a future date&8221;. Labour accepted all of the recommendations, although it continued to defend key stage 2 testing and clearly this arguably ambivalent and non-committal position was not enough to persuade the NAHT and the NUT that ministers were serious about testing reform. The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, meanwhile, told the TES in April that his party planned to ensure the tests were &8220;scaled back&8221;. He said of the Key Stage 2 tests: &8220;These exams clearly don&8217;t have the confidence of many teachers. And that&8217;s not hugely surprising when you hear all the stories of 11-year-olds being stressed and made anxious over them, and when you think there are children spending more time practising exam techniques than learning creatively.&8221; Most intriguing is the position of the education secretary himself. Only last summer, in an interview with Andrew Marr&8217;s Sunday morning BBC1 show, Michael Gove said that he planned to replace key stage 2 Sats with tests taken at the beginning of year seven. He said: &8220;At the moment you have tests which are taken at the end of primary school&8230; and one of the many concerns that people have is that that completely narrows teaching during the final year of primary school and all the focus is on drilling children just for those tests. &8220;Now we believe that what we should do is move those tests to secondary school. And the reason why is that when we&8217;ve talked to the best comprehensive schools, the one thing they tell us is that they don&8217;t completely trust the SATs tests and they run their own tests anyway to check the literacy level, the reading age of children when they arrive, and also to check their knowledge and overall competence. &8220;And we thought, why is it the case that you need two sets of tests?&8221; Last month, the coalition document published by the new Conservative/Liberal government said: &8220;We will keep external assessment, but will review how Key Stage 2 tests operate in the future.&8221; This week, curious as to why this review was not mentioned in the answer to the DfE question, I asked the Department for Education what it would amount to, and when it would happen. A DfE spokesman would only say that &8220;external assessment at Key Stage 2 will be retained&8221; and that &8220;as the Coalition Agreement makes clear, we will review how Key Stage 2 tests operate in future and will provide further details in due course&8221;. He also referred me to the Queen&8217;s Speech debate earlier this month, during which Mr Gove offered a &8220;tribute&8221; to Mr Balls. Mr Gove said: &8220;The KS2 tests are a vital accountability measure, and Mr Balls&8217;s robust case for their continuation ensured a consensus across the House for more data, greater parental accountability and a relentless drive for improvement in early years education.&8221; The questions for Mr Gove and Mr Clegg, surely, should be obvious. If they were so concerned about the &8220;narrowing&8221; and creativity-sapping impact of the high stakes testing regime on children&8217;s education before the election, why has their position changed towards seemingly unflinching enthusiasm now? And what is Mr Gove in particular going to do to help those children whose educational experience he clearly felt, as of last year, was being damaged by the current testing and accountability apparatus? NOTES: The DfE&8217;s question-and-answers on the curriculum can be viewed here. The coalition document, with the test reference on page 29, is here. A transcript of Mr Gove&8217;s interview with Andrew Marr is here. A report of Nick Clegg&8217;s interview with the TES is here.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=324Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:36:03 GMT20100617043603Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:36:03 GMT20100617043603Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:36:03 GMT20100617043603Don&8217;t know about you, but something doesn&8217;t seem right. Here we are into the second month of a new government, and there&8217;s only one bit of education legislation coming to the boil (potentially far-reaching, I&8217;d agree &8211; but definitely singleton). Michael Gove has committed a couple of swift knifings in that time as well, but neither Becta nor the GTC are going to be very much lamented, from what I can see. Ah, the GTC. What an extraordinary organisation. One of its aims was to unify the profession &8211; and it did, against it. I&8217;ve had my ear bent by heads moaning that it completely failed to do anything about their truly incompetent teachers, and my ear bent by teachers who were completely aghast at the hectoring tone whose most recent outing was in that embarrassing code of practice, which stopped just short of reminding professionals to change their underwear daily. Part of the problem for the GTC from the start was that it was entering a crowded market: not on the disciplinary front, but as the voice of the profession. And I wonder if its unwanted child status actually led to a bunker mentality which caused persistent problems. I&8217;ve just remembered that football chant: &8220;No one likes us, we don't care, We are Millwall, super Millwall&8230;&8221; For a long time, the organisation used such impenetrable jargon that education hacks would joke about translating from the original Klingon. That was coupled with the slightest air of we-know-best defensiveness with campaigns like the push on professional development and that saintly code of conduct. All a bit of a shame as there were some really interesting ideas buried underneath an impenetrability of words (such as the Teacher Learning Academy, one of those TLAs you could rearrange anyway you like to mean nothing very much). I think the organisation has improved a lot recently, probably thanks to the leadership of Keith Bartley, who comes across as a fully paid-up member of the human race. But it can take a long time to erase the whiff of sanctimoniousness, and Michael Gove probably thought he was safe in giving the GTC a bit of a kicking. Low-hanging fruit and all that. Bet he was astonished when the ATL came out in its defence. And, as the TES pointed out, it&8217;s a bit cavalier to chop the profession&8217;s own disciplinary scheme without consulting on something to replace it. Pre-GTCE, there was List 99. In future: what? And will the new scheme have some connection with the vetting and barring system which may itself be under review? Oops, I&8217;ve digressed. The point I was going to make was that during the first days of Labour David Blunkett never stopped naming and shaming schools or announcing changes, a pattern which remained for a full 13 exhausting years of government. Ed Balls is still at it, tweeting madly about schools and hospitals and free school meals. But Gove is, well, eerily quiet, and that&8217;s something we&8217;re just not used to. I suppose it could just be that he&8217;s a different character to Balls (and isn&8217;t scrapping to become leader of his party). But I was rather intrigued by the final paragraph of his reply to Balls, outlining his planned spending. &8220;I am keen to benefit from work you commissioned at the Department, when Secretary of State, on potential efficiencies in the sector. In the spirit of transparency I would be grateful if you would be prepared to discuss publishing confidential advice given to your ministerial team on the best way to achieve saving, specifically the Handover Report on spending in schools. I am sure that, in the national interest, you will want to do everything possible to help us reduce the deficit in the most sensitive and careful way.&8221; I suspect there&8217;s something interesting buried in this paragraph (rather like the impact assessment for the academies bill). But I also suspect we aren&8217;t going to find out what it is unless Mr Balls agrees. Susan Young is an education journalist Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=323Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:01:47 GMT20100614060147Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:01:47 GMT20100614060147Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:01:47 GMT20100614060147Mick Brookes discusses academies; issues of funding and the assessment reform campaign.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretary-roundup-29/Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:03:12 GMT20100629020312Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:24:43 GMT20100610122443Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:03:12 GMT2010062902031220246It is pleasing to report that in the wake of a consultation exercise organised by Ofqual, the decision to move forward the 2011 summer series timetable has been reversed. The awarding bodies will no doubt be issuing amended draft timetables in due course.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=322Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:02:59 GMT20100610110259Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:02:59 GMT20100610110259Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:14:50 GMT20100610111450Well, the first month in to a coalition government and I suppose we should all be getting used to odd things happening. But it&8217;s all very peculiar. The current thing which is getting me scratching my head in bewildered wonderment is the very strong suggestion that in some form the Alexander primary review is on the official agenda. You will remember that this massive, intensively researched and overarching edifice of a document was rudely dismissed by the then Government, whose researchers would barely have had time to read the title page. But then, it was widely surmised that the Department for Cushions and Soft Furnishings had commissioned its own Rose review in order to be able to sideline anything Professor Alexander&8217;s team said about KS2 Sats. Wrongly surmised, I am quite sure. It came as a surprise that the Rose curriculum was abandoned in the pre-election &8220;wash-up&8221; of legislation, particularly since Labour had been confident enough about its future that they had sent out all the documentation to schools, presumably at vast expense. So quite why they ditched it in those last frantic days &8211; when the election was called at a time of their choosing &8211; is a bit of a mystery. With all its talk of &8220;domains&8221; the Cambridge Primary Review, to use its proper title, seemed unlikely to be of much interest to Michael Gove, whose expressed desires have included a push on the basics and more proper subjects. But it appears that the two sides have been in communication for some time now, and that the new Government is looking seriously at the Alexander documents as it considers how to proceed, with high-level meetings in the pipeline. When you look at some of the top-line items again, it&8217;s possible to see a certain synchronicity (but if Michael Gove ever talks about new primary domains, I might have to eat my own dunce&8217;s cap). It&8217;s worth looking at the team&8217;s newest document, Policy Priorities for a New Government, which does highlight some of the issues which would have to be faced as part of any reform. &8220;Perhaps the most frequent and disturbing comment voiced by teachers at our dissemination events has been this: &699;We&8217;re impressed by the Cambridge Review&8217;s evidence. We like the ideas. We want to take them forward. But we daren&8217;t do so without permission from our Ofsted inspectors and local authority school improvement partners.&700; It continues: &8220;the Review has identified eleven post-election policy priorities for primary education. But here&700;s the proviso: we commend them not just to the next Prime Minister and Secretary of State, but also to schools. &8220;For if schools assume that reform is the task of government alone, then compliance will not give way to empowerment, and dependence on unargued prescription will continue to override the marshalling and scrutiny of evidence.&8221; To help with this, the review team is launching a network for schools which are keen to develop some of the ideas for themselves: (email Julia Flutter onjaed100@cam.ac.uk). Interestingly, the 11 priorities include the following: &8220;&8230;seize the opportunity presented by the dropping of the primary curriculum clauses from the Children, Schools and Families Bill. &8220;Understand that the Rose Review&8217;s narrow remit prevented it from addressing some of the problems of the primary curriculum which are most in need of attention, especially the counterproductive sacrificing of curriculum entitlement to a needlessly restricted notion of &699;standards&700;, the corrosive split between the &699;basics&700; and the rest, the muddled posturing on subjects, knowledge and skills, and the vital matter of the relationship between curriculum quality, expertise and staffing; and that the curriculum debate therefore remains wide open. &8220;But don&8217;t think that the minimalism of the 1950s (or 1870s) is an adequate alternative. Look instead at the Cambridge model: an aims-driven entitlement curriculum of breadth, richness and contemporary relevance, which secures the basics and much more besides, and combines a national framework with a strong local component.&8221; The others include a debate and decisions on what primary education is for, and proper assessment of the broad curriculum to replace the current KS2 Sats, officially-approved teaching and removal of the old professional standards for teachers. Nothing controversial there, then. But given that the approach the Government has taken so far is that heads and teachers should be given the freedom to teach, with academies having the freedom to ignore the national curriculum, perhaps it is genuinely possible that the Alexander proposals could form at least an underpinning to the changes to come. Perhaps more lies ahead for primary schools than a return to the 3Rs? Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=321Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:07:40 GMT20100609040740Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:07:40 GMT20100609040740Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:47:18 GMT20100609044718There have been two significant announcements thus far this week. One relates to the IGCSE. Nick Gibb announced that all specifications will now be available for the maintained sector. This means that all IGCSE specifications will be recognised for performance table purposes. The second announcement was not entirely unexpected. There will be no funding to support the implememtation of the last wave of diplomas (science, humanities, languages)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=320Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:16:20 GMT20100608051620Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:16:20 GMT20100608051620Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:31:14 GMT20100615033114Ofqual&8217;s new responsibilities include ensuring that expenditure on examinations represent value for money. &8216;ERAG&8217; is a stakeholder group set up to advise Ofqual on this aspect of its work. Ofqual&8217;s initial work includes research into the &8216;examinations market&8217;. Should members have points they wish to draw to Ofqual&8217;s attention on any aspect of this, they are invited to contact Si&244;n Humphreys who represents NAHT on this body. (sionh@naht.org.ukhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=319Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:06:22 GMT20100603040622Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:06:22 GMT20100603040622Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:41:54 GMT20100607104154The awarding bodies have made a significant change with effect from next summer. In short, the starting date for AS examinations has been brought forward. The knock-on effect of this is that the results process for all examinations will move forward by a week. The professional associations are in agreement that this was done without adequate consultation. NAHT has particular concerns about the impact this will have on work-life balance for senior leaders in schools. Members are invited....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=318Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:05:24 GMT20100603040524Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:05:24 GMT20100603040524Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:45:03 GMT20100607104503Branch secretaries were recently sent details of two vacancies for members to be elected National Council as Secondary representatives. This will involve being a member of the secondary committee. Council meets five times annually and secondary committee meetings currently take place about a fortnight before these meetings. Meetings are held in Central London. However, we are exploring the possibility of enabling members to participate by means of a telephone link. If interested members....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=317Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:04:35 GMT20100603040435Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:04:35 GMT20100603040435Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:44:09 GMT20100607104409NAHT advice has been for schools to ensure that students and parents/carers are aware of the criteria for awarding A. This was re-emphasised at a recent Ofqual consultation event. In summary, to be awarded an A a candidate must obtain an A across all units (including AS) and average 90% in the A2 units (NB not 90% in all units) This can give rise to a situation where a candidate with a higher UMS total can be awarded an A grade than an A candidate with a lower UMS total. Members are advised....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=316Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:03:41 GMT20100603040341Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:03:41 GMT20100603040341Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:42:50 GMT20100607104250Not too sure what it is about education which ensures that more heat than light is generally thrown around during debates, but that rule is holding true once more as the new Government&8217;s plans for extending academy status to any outstanding school which wants it come closer to reality. Following the arguments over the last week or so, your average Martian would have come to some very odd conclusions about the English education system. Depending which bit of the British media was being monitored on the red planet&8217;s spaceship, the alien race might reasonably have concluded any of the following: local authorities always protect the rights of all children and all schools Successful schools secretly hate children with special needs headteachers of schools which are considering becoming academies secretly want lots of power and don&8217;t care about children outside their school local authorities control everything that goes on it their schools with a rod of iron any school which does not opt out will lose all its funding and be forced to exist on scraps all schools in all local authorities are currently equal I could carry on, but am losing the will to live. As, probably, is the bemused Martian observer witnessing an argument being carried out in starkest black and white, with no shades of grey permitted. Clearly, the Martian&8217;s conclusions are extreme and nutty &8211; but not much more so than claims being made for and against the new policy. Unless some of the rhetoric is toned down a bit, we risk returning unnecessarily to the past where grant-maintained schools were often at daggers drawn with their local authority neighbours. And that doesn&8217;t do anybody any good. My problem with the new academy status is that I don&8217;t wholeheartedly think it&8217;s either a good thing or a bad thing, and that very little nuance has entered the argument just yet. The important thing is that it&8217;s a done deal. The legislation is on its way, and some schools will use it. Therefore, it is everybody&8217;s job to make sure that children are not disadvantaged as a result. The antis, led by Ed Balls (who, let&8217;s remember, is currently taking part in a fight to the death to lead the Labour party, had a penchant for telling people exactly how to run things, and himself encouraged the creation of new academies, sometimes against the wishes of the locals) are painting the initiative as the death of locally-accountable schools, and as a way of creating a two-tier system where poorer kids and those with special needs will languish. The pros, led by Michael Gove and most of the right-wing press, claim they are only seeking to remove schools from the jackboot of wickedly controlling local authorities who seek to prevent diversity or success. But these simplistic arguments miss two major points. The first, and most overwhelming, is the heads and teachers staffing these schools are the same people that they were last week or last year. Which means, most are teachers not for the money, power or prestige, but because they like kids and being able to make a difference to their lives. So while it&8217;s entirely possible that one or two schools will opt out and quietly start dumping pupils who make trouble or have special needs (in much the same way that it is claimed some existing academies replacing failing schools appear to have done) it&8217;s probably wrong to think that every school would do this. And the second point is that in most cases local authorities can interfere very little in the day-to-day running of their schools. Local management of schools has been around for a very long time now, but you&8217;d hardly think so from the current portrayal of local authority politics. However, it is true to say that many schools are strongly irritated by their LA and the way it is run, and some will make the jump just to be free of that. And despite all the rhetoric, it&8217;s hard to believe that zillions of schools are currently plotting to jump in September. Around 3,500 are currently eligible, as outstanding schools. A few will be itching to go and are prepared to start now: others will wait to see how things look in the next academic year, and how the financial benefits look. They may look very tempting as the cuts start to bite further down the line. Many are effectively window-shopping and thinking about it. But even the DfE&8217;s own documents are only projecting 200 conversions a year for the next three. There is a third point, which is the Prime Minister&8217;s family history. Having had a son with extreme special needs himself, he is unlikely to be keen on any policy which makes life harder for children with SEN and their families. Coupled with the Lib Dems&8217; pupil premium, there should be adequate safeguards for less privileged kids in society &8211; but, equally, campaigners are right to be cautious. In the end, the devil will be in the detail and how we all behave. What Mr Gove does on league tables and accountability is crucial: he needs to make sure these clearly reflect the progress of all children, not just those which can be hauled over the C/D border. Similarly, there needs to be careful work around the demand for all new Academies to help a named, less successful school. Empire-building should not be the name of the game. And admissions rules will stay the same for the new academies, which should mean they get the same intake as they do now. With no Ofsted inspections and no local authority backstop, there are clearly some risks that some schools may behave in a solely self-interested fashion. But heads aren&8217;t business people: they are former teachers. They are there because they care about kids and have spent a lifetime working with kids. And my gut feeling is that this makes a huge difference. Come September, schools are going to be able to become academies and do their own thing, no matter what anyone thinks about it. The important thing is for everyone to make sure the system continues to work for pupils. Alienating those who have made the jump risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=315Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:05:26 GMT20100601120526Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:05:26 GMT20100601120526Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:25:07 GMT20100629042507What will heads have made of the revelation, in Friday&8217;s TES, that schools adjudged to be &8220;outstanding&8221; by Ofsted might never have to experience an inspection again? If shrieks of joy may have been premature, I can imagine that some cautiously optimistic glints in the eye might have been glimpsed in staffrooms which emerged happy from their last encounter with Her Majesty&8217;s Inspectorate. However, I&8217;m not sure that all schools will share that position. And I think that the public should be sceptical about these plans, as they should about the coalition&8217;s still-forming proposals on accountability more generally. At first glance, the new government&8217;s proposals to focus Ofsted inspection on &8220;areas of failure&8221; &8211; as mentioned in the coalition&8217;s &8220;programme for government&8221; document &8211; make sense. Michael Gove, education secretary, wants to direct inspectors&8217; attention to schools which did not do well in their previous Ofsted report. &8220;Outstanding&8221; schools, then, need never be inspected again, he appeared, amazingly, to tell the TES, although closer reading reveals that he said there would be some safeguards. A school which was previously outstanding but appeared afterwards to be falling back on some measures &8211; which the newspaper suggested could include data on achievement, pupil exclusions and teacher absences and turnover &8211; could be re-inspected. Parents would also, presumably, be able to trigger a re-inspection by complaining about a school in number. As I say, in some ways this can be presented as making sense. First, in a time of ever-tightening budgets, it will enable resources to be focused on those schools where inspection &8211; if it is seen to have a positive effect on bringing about change &8211; could be expected to make the most difference. Second, it fits well with a narrative, which again at face value is right, which says an accountability system should only intrude into teachers&8217; working lives where, without it, schools would be letting down their pupils. However, I think there are two big flaws with this plan, one reasonably obvious and the other perhaps more subtle. The more straightforward difficulty, I think, is that these proposals misunderstand the twin purposes of Ofsted inspections. They are supposed not just to put schools under pressure to improve, but also to inform parents as to the quality of each institution. However many reservations I have about the current Ofsted arrangements, without them parents considering sending their child to a school which is no longer inspected &8211; having previously been graded outstanding - will have no detailed, rounded information at all about the quality of that institution. There will simply be no recent report on a school, with families simply told that once it was &8220;outstanding&8221;. I cannot see how that position squares with the new government&8217;s commitment to accentuating choice in the schools system. Without decent information, how is it possible to make an informed choice? The only other source of official information, of course, will be data published on the school. This brings me on to my second reservation. Mr Gove appears to want to place a lot of emphasis on statistics, arguing that &8220;what we absolutely have to have is public, objective data about how schools are performing&8221;. Information of the sort contained, then, in league tables, would necessarily be given more emphasis. If one accepts accountability as unavoidable in the modern schools system &8211; as I think we must &8211; there are broadly two choices: base it mainly on qualitative, rounded judgements of schools&8217; qualities, as in inspection systems, or found it on statistical indicators, as in league tables. No system is perfect. But given the problems of the latter - including narrowing the emphasis in schools to what is measured; the seemingly unavoidable unfairness inherent in all ranking systems, none of which are &8220;objective&8221; and none of which can properly take into account factors outside of a school&8217;s control; and the difficulty that parents often have making sense of data - I think inspection systems, if they can be properly managed and made less data-driven and punitive than the current regime, have fewer downsides. Mr Gove&8217;s plans risk providing poorer quality information to parents: a set of figures rather than an inspection report written in English, for those schools which escape inspection. And while his suggestion of giving more freedom to successful schools from central bureaucracy may sound seductive to professionals, in reality they will still have to focus very carefully on the statistical indicators against which they will continue to be measured. Narrowing of teaching towards only those measures, and teaching the test, then, will continue, to be a serious risk. A data-driven education system, rather than one founded on human judgement, may well cut costs. But I don&8217;t think this would be money well-spent.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=313Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:55:23 GMT20100601095523Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:55:23 GMT20100601095523Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:37:26 GMT20100601113726May 25 2010 and the historic Queen&8217;s speech from the first peacetime coalition government since goodness knows when at a time of the greatest financial crisis since goodness knows equally when. The columns of the day were packed with all kinds of educational snippets. So, what have we got? Cuts, naturally but academies and free schools! &8216;What,&8217; as the person on the Clapham Omnibus said, &8216;is all that about?&8217; Primary and secondary schools graded outstanding by Ofsted could be fast-tracked into free-standing academies by the autumn. The person on the CO might wonder why, if a school is doing so well without being an academy, does it need to become an academy. Unless it is a wheeze to give good schools more money, taken, one can only surmise from other schools in less privileged circumstances. No wonder this mass opt out proposal has been described as irresponsible and likely to lead to chaos. One does not wish to undermine the harmony breaking out all round but, at some point, it might be worth remembering that the new Lib-Dem Education Minister did actually say during the election campaign that the free school plan was a &8216;shambles&8217; and that unless you gave local authorities the power to plan and have money available, &8216;it&8217;s just a gimmick.&8217; One-to-one tuition under threat. Cuts are always bad news. Inevitably money is saved from new or experimental activity and transferred to the cautious and traditional. And so it is with the threat to one-to-one tuition. It matters not that new government wishes to help children from deprived backgrounds who are falling behind. The initiatives Every child a Reader or Writer or Counter is reclassified as a bureaucracy cost, as indeed does the monitoring and evaluation just in case they discover that the schemes are working well. Call for &8216;bounty fund&8217; for poor students. At this very difficult time for public finances, the Sutton Trust which has an excellent record in supporting access to higher education from the more disadvantaged members of society, is putting forward some interesting ideas to the review into University funding. The two main proposals are that universities should be rewarded with extra money for taking pupils from poorer families and that the government should consider giving poorer students a &8216;free&8217; first year at University. The trust believes that this would alleviate some of the risk and uncertainty that deter non-privileged students from applying. University Places in spending cut Oh dear! Meanwhile cuts to the university budget of &163;200 million pounds will mean 10000 fewer extra places than had been announced. Toddlers who lie &8216;will do better.&8217; One rather fears the media has once again, managed to twist, no not lie exactly, the findings of Canadian research. It is not suggesting that parents should encourage their children to tell lies in order to improve their Sat scores. They could do that by lying about their results. No, it is simply observing that in a young child the complex brain processes required in understanding the concept of lying can be one indicator of intelligence. Dare one suggest identifying &8216;future politicians!&8217; Schools tackle concrete jungles It is always encouraging to read about projects which bring together imaginative thinking with children&8217;s natural enthusiasm. The concrete jungle campaign is asking pupils to help protect Britain&8217;s wildlife by transforming concrete areas into green spaces. The aim is to create more than 300,000 square metres of wildlife habitats in schools and to log them on its website. The first metre will be dug up in south east London. History lessons strike a new note. Unusually as it is not a quiet time for news, the regular &8216;bash the history teacher, schools, society, seems to be upon us bewailing pupil ignorance of such things as &8216;who built Hadrian&8217;s wall?&8217; and &8216;who won the battle of Trafalgar?&8217; All is well. A National campaign &8216;Sing Up&8217; has been commissioned to come up with songs for pupils to sing on school trips to historical sites. Keep an ear on the charts for the Stonehenge number: Quarry the stones, our poor aching bones, Working together far from our homes. Views sought over no-pupil Borders school Finally, what would the English Department for Education make of the Border&8217;s school which by August, will have no pupils. It could be a close run thing between closing it to save money or turning it into an Academy.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=309Thu, 27 May 2010 09:59:59 GMT20100527095959Thu, 27 May 2010 09:59:59 GMT20100527095959Thu, 27 May 2010 09:59:59 GMT20100527095959Right now, I wish I had a crystal ball which would give me an idea of precisely how many schools will take up the new Government on its kind offer of academy status. Last time round, when the then Conservative government invented grant-maintained schools, many secondaries jumped at the chance, not least because of the extra cash on offer. As the financial inducements dried up, so did the numbers of new schools wanting to join in the party. At the time of writing, it isn&8217;t clear what kind of extra cash would be there for the new academies. The existing ones, set up in the old-fashioned way with sponsors, have generally had the sponduliks for some multi-million pound building work. Given the financial state the nation&8217;s in, it&8217;s hard to imagine that every new academy is going to be able to find itself a sugar daddy &8211; which leaves them with funding &8220;at a comparable level&8221; to maintained schools, according to the pr&233;cis of the Academies Bill. So the drivers for aspiring academies are unlikely to include money: it will be more about the promised freedoms. And that&8217;s where things could be very different from the days of GM schools. My hazy memory of GM schools was that very many of them were avowedly independent and often disdainful of their local authority. In turn, the local authority often loathed these schools. The big exception to this was Kent, where memory suggests the local authority actually encouraged schools to opt out as they got extra money for doing so, and where relations remained generally good. But it was a very different time. The national curriculum was in place, and testing, but league tables were either non-existent or not important. Moreover, the spirit of the day was competition, with a school-eat-school mentality in many cases actively encouraged. But now the mood music is very different. Talking to a couple of directors of childrens&8217; services last week, there was a relaxed attitude to the thought of schools going down the academy route. For one, working in a big city, this was because schools now routinely work together, sometimes sharing staff and resources, sometimes helping with improvements. She had already talked to heads, stressing that there would be real opportunities for flexibility ahead and that if they did choose to go for academy status she hoped the current working arrangements would continue. Her colleague, from a different city authority, had herself helped parents set up an academy in a situation where there was an unmet demand for a faith school. The process was long and arduous: now, she said, the LA was keen to help parents who wanted to set up a free school under the new legislation to do so. After all, she had already learned the hard way how to do it. And that&8217;s not all. There is some acknowledgment among DCSs that perhaps the focus has been too much on safeguarding and perhaps not enough on education. The mood music from the new DfE is all about education as a transformative universal service, and directors of childrens&8217; services in the main agree with that focus. And no matter how many schools do choose to go down the academy route, last year&8217;s legislation means local authorities remain responsible for 0-19 education. Yet there are doubts. The head of the Local Government Association, herself a Conservative, has expressed worries about the effect on poorer children. Most of the teacher unions have concerns. We don't yet know how the governing bodies would work if the new academies don't have a big business sponsor, like the older ones. And with other flexibilities on curriculum and so on promised in the second education Bill, it's not entirely clear what extra opportunities and freedoms will be available for heads who make the jump. So it&8217;s hard to call on where we&8217;ll all be in 18 months time when the next Queen&8217;s Speech outlining upcoming legislation is due. But on the current, limited evidence, it doesn&8217;t look as if we&8217;re returning to the bad old days of GM status. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=308Wed, 26 May 2010 14:58:19 GMT20100526025819Wed, 26 May 2010 14:58:19 GMT20100526025819Wed, 26 May 2010 14:58:19 GMT20100526025819Stick two political parties&8217; education policies in a head-on car crash with each other, and what survives the wreckage? That&8217;s the way I feel picking through the interestingly terse 33-page coalition document which presumably provides the bare bones for next week&8217;s Queen&8217;s Speech. Each party&8217;s headline policy has made it intact: the Lib Dem pupil premium is there, alongside the Conservatives&8217; parent-led free schools and off-the-shelf academies. And it&8217;s as interesting for what it doesn&8217;t say as it does. Primary curriculum, left in limbo after the Rose version bit the dust in the hurry to pass education education before dissolving the last parliament, remains unmentioned. Michael Gove has apparently expressed a desire to revisit the Alexander review and have another think: he&8217;s certainly stressed the 3Rs and &8220;proper history&8221; in the past. Neither are mentioned specifically in the coalition document, but there are hints of the vaguest kind: &8220;&8230;all schools have greater freedom over the curriculum&8221; Diplomas are another potentially divisive area. You may remember that the Tories wanted to scale them back, the Lib Dems wanted more. On the evidence of the coalition document they&8217;ve kicked this one into the long grass while they argue a bit more, because presumably this is the crucial sentence: &8220;We will improve the quality of vocational education, including increasing flexibility for 14&8211;19 year olds.&8221; In fact the interesting thing about the curriculum is that the only specific bit of name checking is for the iGCSE, which some state schools &8211; but not overwhelming numbers &8211; would like to be able to stick on the curriculum. If I was being suspicious, I might think that was designed to appeal to the new schools which the coalition is encouraging, some of which will no doubt be part of international chains. Even though the document signals rather a lot more change to come, it looks as though there may be much to cheer for schools. There is a promise to review how KS2 tests operate, although external assessment will stay. There is a promise to reform league tables so schools can focus on the progress of all children, not just those on the C/D boundary. There is also a promise to &8220;simplify the regulation of standards in education and target inspection on areas of failure.&8221; Presumably this means Ofsted: exactly what it means is unclear. And another interesting line promises to publish &8220;performance data on educational providers, as well as past exam papers&8221; &8211; an attempt to scotch the ongoing standards over time row, perhaps? But what it does appear to suggest that it isn&8217;t only schools which will be under scrutiny in future, but other parts of the education system as well. There are clear areas where pre election promises have been watered down: the Conservative desire to bar graduates with Thirds from publically-funded teacher training has disappeared, replaced only with an aspiration to hire more good maths and science graduates. The small print in all of these areas will be genuinely interesting. Exactly how will schools be helped to prevent homophobic bullying or improve discipline? How will they &8220;improve the quality of the teaching profession&8221;? And what will happen if schools have &8220;greater freedoms to pay good teachers more and deal with poor performance&8221;? For many heads, this would be a double-edged sword. So far, it&8217;s positive that the administration&8217;s To Do list is in plain English, without any of the bombastic but ultimately meaningless language of recent educational pronouncements. If the Government is genuinely serious about giving schools more freedom and flexibility, then there could be some interesting times ahead. But the devil is generally in the detail&8230; and if the Queen&8217;s Speech doesn&8217;t give a clue as to where the little imps may be hiding, then the first Education Bill of this administration will probably flush them out. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=307Fri, 21 May 2010 17:05:12 GMT20100521050512Fri, 21 May 2010 17:05:12 GMT20100521050512Fri, 21 May 2010 17:05:12 GMT20100521050512I was one of those children who loved school, generally enjoying most of the work which was thrown at me. But I have a confession: I think I would have struggled, as a youngster, with the task of writing creatively under exam conditions. It was, by the way, something I was never asked to do during my school years in the 1970s and 1980s. That, though, is the challenge which has faced our 11-year-olds for years now, as part of the key stage 2 English Sats. Amazingly, their performance in two sets of creative writing tasks on one day in May is meant to act as a definitive verdict on their progress in writing over the past four years. This, I think as an observer looking in at what now goes on in education, is crazy. During a recent online debate on Sats for the website Schoolgate, I mentioned last year&8217;s longer writing task, in which pupils were presented with an illustration of a pair of trainers and asked to write a report about them. This, I was far from the first to suggest, might not have been the most interesting challenge for a child. If they found themselves less than inspired, and were marked down as a result, I asked, how could it act as a fair reflection of their overall ability? I was challenged on this by someone who was opposed to the Sats boycott, to the effect that although that particular task may have been boring, this should not imply that the whole system was problematic. But this is, I think, to ignore the bigger picture. Last week&8217;s Sats writing tasks, as I understand it from a marker source, went down better than those of 2009, among those schools not taking part in the boycott. The 2010 longer writing task asked children to write a guide to looking after an imaginary animal called a &8220;miptor&8221;. The shorter assignment required them to write a recommendation setting out why someone they knew should receive an award. If many children felt enthusiastic when faced with these instructions, I am glad for them. But it does not obscure the fact that this looks to this observer to be a bizarre way to assess their progress. Hanging so much, for pupils and schools, on these two tests is odd, for several reasons. First, it does not reflect how creative writing works in the real world. Although some of us face deadlines when writing, we will not find several years&8217; work judged on the basis of having to be spontaneous on demand during a pre-assigned timeframe of a few minutes. Second, any pupil can over- or under-perform on any test. Placing so much emphasis&8211; including official judgements of progress over a whole key stage &8211; on a test which would appear to be particularly vulnerable to concerns that pupils&8217; responses could be affected greatly by the degree of their interest in the question, does not seem smart to me. Finally, I know markers have struggled with the interpretation of the mark scheme for the English tests in particular in recent years. And official studies have shown that many level judgements may be inaccurate. So, again, why are we basing so much on what could be unreliable results in these &8220;snapshot&8221; tests? And, if children do need to be judged on their performance in such tests, why is this not at least placed in some kind of wider context, assessing their capabilities over a longer period? At a Teachers TV debate on assessment reform recorded yesterday, for which I was one of the panellists, there seemed little argument that the current structure needed radical reform. When it works in this way, is that any surprise? My English marker contact indicates that marker training &8211; which has been a source of frustration since at least the ETS debacle year of 2008 &8211; has been improved this year. Markers were placed in small groups, rather than &8220;all together in a hall&8221;, and given more scope to discuss the mark scheme. Elements of the process for checking marker quality are taking place with computer support this year, another aspect which caused consternation during the meltdown two years ago. But my source says the systems put in place by Edexcel, the exam board which has replaced ETS in running the marking, are much better. She reports having received scripts from three quarters of her allocated schools to mark, with other examiners observing a similar pattern. Schools without scripts are, of course, likely to have boycotted the 2010 tests. She adds: &8220;Writing topics have allowed children to write more creatively, and in my view demonstrate their skills to a greater extent than last year&8217;s topics. Marking levels seem rather tough, though, so I can see a similar pattern emerging as last: reading on the whole given higher levels than writing.&8221;http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=305Wed, 19 May 2010 10:25:10 GMT20100519102510Wed, 19 May 2010 10:25:10 GMT20100519102510Fri, 21 May 2010 10:28:10 GMT20100521102810Wouldn&8217;t you just love to be in Sanctuary Buildings at the moment? (That, by the way, is where the Government&8217;s education department lives. Given the number of name changes that Ministry gets, it&8217;s probably the safest way of referring to it) As a hack, I&8217;m delighted that the Department for Children, Schools and Families is no more. It was a devil to type and remember &8211; the only way I could ever do it was as the department for cushions and soft furnishings. Before that, for the benefit of very young heads, was the Department for Education and Skills, the Department for Education (I think), possibly the Department of Education and definitely the department for Education and Science. So what we&8217;ve got now is the Department for Education, again. Blissfully simple &8211; as is the website, which has lost all those rainbows and smiley faces and suddenly looks crisp and businesslike. But like swans, there&8217;s an awful lot going on under the water. The home pages contains the warning: &8220;All statutory guidance and legislation linked to from this site continues to reflect the current legal position unless indicated otherwise, but may not reflect Government policy,&8221; and I&8217;d put that forward for understatement of the year so far. Twitter contains some glorious clues to the fun and games going on. An anonymous &8220;mouse wielder&8221; has posted twice today, first: &8220;Web revolution sweeps Whitehall!!! First as tragedy. Then as farce. You wouldn't believe the chaos behind the scenes.&8221; And then, moments later, the afterthought: &8220;Actually you probably would. Think the IT Crowd crossed with the Thick of It.&8221; Of course, the name change reflects the politics. Michael Gove has made no secret of his desire to reinstate Education as the important bit of the department. Directors of Children&8217;s Services have become increasingly twitchy during the last months as a result of his remarks on the subject, although none of them have been willing to believe &8211; on the record at least &8211; that the government would split their roles once again. While there&8217;s nothing official as yet, the new departmental set up is giving some interesting clues. Under the previous set-up the Children&8217;s Minister was a proper minister of State, with the right to attend cabinet meetings. Now the Children post is held by a parliamentary under-secretary (still Tim Loughton, though, who has shadowed the job for the past four years) which is quite a demotion. It is beginning to look as though schools will be concentrating on education once more, with further integration of what has been called &8220;the children&8217;s workforce&8221; in many quarters being halted or rolled back. The department contains Lib Dem Sarah Teather, who knows her stuff, and it looks as though we&8217;re going to get a fast mix of free schools and academies, with some pupil premium money thrown in. Cuts are clearly going to be on their way &8211; if not at the frontline, then to back-office functions which make life easier for schools. What else do we know? Michael Gove isn&8217;t a fan of the Rose review primary curriculum &8211; so don&8217;t bother reading that huge pile of bumph clogging up the corner of your office. He is, apparently, in favour of revising the Alexander document and moving on from there. And expect directive on teaching Proper History. Got your copy of 1066 And All That to hand? He doesn&8217;t approve of Ofsted&8217;s limiting judgments &8211; so a possible chink of light there for heads. SATS &8211; some talk of shifting them to year 7, I recall &8211; but he definitely thinks they&8217;re A Good Thing. But according to my horrified 14 year old, he is going to impose full school uniform on everyone. I thought she was hallucinating (and bonkers, since her school insists on uniform anyway) but I read a snippet yesterday suggesting that he wants all schoolchildren to wear ties. Perhaps it&8217;s me that&8217;s hallucinating. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=304Fri, 14 May 2010 15:04:44 GMT20100514030444Fri, 14 May 2010 15:04:44 GMT20100514030444Fri, 14 May 2010 15:04:44 GMT20100514030444ONGOING SUPPORT FOR THE NEW SECONDARY CURRICULUM Members will be aware that since the introduction of the new secondary curriculum in September 2008, the DCSF organised a coalition of organisations to support schools and LAs in successfully implementing the changes. The work of this group formally ceased at the end of April 2010. The purpose of this guidance is to ensure that members are aware of the legacy arrangements for continuing support. It could well be the....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=303Tue, 11 May 2010 16:22:35 GMT20100511042235Tue, 11 May 2010 16:22:35 GMT20100511042235Tue, 11 May 2010 16:22:35 GMT20100511042235Less than a week to go, now, so which way will primary heads jump on whether or not to join the Sats boycott? I have always tried to stay outside the debate on the unions&8217; tactics with regard to how to protest about the problems inherent in high-stakes testing. I have felt it was important to point out the evidence of the effects of hyper-accountability in schools, and the problems with the over-interpretation of test data, but that it was up to teachers to decide for themselves on the strategies needed to push for change. I still feel that, and certainly would not presume to urge any head to act in a particular way. That said, I do have sympathy with heads who feel that a boycott is the only way to push for action: the NAHT and other unions have been making the case for the government to take seriously the impact of its centralised testing and monitoring regime for more than a decade now, and concessions from ministers have been limited. The fact that there has never even been a proper official inquiry into this issue speaks volumes. The strength of feeling among heads at the NAHT&8217;s annual conference last weekend was notable. In the last couple of weeks, I have been watching the arguments thrown at heads who are considering joining the action, and I have to say, I find many of them weak. So what are they? The first says that children will lose out if they fail to take the 2010 Sats tests next week. Ed Balls made this point in his letter to school governors last week, arguing that pupils &8220;should all be given an opportunity to demonstrate their achievements in tests that are set and marked properly&8221; and that failure to administer the 2010 Sats would &8220;disrupt children&8217;s learning&8221;. I find this unconvincing. There is nothing to stop a head setting an alternative set of tests, such as previous years&8217; Sats, and giving pupils levels based on their results in these assessments. Or they could decide not to set tests, and instead simply allow teachers to use their own judgements on pupils&8217; levels based on their work over four years. Some have argued that pupils need to sit tests after all the build-up. I say we should leave that decision up to the head: taking part in the action does not close off the option of testing the children if the head believes this is the best thing for his or her pupils. In the end, a judgement on this comes down to who you think is best placed to take a decision in the pupils&8217; interest: their head or the government . The second says that parents will lose out on the information that Sats provide on the progress of their children. But this overlooks the fact that teachers are able to make judgements for themselves. However schools provide the information &8211; whether it is through a level generated through alternative tests, or through teacher assessment &8211; parents will still find out. And, although externally marked tests are billed as more &8220;objective&8221;, in reality there have been problems with some Sats marking for years and any pupil can under- or over-perform on the day. The third says the timing is not right: schools should have been told early in the academic year of the boycott plans, because it was unfair to build children up for tests which might not happen. Yet the unions had no choice with that: industrial relations law means that ballots for action cannot take place more than a month before the action (in this case, the boycott of the tests themselves) begins. If they wanted to take a stand through industrial action, they had to do it in this way. And again, alternative tests can be used for pupils. The fourth says, again, the timing is not right: with an election always on the cards this spring, the unions should have held off for another year to wait and begin negotiations with a new government. Well, this comes down to tactics and it is a view but, after years of making their case, I can see why the NAHT and NUT have said they can&8217;t just put if off until 2011. The fifth says: the action might not be legal. Without wishing to tempt fate, the Government last month did hint at a legal challenge to the dispute, but it has yet to materialise. Mr Balls also suggested to governors that they &8220;should not frustrate another competent person from administering the tests&8221;, and that heads could be instructed to be absent from school &8220;while another person administers the tests&8221;. But separate advice from NEOST, the National Employers&8217; Organisation for School Teachers, argues against sending the head home, and says it is not legally possible for governing bodies &8220;to engage other agencies&8221; to administer the tests. The NEOST letter adds that &8220;it is unlikely that other teachers who are not members of the NAHT or NUT will be prepared to help to make arrangements to run the tests in schools where they are being boycotted&8221;. The sixth argument, reportedly used by Mr Balls in his speech to the NAHT&8217;s annual conference over the weekend, was that Ofsted inspectors could penalise schools taking part in the boycott by marking them down. That looks like bullying to me, and would it not also be a dereliction of duty by Ofsted, whose purpose surely must be to pronounce on the quality of schools for parents, not to punish those taking part in legal industrial action? If the inspectorate really cannot pronounce on school quality without 2010 Sats data, this is not a good reflection on its processes. All this is easy for me to say, no doubt, not having to take a decision at the sharp end. I know that heads will weigh these arguments very carefully in making a judgement on what is in the best long-term interests of their pupils and of the profession.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=302Wed, 05 May 2010 13:11:06 GMT20100505011106Wed, 05 May 2010 13:11:06 GMT20100505011106Wed, 05 May 2010 13:11:06 GMT20100505011106At this point in an election campaign &8211; especially this election campaign &8211; it&8217;s images which tend to stick in the mind. The weekend&8217;s NAHT conference told the story of heads chucked on to the scrapheap because of a single Ofsted report, of heads with only 18 months&8217; life expectancy if they are still in the job at 60, and of children who introduce themselves by SATs level. In a sane world, none of these things are desirable. You look at the blank face of teacher Peter Harvey, cleared of attempting to murder a pupil who goaded him once too often, and discover that &8211; perhaps surprisingly &8211; large numbers of the people who join in on chat sites are broadly sympathetic towards him. The thought crosses your mind that something will surely be done to create a more sensible system, without the waste of talent among heads, teachers and pupils. And then you look at what our leading politicians are currently doing to themselves and realise: they&8217;re hardly going to sympathise with anyone else right now. For politicians, there are currently just two thoughts: winning the election, and the horrors that will be unleashed once it&8217;s won. For the winner, there&8217;s the knowledge that the whole country is likely to loathe them as soon as the first Budget has been presented. For the loser, there&8217;s probably shedloads of blame and a ritual defenestration. So, do they care about making schools more sensible places, and harnessing the talent which is there? At this point in the game, on zilch sleep and a diet of tea and Kit-Kats, highly unlikely that empathy for anyone else will kick in when their own suffering is so extreme. But on Friday, the SATs boycott becomes the first problem in somebody&8217;s in-tray &8211; at which point, resolving it becomes a major priority. So the terrible timing dictated by trade union legislation, which led to an 11th-hour boycott of the SATs, does at least have one upside. But the interesting thing will be if not much happens: that the incoming Secretary of State blusters a bit and kicks the problem into the long grass. In the event of a hung parliament, this scenario strikes me as a distinct possibility. What happens next? Will parents scream and kick, and refuse to apply to schools with no SATs results? (unlikely: they&8217;ll do what they usually do which is look at the Ofsted report, ask other parents, and go and look round). What will happen to the annual league tables? Will Ofsted fail all schools with no SATs data to pore over? Be jolly interesting if they tried. Would they rewrite the inspection process to include teacher assessment instead? Spend more time looking at lessons? Certainly, with an election out of the way the boycott will take on its own momentum as a story, as the incoming government faces its first industrial dispute, and reporters are diverted back to normal duties. It&8217;s going to be an interesting time. Susan Young is an education journalist. Email me at educationhack@googlemail.co.ukhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=301Mon, 03 May 2010 23:32:41 GMT20100503113241Mon, 03 May 2010 23:32:41 GMT20100503113241Mon, 03 May 2010 23:32:41 GMT20100503113241In this podcast NAHT General Secretary Mick Brookes discusses the issues raised at the press conference in Liverpoolhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretarys-roundup-28/Sat, 01 May 2010 10:15:11 GMT20100501101511Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:14:08 GMT20100430051408Sat, 01 May 2010 10:14:57 GMT2010050110145719726Here we are in the run up to the General Election, a case of good news bad news if ever there was one. On the one hand come promises about resources and protecting the front line; on the other hand come merry wheezes and cracking ideas and lots of interference. It is difficult to know whether to wait cheerily for funding and support or brace oneself for a wet sock around the ear. What we can be sure of is that all the parties, in spite of over 25 years of tinkering on a grand scale, are going to claim that they alone can wave the magic wand of standards, fairness and quality. Dare one peep cautiously round the edge of the party manifestos? Having done so can we be permitted the smallest tinge of cynicism and bemusement at what is on offer. First the Labour Party, who, one must not forget, have spent the last 13 years hammering away at the system. It is amazing that they have any ideas left. Their specific school policies include: &183; An expansion of free nursery places for two-year-olds and 15 hours a week of flexible, free nursery education for three and four-year-olds. That must be good even though it&8217;s been a long time a coming. How can it have been overlooked by the other main parties? &183; Every child leaving primary school secure in the basics. Goodness me, what have schools been trying to do all these years? &183; Giving parents the power to bring in new school leadership teams, through mergers and takeovers, with up to 1,000 secondary schools part of an accredited schools group by 2015. Oh dear! Get thee behind me gimmick. &183; Every young person guaranteed education or training until 18, with 75 per cent going on to higher education, or completing an advanced apprenticeship or technician level training, by the age of 30. Under how many guises have we seen this one? &183; Spending increased on frontline Sure Start and free childcare, schools and 16-19 learning. See first and fourth proposals above. Next the Conservative Party who, when last in office brought in the Education Reform Act and invented the rottweiler wing of Ofsted. Raising the entry requirement for taxpayer-funded primary teacher training Requiring new graduates to have at least a 2:2 in their degree to get state-funded training. This will not prevent some teachers entering the profession who should not be there whilst denying entry to some who should be there? Paying the student loan repayments for top maths and science graduates while they remain teachers. So many questions to ask about what is a fundamentally divisive policy. Giving teachers the strongest possible protection from false accusations. Is this not a self-evident requirement ? Hardly something for a manifesto. Strengthening home-school behaviour contracts. It would be easier to support this idea if one knew what it meant. Establishing a simple reading test at the age of six. It would also be easier to support this idea if one knew what it meant. Reforming the National Curriculum. At last, surely not. Overhauling Key Stage 2 tests and league tables. At last, surely not, again. What does &8216;overhauling&8217; mean I wonder. There must be a catch here somewhere. Allowing all state schools to offer high quality international examinations. Such as? Extra funding for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Where and How much ? Parents to be encouraged to set up state-funded &8216;free&8217; schools. One of those priceless proposals which leave you gently shaking your head in disbelief. And the Lib Dems, poised for power!? Providing schools with an extra &163;2.5bn so they can cut class sizes and offer more one-to-one tuition. Nice one if you can get it. Proving a pupil premium to encourage good schools to take more children from deprived backgrounds. Has this perchance not been tried before? How might it work? Scrap tuition fees for full and part-time students. Can&8217;t argue against it if the money is forthcoming from a less worthy alternative. Replace the National Curriculum with the more flexible Minimum Curriculum Entitlement. The idea of a flexible minimum must be covered by a figure of speech. Creating a General Diploma that combines GCSEs, A-levels and vocational qualifications. At long last! As with all General Election promises it is a case of watch this space and don&8217;t hold your breathhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=287Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:40:43 GMT20100428014043Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:40:43 GMT20100428014043Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:54:47 GMT20100428025447One of the most crucial purchasing decisions faced by schools is that of buying or replacing a Learning Platform or 'Virtual Learning Environment'. This issue faces school leaders in all phases, whether in or out of a capital programme. 'Opensourceschools' recently published a posting originally located on Paul Haigh's blog Paul is Senior Assistant Headteacher at Notre Dame High School in Sheffield and an authority on procurement issues; his blog is strongly recommended: http://haighysblog.blogspot.com In this posting Paul discusses the options facing schools contemplating buying or replacing a VLE. The piece outlines the pros and cons of the commercial and open source solutions. In addition to a clear exposition of the issues the posting inspired several interesting and relvant responses. The post and responses can be accessed at http://opensourceschools.org.uk/choosing-vle.htmlcomment-937http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=286Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:13:10 GMT20100427021310Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:13:10 GMT20100427021310Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:13:10 GMT20100427021310Being an education journalist is a terribly Green calling &8211; wait long enough and the stories just recycle themselves. So I wasn&8217;t terribly surprised by this week&8217;s story in the TES about a couple of advanced skills teachers who fear they&8217;re going to lose their jobs as part of a money-saving exercise, and that this may be part of a bigger picture. There were dire warnings about the consequences when local management of schools started (rather before my time, but I heard about it), when grant-maintained schools came in, and when the teachers&8217; pay threshold was introduced. But I was also intrigued by a neighbouring story suggesting that teachers over 50 were being badly treated by young heads. A survey, conducted last month by NASUWT, found more that a third of teachers over 50 had been patronised or condescended to, a third had heard negative comments about their professional skills, and a third said their views were deliberately disparaged. Presumably there are a few oldsters who are guilty as charged &8211; but all of them won&8217;t be. A few may have attracted the wrong kind of attention because of their position on the pay scale. And some people do love to moan. But it&8217;s a shocking survey even so, not least because of the waste of talent and misery such attitudes can engender, even if they&8217;re not so common as this survey would suggest. Some of the most illuminating time I&8217;ve spent in the classroom as a journalist was in a school where a couple of the permanent cover teachers are older (much older, actually) and part time. I swear to you that one of these teachers had eyes in the back of his head, and a sixth sense which sprang into life as soon as childish fidgets went over the line into something else. Not only was this teacher one of the best exemplars of managing a class that I&8217;ve ever seen anywhere, but he also taught a damn good lesson &8211; you know, pace, rigour, vigour, all those buzz-words. And it looked fun. The kids were engaged&8230; and didn&8217;t dare take their eyes off him, either. What&8217;s interesting about this school is that this pair of teachers were actively valued for their contribution&8211; and much of that is because of their years of experience. You could see that they were just as much at the heart of things as the younger ones, and everyone benefited &8211; not least the kids, who regarded the two oldsters as characters. Which they certainly were, but in a good way. The interesting thing is that under a previous head these teachers clearly had been sidelined, although in different ways: grudging respect and mutual avoidance seemed to be the better of the available options. From all accounts, it took the arrival of a new head to evaluate clearly the strengths of the staff and then work to them. Moreover, as staff report it, the atmosphere became different for everyone: a real team where everyone was valued. And that&8217;s one of the important things about it. Sideline or belittle a couple of members of staff whose faces don&8217;t fit, and (unless everyone agrees that they&8217;re underperforming) you create an atmosphere of fear rather than that go-ahead team. I really hope the survey overstates the problem. And I really hope that if budget cuts are on their way, history isn&8217;t inevitably going to repeat itself. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=284Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:04:34 GMT20100426040434Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:04:34 GMT20100426040434Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:04:34 GMT20100426040434If this academic year isn&8217;t an annus horribilis for school leaders, then frankly I don&8217;t know what is. First it was the snow, the school closures and all the sniping about school closures (and in some cases, school openings) from people with an entirely different set of priorities and pressures. For primary heads, there&8217;s the fun and games of a new primary curriculum &8211; or not, since the Rose reforms were snatched away in the final &8220;wash up&8221; as politicians got ready to take to the streets on the four-yearly baby-kissing frenzy. Ed Balls, answering questions on the TES forum this week, cheerily advised schools to just get on with the new curriculum &8211; not, I suspect, his first choice of sentiment in most circumstances. But then, he&8217;s still hoping to get back in and have another try with the legislation. And, presumably, he&8217;ll be miffed if schools take his advice to do what they think is right in another way, by following the unions&8217; ballot and boycotting the SATs. Now there&8217;s the joy of the volcano with staff and pupils stranded all over the world. Again, the rest of the working population has a bit of trouble understanding why this particularly affects schools. And sometimes so do school staff &8211; see the raging arguments over whether Rarely Cover should be invoked or ditched in the current circumstances, again on the TES website. And then there&8217;s the interesting question of what&8217;s going to happen under a new Government. Mr Gove&8217;s rewritten history syllabus is beginning to look a less likely option &8211; so what might happen with a Lib/Lab pact? (I&8217;m coming over all 1970s just typing that). The main points of the Lib Dems education policy are joyously simple: get shot of university tuition fees, give more money to schools in the most challenged areas, bringing down class sizes, and prevent politicians from meddling in schools. Here&8217;s that last bit as a direct quote: &8220;We will slim down the curriculum and pass an Education Freedom Act banning politicians from getting involved in the day to day running of schools.&8221; Quite how that would square with the Labour tendency over the last 13 to legislate and interfere, I&8217;m not quite sure. But what a thought. Talking about politicians interfering in schools, I&8217;m now beginning to believe that they should be banned from canvassing anywhere that most of the punters are too young to vote. My two local sixth form colleges have both had visits within the past few days. At the first, the students had to be shipped in specially to meet Gordon Brown as they were still on holiday. What&8217;s more, students from the other city college were invited as well (or at least those studying politics were). Days later, the second college played host to David Cameron, in tie and shirt sleeves. But it really is taking advantage, isn&8217;t it? In a sixth-form college, in early May, only the A2 kids with birthdays between September and now are going to be eligible to vote &8211; charitably, something under half of them. And the leaders take advantage of their fresh faces whilst using their youth to bat away any tricky questions. One kid, having seen Mr Brown &8220;sucking up&8221; (my polite interpretation of what he actually said) to Mr Clegg in the debate, asked a question of the PM and said that he&8217;d &8220;intimated&8221; that he&8217;d be prepared to do a deal with the Lib Dems. He was swatted aside in a way that an adult would not have taken without an argument: is that very fair? And my final question: have the politicians signed up for vetting and barring? After all, they&8217;re meeting young people regularly &8211; and it was their idea in the first place. Thought not. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=283Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:15:43 GMT20100420121543Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:15:43 GMT20100420121543Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:15:43 GMT20100420121543Ten days into the election campaign, and the economy has loomed large. All three main parties acknowledge the need to find a way of reducing the deficit, and all three say at least part of this trick can be effected through that magical phrase: &8220;efficiency savings&8221;. Assorted commentators have rightly pointed out that these much-used words can serve as camouflage: a way of avoiding spelling out to the electorate exactly where cuts to public services will fall. To be blunt, anyone can call for spending to be more &8220;efficient&8221;. But how is this to happen, and can savings simply be found by reducing wasteful activity, however that is defined? My experience in covering the fall-out to a previous round of &8220;efficiency savings&8221;, as they affected one organisation, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, suggest reasons for scepticism about what can be achieved in this field. In 2006, I wrote about how the QCA was under pressure from the Government to cut costs. Ruth Kelly, education secretary at the time, wrote to the authority asking it to cut &163;20 million from its &163;150 million annual overheads by 2007-8, following up on an efficiency drive across Whitehall overseen for Gordon Brown by Sir Peter Gershon, who is now advising the Conservatives on efficiency saving. I reported at the time that staff numbers at the QCA could be cut from 667 to 400. A separate review led to the recommendation that the QCA relocate from its offices near the Ritz hotel in London&8217;s Mayfair to the less glamorous, and less expensive, location of Coventry, a move which was completed this year. So were these targets achieved? Well, it became clear over the years that the anticipated budget cuts were proving hard to drive through. Published QCA accounts show its net spending actually continued to rise in the years 2005-8, from &163;133 million in 2004-5 to &163;170 million in 2007-8. Only in 2008-9 did it start to fall, dropping to &163;147 million. Even this figure was unusually low because of a &163;19.5 million payment the authority received from the American test marking contractor ETS, which had to pay it after its contract was terminated following the 2008 Sats marking fiasco. In 2004-5, the total number of permanent employees at the QCA was 512, with temporary staff numbering 27. By 2009, its permanent employee numbers were up to 572, while there were a further 151 temporary workers. One could argue that the QCA is a special case and that it had an extraordinary amount of work to contend with over this period, from the introduction of diplomas to new A-levels introduced in 2008, new GCSEs in 2009, the new secondary curriculum and planning for the Rose review of primary education. In 2008-9, it found itself stretched having to deal with the test marking crisis, although many will see that, of course, as a fiasco at least partly of its own making. And its costs in recent years have been added to by one-off redundancy overheads paid to people who left the organisation as it moved headquarters. These outgoings will reduce if the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, as it is now called, survives after the general election. At least one source has also whispered to me that the organisation was simply not bold enough in trying to cut its costs. The Conservatives would no doubt make this accusation of Gordon Brown. However, this one experience underlines to me how difficult savings can be to drive through. If a government still wants, for example, changes to qualifications, someone has to oversee them. If it wants a curriculum review, there will be cost implications. National testing, which has traditionally occupied a large proportion of the QCA&8217;s spending, also costs money, of course. The Conservatives, who remain in pole position to be the next government, are not keen on the QCDA. Transferring its activities to the Department for Children, Schools and Families or a successor department could avoid the duplication of work which has notoriously seen DCSF officials &8220;shadowing&8221; their counterparts at the QCA, essentially doing similar tasks. But true reductions in overheads are unlikely to be achieved while the march of change in qualifications, the curriculum and other aspects of education, continues. Ensuring money remains at the frontline of education &8211; in the classroom &8211; by cutting the &8220;back-office&8221; functions provided by quangos may not be as simple as it sounds. POSTSCRIPT: As I was writing this blog, the Conservative manifesto announced that the party would &8220;keep key stage 2 tests and league tables&8221;. The first part of that pledge appears to be a reversal of the shadow schools secretary Michael Gove&8217;s suggestion, in an interview on BBC 1&8217;s Andrew Marr programme last summer, that tests at the start of secondary school could replace those at the end of primary. I intend to blog some more about this, so watch this space.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=281Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:37:52 GMT20100416043752Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:37:52 GMT20100416043752Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:37:52 GMT20100416043752There was a really interesting bit of research published last week which purportedly showed that the amount of time parents spend with their kids had risen significantly since the 1970s. There are some real oddities about it (how did mothers then manage to spend an average of only 8 to 21 minutes a day with their children? It takes at least that long to feed the little blighters three times a day) but I was particularly struck by the comments of the researcher. She thought many parents now actively take their children to museums and so on to help them get into a good university. I think that might possibly be true, but is only a small part of the picture. As a child of the 1970s myself, I&8217;ve got the distinct memory of being told lots of stuff about the way the world worked by the adults around me. Parents would chat to you, parents of friends would chat to you, and the random adults you saw every day would chat to you. They&8217;d tell you about the war, the unions, why the three-day-week was happening, and so on. You&8217;d sit round the table eating, and listen to the adult chat. It might have been boring, but you weren&8217;t allowed to say so. There were only three telly channels, so everyone &8211; including the kids &8211; would watch the news. I spent some years in a confused haze thinking Mr Wilson and Mr Heath took it in turns to be Prime Minister and shout at each other. To put it another way, kids knew about grown-up stuff &8211; not private stuff, like sex or scandal &8211; but about recent history, and politics and so on. And it strikes me that as a society we&8217;re now very successfully not doing that for our own offspring&8211; which is possibly what those parents are now trying to do more consciously. I don&8217;t quite understand why, but we&8217;re positively ghettoising younger people into their own clans with their own interests. From the age of 10 or younger, kids seem to live in a world of teen pop stars (ever heard of Justin Bieber?) and quasi-reality shows. The popularity of peer learning can often reinforce the idea that adults are irrelevant, old, or paedophiles. Teenagers are expected to do their own thing and be uninterested in what goes on around them. My next-door neighbour comes from Iran and says teenagers there are not expected to behave badly or differently in the way they are in the West. Her own son, brought up with an extended family of aunties and cousins, has grown into a young man, apparently without going through the regular teenage stuff. Children can spend most of their waking lives most weeks with kids their own age, going from schools to afterschool clubs and only finally home to spend a bit of one-on-one time with an adult. Increasingly, safeguarding means out-of-school activities are also becoming limited to spending time with other children. My kids go climbing at a local centre each Saturday morning. The centre currently has a discussion document considering its future, which suggests that they may be pushed to stop adults climbing at the same time as children and young people. Perhaps I&8217;m na&239;ve, but I haven&8217;t heard of lots of cases of paedophiles trying to chat up kids in a smallish and very public space. On the other hand, kids mixing with and learning from older and more experienced adults is the way humans have learned and evolved. One famous sociologist, Norman Dennis, has suggested that most boys were taught how to be responsible men by older colleagues when they started work as teenagers. Children are getting used to the idea that adults are not to be trusted, though, and the power it gives them. I&8217;ve recently heard of a case where a primary-aged child who was violent in class running out of the school and threatening teachers (within hearing of the other children) that any attempt at restraint would result in a call to &8220;the child protection agency&8221;. Interesting that Ed Balls launched new guidance on teachers&8217; use of restraint at the Nasuwt conference. But it strikes me that it may be time to think a bit more widely about the way we seem to be isolating children and young people as a result of other social policies, and consider the wider effects of that &8211; as I suspect those museum-visiting parents are doing. It&8217;s something of which schools are clearly aware. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.com.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=280Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:35:45 GMT20100413033545Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:35:45 GMT20100413033545Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:35:45 GMT20100413033545Previous posts addressed issues related to e-safety. E-safety is, of course, one of the components of &8216;digital literacy&8217;. This is an emerging and developing concept. &8216;Futurelab&8217; has produced an informative publication that summarises developments in this field to date. The executive summary is reproduced to give a flavour of why this is a useful planning resource. Executive summary This handbook is aimed at educational practitioners and school leaders in both primary and secondary schools who are interested in creative and critical uses of technology in the classroom. Although there is increasing policy and research attention paid to issues related to digital literacy, there is still relatively little information about how to put this into practice in the classroom. There is even less guidance on how teachers might combine a commitment to digital literacy with the needs of their own subject teaching. How can digital literacy be fostered, for example, in a maths or science lesson? This handbook aims to introduce educational practitioners to the concepts and contexts of digital literacy and to support them in developing their own practice aimed at fostering the components of digital literacy in classroom subject teaching and in real school settings. The handbook is not a comprehensive &8216;how to&8217; guide; it provides instead a rationale, some possible strategies and some practical examples for schools to draw on. The first section details the reasons teachers should be interested in digital literacy and how it is relevant to their subject teaching. It looks at the increasing role of technology in young people&8217;s cultures, the support they may need to benefit from their engagement with technology and the way in which digital literacy can contribute to the development of subject knowledge. The second section discusses digital literacy in practice and moves through a number of components of digital literacy discussing how these might be fostered in the classroom. The handbook ends by looking at issues related to continuing professional development for teachers and the ways in which digital literacy can support whole-school initiatives. It is teachers that are expert in their own school context, in the needs of their students and in the pedagogical techniques required to support learning. This handbook has been informed by the work of fourteen teachers who are interested in how technology is used in classroom teaching and who took part in Futurelab&8217;s digital participation project. Rather than being prescriptive, it aims to provide information which will help teachers to make the best use of their own expertise to support students&8217; emerging digital literacy.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=279Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:03:28 GMT20100409030328Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:03:28 GMT20100409030328Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:03:28 GMT20100409030328E-Safety Policies NAHT&8217;s ICT committee has reviewed a number of policies produced by LAs. Most are similar and reflect generic advice issued by Becta and other organisations and the &8216;unique selling point&8217; relates to reader friendliness. Documentation produced by Leeds and Kent met this criterion. Both are included in the material found at the following link: http://www.nextgenerationlearning.org.uk/safeguarding-learners/Case-studies/Acceptable-use-policies/ This is a summary of good practice produced under the auspices of Next Generation Learning. Much of the content relates to Acceptable Usage Policies. . In a survey carried out in 2008 Becta found that only 55% of teachers could categorically state that their school had an AUP in place. Judicious utilisation of this resource should ensure that school are fully compliant with requirements in this area. Schools that have policies up and running may find the content to be of use was part of the policy review cycle.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=278Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:31:14 GMT20100409023114Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:31:14 GMT20100409023114Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:31:29 GMT20100409023129Online Safety and Protection CEOPS has produced what appears to be a very useful resource for anyone involved with or concerned about online safety and protection for young people. It was highly recommended in a recent blog on &8216;Edugeek&8217; and can be found at: http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/ The site has sections aimed at different age groups and also for parents and carers and teachers. This could be of particular use for primary schools as they prepare for the requirement to teach pupils about internet safety from 2011 onwards. (summary at http://www.ictforeducation.co.uk/English__Primary_net_safety.html)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=277Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:14:11 GMT20100409021411Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:14:11 GMT20100409021411Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:14:23 GMT20100409021423In the wake of the 2010 Budget there was a Gadarenian rush of government departments announcing the extent of proposed efficiency savings, or, in Treasury parlance, &8216;operation costs&8217;. The overall scale of savings is &163;11.1bn with the DCFS weighing in with &163;1.1bn. Around half of this amount will accrue from: &8216;a greater use of collaborative procurement in schools&8217;. The DCSF has instigated measures to improve the capacity of school leaders in this area, a point that picks up on the theme of the previous blog. However, what would a straw poll carried amongst school leaders reveal about awareness of initiatives such as &8216;Open&8217;, &8216;BuyWays&8217; or the &8216;Educational Procurement Centre&8217;? This is not intended as a cynical point but rather to highlight three key problems. The first is that there is an awareness gap. The hurly-burly and ever-changing priorities facing schools serve often to conceal wood from trees. As with some of Becta&8217;s work, school leaders are simply not aware of what is out there. The second point is that school leaders, if they wish to become proficient in this aspect of management, are obliged to engage in a process of self-improvement. This is an indication of deficiencies in leadership training. Maybe the answer lies in the very phrase &8216;leadership training&8217;. It can be argued that leadership has been emphasised at the expense of management and the balance needs to be readdressed. Lastly, even if school leaders assiduously take advantage of what is in place, the parameters have shifted, the key word being &8216;collaborative&8217;. Becta&8217;s equivalent term is &8216;aggregation&8217;. How will structures emerge to enable schools to act in this way? It appears that they can either wait, Godot like, for the LA to come galloping over the horizon or, back to Samuel Smiles, seize the initiative themselves. Perhaps there is a role for an organisation such as NAHT to help its members organise in this way. For all the current rhetoric about &8216;protecting front line services&8217; the reduction in &8216;operation costs&8217; begs the question of where the cutback will actually manifest itself. The implication is surely that as a consequence of a reduction in funding schools will be obliged to collaborate. Is this what &8216;making more from less&8217; really means? LINKS: http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/epc/http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=276Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:11:01 GMT20100409021101Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:11:01 GMT20100409021101Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:13:07 GMT20100409021307ICT procurement is often regarded as being a thorny and contentious issue in schools. Without wishing to trivialise or explain this away it is interesting to locate this in a wider context, one provided in the thoughts of Edward Leigh, the outgoing chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. In an open letter written to his successor Leigh reflects on poor procurement practice across the public sector. It is a case of not learning from history as the same mistakes are constantly repeated: &8216;Time after time Departments have wasted millions on IT systems that fail to live up to promise, come in late and cost hugely more than forecast.&8217; Are that lessons that schools can learn from Leigh&8217;s gloomy analysis? He suggests that procurement ought to be a straightforward process resting on three common principles: &216; Senior level engagement; &216; Acting as an &8216;intelligent client&8217; &216; Ensuring that the means (and will?) exists to realise the benefits from the project. Maybe Leigh&8217;s words can be the building blocks for a framework for the effective training of school leaders in what will become an increasingly important area come the post election age of austerity. The case for this is strengthened when the notion of being an &8216;intelligent client&8217; is examined. Leigh offers a definition of what it is not: &8216;poorly defined requirements and a lack of capacity to engage effectively with suppliers&8217;. Sounds familiar?http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=275Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:09:40 GMT20100409020940Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:09:40 GMT20100409020940Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:10:09 GMT20100409021009There won&8217;t be much mourning among heads &8211; or teachers, or home-educating parents &8211; if the current education bill going through the Commons has to be eviscerated because of the election campaign. It&8217;s a bigger mystery why the Government has been staunchly persisting with bits of new legislation which just about every head in the land and many others beside had loudly complained was unworkable. And good on the opposition parties for listening, and working to lose the problematic bits &8211; pupil and parent guarantees, licence to teach, and the register of home educating parents. I watched some of the debates live, and was horrified by the tiny numbers of MPs taking part. The pupil and parent guarantees were just plain silly, opening the door to all sorts of malicious or (as the lawyers put it), vexatious action against schools by disgruntled families, perhaps goaded by ambulance-chasing lawyers. Apart from anything else, the current maths and literacy tutoring arrangements for pupils who have fallen behind appear to be both popular and working rather well &8211; why add yet another (unworkable) layer of action before the previous one has been properly evaluated? Licence to teach, equally, just seemed like yet another stick to beat teachers with. There is a competency process for teachers who are incompetent or sub-standard, which ought to do the job perfectly well. The problem is that actually, it doesn&8217;t work all that well. Heads complain about endless procedure, foot-dragging by the local authority and deals often cut with the teacher&8217;s union which means that all too often they end up failing in another school&8217;s classrooms, where the procedure starts all over again. Heads of my acquaintance haven&8217;t been so impressed with how the GTC handles these cases either. And as for the punitive measures against home-educating families &8211; well, if local authorities can&8217;t work out which kids are not in their schools after years of &8220;joined up&8221; services then it&8217;s a pretty poor lookout. Khyra Ishaq, the Birmingham seven-year-old who starved to death, was removed from school by her parents but not only had she been there to start with (where teachers reported their concerns to social services) but social services also knew perfectly well about the family and had visited. Citing that case as a reason to start regulating home education seems a bit opportunistic. For a country which has money troubles, ditching these over-the top measures is just common-sense. There would be other, much cheaper and more direct, ways of achieving these stated measures to improve education. Thinking of offering parent guarantees to stop pupils falling behind? Why, when the tutoring looks good and can be used as necessary? Want to ensure teachers are up to date and good at their jobs? Give each one an entitlement to a bit of CPD outside the Inset days, and encourage them to do it &8211; and that includes supply staff. You might need to spend a little bit on either providing cover at work or compensating supply staff for loss of earnings. Oh, and it might be an idea to beef up heads&8217; powers over competency procedures, looking again at the GTC system if necessary. Worried about home-educating parents? Then encourage a bit of flexi-schooling, offering such kids a morning or so in school each week for particular subjects, or provide a resource room in the children&8217;s centre for such families to use. Much cheaper, much less bureaucratic, more carrot and less stick. Perhaps, in the new financial climate of the next Parliament, school leaders can hope that cheaper and simpler options will be preferred. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=272Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:13:38 GMT20100406121338Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:13:38 GMT20100406121338Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:13:38 GMT20100406121338With attention now being heaped on the possible boycott of KS2 English and maths Sats this year, it is a little-mentioned fact that nearly 30,000 11-year-olds are to take a national test this May, whatever happens. These are the children whose schools have been selected to form part of a national sample through which the overall performance of England&8217;s primaries in science can be monitored. The principle of sample tests is widely regarded as a good one, as, in an ideal world, they produce richer national data than is possible under Sats but without some of the downsides, because they are not &8220;high stakes&8221; for either the school or the pupil. However, the background to this year&8217;s introduction of a sample test in science suggests this is a rushed job, which will make comparisons with pupils&8217; performances in previous years&8217; Sats &8211; the main function the media will be looking for this test to perform - more difficult. Key stage 2 science tests were abolished, for the vast majority of year six pupils, last year after the Government&8217;s &8220;expert group&8221; on assessment recommended that they be replaced by teacher assessment as the main measure of pupils&8217; achievements in the subject, and how well their schools had taught it. The group had expressed concern that some schools were reducing the amount of practical, investigative work their pupils carried out because of the demands of preparing for the &8220;paper and pencil&8221; tests. It also found that the assessment of the science curriculum at key stage two was &8220;not best done by an externally set and marked written test&8221;. However, the Government&8217;s view would appear to be that teacher assessment alone will not be good enough when it comes to that other traditional function of testing: monitoring the nation&8217;s education standards. This is where the sampling comes in. Instead of the whole cohort sitting the tests, a small proportion of pupils, 5 per cent, or 27,000 pupils in 750 schools, will do so, with the proportions achieving level four and five reported back as a measure of overall teaching standards. The schools to take part have already been notified. While it may sound relatively simple to assess performance levels this year against those of last, when almost all pupils took the test, in fact the change raises some serious questions about the comparability of the figures. The biggest, once not-insuperable technical issues such as deciding which pupils are selected to take this year&8217;s tests as a representative sample as the nation as a whole, will be the question of motivation. For how can the results of last year&8217;s tests, which were &8220;high stakes&8221; for schools, be compared to this year&8217;s, where results will not be published at school level? Indeed, as one leading science source told me, the great thing about this year&8217;s tests in science will be that, without league tables hanging on them, schools will be free to put these assessments in their proper place, without weeks and weeks of preparation. But this would be expected to have a knock-on effect on performance. An assessment expert source said: &8220;The number of marks people get in a low-stakes context tends to be lower. So the results that might emerge at the end might make it look as if standards have gone down, because you are changing the nature of the test, in that they are not being used for league tables any more.&8221; If results fall, then, it will not be clear if this is because teaching and learning standards have fallen or because the nature of the use to which the test data are being put has changed. Interestingly, a paper on this year&8217;s tests produced by the QCDA (http://bit.ly/a9LIOf) appears to acknowledge the lack of comparability, admitting that schools may change their preparation this year because the tests are being used for &8220;monitoring national standards&8221;, rather than school accountability. In reality, this year&8217;s national monitoring exercise in science is something of a compromise, or bodge job to put it less charitably. Well-established systems sampling the performance of whole countries, such as those used for the international TIMSS tests, use a different model. These involve different pupils being assessed on different parts of each tested subject&8217;s curriculum, allowing pretty much the whole curriculum in those subjects to be tested overall, which is not possible with Sats. Also, certain test questions are retained from year to year, allowing direct comparisons to be made between answers in different years. This, again, is not possible with the current Sats. In theory, sample tests could also allow for experimental work to be assessed nationally. These types of sample tests allow much richer, arguably more reliable, information to be generated than has ever been possible through our national curriculum tests. But there was not time to develop such a structure for science for this year, so, while welcome, it will begin in 2012 at the earliest and this year&8217;s tests are on exactly the same model as those of previous years, only with fewer pupils taking them. Until 2012, then, anyone seeking to read very much into national science test results would be foolish. In passing, one could also note that the QCDA&8217;s statement on the change to teacher assessment in science says that, in science, teacher assessment &8220;takes greater account of pupils&8217; practical grasp of the subject than tests and is based on their attainment throughout the academic year across the full range of the programme of study&8221;. A similar point could be made, at least for the second part of this sentence, by anyone arguing for teacher assessment in English and maths. back to texthttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=271Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:17:19 GMT20100331121719Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:17:19 GMT20100331121719Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:17:19 GMT20100331121719I got thinking about school policies this week, for unashamedly personal reasons. Middle daughter will start secondary school in September, and I&8217;d dutifully sent back the enrolment form giving contact and medical details, and so on. The uniform one I parked for a week, on the grounds that I was going to check what outgrown clothes we already had lurking in her elder sister&8217;s cupboard. This is probably why I managed to miss the other bit of paper, about the school&8217;s acceptable use of the internet policy, until after the date they&8217;d wanted it signed and returned by me and my 11-year-old. What happened next? I made that Homer Simpson noise (&8220;D&8217;oh!&8221;) when I realised this particular bit of paper was overdue for action. I read it through (something like a side and a half of closely-typed A4 of internet rules aimed at staff and kids &8211; so only about half of it was applicable). I signed it and stuck it in front of my daughter, racing to complete her year 6 project. Sign here, I said. What is it? she asked. It&8217;s you promising to be good on the internet when you start your new school, I said. No going onto bad websites or giving out personal details to anyone you meet online. Oh, she replied, absentmindedly, and signed it. My point in telling this dull story is: what is the point of sending out an almost unintelligible (for an 11-year-old) policy to be signed some six months before it&8217;s needed? She won&8217;t remember it now, let alone in September. There can be only one possible reason, which is that the policy has to be signed in order for the school to cover its back on policies. Look, Ofsted, job done. I can hope and believe (for I know it&8217;s a good school) that they will reinforce the rules, in plain English, when the new Year 7s log on to the system for the first time, with frequent reminders. Ofsted is clearly very keen on schools having a policy for everything, and everything in order: the Sunday Telegraph had a large story this week on independent schools falling foul of the inspectors because they had lots of separate policies rather than drawing them all together. I also remember my successor as chair of a rather old-fashioned parent-run playgroup tearing her hair out because the new Ofsted guidelines meant it needed to have boxfiles full of policies on absolutely everything. A quarter-century of basic rules and common-sense, previously adequate for little group of kids and adults in a small, safe space, was no longer deemed acceptable. And then there is the tragic case of 11-year-old Samuel Linton after an asthma attack at school. With five staff now suspended while an inquiry takes place, I don&8217;t really want to comment on this one &8211; but I can tell you that the jury found the school had &8220;failed to implement an in-school asthma policy, failed to train staff in dealing with asthma, failed to keep a health care plan, failed to share information with staff about Sam's asthma attacks and failed to monitor Sam's condition on the day of his death.&8221; The family&8217;s lawyer, Jonathan Betts, summed up the rather more intemperate comments of many people when he said: &8220;The inquest has shown the lack of training, lack of communication between staff, lack of record keeping and a complete absence of common sense in the event of a child suffering from an asthma attack.&8221; It&8217;s far too easy to sling criticism round in this case, without really knowing all the facts, but it does make me wonder: do schools really need more policies? Or, perhaps, a different approach altogether? And is a different approach possible without completely rewriting the inspection rules? Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.com.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=270Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:25:27 GMT20100329042527Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:25:27 GMT20100329042527Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:25:27 GMT20100329042527It all began with le weekend. This borrowing from English was generally acceptable because it actually described an English concept. It moved on to (slightly different) le dancing (dance hall) le footing (running) and le parking (car park) then with American films and early computer speak, the language went mad and soon there was attempted legislation to ban franglais - at least from places where government and its agencies had the power, generally in advertisements. The world has now gone madder still. Computer speak is out of control and text messaging, ipod this and facebook that, English itself is under threat. Already there is a generation gulf, to use a phrase, in the area of controversy. Two things are happening. First Councils are feeling the need to ban certain jargon words, whilst at the same time, those very Councils are creating and renaming job titles to spectacular effect. Some of them posted up on websites almost defy the imagination: a bin man: &8216;waste management and disposal technician,&8217; a librarian: information adviser, an accountant: &8216;worldwide marine asset financial analyst,&8217; receptionist: &8216;welcoming agent and telephone intermediary'. Student jobs: counting cars passing through a set of traffic lights: &8216;surveyorship enumerator,&8217; delivering faxes around a large office:&8217; internal communications communicator, &8217; taking school groups round a museum: &8216;coordinator of interpretive teaching,&8217; lifeguard: &8216;wet leisure assistant If you don&8217;t take the bull by the horns then the writing is on the wall because the Tour de France is a totally different ball game. If the British boy wants to win a medal he will have to put his skates on and swim like a greyhound. We must get back to a level playing field by not moving the goal posts. Intro from BBC News The LGA lists includes suggested translations of some terms &8216;measuring&8217; for &8216;benchmarking,&8217; &8216;idea for &8216;seedbed,&8217; &8216;delay&8217; for &8216;slippage,&8217; and &8216;buy&8217; for &8216;procure.&8217; Pointless: cascading, core message, direction of travel, empowerment, enabler, evidence base, facilitate, fast track, functionality, funding streams, horizon scanning, incentivising, innovative capacity, joined up, level playing field, mainstreaming, meaningful dialogue, multi-agency, network model, outsourced, overarching, performance network, prioritization, proactive, proportionality, robust, scaled back, , service users, single point of contact, social exclusion, strategic priorities, thinking outside the box, toolkit, top-down, Easily slipped into: across-the-piece, can do culture, Meaningless: blue sky thinking, conditionality, consensual, coterminosity, double devolution, holistic governance, peer challenge, predictors of Beaconicity, rebaselining, stuational slippage, sustainable, systematic, worklessness. Education is not free of this guff. How many efforts have been made to replace the word &8216;teacher&8217; or &8216;head teacher&8217; for manager/leader In my time at NAHT we came perilously closehttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=268Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:15:39 GMT20100322091539Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:15:39 GMT20100322091539Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:15:39 GMT20100322091539You know that phrase about there being an elephant in the room, which everyone is politely ignoring? Well, I can see one now, and it&8217;s not even pink and floating. Rather it&8217;s grey, very large, and faintly terrifying. My particular elephant is financial, and more particularly what any incoming government is going to have to do to balance the country&8217;s books this summer. I know there have been various political promises that education and health will be ring-fenced against cuts &8211; but I&8217;m beginning to wonder how long such promises will last. You see, I&8217;ve been tempted into the pages of the Financial Times where there are people who actually understand money (my brain exploded the night Robert Peston explained what all the noughts meant on the amount of money the government had spent on bailing out the banks for a second time) and it&8217;s getting harder to see that education can possibly remain immune. The FT has a columnist called Martin Wolf, who says the cuts which will need to be made over the next two parliaments are equivalent to a sixth of total spending, two thirds of the public sector pay bill and all the spending on the English NHS. Last week, he quoted something called the Green Budget, from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, saying &8220;the forecast level of public sector debt in the UK increases faster over the period from 2007 to 2014 than in any other G20 country, with the exception ... of Japan. As a result, while the UK had the tenth-highest debt out of 19 countries in the G20 in 2007, by 2014 it is forecast to have the fourth highest behind Japan, Italy and the US.&8221; Wolf&8217;s understanding of this? &8220;Far worse, I fear the government denies the task ahead. Ed Balls, secretary of state for schools and Mr Brown&8217;s closest associate, told another newspaper that he has been asked to make savings of &163;500m by 2013. That is 0.3 per cent of this year&8217;s public sector net borrowing and 1 per cent of the spending of his own department, itself the third- largest spender after social security and health. This is simply risible.&8221; The FT has also quoted IFS economist Rowena Crawford, who reckons that with the promised ring-fencing of education and health, the cut then required for the Ministry of Defence would be equivalent to no longer having an army. According to Libby Purves in the Times this morning, every public sector worker in Ireland has taken a pay cut of 13 per cent in the past year, in order to help nurse the Celtic tiger back to recovery. Even frozen budgets are going to have huge impacts on schools and education, but it&8217;s hard to believe on this kind of evidence that whoever wins the election is going to be able to keep a promise on maintaining spending for very long. I&8217;m starting to wonder whether the politicians have any better grasp of all this than I do. Saturday&8217;s suggestion that free school meals for all might be included in Labour&8217;s manifesto had me snorting tea all over the Guardian. I can see this might be a fantastic aspiration, possibly, for improving the diets of lots of children &8211; in good economic times. In our current mess &8211; well, at best it would risk turning off a lot of voters without children who tend to think that feeding children is generally their parents&8217; responsibility &8211; which further risks such voters chafing against the wholesale protection of education. What may save heads from having to make painful budgetary cuts a year or so from now could be the rising rolls which our same politicians and officials failed to predict. But the net effect is likely still to be spreading the cash more thinly. It strikes me that it would be highly sensible for those at the frontline of education (and that means you) to think through what is really essential and what may not be. And that means thinking about everything &8211; the extended schools&8217; agenda, the development of the childrens&8217; workforce, SATs, quangoes, licence to teach, upgrading technology, new buildings. How things are done may perhaps be up for consideration as well. Is the cost of vetting and barring going to slash numbers of parent helpers and volunteers in schools? Are current interpretations of health and safety rules overly prohibitive? What about &8220;rarely cover&8221;? What about PPA? What you&8217;d cut and what the politicians would cut may well be separate things: but it may be vital for the profession to decide on its own essentials and then present a good public case if ever that elephant starts rampaging round the room. Which I suspect it may, sometime after May. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=269Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:23:59 GMT20100322012359Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:23:59 GMT20100322012359Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:23:59 GMT20100322012359How serious is the Government about reducing teaching to the test? Not nearly serious enough, I would say. The ministerial letter to schools last week (http://twurl.nl/qoez76) on the subject was significant, and not only for its timing in trying to persuade heads not to boycott Sats. But simply writing to heads and suggesting they don&8217;t go in for pre-Sats cramming is a tokenistic approach to an extremely deep-rooted problem. First, though, the significance. The letter, signed by Ed Balls, the schools secretary, and his deputy, Vernon Coaker, said: &8220;There is good evidence to suggest that &8216;teaching to the test&8217; can turn children off learning, and can reduce what, and how, they learn about a subject. In short, we feel the approach is counter-productive and one to be discouraged.&8221; This is vital because, as I wrote two years ago, (http://bit.ly/aSMFrI) the Government has faced both ways on teaching to the test for a long time. Although ministers would not, of course, endorse it in speeches, in other ways it has been encouraged. I will say more about this below. Those who defend test-based accountability around the world seem to rely on two arguments against the many who point to downsides such as narrowing the curriculum and the educational undesirability of months of test prep. The first is to argue that it need not happen/does not happen, and/or if it is happening, it is not the fault of the test-based accountability structure, but of the teachers who go in for it. The second is to say that while it does happen, there is no problem with extensive test preparation. Since the tests are measuring aspects of education that are felt important to measure, a pupil who is subject to extensive test preparation is therefore a well-educated pupil. Teaching to the test is fine, then, so long as it is a good test. For years, the Government was vague on this issue. Its most common position was to assert that teaching to the test was not really a problem/not happening (ie the first defence), while in practice encouraging it because this is how its policies work: it lays down a statistically-based objective, then monitors and enforces vigorously all policies which might contribute to the hitting of that objective, including, in this case, extensive test preparation. The letter now rules out the second defence and is therefore an important statement from ministers. But it does beg the question: if teaching to the test is really now seen to be wrong, why is it still being encouraged in other ways? For example, the letter comes with attached guidance to heads on how to avoid teaching to the test. At the end of this document is a list of links to supporting resources, including the Government&8217;s &8220;primary framework for teaching literacy and mathematics&8221;. Under &8220;year six units&8221; for literacy, the framework suggests an eight-week programme of revision for the tests, beginning with pupils practising questions on fiction and non-fiction texts. That looks like eight weeks of teaching to the test to me. If it is educationally undesirable, why go in for anything more than a few days, say, of pre-test familiarisation? And if eight weeks does not count as over-lengthy teaching to the test in the Government&8217;s eyes, why put this guidance out now, less than eight teaching weeks before the tests themselves? In the past, the national strategies have advised that test questions be included in lessons for months in the run-up to the tests. And if extensive teaching to the test really is educationally problematic, as I think it is, then the position in secondary schools, where teaching to &8220;assessment objectives&8221; has been part of the landscape for years, also needs considering by ministers. There is no evidence that that is being looked at. If the Government were really serious about this subject, it would be asking many more questions. Exactly how much teaching to the test is going on? In how many schools? Are schools in more middle-class areas going in for less of it than those with disadvantaged pupils, as is sometimes said? Most importantly, what are the causes of it? After 20 years of arguments on this subject, the fact that ministers have still not conducted their own detailed inquiry tells, I think, its own story. It has to be acknowledged that the statement on teaching to the test is of a piece with a general softening of the Government&8217;s stance on test-based accountability under Ed Balls: only three years ago it was still baldly stating that the benefits of its regime had been &8220;immense&8221;, and we have had the ending of the key stage 3 and key stage 2 science tests since 2008. It&8217;s not enough, though to make a real difference at key stage 2, particularly with the Government offering few commitments on the future of English and maths assessment and its pledge to publish teacher assessment results alongside test data merely re-instating the position of the 1990s. I would love to know how many heads change their position on pre-test cramming as a result of this missive. I suspect the answer will be &8220;not many&8221;, especially as it&8217;s already too late to do much about this year&8217;s preparations. You can email me with any thoughts on this at warwickmansell@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=266Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:51:35 GMT20100316105135Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:51:35 GMT20100316105135Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:51:35 GMT20100316105135Was your education fit for the 21st century? I ask because it seems to be one of those buzz questions at the moment. At one end of this particular argument you&8217;ve got the techie types who argue that it&8217;s useless teaching kids to do anything except use technology and master Google searches as everything will have changed by the time they enter the world of work. Therefore it&8217;s useless to teach them any facts &8211; they&8217;ll all be irrelevant or wrong &8211; and it&8217;s vital for them to learn using their mobile and their MP3 player. At the other end there&8217;s Michael Gove arguing for a good old-fashioned curriculum, with lots of reading, writing, &8216;rithmatic and plenty of history. I&8217;ve paraphrased the arguments a bit , and probably polarised them rather more than they deserve, but you get the picture. I was delighted therefore by the head at the weekend whose comment on Michael Gove&8217;s proposed curriculum was that this was much how she was taught in the early 1960s, and it hadn&8217;t prepared her for life in the 21st century. Well, I don&8217;t know that my education prepared me for life in the 21st century &8211; but on the other hand, I am not really sure what could have done. And if my school had tried, would I have lost the will to make it as far as now? What could prepare you for the horrors of hanging on the phone for hours to organise your banking via a call centre, sitting in a traffic jam on the M25 for weeks, or listening to politicians trained by spin doctors? Just perhaps, sitting in the back of a stunningly boring lesson. If I think about my personal and professional life: how could school have prepared me for the boss so gratuitously horrible that one of my colleagues regularly drank a stiff brandy on the train on her way into work? How could it have prepared me better to battle in to work each morning as bomb threats brought the capital to a standstill? Could it have prepared me better to create a stable home life for my children? Survive years of sleepless nights? Or do any of the other things we might think are important? My school taught a very traditional curriculum, with a few mavericks bringing it all to life. I learned about creativity and trying different things from a fantastic art teacher, useful biology from another barmy member of staff, and a real sense of how events can shape things from a history teacher who&8217;d gone off and got himself a doctorate with the OU. Unless you count the hockey lessons where I hid, the only teamwork I experienced was when the art teachers staged his own rather avant-garde plays, much to the horror of the school establishment, and I learned to do the lights and stage-management. In other words, I learned as much from what wasn&8217;t officially on the curriculum as what was. Oh, and I learned how to deal with boredom and get on with what I had to do even if I didn&8217;t want to &8211; a very useful skill for a working life, that. What do I wish my school had been able to teach me to survive and thrive in the 21st century? With hindsight, I wish they&8217;d really drilled maths and French into me so that I&8217;d got a good grasp at the time (it&8217;s never the same doing it later &8211; and both of these things are really important, especially in a Europe where we can work anywhere). I wish they&8217;d taught me useful cooking, rather than puff pastry and how to make Harlequin sandwiches (they&8217;re the ones with brown AND white bread &8211; the height of sophistication, eh?). And I really wish they&8217;d got me to like sport, ideally running. I&8217;ve taught myself how to run now, starting with minute-long bursts, and it&8217;s a brilliant form of exercise and relaxation &8211; but I needed to build up my skills at school, not be expected to run miles without preparation. All of which is a long way of saying I think the techies and Michael Gove are both right in some ways. Yes, the traditional stuff is important. Yes, it&8217;s also important to be comfortable using new technology, and being able to work in teams. But life isn&8217;t all about work, and education is also about the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Is it possible to have a proper, grown-up debate about this? Or didn&8217;t we learn how at school? Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=265Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:20:35 GMT20100315072035Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:20:35 GMT20100315072035Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:20:35 GMT20100315072035In this podcast NAHT General Secretary Mick Brookes discusses the ballot of members regarding SATs.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretarys-roundup-27-vote-yes/Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:39:40 GMT20100429083940Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:23:39 GMT20100315042339Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:39:31 GMT2010042908393119027Interesting to read the comments of new children&8217;s commissioner Maggie Atkinson in the Sunday Times yesterday. Until very recently a director of children&8217;s services, Ms Atkinson had made a chat with some local teenagers one of her final acts before moving to her new job. What did they tell her? That they had too much work to do. From this, she concluded that 8 GCSEs might be a better number for most teenagers to be taking than 10 or 12, taking off the pressure a bit. Moreover, she&8217;d apparently like to do away with the KS2 SATS for much the same reasons. I&8217;ve been impressed with Ms Atkinson when interviewing her in the past, so I&8217;ve scratched my head a bit over this. Surely as a hands-on DCS such views shouldn&8217;t come as news to her? Presumably her former authority has put pressure on schools to improve their results by getting teenagers (and ten year olds) to aim as high as possible? Could she be demonstrating her detachment from Ed Balls after the mini row over her appointment, when the Commons committee on education was refused its right to interview her before she was confirmed in post? But now I&8217;m wondering whether there&8217;s more of a sea-change going on among directors of children&8217;s services, whose role encompasses getting children to work as hard as possible, often worrying about their achievements, at the same time as they are responsible for their mental and physical health and happiness. Are the education and health aspects of the brief becoming mutually contradictory? I have just interviewed another DCS for another publication, and she too was expressing qualms about the way children are being pushed. One headteacher had asked her: &8220;how come everybody has got to be average these days?&8221; She was becoming, she said, seriously bothered by the effect on children&8217;s mental and physical health. So, if NAHT and NUT members do indeed vote against using SATs to assess children&8217;s progress this May, there may be a growing body of support quietly massing in the form of the Children&8217;s Commissioner &8211; personally appointed by Ed Balls -- and perhaps more than a few directors&8217; of children&8217;s services. I&8217;m also starting to happen what happens next if there is a boycott. By that, I mean how dear old Ofsted&8217;s inspections will go ahead without the usual data on which they rely to make judgments. Will they accept teacher assessments with some form of external validation or will schools with no Sats data automatically fail on some technicality? Given that infant school inspections must rely on teacher assessments, presumably this ought to be perfectly legal for Ofsted purposes &8211; but I wouldn&8217;t bank on it. And if they start failing schools right, left and centre, the consequences start to look weird. Will parents and local authorities rise up in revolt? Will governing bodies resign en-masse? Do we end up losing heads at an even faster rate than now? And if those in charge are starting to get concerned over the effect on children&8217;s mental and physical health of academic pressure, then are Ofsted&8217;s new &8220;raising the bar&8221; inspections moving against the tide? Is the bar being raised because those softies in charge of local authorities are starting to worry about what&8217;s happening to children who are all being forced to achieve at least an average level, and as a result are not felt to be pushing schools hard enough for the Government? Last week&8217;s horribly plausible TES analysis of recent inspections did indeed seem to show that schools are being seriously downgraded because the framework has been designed to &8220;raise the bar&8221;. I for one will be really interested to see exactly what is in Ofsted&8217;s report on itself this week. Susan Young is an educational journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=262Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:12:54 GMT20100308101254Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:12:54 GMT20100308101254Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:12:54 GMT20100308101254Do I even need to pose this question? If not, what can be done about it? These questions are at the front of my mind again, as the election nears and the parties compete for the education vote. All want to win plaudits by showing their commitment to improving matters through pledging to take the supposed shortcomings of the system seriously, and therefore to introduce radical reforms. But few seem to acknowledge that change has been almost constant for 20 years now. Is never-ending reform, while making sense to politicians constantly chasing headlines and votes, really the way to make the most of our public services? Again, that question almost answers itself. But still the change comes. At times, it is hard to avoid the sense of policy-making-by-auction, with the sides desperately trying to outdo each other in their drive for reform, with all the depressing implications that has for what should surely be a thoughtful, patient and long-term process of helping bring about improvements in pupils&8217; understanding, engagement and motivation. Last week&8217;s proposal put forward by Gordon Browns and Ed Balls on giving more power to parents when the schools their children attend are &8220;struggling&8221; is a case in point. Labour&8217;s policy would allow parents to vote on bringing in another provider of education if a significant group of them were unhappy. Local authorities would have to conduct the polls, and these alternative managers would be selected from a list of approved providers, or &8220;brands&8221;, as Mr Brown called them, including groups which already run academies, and successful schools. All very eye-catching. But what will these powers mean in reality? Aside from engendering yet more stress in heads and governing bodies, will they bring about genuine improvements? I can&8217;t see it. Parents already have the right to call in Ofsted if they have concerns, and have used it in one high-profile case involving an academy. (See http://bit.ly/cpay9x) Simply giving them the right to call in another provider does not seem to be taking this much further, given that a failing Ofsted report will usually lead to the head changing. Successful providers may have good track records with other schools, but I have to say that dramatic improvements in results should always be treated very cautiously, given the statistical gaming of the accountability system that sometimes goes on. No, it seems as if Labour is simply using this policy as a strategy to take on the Tories for parents&8217; votes, as the Conservatives are already pledging to make it easier for families to trigger the establishment of new schools if they are unhappy with local provision. For a sense of the concern within Labour of being on what could be seen as the wrong side of this argument, see a recent piece in The Times by former minister James Purnell, suggesting the party needed to do more to promote parental choice of schools (http://bit.ly/c5qFHx). This was eagerly seized on by Conservative advisers as an admission that Labour was losing the battle for parents&8217; votes. The new Labour policy followed a few days later. If this was a tactical gambit in which Labour was introducing a policy with long-term implications for school-parent relationships simply to gain some short-term tactical advantage in the chase for parents&8217; votes, it should be ashamed. The day-to-day fight between politicians is no way to run our schools. There are other problems. In focusing so much, in their pre-election skirmishes, on structural reform, politicians take attention away from the need to attend to what evidence shows is most important: the quality of teacher-pupil classroom interaction. In changing things so regularly, they exhaust staff and take time away from what teachers tell me matters most: the core business of classroom success. Most fundamentally, so often this fight about how education needs to &8220;improve&8221; is essentially predicated on negativity. In their seemingly ever-increasing desperation to talk about what needs to change, and in particular about helping parents escape supposedly failing/underperforming/struggling institutions, the politicians inevitably undermine state education. To be fair, all three main parties have implicitly offered support to those who might criticise aspects of the reforming logic which they all share. Michael Gove, for the Conservatives, acknowledges that schools need a break from change, and says they will get one... after a blaze of early activity should the Tories win power. Nick Clegg, for the Liberal Democrats, talks about the need for parents and schools to work together. And Ed Balls, for Labour, flagged up some practical problems with the Conservative emphasis on new schools which centred on the difficulty of waiting for structural change to bring about results. But really, a more mature approach to politics &8211; based on standing back and asking what is really in the national interest &8211; would be very different. A politician who promised to try to get the country behind its schools, to stop the perpetual focus on the negative and who was prepared to &8211;genuinely &8211; take some of the politics out of education might win my vote. I think it will be a long wait, though.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=261Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:18:47 GMT20100305041847Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:18:47 GMT20100305041847Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:18:47 GMT20100305041847I remember the phone call vividly. On the other end of the line was the late, great, Ted Wragg, the much-loved professor of education at Exeter who took great pleasure in taking a rise out of authority (particularly Ofsted and the Department of Education) whenever he felt it necessary. In other words, pretty often. Ted was never less than whole-hearted in any conversation, but he was particularly aerated on this occasion. &8220;Falling rolls!&8221; he said. &8220;Huge problem brewing and nobody seems to see it coming. It was terrible last time. The TES needs to do something about it, now.&8221; (I think this would have been late 2003, because as the project &8220;to do something&8221; developed, so did my pregnancy. And I have an equally vivid memory of Ted enquiring solicitously &8211; and fortunately for him, over the phone -- if I&8217;d entered the &8216;bovine&8217; stage yet. ) Ted was the first person to start shouting about this demographic change, and local authorities appear to have taken heed of the warnings over falling rolls &8211; but so late that the rolls are rising once more. According to this week&8217;s TES, roughly a third of the school closures of the past decade have been in the past two years &8211; yet many local authorities are adding temporary classrooms to their infant schools to meet the rising demand. Ted was right then, but it seems as though everyone in authority has remained fixed on that 2003 message. How can it be that nobody noticed the rising birthrate, increasing numbers of newly-arrived families with young children, and the dramatic population shifts in certain areas? Who is planning now for the consequences of last year&8217;s record birthrate? And it seems odd that a Government so willing to intervene in family life hasn&8217;t found a way to officially track local birthrates and household mobility to sort this one out. You&8217;d have thought it would be relatively simple: perhaps a short tick-box form to be completed with the nursery vouchers application when a child was two would do the job. It could even be anonymous, and would simply ask the parents if they were likely to be living in the same area when their child reached the age of five, and if they were planning to educate in the state or private sector. Children moving to the area could be given the form when signing up with a GP, or registering later for nursery vouchers. Surely even the Every Child Matters joined up databases could be used (and would also give a clear indication of how many kids are being educated at home, also about to be the subject of an unwieldy new regime). Unfortunately there are several reasons why school numbers matter to heads. One is the obvious one that coping with sudden rises or falls in numbers has dramatic effects on schools. The other is that some of the recently-vanished schools have been federated, often to save money on running costs (such as your salary, dear NAHT member). Pushed by Ed Balls and seconded by local authorities desperate to save money, mass federations are starting to have the air of Tesco schools. In other words: you&8217;ve been told what to teach; you&8217;ve been told how to teach; that must mean that we can join you up at will to any other school and not only will it work but standards will rise. Hooray! Local authorities already routinely consider federation if the head of a &8220;linked&8221; infant or juniors resigns: what would be next once all those are done? Hundreds of thousands of parents are in a tizz today waiting for the school admissions letter telling them which secondary school their 11-year-old will attend. School choice (sorry, preference) really matters. Mass federations and closures could prove highly unpopular, but how many parents are going to notice what&8217;s happening, all unofficially and without announcement, until it&8217;s too late? Susan Young is an education journalist Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=260Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:26:51 GMT20100301112651Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:26:51 GMT20100301112651Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:26:51 GMT20100301112651It wasn&8217;t quite the half term I&8217;d planned, when Big Daughter wound up in our local children&8217;s hospital for an appendectomy. But, once the worries subsided, it was a fascinating experience. Read most newspapers and you&8217;ll be left with the impression that hospitals are filthy places where patients are left drinking their own flower water and leave with worse bugs than when they arrived. You know that every single hospital can&8217;t be like that, but&8230; Anyway. I&8217;ve never been anywhere so clean, ever. Every surface was immaculate, hand gel dispensers bristled on every wall and landfill must be groaning under the weight of disposable gloves and aprons. Given, it&8217;s a brand new hospital, but this place was more like a luxury hotel. Despite the state she was in, Big Daughter was entranced by the tiny televisions which curved down over the beds, and the beds themselves, with their patient controls to make them move this way and that. I was astounded by the equipment, the fixtures and fittings and the fact that every single cubicle included a specially-designed fold-out bed for a parent to stay the night. The interesting thing is that the reputation of this hospital is based on its previous century-plus of service in increasingly ramshackle buildings whose Victorian walls were covered in murals lovingly painted by the staff. People talk about how marvellous it is from the basis of long-ago treatment in a now-derelict building. Talk to people who are singing its praises, and you&8217;ll discover they haven&8217;t set foot inside for years, and probably couldn&8217;t even find the new building. The same phenomenon surfaced this week in the Millenium cohort report which found that parents claimed to be startlingly uninfluenced by league tables when choosing a primary school. What bothered them was the location and available childcare, rather than SATs results. While this doesn&8217;t mean it&8217;s wrong to have report cards or objective evaluations of pupil progress, it does get you thinking. The Academy programme takes this approach to extremes, by excising old buildings, old names and in some cases the old pupil cohort to improve the image. After years and years of improving schools, it still doesn&8217;t take much for the papers to start snarling about trendy teachers (Talk about outdated slang) and all the rest of it. Government ministers banging on endlessly about world class education (what does that mean) and new initiatives doesn&8217;t help: what would? I still think the Teaching Awards are a slightly odd idea, given that unlike the Oscars on which they were based, you can&8217;t then go and see the winning staff in action. (&8220;Cor, that Mr Smith&8217;s a bit of alright and he&8217;s got a real way with physics &8211; let&8217;s go and catch one of his lessons, shall we?&8221;) And also because most people in this country watch the Oscars to mock the acceptance speeches. But having said that, they&8217;re as good an idea as we&8217;ve currently got for getting real stories about real teachers, heads and schools out into the mainstream, and I can&8217;t quite work out why schools don&8217;t plug them more. Especially now there&8217;s new awards, including one for teams and one for special schools. I&8217;ve once seen a school tell parents about the awards and how to apply &8211; no more. And yes, I can see it looks a bit like fishing for compliments but if motorway service stations can stick up a portrait of their Colleague of the Month, then why not? After all, if it makes parents think about the service their kids are actually getting, that&8217;s all to the good. One of my children was taught by a couple of regional finalists (a fantastic team of teacher and TA). They were so pleased about the nomination, and what the judges said about them, and wore their badges in class. They were utterly wonderful &8211; which got me thinking about all the other utterly wonderful teachers my kids have had whom I&8217;ve never thought of nominating. Perhaps, with a week to go until March 1 when this year&8217;s entries close, I&8217;ll actually do it. And perhaps heads and governors should remind us all to do it as well, and maybe even institute more in-school nomination schemes for great staff doing good things. And then, gradually, maybe the rest of the world will know about it. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=259Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:09:26 GMT20100222110926Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:09:26 GMT20100222110926Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:09:26 GMT20100222110926What matters most in any school? The quality of teaching. What is the point of a system of school inspection that prefers the analysis of data to the observation of classroom practice? There is no point.&8221; So began Chris Woodhead in a column in the TES on Friday, and I have to say, I agree with him. Of course, I have misgivings about the former chief inspector&8217;s role as teaching&8217;s &8220;witchfinder general&8221; &8211; as he was once labelled &8211; and, at the risk of stating the obvious, Ofsted has never escaped the problems inherent in the confrontational approach of his time there. But in this case, he has a point. Back in 2008, I put the published Ofsted results of more than 7,000 schools through a spreadsheet, and found that almost all of them received the same overall judgement as they obtained on the section of the report entitled &8220;achievement and standards&8221;, suggesting that test and exam data were shaping inspectors&8217; opinions to a remarkable degree. Since then, Ofsted&8217;s regime has undergone another of its regular iterations, with inspectors now spending a bit more time in classrooms, and instructed accordingly to put slightly less emphasis on results data. But there is no doubt in my mind that statistics still have a huge influence on inspection judgements. Is this a good thing? To this degree, no. Mr Woodhead is right in arguing that an inspection system which was worth having would have knowledgeable inspectors spending time in classrooms, interacting with teachers, pupils and then their parents, to reach a detailed view of the quality of pupils&8217; classroom experiences. Those objecting to this largely qualitative, observational approach &8211; who must, presumably, include the modern Ofsted &8211; must hold either that the results generated at the end of the teaching process are the most reliable guide to teaching quality or that it does not matter whether they are or not, since the grades are all that count in education. I don&8217;t buy either of these arguments. Any data-orientated system is based on assumptions which guide the way the indicators are constructed. It is susceptible to &8220;gaming&8221;: those being monitored look for short-cuts to boost the numbers. A system which says test results are all encourages teaching to the test. Importantly, in education, grades cannot just be &8220;delivered&8221; for pupils by teachers. Pupils have to work hard and the concentration of an inspection system only on the end of the process downgrades the weight placed on pupils&8217; efforts: effectively teachers have to produce results, regardless of pupils&8217; commitment to the process. And to be well-educated is not just to emerge with good grades. Crucially for parents, the inspection reports produced under a statistically-orientated system can read as if they were written by a computer: reports published during the last five years under the data-driven approach are far less informative, in my view, than under the previous regime. It is an interesting question as to why we have got to the position whereby statistics are so central to Ofsted judgements. I think there are several reasons: a belief that inspection should follow self-evaluation, with self-evaluation largely data-driven; the mistaken (and highly damaging) view that statistics are somehow always more objective than judgements by experienced human observers; and an ideology, still too rarely debated in education, that says that results are all that matter. But a big part of it is probably cost: number-crunching is cheaper than lengthy observation. Of course, state schools have to be held accountable. And I think some form of inspection system is essential, since the only alternatives are crude, completely numbers-driven approaches to accountability such as league tables, which have the downsides I&8217;ve alluded to. Detailed inspections based on a visit of at least several days, and as part of a conversation with the teaching staff, if necessary the pupils and the local community, though not without downsides, are the way to go, I believe. One final thing: it was good to see so many of the five contributors in the TES questioning the data-driven approach, and congratulations to the paper for running this debate on &8220;mending Ofsted&8221;. I am not a critic of everything Ofsted does; some of its reports on the quality of teaching in a particular subject nationwide seem to me very well-written and evidenced. But overall, the debate is timely: the inspectorate needs to be held to account, continually, given its power. You can view the TES article here: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6035611http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=258Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:31:56 GMT20100218103156Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:31:56 GMT20100218103156Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:31:56 GMT20100218103156For a French graduate I warm to the phrase &8216;Plus &231;a change, plus c&8217;est la meme chose&8217; and certainly teachers as they steadily nudge their way towards retirement, are used to seeing ideas, initiatives, cunning plans and jolly wheezes come round several times in their careers. Since the unleashing of the manic in the 1985 Education Reform Act the gap between such recurring events has become smaller and smaller. So it was comforting the other week at the beginning of February, watching part two of David Dimbleby&8217;s Seven Ages of Britain to see a theme which is still causing angst and plus &231;a changeness after about twelve hundred years. One wonders how headteachers and the NAHT itself would have responded to the lamentations of the then new King of Wessex, Alfred the Great which echo so well those of modern Prime Ministers, heirs to the throne and Secretaries of State. Had there been a Wessex Office of Ofsted, Alfred would certainly have unleashed a plethora of inspectors on an unsuspecting populace. Under Alfred&8217;s leadership the Viking threat was contained. But peace could only be preserved if people were prepared to learn from the past. How true, one wonders, is this today? Alfred may have saved his kingdom but he was in despair about the state in which it had fallen. And this is where the plus &231;a change bit comes in. He was particularly worried that learning had gone into complete decline. And no doubt if any children of Wessex proved to be successful in examinations, it could only be because the questions had got too easy. Alfred said that in the old days people used to read Latin. Which people? Those who went to Wessex College or Wessex Academy or Wessex Grammar School? In the good old days said Alfred, people could understand the important books which, in his words: &8216;were needful for people to know.&8217; Thankfully not too many books had been written otherwise Alfred might have found himself assailed on all sides with lists and counter lists of hefty &8216;needful to know&8217; books. Luckily for him he did not need to determine whether Shakespeare ought to feature, and if so, which play? Nevertheless, faced with this decline in standards, Alfred was determined to do something about it and he took radical action. We know all this because one of the artefacts in the Dimbleby programme was the oldest book in the English (Anglo- Saxon) language, a translation by Alfred himself of a book written by Pope Gregory called &8216;Pastoral Care.&8217; It is a sort of tract about leadership. It explains how, if you are a leader, you should behave, how you should deal with problems, how you shouldn&8217;t be arrogant, how you should be humble and all sorts of other important matters. He was very worried that people in the past had had wisdom and somehow it had got lost. This seems to me to be an essential book for School Leader Courses and I am a little surprised that it does not feature more highly, in either the Latin or Anglo-Saxon versions, in the list of essential reading for Head teachers. It starts it with this introduction: &8216;I want this distributed to all the bishops and I want it read to the people. I want people to learn and understand.&8217; Today, no doubt, Alfred would want it posted on the wwww (Wessex world wide web) complete with targets. Those at the top of the tables would receive one of those beautiful jewelled tokens which he gave to people who were prepared to remain loyal to him.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=257Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:46:35 GMT20100217104635Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:46:35 GMT20100217104635Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:46:35 GMT20100217104635If you haven&8217;t opened your copy of the TES yet, here&8217;s a little health and safety advice before you do. Make sure you are sitting down and your mouth is empty. Put any hot drinks well away from you. Now open up, and on page 28 there&8217;s Chris Woodhead talking about Ofsted and about how maybe it should be abolished if it can&8217;t be reformed. Yes, I am talking about that Chris Woodhead, the man under whom Ofsted terrified an entire profession. The man who reckoned loudly that there were 15,000 incompetent teachers. And these days, the man who&8217;s probably recalled fondly by heads and older teachers who remember the days when school inspectors looked at a bit more than the data. Let me regale you with a few of his juicier morsels (he was always a brilliant polemicist and well worth reading, even if you subsequently wanted to hit him with something heavy). &8220;What matters most in any school? The quality of teaching. What is the point of a system of school inspection that prefers the analysis of data to the observation of classroom practice? There is no point... &8220;Forget education, education, education. What matters now is compliance, compliance, compliance. &8230;The clock could be turned back. If the Conservatives win the next election, it will be turned back. Inspectors might again spend time in classrooms watching teachers teach&8230; they might bin the policies and the paperwork and ask themselves the only important question: would I want my son or daughter to be taught by these teachers? That is the question that mattered most to me when I was chief inspector. It is the only question that should matter now.&8221; He goes on to list the changes which he believes are necessary to Ofsted, but doubts they are likely to happen. Even if Michael Gove were to be next secretary of state for education, he says he would be unlikely to welcome reports that expose the failures of his policies. Therefore, says Woodhead, he is pessimistic about the future of education. &8220;It pains me to say it, but Ofsted might as well be abolished.&8221; You&8217;d expect Mr W to be gloomy about what&8217;s happened to his baby since he left, but an awful lot of heads would agree with his analysis. Schools, as those inside them understand, can be utterly banjaxed by their data, even if they&8217;ve got the best teachers in the land who are doing fantastic things for their kids. If your school is in a deprived area and trying to make good the deficiencies of parenting in many deprived families, outlined today by the Sutton Trust&8217;s new research, or is a junior school in a less deprived area with a feeder infant school with unbelievably good ks1 results (which perhaps don&8217;t seem replicable at the start of year 3), then it can be doomed to a dismal Ofsted report. And that can demoralise your excellent teachers and send them and pupils from the most motivated families elsewhere&8230; and so on. There was talk in the weekend papers and this morning of the need for a new great education debate because education has become so "formulaic and mechanised" that there is an urgent need to "remodel and refashion" it. The man shouting for this, you may not be surprised to hear, is Anthony Seldon, head of Wellington College, Blair biographer, and academy sponsor. But in a funny way he&8217;s turning into a genuine national figure, in that he&8217;s willing to talk about the big picture in education in a way that few people are. To some extent he appears to be backed by Professor Dylan Wiliam, who says something needs to be done to improve teaching but says a Callaghan-style great debate is unnecessary. Well, I&8217;m not so sure. If Chris Woodhead is calling for the abolition of Ofsted unless it is simply allowed to judge the quality of teaching once more, then perhaps we&8217;ve gone horribly wrong somewhere. And I&8217;m not convinced that allowing schools which teach meditation, backed by Goldie Hawn (as reported over the weekend, honest) is the answer either. You really couldn&8217;t make it up, any of it. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=256Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:22:53 GMT20100215102253Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:22:53 GMT20100215102253Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:22:53 GMT20100215102253Holding two mutually contradictory ideas in your head makes it ache, as I&8217;ve discovered today, reading round the wonderful world of British education for this blog. On the one hand&8230; a large and well-attended conference at the National College ten days ago was considering how schools were going to cope with a small 0.7 per cent budget rise. And on the other is the Conservative party draft manifesto on education, which is promising heads the &8220;power to pay good teachers more&8221;. Well, I&8217;m fascinated as to how this one is going to work. Swedish-style schools and teachers with firsts have got all the attention so far from the manifesto and I&8217;d somehow overlooked this. The document makes no mention of heads being able to pay bad teachers less, so presumably anyone wanting to take advantage of this power is looking at spending more of their budget on staffing. Given that most of the budget is staffing, it&8217;s hard to see where the shortfall is going to come. I think it&8217;ll take the combined forces of all the school business managers (much praised by the NCSL as being able to tap into the black arts of making money go further) to sort this one out. (Thinking about it more, there aren&8217;t enough heads to go round the current number of schools: what&8217;s going to happen if Mr Gove&8217;s parent-led Swedish-style institutions do actually open? Would his promised changes to the Ofsted regime actually make being a school head a more desirable occupation once more? How much freedom would the new schools have? And &8211; could they really be as small as the Scandinavian ones which do sometimes have just 100 pupils?) But as the inevitable election draws closer and the political frenzy increases, it&8217;ll be interesting how many more apparently hard-to-deliver promises will be made about schools without reference to those expected to carry them out. That means you, of course. A fascinating development is the Mumsnet-style hustings, where politicians communicate with the electorate via webchat. Today found Ed Balls (who&8217;s already done Mumsnet) in the hotseat at Times Online, facing an interesting demographic of questioners. Put it this way, in the instant poll on the page, support for private education hovered at around the 70 per cent mark and that for grammars not far below. But, interestingly, more than half of respondents, whilst keen to keep testing in school, wanted less of it. The questions which were answered by Mr B mostly involved disruptive kids in mainstream, private vs state education, home education and stammering. Reader, I asked a couple of questions relevant about heads on your behalf (because you were presumably working at 1pm) but these clearly just didn&8217;t fit the theme. Would we have been any the wiser if my questions had been picked? Not really, judging by the tenor of the answers he did give. And although he generously did an extra 15 minutes at the end, none of the questioners seemed much happier for their answers. Mumsnet itself, meanwhile, has just subjected Jim Rose to a light grilling in which the questions were actually much the same as those chucked at Ed Balls late last year. Major themes: the rights and wrongs of home education; why premature babies can&8217;t start in Reception at 5 if necessary; phonics teaching; the infant curriculum. (See below for a marvellous, but long, quote from Sir Jim which gives the flavour of the thing). The trouble with these webchats is that they&8217;re diverting us. Politicians can appear as though they&8217;ve endured a Paxmanesque grilling at the hands of bolshy consumers (usually parents) when they&8217;ve only dodged questions about biscuits and swerved the specifics. They can claim to have connected with the people and been full and frank, when the format makes it very easy to spot the tricky questions and either ignore them or give a formulaic reply. Compare Ed Balls&8217;s 75 minutes online with Michael Gove&8217;s recent four-minute grilling on Newsnight about the efficiency of Swedish schools&8230; and then start to worry. Because if political rhetoric is going to be increasingly put unchallenged before the electorate in this way &8211; with parents with axes to grind replacing experts, researchers and journalists -- then heads may find themselves handling increasingly unrealistic expectations in future. And this was the Jim Rose quote which was just too long to use above.. &8220;JimRose: Hello LoveBeingAMummy, I am thinking of stealing your great title and becoming LoveBeingAGrandad. Interesting &8211; this is a question f you had three wishes and could change things instantly, which three things would you change and how? I often ask of primary headteachers and usually receive answers to do with: reducing the amount of testing (SATs); dropping publicly reported school league tables; making an over-demanding National Curriculum less prescriptive, and giving more time for schools to consolidate existing initiatives before introducing additional ones. All of these things are now at the forefront of professional and public debate and there is no doubt that some significant changes are being made by policy makers while holding to that which is good. I have never put much faith in 'quick fixes' but I hope the recommendations of the reviews on reading, dyslexia and the primary curriculum with which I have been involved will contribute significantly, in the short and longer term, to children's education and well-being. My wish would be for all primary schools to be as good as those at the leading edge (of which we have many that are 'world class'). Since we are constantly told that the 'the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers', how we fulfil that wish, must mean investing in securing and assuring top quality teaching.&8221; And on that point, the Commons select committee on education has got some interesting recommendations on teacher training, including forcing schools to provide placements by making a good Ofsted dependent on their participation, increasing use of Masters&8217; qualification and ring-fencing of CPD money. They&8217;re also recommending the trickiest thing of all: ensuring that supply teachers get CPD and performance management, paid for in the same way as employed teachers. It&8217;s interesting (especially as the report also wants graduates with the best degrees to teach) &8211; but where are the votes in teachers&8217; professional development? It&8217;s never going to be a hot topic on Mumsnet&8230;. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=254Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:49:22 GMT20100209034922Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:49:22 GMT20100209034922Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:11:20 GMT20100215101120WHY are politicians in other countries keen to embrace aspects of the English school accountability system which have proved so controversial over here? From a UK perspective, this apparent trend looks bizarre, given the amount of criticism which has come the regime&8217;s way recently. But I think there are some reasons why policies such as league tables and national testing can be seen as attractive to governments. They need keeping in mind even by those of us who are sceptical as to their effects. The latest instance of English-style reform came last week, when the Australian government launched a system whereby school-by-school national test results of pupils in years three, five, seven and nine were published for the first time. The unveiling of this data, on the &8220;My School&8221; website has, perhaps unsurprisingly for those living in the UK, prompted stories about parents rushing to withdraw their children from &8220;poor performing&8221; schools, while estate agents are reportedly salivating over the prospect of using school test scores to help sell houses. In New Zealand, the recently-elected National Party announced in October it would introduce a system of &8220;national standards&8221;, which will measure the achievement of all pupils in years one to eight against nationwide benchmarks. Although it is frankly difficult to keep up with what is going on across the globe, my perception is that there is a bandwagon for national testing and data-driven accountability systems in many areas of the world. This excludes the UK, of course, where Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have rejected the English model and, even in England, four major national tests have been axed since 2008. In Australia, the unions have been vocal in highlighting dangers, including the likely vilification of schools at the bottom of the rankings and the fact that while simplistic statistical judgements create the illusion that what is being compared is school quality, the rankings will often say just as much about pupil backgrounds. Yet still the Australian Labor government has pressed on. Why, and why is this policy also winning followers elsewhere? I should say, first off, that I guess many politicians may be genuine in their belief that there is nothing wrong, in an era of openness, in running a national testing system and then publishing school-by-school results. But I think there are other, more subtle and possibly more cynical reasons why this system is finding favour. First, it can be sold as &8220;opening up&8221; the education system to parents. Those who argue in favour of national testing/accountability often suggest that there is a kind of conspiracy going on, with teachers, their unions and anyone who opposes the policy trying to hide the true state of schools from the public. Second, it allows politicians, and many of those in the media who also love league tables and statistical information, to position themselves as on the &8220;right&8221; side of this argument: for the public interest and against &8220;self-interested&8221; professionals. I have never accepted this line &8211; the evidence suggests unions who catalogue the problems are right, and it is creepily centralising (advocates of high-stakes testing appear to be saying &8220;if you disagree with me, you by definition do not have pupils&8217; best interests at heart&8221;) - but it can be persuasive to those not sympathetically disposed to teachers or their leaders. Third, any ranking system &8211; or system of information in which the political centre controls the way in which institutions are judged and data published &8211; centralises power. Hence these structures can be viewed very favourably by national politicians, civil servants and their advisers. Fourth, and more mundanely, we live in an age of spreadsheets. With comparisons now possible in so many areas of life &8211; from mobile phone tariffs to the popularity of competing television shows &8211; arguments seeking to resist this trend in education are made more difficult. I disagree fundamentally with some of the arguments being made by those in favour of moving to English-style high-stakes accountability systems. I do not think most teachers are at risk simply of failing their pupils, as is implicit in the moves towards hyper-accountability. I believe that such structures can transfer power and trust away from the front line and towards those more remote from pupils: politicians, civil servants and the media. While I think providing information to parents publicly is vital, as is some form of accountability, the most important calculation in all of this must be the likely effect on the learning experience for pupils, which, as we know, is often far from positive when league tables, targets and closure threats are involved. Above all, I have huge reservations about placing high weight on statistical comparisons of any kind: they all have their limitations and responsible governments would recognise this. That they can often be reluctant to, because of the attractions of this process as outlined above, owes as much to political calculation as to doing the right thing by pupils, which is why it should be questioned. I reported in a chapter of my book, Education by Numbers: the Tyranny of Testing, that the English model had not been readily exported. Sadly, this may now be changing. - I just thought I&8217;d record here my shock and sadness at learning of the death of Ian Foster. I didn&8217;t know Ian for that long, but spoke to him a fair bit over the past couple of years about the testing/accountability campaign. He was helpful, courteous, friendly, supportive and, of course, very well-informed about NAHT members&8217; concerns. A very great loss.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=253Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:15:32 GMT20100203041532Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:15:32 GMT20100203041532Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:16:30 GMT20100203041630Monday again, and you can&8217;t get through the morning news programmes without politicians boasting about how they&8217;re going to make it a fairer society if you vote for them. Ed Balls was notable by his absence this morning. Instead, we had a BOGOF of Michael Gove and Nick Clegg, both basically singing from the same hymn sheet (which itself bore more than a few similarities to the Balls version). The motherhood and apple pie bit is that we need to become a fairer society and in order to do that we need to give equal opportunities to all our children. And that&8217;s where you come in, as head teachers. It&8217;s schools which are largely going to deliver this vision. To Gove &8211; who to be fair is also talking about a far more targeted version of Sure Start as well -- this is &8220;a moral imperative and an economic imperative&8221;. Clegg, meanwhile, says kids in Tower Hamlets have had much more money spent on them than equally impoverished children in Rutland or Bristol. He&8217;s planning to spend even more, funded by slashing the &8220;great plethora of quangoes, inspection regimes and bureaucracy which has grown up in the educational establishment under Labour.&8221; Sensing blood, his interlocutor asked Clegg to name names. His answer may not have been the one you were hoping for, but it seems that if the Lib Dems get the key to Downing Street, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and Becta may be having to raise some of their own money. But it&8217;s interesting, isn&8217;t it, that the politicians are so united on fairness and equality of opportunity -- and that schools are felt to be the obvious engine for these desired changes. And yet it&8217;s a terribly old message: comprehensives were going to put everyone on a level playing field, as were academies, and Every Child Matters. Retired teachers have told me how they used to keep bags of clean clothes and nice soap tucked away in their classroom to help those pupils whose parents couldn&8217;t organise or prioritise keeping them clean and fragrant. And still politicians feel that they are tapping into a national zeitgeist of unease for which schools provide the natural fix. But the trouble is that it&8217;s all terribly vague. Are politicians troubled by this because of last week&8217;s report on the increasing inequality of life in the UK, or because of youth unemployment and recession, or because of the headline-grabbing horrors of Baby P and the Edlington boys? What do they expect schools to do about it? Is it purely to educate kids into a better life with a handful of qualifications, or to do the soft stuff like social skills, mental and physical health referrals, wraparound childcare and SEAL classes? For it strikes me that there could be a great deal of unrealistic political expectation about to be dumped on the heads of our heads, and this was brought home by two unrelated stories this week. In the first, research has shown than if your mum or dad is obese, then you also have a much higher chance of being obese by the time you start school. Healthy lifestyle lessons at school just don&8217;t have an impact. But of course, don&8217;t expect previous advice to be withdrawn any time yet as, frankly, schools are easier to target than podgy parents. And then there&8217;s the very silly tale about Tesco banning customers in pyjamas from one store. Radio 4 and the posh papers made a real meal of it &8211; with the underlying assumption that actually this was about class, or a lack of it. There were tales of mums saying that getting the kids to school in the morning meant they had no time to dress themselves, and what was the problem, anyway? But the problem may be later, for those kids. Because in the real world people do better if they can operate within the often unspoken rules &8211; being polite, dressing up for job interviews, being organised. It&8217;s not fair on those children if they grow up assuming it&8217;s OK to wear nightclothes almost anywhere you want &8211; because they&8217;ll be up against other youngsters who know how to play by the rules. But if schools are going to be the engine of equality for children (again), will they be asked to teach these life skills or just concentrate on Gradgrindian facts? How can they ensure that children are making the most of the their talents, and aren&8217;t being pushed into easier but less useful qualifications? Should they be teaching the art of good parenting, to help the next generation? And how much difference can a school really make? It&8217;s only early skirmishes as yet, but it does look as if schools are going to find themselves at the heart of this election campaign with a lot of political hopes and aspirations pinned upon them. And that means it&8217;s time for some urgent debates, involving heads as well as policy makers, about what is expected and what is realistic. And also whether the sort of school which seems to be wanted can exist in the land of the league table. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=252Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:26:39 GMT20100201032639Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:26:39 GMT20100201032639Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:26:39 GMT20100201032639Mick Brookes talks about the decision to ballot members on the SATs action. He also talks about funding, procurement and school balances.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretarys-roundup-26/Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:53:54 GMT20100127045354Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:52:26 GMT20100127045226Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:53:44 GMT2010012704534418381So the ballot on SATS-stopping action is actually going ahead. Is it striking fear into the Government? Well, the most recent announcement from the Department for Cushions and Soft Furnishings since is the easily misread Tweet, &8220;Ed Balls launches sex & relationship guidance.&8221; (My first thought: ugh. Second though: oh, that&8217;s not what they mean, is it?) Anyway, back to the crux of the matter, which is the ballot. Presumably the Government is intending to do its usual thing, which is to stoutly assert that parents want their children tested and that responsible heads will Keep Calm And Carry On. But I&8217;m not so sure that strategy will work. For one thing, we&8217;re at the dog-end of a Government where even MPs aren&8217;t terribly interested in education. I tuned into the BBC Parliamentary Channel to watch some of the second reading of the education bill a couple of weeks ago. My first thought was: where is everybody? There was probably a solid handful of MPs on each side of the house, and many of those, though not household names, have a particular or enduring interest in education. Like the Conservative, for instance, who argued passionately against the proposed changes to home education. A quick Google search revealed this to be his specialist subject. If MPs aren&8217;t interested in pupil guarantees or home school contracts or all the other stuff in the latest Bill, then presumably they don&8217;t think their constituents care either. Which probably means that they won&8217;t be manning the tumbrels if heads explain rationally why they don&8217;t think the testing regime at 11 is the best way to help pupils and schools and offer an alternative. And in another example of the law of unintended consequences, parents in some areas are getting very cross about official pronouncements on their cherished and high-achieving schools. I&8217;m talking about junior schools, which are increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place. Some feeder infant schools are increasingly sending on children with, frankly, unfeasibly high grades at KS1. One head routinely acquires moppets bearing Level 4 and occasionally Level 5 labels. Her first action is to re-test, whereupon she discovers that the infant is not quite a child prodigy. The LA moderates the teacher tests at 7, apparently &8211; but on self-selected papers. Anyway, the child is permanently labelled and under the current Ofsted reign of terror, the receiving school is well and truly stuffed even if it can prove that Jocasta and Tarquin were actually merely average when they arrived. Formerly outstanding schools are now being put in special measures as a result, and parents (who know how good the school really is) are becoming furious that not only may their much-loved head be leaving as a result, but also that there is all sorts of unnecessary upheaval going on. The current system just doesn&8217;t hang together, and a thoughtful administration would at least have a quick run through the problems and perhaps consider the alternatives which the NAHT&8217;s senior members have spent months of their spare time poring over. Any chance of a strike ballot concentrating minds? We&8217;ll see. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.com.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=249Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:22:14 GMT20100125102214Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:22:14 GMT20100125102214Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:22:14 GMT20100125102214The Children, Schools and Families Committee - the cross-party group of MPs which scrutinises Government education policy - has been a force for good during the 10 years I have been reporting on the fields it covers. In an era in which the Government and its agencies have exerted a degree of control over what goes on in schools which is both unprecedented in English history and remarkable when compared to what occurs in other countries, the committee has been a genuine check on this centralism. This is partly a product of stability: Barry Sheerman, the committee's chair, has held that post for the past decade and his experience and independence of mind shines through in the reports. I was optimistic, then, in anticipation of the results of its latest inquiry, on the subject of school-by-school accountability. And to a large extent, the 100-page plus report produced by the committee this month does not disappoint. This document is the last of three on what the committee has charactised as policies central to what goes on in schools, the first two being testing and assessment; and the national curriculum. All three, of course, are inter-linked. The committee's latest conclusions include many well-founded criticisms of the current accountability apparatus. This is rightly scorned as "overly complex" and "coercive", with the "naming and shaming" element - publicly identifying institutions deemed by the Government not to be doing well enough - seen as particularly damaging. Constant initiatives, though promoted by ministers as evidence of the "flexibility"of the system to adapt as required, have been counterproductive, says the report, which argues that "the relentless pace of reform has taken its toll on schools and their capacity to deliver a balanced education to their pupils". The report gained press coverage for questioning whether Ofsted had become "unwieldy and unco-ordinated", while it also calls on the inspectorate to place more emphasis on inspectors observing teaching, and less on test data (though Ofsted might say this is already happening). It criticises league tables as "damaging", and supports the principle behind the new school report card, which is scheduled for release next year and aims to introduce wider measures of school quality than exam results. However, the committee's report strongly criticises Government plans that the new card will result in a single grade for each school. All sensible stuff. If I do have a criticism, however, it is that I would have liked the report to have looked in greater depth at some of the foundations on which the accountability structure has been built. It talks repeatedly and largely unsceptically, for instance, about schools "performing" at a certain level ( for example, those deemed to "perform" well would have no need for conventional inspections). But this is Government-speak, which should be questioned. For me, the language of "performance" has become too tied up with the notion of test scores and/or other dubious data indicators to be of much use. Arguably, it also suggests a top-down system in which the politicial centre defines indicators and then institutions seek to "perform" to please their political masters. That is, it is part of a system of coercion. As currently understood, a school is said to "perform well" when its pupils achieve a certain set of test/exam results. In future, school "performance" might translate as pupils achieving to a certain level on another set of Government-defined indicators. The school itself, then, is not doing the "performing" at all. We should be clear about this. A good school, in my idealistic world, is not one which is "performing well". It is one which is providing good teaching, an interesting, challenging and possibly inspiring curriculum and giving its pupils the grounds to become well-rounded individuals. Pupils educated in this way then need to build on these good foundations to do well - but this final bit should be seen as their responsibility, not the school's. If anyone is "performing" in this system, it is pupils, not their schools, although the very word is jargonistic, opaque and unhelpful. A better system would not use the word at all. That said, this is is an important report which will add to the pressure on this and the next government to get a grip on school accountability. A newcomer to this system, reading it, will wonder how England has reached this strange, unhappy point where mistrust and fear of failure seems to be a dominating feeling. A probing report then. When the committee is reconstituted after the general election, probably under a new chair, it will have a hard act to follow.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=247Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:55:17 GMT20100119095517Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:55:17 GMT20100119095517Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:55:17 GMT20100119095517It&8217;s Monday morning so there must be a new educational policy being announced somewhere by one of the political parties. This week&8217;s is certainly eye-catching&8230; but the more I think about it, the more it seems to unravel. The basic premise is simple: the Conservatives are promising that they would entirely prevent graduates bearing anything less than a 2:2 degree from PGCE courses. Maths and science graduates from &8220;top&8221; universities, however, will practically be snatched off the street to train as teachers. Such trainees will get all their loans paid off providing they stay in the classroom, plus free Ocado deliveries on a Friday and a clothing allowance at John Lewis. OK, I made the last two bits up&8230; but you get the drift. And career changers will also be hustled into the classroom to do on the spot teacher training, apparently displacing teaching assistants and back-to-work mums who can&8217;t afford to train any other way. According to Michael Gove on Radio 4, this will help us emulate the system in Finland and Singapore, where only the brightest graduates are accepted into teaching. It will also mean teachers become truly respected once more and our education system improves. At which point the blissful Evan Davies asked the question I&8217;d been shouting at the radio: &8220;Aren&8217;t you going to raise their pay?&8221; Apparently this will not be necessary, because of the kudos of being an elitist teacher. Why, in Finland, teachers are paid about the same as they are here and they&8217;re STILL queueing up to get into classrooms. I applaud the aim and some of the means but the fundamental problem is that the UK isn&8217;t Finland or Singapore. There, education is valued and teachers respected in a way they are not here. Years ago, the last conservative Prime Minister, John Major gave a speech promising to raise the public image of teachers &8211; whose car, he said, would be the &8220;battered jalopy&8221; in the car park -- by raising their pay and so their standing. Did it work? You tell me. Anyway, the current government has been waving incentives at &8220;shortage subject&8221; graduates for years&8230; and we&8217;re still not overendowed with maths or science teachers. There is of course one very good reason for this: that those who are truly talented in the sciences are also less likely to be truly talented at people skills which are an essential ingredient of teaching, particularly of younger children. You can stick a boffin in front of a motivated A Level class and probably get away with it: but put the same teacher in with a group of lively nine-year-olds and watch the mutual incomprehension grow. It&8217;s also hard to see how these graduates are going to feel elitist in a profession which is so mercilessly hemmed in and patrolled by Ofsted inspectors, lesson plans and league tables. Rogue geniuses tend not to thrive under those working circumstances. Even the merely very brainy might chafe at the complete lack of autonomy. I&8217;m also thinking about some of the best teachers I&8217;ve ever encountered &8211; the really inspiring ones, who appear to perform everyday miracles with the children. I have a feeling that most of these teachers haven&8217;t got an Oxford 1st in Physics&8230; and that they might be markedly worse at what they do if they had. So: is it a good idea to only go for the best graduates? Probably not always. Will making entry-level more elitist raise the numbers who want to do it? Maybe in a recession &8211; but if you want to keep it going later the profession will need to be loosened up to make it more attractive to stay. So: it&8217;s the start of a good idea. But needs more work, Mr Gove. I rather wonder what the Tories would make of some of the interesting stuff presented at BETT last week. I was fascinated by a graph presented by Sheffield teacher Paul Haigh, showing that 56 per cent of a student sample used a computer to do their homework nearly every day, and only ten per cent never used one. &8220;This was considered thought-provoking,&8221; he tweeted. Given that secondary schools now rarely issue textbooks to kids which they can take home, and that most teenagers loathe writing by hand but are magnetically attracted to computer keyboards, I was only surprised that the percentage of teenagers never using a computer for homework was so high. (What percentage of that 10 per cent never do homework at all, I wonder?). Then he posted another survey, showing all the &8220;untapped&8221; bits of technology owned by the pupils at his school. 81 per cent have a mobile: 30 per cent a wi-fi enabled mobile, more than half have a laptop&8230; and so on. Get those being used in a classroom and you&8217;ve got a real resource, he says, which can be topped up with the school&8217;s own purchases. In recessionary times, that could well be the way forwards. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=245Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:40:50 GMT20100118114050Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:40:50 GMT20100118114050Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:40:50 GMT20100118114050It may just be that with half an eye on league tables and icy roads, one or two headteachers may have missed an opportunity to strengthen the teaching of modern languages in their schools. It has been revealed that a collie dog in a RSPCA centre in Oldham was failing to respond to basic commands and staff thought that he might be deaf. When they looked into the dog&8217;s history, however, they realised that the cause of the problem was the fact that the dog came from a Polish family and did not understand English, let alone the Oldham accent. Being used to the Polish dog commands of &8216;said, do mnie, noga, zostan and aport,&8217; the dog could not grasp &8216;sit, come here, heel, stay and fetch.&8217; The staff at the animal home set about using these few basic commands and the dog soon got the hang of it. This raises all kinds of possibilities for language learning, apart from a lucrative market for dog interpreters. When the plan for full encouragement of the Modern Foreign Languages in Primary Schools was launched a major survey of current provision was carried out: &8216;The Provision of Foreign Language Learning for pupils at Key Stage 2&8217; Where it was offered PMFL was taught by class teachers in 41% of schools, by peripatetic teachers in 16% of schools, by volunteers or parents in 15%, by secondary school teachers in 13%, by having a languages teacher on the staff (who was often also a class teacher,) by foreign language assistants in 5% and by teaching assistants in 4%. No mention was made of dogs (unless they make up the missing 6%) Not a word about French poodles or German dachshunds let alone British born Polish collies who have learnt to fetch. What an opportunity missed! Foreign dogs could be brought into schools to act as canine assistants, rounding up small groups of pupils into pens and not letting them out until they had learnt the French for &8216;It&8217;s snowing, we must make a big effort to get into school today&8217; or &8216;Look out Ofsted&8217;s about.&8217; Some dogs indeed could replace struggling children in any modern Language Sats of the future in order to bolster the school&8217;s league table performance. Leaving dogs to one side for the moment, we need to keep reminding ourselves what we are trying to achieve with the PMFL policy. Make no mistake, the nation is at crisis point. The disastrous decision was taken a few years ago to remove compulsory foreign language learning in Key Stage 4. The results of this change in policy are plain to see. The numbers taking GCSE has dropped dramatically and sadly, amongst pupils more than capable of high achievement in languages. The knock on effect at A level and beyond is even more marked. Students and unfortunately, schools, trapped in the performance tables bind, are shying away from A level languages because by comparison with many other subjects, it is jolly difficult to get a good grade. The felonies go on being compounded. So the government chips are down on the primary solution. The argument is that by learning a language from an early age youngsters will be excited and motivated to go on studying it when it becomes a bit more like hard work. Let&8217;s hope so. The first PMFY cohort must be nearing GCSE option time. I hope there is a proper study waiting to roll to see how the policy is working, whether the teachers have been able to take on this extra responsibility and whether the courses and materials are doing the trick. Otherwise the call might have to go out for German Shepherd Dogs, many of whom are bi-lingual.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=244Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:11:34 GMT20100115101134Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:11:34 GMT20100115101134Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:11:34 GMT20100115101134Sorry, but I want to talk about snow today. I know everyone in the media and politics has been banging on about school closures and snow and &8216;elf n safety for the best part of a week now, but it seems to me that they&8217;re all skating around on the surface. As usual, you might say. So, I&8217;ve got a few observations to make. The first is that I wonder about the precise role being played by PFI contracts in the problems schools have faced with clearing snow. From a few quiet, off-the-record chats I&8217;ve recently enjoyed with school staff at all levels, this seems to be a significant problem for several reasons. The first is that clearing the snow away is the responsibility of the maintenance and caretaking staff &8211; who, in PFI schools, are employed not by the governors or the LEA, but the PFI company. Let&8217;s call them Cashflow, for the sake of argument. So, Cashflow has, let&8217;s say, three staff for each secondary school it runs, and a small central supply of grit. There&8217;s a big snowfall and then it freezes. It&8217;s going to take more than three blokes with spades to clear what needs to be cleared. Is there anything in the contract forcing Cashflow to import some extra navvies, or actually locate its grit? And have they any reason to care? Is anyone with a bit of clout putting pressure on them? What about asking parents to come and help out with a shovel? Tricky too, apparently, because the site actually belongs to Cashflow. Does their permission have to be asked? And can you actually get hold of anyone there to do that, or to strongly request that every path round the school gets cleared, pronto? Multiply that up by the number of PFI secondary schools out there, and this alone could be a sizeable problem. And if a desperate school wants to hire its own little digger, then what? And finally, if councils are persuaded to help their schools out with a little of their carefully-hoarded grit, is it going to go to the PFI ones whose maintenance technically is someone else&8217;s responsibility? Another problem, away from PFI, is the sheer numbers of pupils in secondary schools now. On some sites, it&8217;s almost physically impossible to move them around without going outdoors. And outdoors there&8217;s inches of snow and ice. &8220;And can you imagine teenagers coming to school in wellies? They just wouldn&8217;t,&8221; one teacher confided. Perhaps not willingly, no. But my guess is that if a school specified strongly that it was open, but only for kids with sensible footwear and clothing, quite a few parents might exert a bit of authority. Especially if it was made very clear that kids without correct footwear were warned not to attend school and would be sent home if they did. Not being a lawyer, I have no idea if such warnings would have any legal status &8211; but again, it might help. Retired teachers are baffled by the closures. &8220;Our contract said we had to make all reasonable efforts to get into school,&8221; one told me. &8220;I used to walk. What&8217;s going on?&8221; Well, we all live further from our workplaces now&8230; but there is that much-ignored proviso about reporting for work at your nearest school if it&8217;s impossible to reach your own. I&8217;ve never seen any attempt to make that work, but a hospital administrator in the Scottish Borders was talking happily of how something similar had been fantastic for medical services in the area in the previous week. Perhaps this will be a good use for the new vetting and barring scheme than under the current CRB-for-every-institution scenario. And if lessons are to be learned, as people like to say, from the current situation, it might be an idea to provisionally rig up lists in LEAs of who lives where. Another thing I&8217;ve noticed during the Great White Out is that closed schools are yet another reason for a little light teacher-bashing. Schools must be closed because staff aren&8217;t trying hard enough, seems to be the argument. The Telegraph suggests adding &8220;snow days&8221; on at the end of term (yes, like parents are going to like that idea when they&8217;re only allowed to holiday during holidays as it is) in a punitive kind of way. I&8217;d also argue that schools aren&8217;t necessarily helping themselves here. Those which can&8217;t open should explain clearly exactly why not on their websites. Vague talk of weather or health and safety doesn&8217;t help. Detail helps people understand, and gets them on side. Oh, and stick a bit of work to be done by the kids there while you&8217;re at it. A bit more leadership from the very top would have been good too. Ed Balls doesn&8217;t help by talking smoothly about heads&8217; risk-gauging abilities whilst urging schools to open as quickly as possible. Were he able or willing to do something more positive, such as make clear that heads personally will not risk being sued if someone slips on the ice, or to direct local authorities to divert grit to open schools up, that would be a different matter. It doesn&8217;t really help that since the last bad winter, schools have become in part a giant child-minding service to enable the whole population to go out to work &8211; at the same time as the government has upped its rhetoric on the importance of kids attending every single lesson. Which makes it very difficult for anyone to advocate the commonsense approach of perhaps welcoming the odd snow day but making sure schools open pretty damn quick thereafter. So in an ideal world, what&8217;s to be done? Bad winters come in clusters, and we may get another couple of snowy ones &8211; or just the usual drizzle. But it might not cost a lot to look at how the PFI contracts are working, and perhaps look at safeguarding heads against personal injury claims if they open up in good faith. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=242Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:06:09 GMT20100112100609Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:06:09 GMT20100112100609Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:06:09 GMT20100112100609You can tell we&8217;re into an election campaign as everyone&8217;s spin machine moves up a few gears. I delayed getting down to writing this week, as a series of excitable news reports on Sunday indicated that we were going to get a big educational announcement on Monday. One particularly favoured organisation was able to reveal, breathlessly, that this would include a promise to teach Mandarin Chinese to tots as young as seven. Phew! So I waited patiently. And because I missed breakfast telly with Ed Balls, this much-vaunted announcement was fairly well-hidden by the time I went looking. And also, not all it seemed. If you were feeling pedantic (and I often am) you might wish to rewrite the thing in plain English. Which is, that the Government is reminding everyone that this year kids in KS2 will have the &8220;opportunity&8221; to learn a second language &8220;This comes a year ahead of foreign languages becoming a compulsory part of the national curriculum for children over seven, which will allow schools to choose which language to teach, from Arabic to Mandarin, Japanese to French.&8221; my italics, Government press release. Right. So what he&8217;s actually saying is that schools which want to can jump the gun on language teaching. And they can teach any language on the national curriculum&8230; if they can find someone to teach it. Given that secondary schools are also being urged to teach Mandarin and Arabic, anyone who can teach either is in danger of having limbs ripped off in the rush. Let&8217;s go back to the press release for more edification. &8220;As Mandarin becomes a GCSE this year, the Government is also today setting out their aspiration that all secondary school pupils should have the opportunity to learn languages like Mandarin if they choose... &8221;Through language partnerships between schools, Ministers want every school to have access to specialist teachers, and are encouraging Heads to join up with neighbouring schools to share knowledge and expertise to give all pupils the chance to learn. &8221;On top of putting more specialist language teachers into schools, Teach First is into its second year of a pilot to recruit the best language graduates to become specialist teachers in the most challenging schools.&8221; But you&8217;ll be relieved to know that&8217;s not all they&8217;ve done. &8220;To back up the Government&8217;s commitment to get all children learning a language for at least six years, it has invested &163;7 million in training around 5,000 specialist primary language teachers since 2003, the most primary subject specialists to have ever been trained. Around one thousand more will start courses in September 2010, which means that around 7,000 language specialists will have been through the intensive training by September 2011.&8221; So that&8217;s all right then. Except I think 5,000 and 1,000 actually makes 6,000 not 7,000. Perhaps they&8217;re not counting the ones currently on a course. And -- how many primary schools are there? 24,000 is the number that sticks in my mind, which means roughly one specialist language teacher for every three and a half schools (or four, if my six thousand is the correct number of teachers). If this plan is to &8220;ensure children develop a love for languages early on&8221; as Mr Balls hopes, then I&8217;m not hopeful. I&8217;m prepared to be shot down in flames on this, but I think it would be really tough for non-specialists to teach languages to young children. Yes, children learn languages better when young, but with lots of practice and help. On these figures it looks like if even primaries share the language teachers out fairly, (perhaps hiring one between a cluster), each school will have about one and a half days each week to teach four year groups. The likelier scenario is that of haves and have-nots. Or, possibly, of secondary language teachers (probably mostly redundant German specialists) being recruited, but a lot of retraining would be necessary. The grand plan, as I recall, was to de-compulsorise (sorry!) secondary languages and redistribute the resources a bit to &8220;build a love&8221; for languages in younger children which would carry through to public exams. It&8217;s beginning to look as if we&8217;ve decimated secondary languages and are not going to give primary schools the tools to do the job either&8230; but we have successfully raised the aspirations of parents in an election year. Do let me know when the first one collars you to ask when the Mandarin lessons are starting for little Olivia, won&8217;t you? Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=241Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:32:24 GMT20100105123224Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:32:24 GMT20100105123224Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:32:24 GMT20100105123224A happy new year to all readers of this blog, and I&8217;d like to start 2010 with a posting which, unlikely as it may sound, is extending some qualified festive cheer towards an organisation with links to the Government. Right, I hope that hasn&8217;t deterred too many of you from reading to the end! But the reason for my positivity is a section in the recent annual report from Kathleen Tattersall, chair of the exams regulator Ofqual, in which she expounds what to my mind is some very welcome thinking on the reliability of test results. Ofqual is in the midst of a two-year investigation into this subject. But it has already provoked controversy in the media by venturing, bravely, into public pronouncements on this highly-charged issue. The regulator came under fire last year when it was reported as saying that we should avoid using the word &8220;error&8221; to describe what happens when a pupil does not receive the exam marks they deserve. The reluctance to use &8220;error&8221; comes because, says the report, &8220;the word in its ordinary usage does not capture the nuances of the way it is used in assessment&8221;. However, this suggestion was taken, says the report, by the media as Ofqual &8220;shying away from any discussions of mistakes&8221; in the awarding process. In effect, the reports might be saying, Ofqual was simply trying to cover up the fact that examining was unreliable, or trying to obfucscate real problems with exams because the reputation of the system was more important to it than doing the right thing by pupils, parents and teachers. However, having read Ms Tattersall&8217;s argument, I think her views have some strength. The report makes the point that the word &8220;error&8221; has at least two meanings. In everyday speech, it simply means a mistake. But in mathematical measurement, it means &8220;the difference between an approximate result and the true determination&8221;. Ofqual, the report argues, does not want to use the word &8220;error&8221; because the two meanings carry very different implications for the way the regulator works. It was better to try to separate out those implications by using separate terms for each. The report says Ofqual takes errors that are really &8220;mistakes&8221; very seriously. Careless errors by examiners have to be eliminated by the exam boards, and any mistakes of this kind are unacceptable. However &8211; and here is the brave and welcome admission from the regulator &8211; the second kind of error has to be acknowledged as an inevitable part of most testing systems. As the report says, &8220;there will be a degree of imprecision that cannot be removed&8221;. The report does not spell out completely what this means. It only says: &8220;This imprecision, which is not a mistake but which can affect the reliability of a qualification, arises from factors over which neither the awarding organisation nor the regulator has any control, such as the degree to which the assessment reflects two years of classroom teaching or the fluctuations in a candidate&8217;s performance from day to day.&8221; The message should be clear. The report implies that there will inevitably be some degree to which a test result might not reflect a pupil&8217;s underlying understanding of a subject, even when the tests themselves are subject to the most rigorous of checks. At its most basic level, unreliability can occur through a child simply having a good or bad day when they take an exam. They might generally be particularly good or bad at taking tests, ie disposed to do better (or worse) in day-to-day classroom work than in the pressure of a time-limited, one-off test. If we are trying to measure underlying understanding, and not test-taking ability, this is a problem. And, to add another source of &8220;unreliability&8221; of my own, examiners&8217; judgements in some subjects such as extended writing in English must always be to some degree subjective if they are to remain meaningful. To the degree they are subjective, they are, of course, not completely objective, true or 100 per cent reliable. In passing, this is why, when I have observed senior civil servants arguing in the past that a child with the same test results at KS2 and KS3 has &8220;made no progress&8221; over three years, I have got annoyed. The pupil might simply have under- or over-performed on one of the test days, to give just one potential source of unreliability in the data. We need better information than any test of the current kind can provide before making such a sweeping assertion. Honest and open acceptance of these arguments, which happens too rarely in my view, might then open the way to greater questioning, at official level, of the weight that is then put on the data generated by test results. These scores, as Ofqual would appear to accept, should clearly never be seen as the final word on pupils&8217; progress.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=240Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:25:50 GMT20100104022550Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:25:50 GMT20100104022550Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:25:50 GMT20100104022550Here you are: an awards ceremony you can attend in your slippers and dressing gown. Or your Christmas jumper. Well, you&8217;ve got to wear it somewhere&8230; The Chris Woodhead prize for tact and motivation: The judging panel took about five seconds on this one. It goes to Mr Ed Balls for his remarks on schools saving money, and his suggestion that it might be better to have fewer heads and spread them around a bit. The Victor Meldrew prize for most remit-expanding decision by an official: the revelation that schools might end up in special measures for having doorhandles low enough for children to reach (sponsored by B&Q). The judges felt this was a crowded field and gave an honourable mention to the inspector who insisted that the headteacher&8217;s small dog be risk-assessed. The media prize for most wilfully misunderstood educational innovation: Remember the furore? A successful, technically-savvy teachers innocently pointed out that since teenagers routinely carry enough computing power with them to have easily organised the 1969 Moon landings, it might be an idea for schools to capitalise on this by getting them to use phones and laptops in class. And they might actually enjoy the lessons, too&8230; Months later, the teacher is still blinking from the mauling he got once the story escaped from the friendly surroundings of the TES and the Observer. It was last seen running frantically through the pages of the Mail, hotly pursued by irate slate-wielding journalists and readers. The La, La, La, can&8217;t hear you award: Vernon Coaker, government minister, wheeled out to dismiss the gargantuan Cambridge Primary Review within moments of its publication. Also known as the Campbell Rebuttal Prize. The 1066 And All That Curriculum Prize: awarded to Michael Gove for his Conservative conference promise to bring back Real, Chronological History of Britain lessons in all schools. Clearly a vote winner, that one. The Damned if you do&8230; (or if you don&8217;t), award: Given to those authorities which penalised schools which actually opened in the early 2009 snows, but failed to get all the kids in. Meanwhile, neighbours which closed their doors did fine, merely incurring the wrath of the Daily Mail for proving that the country no longer has a backbone. The Met Office Long Range Forecast award: will go to me if I try to predict anything much which is going to happen in 2010, apart from a general election. Will it be schools in office blocks with wall-to-wall history lessons, or yet more centralisation and education acts? Your guess is probably as good as mine&8230; so a happy new year to you! Susan Younghttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=239Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:03:19 GMT20091229090319Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:03:19 GMT20091229090319Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:03:19 GMT20091229090319So. Three days to do your Christmas shopping, now, eh? That&8217;ll be a test of your organisational abilities&8230; and you&8217;ll be experiencing exactly how other organisations deal with their customers at a time of stress. Many of the best shops sharpen their act by hiring &8220;mystery shoppers&8221; who find out what the customer experience is really like. I shouldn&8217;t suggest this while Ofsted inspectors seem to be on the rampage trying out their lovely new regulations, but it does sometimes strike me that schools might benefit from an occasional visit of an educational mystery shopper. This came home to me fairly forcibly last week as I picked up a copy of the free paper, Metro. Its screaming headline was Scrooge School. The story was of a pair of infant children who weren&8217;t allowed to attend their primary&8217;s Christmas party because it was only for children with 100 per cent attendance records. The children missed out because their father had died from cancer this term, and they had missed several days as a result. &8220;I rang the school office&8230; and the woman said &8216;bereavements count,&8217;&8221; the children&8217;s mother told the paper. The school &8211; which I won&8217;t name &8211; said the children should not have been barred but the mother &8220;had spoken to the wrong person&8221;. No school would willingly court this kind of publicity. Presumably, no school would truly want to be so hardline about these kind of attendance inducements that it would behave in this way. But it appears that at least one staff member in this school was under the impression that this was the correct answer to give, without even thinking about referring the query to someone else. How on earth could that be? And while this is an extreme example of miscommunication, it is the everyday interaction between parents and staff which build strong home-school relationships which ultimately will have an impact on teaching and learning. Canny heads are on the lookout for this kind of thing: just as well, because Ofsted is only geared up to discover tensions when they have become problems. From this point of view, the Ofsted parental feedback form is hopeless, particularly with no-notice insepctions. From recent personal experience, I can tell you that if it makes it home in a teenager&8217;s bag, it only emerges two days after the deadline for its return. And if you&8217;re going to be motivated enough to fill it in during a busy week, that&8217;s because you either love or hate the school. Less strong feelings than that and it&8217;ll slip into the drift of paperwork which needs doing, sometime. But what often matters to parents and carers on an everyday basis is how they are dealt with on a routine basis by their school. Are the office staff friendly or dragons? Are they helpful or officious? If a day off is required to deal with a death in the family, what is the tone of the reaction? Does the head wander round cheerfully, hide, or clearly mingle reluctantly with parents? Does the website work, and is the useful information (term dates, dinner money costs, non-uniform days, etc) all up there for the desperate parent at midnight? What&8217;s the tone of the newsletters? Is useful information also displayed around the school &8211; complete with contacts parents might need? And so on. I remember my TES colleague Gerald Haigh, himself a former head, talking in this vein some years ago, and suggesting leaders should regularly walk through the public areas of the school with an outsider&8217;s eye. Something to think about, perhaps, as you wait in the queue for the Tesco car park. Thank you for reading! I hope you all have a very merry Christmas. You&8217;ve certainly earned it&8230;. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=237Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:39:48 GMT20091221103948Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:39:48 GMT20091221103948Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:39:48 GMT20091221103948Mick Brookes sums up the latest news on current NAHT issues.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretarys-roundup-25/Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:22:57 GMT20091221042257Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:19:45 GMT20091221041945Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:22:52 GMT2009122104225217801I was surprised to read, in the TES, Christine Gilbert sticking quite so forcefully to the idea that schools&8217; &8220;raw&8221; test and exam scores should have great influence on the overall inspection grade each institution receives. I think this position reveals a contradiction at the heart of the way Ofsted currently operates, and that it makes its work in schools to some degree incoherent. This is because I don&8217;t think anyone at the inspectorate is really trying honestly to answer the question: &8220;What is Ofsted for?&8221; In her TES article, http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6029910, Ms Gilbert set out the position that, while value-added data were taken into account as inspectors framed their judgements, unadjusted results were also vital. The latter were certainly considered more important now than under the previous inspection system, which operated until last summer. To be clear, I think one of the changes under the new Ofsted regime &8211; the greater emphasis on lesson observation &8211; is welcome. But consider Ms Gilbert&8217;s statement on the results data. The chief inspector wrote: &8220;Let me put my cards on the table here. I have no doubt that value-added measures provide useful contextual data that help us to judge how far pupils have progressed and how they compare with others in similar circumstances elsewhere. &8220;But the bottom line must be: what matters for a young person trying to get an apprenticeship, job, sixth form or college place? No employer is going to offer a young person a position if they have no decent qualifications, no matter how strong the contextual value added (CVA) score &8211; just as no pupil is likely to do well in secondary school without learning how to read, write and do arithmetic confidently in primary school. &8220;So, inspectors do take account of value-added measures. But it would not be right to ignore the importance of overall test and exam scores.&8221; What is wrong with this, as a statement? Well, it depends what you think Ofsted&8217;s purpose is, in relation to school-by-school inspections. Is it here to provide fair and at least notionally objective information to the public &8211; and parents in particular &8211; about the quality of each school? Or is its function mainly about encouraging &8211; to its detractors, forcing &8211; schools to act in particular ways? If it is the latter, then Ms Gilbert&8217;s statement holds water. Essentially, she is arguing that, because unadjusted exam results are what matter to pupils and their parents, this is what the inspectorate should focus upon. By implication, doing so puts pressure on schools to improve on those measures. It is a very similar argument to that used by ministers in defence of their National Challenge scheme. For all the controversy around that programme, the position of ministers is relatively clear: they will not excuse what they see as &8220;underperformance&8221;. That clarity is lacking in the case of Ofsted, however, because of its dual role. For the inspectorate cannot claim to be performing that first function &8211; providing good information to the public on the quality of each institution &8211; effectively if it truly holds that raw results are crucial to pronouncements on schools&8217; quality. This should, surely, be obvious. Take two schools, one serving a leafy area in a university town whose pupils are mainly the children of professionals educated to graduate level, and a second next to an inner-city estate with a large proportion of pupils on free school meals and in the early stages of learning English. If those two schools end up with identical &8220;raw&8221; results, the logic of Ofsted&8217;s position of emphasising those results would be that the two schools should be seen as of identical quality. That position is absurd, given the wealth of research evidence we have about how pupils&8217; backgrounds tend on average to affect their exam performance. Value-added systems, though always imperfect, aim to isolate the influence of the school &8211; as opposed to factors outside of its control &8211; in the production of results. Therefore &8211; and leaving aside for the moment my great scepticism about the weight given to exam data of all types as judgements of schools&8217; characteristics &8211; any data-driven system which wants to get better information on the quality of a school will have to take value-added results more seriously than raw scores. If parents view reports on these two schools and find inspectors reaching the same judgement as to each institution&8217;s overall quality, they will have been misled, because the second school will have had to have done much more work with its pupils. Its position is as if it were a runner giving a rival a 100 yard start in a mile race with both then crossing the finishing line together. Which is the better athlete? I think we know the answer. Even if value-added scores are taken into account by inspectors, the raw scores data, if emphasised, will skew the picture in favour of the &8220;leafy&8221; school. Therefore, parents reading the two reports will not be getting a fair comparison of their relative merits. It could be argued that what parents want to know about are not contextual figures, but raw exam results. But they already have access to raw scores, through league tables. Ofsted, surely, should be about providing the context if it can have any pretence to be taken seriously as a gauge of the quality of individual institutions, rather than the characteristics of those they educate. If Ofsted came out and said its main purpose was to influence what happens in schools &8211; effectively to enforce a school improvement regime &8211; and that the production of objective information on school quality was not its main concern, its position might be defensible. But it cannot act in the current way and also maintain that inspections &8211; if they really are weighted heavily towards &8220;raw scores&8221; &8211; are facilitating fair and reliable comparisons between schools, They are not, and Ofsted cannot have it both ways. (If we accept that exam results data of any type provides reliable and trustworthy information on schools&8217; quality, which must be Ofsted&8217;s position).http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=238Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:09:14 GMT20091221030914Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:09:14 GMT20091221030914Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:09:14 GMT20091221030914Excellent news that some sense has been seen in the vetting and barring mess, and that some of the loonier regulations have been loudly amended. But would it pass the Santa test? You can just see the official checklist, can&8217;t you? Elderly man, visiting child&8217;s home once a year to bring presents. Well, it&8217;s just once a year so it&8217;s not frequent contact (but it is regular). But that&8217;s every child in the world in one night, so does it mean he needs to be vetted? Brings presents. Is that grooming? Goes into children&8217;s bedrooms at night? Sounds a bit dodgy. Nothing on him, not even a speeding fine, but it just doesn&8217;t add up. Better bar him to be on the safe side. Loved hearing Sir Roger Singleton blame the previous mess on MPs in the Commons this morning, asserting in a wonderful civil servanty way that yes, the rules were devised during the debates on the Bill which happened whilst everyone was still rather emotional in the wake of the Soham murders. Presumably it can&8217;t have been MPs who gave the definition of regular and frequent contact with children as being once a month, or the rules couldn&8217;t have been amended as they have been. But it still doesn&8217;t really work, does it? It&8217;s a small victory for common sense, in the meaning that the rules are better than they were going to be. But they&8217;re still not what most heads and people who work with children would devise if you were starting from scratch. As most primary heads will be painfully aware, the new definition of &8220;regular&8221; and &8220;frequent&8221; contact is now set at weekly. I&8217;ve just finished a six-week stint in my local junior school, hearing year 6 kids read for ten minutes each every Thursday. I do have a CRB in this school for a different reason, but in order to run this kind of scheme in future every parent volunteer &8211; five per class in this case &8211; would have had to have had a vetting and barring check. Or it would have had to have been set up fortnightly, which presumably would not have worked so well for the kids. That level of bureaucracy is going to take these kind of helpful initiatives off the agenda at many schools, or will mean that you end up with a small pool of parents who are pressganged to help with anything because they&8217;ve already been vetted&8230; and those who wait, unvetted, in the playground, to pick up their kids. Let&8217;s not forget that most of them will just as trusted by the pupils as the adults who make it into the classroom. There are several other things about this which make me cross. One is that the vetting and barring scheme would have saved the Soham girls from Ian Huntley &8211; but only because he himself worked in education. If he&8217;d been a bank clerk or a builder, checks on his girlfriend Maxine Carr would not have covered Huntley, and the girls would still have trusted him. Another is that this supposed victory for common sense is still going to cause huge problems for schools and youth organisations, and the result will be to further impoverish relations between the generations. Why do we need to spend so much time now protecting children from adults, and are the rest of Europe following the same path? According to a social worker friend of mine, the reasoning is that more paedophiles are being created by the availability of child pornography on the Internet. The Portsmouth nursery case suggests that might be true, to some extent. But surely it is time for some serious energy to be expended in discovering what really is going on, and then doing more to protect children by barring such material and upping the sentences on those found guilty of viewing it. Better to restrict Internet freedom than the freedom of children to trust adults. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=235Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:04:10 GMT20091214030410Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:04:10 GMT20091214030410Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:04:28 GMT20091214030428Mick Brookes discusses the latest news on inspections, funding issues and also updates on the Assessment Reform Campaign.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretary-roundup-24-december-2009/Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:49:27 GMT20091209104927Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:46:45 GMT20091209104645Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:49:21 GMT2009120910492117630Mick Brookes briefly talks about a dispute with the Social Partnership that threatens our future relationship.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretary-roundup-23/Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:13:26 GMT20091209101326Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:51:29 GMT20091209095129Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:13:10 GMT2009120910131017622Who&8217;d be a head? Not many teachers, according to new research. The National College found that just nine per cent of teachers fancied trying for headship within the next three years. Even among middle leaders, currently being groomed for headship, only 40 per cent actually wanted the job. You could pick holes in the questions &8211; if teachers wanted to become heads in the next three years, for instance, they should probably already be a middle leader or on the NPQH course. And why wouldn&8217;t middle leaders fancy staying in that job if it was interesting, rather than move on? But then another report pops up. Pisa, as you&8217;ll know, is the tremendously authoritative snapshot of education across the world published by the OECD. They have taken an interest in headship in England, and have come up with some interesting conclusions: the Government, and Ofsted, is to blame. Here&8217;s a couple of quotes, courtesy of the Financial Times. &8220;In England, the role of principal is seen by classroom teachers and middle-level leaders as involving high risk and high stakes. . . The Education and Inspections Act of 2006 gives local authorities new, strict powers of intervention. In addition, the English inspection agency, Ofsted, has new powers to intervene on the grounds of parental complaint.&8221; &8220;Fear of their schools being deemed as failing is a powerful disincentive to teachers who are considering applying for National Professional Qualification for Headship, which is mandatory for those in principal posts.&8221; &8220;Concern about being responsible for a failing school restricts initiative and innovation as principals may fear making mistakes&8201;.&8201;.&8201;.&8201;Principals need to be confident that leadership is not a form of tightrope walking. They should not be expected to leave if their schools are given warnings about the need for . . . improvements.&8221; This is a tremendous vindication of what heads&8217; leaders have been saying for ages, as education secretaries stick their fingers in their ears. It&8217;ll be interesting to see if anyone in government pays any attention at all to this report, or even if it any other papers pick it up. It&8217;s also interesting to look at the Pisa information in the context of a couple of documents newly placed on the NAHT website: the union&8217;s breakaway proposals to the RIG group and also the fruits of the union&8217;s work on other forms of pupil assessment than the current KS2 tests. My brief and probably inaccurate pr&233;cis of these and their significance is this: the NAHT feels strongly enough about the importance of a flexible leadership structure in schools &8211; with posts which could be a stepping stone to headship, and support the head in a difficult role &8211; to create a separate document from the rest of the rewards and incentives group, then someone should be listening to the reasons. This could be one key to helping the next generation of heads come forward. And the current Year 6 tests are part of the football manager syndrome which afflicts heads now that good Ofsted rankings are possible only with good pupil results. No-one&8217;s arguing for a get out clause for hopeless or lazy heads. But it would be nice if the Pisa report was read thoughtfully, with an open mind, and those in charge of our education system considered carefully what was actually being said. Still, at least Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling aren&8217;t going to be demanding you send some of your pay back to the Treasury. School heads currently don&8217;t seem to figure on the Taxpayers&8217; Alliance list of public employees paid more than &163;150k, and for whose pay packets special permission will henceforth have to be sought. But I can tell you who does (or did in the past financial year, anyway): Mark Haysom of the Learning and Skills Council (departed/departing,), &163;289k; Christine Gilbert of Ofsted, at number 155 in the list and earning &163;230-235k; David Bell of the DCSF, at just over &163;200k; another two Ofsted directors with salaries of &163;177 and &163;162k; and then Ken Boston of the QCA (both departed) on a range of &163;160-&163;165k. A couple of others on the list are (at number 655) Steve Munby of the National College, earning a total of &163;161,360 and just below him Tom Jeffery, Director General of the DCSF, on &163;157,500. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.com.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=232Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:21:41 GMT20091207042141Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:21:41 GMT20091207042141Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:21:41 GMT20091207042141Can you encapsulate the extent of any improvement in a nation&8217;s education system in a single figure? Well, a report this week from the Office for National Statistics suggests that the answer is &8216;yes&8217;. And the figure, for the years 1996 to 2008, is between 0 and 0.1 per cent. Sceptical? You are right to be. But please don&8217;t laugh. This is serious stuff. For the results of the ONS&8217;s calculations helped shape the debate this week on the success of our schools, capturing headlines to the effect that they were a &8220;damning indictment&8221; of Labour&8217;s education record. In fact, the statisticians&8217; attempts to quantify the &8220;productivity&8221; of schools investment have been fraught with difficulty for years. They are based on heroic assumptions about what matters in education and how to measure it. This means the scores generated are inherently subjective: they depend on these assumptions. And the huge caveats that come with this exercise command little attention in the public debate. Moreover, the main &8220;output&8221; measure the ONS uses in judging the education system &8211; GCSE results &8211; was never designed for that purpose and, I would argue, therefore does it very badly. In 2004, I wrote a piece for the TES http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=396227 about previous attempts to measure public sector productivity. Officials attempting this calculation used simply to look at the money being spent, compared it to the number of pupils being educated and then calculated productivity. If more pupils were educated, but spending stayed the same, this measure would view it as more productive, hence it would favour larger class sizes. Similarly, police productivity stats looked at the number of crimes dealt with per pound spent. There was a fairly obvious flaw, however: if crime fell with spending constant, productivity would have been said to have gone down. Ministers, aware of these absurdities, wanted to try to make the measure more sophisticated. What if, they might have argued, governments did want to invest in improvements in education, for example by cutting class sizes? Could we not come up with a measure which attempts to gauge any improvement in quality, to help people decide whether the investment was worth it? The products of that effort were this week&8217;s ONS study, with pupils&8217; average score in GCSE and &8220;equivalent&8221; qualifications &8211; as measured through an equally subjective points system devised by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority &8211; the main indicator as to whether education is improving. Implicit in the model and coverage was that grades have not risen fast enough, even though the annual exam debate in August centres on questioning the reality of year-on-year improvements. The ONS model found that education &8220;outputs&8221;, as measured mainly by improving GCSE scores, rose by 33.4 per cent in the 12 years to 2008. But &8220;inputs&8221; &8211; spending &8211; rose by 33.3 per cent. Take the one from the other and you get the 0.1 per cent &8220;productivity&8221; increase. The major caveat in the ONS report but which has not featured in the debate is given in the following quotation. &8220;It is unlikely that a single measure of productivity change will ever capture all the costs and benefits of education.&8221; Um, yes. Does this not defeat the object of the exercise? A first major problem with the ONS&8217;s approach, of course, is that it is implies that all we should value in education is improving exam results. I&8217;ve argued elsewhere that, actually, it is questionable whether the rising national grades cherished by politicians and statisticians are of much use, in themselves, for individual pupils, who must compete against their increasingly well-qualified peers, as results rise, for jobs and higher education places. Second, GCSE results may be seen to be the most easily quantifiable &8211; if we must seek to quantify &8211; measure of educational quality. But they remain a poor measure. In a paper published by the British Academy in 2000, Mike Cresswell, now head of England&8217;s largest exam board, wrote: &8220;Exam results cannot be reliably interpreted as quantitative indicators of long-term changes in educational standards.&8221; GCSE grades are not designed to check for changing education standards over time, he argued, but to allow employers and universities to select between students. These calculations inform the decisions by examiners on where to set grade boundaries, which then produce the statistics which are used by the ONS to judge the quality of our education system. Most fundamentally, the ONS paper admits that spending on education has increased in large part because of the rapid expansion in publicly funded nursery provision and through a major increase in the number of school support staff. These therefore make it harder for the &8220;productivity&8221; figure to rise. But are they, nevertheless, positive developments? I think that&8217;s in large part a value judgement, which quantification in this way will not help us to resolve. Nursery investment after 1997, for example, cannot affect the GCSE scores used in this model because the pupils affected are not old enough to have taken their GCSEs. As an aside, it would be interesting to compare the &8220;productivity&8221; of independent schools on this measure &8211; the results they achieve for the amount spent &8211; to those in the state sector. As ever, there would be different results according to the model chosen. But it would be a largely pointless exercise: parents choosing a school will judge for themselves what they want &8211; many might see private schools&8217; investment in smaller class sizes as money well spent - and make their own decisions. Similarly, voters will make up their own minds on how much money they think should be invested in state education, try to form a judgement for themselves on whether schools are improving, and cast their votes accordingly. If there is any justice, these figures will not have any bearing on their thinking.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=231Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:37:03 GMT20091203033703Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:37:03 GMT20091203033703Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:37:03 GMT20091203033703Years ago, when I was a national newspaper reporter, I interviewed a really interesting American bloke whose job was to analyse what people said, usually for the police. I can&8217;t now remember his name, but I do remember his central message, which is that people always tell the truth &8211; somehow. What they really mean will sneak out despite their best endeavours, although you might need an expert like him with a tape recorder and a very astute ear and questioning method to help things along. This has been a useful party game ever since, notably when you get those tearful press conferences on the news with someone appealing for the murderer of their loved one to come forward&8230; but I digress. What reminded me of this was the fantastic Ed Balls interview on the front of the TES. There are so many holes to pick in what he said that I barely know where to start &8211; except with the sentence which simply jumped out at me. To put it in context, he&8217;s talking about heads and governors having to make hard choices about their school budgets, which he says, will be &8220;rising&8221; but &8220;tougher&8221; than in the past. (Pause for a bit of head scratching). The italics in what follows are mine, by the way. &8220;If they want to keep the one to one tuition, which we&8217;re guaranteeing in the new legislation, and if they want to keep the extra teaching assistants and teachers &8211; over 120,000 more teaching assistants, 40,000 more teachers &8211; and if they want to keep the smaller class sizes, then they will have to look elsewhere for savings to make their budgets add up.&8221; So. Let&8217;s get this straight. If heads want to keep one-to-one tuition (did anyone ever ask if they wanted it?) which the government has guaranteed in new legislation&8230;they&8217;ve got to cut costs elsewhere. Want? If the Government has guaranteed something in the legislation, in what sense do heads have a choice about it? This is a sentence worthy of George Orwell. To continue with our analysis of that one sentence of Balls (Drat. Must learn to be more careful with apostrophes.), he continues with the presumed desire of heads to continue employing the extra TAs and teachers, and having the smaller classes. Well. Either these things are an essential, in which case the Government should continue funding them and make it very clear that they are necessary, or they&8217;re a luxury, in which case that&8217;s where cuts should be made. You can&8217;t have it both ways, and you can&8217;t have it both ways and issue threats. Well, clearly you can, actually, because that&8217;s effectively what the education secretary has done, throwing in a bit of electioneering for good measure. And that&8217;s not the only shocker in the interview. We&8217;re back in the argument that heads have got to federate schools in order to save money and avoid firing teachers and teaching assistants. So it&8217;s bad to fire teachers and teaching assistants, but good to fire heads? Are heads expected to fall on their swords to save their school&8217;s budget (but sacrifice its autonomy)? I&8217;m sorry, but I just don&8217;t get this idea at all. Parents are going to be far from ecstatic about their school losing a head to save money, and becoming a satellite of decisions made elsewhere. Leadership, we&8217;re told, has been the bedrock of school improvements made during the past decade. And the choices seem to be to actively lose heads (fire them? Let them go?) and federate deliberately, or to wait for people to retire or move on and then tack that school on to another one. As my teenage daughter would remark, that&8217;s a bit random. And then who&8217;s going to sort out all the paperwork demanded by Ofsted and the DCSF? I can see votes in cutting back hospital bureaucrats, and I can see votes in cutting back government bureaucrats in the DCSF, Ofsted and all the quangoes. But heads are bureaucrats with a point. People understand why they&8217;re there. So. I think what Ed Balls is really saying is that he wants to cut the education budget but keep all his own staff, and teachers and TAs because he can boast about how many more Labour has provided. And it sounds good to present heads with a choice even if it&8217;s not real. You just couldn&8217;t make it up. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=228Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:32:20 GMT20091130103220Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:32:20 GMT20091130103220Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:32:20 GMT20091130103220Is Labour seriously about to get rid of Sats tests? I would not bet on it just yet. Ed Balls, the schools secretary, appeared to be dangling this tantalising prospect in front of teachers and, no doubt, some parents, when he was quoted last week as saying that the testing system is not &8220;set in stone&8221;. He was &8220;not closing the door on long-term reform&8221;, which prompted headlines including &8220;Ed Balls says Sats could go by 2012&8221;. He then set out a series of measures to raise the profile of teacher assessment which could be seen as paving the way for this becoming the main element of school-by-school accountability from, perhaps, 2012, or even 2011 given that Edexcel only has a one-year contract to mark the tests, finishing in 2010. Mr Balls said that, from next year, teacher assessment (TA) data would be published on a school-by-school basis in league tables alongside test results. This is a return to what used to happen before 1999. Perhaps more significantly, he also said that these TA judgements would be subject to a system of &8220;light touch local moderation&8221;. This suggests other schools would check on their neighbours&8217; results, to provide an element of outside scrutiny. This could be seen as essential part of ensuring public trust in TA, in providing an outside check that teachers were not inflating their pupils&8217; scores. Finally, he hinted that teacher assessment judgements could be used as one of the measures in the new report card system, under which schools are to be judged on a range of indicators, including pupil wellbeing, alongside their traditional academic results. Labour has pledged to introduce these cards, which may or may not replace conventional league tables, in 2011. How much of a commitment to scrapping Sats is this? Well, first it should be acknowledged that simply for a minister to open the way to being quoted as saying he would consider scrapping Sats is a victory of sorts for those who have been campaigning for years for the downsides of high stakes testing to be taken seriously. Until recently, such a move would have been unthinkable: the government told MPs in 2007, for example, that &8220;the benefits of a national system of assessment have been immense&8221;. Ministers were also fond of saying that their test-based accountability system was &8220;non-negotiable&8221;. In the last two years, of course, we have seen key stage 3 tests disappear and the demise of science Sats for 11-year-olds. But there is still plenty of room for scepticism over whether this will really mean the end of the KS2 tests. There is no hard-and-fast commitment here. Teacher assessment might be an element of the report card. It might not. And even if it were, Mr Balls has not said whether or not it would be the only measure used in the report card to judge pupils&8217; academic progress, or a measure to be used alongside the tests. The continued presence of trials of a new form of testing &8211; the single level tests - further muddies the water. And confusingly, in the statement put out by the Department for Children, Schools and Families to announce the latest position, Mr Balls also welcomed comments in the spring, from the government&8217;s &8220;expert group&8221; on assessment, that KS2 tests in English and maths would remain. All of this may be irrelevant, of course, if the Conservatives win the election. They remain committed to tests, although they have talked about moving them to year seven and expressed concern about teaching to the test. My first thought, on hearing of the government&8217;s announcement and Mr Balls&8217;s comments, was to wonder whether all of this was an attempt to sow doubt in the minds of teachers considering a boycott of next year&8217;s Sats. Maybe that was an overly cynical interpretation. But I would caution against reading too much into these stories quite yet.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=227Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:43:45 GMT20091127014345Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:43:45 GMT20091127014345Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:43:45 GMT20091127014345Howling wind, hammering rain, more floods possibly on the way&8230; and in Cumbria school heads are calmly opening up for business. Every workplace in the area is going to be suffering from many of the same logistical problems &8211; but it&8217;s different for schools, where the role is to provide normality for upset or even traumatised children and their families, and work around the difficulties faced by staff. So it was fantastic to hear a report from All Saints primary in Cockermouth on Radio 4, with head Nicola Smallwood explaining in matter-of-fact tones that they had wanted to get things back to normal as soon as possible. Even though, that is, the school kitchen is currently being used as a feeding station for the emergency services. The school is dealing with some upset pupils, particularly the younger ones. But the spirit is clearly upbeat, with the Year 6 kids meeting to organise a fundraising event for flood relief. One teacher interviewed had spent the weekend as a volunteer and would clearly have felt guilty at being in the warm and dry of his workplace had it not been for his role with the pupils. &8220;The children wanted to talk and I have been really pleased with their reaction. But I thought we&8217;d spend minutes on it, and it was an hour.&8221; It&8217;s that kind of story which demonstrates why a recent survey of parents found that heads were among the best leaders in the country, just two percent behind army officers. Interestingly, heads (voted the best leaders by 29 per cent of those polled) were ten percentage points above police officers, and almost 20 per cent above football managers and councillors. Admittedly, the poll was purely of parents, and you might say they are likely to give a different answer to other members of the population. But they are also the main customers of schools (or do I mean stakeholders?) so you&8217;d hope they feel good about heads. Rather less impressive, though, was the reaction of the Scottish schools minister Fiona Hyslop upon arriving at a heads&8217; conference in Glasgow last week, and according to ASCL leader John Dunford causing upset with her &8220;uncalled-for&8221; remarks about the number of &8220;large cars&8221; in the car park. He doesn&8217;t say if she arrived in a chauffeur-driven vehicle herself, so we can only speculate. We can also only speculate on the future of SATs tests since last week&8217;s announcement that teacher assessments would be published from 2011. For the moment, this year&8217;s tests appear to be firmly in place, but Mick Brookes and the NAHT leadership clearly hope there is more to be gained if heads stay firm &8211; and that includes not replying to the QDCA survey of optimum SATs tests timing with a date. After all, what education secretary would want to muck with such a well-respected group of people in an election year? Two interesting bits of zeitgeist this week. The first is that Ofsted seems to be in for a good kicking over inspectors&8217; interpretation of the new framework, and for the way it&8217;s going into children&8217;s services. With a former chief inspector suggesting the agency may simply have taken too much on, there seem to be some interesting developments. And the second is lower key but also interesting: pupil voice. Professor Dennis Hayes &8211; a bit of a character -- says the current &8220;obsession&8221; with consulting pupils over issues such as homework and the school curriculum undermines the power of adults. He&8217;s not wild about pupil voice, as he told the Daily Telegraph after outlining his views in a speech in London. &8220;Everywhere I go the clearest sign of the rejection of adult authority is listening to learner, student, pupil or infant voice. Anybody&8217;s voice but the voice of adults,&8221; he said. &8220;I love debating with pupils and students and getting them to research but basically they know nothing.&8221; Interesting, I thought. The next day my TES arrived, and wonderful Mike Kent &8211; a heads&8217; head &8211; was making a similar argument in his column, pointing out that asking children how they feel will get a response based on that precise moment only, and that the expertise of schools and teachers should not be downgraded. So: is the fashion for pupil voice about to subside a bit? Or is the Government&8217;s planned new bit of legislation about rights and entitlements for pupils about to push the phenomenon further still? Watch this space. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=224Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:56:17 GMT20091123035617Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:56:17 GMT20091123035617Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:56:17 GMT20091123035617You can often learn a bit more about Government policy by the audience they&8217;ve chosen to tell about it. We&8217;ve had an interesting example this weekend, where Ed Balls got into bed with the Sunday Telegraph &8211; probably not, one would suspect, his newspaper of choice. The Telegraph was happy to accept (and edit) Mr Balls&8217; honeyed words about how he plans to chastise local authorities which have failed to get improvement plans sorted in 50 underperforming secondaries. These are newly-acquired powers, which apparently Mr B intends to try out sometime this week. His column also included strong hints as to the contents of the Queen&8217;s Speech this Wednesday, which will set out the final legislative programme of the current Parliament. And possibly the current government. He is promising &8220;stronger powers for parents and local communities to demand change and faster progress&8230; all councils conducting an annual survey of parents on the provision of local secondary schools. If parents are unhappy with the schools around them, local authorities will have to address those concerns. &8220;And where standards are unacceptably low, Ministers will be able to direct a local authority to issue a warning notice to a school and to close any school which fails to comply with a warning notice.&8221; Also on his shopping list are new guarantees for pupils and parents, including an entitlement to &8220;one to one tuition&8221; for children falling behind and &8220;to ensure tough discipline&8221;. And &8211; my favourite -- &8220;we will reduce bureaucracy so that - like colleges, universities and voluntary-aided schools - all academies are guaranteed charitable status.&8221; Not like independent schools then? Better not to mention their charitable status, for some reason. Interestingly, he doesn&8217;t mention much of the other stuff which is going to people the Queen&8217;s Speech, including the teacher MoTs which he promises will put the profession on a par with doctors. For this article is what it is and where it is for purely political reasons. You can almost visualise the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick Of It yelling into a phone in the background. After a few paragraphs outlining how tough he&8217;s going to be, comes this one: &8220;Michael Gove fundamentally disagrees with what he calls our &8216;statist&8217; approach. He does not think we should be intervening where there is under-performance and wants to remove any role for locally elected councils.&8221; An interesting one, this, given that many of the actions of this Government have been to reduce the role of locally elected councils, particularly in education. Also interesting that he is overlooking the Gove intention to jump hard on failing schools. But this is a clear attempt to present Labour as tougher and badder on schools than the Conservatives, to an audience which is likelier to be naturally Tory. It&8217;s beginning to look like schools and education are going to be right in the firing line in the upcoming election &8211; perhaps surprisingly, given the state of the economy and the likely ideological battle over the NHS. And it also looks as though Labour doesn&8217;t feel entirely confident about its record on improving education. It&8217;s not moving fast, either. Cynically, I can see two ways in which the party could attack Gove&8217;s Swedish schools idea whereby parents can set up their own establishment. One is that parents haven&8217;t exactly fallen over themselves to set up their own schools under previous legislation and it&8217;s hard to see them doing it now. Though I suppose it wouldn&8217;t go down well to say that &8220;we sort of tried this and it failed.&8221; And two: the Tories did their own bit of spinning last week and told the TES that groups of expert schools might be good candidates to set up their own schools. Teachers running schools? Nice idea, but it does feel a little like bet-hedging. Anyway, you might expect Labour politicians to think that idea would terrify Tory voters, and to use it accordingly. Interesting that they didn&8217;t. But the bigger picture for school leaders has got to be that the heat is going to be on this autumn as education once again becomes a battleground &8211; with the obvious knock-on effect that no political party is going to be advocating steady-as-we go policies. It&8217;s going to be another bumpy few years. Should you trouble yourself with the upcoming legislative programme? There&8217;s got to be a reasonable chance that the Education Bill won&8217;t make it through both Houses before an election is called (the Tories are apparently geared up for March). There&8217;s also got to be a reasonable chance that the next Government will have entirely different fish to fry and won&8217;t be interested in personal tuition and legally-binding home-school contracts. Either of these look like a potential nightmare for schools, if parents think their children have lost out in their education and threaten legal action. It could even have the curious consequence that schools in catchments of traditional low expectation can heave a sigh of relief, whilst those dealing with more aspirational families acquire shedloads of potential legal trouble along with all those nicely-behaved children. Any incoming government might want to do without this particular bit of legislation. The trouble is that ditching it might attract adverse headlines &8211; and actually, it&8217;s the schools which are likely to be tearing out their hair over it rather than those in charge. It&8217;s beginning to look as if the only escape could be an early election. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=223Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:56:01 GMT20091116115601Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:56:01 GMT20091116115601Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:56:01 GMT20091116115601An experienced key stage 2 English test marker contact of mine has been in touch to argue that the very strange results in some schools this year are no surprise. The reason? The mark scheme, in both reading and writing, was &8220;almost impossible to implement effectively&8221; and sometimes &8220;almost unfathomable&8221;, she says. And this was widely discussed among markers at the time. Both this blog and the TES have been reporting some odder-than-usual patterns in the marking this year, with some heads furious that mistakes have not been corrected even after the reviews process. There has been particular unhappiness with the marking of writing. I spoke to one head whose school&8217;s proportion of level five writers fell from 50 per cent in 2008 to 15 this year. Of 64 papers sent back for review, not one was changed. Teachers on the TES&8217;s online forum also came up with some horror stories, one reporting that their school had 77 per cent of pupils at level 5 in reading and only seven per cent in writing, while another reported an even bigger drop in level five writing scores, from 61 per cent in 2008 to 17 per cent this year. Another said: &8220;Our writing scores dropped from 85 per cent level four and above and 33 per cent level five in 2008 to 47 per cent and 7 per cent this year, with the same teaching staff in year six. The whole experience has left us demoralised and crawling with LA consultants. Already, I am struggling under the pressure to &8216;improve&8217; this year. It is the marking that needs to improve, not our teaching!&8221; It should be said that for years there have been big gaps in the national results for reading and writing, with pupils always faring better at reading. Also, the national figures do not show writing scores nationally as having dropped off more sharply than reading: both fell around one percentage point from 2008 to 2009. The reports from schools, though, illustrate how volatile results can be in individual institutions. Asked about the discrepancy between reading and writing scores in some schools, the marker said: &8220;Markers predicted that during the marking process. We have to follow the mark scheme and all related guidance, and this year the nature of all of that was resulting in a noticeable number of low scores for writing.&8221; She added: &8220;In past years, pupils could write &8216;off-piste&8217;, and although one would have to lower the mark slightly for Composition and Effect, the piece could be awarded fairly good marks if not meeting the task set. &8220;That has now changed, and children lose significant marks if they do not follow the prompt accurately.&8221; She adds that this year, boys were favoured by the notorious longer writing task in which pupils were asked to write about a pair of trainers. She said: &8220;The boys were far more able to wax lyrical about the expectations of a pair of trainers, with girls not being able to get much beyond the colour of the laces and sparkly decoration.&8221; The marker told me in the summer that the mark scheme was &8220;very complicated and often unfathomable&8221; and &8220;almost impossible to implement effectively&8221; because of contradictions within it. This marker, however, has since received an A grade rating. She says that, although markers were aware of problems and &8220;anomalies&8221; in the rules for marking writing and reading early on, which had not emerged in previous years, there was little they could do about it because they could not override the mark scheme. This detail should be contrasted with the analysis of the system provided by the official figures. Data published this month show that schools requested reviews on around 3 per cent of scripts, or around 50,000, with around one in 10 of these changing level as a result, or well under 1 per cent of the total. The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency suggested the figures showed that marking was consistent and that quality assurance procedures were effective. As ever, though, national average figures do not tell the whole story.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=221Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:50:49 GMT20091116095049Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:50:49 GMT20091116095049Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:50:49 GMT20091116095049I don&8217;t know what gets into Prime Ministers sometimes. As if they haven&8217;t got enough to do with wars, the world economy, global warming and the vegetable patch at 10 Downing Street, they have to put in their two pence worth on SATs. (Or, with inflation, their two quids worth.) Major did it, Blair did it and now Brown is at it under the TES heading: &8216;The Prime Minister sets out his vision for 21st-century education.&8217; with the by- line: &8216;Writing exclusively for the TES, PM says primary testing is vital to accountability.&8217; Accountability note, not learning! Much of what he says is very laudable. Who can argue with his school motto recited on his first day in Downing Street: &8216;I will try my utmost&8217;? Funny things mottos. There is a school which used to be divided into a girls&8217; and boys&8217; school. The girl&8217;s motto was: In Veritate Victoria (the not terribly illuminating &8216;Victory lies in the Truth.&8217;) The boy&8217;s motto was &8216;I byde my time.&8217; My own school motto was in Latin which put paid to a large selection of the intake. It was &8216;Indivisa Manent&8217; (Undivided we stand.) At first sight. it seems to have meaning but when you get down to living up to it, so to speak, it is a lot easier for a teacher to admonish a pupil for not doing his or her utmost (What is the opposite of utmost I hear you cry? ) than to harangue form 3B for standing divided. But enough of mottos! If all children are to have the precious gift of &8216;opportunity,&8217; says the PM there is no more important job than being a teacher? (Not even Prime Minister, Prime Minister!)But you can&8217;t just jump from there, to saying &8216;So we must have SATs and performance tables then.&8217; We are happy to share with you also Ofsted&8217;s view that we currently have &8216;the best generation ever of dedicated professionals.&8217; It is &8216;to them that we must turn&8217; and &8216;in them we must place out trust, drawing on their expertise, passion and commitment.&8217; That is all very well Prime Minister but when their expertise, their passion and their commitment are spent and they tell you they could achieve so much more without SATs or performance tables to jolly them along, why don&8217;t you listen to them? Indeed have you and your Ministers caught up in your obsession with targets, transparency and accountability, ever paused for a moment to consider the simple arguments against having SATs and performance tables? Do you not realise that all schools cannot all be equal first in a performance table, or the same school be first all the time? Might it not be obvious that if 30 children in a classroom have all just arrived without English as their mother tongue, there is a small possibility that they will score less well in a test than 30 children for whom English is their mother tongue let alone 30 children in an affluent area with supportive parents. But above all, do you not see the contradiction between wanting teachers to perform small miracles every day, to stretch and excite pupils whilst, at the same time having to force feed them to get better SATs scores. Little wonder that that teaching to the test is rife. You urge schools and teachers to do all they can &8216;to ensure children have mastered the basics by the end of primary school, to transform the prospects of every pupil, particularly those from modest backgrounds by responding to their personal needs.&8217; Of course the profession shares those aspirations with you, so why do you and your Ministers make it so much harder to do their utmost. How about it Mr Brown?http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=210Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:25:41 GMT20091111102541Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:25:41 GMT20091111102541Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:25:41 GMT20091111102541I&8217;ve done more headscratching than usual over today&8217;s blog (and before you ask: not, it&8217;s not nits). You&8217;re all busy doing the stuff school leaders do in the thick of the autumn term, with perhaps more than one eye on Rose review curriculum changes, or considering how to answer the indicative poll on a possible boycott of next summer&8217;s tests. And the politicians, mercifully, have gone all quiet since Ed Balls&8217;s foray into sex ed last week. Though that was a revealing episode in itself. The news media is absolutely fascinated by school sex lessons, isn&8217;t it? To the extent that last week&8217;s headline was not about the terrific new syllabus, but that parents can&8217;t fish their Year 11 offspring (many of whom may already be sexually active) out of the lessons. Ever since the furore over the book Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin, and how it was used in a limited way in some schools, the reactionary end of the press has been telling us that kids are being taught how to 'Do It' at a disgustingly early age and that messages about contraception just lead to a rise in teenage pregnancies. You&8217;ll know it&8217;s the Daily Mail if it includes the line that &8220;children are losing their innocence&8221;. Innocence? In a society of explicit pop lyrics and even more explicit early evening soap operas, I&8217;m not too sure how kids can ever be innocent. The crime would be to keep them ignorant, so that they can&8217;t make sense of what the media throws at them every day. And you can shelter children from the TV, internet, radio and newspapers all you like, but it&8217;s a bit more difficult to deafen them to horribly savvy teenage siblings, whether their own or someone else&8217;s. When a perfectly ordinary child from a very middle-class home does as instructed and posts an anonymous question for discussion during the sex ed class &8211; and that question is &8220;Can you do it with your bum?&8221; then it&8217;s hard to see what innocence might be damaged. This isn&8217;t a newspaper urban myth either: I heard about it from the teacher involved, who had taken it in her stride and then talked to colleagues about how to handle it. The interesting thing is that as I recall the question hadn&8217;t been deliberately provocative, but a general, genuine enquiry. A tiny proportion of parents do choose to remove their children from lessons now, but beyond that the subject is so little of an issue that when schools invite parents to view The Film they&8217;ll be showing to year 5 or 6, perhaps a third of them choose to attend. Beyond that, parents outside faith schools are rarely told exactly what will be taught, and a vanishingly small proportion of them choose to ask. How many currently know they&8217;ve got the right of withdrawal? How many of them know the sex ed syllabus is currently drawn up locally? Very few, is the answer: and that&8217;s because the vast majority feel safe with what their school chooses to do. It&8217;s just that the media and a few loud pundits don&8217;t get that. But then, there&8217;s a lot about education that the media doesn&8217;t get &8211; probably in common with the rest of the adult population as well. And although a lot of it is our fault for assuming that we all know about school because we&8217;ve all been to one, it&8217;s also up to the profession to keep us up to date. And to do it in language we can all understand, too. I had a fabulously ranty email this week from Dave Borrie, head at Shaw Primary in Wiltshire, about an interview John Humpries did on the Today programme last week. (Thanks, Dave.) Here&8217;s a flavour&8230; &8220;His emotive and aggressive response to the thought of teachers and heads getting hummy with students, being human, in other words, rather than distant, authoritarian figures, was amazing and the reaction to the word Headlearner was positively Gradgrindian! He's lost a lot of my respect... &8220;Why, oh, why is education seen as a preserve of the National Trust or English Heritage? We just aren't allowed to make a curriculum and schools fit for the 21st Century and the challenges of tomorrow!&8221; I can see where Dave&8217;s coming from, and have a lot of sympathy for him. Humphries and his interview subject were somewhere back in the 1950s, and things have changed since then, usually for good reasons. But then I remembered the comments made by Libby Purves this week about her reasons to stop presenting The Learning Curve after a ten year stint. "I had to go to the controller and say that I was actually afraid I was going to slap somebody," she said at a lecture organised by Theos, the think tank for religious affairs, in Westminster. "I told him that if I had to talk to any more educationalists or curriculum designers violence might happen." Now, Libby knows her stuff. So I think there is a genuine disconnect here, either of ideas or presentation. Talk of 21st century schools and lifelong learning all you like, but unless you explain precisely what you mean by that, most people think you&8217;re talking nonsense. Because, they reason, surely the fundamental principle of school remains the same? Apart from computers, what can have changed? In the coming months, there are going to be some battles fought over education as politicians line up to attack or defend the Diploma, traditional/modern teaching methods and all the rest of it. There may also be public relations battles over the KS2 tests. Being a Headlearner is a perfectly valid concept for schools &8211; but only if you explain it to the outside world without using jargon, and are prepared to good-humouredly repeat that explanation to anyone who raises an eyebrow. And that goes for everything else which is going on in schools which may have changed over the years. Embedding change really does take time, and in a nation where most adults still think about headmasters and mistresses, headlearner is probably a jump too far. After all, think about your reaction if your hospital consultant described him or herself as a learner, even if you know perfectly well that he has to do professional development too. It&8217;s looking like we&8217;re on the cusp of big changes again. If you get a chance to get out there and explain precisely what your 21st century school is doing, in simple terms, then do it. It&8217;s the only way John and Libby and their huge audiences are really going to catch on to what you&8217;re doing.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=209Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:50:44 GMT20091110115044Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:50:44 GMT20091110115044Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:50:44 GMT20091110115044Do any members know of any good provision in this field? A member who is Head of a PRU is losing his only Maths specialist due to sickness and has a major problem in meeting the needs of a student studying GCSE Maths. Any ideas for an online solution or part solution?http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=207Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:51:36 GMT20091105045136Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:51:36 GMT20091105045136Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:51:36 GMT20091105045136http://www.agent4change.net/ is strongly recommended. It is a lively and accessible site that appears to cover all major current issues. There is some interesting stuff on learning platforms in the wake of Becta's recently published annual review of the Harnessing Technology initiative. A summary of its main findings will be posted on this blog in the near future. We are very interested in gathering members' views on learning platforms. Becta's review confirms Ofsted's description of their implementation as being akin to a 'cottage industry' (January 2009) The ICT Committee has Learning Platforms on its agenda for its meeting on November 19th and your contributions to help inform this discussion are warmly invited.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=206Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:47:46 GMT20091105044746Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:47:46 GMT20091105044746Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:28:30 GMT20091106042830Welcome to the NAHT's latest blog. It is hoped that this will become a lively forum in which members share their concerns, thoughts and experiences of all aspects of ICT in schools including funding, procurement, resources, curriculum and pedagogy. It will also provide an opportunity to find out how the ICT Committee is working on your behalf and for you to suggest areas that your committee ought to be addressing. I am the serving officer for the committee and represent NAHT on a number of Becta bodies and also the Partnership for Schools 'Leading Learning' group. Please do not hesitate to contact me by e-mail (sionh@naht.org.uk) telephone (01444 472437) or mobile (07595657805)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/ict-blog/?blogpost=205Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:36:16 GMT20091105043616Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:36:16 GMT20091105043616Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:28:51 GMT20091106042851Postal workers permitting, NAHT and NUT members will be getting an important document over the next few days which just might have some far-reaching consequences. You&8217;ll probably know it&8217;s about the possibility of taking action over the KS2 tests: would you like to see them abolished; would you be willing not to administer the tests next summer; and would you like to see their phased abolition? Answering yes to the above doesn&8217;t yet commit you to anything, but it&8217;s another line in the sand for the membership of both organisation, and for everyone concerned with primary education. Interestingly, it looks as if the Government is slightly rattled by the chance of action against next year&8217;s tests. It&8217;s not every day you get Gordon Brown (or, more likely, his chief spindoctor) writing in the TES, though it&8217;s not unprecedented &8211; I seem to remember Tony Blair did it once or twice. Interesting message though &8211; talk about the velvet glove on the clunking fist. Or do I mean a lump of lead in an old sock? Boiled down, he seems to be saying that the Government has spent its time in office whacking schools into line and now that there&8217;s conformity and improved performance it&8217;s possible to loosen the leash. That&8217;s as long as schools and teachers behave, of course. And one of the ways of making sure you behave is those external tests at KS2, along with GCSEs and A Levels, which are apparently vital to &8220;hold schools to account&8221;. Interesting to see it so explicitly put when the official line has been that such tests are all about ensuring that children reach the expected level, and recognising children&8217;s achievements. As for GCSE and A Level &8211; well, always thought those exams were more about ensuring the lifechances of the individual. You mean they&8217;re just to tell us how good the schools are so that parents can lie to get a place there for their own kids? Anyway. Surely there&8217;s cheaper ways of holding schools to account than externally testing every pupil? Read your consultation paper carefully, and you&8217;ll find suggestions for how this might be done. You&8217;d have thought the DFES, with a little encouragement from the Treasury, might have been able to come up with its own ideas on this. So. If the overwhelming answer to all three questions is yes, then the Government may have a fight on its hands. I wouldn&8217;t expect a boycott to get much support from the Tories, either, even though they&8217;ve been talking about moving KS2 tests to year 7: they&8217;re not going to want to support industrial action on the eve of an election. That election is a major reason the Government is palpably nervous on this one. Also, if there&8217;s one respected group of people left in the country, it&8217;s probably primary heads. The Mail may set its attack dogs on &8220;trendy heads&8221; (no doubt trained in those terribly Lefty colleges), but there&8217;s an awful lot of parents out there with very different personal experience. By the nature of the job, primary heads tend to be known personally to parents. And unless something&8217;s gone wrong, the head will have earned the respect of the parents, which then tends to be extended to the whole profession. Moreover, even if the boycott does go ahead the children will be assessed. Unlike the postal dispute (which may mean your consultation paper doesn&8217;t arrive till December), it would appear to have little deleterious impact apart from doing an army of test markers out of a few extra bob. Children would not actually miss out at all. It could be, if you like, a victimless crime. Given the recent fiasco over KS2 tests and the dumping of those at KS3, it&8217;s hard to see much of a head of steam building up over this. But on the other hand, it&8217;s individual heads who will be getting the pressure piled on to comply. And pressure there would be, because the Government can&8217;t risk losing face at this point in its proceedings. It&8217;s even helped to box itself in by preventing Sir Jim Rose from looking at Sats in his primary report, and acquiring an expert group report which recommended that they continue. It&8217;s going to be really interesting to see how this one develops. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.com.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=204Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:10:37 GMT20091103031037Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:10:37 GMT20091103031037Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:12:07 GMT20091103031207Members have raised concerns about a clash on June 8th 2010 when GCSE French and Religious Studies are timetabled at the same time. Initial representations to JCQ to resolve this led to an erroneous response. When JCQ realised that an error had been made it was too late to change the arrangements. This could therefore lead to considerable inconvenience and logistical problems for many centres. Members are advised to ensure that arrangements made are consistent with the procedures contained in....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=203Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:49:38 GMT20091030044938Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:49:38 GMT20091030044938Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:34:40 GMT20091117023440Gordon Brown makes a superficially attractive case for, apparently, handing more freedom to classroom professionals in this week&8217;s TES. But this &8220;freedom&8221;, the concept of which is not new at all, will be illusory as long as the current test-based accountability regime survives. The argument the Prime Minister seeks to make has been around since at least the early 1990s, in debates about public sector reform &8211; or New Public Management, in the jargon - around the globe. In the article, Mr Brown makes much of the Government&8217;s recent moves which could be seen as devolving power from the political centre to those in the classroom. For example, it is replacing the National Strategies with a system in which schools will be able to choose for themselves the teaching and improvement advice they choose to buy in. Also, it is reducing the content of the national curriculum in primaries, following a similar move in secondaries, with the intention of allowing teachers more freedom as to what they teach. So far, so warm and cuddly for the TES&8217;s readership, and in keeping with the desire of politicians of all parties to be seen as handing power to the front line. The quid pro quo, though, is that with this freedom comes responsibility. Schools will continue to be held accountable for their performance, through the high-stakes testing system. This is in line with the thinking behind New Public Management, which says that managers do not have to dictate to workers, in any field, precisely the tasks they must perform. The route the workforce chooses to take to improve the quality of what they are doing is up to them. But they must be held to account, through a series of performance measures, for their success. I have never been convinced by the line that such a system is actually successful in devolving power to the front line. For, at base, and most crudely, the argument can be summed up as: &8220;Do what you like. But if you fail to perform, according to the indicators that I set for you, I will sack you.&8221; That sounds like a strange form of &8220;freedom&8221; to me, and it is clear who still calls the shots. Arguably, it is creepy, too, giving those at the centre the chance to claim devolution, while in reality continuing to pull the strings. For me, it is more centralising than a system which set out, for example, a detailed curriculum which teachers should follow but did not have strong sanctions for failing to meet centrally-determined priority pupil &8220;outcomes&8221; at the end. As many have argued, while the Rose Review of the primary curriculum is indeed setting out the potential for greater freedoms for schools over the curriculum, it was barred from looking at testing. And while high-stakes assessment, with Ofsted inspections and the rest hingeing on it, continues to exist, of course teachers will not feel very free to do much other than focus very carefully on the content of the tests. The current Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, which is going through Parliament, illustrates the centralisation lurking. It gives the Secretary of State the right to intervene &8211; to direct local authorities to take action &8211; in schools which are not just deemed to be underperforming as measured, presumably, by national test and exam results. No, remarkably, he will also have these powers for schools which &8220;may in the future be low-performing&8221;. Thus is the notion of &8220;pre-crime&8221;, familiar from the Tom Cruise film Minority Report in which Cruise seeks to prevent illegality by reading minds to discern illegal intentions, being introduced into English education law. Whatever the arguments in favour or against handing more power to the teaching profession, one thing should be made clear: this &8220;freedom&8221; is on the Government&8217;s terms, and a limited one at that. See http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6026361 and http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6026416http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=200Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:54:31 GMT20091030015431Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:54:31 GMT20091030015431Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:54:31 GMT20091030015431Mick Brookes Roundup - Teaching Awards 2009.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretarys-roundup-22/Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:36:01 GMT20091027093601Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:48:15 GMT20091026044815Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:35:52 GMT2009102709355216738Arguably the most revealing statement of last week&8217;s exhaustive and deeply impressive Cambridge Primary Review report is to be found tucked away on page 478 of this gargantuan read. The review team, led by Professor Robin Alexander, were reporting on the level of engagement of ministers and officials with their work. Knowing that Whitehall, Westminster and media newsrooms are busy places, the team had decided to produce not just lengthy interim reports as part of the review process, but short three- to four-page summaries of them. The team would then have meetings with officials to discuss the findings, knowing that the other side would have had a chance at least to read and digest these shorter reports. But the review says: &8220;At our meetings with senior DCSF officials and advisers, it became apparent that the full reports were rarely opened and even the briefings were unlikely to have been read.&8221; So here, then, was an inquiry which had built up an enormous amount of evidence, not just from the academics writing the report but from meetings (238 of them) with pupils, parents, governors, teachers and their representative organisations, as well as politicians; from written submissions (1,052); and from surveys of previous research. But Whitehall was not interested, presumably since it did not fit its agenda. The inquiry had not been set up by Government, could not be controlled by Government and had things to say which were unpopular with Government. The fact that its findings were based on solid consultation with the public was, then, neither here nor there. It simply was not to be listened to. If the above sounds world-weary, I think this is unavoidable, particularly for anyone who now watches the political process close-up. In recent years, for example, I have also seen ministers resisting calls for a proper inquiry into the effects of teaching to the test in schools, presumably because this could be politically inconvenient &8211; never mind the effect on the pupils. And the fall-out from last year&8217;s Sats marking debacle showed how political accountability, advocated as inescapable for those working on the frontline, can operate in such a way that civil servants and ministers are able to exert large influence behind the scenes but be nowhere to be seen when something goes wrong. The paradox of this, and in the sense the tragedy of our system at the moment, is implicit in Professor Alexander&8217;s report. Consider two sets of people: those working in our schools, and those involved in education at the political level: politicians, civil servants and advisers. Among the former, I think there is plenty of idealism and commitment, and a great many people trying to do their best for children. In Whitehall and Westminster, many people are also, no doubt, well-intentioned. Yet their actions are constrained by the often cynical logic of the political process. For an example of this cynicism taken to its most extreme form, see a blog posting by the former political adviser Conor Ryan following the review&8217;s curriculum report, in February. To put it mildly, the fostering of independence of thought, constructive criticism and even-handedness with empirical evidence are not among the strengths of the political centre. The great shame is that the accountability apparatus now vests so much power in the latter group, at the expense of the former. The wave of support which seems to have come the Primary Review&8217;s way, at the expense of those within the Westminster village who sought to rubbish it, is well-deserved. It suggests that we deserve better than what we are currently getting from our political masters, not least the courtesy to listen to what people really think about the education system, which they oversee on our behalf. Please read an entry on this on my blog, posted at the time of the review&8217;s interim report on the curriculum: http://www.educationbynumbers.org.uk/2009/03/04/time-to-move-on-conor/http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=199Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:00:14 GMT20091020120014Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:00:14 GMT20091020120014Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:00:14 GMT20091020120014To an outsider to teaching such as me, it is staggering. The weight now placed on test results as verdicts on the quality of pupils&8217; education is huge. Heads&8217; careers can rest on them. Test marks appear to be taken by inspectors as gospel. Pupils&8217; targets for future attainment are calculated on them. Yet the accuracy and reliability of the marking process is, far too often, alarmingly fragile. At the bottom of the accountability regime sit hard-pressed part-time markers doing their best to follow a mark scheme which, for English at least, is clearly subject to interpretation. Marking errors appear not always to be corrected, sometimes even after appeals. And schools can be lauded or damned on the basis of a handful of pupils&8217; performances under this system on a single day. Why is this situation still tolerated, I wonder? The latest jaw-dropping evidence on test marking came my way last week, courtesy of the NAHT, who put me in touch with head teachers. It was also the subject of a front-page story in the TES; see: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6024107 My evidence comes after speaking to just a few heads, mainly from one local authority, Wolverhampton, who got in touch with the union. They relate to the writing marking and include: - The head of a school who spent a week with her deputy going through 60 papers last term, after being shocked by what the school saw as severe under-marking. The head, Gill Morris of Northwood Park primary, was until recently herself a senior English marker. Only 39 per cent of her pupils achieved level four in writing this year, while none got level five, compared to figures for reading of 75 and 18 per cent respectively. The school sent the scripts back for review, and not a single mark was changed. They appear not even to have been re-marked. Nor was any of the detailed points made by the school addressed. There appears to be no further appeal. - Another school , Oak Meadows, had two pupils&8217; writing papers which were returned unmarked first time around. After 23 papers were sent back for review, the school&8217;s percentage of level fours in English jumped from 61 to 70 per cent. - Mick Murphy, at Claregate primary, sent back writing papers for review thinking they had been under-marked, but found 15 pupils&8217; papers returned having been given a lower mark than they originally obtained. Two pupils fell a level in English. Mr Murphy said he would have to call the pupils&8217; parents to explain. &8220;I can take this on the chin. But how can a child do that, when they think they have achieved a level and then it is taken away from them?&8221; he said. - Adrian Hayes, head of Our Lady Immaculate RC Primary, Chelmsford, asked for a review after his level five English scores dropped from 50 to 15 per cent this year. The school spent more than &163;1,000 checking the marking itself. Some of its reading papers were upgraded on appeal, although Mr Hayes was not concerned about the reading marking. But of the 64 papers sent back to be re-marked for writing, not a single mark was changed. Mr Hayes fears that his next Ofsted will judge him on the results. The particular worry for those heads who remain unhappy following the reviews process is that, while they can express their anger about the &8220;process&8221; under which these took place, there now appears no chance for their results to be overturned after appeal &8211; even when no re-marking appears to have taken place. Another justifiable fear may be that pupils given inaccurately low test results could find the targets, or &8220;aspirations&8221;, generated for them in secondary school under the Fischer Family Trust data system set too low. I am keen on writing more about the link between test results and Ofsted inspections, so please watch this space. I am also keen to talk to more heads who have been affected, so please email either me at warwickmansell@gmail.com or the NAHT&8217;s Ian Foster: ianf@naht.org.uk.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=198Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:59:26 GMT20091020115926Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:59:26 GMT20091020115926Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:59:26 GMT20091020115926QCDA appears to have woken up to the fact that guidance hitherto issued regarding the above has been poorly focussed and too scattered. A consultant (!) has been appointed to produce guidance and I have been invited to take part in this process. They are seeking examples of good practice, planning, etc to be included in the material they are producing. It is difficult to envisage many examples of actual good practice at this stage given the newness of the courses. However, examples of good....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=197Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:33:30 GMT20091014093330Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:33:30 GMT20091014093330Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:33:30 GMT20091014093330Mick Brookes talks to members about the Assessment reform campaign and what members can do further the campaignhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/copyof-general-secretarys-roundup-21/Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:55:41 GMT20091013015541Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:51:36 GMT20091013015136Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:55:32 GMT2009101301553216631How does the debate on high-stakes testing in America compare to the one which has been going on over here? This is a question which I found interesting in researching my 2007 book on our assessment system. Are we being led, as in so many areas of life, into an American system of testing, which is already controversial on the other side of the Atlantic? Or is the English regime ahead of the American in terms of the pressure, issuing from national politicians, which it piles on schools to raise test scores? Actually, I think the answer is &8220;a bit of both&8221;. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the intensely controversial law on testing implemented by George Bush in 2002 and retained under the Obama government, there can be what seem to me staggeringly crude interventions in schools which are struggling with their test results. These include giving the state in which the school is located the right to close it, or to stop pupils moving to the next year group, to force them to attend summer school or to withhold performance pay for teachers. Some aspects of American education which are not such an issue over here, such as bigger differences in funding between schools in different neighbourhoods, can also add fuel to the debate. On the other hand, the American system is not nearly as centralised as ours: the powers of Washington DC to set the NCLB framework are offset by the fact that schooling is basically the responsibility of states, rather than the federal government. No Child Left Behind forces states to set pupils a test every year from years 3 to 8, but the states set the tests themselves. Now new research suggests that No Child Left Behind is unpopular with the general public, and becoming more so. The American education magazine Phi Delta Kappan, for which I should say I am now an online columnist on UK schools policy, has been administering an annual opinion poll on education for the past 41 years. The survey, carried out with pollsters Gallup on a representative sample of the public, is admirably scientific. Its latest incarnation found that in 2009 only 28 per cent viewed No Child Left Behind favourably, compared to 48 per cent who viewed it unfavourably. Even among Republican voters, who tended to be more supportive of NCLB than Democrats, a narrow majority were against the policy. The national percentage viewing it unfavourably has risen from 40 per cent two years ago. Asked directly if they thought NCLB was &8220;helping&8221; or &8220;hurting&8221; schools in their community, more of those polled &8211; 29 per cent &8211; said it was hurting than helping (24 per cent). Some 43 per cent said it made no difference. All of this suggests that the arguments often used to support high-stakes testing &8211; that it provides objective information to parents on standards and helps teachers to focus on what is necessary to help their pupils improve &8211; are being questioned by people who can see that things are not quite so simple in the real world. Teaching to the test is a clear worry in the US. That said, the poll did uncover strong support for the idea of testing and the &8220;tracking&8221; of students&8217; progress through test results, with 66 per cent in favour of the concept of annual tests for grades three to eight. As many people have argued, however, it is not just the existence of testing, but the uses to which test data is put, which is crucial. Warwick Mansell is author of Education by Numbers: the Tyranny of Testing (Politico&8217;s)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=194Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:17:12 GMT20091008121712Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:17:12 GMT20091008121712Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:17:12 GMT20091008121712The NAHT hit the front page of the Times Educational Supplement on 2 October. The main headline screamed as they say in the tabloids &8216;Heads&8217; Fury at &8216;injustice&8217; of Rejected KS2 Appeals.&8217; The sub headline read &8216;Unprecedented level of disquiet in primaries as English written SATs not regraded.&8217; From my observations over twenty years or so, if the level of disquiet is unprecedented then it must be pretty huge or whatever word best describes a high level of disquiet. The upheaval is over the high number of rejections in response to appeals over KS2 marks, which Heads argue, is unfair. Teachers, pupils and parents put a very high premium on &8216;fairness.&8217; Two specific examples stand out. One school where the teacher who prepared the appeal is actually a marker, asked for a remark of 14 scripts and only one was changed. The other was not awarding a spelling mark to a child for spelling &8216;enormous&8217; correctly. Perhaps he or she was writing about &8216;enormous disquiet.&8217; To the outsider it looks very much as if the latest body responsible QCDA (if in doubt change the name and pass the scapegoat ) has decided to flex some sort of muscle, declare that all is well with the system and that appeals will not be tolerated. This attitude is hardly endearing when already there is a major call from the NAHT/NUT to abolish the KS2 SATs and to come up with a better form of assessment. But should all the energy should be channelled into fighting the SATs alone. Certainly the profession has had enough of flawed assessment arrangements sapping pupil confidence and teacher morale but surely the worse evil is for these results to be used as the basis for creating flawed competitive performance tables and, in too many cases, for inviting a team of inspectors to come on a jolly visit. That is why, o powers that be, that people get very angry indeed and get themselves on the front page of the Times Educational Supplement, when unfairness, incompetence and intransigence hold sway. At the very least, if the wretched performance tables or whatever new name they masquerade under, are to continue then the SATs have to do what it says on the tin: The tests and tasks should enable pupils to perform at their best level and the majority of pupils to achieve level 4, the level at which an 11 year old should be able to cope with the demands of the Secondary School curriculum in Year 7. The mark schemes must underpin the tests and have to be fair and valid. The markers have to apply the mark schemes consistently and be properly trained and monitored. An appeals process should be seen to be rigorous but fair. This year, if the strength of colleague comments is anything to go by, the expectations of the above have fallen way short of the mark. Somehow, in its assault on the SATs the Headteacher and Teacher Unions need to persuade the politicians and the media that tests and exams are not an exact science, that the present system is badly flawed and that the first step has to be the abolition of performance tables. A few years ago, just before she resigned unexpectedly as Secretary of State, Estelle Morris, who until then had seemed well-attuned to the views of the profession, declared in a speech that if league tables were acceptable for football then why not for schools. If this is to remain as public policy then schools should be allowed to buy pupils on the open transfer market and SATs should be taken on a squad system whereby specialist mathematicians could be allowed into the exam room in the last few minutes to mop up any remaining damn tricky sums.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/arthur-de-caux/?blogpost=193Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:13:30 GMT20091008121330Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:13:30 GMT20091008121330Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:14:06 GMT20091008121406I&8217;m just learning how to use Twitter, one of those new-fangled social networking sites, and boy, it lets you know some odd things. Put very simply, you sign up to &8220;follow&8221; the Twitterings (and that&8217;s often a very apt description) of people or organisations that interest you. And then you get all sorts of stuff coming your way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, politicians and government departments are very keen on using this new method of making us feel in the loop. So I&8217;m following Ed Balls. And this Tweet sent me to bed last night scratching my head in puzzlement. &8220;in a caravan in the Lakes finalising our new careers advice strategy... and baking a chocolate and passion fruit roulade (swiss roll)&8221; In a caravan? Well, I suppose it&8217;s half term. And it&8217;s very Man of the People. Don&8217;t suppose government ministers are allowed to be seen in hotels with their families during a recession. Finalising our new careers advice strategy? Suggests it&8217;s not a family holiday then. &8230; and baking a chocolate and passion fruit roulade? So is it a family holiday, or isn&8217;t it? Do ministers routinely bake fancy cakes for their staff whilst finalising a careers strategy? Or do they routinely finalise careers strategies whilst on a family caravan holiday in the Lakes? Must be a big caravan if you can bake a roulade AND finalise a strategy inside it, with either a full complement of kids or a full complement of advisers. Or, worse, both. Ugh. Either way, surely a chocolate and passion fruit roulade doesn&8217;t meet healthy eating guidelines which schools are urged to follow? And most mysterious of all, why call it a roulade and then explain it&8217;s a swiss roll? Is that going for the middle class vote and the working class one as well? Baffled, I gave up. It&8217;s just amazing how much confusion and ambiguity can be contained in less than 160 characters. Today, it turns out, the government is launching a pilot careers advice scheme in seven areas, aimed at primary children in deprived areas. As I understand it, the idea is to raise aspirations early, suggest the idea of university and get parents talking to their kids about the sort of jobs they might do in future. Interestingly, Sutton Trust research shows that three quarters of 11 year olds think they might go to university, so there appears to be no lack of aspiration there. But what happens next? And here, we perhaps come back to the underachievement of white working class boys. Some of the problem is undoubtedly lack of aspiration but there is more to it than that. Some secondary teachers I&8217;ve talked to say the problem is that no-one&8217;s made the connection for these boys between doing well and school and getting a good job later. In middle-class homes, that connection is made explicit and implicit: parents and relatives explain exactly why you need to sit down and listen, and how that attention is likely to lead to good exam results and then on to more education. But in families with less positive experiences of education and employment, the link is less likely to be made and reinforced. So if the school pilots are able to address some of this, it might genuinely give children the edge that middle class families often give. And in an age where kids&8217; ambitions can be summed up as a desire for fame, the idea of some early or consistent career advice can only be a good thing. Another bit of Sutton Trust research found the proportion of 15 year olds who recalled having formal adviser meetings fell from 85% in 1997 to 55% in 2008. During the same period the numbers of those who had learned &8220;something&8221; or better from careers advisers or teachers halved to 25 per cent. Only 22 per cent had any form of careers talk, down from 45 per cent. Now that is truly shocking, and the upside information &8211; that many more kids had visited university &8211; doesn&8217;t really help. Again, middle-class parents are probably likelier to talk about careers with their children, even if their information may be limited or out of date, so again, it&8217;s the deprived kids who really miss out. And if the bulk of the information kids are getting is university related, that may certainly influence them to go there. But if they are doing this with the vague idea that a career will suggest itself at some point when they are there, then there&8217;s every likelihood that they&8217;ll emerge still without the faintest idea, and possibly without the right qualifications as well. Not really surprising that poorer families are still suspicious of university education, is it? Accruing debt with no clear idea of how it will be paid off is not going to appeal to poorer families &8211; and that&8217;s a sensible approach. I&8217;ve long thought that was the real Achilles heel of the AimHigher approach. Debt is real, and scary, and it really isn&8217;t bright to incur it without a clear plan of how to pay it off. The problem is that many middle-class kids did go to university with no clear career plan &8211; but that was when a degree was a huge premium in itself, whatever subject it was in, and before the days of fees and loans. I'm not advocating vocational courses, but we seem to have hung on to that old-fashioned approach of university being a good place to grow up and delay the evil day of deciding on the future, despite new circumstances. Careers information really is the missing link for equalising opportunity, and it&8217;s a scandal that it is currently a big hole in the system. I&8217;m still completely mystified by the caravan and the roulade, but if those are what it takes to help great swathes of children, then fine. Desperate means, desperate measures. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=191Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:27:19 GMT20090930062719Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:27:19 GMT20090930062719Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:17:40 GMT20091026051740Politicians can be just breathtaking sometimes. The official message for years has been that headship is so important that it has to be renamed Leadership, with a whole college dedicated to its promulgation and Ofsted inspectors checking out how it works in each school. But now heads are the first port of call when it comes to saving public money, named by Ed Balls as part of the &8220;bureaucracy&8221; which can be trimmed down to save a couple of billion quid. If heads are bureaucrats, it&8217;s largely because this government has made them so. Now that the success of a school depends on its jumping through various hoops and meeting myriad targets, then the success of a head depends on making all that happen. Newer heads might take all this for granted: if so, check out the TES website for past columns by Mike Kent, who retains the ability to be cavalier about official form-filling. I can think of many more painless ways of saving money, starting with the enormous bureaucracy of the KS2 tests and the inspection regime. There could be savings at the National College for School Leadership itself, which has just spent seven grand asking kids who their ideal head would be. (David Tennant, since you ask &8211; a fine choice. But I could probably have found that out for the price of a box of sweeties and a CRB check). And yes, I know seven grand is a drop in the ocean &8211; but take care of the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves, as my gran used to say. I might also reconsider putting vast sums into those academies which aren&8217;t actually replacing failing schools. But there is more than a whiff of political expediency about this, and in more ways than one. Ed Balls is talking about creating more school federations. This was an option anyway, because of a looming shortage of heads &8211; but quite convenient to be able to kill two birds with one stone. But does it actually save money to have federations in this way? You might have one superhead earning a bit over the odds, but then each school has to have its own raft of deputies and so on to actually run the thing. How much money is actually saved? And then, if you&8217;re getting the back-office staff to do for two schools rather than one, why not really save money and get a lot of the admin work and schools spending a bit more centralised? We could call it&8230;. a local authority. Nah, silly idea. Governments have spent the last 20 years trying to get rid of those, haven&8217;t they? Being cynical, I also wonder about the motives for the weekend&8217;s intervention. Clearly, the politicians have now worked out that the public have realised that there are going to have to be spending cuts and the parties are now falling over each other in their race to see who&8217;s hardest. But it&8217;s rare for ministers to offer up their own departments for slaughter, which makes it look a little like positioning in case Gordon Brown gets the chop after the party conferences or the next election. It&8217;s notable that Ed Balls isn&8217;t actually naming any of the educational bureaucracy he&8217;s considering for surgery except heads, and the salaries of teachers &8211; no mention of cuts in the DCSF quangocracy, for instance, or any of the other burgeoning bureaucracies. So why heads and teachers? Is it because they are seen as middle-class and well paid? That he thinks the electorate still think school staff have a cushy number? That he genuinely thinks heads are fairly expendable given the centralisation of the curriculum and the target culture? Or that the demographics and national debt means that school federations and pay freezes would happen anyway, so he might get some political mileage out of it? Interestingly, I&8217;m not sure that this will play terribly well with parents, if not the rest of the electorate. People expect schools to have a head teacher, not some remote figurehead. Some federations are clearly created for compelling and individual reasons, and while these are accepted by the public and by parents, it would be interesting to see whether doing it wholesale, to save money, would be. Susan Young is an educational journalist. Contact me at educationhhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=187Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:28:34 GMT20090921042834Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:28:34 GMT20090921042834Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:11:37 GMT20090922111137A couple of weeks ago, I came across a set of documents on the Department for Children, Schools and Families website which made for very interesting reading. The 49 papers, which included minutes of meetings, email conversations between officials and written briefings for ministers, give an extraordinary insight into crisis management as the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the National Assessment Agency grappled with last year&8217;s Sats marking fiasco. I believe that they were published by the DCSF following pressure from the Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee for background papers on the issue to be made available. I have written articles on what the new documents show, which are published today by the Guardian. (www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/sep/14/edballs-warned-of-sats-fiasco and www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/sep/15/sats-marking-fiasco-government-blame?commentpage=1) They detail the early warnings that ministers had of the problems, and the advice and reassurances they were given by their own officials, as well as those from the NAA/QCA. But there are other aspects which I&8217;m sure will interest readers of this blog. The paper trail starts back in March 2008, and initially consists largely of minutes of meetings of the &8220;Assessment Board&8221;, a joint committee of DCSF and NAA officials which was considering many aspects of assessment. A minute of one meeting on April 7th shows how those responsible for the tests were on the defensive, as criticism built up of the Sats regime. It says: &8220;From a media/public point of view, we should prepare for a difficult few months ahead in that the media is quickly picking up on any issues relating to testing and assessment.&8221; It is clear that teacher assessment was being looked at. &8220;The board agreed that a meeting should be scheduled to consider the position of teacher assessment&8221;, say the minutes, although there is no reference in the documents to this meeting itself. Figures revealed in a May 14th note from the NAA showed that not a single one of the 2,585 Key Stage 3 maths and science markers failed &8220;standardisation&8221;, the initial marking exercise carried out on examiners for the first time last year to assess if they were marking accurately. Some one per cent of English markers failed. The new checking system had been billed by ETS as leading to closer vetting of markers but I wrote stories at the TES of claims that examiners were being passed to mark despite many marking errors. The documents do not contain a similar break-down for KS2 markers. And, in fairness, the NAA and the test contractor, ETS, always argued that further marking exercises which examiners had to carry out during their work were a key part of the vetting process. Again, figures for success rates in these later &8220;benchmarking&8221; checks are not provided. Throughout the process, however, markers alleged that the logistics of the system were letting them down, and the documents provide copious evidence. Also, there is a tantalising admission, in a &8220;status report&8221; from the NAA to the DCSF on June 2nd. It says: &8220;Marking English is confirming that consistent application of the markscheme by markers is difficult.&8221; This bears out what some markers were saying, in both 2008 and 2009. It will surely not reassure schools who might be concerned about the weight being placed on English results in particular. The pre-occupation with spin or presentation is occasionally visible. A briefing went to ministers dated May 15th from an unnamed DCSF official, in anticipation of a report I wrote for the TES which highlighted concerns from scores of markers online that the system was already in disarray. The note admits that there had been 10,000 calls to ETS&8217;s helpline on a single day and that 40 per cent of English markers had been temporarily wrongly barred from marking. But it then includes advice to ministers on what to say if questioned about the problems. These &8220;lines to take&8221; included: &8220;Delivery of NCnational curriculum tests is the responsibility of the National Assessment Agency,&8221; and &8220;There have been some glitches in the new system, but these have now been fixed.&8221; After it became clear that results would be delayed, NAA/QCA and DCSF officials gathered for a post-mortem. A note includes the observation that there had been a &8220;predictable? cultural disconnect between ETS and British markers&8221; and a claim that ETS, the cheapest bidder for the marking contract, had &8220;seriously underpriced the work&8221;. Finally, news of one individual who, weeks after the results were supposed to have been released, still had hundreds of scripts. A note from the NAA, dated July 25th, said: &8220;The final marker known to be in possession of scripts has 843 papers of which approximately half have been marked. UPS the parcel firm are liaising with the marker to collect these scripts as quickly as possible.&8221; What a mess. The documents can be viewed at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/NCT2008documents/http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=186Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:44:52 GMT20090916104452Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:44:52 GMT20090916104452Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:45:46 GMT20090916104546Concern was raised at the recent Secondary Committee meeting about a perceived paucity of C grades awarded in the above examination last summer. Please contact Headquarters if you share these concerns. (sionh@naht.org.uk)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=185Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:30:45 GMT20090914033045Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:30:45 GMT20090914033045Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:30:45 GMT20090914033045A member had informed us that two of his A level candidates who achieved the grades stipulated in their university offer had their offer of a place removed following results day. Our colleague took up their cases and was successful on their behalf. The Association would be interested in hearing of any other similar incidents (contact sionh@naht.org.uk)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=184Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:27:49 GMT20090914032749Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:27:49 GMT20090914032749Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:27:49 GMT20090914032749Mick Brookes talks to Robert Sanders about Sats, Rarely Cover, and other issues for NAHT members.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretarys-roundup-20/Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:19:41 GMT20090923031941Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:24:46 GMT20090914032446Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:19:41 GMT2009092303194116020A pilot for 'Framework for Excellence' was launched in 113 school sixth-forms in 22 LAs this month. Details of pilot can be found at: http://ffe.lsc.gov.uk/schoolsixthformpilot/ This was discussed at the recent Secondary Committee meeting and the committee wishes to monitor this. It would therefore welcome the views of any members involved in the pilot and from others with an interest in the matter. Responses to sionh@naht.org.ukhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=183Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:24:00 GMT20090914032400Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:24:00 GMT20090914032400Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:24:00 GMT20090914032400You can&8217;t have missed the advert for the general secretary&8217;s job &8211; so what do you think? Impressed that your own organisation is asking for nominations from members? Convinced that you couldn&8217;t do it, and nor could anyone else you know? Or letting the thought marinate gently in the back of your mind? For me, it shows how far the NAHT has come in a few short years. Last time a general secretary decided it was time to call it a day, in came the headhunters and up came the name of an education official. As I recall subsequent events from an outsider&8217;s point of view, the men in suits were keen to defend their nice safe choice whilst Mick Brookes, then a real working head in Nottinghamshire, turned up on his motorbike and demanded to be added to the interview list. When Mick won the vote, education journalists were cheering him on and have continued to do so. Not only was it one of those David and Goliath moments which happen all too infrequently, but it was also a matter of common sense. Why shouldn&8217;t someone who leads for a living be able to up his or her game a bit and lead the leaders? Again, my personal and probably flawed recollection is that some people were waiting for Mick to slip up somewhere. But a larger number of people were willing him on and thoroughly enjoying watching a working head broaden his canvas, whilst never losing sight of the practicalities of what really goes on in a school. Like John Dunford, he&8217;s been a great ambassador for heads and what they actually do. So good luck to anyone who&8217;s considering applying for the job themselves. It&8217;s refreshing to see the net being intentionally cast so wide &8211; and also that the advert itself has been written in plain English. Watching the latest Harry Potter epic in the cinema at the weekend, my mind kept on wandering to wonder what exactly the officials at the independent safeguarding agency would have made of the goings-on at Hogwarts. I don&8217;t even know where they&8217;d start. The students like to hang out with Hagrid, who lives in a shack outside the grounds, breeds dragons, multi-headed dogs and giant spiders and has some funny secrets in his past. They also appear to be encouraged to drink by members of staff, including at a local bar and in the Potions tutor&8217;s private rooms. And it&8217;s not unknown for teachers to be alone with students &8211; with doors shut. And worse still, the school head (a shockingly old man who wears a dress) is prone to dragging off lone students on hideously dangerous adventures and ordering them to keep secrets. Put that way, the school sounds like a paedophile&8217;s charter &8211; but however, fantastical, there is an innocent explanation for everything and rather a lot of safeguarding going on. Hard to see, though, how a paper-sifting official in Darlington is going to be able to make those sorts of judgments trawling through bits of &8220;evidence&8221; of whether someone is suitable to be in contact with children. Many listeners of Thursday&8217;s Today programme were open-mouthed at the convoluted way in which the children&8217;s minister reluctantly &8220;clarified&8221; how the new regulations might work for parents giving lifts to other people&8217;s kids. Her apparent difficulty in answering the question clearly, which might have killed the story stone dead, left the way open for all kinds of other concerns, which have flooded newspapers and the internet over the weekend. Although lots of the shouting has been about the effects on voluntary organisations, schools are clearly going to find even more implications than they have already experienced through the CRB regulations. One might be that parents and grandparents become more reluctant to volunteer their time, either because of all the publicity or because they resent the lack of trust. Those with spent convictions in their past may also be concerned about being turned down on a check, even if their misdemeanour was nothing more serious than shoplifting. Would they be willing to take the risk? Possibly not. Children, meanwhile, are quick to pick up on this sort of thing, and there is a definite shift of power implicit here. ISA officials will be looking at &8220;soft&8221; information, which might include malicious allegations. And if a bit of childhood spite can have that potential effect on your career or personal life, who&8217;s going to want to take the risk? Children should not fear adults &8211; but adults shouldn&8217;t fear children either. And that looks like a real risk under the planned arrangements. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=182Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:19:27 GMT20090914031927Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:19:27 GMT20090914031927Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:19:27 GMT20090914031927I'm sure that secondary colleagues are aware that the Association has a Secondary Committee that meets five times a year. I am the servicing officer for this committee and, in collaboration with the Chair, Mike Stewart, am responsible for drawing up the agenda. As a means of improving the lines of communication between the committee and the wider secondary membership, I would like to invite you to contact me by e-mail if there are any issues that you feel the committee ought to be discussing....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=181Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:13:59 GMT20090914031359Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:13:59 GMT20090914031359Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:14:48 GMT20090914031448It&8217;s not often that reading a book really is a life-changing experience, despite what blurb-writers like to suggest on the cover. But I&8217;ve just finished Ben Goldacre&8217;s Bad Science, a book whose mission is to teach useful scepticism about alternative medicine, medical research &8211; and above all, the way in which research is reported by drug companies and journalists alike. I&8217;ve been pressing Bad Science on everyone I meet since, because even as a practicing journalist of far too many years, I have developed a tendency to give some credence to the Daily Mail style headlines along the lines that eating a bunch of dandelions for breakfast will stop you getting cancer. You assume that the journalists are accurately reporting the science, and that in turn the researchers were accurately reporting their research, and that in turn the research was conducted properly. Wrong! And possibly on all three counts. Anyway, it was the Bad Science approach that floated in front of me when I read this week&8217;s research suggesting that teaching assistants actually hinder the progress of their pupils. I usually go back to original sources before blogging on anything (I read it &8211; so you don&8217;t have to) but Dr Goldacre&8217;s cheery rants have strengthened that instinct. Boy, am I confused now. According to the TES coverage, the problem is down to low-attaining and SEN pupils being put in the charge of TAs and therefore taken away from the curriculum and teachers. &8220;It&8217;s the routine way in which children in most need of support are regularly separated from the curriculum,&8221; research leader Professor Peter Blatchford told the TES. But go back to the press release put out to support the Institute of Education research by its press officer &8211; who I know to be precise about getting things right &8211; and there is another quote from Professor Blatchford. He says: "The reasons why pupils have this support in the first place &8211; lower achievement, learning and behaviour difficulties, social class &8211; have all been accounted for in the analysis. So we cannot say that pupil characteristics are the cause of their slower progress." So if these pupils were kept with the teachers, would they make the expected two subgroups of progress per year? If they did, would the rest of the class suffer from less teaching time? The Blatchford team make the useful point that teachers should be trained in how to manage TAs, and each pairing should get scheduled time to discuss pupil progress. But although this is a huge study, it contradicts previous research &8211; including an EPPI review of previous research which looked in depth at 32 earlier papers and found that TAs, used properly, could help enhance children&8217;s basic literacy skills as well as other areas. Interestingly, this review also called for teachers to be taught how to manage support staff. You get another dimension of the argument by reading the postings on the TES website, many of which assert that the problem lies more in the policy of extensive inclusion of kids with special needs, often severe. Reading some of these rants, it&8217;s hard to agree with the conclusion of most of the research that pressure on teachers has been eased by having a TA in their classroom, but there you are. But by conducting a quick and dirty review of the research on offer, one thing is common to every study &8211; the recommendation that we teach teachers how to manage their assistants. The only problem now is that there are probably 15 different bits of research telling you the best way to do it&8230; and they&8217;ll all contradict each other. Ah well &8211; that&8217;s what leadership is all about. So over to you on that bit. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=176Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:42:40 GMT20090907094240Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:42:40 GMT20090907094240Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:42:40 GMT20090907094240So, another exam results season is at an end, and what have we learnt? There was another record set of results, with A-level and GCSE grades improving at both the top end and in terms of the proportion of C grades or better. There were worries about whether even highly qualified school leavers would win places at leading universities, with competition for admission fierce. And there were the annual calls to resist questioning the results themselves, for fear of undermining students&8217; achievements. Well, here is a controversial statement, which underlies all three of the sentences above. The grades race is utterly self-defeating, even on its own terms. Making improving exam results the central goal of education policy &8211; enforced through competitive league tables, Ofsted inspections, Fischer Family Trust judgements and the rest - has succeeded neither in helping bring about genuine improvements in teaching and learning, nor in promoting social mobility and a fairer society. The central reason for this is that improved grades, though cherished by the adults who run this regime, have relative, rather than absolute, value for young people. That is &8211; and this is the harsh reality of this system - grades are only important to those achieving them to the extent that they confer advantage over one&8217;s peers. Yet they are pursued nationally as if they have absolute value. So, because university places are rationed &8211; and especially so, this year &8211; students achieving even straight A grades at A-level are not guaranteed entrance to some of the top institutions, because there are so many of them gaining the highest marks, while those with lower grades have also faced a struggle for university admission. Similarly, employers wanting to choose between new recruits with a clutch of good qualifications will not take on more young people simply because more have good grades. As before, all other things being equal, they might be expected to pick from those with the best marks. To make these arguments is always to run the risk of being accused of elitism, in that it suggests an enthusiasm for rationing the numbers achieving good grades. But the reality is that rising results only mean something, and are only likely to feed into genuine benefits for pupils later in life, if they have true value in signifying genuine improvements in learning. And no-one can be sure that this is the case, because the system does not check for transferrable gains in understanding, rather than exam-specific knowledge. Teaching to the test &8211; that is, preparing students in ways which are specific to particular exams - is encouraged, rather than fought against, by the accountability regime. Indeed, teaching to assessment objectives is semi-official policy. And the securing of good grades has been politicised because ministers have said they will be judged in this way. Individual students will still have worked hard for their good grades, and should be praised for that. But the system is not good at promoting skills which are non exam-specific. Thus, results may rise, but are they testimony to improved understanding which can be demonstrated outside of the confines of this assessment system? It is unclear, because there are few checks. Meanwhile, perhaps the most challenging finding for ministers from the results season was that independent schools have pulled away, in recent years, from state secondaries in the production of A-level A grades. Any suggestion that teaching for exam success is justifiable in terms of the qualifications it produces for pupils from poorer backgrounds faces a tough time explaining away this statistic. The production of good grades as ends in themselves is about politics &8211; delivering results for national and even local policy-makers, many of whom are no doubt very well-intentioned &8211; rather than education. It should be questioned continually.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=175Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:11:57 GMT20090901031157Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:11:57 GMT20090901031157Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:11:57 GMT20090901031157Blogging today feels a little like intruding on private grief. Here I am, sitting peacefully in front of a computer, whilst I know thousands of school leaders are rushing round schools on that adrenaline high that September brings. And on top of the usual extra layers of paperwork and bureaucracy that the new year has brought, few of which have anything to do with actually teaching the kids, there is a real feeling of change in the air. To misquote Donald Rumsfeld, there are lots of knowns this year &8211; but even more unknowns, or partially unknowns. For a start, there&8217;s the likelihood of action against the KS2 SATS. It&8217;s a long time since heads threatened to act alongside a teacher union in this way, and therefore lots of unknowns. How would parents react? What official action would there be? What about the governors, or the local authority? And given that we might be in the middle of a general election at that point, would all the politicians be looking the other way? And then there&8217;s swine flu. If it does come back with a vengeance, as we&8217;ve all been warned, at what point will it be deemed OK for a school to close? What happens to the new &8220;rarely cover&8221; rule if half the staff are at home in bed? How will attendance be judged if you decide to close because staff levels are unsafe? And what about league tables? Then there&8217;s all the whip-cracking stuff about coasting schools, national challenge schools and the new powers the Government has taken for itself to intervene if it thinks the local authority is being a bit lily-livered. Whether it does or not probably depends, as so much else will during the next few months, on the progress of the H1N1 virus and also on how things are going politically. Politics may well prove important to schools for other reasons. According to a long op-ed piece in the Telegraph this weekend, the Tories have decided that the NHS is too sacred a cow to touch during a first term in office (and thereby by implication during an election campaign). Education, therefore, is going to be The Big One for them as far as campaigning goes, and also during a first term of office should Mr Cameron gain the keys to Downing Street. And the Gove plans would have enormous implications for school leaders. Primaries would lose SATs tests to secondaries. Diplomas might stop in their tracks. League tables would be reformulated and parents could start their own schools. Since as far as I&8217;m aware, that option has been on the statute books in some form for a while now, it&8217;s not clear to me that it will make a lot of difference. Except, interestingly, one or two high-profile parents are actually threatening to do it under the new plans. Toby Young, journalist and inspiration for the film How To Make Friends and Alienate People, says he wants to start one for his four London-based children. Not too sure what qualities will be required by heads of these schools&8230; Anyway, it&8217;s clearly going to be an interesting year&8230; Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=174Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:37:09 GMT20090901013709Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:37:09 GMT20090901013709Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:37:09 GMT20090901013709Apparently VisitBritain is trying to concoct a perfume which evokes the UK. Desirable elements apparently include the whiffs of cut grass and lawnmower petrol. If there was a smell to the pointless educational debate which is routinely fired up every August, I&8217;d suggest that should be the number one ingredient in the mix. If I were a head, or a teacher, I&8217;d spend August in a state of fury as the whole nation has a go at you for doing what you&8217;ve been instructed to do. Does any other nation on earth work itself into a froth about exam results, on the grounds that they must be getting easier/they are the wrong subjects/school leavers still can&8217;t spell? Meanwhile the Government minister wheeled out to comment comes out with something soothing, whilst we all know perfectly well that plans are being hatched for yet more stuff to be done by schools next year. The problem as far as I can see is that we need to have a bigger debate about education, not the smaller one we roll out every summer. Put simply: what is education for? As a nation, what do we want it to do for us and our children? Is education about the transmission of our culture to the next generation? Is it fitting them for a lifetime of living? For work? To sort out social inequality? Other nations now seem much clearer about this than we are, perhaps because they have done less mucking around with the system in the first place. It&8217;s also easier for independent schools, which have also resisted wholesale tinkering with what they do and why. Private school parents are paying for their kids to emerge &8220;well educated&8221; in the old-fashioned way, with reasonable knowledge of science, history and literature, the chance to have developed their interests with music and sports, and also enough good exam results to take them further. But the state sector is a bit more of a mess, driven by all sorts of competing imperatives which all started as good ideas but are not necessarily working well together. Take the National Curriculum, which emerged from the desire to make sure everyone would have had access at school to the same body of knowledge &8211; the idea that education is transmission of culture. Most people can relate happily to that idea, but the curriculum was just too damn big to start with, and is about to change yet again. Still, it meant I could have a cheery conversation with my seven-year-old niece at the weekend, bursting with information about Henry VIII and how he cut off the head of Elizabeth&8217;s mummy. (Mummy&8217;s name, it emerged, was Amber Lynn&8230;) Then came the &8220;simple pencil and paper tests&8221; to make sure kids were keeping up and not slipping through the net. Again, these became rather more complicated &8211; and then acquired a whole new purpose to make sure schools were kept on their toes. Parental choice &8211; sorry, preference? Great idea. How can we help them choose? Let&8217;s have a league table, created from exam and test results. But not all academic exams will count &8211; so it doesn&8217;t matter how many kids opt for the International Baccalaureate, you&8217;ll only get points for this IT diploma. Maths and English not doing well enough? Right, let&8217;s have a new sort of league table which only counts your A-C grades if they include both of those subjects. A Levels too old fashioned? Make them modular, then muck around with the number of modules when it doesn&8217;t work. Pupils don&8217;t know what to do to improve? Set them tasks which include clear definitions of the marks they&8217;ll get for including different levels of information. So out of years of good intentions, we now have the mad system whereby tests intended to check kids were doing well enough at school are primarily there to show how well the schools are doing. Schools may find themselves making decisions about what exams the pupils should sit to maximise their league table potential, rather than the pupils&8217;. And, as the rather fantastic Assessment in Schools &8211; Fit for Purpose report points out, there&8217;s an awful lot of weight being placed on tests which are intended for something entirely different. And still the arguments rage on about grade inflation, setting, selection and grammar schools, with politicians promising to tinker around the edges of how the league tables work. They can chunter about rigour and world-class and employers and vocational education till they&8217;re blue in the face, but it doesn&8217;t take us anywhere. What&8217;s needed is a proper, grown-up debate about what we really want education to do, and then make the necessary changes. Time to look at the big picture. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=173Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:06:28 GMT20090824030628Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:06:28 GMT20090824030628Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:06:28 GMT20090824030628League tables, like Sats, come in for a lot of criticism these days. And not just from those who might be termed the &8220;usual suspects&8221;. At the weekend, the Tories joined the Government in criticising some of the effects of the current rankings, and floating their own radical proposals. But, while their analysis of two of the side-effects of the current regime is persuasive, their alternative proposals just show up the deep conceptual problems behind league tables of any kind. The two Conservative criticisms of league tables, based on interim findings of a review of the exam system, break down as follows. First, they argue that the focus on &8220;threshold&8221; measures of performance &8211; the percentage of a school&8217;s pupils achieving five or more GCSE A-Cs, including English and maths &8211; leads institutions to focus on &8220;borderline&8221; C/D pupils, at the expense of others. That this has been happening, and that it is a negative feature of the league tables for anyone who cares about equity, is undeniable. And the Tories&8217; proposed solution, which would simply rank schools on average points scores, may have merit. Second, they say that the rankings pressures on schools force them to seek out &8220;easy options&8221;: qualifications which are seen to offer a less demanding route to success in the tables for the school, towards which it will push the pupil whether or not this in their long-term interests. This is also a valid complaint. Given the huge pressures on schools to raise their published scores, some have undoubtedly steered pupils towards, for example, the old intermediate General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQ), which for some reason were deemed to be &8220;worth&8221; four GCSEs to the school, but about which many employers and colleges were sceptical. But the solution is highly problematic. The Conservatives would give higher weight to supposedly &8220;harder&8221; subjects in the league tables, such as maths and physics, and less weight to their &8220;softer&8221; counterparts, such as media studies. Amazingly, qualifications such as the diploma would carry no weight at all. Well, encouraging the system to come to any formal view of which subjects are more difficult than others is, it seems to me, a mug&8217;s game. Is physics harder than, say, English? Who knows? They are just different. Some people find physics easy and English taxing, and vice versa. Academic attempts to try to come up with definitive lists of the most difficult have never been conclusive. And &8220;harder&8221; subjects such as maths and further maths A-level actually have far higher A grade rates than media studies. Meanwhile, simply removing all points from diplomas looks like an attack of political vindictiveness. No matter what one&8217;s views of the worth of these qualifications, which have been designed with unprecedented input from employers, the idea that a school should get no credit for devoting two years of teaching time to them seems nonsensical. What is most illuminating, though, is what this debate says about the assumptions that underpin the secondary tables. The Government assumption that governed one set of rules &8211; that a GNVQ was &8220;worth&8221; four GNVQs &8211; was highly questionable, just as is the Conservative view that diplomas have no merit at all. Yet all rankings come with these assumptions built in. They are necessary to support the, in my view ludicrous, position that the quality of schools which educate hundreds of pupils on many courses can be summed up, in the worst case, in a single number. The creation of any ranking system is subjective. But the subjectivity remains hidden from view, as supposedly &8220;objective&8221; scores are used to differentiate between institutions. The deeper problem &8211; that results pressures can force schools to put their own interests ahead of their pupils&8217; long-term learning needs &8211; is reflected in the Tories&8217; criticisms but not in the proposed cure. As I&8217;ve said before, accountability is important. But trying to use complicated statistical ranking systems as the basis of comparisons is an exercise in futility. Warwick Mansell is author of Education by Numbers: the Tyranny of Testing (Politico&8217;s)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=172Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:45:04 GMT20090818114504Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:45:04 GMT20090818114504Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:45:04 GMT20090818114504Here it is: the blogger&8217;s nightmare week of the year. A Level results out, improved for the umpteenth year running. Time for the annual shouting match as one side claims lower standards and the other improved teaching and hard work. There was even a study attempting to prove it one way or the other about a decade ago, which as I recall turned out to be inconclusive because there were great gaps in the papers which had been kept, and because the content and style of the exam had changed. It would be interesting to re-run the exercise now with particular reference to pre and post curriculum 2000 A Levels, and looking at the effect re-takes have on results, but I suspect it&8217;s not the interests of the current government or its quangoes to do it. At least this year there are a couple of interesting interventions from Professor Alan Smithers and Peter Hyman, the former Blair adviser who&8217;s now a deputy head at a London secondary. Put briefly, Smithers is arguing that pass rates for the IB have fluctuated over the past years but not shown an upward trend, unlike A Level. Therefore, A Level must have been getting easier and the IB has not. Hyman describes &8220;spoon feeding&8221; exam candidates their GCSE material whilst desperately trying to get them thinking during school assemblies and other off-lesson time. If he thinks the exam system needs an overhaul, then he&8217;s in an interesting position as a former &8220;one of us&8221; with aquired specialist knowledge. The think tank Civitas have got in on the act, releasing a survey of teachers who mostly mutter about dumbing-down of A Levels. And, unsurprisingly, the Tories have decided to tell us a little about how their education review is going, revealing that they plan to do something to make GCSEs and A Levels more rigorous (no idea what, yet) and, interestingly, that league tables could be revamped with a sliding scale of points for different exam grades. Most vocational qualifications wouldn&8217;t be eligible for league tables at all. Which I can see in one way, but also seems to take us back 20 years. I hate to mention France or Germany, but I&8217;m going to &8211; two economies apparently emerging from recession before us, both with strong traditions of good vocational and technical education. Meanwhile, the pilots of our hideously complicated new diploma, which seems to involve bussing kids all over their home towns for different elements of it, are apparently disappointing, with the worst aspects being functional literacy and numeracy. There do seem to be serious problems here, not of schools&8217; or teachers&8217; making, and it would be sensible &8211; not to say a nice thought &8211; if politicians were to make a habit of asking teachers what they think of what they are doing. But ironically, just as a real head of steam is building up over this, it is being dwarfed by a much more real problem: the immediate future of this year&8217;s school-leavers, whether at 16 or 18. For many of them, it&8217;s going to be bleak: not enough university places for everyone who wants them, and high rates of youth unemployment. As many as 20 per cent may be long-term unemployed by the age of 21 &8211; and past experience shows they may never properly make it into the job market, even when the recession is over. What do you say to them, as schools, when they come in for their exam results? What do you say to next year&8217;s GCSE and A Level classes, who are working for an uncertain future? This is one area where platitudes won&8217;t do. Swift and sensible planning, perhaps for more apprenticeships is urgently needed. And schools need some quick and dirty advice on how to reassure, advise and guide a generation of young adults who may be about to be dealt one of the worst hands of the past century. Seen any signs of action in this area? No, nor have I. Susan Young Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=171Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:35:37 GMT20090817033537Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:35:37 GMT20090817033537Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:35:37 GMT20090817033537Normally, I&8217;m a news junkie even on holiday, getting my daily fix from echoing longwave bulletins and the odd overseas edition of the British press. But not this summer. Ten days abroad was a blessed respite from swine flu hysteria, economic gloom, the Jordan divorce and political non-stories about Harriet Harman&8217;s views on women in charge. So in between the holiday washing, I&8217;ve been settling down to read several missed copies of the TES. And the distance brought by even days out of touch makes you realise just how nutty many of the nation&8217;s attitudes to education are. My first jaw-dropper was the revelation that former bankers and the like aren&8217;t necessarily capable of being classroom-ready in the few months proposed by the Government&8217;s new fast-track teachers scheme. The Institute of Education, running the pilot programme, is sending most applicants off to conventional courses and says it may not fill its 40 places. Well, der, as my daughters would say. Only starry-eyed Government ministers would assume that the skills which make a good banker are identical to those of a good teacher. And possibly the authors of that new report from Politeia whose general thrust was that our teachers are the most underqualified in the world. And in their later careers, also among the worst paid, most of them didn&8217;t add. Then there was a report finding that Japanese teachers work longer hours than their British colleagues &8211; but despite that, teachers here are far more stressed because of league tables. Wonder what the bankers will make of that? Sats results are apparently hideously disappointing because they actually dropped (shock, horror!) by a whole percentage point on last year. One percent! The outrage! And they say teachers are underqualified at maths&8230; But then there&8217;s the stuff which is under the radar. For instance, the new regs which mean everyone in schools has to be CRB checked every three years and even the most fantastic schools won&8217;t score well with Ofsted unless they are seen to have dotted all the paperwork Is and crossed all the Ts. And then there&8217;s the row over authors refusing to be vetted to do book readings in schools. I can see their point. It&8217;s not as if they are going to be doing one to one sessions with kids, or taking them off into dark corners. It gives the sinister feeling that no adults can be trusted to meet children unless the State vets them. Even Michael Bichard, whose report into the Soham murders started the whole CRB circus, is quoted as saying that including the authors seems to be overdoing it a bit. And a couple of final thoughts on this. One is that Ian Huntley, whose murky past wasn&8217;t revealed when he got the job as a school caretaker in Soham, did not know Holly and Jessica through his work. He knew them because his girlfriend was their class teaching assistant. Which means, as far as I can see, that the same thing could happen again, providing the murderous boyfriend or girlfriend didn&8217;t actually work in education themselves. The next Maxine Carr&8217;s boyfriend may work in IT or some other blameless job. He would still be trusted by children who knew his girlfriend, or simply knew him as a neighbour. And unless you check absolutely everybody who children might trust (other parents in the school playground, for instance) you can&8217;t legislate against that. The other final thought: I was interviewing the HR director of Brighton Pier recently about the difference training members of staff has made to their job satisfaction. In passing, he mentioned that staff from other parts of Europe, particularly southern and Eastern countries, hate working on the children&8217;s rides. Why? Because they are allowed no physical contact with them, which feels completely unnatural. Are abuse rates astronomically high in the rest of the EU? I&8217;d really like to know if we&8217;re really helping children &8211; and what the long-term effects of all this will be. Maybe all this will seem sane and normal after another week back in the UK... Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=168Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:00:06 GMT20090810040006Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:00:06 GMT20090810040006Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:00:06 GMT20090810040006Test results &8220;down by one percentage point&8221; Warwick Mansell &8220;School test results woe&8221; screamed the Doncaster edition of the local Star newspaper, amid news that the local authority&8217;s KS2 sats scores had fallen by one percentage point in English and science, and by two in maths. For the Sheffield edition, the headline changed slightly, to &8220;school test results shame&8221;, with the story highlighting local falls of two points in English and one point in science, but a two point rise in maths. London&8217;s Evening Standard, I am told, led its front page with news that the national figures for English had dropped by a percentage point, from 81 to 80 per cent achieving the expected level four, the first fall since the tests were introduced in 1995. This angle earned prominent coverage in most of the national press. This coverage illustrates the farcically superficial nature of what passes for accountability through test results. Put simply, the test result data are not nearly robust enough to support these interpretations. Single or even two percentage point changes really say nothing about any movement in standards. An inquiry for the Government by Sir Jim Rose in 1999 into the setting of the pass marks &8220;or level thresholds&8221;, in the jargon, for national tests contained the following interesting insight. It said: &8220;An enormous amount of technical and statistical expertise is brought to bear on designing the tests and making them consistent with the national curriculum standards expected of pupils at the end of each key stage, year-on-year. Nevertheless&8230;there will always be a degree of subjectivity in what is done, for example, to agree the level thresholds, and in the judgements of markers when marking questions.&8221; Rose then highlighted how, in discussions about where to set the level threshold or pass mark needed to achieve level 3 in English in 1999, there was a disagreement of five marks between the mark at which marking experts believed it should be set, and that suggested by statistical analysis. Eventually, human judgement prevailed. At level four, there was a difference of one mark in the two suggested pass marks. Rose concluded: &8220;Where such small margins are involved, it becomes obvious that testing is not an exact science. The justification for choosing one &8216;pass mark&8217; over another can be barely discernible.&8221; Yet, precisely where the pass mark is set can have a large impact on the percentages of pupils achieving any given level or not. When I analysed data from 2005, I found that a move of two marks in the level four threshold would lead to around a three percentage point swing in the proportions reaching that benchmark. A report on level-setting for KS3 science in 2007, conducted by the OCR exam board for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and quoted in a chapter by Paul Newton of Cambridge Assessment, in a book just published, is similarly interesting. It shows how the proportion of pupils gaining a particular level could have varied by up to five percentage points according to whether it was decided to set the pass mark at the lower end of a confidence interval suggested by statistical modelling, or at the higher. In other words, as Rose concluded, this is an imprecise science. Attempting to have a national debate around a rise or fall of one percentage point is highly unwise. And that should not prompt a throwing up of hands and a call for a &8220;more accurate&8221; testing system, but a reconsideration of the weight being placed on test results. Overall, if this is how schools and the Government are held to account, it is unscientific, verging on the meaningless. The current accountability regime does little to enhance public understanding of what is going on in schools, or, in my view, to promote genuine improvements.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=167Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:15:45 GMT20090807121545Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:15:45 GMT20090807121545Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:16:03 GMT20090807121603The debate about the Government&8217;s new system of school-by-school accountability is, to my mind, falling into a familiar trap. It is this. Whenever a problem is found to occur with league tables of any sort, the argument, which the Government often leads, becomes one of how to reform the tables and tweak the indicators, rather than acknowledging the underlying truth that statistical ranking systems of all kinds come with some fairly unavoidable difficulties. Since the 1990s, this has led ministers to augment traditional &8220;raw scores&8221; league tables with &8220;value-added&8221; statistical rankings, which were felt to be fairer to schools serving disadvantaged areas, and then &8220;contextual value added&8221; scores, which were seen to be even fairer. The new report card system now being proposed is merely the latest iteration of league tables. The tendency in the past has been to give each new version of the rankings a couple of years&8217; grace before its flaws become clear. I think the problems should now be pointed out from the outset. These thoughts came to mind as I listened to a recent discussion on the new report card system, which ministers are to pilot from this September, for possible introduction from 2011. The report cards, which are being piloted over the next two years, will embrace other indicators than exam attainment data, including information on pupils&8217; progress and wellbeing and on the performance of children with special educational needs. Speakers at the Westminster Education Forum conference were cautiously well-disposed towards them, implying that they might sort out some of the problems which conventional league tables have created. Phil Revell, chief executive of the National Governors&8217; Association, said: &8220;The current league table system is way too narrow. The focus on key stage 2 level four and GCSE A-C shames the system. It disincentivises schools from addressing the needs of pupils at both ends of the ability spectrum.&8221; He said the report card had &8220;great potential&8221;, but it was necessary to see how its indicators were calculated before making a final judgement. Other speakers, including Patrick Roach from the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, were similarly balanced. Conventional league tables, he said, had encouraged teaching to the test and demoralised teachers. These comments follow remarks from Ed Balls, the schools secretary, at the NAHT&8217;s annual conference in May. &8220;League tables give you a narrow view of what a school does...This is a system where the way to improve your performance is only to focus on the two to three children who are performing just below level four at key stage 2. That&8217;s not what education is about, and that&8217;s why we need to improve accountability,&8221; he said. On one level, these statements are welcome, in embracing reality. What they fail to acknowledge, though, is that any statistical ranking system, including report cards, will encourage just the sort of behaviour that these speakers decry. If you are concerned, for example, about the needs of certain groups being neglected under the current regime, this problem will not go away if you change the indicators. Those being judged by a new set of statistics may simply focus their attention on different groups of pupils. For example, if a central measure is to become which pupils make two levels&8217; progress during a key stage, evidence of what happens under the current accountability structure would suggest that schools will focus more attention on those children who they think are on the borderline of just achieving that target, or not. Others will be relatively neglected. In other words, what has been termed statistical &8220;game playing&8221;, or &8220;playing the system&8221; is inherent in all regimes under which much rests, for the schools and others, on raising the statistical indicators. Arguably, it is what the system implicitly wants to happen. I don&8217;t think this phenomenon has been at all positive for English education, and I cannot see the report card changing that. Accountability is essential. But for me, it does not need to be mechanistic, statistics-based accountability. Parents and others do need to be presented with information on school quality. But please, let us get away from crude, data-driven approaches. Warwick Mansell is the author of Education by Numbers: the Tyranny of Testing (Politico&8217;s). www.educationbynumbers.org.ukhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=165Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:20:21 GMT20090729022021Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:20:21 GMT20090729022021Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:20:21 GMT20090729022021Kathy James, Senior Assistant Secretary with NAHT's Education Management department, discusses the latest Government White Paper and clarifies the NAHT position on a potential ballot.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/kathy-james-assessment-issues/Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:07:35 GMT20090730110735Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:36:01 GMT20090727043601Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:07:34 GMT2009073011073415434&8220;National tests provide objective, comparable information about every child.&8221; So said Jim Knight MP, the former schools minister, as the Government faced mounting criticism of its testing regime at the height of last summer&8217;s marking crisis. But is the information provided by the Sats really completely objective? Insights into this question, and many others, were provided in a fascinating talk I attended last week by Tim Oates, head of research at Cambridge Assessment who used to hold that position at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Offering a review of how testing policy has developed in the past 20 years, Mr Oates painted a picture of a system which has been in virtually constant flux, and subject to behind-the-scenes problems which give the lie to suggestions that, so far as the tests are concerned, life is as simple as the quote from Mr Knight would suggest. It is widely known, for example, that the Sats are subject to measurement error. That is, the level a child receives may not be the one they deserve to get on any particular test. Reasons for this may vary from a child under- or over-performing on the day to marking inaccuracy. Professor Dylan Wiliam, of London&8217;s Institute of Education, said in 2000 that at least 30 per cent of pupils could be given the wrong level in Sats tests. The reality is that there is no definitive figure for measurement error, but that it is clear that no test will ever be 100 per cent reliable. Other insights in this talk further undermined the idea of objectivity. For example, Mr Oates highlighted recent results from the key stage 3 science tests, which show the standards supposedly evidenced by these assessments lurching up and down dramatically from year to year. In 2002, the proportion achieving level six or above was 34 per cent; in 2003, it rose to 40 per cent; and in 2004 it fell again to 35 per cent. &8220;This is implausible, and points to problems in the tests and level-setting, not to a real change in the underlying standards or in the cohort taking the tests,&8221; said Mr Oates. He also presented a graph showing the effect of the policy, used until last year, of instructing Sats markers to re-mark the work of pupils whose test results, on first marking, would have left them just short of a level, but not those just above it. Because many pupils, when re-marked, gained the few marks that they need to push them above the level, nationally there were very few children who finished just short of a level, and many who just scraped it. Is this a true reflection of education standards, or is it more reflective of the characteristics of the marking? Other phenomena highlighted were the fact that the tests were made more accessible during the 1990s, meaning that questions were written increasingly carefully so as not to confuse pupils and the test booklets were made more presentable to them, raising questions about comparability of standards from year to year; that several times the QCA changed the tests at the last moment after being unhappy with pre-testing; and that there are growing concerns among assessment experts about what a national curriculum level actually means. To make these points is not to argue that England&8217;s testing system is run incompetently. The tests are subject to painstaking trials, and the level-setting is equally conscientious. But it does suggest a degree of caution should be used in both the interpretation of results and the uses to which the test data are put. This, though, is not what happens&8230;http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=163Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:03:14 GMT20090722110314Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:03:14 GMT20090722110314Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:03:14 GMT20090722110314I&8217;ve been scratching my head a bit ever since listening to former minister Alan Milburn talking about how to improve social mobility, and the recommendations in the Fair Access report he and a committee of experts have published today. He&8217;s impeccably qualified to lead such a project, given that his life&8217;s journey took him from a council estate to the heart of Government. Presumably that&8217;s one reason Gordon Brown asked him to take it on. You could argue that like every politician, he has aspirations in spades. And being a successful politician, he probably has the hide of a rhinoceros, which is also a useful attribute for getting on in life. And you cannot argue with the premise that people from every background should have the same opportunities to succeed and use their talents, and that the most &8220;desirable&8221; jobs (judges and journalists, from what I can work out) should be open to all. For once, schools are only part of the argument, but an interesting one. The Fair Access report is arguing that many more children in disadvantaged areas need to get five GCSEs, including maths and English, to even start to compete for these desirable jobs or university. They also need schools to teach &8220;soft skills&8221; for employability, and join up to organisations which are more common in the private sector, such as the Cadet Force or the Duke of Edinburgh award. I couldn&8217;t agree more with all this, but not purely because it makes people more employable. There used to be this quaint idea that education was all about giving people the building blocks for adult life &8211; all of it, and not just the 9 to 5 bit. This notion has survived in private schools to some extent, but government expectations from state schools over the past decade or so have been frankly utilitarian. There is also useful talk of giving money for disadvantaged pupils directly to their schools, and a slightly vague suggestion of allowing children in underperforming schools to carry extra cash to encourage a more popular school to take them in. We&8217;re told this will encourage the popular schools to expand. Not really convinced, again &8211; firstly, because it&8217;s usually down to the local authority to give such permission, and secondly because good schools aren&8217;t infinitely elastic. There&8217;s also a suggestion that governors should include university employees to encourage closer links with schools. All of which is interesting stuff, but again suggests a punitive attitude towards schools which are experiencing an uphill struggle in their everyday work with the poorest people in society. One primary head regularly makes my hair stand on end when he outlines the routine problems for children and their families with which he struggles each week&8212; alcoholism and violence being the basics. Aspirations? On the estate in which he works, families wonder if there is something wrong with their children if they are not themselves parents at 16. Getting the children to aspire to anything outside what they know is a full-time job. Schools and Sure Start really aren&8217;t enough to challenge this kind of nurture, and it&8217;s partly a product of the exceptionally polarised society in which we live. My other slight concern is of letting down the pupils who do manage their five GCSEs, or their A Levels, or their degree &8211; and then find the bar has been raised still higher for that desirable job. Sorry, you'll need a Masters now. That&8217;s one of the odd (to me) underlying assumptions of this report: that apparently experts have told the committee that most of the new jobs created over the next decade will be professional and managerial ones, and that we&8217;re going to be even more of a service industry nation than we are now. Leaving aside the puzzling idea that we will somehow require more lawyers, or that the NHS will be able to afford more doctors, or that any media organisation will pay for more journalists while the old financial model is still being undermined by free news on the Web, I can&8217;t quite see what all these people are going to manage. Surely part of our current problems is that most of the jobs we&8217;ve had in the UK recently have been providing services to each other, and then using our wages to import stuff that other people have made or grown. Is it a safe economic model to come out of the recession doing exactly the same, but more so? And if only super-privileged kids are getting into the desirable jobs, surely that&8217;s partly because the pool of jobs that people regard as desirable have mysteriously shrunk over the years. Fair Access is all about getting children and young people and their parents to be aspirational, but to a very narrow range of jobs. On a swift reading of its 167 pages, there&8217;s no mention I can see of getting children aspiring to be scientists or high-quality engineers, or anything else which would enable UK PLC to compete technologically or at least make more of the stuff that people want to buy. Given that today the Government has given the go-ahead for 10,000 more university places than it originally intended &8211; but only in science, technology, engineering and maths &8211; there seems to be a bit of a gap in its joined-up thinking here. Does it want practical, highly educated people, or does it want &8220;professionals&8221;? Shouldn&8217;t we as a nation aspire to more? Fair Access points out that journalism is now stuffed with privately educated people from backgrounds of income which is way above average, but that not all that long ago a school-leaver could join a paper as a messenger and work their way up to being a Fleet Street star. When I started out, as a graduate from a very modest background, all the training was geared to people with A Levels. The old hands all loathed graduates. We were apprenticed to our papers for a couple of years, till we passed the proficiency test which checked our accuracy and flair as reporters as well as practical knowledge of law, institutions and shorthand. It was a fantastic way to train, because you learned about tenacity, hard work, how to get people to talk and how to then present the information. You learned from mistakes (I still cringe at the memory of my second day, when I asked a rabbi for his Christian name) and you learned it wasn&8217;t a glamorous job, but a really interesting one. Why has it turned into a graduate profession? Because we&8217;ve all been sold the idea that it&8217;s better to learn at university, and because competition is so enormous for a job in &8220;the media&8221; that you have to jump through more hoops first. Has the level of professionalism increased? Some of the best journalists I know started work at 17 or 18. These days, when schoolkids or students ask me about careers in journalism, my opening gambit is to suggest they consider doing something else. The current hunger for celebrity means there is so much competition for media work, and it&8217;s increasingly hard to actually find a job. If they are determined, I suggest getting a science or maths qualification first. If they still want to be journalists, at least they&8217;ve got a unique selling point among all the arts and journalism grads. And they can always fall back on a real job. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=162Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:52:56 GMT20090721035256Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:52:56 GMT20090721035256Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:50:41 GMT20090722115041Posted By Site Administrator at 02/07/2009 Why do the words &8220;I despair&8221; seem to be uppermost in the mind as I contemplate the publication this week of the government&8217;s latest white paper on schools reform? After all, while there were many reactions to the document &8211; ranging from a welcome for its emphasis on one-to-one tuition for struggling pupils through a concern about the &8220;licence to teach&8221; scheme to a general sense that not much in the paper was very new &8211; a sense of complete desolation was not, shall we say, a widely-reported feeling among those learning of the paper&8217;s contents. But it&8217;s not far from my view. The reason? Well, over the past five years, I have found myself attempting to catalogue the problems associated with what might be termed &8220;performance-orientated schooling&8221;. This is the idea that the central goal of education is to improve statistical outcome measures of pupils&8217; achievement, often, but not exclusively, in terms of test and exam results. Crucially, under such a regime, these measurable outcomes can come to define &8211; at an official or semi-official level - all that matters in a person&8217;s schooling, because they form the basis on which schools and teachers are judged, and also define how politicians and other powerful people talk about the success of the education system. Because of this, my 2007 book on this subject was called &8220;Education by Numbers&8221;. I wanted to capture a sense that statistics had become the be-all-and-end-all: the ultimate goal of the education system had becoming improving the figures, ideally incrementally by a few percentage points every year. I believe the latest white paper pushes this approach even further than before, as its vision, set out over 104 pages, is couched almost entirely in terms of how schools &8220;perform&8221;. This always implies an associated statistical outcome measure. Yet the document is virtually free of any discussion of education in itself: what makes a good lesson, how pupils can be motivated to want to come to school, how teachers and pupils could be supported to read around their subjects, and so on. The word &8220;performance&8221; features 84 times in the document, and &8220;performing&8221; a further 37 times. Although much has been made of the government&8217;s move to abolish the national strategies as signalling a move away from top-down control of schooling, this authoritarian paper is also replete with suggestions about how ministers and the government will &8220;intervene&8221; in schools which are not &8220;performing&8221; to their expectations. I am not dismissing the importance of exam results to pupils&8217; futures. But leaving aside the sometimes questionable measures that can be taken to improve them, these measurable outcomes are not, never were, and never will be the sole purpose of education, in my eyes. As last month&8217;s Nuffield Review on 14-19 education put it, in describing what has happened to England&8217;s education system: "As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have proportionately lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of question ... of seeking understanding.&8221; Of course, the government will say that it is precisely to address these kinds of concerns that it is introducing...erm... a new set of measures, within school &8220;report cards&8221;, assessing other aspects of school life, including pupil &8220;well being&8221;, take-up of school lunches and healthy exercise. Looked at from one angle, this is very sensible: why not recognise this work officially? Considered from another viewpoint, it is beyond satire: will league tables in pupil happiness and penalties for underperformers follow. Much of the thinking behind the white paper may appear well-meant, such as the call on schools to close the achievement gaps between different groups of pupils because everyone deserves a good start in life. But I think it would benefit from an alternative view of just what the purpose of education is. Is it all about raising the numbers, or is it something more? We should debate this properly, Mr Balls.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=161Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:58:52 GMT20090720035852Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:58:52 GMT20090720035852Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:58:52 GMT20090720035852Posted By Site Administrator at 19/06/2009 13:53:11 So, yet more evidence that the educational argument on the impact of high-stakes testing on the curriculum is being won, then. That would be my first reading of Sunday&8217;s shock news that the Conservatives are...wait for it...promising to scrap England&8217;s last remaining Sats tests, at key stage 2. I must admit, I have had my doubts about whether I would ever write the above sentence. The Tories, most notably their schools spokesman Nick Gibb, have often taken a hard-line stance on the importance of using tests to hold schools to account. And lest we forget, the tests themselves were introduced under John Major&8217;s government, following the launch of the national curriculum under Margaret Thatcher. There have been alternative strands of Conservative opinion. A report in 2007 for the party by Baroness Pauline Perry, the former chief inspector of schools, said: &8220;A relentless focus upon key stage tests has not only created a culture of over-teaching to the test, but has driven the enthusiasm to learn out of the classroom.&8221; However, the Tories have never recommended dropping key stage 2 Sats until now. In making his announcement on the BBC&8217;s Andrew Marr show, the shadow schools secretary Michael Gove suggested that practical concerns &8211; last year&8217;s marking failure under ETS and the need to review costs - played a part in his decision. But he also gave a third reason. He said: &8220;One of the many concerns that people have is that high-stakes testing completely narrows teaching during the final year of primary school and all the focus is on drilling children just for those tests.&8221; That is a significant statement. Once you accept that the current high-stakes testing regime can be and is educationally damaging, serious reform is, I believe, inevitable. The weight of evidence on the educational downsides of test-driven accountability has been building inexorably in recent years. Until now, it has largely been ignored in the positions of the two main parties. Although it could be dismissed as rhetoric, I also think it was important that Mr Gove began the discussion with Andrew Marr with the following: &8220;What we want to do is we want to make sure that we have a system of testing and assessment which actually serves the interests of children.&8221; Too often, this has not been the case. Head teachers are likely to have reservations about the Conservatives&8217; suggestion for what goes in the place of Sats. Having noticed that many secondary schools re-test pupils at the start of year seven, only a few months after the key stage 2 tests, he proposes to use tests marked by teachers at the start of secondary (ie after the summer holidays) to judge pupils&8217; understanding of the primary curriculum. Most controversially, these results will then be aggregated to produce league table figures on the performance of primary schools. There will be unintended consequences, which need to be taken seriously from the start. I am not sure, also, how much work the Tories have done on the details. Overall, though, I think it is an interesting idea, which will make teaching to the test more difficult for primaries, and therefore is worth looking at seriously on educational grounds. The Conservative position also suggests a willingness to work with a school-based assessment system, which Mr Gove suggested would cut costs. The statement puts new pressure on the Government in what is becoming an ever-more-central area of education policy. Ministers have responded robustly, declaring that the Conservative move would be a step back for accountability. Labour is therefore trusting that voters, including parents, really do, on balance, like the Sats. But do they? www.educationbynumbers.org.ukhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=160Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:54:48 GMT20090720035448Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:54:48 GMT20090720035448Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:54:48 GMT20090720035448Posted By Site Administrator at 15/06/2009 10:36:16 It may be one of the biggest conundrums to face the teaching profession over the coming year. If Sats are to go, and a form of teacher assessment is to replace them, how can one devise an assessment system which will command credibility with both the profession and the public, but without adding greatly to teachers&8217; workloads? This issue was exercising assessment experts and teachers alike at two conferences I have attended in the past two weeks. Last year&8217;s scrapping of the key stage 3 tests, and the recent decision by the Government&8217;s &8220;expert group&8221; on assessment to scrap the key stage 2 science Sats from next year, suggest a greater role for teacher assessment in both primary and secondary classrooms from now on. But what form should it take? At the first conference, laid on by the National Foundation for Educational Research for assessment specialists, there was a degree of uncertainty about what would replace the science tests next year, let alone the future of teacher assessment should the key stage 2 tests in English and maths go too. In early May, the expert group said that there should be a new basis for judging pupils&8217; progress in science. Instead of pupils sitting key stage 2 science Sats, teachers are to use a version of Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) &8211; the detailed system for checking children&8217;s achievements in particular aspects of a subject &8211; to reach judgements on the levels their charges have reached at the end of year six. Although APP is currently available in reading, writing and maths, it has not yet been developed for key stage 2 science. The expert group&8217;s report says, however, that it will be in place by next year. In addition, the group, all of whose recommendations were accepted by the Government, says that the DCSF will work with national scientific organisations to develop some further assessment tasks which will enable teachers to assess pupils&8217; practical and investigative scientific skills. It looks like a tight timescale to come up with materials which will have big implications for teaching, although I gather that the APP science tools have been in development for a while. And there may be much goodwill for this change in schools, given the report&8217;s finding that Sats tests were not assessing all that mattered in the science curriculum. The bigger issue, of course, is the future of the key stage 2 English and maths tests. The NAHT and the National Union of Teachers, of course, are determined to make last month&8217;s Sats the last ever taken. But at the second event I attended, the National Union of Teachers&8217; annual young teachers&8217; conference in Lincolnshire, there were signs of unhappiness about a system which could be seen as a contender as a possible replacement for Sats: the aforementioned Assessing Pupils&8217; Progress. Teachers were worried about the workload involved in APP, an issue which the rival NASUWT has already cited as a reason for calling, incredibly, for possible industrial action in support of Sats. The NUT members were also concerned that APP could be a time-consuming way of reaching judgements on pupil levels which they already knew. One said she thought that it would narrow the curriculum, with teachers encouraged to teach only to the assessment objectives within APP. My judgement is that those campaigning for the end of Sats will be wary of associating themselves too much with APP, because of the level of controversy it has created in schools. The challenge, then, might be to come up with an alternative, less bureaucratic, system of moderated teacher assessment. And fast.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=159Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:53:03 GMT20090720035303Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:53:03 GMT20090720035303Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:53:03 GMT20090720035303Mick Brookes discusses current education issues.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretarys-roundup-19-july-2009/Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:32:26 GMT20090720033226Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:49:42 GMT20090716114942Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:32:25 GMT2009072003322515308Postponed publication of Framework for Excellence 2009 The LSC together with departmental colleagues at BIS and DCSF have worked closely with FE colleges and training providers over the past year to develop the Framework for Excellence and place it at the heart of performance assessment of post-16 education and training. Significant progress has been made and we are confident that in future the Framework will: support the new local authority commissioning arrangements; ....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=156Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:58:11 GMT20090715115811Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:58:11 GMT20090715115811Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:04:21 GMT20090716030421Last week there was much wailing and wringing of hands because some scientists had created sperm in a lab, leading to fears of the redundant male. This week we need more men, urgently, in the nation&8217;s classrooms. In the newsroom of The Sun, this is known as a reverse ferret &8211; in other words, when you completely change tack on a story. I&8217;ve got a vague memory of a big research project coming out about five years ago, which concluded that the sex of the teachers was irrelevant to how the kids did. I can perfectly well believe that &8211; and yet, I do think that male and female teachers often bring something different to the party, and that difference can be hugely important. Unscientifically, I thought back to my own schooldays and realised that the male teachers were the ones I really remember, and not just for their rarity value. They were the characters, the ones who brought themselves into the classroom, the ones &8211; as Denis Healey would say &8211; with a hinterland. There was Mr Wheeler, the primary teacher who rode a penny-farthing round town and owned a steam engine. He was also nutty about Gilbert and Sullivan, and put on The Mikado and the Pirates of Penzance with a cast of ten-year-olds. Marvellous, that was. There was his colleague, the enormously tall Mr Stone, who encouraged the writing of stories that went on and on, getting ever more inventive. In secondary there was the art teacher who was also a published poet. Mr Szirtes wrote a couple of extraordinary school productions (even more extraordinary in the context of a rather staid girls&8217; grammar school), encouraged our creative writing efforts, and ran a printing club with an ancient press at lunchtimes. There was an irascible Physics teacher who had a mean aim with a board rubber, and the most fantastic biologist, Mr Graham, whose cheery explanation for the evolutionary benefits of eyebrows I remember clearly to this day. That&8217;s enough teachers, but you get the picture. They were interesting, unpredictable, and wanted to share their own passions and interests with the pupils. And it&8217;s partly because of this collection of maverick males that I have such affectionate memories from school, making me (I hope) the sort of parent who fully supports and encourages my own children&8217;s education. Perhaps we should be shipping such teachers to areas where schooling isn&8217;t much valued? Don&8217;t get me wrong &8211; I had fantastic female teachers too. But they tended to leave their obsessions outside the classroom. Or maybe it&8217;s only men who have those kinds of obsessions? And I know not all male teachers have that quirky edge, although unscientifically I&8217;d think it&8217;s a much higher proportion than in their female colleagues. They&8217;re still in the system as well &8211; I know of one whose former pupils can sing along to most Beatles songs. Maybe as a man, you have to be a bit of a character to brave the tide and go into teaching. Modern teaching probably does actively dissuade men. False accusations are a real worry for all teachers now, and men feel particularly vulnerable. And (this is purely my personal opinion), in the same way that boys and girls often learn in different ways, men and women operate in different ways. Men prefer not to read the instruction manual (&8220;it&8217;s cheating&8221;) and refuse to ask for directions until they&8217;ve been round the same one-way system three times. If you want more men in the system, the system may have to allow them to go off-piste in lessons a little more often, and make them feel truly protected against a casual accusation. In other words, some big changes are needed. Can&8217;t see them happening though. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.com.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=154Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:56:23 GMT20090713115623Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:56:23 GMT20090713115623Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:46:16 GMT20090715024616I came accross the following abstract of research carried out into the above. It appears in the latest online journal of the Economic and Social Research Council. "More than 90 per cent of teachers have experienced some form of violence at school, whether verbal or physical abuse, non-verbal intimidation or threats, according to a new survey of 275 secondary school teachers from schools in the south of England. Just over half of these teachers admitted their....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/blogs/secondaryblog/?blogpost=153Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:24 GMT20090707010124Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:24 GMT20090707010124Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:24 GMT20090707010124It&8217;s that brilliant time of year where most of your hard graft is done and there&8217;s fun on the timetable. Sports weeks, activity weeks and school fairs have the upper hand on policies and planning, and school leaders are on show, meeting and greeting, congratulating pupils and gladhanding parents. But there are a few clouds gathering on the horizon. Public sector pay is clearly being put up for discussion as a &8220;painless&8221; cut which could be made to ease our rickety finances. More ominously, there are signs of public anger brewing over the issue. A local paper website ran an article about the number of &8220;fatcats&8221; earning more than &163;50k in one local authority, naming heads as among these highly-paid staff. Reaction from readers was, universally and vociferously, outrage. Strangely, there seemed to be no differentiation made between heads and anonymous County Hall managers, and that really surprised me. And with Alastair Darling, David Cam