Susans October 2009 blogs

25/10/2009

I’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 “follow” the Twitterings (and that’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’m following Ed Balls.

And this Tweet sent me to bed last night scratching my head in puzzlement. “in a caravan in the Lakes finalising our new careers advice strategy... and baking a chocolate and passion fruit roulade (swiss roll)”

In a caravan? Well, I suppose it’s half term. And it’s very Man of the People. Don’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’s not a family holiday then.

… and baking a chocolate and passion fruit roulade? So is it a family holiday, or isn’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’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’s a swiss roll? Is that going for the middle class vote and the working class one as well?

Baffled, I gave up. It’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’ve talked to say the problem is that no-one’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’ 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 “something” 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 – that many more kids had visited university – doesn’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’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’s every likelihood that they’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 – and that’s a sensible approach. I’ve long thought that was the real Achilles heel of the AimHigher approach.  Debt is real, and scary, and it really isn’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 – 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’s a scandal that it is currently a big hole in the system. I’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.com

§       At 16:08 on 26/10/2009,
Gerald Haigh wrote:

One of the points made by the Nuffield Review of 14 - 19 Education and Training, in which I had a very small part, is that not only is the "work hard, get a good job" link not made, but it actually doesn't exist for a whole sector of the population. People get jobs for a whole bunch of reasons -- moving from Saturday jobs, family contacts, meeting somebody, a mate gets you in and so on. Young people realise that often better than their teachers do -- because teachers, in common with all the other rule-makers in society, have come up the exam/university/good job route, and assume it must be right for everyone. So teenagers disconnect when they're preached to about what they see as something they're not going to be taking part in. Careers advice, like all other bits of education, needs to start where the kids are at.
The Review's worth reading of course. www.nuffield14-19review.org.uk

§       At 17:18 on 26/10/2009,
susan young wrote:

That's a really good point. I'll go back to that review

18/10/2009

I’m not qualified to offer an opinion on whether or not Ed Balls is a bully. Barry Sheerman says he is, Mr Balls says he isn’t. I guess on balance Mr Balls should know.

But he’s certainly a master of the subtle art of sticking up two fingers, both personally and as leader of a major government department.

It’s surely beyond coincidence, for instance, that the Department for Cushions and Soft Furnishings chose today to release its plans to formalise children’s entry to school or nursery at the age of four.

That’s effectively the next working day after the release of Robin Alexander’s mammoth review of primary education, whose 175 recommendations suggested that later rather than earlier might be the way to go when starting school.

I suppose it might have been on the government’s famous “grid” – the cross-departmental planning sheet which ensures that big announcements don’t overlap each other (unless they want to bury a bit of bad news) for ages. But then, so might the publication date of the Alexander review.

And Vernon Coaker managed to rubbish the thing as being out-of-date within hours of its publication. If he’d managed to read the whole thing before saying that, then respect to him.

I’m a swift reader and it took me well over an hour to speed-read the final chapter as a precursor to going through it more carefully. That’s chapter 24, by the way. So Mr Coaker must really have been burning the midnight oil in his devotion to duty, reading the whole thing in order to comment so succinctly on the outcome of three years’ work by a huge team. What a marvellous man.

The problem is that the government is on fairly safe ground in rubbishing the Alexander review. One reason is that it knows perfectly well that most people won’t read it and will rely on what reporters tell them. And then they’ll remember the soundbity bits, like the line about modern primary education being as narrow as that given to Victorian kids.

Having said that, quite a few non-educationists I know were interested to hear what Professor Alexander had to say on the Today programme on Friday morning, and were horrified by the official stonewalling he got.

An awful lot of otherwise interested parents are going to be a bit confused by the fact that there have been two primary reviews floating around this year. If you believe the conspiracy theorists, the government-commissioned Rose review was itself inspired by fear of what Robin Alexander might do during his three year, charitably-funded project.

And then there’s the nature of the Review itself. No dumbing-down here. Professor Alexander takes no prisoners whilst surveying the whole primary system, from starting age through subjects to SATs. But again, it may not be very accessible to most parents, or even most teachers.

It is a worthy successor to the Plowden report of thirty years ago in its breadth and scale, but the team must be aware that no political party is going to buy into the whole package – or even part of it – immediately. One major reason for that is discussed in the report itself on several occasions – that decisions are taken on teacher training, curriculum and just about everything else without recourse to any available research.

Or, as the team so eloquently puts it: “The politicisation of primary education has also gone too far. Discussion has been blocked by derision, truth has been supplanted by myth and spin, and alternatives to current arrangements have been reduced to crude dichotomy. It is time to advance to a discourse which exemplifies rather than negates what education should be about.”

Every school is getting a booklet in the post, and there is a series of events round the country to explain what the review is about. It’s probably worth finding the time to go and learn more about what the politicians will be recommending in a decade or so. And then spread the word.

* If politicians (apart from Vernon Coaker, of course), won’t read the Alexander review I think they should be made to peruse this succinct summary of the state of British education, posted in the comment section of the Guardian website:

“My children were educated, initially, in Finland where they didn't start until they were over 7 (so 5 year old boys don't get the confidence sucked out of them). Our 11 year old has thus ``missed'' 4 years of education (having also been put up a year here), yet comes top in everything. Go figure.

So this is for free (hopefully one of the plethora of tzars and consultants coining a couple of hundred grand a year can pick it up): ahem

STOP TREATING THE UK'S CHILDREN AS POLITICAL COUNTERS AND LET THEM START SCHOOL MUCH LATER, FEED THEM WELL (YOU KNOW SALAD, SOUP, VEGETABLES) AND MIX IT UP A BIT (I.E. STOP TEACHING TO SATS AND GET OUT OF THE CLASSROOM FROM TIME TO TIME). OH AND KEEP ``FAITH'' AS A SUBJECT TO BE INCLUDED IN THE ODD LESSON, RATHER LIKE TRIGONOMETRY, AND NOT A MODEL FOR LIFE.

JEESCH.”

Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.com

12/10/2009

Loose talk costs lives, they used to say. And it’s certainly costing politicians a bit of goodwill from headteachers as the fallout from the opening weeks of the election campaign continues.

First of all Ed Balls merrily lumped heads together with “bureaucrats” in his quest to save money by losing jobs. Given that this government has spent the last decade and lots of cash on building up the idea of leadership as an almost mystical calling, this seems an odd mistake to make.

And then Michael Gove has compounded the error. In his conference speech last week, he spent a lot of time threatening to do away with bureaucrats, without ever being specific about who he meant. This line -- "We will tackle head-on the defeatism, the political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down that is at the heart of our educational establishment" – has now led to a furious letter from heads to the Guardian.

Who, they asked, was at the heart of “the educational establishment” if not heads?

But, says Gove, he has been misunderstood. According to the Guardian, a Tory spokesman said: "In his speech Michael celebrated success in state education and made clear that further improvement depends on trusting heads more, giving them more power and control and freeing them from bureaucracy.

"It is the educational establishment, specifically this government and its agencies, who have frustrated this process. Michael looks forward to working with heads to reduce the bureaucratic burden and enhance school autonomy."

So that’s clear then. Except it probably isn’t. Looks like bureaucrat-baiting is here to stay, but no-one’s going to clarify exactly who they are.

Still it should go reasonably quiet on the politics and initiatives front until the election campaign starts in earnest, unless the Lords really do manage to prevent the current Education bill to go through in its current form.

They want to give the thing proper scrutiny – perhaps wishing to avoid a repeat of the unravelling Vettting and Barring regulations – but are refusing to do the caffeine-fuelled all-nighters it took to get it through the Commons.

At risk, apparently, are sections pertaining to the QCDA and the new Young People’s Learning Agency (even though the former is already up and running and the latter’s new boss has already been named). Given that both acronyms are going to be fully staffed with bureaucrats you’d think a little scrutiny would be welcome, but the word is that Royal Assent is expected in November.

God knows what either lot of politicians would make of the current fun over the idea that mobile phones could be legitimately used in classrooms.

This particular hare was started by Paul Haigh, an assistant head at ICT hotspot Notre Dame High in Sheffield. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole thing has morphed into a row over teachers being bullied on social networking sites and kids texting each other, but it’s worth going back to the original material.

What he actually suggests is that schools are currently having to use technology in pretty inefficient ways. Carting your class off the to ICT suite means you are bereft of other equipment, such as wall posters, which could have been part of your lesson, and that you may have to find ways of filling the time.

But talk to pupils about the technology they personally own – smartphones, laptops, netbooks – and with a bit of ingenuity they can be harnessed to join your other resources.

Haigh makes the interesting point that if kids are texting mates during lessons, that’s because they’re disengaged. Without the phone they would still have been disengaged, but using the old-tech method of staring out of the window. With it, he says, there’s a chance of giving them an exciting lesson, which may catch their interest.

He adds: “I once almost confiscated a phone in a lesson only to find out the child was doing just that- texting her mum to say how well she was doing, I quickly retreated from shooting myself in the foot- it was proof that I'd finally got through to this girl and she was proud of her achievements; she was so proud to get a grade C in her GCSE mock she had to tell the next person its mattered to as much as her; her mum- and I'm all for parental engagement through new technology.”

Becta seems to approve: bet the politicians won’t.

Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.com.

7/10/2009

What on earth is going on? Had I stumbled upon a morning sofa-based chat programme, or could this really be a live broadcast of the Conservative party conference?

There were six people in armchairs, smiling and relaxed, answering questions from expert delegates on special schools, history and music. They smiled and – they even told jokes.

Not very good ones, mind, but you had to forgive shadow culture secretary Ed Vaizey, promising to do more for music in schools, thanking the speaker for giving him a singing lesson. “I will be singing in the bar of the Midlands hotel tonight… Suspicious Minds, that famous Elvis song about the Labour cabinet!” he chortled.

Nasty party? You could practically see the shovelfuls of earth fly into the air as the Conservative high command endeavoured to bury its old reputation far more than six feet under.

But then… came Michael Gove. And we were back in high Tory territory of teaching history, wearing ties, expellings and suspensions. Oh, and an entirely new sort of teacher recruited from the ranks of ex-soldiers.

They used to say that Michael Heseltine knew where to locate the pleasure centre –putting it politely -- of the Conservative party at conference, and it seems that he passed on the same black art to the current Michael.

His speech should go down a storm with readers of the Mail and the Telegraph, and has already provoked storms of outrage on the Guardian’s talk boards.

Does that make it bad news for heads and teachers? Not sure – unlike the speech made last week by Ed Balls, there’s a lot more there than meets the eye.

That’s partly because a lot of his targets were frankly a bit mysterious. Where Harry Potter characters refer fearfully to The Dark Lord and He Who Must Not Be Named, Mr Gove chunters about bureaucrats and how they must be removed. Who are they? No idea. The only organisation to actually get a namecheck was the QDCA.

“For far too long out of touch bureaucrats have imposed faddy ideologies on our schools which ignore the evidence of what really works in education.

“Teachers have been deprived of professional freedom, denied the chance to inspire children with a love of learning and dragooned into delivering what the bureaucrats decree.

We know that the countries with the very best education systems are those with the best teachers - and we know that the only way we can deliver real improvements in education is by strengthening the role of great teachers - and diminishing the power of the bureaucrats,” he said.

But in the world of the shadow children’s secretary – unlike that of his Government counterpart – heads appear not to be classed as bureaucrats. Far from it.

In fact, should we wake up to the Camerons’ removal van in Downing Street on the morning of May 7, I’d advise any decent head to take a slug of Pro-Plus and wait by the phone.

Where Labour did naming and shaming in their first 100 days, this lot promise wholesale evictions of heads in the “worst” schools, to be replaced by better performing models.

Where are all these paragons to come from? Does this mean a lot more executive headships? Will the ousted heads get to go and improve themselves in the better schools? Has anyone noticed that leadership is often highly rated by Ofsted in national challenge schools? Your guess is as good as mine.

One interesting line which was only a throwaway in the speech itself, but press-released later, is that Ofsted’s own remit will apparently be scaled right back. It will be looking at teaching and learning, and high-performing schools will be excused inspections unless a parent grasses them up or results start to fall. Which means, I think, that the only measure of how good a head was would be results or school popularity.

So, what would the Gove education system of the future look like? Academies wherever you look for starters. Good schools can go for academy status whenever they like, others will have to ask permission. The “worst” schools will be turned into academies too. Local authorities are apparently classed as bureaucrats.

Parents would apparently be able to fulfil their dream of a good, small school on the doorstep, possibly by setting one up themselves. All schools would get strong discipline, uniform with specific namechecks for blazers and ties, and no more namby-pamby reinstatement of violent excluded pupils.

British “narrative” history would be back on the curriculum, kids would get a reading test after two years at school, and the sciences are to be rescued from their dumbed-down state.

So far, so traditional – except the model for all this is not some Kent grammar but Mossbourne Academy in Hackney. Adding to the sense that there really is something new here is Gove’s personal fervour that children from poor backgrounds deserve second chances – like the one he got upon being adopted.

For most of the speech he appeared as mild-mannered as the psychologist Niles Crane from Frasier – until he went off piste with the unscripted snarl: “The waste of talents is simply unacceptable and under a Conservative government IT WILL END!”

The tone was an interesting contrast to Labour last week as well. The session involved a fair few jokes, many of them at the expense of the science and history curriculums. And notably, where Labour speakers toiling away at the podium talked of “our children,” the Conservative phrase was “your children.” Explicit promises on special schools will have pleased many people as well.

What didn’t we learn? For one thing, exactly how parents will be able to spend the £5,000 (more if they’re poor) they will be given to buy their children’s education under a Conservative government. Are we talking vouchers here?

We didn’t really learn how the Bonfire of the Bureaucrats is going to work, particularly if the curriculum is about to be turned upside down yet again.

 And we didn’t really get a sniff of what would happen to the children’s agenda end of his department other than a promise during the session that parents giving lifts to other children would not have to be vetted.

It’s far from clear how the human rights act would to be amended so that excluded children wouldn’t win appeals to win back their old school places, and far from clear just how all these lovely little schools could be constructed all over the place.

And primary schools? If local authorities are being written out of the picture then presumably we’d be getting primary academies and an awful lot of duplicated bureaucracy.

We still don’t know just how all this would work. But it looks like there are going to be a lot of jobs out there for head teachers.

Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.com

30/09/2009

I try to put myself at your service, and today I’ve truly done my best. I’ve sat through Ed Balls’ speech to the Labour party conference, all so that you don’t have to.

And I have to say is that my first reaction – apart from losing the will to live – was to scratch my head and wonder what all that was about. Because to cut a long speech mercifully short, for once I don’t think he actually announced anything much. Which is pretty weird for this government.

There was one truly new thing, which was the announcement of an enquiry into racism in schools. That seems to be looking into whether or not teachers should be allowed to be BNP members, probably after all the kerfuffle one of the teaching unions made about the GTCE code not actually banning blackshirts.

“I want us to know we have all the powers we need to stamp out racism and BNP activity in all of our schools,” said Balls, explaining he’d put a former Ofsted boss, Maurice Smith, in charge of that one.

There was also the re-announcement of the beefed-up home school contract in which parents have to promise to make sure their kids behave, will be told so in a leaflet, and threatened with court. And that’s it on the “new” front.

But there were interesting lines in his speech – which he delivered rather neatly with the help of some sort of invisible autocue.

I particularly liked this (the italics are mine). “And because parents do want to know how their children and local schools are doing - we will keep tests at the end of Year 6, but we will introduce a new Report Card so that schools are, for the first time, fairly judged on all they do and parents get all the information they need.”

So schools haven’t previously been fairly judged then? Or is he saying that KS2 Sats aren’t a fair summing up of what schools do? How is the report card going to be any fairer?

Another interesting line: “And conference, unlike the Tories, we will not break our promises on pay and conditions to teachers and head teachers.

“We will put teaching on the same professional footing as doctors and lawyers, introduce an entitlement to continuous professional development and keep onreduce workload so teachers can get on and teach.”

How this was to be achieved, he didn’t say, except that the new pay and conditions body for support staff was the crucial part of it. He’s also committed to raising the “’steem” (he still swallows half his syllables) of support staff in all of this, but doesn’t quite specify how.

Nothing there about cutting the “bureaucracy” of heads and federating schools – or not federating them. Since Last Week’s Big Idea wasn’t mentioned in the speech, which was basically a rallying call to Labour activists, you might suspect it’s not really seen as a selling point. It may not die the death, but he’s not going to yell about it.

Another of those crowd-pleasing moments came with his list of Tory sins from the past government, including photocopied textbooks.

(Don’t remember that one myself, but personal experience suggests it’s not something Labour have cured – does your school give books to the kids? I suppose it’s not very 21^st century, but it doesn’t exactly help “break down barriers” to learning if your grasp of something depends on your parents’ memory of the subject or adeptness at finding a suitable explanation on the Web.) Rant over.

Interestingly, he stayed well away from the issues which are really overheating opinion on parental forums, such as the new vetting rules and Ofsted’s interest in private childminding arrangements.

But this speech wasn’t necessarily all about education. The closest he really got to actual education was a fierce defence of the Diploma from Michael Gove’s criticisms.

As Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls began with feelgood lines for social workers, and promised to do his best for vulnerable children. Before getting going, he introduced his mystery guest, Eddie Izzard, to present awards to local community champions. These mostly worked in schools in different capacities. Not too sure how interested the Labour delegates were in any of this, though, as the TV footage showed a remarkable number of people wandering round in the rather empty conference centre.

But Izzard was great. Balls began by introducing him as Izzie Eddard. Grinning evilly, Izzard began to sympathise with the Children’s Secretary about his own name, asking if it had caused him any trouble. “It’s been interesting over the years,” said Balls cautiously. Izzard looked solicitous. “Ever thought of changing it to something else… like Steve?”

Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.com