Mr Read 'How Not To Teach' and 'I 8 Skool'

Headteacher becomes lollipop lady

2010-12-15T13:27:00.000Z

Blackpool - England's Worst Resort?

2010-11-17T11:10:00.000Z

We always took our children to Blackpool for the illuminations. There are those sepia-tinted memories – donkeys on the beach; families on deckchairs, dad with a knotted handkerchief on his head; the Tower standing sentry; clanking trams and the three piers.

It was a long time since we'd visited, for this journey we started just down the coast at Lytham, home of the Open Golf tournament. It isn't an 'in your face' tourist resort, far more genteel and refined, you can tell, up market charity shops, expensive jewellers, chic clothing shops, classy restaurants and renovated Georgian houses. People are dressed casual but smart and the tans aren't fake but the result of holidays in exotic locations.

We got the bus to Blackpool and in the process crossed a metaphysical boundary or border. In some parts of the world this transition is one of stark and brutal contrasts. Drive out of Cape Town Airport and you encounter the outskirts of Khayelitsha township, half a million people living in desperate conditions, a few miles down the road there are the manicured lawns and electrified security fences of the white suburbs. From the third world to the first world.

Lytham to Blackpool wasn't a similar experience not a different planet but still a different country. The shops that were open had giant signs that screamed in red and black letters, 'Sale!' or 'Bargain!'. Entrepreneurs with an eye for opportunity had established temporary covered markets in front of abandoned shops. Closer to the sea front the boarded up guest houses with incongruent or ironic names – 'Majestic', 'Rest a While' and 'Number One'.

Whatever happened to the happy, wholesome holidaymakers? However it's written this will sound snobbish, condescending and patronising but obesity has replaced gaunt, thin and emaciated as the new poor. Not only that there was the old working class tradition; family photograph, wedding, funeral or holiday – you wore your best clothes. People in Blackpool seem to be on a permanent 'dress down day' – grubby trainers, stretchy track suits, lank hair, pasty faces.

Blackpool was the favourite resort of the mill hands and miners, as late as the 1950s there were 70 trains a day off loading thousands of punters. The fall in visitor numbers has been dramatic from 20 million in the 1970s to 10 million in 2008. Between 2008 and 2009 the numbers of overnight stays plummeted by 26%. Over the last twenty years half of the guest houses have closed.

The bus took us past the 'Golden Mile', a complete and utter misnomer, a terminological inexactitude and a contradiction in fact. It's a collection of junk food emporiums – fish 'n' chips, pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers, doughnuts – interspersed with sleazy sex shops. Blackpool isn't alone in its misery you'd find the same in all the other fading sea side resorts – Rhyl, Hastings, Morecambe, Southend, Margate

Blackpool in its heyday was the quintessentially working class resort. It also represented the best of that old world – collectivism, solidarity, hedonism, an opportunity to let off steam, the coarse end-of-the-pier humour. Sadly in a desperate bid for business it has gone down market and become the stag and hen party capital. The excessive drinking culture has turned most town centres on a Saturday night into a Bacchanalian version of the Wild West, but in Blackpool it's ramped up ten fold. There's also the loosening of certain social conventions – what is it about urinating in the street? If I owned a shop I wouldn't want to spend the first hour on a Monday morning removing the smell of piss from the doorway.

Middle class people have never really gone on holiday to Blackpool and for the current metropolitan elite it's off the radar, invisible. If you've moved through that charmed circle of public school, Oxbridge, the City and Parliament, the chances are you won't have encountered, visited or stayed in places like Blackpool. Both the Labour and Conservative Parties have abandoned the resort as a conference venue. The convenient excuse was that there weren't enough five star hotels, in reality it was an embarrassment, they didn't want foreign journalists to experience such a stark alternative to Cool Britannica.

Blackpool is another country. As the economic geographer Danny Dorling has described we are a nation that is drifting apart, where each section of the population, the rich, the middle class, the poor, live apart – they don't live in the same villages or parts of town, their children attend different schools. Their life experiences are separate, a form of social apartheid unseen since the 1930s.

Only in the most extreme circumstances do the chattering classes or the media discover the hidden underbelly of society. When Shannon Matthews disappeared the press pack descended on her Dewsbury council estate and found three generations of families who hadn't worked and so many people never moving off the estate – even to visit Blackpool.

A feature of news management is to always accentuate the positive. A town or city is 'on the up', the background music is 'Things Can Only Get Better'. In fairness you can't accuse Blackpool Council of that, in their bid for the Super Casino in 2002 they spelt it out in simple terms and described a town of 'intense deprivation' with a tourist industry 'moving inexorably towards terminal decline... Blackpool is on the critically ill list and will be on its death bed unless radical action is taken soon.'

Catharsis and confession is always preferable to complete denial but the last throw of the dice, the bid for the Super Casino, ended in failure. Not that Atlantic City is any kind of poster boy for urban renewal. Gambling resorts create more addicts.

Walking around the town centre and its noticeable how many teenage girls there are with babies (one in twelve are pregnant before the age of 18). If aspiration is the best contraceptive there's little chance of that, weekly wages are £100 below the national average. Like other seaside resorts Blackpool has a transient population, combined with endemic poverty that leads to other problems – the numbers on the child protection register are double the national average and the suicide rate for 15-19 year olds is eight times higher.

We didn't stay long, the Tower (recently acquired by the council) is well worth a visit and for children the Pleasure Beach has got some fantastic rides, apart from that there just isn't much to do, there's a few tired shops, Blackpool has never really done culture so pass on museums or galleries, the bracing wind puts the beach out of limits and I don't want to get smashed out my skull on bargain booze.

Going back to Blackpool was like visiting a friend in a precipitous spiral of decline – they're buying clothes from the charity shops, the red bills are piled up behind the mantle piece and the fridge is empty. The next step is the Sally Army Hostel. It's with overbearing sadness, but it has to be said, Blackpool is cheap, tacky, tawdry and depressing. Even the powerful smell of fish and chips cannot mask the overwhelming aroma of mould and decay. The brutal truth is that Blackpool is slowly, inexorably sinking into the Irish Sea and I can't see the current government throwing them a life belt.

The Brain Dead Chimps Guide to Better GCSE Results

2010-11-01T05:39:00.004Z

Kenny Frederick, the headteacher of George Green's School in Tower Hamlets, writes a column in the Times Educational Supplement, once upon a time she was the kind of headteacher I would have wanted to work for – lots of innovative projects, a school at the heart of the local community and imaginative methods to engage children in learning.

Last year the hammer blow came, the school failed its Ofsted inspection. Social deprivation? Imaginative teaching? Community involvement? Ofsted aren't interested in any of that, they worship only one God – test results. Like any bully they prey on the weak and vulnerable, the great majority of schools that fail inspections are in areas of extreme poverty.

In the film 'Plague of the Zombies' cheerful, outgoing people suddenly acquire a glazed, distant stare; with an Ofsted failure headteachers lock themselves away in a dark room and are transformed into spreadsheet obsessives, they start spouting words like 'targets', 'assessment' and they don't have children any more, they are renamed with labels like 'borderline C/D'.

In Kenny Frederick's latest article she relates how trips, visits, any 'unexpected learning opportunities' and staff training has been cancelled due to pressure from controlled assessments for GCSEs. Near the end is a stunning paragraph -

'Our school has set itself a target of a 10 per cent increase next year in the proportion of getting five A* to C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. We need to achieve such high targets because we must reach national averages – other wise we can never be judged by Ofsted as anything other than satisfactory'.

So Ofsted have now become the supreme arbiter of the value and worth of the school. Where did the mania about being more than 'satisfactory' come from? America, where else? In a recent survey 48 out of the 50 states claimed that their test results were 'above average'.

So how exactly do you 'boost' GCSE results?

Relentlessly focus on the C/D borderline group. SEN? Forget them, leave them to do 'independent research' (a.k.a. playing on the computer) with a teaching assistant or supply teacher.

Pressure teachers for results, make sure you've got plenty of NQTs or teachers on temporary contracts, they are more likely to obey orders without question.

Bribe pupils with incentives like Top Shop vouchers or tickets for football matches. What do passes make? Prizes!

You need maths and English passes so lots of basic skills lessons in the afternoons. Abandon Art, Drama and PE.

The other three GCSE passes? Pick an NVQ with lots of course work (easy to fiddle). Avoid difficult subjects like History, Geography or Languages.

Career advancement note: I really must resign as a teacher and become one of those PowerPoint enabled, inspirational 'consultants' who can charge thousands of pounds for spouting the trite and obvious to hostages packed into stuffy hotel rooms.

Sadly the education press is full of demon headteachers who have 'turned their school around' by 'boosting results'. It isn't education, it isn't learning, it isn't teaching, it isn't inspiring, it isn't difficult – even a brain dead chimp could 'boost results'.

The Strange Death of Secondary History

2010-10-30T12:35:00.004+01:00

'BEST EVER!' 'OUTSTANDING!', 'BIGGEST IMPROVEMENT!' As soon as the GCSE results are published the spin doctors employed by local councils put a positive gloss on them. Due to high stakes testing and league tables some schools have dropped more 'difficult' subjects like History in favour of 'easier' subjects like Leisure and Tourism. Nationally numbers of pupils taking GCSE History fell from 35.7% in 1997 to 29.9% in 2009.

The lowest figure in the whole country was for Knowsley, only 16 per cent studied History at GCSE and only 4.3% at 'A' Level. No surprise there, everyone knew how under pressure Heads manipulated test results. This is also reflected in other subjects like Modern Foreign Languages.

Just 18% of those eligible for free school meals studied History compared to 32% who don't recieve that benefit.

The stark reality is that some secondary schools promote a wide range of subjects for their children to choose from. In other schools, due to pressure for test results, there is a restrictive, narrow curriculum mainly based on vocational subjects. Reminds me a bit of grammar and secondary modern schools.

The Strange Death of Primary History

2010-10-25T16:39:00.010+01:00

I submitted an article to the Historical Association's 'Primary History' magazine. Thanks, but no thanks. It wasn't printed. They don't really want to articulate or organise outright opposition to the marginalisation of history. 'Let's wait. If we oppose everything they won't listen to us'.

I understand their logic, but I fundamentally disagree. What have years of 'compromise' and 'negotiations' achieved? According to a survey in 2006 history accounted for only 4% of teaching time in primary schools. That led to the shabby compromise in the Rose Review where history, geography and RE were subsumed into 'Humanities'

Now Michael Gove is proposing a return to 'our island story', the chanting of Kings and Queens and the mnemonic learning of dates.

There is a time to resist and speak out. Historical examples? Martin Luther King was opposed by the majority of black preachers who refused to join public protests against segregation. 'Deal with it through the courts, you'll only provoke the white backlash'. In his letter from Birmingham Prison in 1963 Martin Luther King noted that, 'This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never''.

The Article

Primary History? Before the General Election the Conservative Education Minister Michael Gove outlined his vision for primary history teaching, ‘most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England’. Eton Old Boy David Cameron commented, ‘It is a tragedy that we have swept away the teaching of narrative history and replaced it with a bite-sized disjointed approach to learning about historical events… [a] shift away from learning actual knowledge, such as facts and dates.’

What is the current state of primary history teaching, is there a crisis, are the barbarians at the gates? In 2006 research by Manchester University revealed that only 4% of curriculum time was devoted to teaching history, whereas English consumed 26.7%, Maths 21.9% and Science 9.7% and with ICT now a core subject they will account for the majority of teaching time. Then you have to factor in that MFL will become compulsory in Key Stage 2 by 2014 and there is an expectation that children will receive at least two hours of ‘quality PE teaching’ every week.

The primary curriculum has been straining to squeeze the proverbial imperial quart into a pint pot. Over the past few years a consensus has emerged that change is necessary. The government’s response was to commission Jim Rose to review the primary curriculum. One golden rule for any official inquiry is to choose a pliable chairman or investigator (see the Hutton Inquiry for more details) and as the quintessential ‘safe pair of hands’ government trusty Jim Rose fitted the bill. Second golden rule is to frame the terms of reference so tightly that nothing controversial will emerge. The Rose Review of the curriculum didn’t consider the effect of the National Strategies on curriculum time, or pressure from testing or league tables. In other words the elephant wedged in the classroom blocking out every ray of sunlight was ignored, Wittgenstein would have been proud.

The Cambridge Primary Review team conducted a far more authoritative and thorough inquiry, they concluded after interviewing hundreds of teachers, parents and children that the primary curriculum was narrower than in Victorian times. Sadly the national debate was confined to one week, the government set the tone by immediately rubbishing the findings within hours of its publication, this from a government minister who admitted that he hadn’t even read the full report.

The Rose Review was forced to concede that topic based teaching would have to replace the subject discrete curriculum. Humanities would encompass history, geography and religious education. Despite the fact that curriculum reform was excluded from the Education Bill in the parliamentary ‘wash out’ (all contentious issues were withdrawn) some primary schools are already experimenting with a creative curriculum.

My fear is that if the domination of maths and English are not contested, if the testing regime remains then history will continue to be marginalized. Is there also a danger that Humanities will be taught inadequately, without any thoroughness or rigour? Will it be squeezed in at the end of an afternoon? What training, if any, will teachers receive on topic-based teaching? Is this destined to be another ‘initiative’ that fails because teachers are chained down by assessment, marking and target setting?

Primary history teaching is not on the endangered species list – yet. You can’t say the same about history in secondary schools. There was the sobering and altogether alarming research by the Historical Association –

* Last year only 30% of students took GCSE history, down from 40% in 1995

* In 2006 1,479 out of 3,500 state secondary schools didn’t enter a single candidate for GCSE history

*97% of independent and 94% of grammar schools taught history as a discrete subject compared to 72% of comprehensives and only 59% of academies.

How will this lack of basic knowledge, of historical ignorance and cultural relativism manifest itself? This may be purely anecdotal and unscientific, but I believe it is part of a worrying trend, I’ve observed it at first hand, because over the past year I’ve taught history to trainee primary teachers. One exercise with the first years is to ask them to put different eras in chronological order, so who invaded first – the Romans or the Vikings? Only a gap of eight centuries. The Celts, who were they? Dates or key events, Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the Civil War? Blank faces all round.

I’m not suggesting a return to Michael Gove’s rote learning of dates and kings and queens (although an overall sense of chronology does need to be taught). That method of teaching was dull, stodgy and boring, the patrician view of history, elitist and patriarchal. Where there is time teachers use evidence as a teaching tool, contrasts between rich and poor are studied, students question different interpretations and investigate cause and effect.

So how to address trainee teachers’ lack of subject knowledge? Where I teach subjects are split into two hour sessions, in Year 1 there are three for history, the second year two and three in Year 3. It ticks the box in the Teaching Development Agency’s huge list of competencies but little else. Does it really prepare them in any way shape or form to teach the subject? Or is it a case for being grateful for small mercies? On some PGCE courses training consists of one afternoon on Humanities. I’m also aware, however, that Initial Teacher Training has also been standardised, monitored, scrutinised, homogenised and has to conform to the National Strategies, Ofsted inspections and death by targets.

Does my university have a History Department? There is a cupboard with some outdated resources, but the lecturers don’t meet, revise material, make links with schools and conduct research and I’d be interested to compare with other institutions, are they also dependent on part time, casual, untrained staff?

So once our students make it into schools and metamorphose into teachers what fate awaits them? In the days of the old Local Education Authorities (LEAs) there were subject advisers who arranged courses, visited schools and organised resources in teachers’ centres. History teachers from schools actually met together and produced resources, reports and there are yellowing copies of books with collections of essays on the shelves of university libraries. About fifteen years ago as the pressure from league tables intensified the post of subject adviser became redundant. School Improvement Officers replaced them with their monotheism – there is but one God, test results.

If local authorities became a scorched earth zone in some schools the last of the true believers maintained the faith and pockets of good practise and inspiring teaching remained. They were the old history co-ordinators who encouraged new teachers, fought for their subject and tried to protect it from the ravages of testing, targets and levelling. Under the terms of the ‘Workforce Remodelling Agreement’ the post of co-ordinator was scrapped in its place the ‘Subject Leader’, where the aim was ‘driving up standards’, a managerial role involving observations of other teachers and target setting. Theoretically this new post carries with it a Teaching and Learning Responsibility (TLR) payment. In the real world of primary teaching most schools don’t have the money for TLRs, therefore in many schools teachers refuse to shoulder the burden of ‘Subject Leader’ and senior managers are forced to oversee the entire curriculum.

Is this just superficial, anecdotal? Undoubtedly there are still outstanding examples of history teaching, but is it in any way consistent, widespread or extensive? Maybe a dose of realism is better than starry-eyed Panglossian optimism. I don’t want to diminish or traduce the role that ‘Primary History’ has played; it has kept the eternal flame burning. But to what extent is the Editorial Committee talking to the Editorial Committee? The last four issues contained sixty-six articles – only twelve were by primary teachers.

Crisis is an overused word, but if you examine history teaching and its status in teacher training institutions, local authorities and schools it is apposite. History leads this underground existence in education, tolerated but not celebrated, frequently ignored and marginalized. Are the barbarians at the gates? No, they’ve broken in and sacked the library.

The Baked Bean Factory

2010-10-14T06:11:00.004+01:00

I do the odd bit of lecturing at a Teacher Training College and the Assistant Lecturers were summoned to the annual briefing. O... M... G...

Naturally the event was in an airless lecture hall where nary any beams of light from outside were able to penetrate, welcome to the bunker.

I'll have to admit that as soon as the PowerPoint flickered onto the screen the brain synpases were closing down, narcolepsy, catatonia.

What can I remember? Only certain words remain - 'Audit... review... performance... target... customer... tracking... assessment... feedback... zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.'

This really was the 'input-output' model of management.

Two thoughts -

1) If you had substituted the word 'student' the lecture could have been delivered by the managing director of a baked bean factory.

2) Was it in Terminator 3 that the cyborgs took over?

Another Day Another Dollar

2010-06-26T19:12:00.010+01:00

These days I'm just a day labourer, hourly paid, cab for hire, supply teacher, waiting for that phone call, 'Can you go to...?' The default mode – Another Day , Another Dollar.

Once again I'm heading out on a journey of discovery to an unknown class in an unknown school. The sky over head is smothered by an impenetrable grey blanket, no break in the clouds, freezing cold wind, rain pissing down and I'm asking that eternal question – will there ever be a summer?

The trough of despond? Last night I watched the film version of Cormac McCarthy's book 'The Road'. A post-apocalyptic nightmare as a father and son battle to survive, the only humans left are crazed, cannibalistic psychos. Reminds me of Ofsted.

Switch Radio 4 on and there's an analysis of the government's plan to grant megalomaniac heads total control over their schools a.k.a. 'Academies'. As soon as the 'government spokesperson' is introduced I switch over to local radio. In lieu of hard news we've got 'infotainment', this includes whole swathes of inane chatter between the presenter and whoever is reading the weather or traffic reports.

Nothing about the queue on Queens Drive as the traffic inches forwards, the roads gridlocked, courtesy of whichever privatised utility has taken their turn to inflict misery on dazed commuters.

The gigantic cranes from the Liverpool docks loom over the horizon, the area took a fearful beating during 'The Blitz', houses demolished, people displaced. What the Luftwaffe began has been completed by Mrs Thatcher and private enterprise. There's acres of derelict land and boarded up houses. The only sign of private regeneration is a massive Tesco. Welcome to 'Clone Town'.

Thankfully most of the schools have been rebuilt, wonderful bright new palaces. The receptionist ushers me in and I make a mental note to ring the supply agency and change the photograph, I look like a lifer from San Quentin.

The class teacher has left sufficient notes to teach the lessons, you always fear the 'do what you like', or reams of indecipherable script detailing every minute of your day. The class are lively but want to learn and the teaching assistant knows how to keep them all in order.

Break time passes peacefully, no major incidents, there's a calm atmosphere in the school. Dinner, I race through the marking and venture out to find the staffroom. In most schools this hallowed dwelling has suffered from having a group of slatternly male students in permanent residency. My favourite is the the increasingly desperate notes pinned above the sink – 'Please wash your cups'; 'Don't leave your cup for someone else to wash!'; 'We don't live in a slum – wash up!'; 'IF YOU'VE USED IT – WASH IT'.

In staffrooms any sense of calm and serenity is pierced by the whirr of the photocopier and the noise of doors opening, closing, opening again and banging as the rollers are removed and tangled bits of paper are gingerly prized out. The carpet is threadbare the chairs reclaimed from a skip.

Here it's like a 5 star hotel, comfy chairs and couches, pot plants, dishwasher, cakes for the teachers and whole body massages for stressed teachers (OK. I made the last bit up).

The afternoon rolls along nicely, there's no cheeky back chat and we all troop off to assembly. Often there is the boot camp atmosphere as dominant silver-backed males and teachers who auditioned for the role of Rosa Kleb patrol the hall, that laser bean stare, the pointed finger and 'MOVE!'

Assemblies are a chance for headteachers to preach their corporate message. They've all been trained to National Professional Qualification for Headteachers (NPQH) standards. This is a competency based course with a ticklist -

ability to use spreadsheets
willingness to humiliate staff
can build a professional relationship with consumers (children) and stakeholders (parents)
full frontal lobotomy completed

From the creators of Dolly The Sheep we present the headteacher. But remarkably this specimen seems to have failed the brainwashing competency, he smiles, tells jokes, knows the name of all the children. The assembly is a cross between a stand-up routine and a great family love-in, they've also got a great way of including children with disabilities. I think the head actually likes children – it helps.

So in this post-apocalyptic world, laid waste by Ofsted, School Improvement Officers, testing and league tables, humanity is still clinging on, in some outposts. At 3.30 I surreptitiously edge out of the door and sign the supply form. It's been a good day, it really was a pleasure to teach there.

Academies

2010-05-28T09:51:00.004+01:00

Simon Jenkins 'The Guardian' May 28 2000

As Simon Jenkins noted there is a long and somewhat inglorious tradition of central government attempting to micro manage and run all of the schools in England. The Conservatives tried to free Grant Maintained Schools (GMS) from local authority control, with only a stingy financial bait few schools opted for it.

Heads of GMS schools escaped from local authority oversight or auditing, so this allowed Bromley’s Imelda Marcos, Colleen McCabe, to embezzle, between 1994 and 1999, £500,000 from St John Rigby College . She spent the money on shoes, exotic holidays, cosmetics and a Crystal Palace season ticket. Eighteen months after she began to use the school funds as a personal bank account Ofsted reported that McCabe provided “strong, sensitive and skilful leadership”. Financial planning was “good” and the auditor’s report was “excellent”. Only when the staff finally gave evidence was she exposed as a fraud.

New Labour introduced its 'Fresh Start' scheme where failing schools were closed and reopened with new staff. This was based on the 'Reconstitution' experiment in San Francisco, or as one teacher union leader dubbed it 'The My Lai approach, in order to save the village you have to destroy it first'. 'Fresh Start' never recovered from that car crash moment in 2000 when four 'super-heads' resigned in one week.

It is true that some academies are 'popular' with parents, yes, throw £20 odd-million at a school - new classrooms, shiny reception areas, state of the art computer suites and down the road is Gasworks Comprehensive with its leaky roofs and windows, you don't need to be a genius to work out which school gets more applications.

The other effect of 'school reform' is to reinforce the cycle of failure. Last year the House of Commons Education Select Committee found that 43 schools judged to be in serious weakness in 2001/2 had declined further and were placed in special measures the following year. They noted that some schools were, “unable to attract high-achieving pupils or well-qualified staff, making improvement more difficult.” Of those schools placed in special measures between 1995 and 1997, 40% subsequently closed.

In 2007 Bradford Academy opened with a fanfare of publicity. It originally opened in 1963 as Fairfax community school; in 1992 it was ‘named and shamed’ in the first official league tables; 1994 placed in special measures with the threat of closure; 1996 re-launched as Bowling community college; 2000 reopened as a Church of England school - Bradford Cathedral community college; 2002 placed in special measures; 2004 out of special measures.

When a school under local authority control fails it is the local authority that takes the blame. So no prizes for guessing who will be under the spotlight when a centrally controlled Academy fails.

The Campaign for Real History

2010-05-24T09:55:00.006+01:00

The campaign for ‘real’ history teaching in schools? The Education Minister Michael Gove believes that ‘most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England’.

Spotting a potential gap in the market, Stacey International have republished the 1937 editions of ‘A History of England’ by EH Carter, Chief Inspector of Schools and RAF Mears, who taught history at Warwick School between 1923 and 1933 (the Tudors and Stuarts are published in April 2010). The series has been edited and revised by David Evans, the former head of history at Eton College.

The publicity material promises a ‘straight-forward chronological narrative’ in ‘fast-paced muscular prose’. The series is aimed at, ‘everybody who seeks properly to understand our collective story and to look beyond the random selection and often contentious teaching that have long dominated the curricula’.

The blurb contains an approving quote from Eton Old Boy David Cameron, ‘It is a tragedy that we have swept away the teaching of narrative history and replaced it with a bite-sized disjointed approach to learning about historical events… [a] shift away from learning actual knowledge, such as facts and dates.’

History is undeniably a narrative and you need an awareness of chronology in order to arrange the story into some kind of order. I know from teaching young adults that many of them have a shocking inability to place different eras into order – Victorian, Stuart, Tudor, Viking, Norman, Saxon, Celtic and Roman. Is there a danger that we could become as dim as some American youngsters – ‘The Second World War started when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour’?

Where might a lack of awareness about dates and chronology stem from? You could argue that history teaching; any history teaching would be an advantage.

Research conducted by Manchester University showed that only 4% of curriculum time in primary schools was devoted to teaching history. The dominant subjects were, unsurprisingly, Maths, English and Science – the subjects that are tested and therefore contribute to school league tables. According to research by Professor John MacBeath 98% of Ofsted gradings for schools directly correlate to their test scores.

In secondary schools the picture doesn’t improve. Last year only 30% of students took GCSE history, down from 40% in 1995. Is this because pupils don’t like history? A Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) report in 2007 quoted a survey of 1,700 children, two thirds of whom gave up history at 14, although half liked the subject and rated their teachers. Even Ofsted found that 70% of history lessons are good or outstanding.

One of the main reasons for the marginalisation of history GCSE is pressure from ‘easier’ vocational subjects like media or business studies and PE. Some schools force students to choose a ‘pathway’ at 14 – either vocational or academic. Even if a student wants to study history there will not be space in the timetable to accommodate them. Again there is the pressure for schools to get results, a vocational Btec is worth 4 GCSEs and will count towards that all important benchmark of 5 A-C GCSEs.

In 2006 1,479 out of 3,500 state secondary schools didn’t enter a single candidate for GCSE history. A survey by the Historical Association points to a wide disparity in history teaching – 97% of independent and 94% of grammar schools teach history as a discrete subject compared to 72% of comprehensives and only 59% of academies. Increasingly history is taught as part of humanities or in cross-curricular programmes.

This process is reflected in other subjects, in 2004 schools were allowed to drop the teaching of modern foreign languages (MFL) for pupils after the age of 14, this has subsequently lead to a precipitous fall in the numbers of GCSE candidates. Last year 60% of undergraduates on MFL courses were privately educated.

The campaign for ‘real’ history teaching chimes with the pressure for ‘tried and tested’ teaching methods, yes, those halcyon days of the 11 plus, expensive uniforms, children sitting in rows, rote learning, setting, streaming and ‘back to basics’. The exponents of this comfort blanket neglect to mention that half of children left school without any qualifications and that university education was restricted to a narrow elite. As for private schools there was the legacy of corporal punishment by prefects, compulsory games, rote learning of classics (to the exclusion of other subjects), bullying, cold showers and fagging.

Dates? You do need some knowledge to access the sweep of history – my key dates include the Peasants Revolt (‘serfs ye are and serfs ye will remain’) 1381; the Battle of Bosworth (‘my horse, my horse my kingdom for a horse) 1485; the Spanish Armada (‘I may have the body of a weak and feeble women, but I have the heart and stomach of a king’) 1588 and the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688 that consolidated the Protestant succession. I can use those key events to navigate through the historical record. Many primary classrooms and all secondary school history classrooms will display timelines with key dates to support pupils’ knowledge.

However, what the traditionalists want is a return to those days of yore when didactic instructional teaching ruled in the classroom. In primary schools that took the form of rote learning, the memorising and testing of dates and kings and queens – a handy chart was on the wall next to that map of the Empire (British colonies in pink) on which the sun never set.

Predictably the main cheerleader for ‘real’ history teaching is Prince Charles, in pursuit of this aim he has organised summers schools for history teachers. I’ve never attended but his other projects have included lectures on reducing one’s carbon footprint (despite personal use of private jets and gas guzzling limousines). I have to confess that I’m at one with Tom Paine who protested against hereditary heads of state as archaic and irrelevant as hereditary artists, mathematicians, musicians or indeed historians.

Stacey International is obviously trying to ride the wave by republishing Carter and Mears’ ‘A History of Britain’. It might be of passing interest to dedicated historians, there is an in-depth analysis of the Treaty of Utrecht. However, in essence it is the Old Fogies view of history, the sort of little England ‘our island story’ that was taught in the 1920s, the viewpoint that inspired the newspaper headline, ‘Fog in the Channel – Continent Isolated’.

The book is an example of the ‘kings and queens’ method of teaching history, written in an ‘impartial’ style, so to shamelessly dumb down when it comes to the Civil War, Charles I was ineffectual but then the Puritans were strait-laced killjoys.

In modern history teaching children read accounts, diaries and letters from the time, which help them to understand and empathise with the protagonists. This might include studying events like the Putney Debates where issues like extending the voting franchise were discussed, or reading about different viewpoints and interpretations.

How did ordinary people live? What about the contrast between rich and poor? You won’t really find it in Carter and Mears. As for the role of women in society, the ‘muscular prose’ doesn’t really extend beyond the six wives of Henry VIII, ‘Bloody’ Mary and Good Queen Bess.

The books are outmoded, outdated and antediluvian. Sadly if Michael Gove has his way this type of dry, stodgy, elitist history teaching will become the norm.

Where teachers are allowed the time history is taught through skills and enquiry, processes, concepts and interpretations. Students will be challenged to compare and contrast, sift conflicting evidence and question it for reliability and bias. They will be expected to analyses causes and consequences and try to empathise with people, form all sections of society, who lived in the past.

Another strength of history in primary schools is teaching about ancient civilisations – Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Incas, Benin and in secondary schools English-centric teaching has been replaced by a wider awareness of international events, although there has been an over emphasis on Hitler and the Nazis.

In a multi-racial, multi-cultural society a move back to ‘real’ history teaching would be reactionary and regressive. The Carter Mears series belong on the shelves of second hand bookshops to be viewed as historical curiosities. ‘Real’ history teaching? It was usually delivered by those older male teachers wearing chalk-dusted corduroy jackets with patches sewn on the elbow, droning on in stuffy classrooms as children laboured away for hours, taking notes at hurricane speed, in dread of the inevitable test at the end of the week.

SATS Boycott

2010-05-16T13:46:00.009+01:00

Peter Preston in 'The Guardian'

Peter Preston attacks the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) boycott of the SATs tests for 11 year-olds (School heads put to the test 4/5/10). He castigates those ‘who anger easily, blow their tops’. As for being ‘fist waving and rowdy’ I can’t think of a more inappropriate description, natural rebels they aren’t, they don’t go around spraying graffiti, listening to garage music, wearing studs in their noses, spiking their hair with gel and spitting in the street. Yet within local communities who do people value and trust? Politicians, businessmen/women, or journalists? The headteacher of the local primary school would come close to the top of any list.

So what has stirred them into action? Is this not a cause for concern when people who have worked for decades educating children are threatening industrial action for the first time in decades? They have a strongly held belief that testing children and publishing results in league tables is wrong.

Just how useful are the dreaded league tables? Well let’s put it this way at the top you will find schools in neat villages and the leafy suburbs. Yet, despite the Herculean efforts of their teachers, languishing at the bottom will be the schools in ‘challenging’ areas, with high numbers of special education needs (SEN) children and Free School Meals. The connection between educational achievement and poverty is well established, however, they will be branded as ‘failing’. Ofsted will merely confirm the results of the tests.

Where has that tunnel vision of targets, targets, targets led us? Stafford Hospital ticked every box, exceeded every target and won the exalted status of foundation hospital. The reality was that patients were left to die, unattended, in draughty corridors. So fixated were the staff on fulfilling targets.

The reality of testing in schools is that teachers use every ruse to reach their target. The standard one is to concentrate on the borderline group in the class. Let me give a concrete example. The teacher arrived in September looked at the Year 6 class – 15 children of middle or higher ability (no problem there they’d easily achieve the magic Level 4) 5 SEN children, with no real hope of a Level 4 and 5 children on the Level 3 and 4 borderlines. Potential SATs score 60%, result special measures and misery. Do not pass ‘Go’, please pick up your P45.

The solution? The teacher spent every morning during the maths and literacy hours working with the borderline group, then there were the ‘Booster Classes’ in the afternoon, the parents were summoned in to school, and there was after school one-to-one tuition. The SEN children were consigned to work with the unqualified teaching assistant, the rest of the class were left to their own devices. All of the borderline children achieved Level 4, SATs score rises to 80%, the teacher is hailed as a genius and the headteacher breathes a huge sigh of relief, career still intact. Testing corrupts everything and everyone and it spreads like a cancer around the blood stream.

Over the past decade a consensus for changes in the testing regime has emerged supported by teachers, headteachers, Royal Societies, academics and authors. Wales and Northern Ireland have abandoned SATs and only the government remains to defend the indefensible.

There is a noble tradition of civil disobedience in the face of tyranny or oppression, we teach about it in schools. The NAHT members are taking action on a matter of principle, they have been threatened with legal action, loss of pay, a threat to their careers and that Ofsted inspectors will demand to see test results. Are they not walking the same path as Gandhi or Martin Luther King? Instead they are branded as moaning minnies who shouldn’t complain and just get on with testing 11 year-olds to destruction,

The government’s reply is always ‘standards’ and Peter Preston sites falling standards in Scotland and Wales. Why the fall in standards? Because teachers aren’t teaching to test, spending all their time between January and May on revision, and mock tests. It is true that the more tests children do the more proficient they become, at the same time schools jettison art, music and PE. A diet of gruel eventually leads to malnutrition.

As for the children who won’t be tested being ‘victims’? The fact is that testing reinforces failure, I’ve heard children leaving primary school waving their test results in the air, ‘I’m thick, I’m a Level 3’. More able children become bored and disaffected with the stodgy, unchallenging curriculum. Others succumb to stress faced with these high stakes tests – don’t worry children it’s only the headteacher’s job that’s at stake, no pressure.

Finally Peter Preston gives the impression that the National Union of Teachers’ (NUT) General Secretary, Christine Blower is in favour of hearty, bone-crunching games of rugby as an alternative to SATs tests. The truth is that Ms Blower did suggest a whole list of academic, cultural and sporting activities, a sort of festival of the mind and body, as an alternative to that grim week of testing. As a sop to middle England she might have included rugby. The less salubrious papers indulge in outright falsification, disinformation and misrepresentation in an attempt to belittle their opponents. I had hoped that as an ex-editor of ‘The Guardian’ Peter Preston would have exhibited higher journalistic standards.

2009-04-15T10:36:00.003+01:00

‘I 8 Skool’ by ‘Mr Read’ £8.99

To order the book contact MrRead1@aol.com

Book Outline

1. Introduction
Why teach? Why not teach?

Autumn

2. Gulls regurgitating fish
How the training is organised by ‘consultants’, we’re marked down as an “intensive support” school. I feel like walking out.

3. WLTM GSOH TLC
I inherit a classroom from another teacher and find drawers full of unmentionable things…

4. The Line in the Sand
Reality hits me like a Kirkby Kiss, tests every six weeks, will I be the only one to speak out?

5. The Silence of the Lambs
I am the only one to speak out. How can people stay silent, or worse still agree with tests every six weeks?

6. Has anyone got an INTELLIGENT question?
Some of the strange visitors we get - Mr Crabtree with his wildlife slides, Mr Cuddles who barely got out alive.

7. Creativity and the advance stages of narcolepsy
More creativity in lessons, but… we have to fill in reams of paper to prove it.

8. Health Fascism
I’m all in favour of healthy eating and hate McDonald’s, but banning sweets?

9. Teacher training and the class from hell
Why do student teachers carry round such large files, what the hell are we trying to produce robots or teachers?

10. School Newsletters
Chavs v Posh

11. Extracting the Bodily Fluids
A premiership football club organises some after school activities for our ‘gifted and talented’. They want teachers to attend – without pay!

12. Better Grammar
How to bore children to death from an early age.

13. Unity is strength?
Why are unions so weak and ineffectual?

14. My child is a genius…
Parents’ evening.

15. Speaking VERY LOUDLY
Why is our country so crap at languages? Should we teach it in primary schools?

16. Inspector Read Investigates
When Peter’s ball goes missing I’m forced to turn detective, but D.C. Smith gets a confession…

17. Mr Motivator
Why is training so useless?

18. The aroma of aftershave
A new literacy consultant with a ‘fresh approach’ doesn’t manage to hack it.

19. Where is the Roman soldier?
Where would primary schools be without the Christmas play?

Spring

20. I’m a celebrity
Some of the teachers who could appear.

21. Mimicking silly walks
The General Teaching Council. The organisation that is there to register and discipline teachers. It only makes headlines when teachers are sacked – cue tabloid headlines ‘Teacher Found Drunk in Charge’.

22. Trusting teachers
How observations of lessons are killing teaching – micro targets for each lesson.

23. Writing with Stephen King
A good lesson using Stephen King’s book ‘How To Write’ the detective stories we produce.

24. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
Some of the grants, awards, schemes and fellowships I’ve managed to use to keep me sane.

25. The special education needs panel
They refuse a statement for one of our children, how the system is failing SEN children.

26. Cause related marketing
Tesco and other vouchers, why I hate collecting them, cutting them out and all the free publicity.

27. Dear Dairy
I organise a lesson about Anne Frank based on my visit to Amsterdam. All the children get a well-designed booklet to write in…Dear Dairy. Taxi!

28. Losing the will to live
Another ‘initiative’ is changed.

29. Take me to your subject leader
New proposals for ‘subject leaders’ and a file with 25 different items to file.

30. The SEF
The School Evaluation Form or management gobbledygook.

31. Zen and the art of play ground duty
The job that most teachers can begin to hate, yes it’s Saving Private Ryan again as chaos reigns.

32. Dame Edna and Madge
An Ofsted inspector takes the PE training day with her silent friend.

33. Hightown Park
Our local secondary school in special measures for 4 years, as part of my MA I interview the teachers.

34. The Morecambe and Wise dance
Why do so few people apply to become headteachers?

35. It’s ‘ot
Dean doesn’t remember much about the Egyptians.

36. Oversold and underused
Why ICT is not an each way bet, the book that all ICT teachers should read.

37. Morsels for Godzilla
Ofsted due another visit soon – the ‘light touch’?

38. School motto
Different mottoes that schools could use or not use.

Summer

39. I have a dream…
My visit to America and there are plenty of scary parallels with England.

40. White flight
Chicago and the unequal education system.

41. Blockading the streets
How testing is killing enjoyment in America, thoughts on my fortnight in America.

42. Julia Roberts and a ‘bad hair day’
We get £25,000 to make a film about Victorian times in our locality.

43. Losing my religion
Why should the Church of England that will close in 2050 (based on falling attendance figures) get millions of pounds for faith schools?

44. Stress week
Why is teaching so stressful?

45. The rolled up football programme…
We host a visit for our Irish school and visit the Beatles Museum, the Mersey Ferry and Anfield.

46. Nobody Drowned
We attend the school swimming gala, none of our children drown.

47. Brideshead Revisited
The great divide in our education system, I’m on holiday in Sedbergh looking at their sports facilities.

48. Links with secondaries
How not to do it. Why is it that there is so little contact? My scheme to involve them comes to a grinding halt. I teach a lesson and the teacher doesn’t turn up.

49. Teach what you’re interested in
The Titanic - how you can use film to interest children.

50. The inspectors call
Ofsted finally arrive.

51. Being sworn at by mega rich pop stars
Why I hate Comic Relief.

52. Is beginning to…
What school reports really mean…

53. Blackpool and the end of the pier
We visit the Tower and the brilliant circus; shame the town doesn’t match up.

54. The class of ‘97
What happened to my former pupils?

Conclusion

55. Conclusion
The solution is to trust and invest in teachers.

2009-04-06T15:14:00.002+01:00

SATs Boycott

The joint call for a boycott by the largest teachers’ union (National Union of Teachers) and the main headteachers organisation (National Association of Headteachers) represents the most credible threat to the Key Stage 2 tests.

Almost every educational organisation and academic, across the political spectrum, has called for changes, if not outright abolition, of testing and league tables. Reports, enquiries and research papers must be straining every shelf in the misnamed Department for Children Schools and Families.

Last year Unicef reported on international comparisons of children’s welfare. Out of the twenty-one wealthiest industrialised countries the UK came bottom. Other studies have shown how children’s self-esteem is now linked to their academic ability. Scotland has never used SATs testing at 11 and Wales abandoned them in 2005. After last year’s marking fiasco the Key Stage 3 SATs in England were scrapped.

And yet, and yet, reasoned argument has failed, the government still clings on to Key Stage 2 SATs. There’s been so many letters written, calling for abolition that if quills were still in use every available bird would be denuded of feathers. The government’s response is always ‘standards’, this, despite the fact that when the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) remarked a sample of Key Stage 2 SATs papers, 22% of the English grades were incorrect.

So there it is, unpopular tests that are unfair and completely inaccurate.

The boycott call by the NUT and NAHT is a reprise of the NUT’s campaign in 2003. However, the problem then was, what did they mean by a ‘boycott’, who would be responsible for it, what would the action comprise of? Already there is the danger that it will be mired in legal technicalities, Phil Revell, chief executive of the National Governors’ Association has warned headteachers that any boycott might lead to disciplinary action.

A boycott could lean heavily on headteachers and the Year 6 teachers, who are usually members of senior management. The campaign should involve all members of staff in primary schools; personally I’d like to see a strike on one or more days during the SATs week. That way it would be a collective decision by all teachers to boycott testing, it wouldn’t isolate a few members of staff.

80% of primary heads are members of the NAHT. I’m sure there are older heads who can remember times, if not the Elysian Fields or a millenarian golden age, when children weren’t tested to destruction and phoney league tables weren’t used to judge schools. As retirement beckons there’s many who will be saying ‘sod it, let’s scrap the tests’. As for younger heads? They will be graduates of the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) this is the course that ensures schools are run by cloned, dull, conformist, automatons.

Local authorities employ teams of School Improvement Officers who constantly ‘monitor’ schools, any ‘under-performing’ heads are liable to get the Alan Sugar treatment. So just how many of them will be willing to participate in a SATs boycott and commit career suicide?

To its credit the NUT has led the campaign to abolish SATs. The only reason the ballot failed in 2003 was that the turn out was only 34%. It is though one thing to pass a conference resolution and another thing to get the members to participate. Most primary schools don’t have a union representative and many of the union branches are moribund. Before last year’s strike I visited some of our local schools, in some the reps had done a good job and the school was closed, in another the union posters were on the staffroom notice board but this was because a diligent school secretary opened the post and made sure they were displayed. In others I rang the intercom and asked to speak to the union rep, ‘we don’t have one’, could I speak to any union member, it was about the strike. After a few minutes the door would open slightly, enough to reveal one eye, a reluctant hand would appear, grasp the leaflets, hand and eye would retreat, door closed.

The National Association of Schoolteachers (NAS) and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) have, a year before it is muted, condemned the boycott call. This must take the proverbial, stale, mouldy staffroom biscuit. As part of the government’s ‘social partnership’ the two unions have signed agreements that replaced Management Allowances (MAs) with Teaching and Learning Responsibilities (TLRs) thereby reducing the pay of thousands of teachers; introduced performance management criteria that allow maverick heads to use our old friend test results to limit teachers movement up the pay scales; allowed teaching assistants to replace teachers in front of the class and when the government wanted to change teachers’ pensions in 2004, every union was calling for strike action, apart from the NAS, only a rare conference revolt brought them into line.

Just to look at TLRs in more detail, the old Management Allowances gave extra money to teachers involved in things like pastoral care, the new TLRs only provided extra cash for work involved with increased test scores. In about 100 schools where the union(s) were strong there was strike action by the NUT and or the NAS. ‘Look we are a union! We organise strikes!’ Well, even the state controlled unions in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia organised the odd strike, if they hadn’t they would have lost all credibility. The NAS signed the national agreement that replaced MAs with TLRs, despite the rearguard action in few schools, that did in the main win concessions, nationally, according to the School Teachers’ Review Body, 30,000 teachers lost pay. The NUT as usual talked a good fight, but refused to organise national action.

The NUT/NAHT SATs boycott is a ray of hope. One of the NAHT leaders described the SATs tests as, ‘child abuse’. I don’t believe that was hyperbole. Thousands of children leave primary school as ‘Level 3’s’ saying ‘I’m thick’.

We also need to get the support of parents. What about an alternative vision for Year 6?

· Learn a foreign language
· Improve the link with secondary schools for Year 7
· Write a short story
· Learn to play a musical instrument
· Go on an adventure holiday
· Put on a play
· Undertake a community project

2009-03-30T12:55:00.004+01:00

Jess

This is our cat Jess (no prizes for guessing how she got the name). It’s been tough the past two weeks having to wear a collar. Jess got neutered.

She likes –

· Lying in the warm coals on the gas fire and getting covered in soot
· Eating spiders
· Hiding in cupboards
· Scaring rabbits (my daughter’s)
· Getting stuck at the top of fir trees
· Whiskas pouches
· Lying under duvets
· Hiding under parked cars
· Gazing out of the window at birds

2009-03-27T09:41:00.003Z

Rote Learning?

The Rose Review of Key Stage 2 was reported in ‘The Guardian’. The use of selected papers to leak information has been standard practice under New Labour. Apparently, the education organisations that specialise in certain subject areas were only given three days for consultation on the final draft and the unions were ignored completely.

The primary curriculum is completely cluttered with so many subjects that some are not adequately covered, History only accounts for 4% of teaching time in primary schools.

As for the emphasis on rote learning, yes, it’s true that in some aspects of knowledge you can’t escape it, you just have to memorise French verb tables, German grammar or Chinese characters. There aren’t any short cuts. The old saying that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration is valid in many ways. David Beckham spent hours refining the art of bending the ball around a wall of players at free kicks.

However, I’ve taught children who memorised their times tables. The only problem was that they couldn’t apply them. Ask them 12 x 7, or to use it as an inverse in division and they were stumped. There was the infamous occasion in 1997 when the junior education minister Stephen Byers claimed that schools were falling down in the task of teaching children times tables. He was subsequently door-stepped by a reporter, ‘Minister what is 8 x 7?’, ‘Er… 54?’

Times tables are best taught through strategies 8 x 7? 2 x 7 is 14, double it and double it again.

I’ve got a similar problem with phonics, yes they are one important strategy in the process of learning to read, but our language is not phonetically consistent, you need other skills like reading in context and sight memory. In my experience the poor readers in upper juniors were the ones who could only use phonic strategies. As for whole class teaching, in Year One there are children who can already read fluently, they must be bored to death sitting in phonics lessons. Lastly, what about the joy of reading? Phonics reduces reading to a mechanical de-coding exercise.

Finally it’s good to see the some of the obsessive posters on the TES Forum are beginning to make a few comments that relate to the subject matter. Here are a few tips –

· Try to advance your own ideas rather than just carping and criticising. Keep to the high ground!
· Don’t use personal insults, it’s undignified, shows a total lack of class and you wouldn’t expect it from your pupils.
· Concentrate on quality rather than quantity.
· I’d like to see use of alliteration, metaphor and simile. Most of the writing is, to be frank, dull, repetitive and boring.

Good to see that there is, at last, progress. Some of you have a long, long way to go but keep trying; there are signs of improvement!

2009-03-26T18:51:00.003Z

The End of SATs?

There’s a report in today’s newspapers that the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) are both calling for a boycott of Key Stage 2 SATs in 2010. Is the day of liberation coming?

There’s a growing realisation that SATs tests are completely unreliable. The Qualifications and Curriculum authority (QCA) carried out a review of Key Stage 3 marking and found that 44% of grades in English writing were wrong, in reading up to a third were faulty and in science one in six.

The test results are used by Ofsted as an infallible guide to the quality of education in a particular school, Professor John MacBeath found that Ofsted inspection gradings directly correlated with exam results in 98% of primaries and 96% of secondaries.

The key stage 1, 2 and 3 tests cost £50 million in 2008, that’s enough to pay the salaries of 2,500 teachers.

So is it time to hang out the bunting? Both the NUT and the NAHT will come under pressure to retreat from a boycott. If there is a ballot I’m not confident that the NAHT will be able to deliver a majority vote. The NUT ballotted its primary school members in 2003, but whilst 86% supported a SATs boycott the turnout was only 34%. The other teacher ‘unions’ NAS and ATL have already waved the white flag and indicated that they would not join the boycott.

Amongst parents there is however a growing recognition of how useless the tests are, the NAHT carried out a survey of 10,000 parents, 85% thought that the present system of testing should be abolished and 71% wanted to see an end to league tables.

After the marking fiasco with the American company ETS the government were forced into a u-turn and the Key Stage 3 tests were abandoned.

It will be interesting to see how some Year 6 teachers cope, some of them will be like the long term prisoners who after they are released find it difficult to adapt to ‘life outside’. In Wales even though SATs were scrapped a majority of schools still used them for assessment. Doubtless Ofsted will still want to see test results.

Still, let’s dream dreams. If enough schools organised a boycott the national figures and league tables would be worthless and redundant. Hallelujah! A new day will dawn!

2009-03-26T06:52:00.002Z

Rose Review, 'I see no testing'

Freeing up the primary curriculum? The Rose Review prescribes more rote learning, chanting times tables, dates from history and phonics. The spin doctors were dusting their magic over the plans because to give it a good media spin they included using Twitter, Wikipedia and spellcheckers.

The main problem in primary schools is the inordinate amount of time spent drilling children in English, Maths and Science. Why? Because that’s what children will be tested in, the results of which will be recorded in league tables, the place the school occupies will then decide if it fails its Ofsted inspection and in turn the career prospects of the headteacher.

The terms of reference of the Rose Review of the curriculum specifically excluded the testing culture and that fatal emphasis on ‘the basics’. Sir Jim had to ignore the elephant in the living room, the dinosaur blocking the dining room, the Komodo Dragons cluttering the kitchen or more accurately that enormous Blue Whale wedged in the bathroom blocking every ray of sunlight. So he failed to take into account testing, league tables and the grim Ofsted inspections; their baleful influence has all but stripped any element of creativity, imagination or joy from the primary curriculum.

The Rose Review is the Hutton Enquiry Mark II – limit the terms of reference and install a ‘safe pair of hands’ who won’t ask any awkward questions. Me thinks the bold Sir Jim has laboured and brought forth a veritable mouse.

2009-03-23T13:26:00.003Z

BSF – the best thing since sliced bread?

I’ve received a comment posted by C. Ellams from Liverpool about BSF -

Could your attitude be anymore negative about one of the most exciting projects in this country? I am sick of people looking down, moaning about taxpayers money being used up, this is education for God's sake not nuclear defence so why do you oppose worthy use of the taxpayers money? It is expensive but history tells us the best does not come cheap, all great additions need large finical backing, the London metropolitan sewers, motorways and regeneration of Manchester to name a few.

Teaching is outdated in the UK, sat behind desks in classes of 30 originated as a regimental approach from the Victorian era. The new school designed by Aedas Architects in Kirby is one of the best in the country and there is no need for parents to worry about their children not running off without doing any work as this method of teaching has been tried and tested all over Western Europe, beyond this prior to opening this school had a truancy rate of 48% and since opening attendance is at 88% so something is right. How do I know this? As I am currently writing a dissertation on the BSF programme and have made extensive research into the BSF and I am aware of the negative attitude from the media but none more full of rubbish than this article.

Most schools will close but not until new improved schools are opened. As for the comments about Knowsley being abandoned by teachers, universities are producing a huge amount of teachers aware of 21st century learning techniques and not stuck to their chalk and blackboard.

Finally schools being turned into learning centres, Oh Dear what a disaster! As I type with sarcasm, this is to supply facilities to the community at all hours and our children's education will not be affected. New schools will offer fantastic facilities state of the art laboratories, ICT, teaching zones, local libraries and sports facilities. It would be senseless to deprive Kirby of these facilities that they significantly lack and could teach the unemployed skills that they so drastically require to work. BSF is a good thing it just needs time.

Well, good luck with the dissertation C. Ellams it sounds as though you’ve been talking to some of the Knowsley ‘consultants’, I wonder if you have spent any time with teachers?

You start with the usual consultant-speak, which is to employ that well-known debating tactic – reduce your opponent’s arguments to absurdity. So am I really opposed to spending millions of pounds on new school facilities? Amazing as it may sound, I’m not, the devil is of course in the detail.

That other default mode that the consultants always employ is that any one opposed to BSF is a Luddite and technophobe. This tactic was constantly used at the ‘consultation’ meetings with teachers.

Of course it is true that some people are resistant to change. On the other side you do need to try and take people with you and motivate them. At the start of BSF in Knowsley it was spelt out that poor results = crap teachers. Let’s just say that moral didn’t improve when all teachers were informed they would all get a P45 and have to reapply for jobs in the new ‘Learning Centres’.

Despite extensive national advertising only 8 people applied for 5 posts as ‘Leaning Centre Manager’ (a.k.a. ‘Headteacher’). One school recently advertised for a Head of English and got zero applicants. Knowsley’s attitude to teachers being made redundant was ‘Good Riddance!’ but now they’ve been forced to introduce a ‘bumped’ redundancy policy where teachers can retire early and the post will go to a Knowsley teacher.

So shiny new buildings, state of the art computers, what else do you need? Er, yes, teachers. Social class, ethnic origin, gender, parental help, they all impact on children’s learning but the most significant factor is the quality of the teacher at the front of the class.

And just how good are the shiny new BSF buildings? Has C. Ellams managed to find the report by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment? They reviewed 40 designs and found that 80% were either ‘mediocre’ or ‘not yet good enough’.

The other implication is that use of computers and ICT in and of itself will improve children’s education. A book I’ve quoted many times is Larry Cuban’s ‘Oversold and Underused’. Effect use of computers depends on high levels of maintenance and excellent training for teachers. In Knowsley RM have been given the contract for ‘maintenance’. I have to smile. We have had a set of lap tops, for eighteen months, one of them has never worked, during that time RM and Knowsley have passed the buck between them – ‘not us try RM’ and ‘no, it’s Knowsley’. Wonderful.

In the original BSF material Knowsley extensively quoted the example of Bishop’s Park in Essex who had changed children’s learning experience by introducing a topic based curriculum and vocational courses. Look now and you won’t find it. Why? Because although Bishop’s Park serves a disadvantaged area test results were poor, they failed their Ofsted inspection, went into special measures and are now facing closure. How long will the Knowsley experiment last? Knowsley is already bottom of the GCSE table, poor results and we will be back to rote learning and testing. The Government are constantly threatening to sack the local authority and install a private contractor.

So, school or learning centre? No problem with either, it’s just that the other Knowsley mantra is ‘no change is not an option’. Interesting that, twenty years ago the old mutual building societies were told that they would have to convert to banks, ‘no change is not an option’. Just lending money for people to build houses was old fashioned. What’s happened since? They’ve had to be bailed out by the taxpayer.

So, BSF? Demoralise the teachers, shoddy buildings and over reliance on computers. Yeah, ‘no change is not an option’.

2009-03-20T06:04:00.002Z

The rot of targets

We’re all familiar in education with the way that targets have completely distorted children’s learning, particularly during the testing years. Children lose all individuality and are converted into a ‘safe level 4’ or ‘borderline’. A marking review of SATs papers for 14 year olds by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) found that 44% of grades awarded in English writing tests were wrong. In reading up to a third and in science one in six.

Confirmation that the rot of targets has infected all public services was confirmed with the Stafford hospital scandal. In the pursuit of foundation status the hospital ignored patient care. One of the main targets they tried to achieve was patients moved out of Accident and Emergency within four hours. Patients were transported to a ghost ward, purely to massage the figures. It’s estimated that hundreds of patients died due to lack of care.

What is worrying is that no one within the hospital blew the whistle, it was only when an unofficial patients’ group began to protest that an inquiry was launched. Hospitals used to be checked by Community Health Councils, they were abolished and replaced by completely toothless and ineffectual patients’ groups.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the horrendous crimes of rapist John Worboys led to a wider examination of how the police assess rape. In some London boroughs inexperienced police constables were given the job of reviewing cases. In many instances it wasn’t reported as a crime but as an ‘incident’. More experienced officers were working on massaging the car crime figures. Why? Because that was the most important target.

The furore over the Baby P case highlighted how social workers rather than spending time working with vulnerable children are hunched over a computer inputting data to satisfy the culture of targets.

Targets are a symptom of the way that New Labour want to micro manage everything, as though a minister in Whitehall can pull a lever and everyone will move to order. It doesn’t work.

In the wake of the Stafford scandal the government reassured everyone that most hospitals were putting patient care first. How do they know this? Er… because they are reaching their targets.

2009-03-15T20:21:00.003Z

Master?

A few weeks ago I went to a market research focus group, we were all primary teachers. The facilitator started by asking us to describe our best day or lesson. It really was quite inspiring to listen to all the examples. Sometimes the collective noun is said to be a ‘moan of teachers’, well, it wouldn’t have applied at the beginning.

As the evening progressed it moved on to hours, workload and ‘initiatives’. Interesting to observe that every teacher was working long hours and had no time for the latest government ‘initiatives’. The latest one is to try and get Newly Qualified Teachers to take a Master of Arts course. It is being run as a trial in National Challenge schools in the North West.

The first point is whether a highly academic course that takes hours of study is the best training for NQTs, bearing in mind that between a third and a half leave teaching within the first five years. Workload and behaviour are always cited as the main reasons for leaving.

It isn’t clear if there will funding for cover, but potential MA NQT students could have 10% of time to study, that’s in addition to 10% preparation time and 10% for being an NQT. The expectation is that experienced teachers will act as mentors, unpaid, but they may be able to gain credits towards their own MA.

Another previous ‘initiative’ was the Fast Track scheme which was meant to identify young teachers with potential to become head teachers, started in 2001 it cost £89 million and managed to get 176 recruits into management positions.

Training for NQTs varies widely between different councils, but in most cases the usual ‘inspirational’ Mr or Mrs Motivator trainers have replaced the colleges and universities who used to deliver it.

The government seem to only promote the ‘super-teacher’ model or join in the hunt for ‘failing’ teachers. What about the ordinary teachers who aren’t interested in promotion and don’t want to become head teachers?

2009-02-23T20:05:00.001Z

OCD Head

I was on a course the other week. What did we do during the break? We swapped horror stories of course. The worst example was the OCD Head.

Detailed planning had to be in every Monday morning, with notes for all the groups on guided reading. The Head was constantly patrolling the corridors and ‘popping in’ to watch/observe and criticise teachers.

When she got a new computer she gave the old one to a teacher. All the old files had been deleted… however, when the teacher looked in the Recycling Bin, there were all the Head’s old files.

Every Friday afternoon the Head organised a tea party in her office for that week’s star pupils. On the computer was a folder – ‘Minutes of the Friday Tea Party’. It contained the following gems –

· Nora Delaney told me that Year 5 hadn’t had home readers all week
· Peter Smith said homework in Year 3 was far too easy
· Jane Jones seemed confused about the Literacy Hour, must follow this up

Yes, the ‘Tea Party’ was an opportunity to get unsuspecting pupils to snitch on their teachers.

All the experienced staff had left the school and there was a constant turnover of Newly Qualified Teachers, after a year they left as well.

Surprising how many OCD Heads there are. Just wish there were more Mike Kent’s.

2009-02-08T10:58:00.002Z

Interviews

The worst of times and… the worst of times.

The Venue

You’re not expecting a pamper session in a five star hotel with free massage and reflexology thrown in, but does the interview need to take place in a garishly lit, bare, hot, stuffy, windowless box? I wasn’t expecting them to extract my fingernails (slowly) or to play ‘Sweet Child Of Mine’ at full eardrum shattering volume, but the interior design of one venue was inspired by Abu Ghraib. For some reason the interviewer wore a thick woollen jumper, I was transfixed as the beads of sweat trickled down his face. How to concentrate?

The Panel

The best number on an interviewing panel? A few years ago I was interviewed for a part time teaching assistant post, the venue was in a gloomy darkened room. All ten governors were on the panel, one tip is to maintain eye contact but on this occasion they sat there furiously scribbling down every answer. So which hunched troglodyte should I look at?

Governors

They will usually be the proverbial ‘loose cannons’ during any interview-

a) Somnambulant Sid – he’s had a long ‘liquid lunch’, it’s four o’clock, you’re last on the interview list, he needs to rest his eyes, but, please, does he have to snore so loudly?
b) Crazy Eddie/Edwina – they’ve been on the governors for the last twenty years. Why hasn’t the council replaced them? Because they can’t get anyone else to be a school governor, there is a huge national shortage. During the interview they are most likely to bowl a beamer. They will ask a totally weird question, normally related to a personal obsession. Examples might include – Have you been to Reykjavik? Do you eat wholemeal bread? Can you juggle? Don’t worry they’ve been doing this for years, the panel will hurriedly move on to the next question.
c) The Prof – a retired lecturer. His question will be a long, convoluted and theoretical. There is only one person in the room that knows the answer…

The School

Always, always, visit before the interview. One school had award certificates plastered on every available wall space, they weren’t just Bronze, Silver or Gold but invariably Platinum. They were also awarded for ‘outstanding’ achievements like ‘Best Kept School Car Park – North West’, ‘Tidiest School Corridors’ and ‘Most Colourful School Fences – Northern Region’. Every display was triple backed. In the cloakrooms every coat was on the right peg, the classrooms didn’t have so much as a paper clip out of place. There was a team of OCD teaching assistants constantly tidying and cleaning every available work place. The teachers were all ‘Leading this’ or ‘Leading that’, they were all wore those old-fashioned dresses from the ‘Stepford Wives’ and they had that look…

The Headteacher

This is another sure-fire reason to visit. You might just get the impression that the staff are on the cusp of full-scale mutiny. Go in the staff room and everyone stops talking, you get the kind of withering look of sympathy that a rabbit in a laboratory might expect, just before they inject his eyes with shampoo. In one school the head’s office was a kind of personal shrine – to himself. The walls were covered with pictures of him with assorted local dignitaries; naturally the children didn’t feature anywhere. As we proceeded on a tour it dawned on me that the Deputy Head at been trained in the Uriah Heap School of unctuousness. He bowed and opened every door for the Headteacher. No, the grass is not always greener, it may be contaminated by noxious heavy metals or polluted by life threatening nuclear waste.

Questions, questions

You should be able to gauge the type of school you might be working at by the questions. In one interview every single question was on classroom management. After the interview I walked through the playground, it was like Beirut during the civil war. Another clue is if there are always vacancies in a particular school. Ask a friend, a shadow of fear will pass over their eyes, their face will freeze with fear, you haven’t got an interview in ‘that school’?

Keep me hanging on the telephone

If you haven’t had ‘the call’ within a few hours you know you haven’t got the job, but why keep you hanging in suspense? My record was three days.

It won’t be you

In most cases the Headteacher has already decided on who they want to appoint. You answer the questions during the interview, the panel look bored to tears. That’s why most interviews are pointless. The Headteacher has already chosen a close relative, the nubile NQT he has an unrequited crush on, or, in most instances, they have selected the preferred workaholic who will slavishly obey every instruction. Creative, critical and questioning? Please don’t apply.

2009-02-06T17:52:00.002Z

Testing, testing… is the government listening?

The National Association of Head Teachers’ surveyed over 10,000 parents on the issue of national tests, 85% thought that the current system should be abolished and 71% wanted to see an end to league tables of schools. A recent report by the Children’s Society noted that schools contributed to problems of low self-esteem by introducing too much testing. “There is a clear danger that education becomes less stimulating when the main incentive is to learn things because they will be tested, and when the fear of failure is a major consideration.”

The continual mantra from the government is ‘standards’. However, almost every academic report or survey has shown the the rise in ‘standards’ is a result of ‘teaching to test’ and the high stakes nature of the tests (principally the link to Ofsted inspections).

There is another way. In the 1970s and 1980s sample cohort testing was used to monitor standards. 1.5% of children were tested and as questions could be repeated, a clear pattern of attainment and children’s understanding could be marked out.

Not that testing is ever fool proof, it mainly measures the lowest academic functions, GCSE exams are an exercise in mnemonics (memory) not intelligence. If you have a photographic memory you may be an excellent quiz player, it doesn’t mean you are creative or intelligent.

With the news that Carol Vorderman is leading the Conservative think-tank on maths teaching, we get the newspaper headlines about ‘success’ amongst pupils in Japan and Korea. That’s fine if you want young children to work for hours after school in exam cramming factories. On some occasions they can’t leave until they have passed a test. So in Japan there is the phenomenon of the hikikomori, where adolescents (mainly boys) lock themselves in their bedrooms for years on end.

Will the government listen to Head Teachers? I wouldn’t bet on it.

2009-02-04T06:37:00.001Z

Of pedants, moaners and insults

I’ve been away from the Times Educational Supplement Forum for a while, so it’s great to see that the standard of debate is still high…

Tedious pedants – Make a typo, misplace a comma, fail to use a colon, any tiny grammatical error and these people will instantly seize on it, you’re obviously a complete illiterate. Not that they ever write anything themselves, they just carp and criticise. They remind me of English teachers from the days of yore, those crusty old curmudgeons who managed to turn writing into a dry, arid exercise. Less or fewer? Write it out a hundred times!

Moaners – These people have always infested staff rooms from the days of the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle mentioned them too. They’re the child-hating Old Farts that NQTs always laugh about. Elbow patches on their corduroy jackets, neatly cut sandwiches in their Tupperware boxes, space reserved in the car park, a corner of the staff room that is forever theirs. They just continually moan, moan, moan. ‘Nothing will ever change’. Naturally when it does come to doing anything, like going on strike, or confronting management, you won’t see them for dust.

Insult merchants – It gets a bit like the Monty Python sketch, you’re looking for an argument, but you’ve found contradiction and then abuse (third door on the left). Sadly most of the posts degenerate into an exchange between two or three people who slag each other off, for weeks.

I’m not expecting every post to engage in worthy intellectual debate. OK, it’s Friday, the end of the week, the children are doing your head in, let off steam, but the Forum just seems to be full of the same material that you can find anywhere else on the Internet - puerile, celebrity obsessed, a joke taken seriously, the serious as a joke.

There’s the wild ‘n’ wacky, the bizarre, information on aliens and UFOs, gossip on Paris Hilton, but SATs testing (low grade child cruelty to me) ‘we’re never going to change it’, so no point in discussing that. Sixth formers as cover supervisors? Zzzzzzzzzzz, BORING! Let’s talk about Big Brother.
Maybe it’s just plain naive to believe that there will be a higher standard of debate on the TES Forum. Or have most intelligent people deserted it due to the pedants, moaners and insult merchants?

2009-02-03T07:03:00.001Z

The new Bastardstone’s

I’ve got to admit that I’m shopaphobic, when it comes to national ‘No Shopping Day’ it doesn’t really affect me, on most days of the year I try to practise the creed anyway. ‘I shop therefore I am’? That just isn’t me.

Visiting the new ‘shopping experience’ Liverpool One I wasn’t arriving with any great expectations, so to find a concrete ‘n’ glass, bleak, austere, clone town, crammed full of the usual suspects that completely failed to lift the human soul, wasn’t exactly a surprise.

Whilst it’s true that nineteenth century Victorian cities were crammed with slums they also managed to create parks, art galleries, museums, libraries and neo-classical town halls. What do we build? Shopping malls. The defining buildings of the age are Bluewater, Meadowhall and the Trafford Centre.

Liverpool One also contains a brand new branch of Waterstone’s. Bookshops are struggling to compete with the Internet and supermarkets, so what has been the response of the chains? Dumb down and stock less books. The new Liverpool Waterstone’s has acres of floor space, but not many… books. There’s piles of ‘3 for 2’ offers, celebrity cook books, ghosted football memoirs and chick-lit.

One of the joys of going into a bookshop is the chance to browse, that journey of discovery, finding that nugget or rare jewel, that old forgotten novel, or obscure esoteric book by a wayward undiscovered author. So why bother going to a bookshop where the stock is so limited? I looked at the education section, it was thin, positively anorexic, there was the usual collection of ‘Getting the Buggers To…’ behavioural manuals and that was about it.

If you treat the customers as fools they will respond accordingly, almost as matter of principle I declined to buy anything. Waterstone’s has joined the race to the bottom by trying to compete with Asda and Tesco’s for the ‘Top 100’ titles, it’s a race they are destined to lose. Thankfully independent booksellers, who do stock a wide range of books, are still surviving. Meanwhile there is that cultural desert that is Waterstone’s.

2009-02-01T08:56:00.003Z

Cheap, cheaper and cheapest

One of my previous posts was on the subject of teaching assistants and cover supervisors, (it also gave a link to an article in ‘The Guardian’) someone sent a comment in –

‘Just read the very interesting link written by Colin the Cover Supervisor. All I can say is - shame on the head for not sacking the incompetent twit. If he could not manage the behaviour of a group of kids then he should not have been working in the school. Shame on Colin for not realising that he was taking the job of a perfectly capable Cover Supervisor with Behaviour Management experience and the ability to control their own temper! Cover Supervisors are hardworking, vital members of staff in our school. They are well trained and very well respected.’

Let’s imagine the following scenario, you’re lying in the wreckage of your car after a serious traffic accident and due to ‘financial cutbacks’ the person tending to your injuries is a member of the St Johns Ambulance. Yes, they are very dedicated, do a fantastic job, but they cannot replace trained professional paramedics. So why do we entrust the education of our children to unqualified people? What message does that send?

Before the 2003 ‘Remodelling Agreement’, by law, a class of children had to be taught by a qualified teacher. No sooner was the ink dry than unscrupulous heads began to use unqualified ‘cover supervisors’ to take classes. The National Union of Teachers was the only union to oppose the agreement; there was some local action against the practise. It petered out, mainly because most teachers hate covering lessons that they aren’t qualified to teach.

Using cover supervisors? At least they know the children and the quality of supply staff is variable. Surely there isn’t any harm in giving teachers a break and using them for the odd lesson? Let’s be honest, using unqualified cover supervisors, the children don’t actually learn anything, the lesson will be death by worksheets. It is also the thin end of the wedge.

Just how thin is that wedge? In April 2008 ‘The Guardian’ reported on Chalfonts Community College in Buckinghamshire, they were using sixth formers (payment £5 an hour) as supply teachers. There is a better way; before the supply service was privatised some local authorities had teams of well-trained supply teachers (no it wasn’t always perfect) who worked with a small number of schools.

During the last ten years teaching assistants in primary and secondary schools have risen from 61,260 to 165,380 and other support staff from 75,200 to 147,000. In primary schools the number of teachers increased from 183,930 to 188,860. Why not bring class sizes down and use experts to work with special education needs children?

Cover supervisors? It’s part of the process where teaching has become de-skilled, de-professionalised and de-valued.

2009-01-21T16:56:00.002Z

The inauguration of Obama

You can always rely on journalists to lose all sense of perspective and proportion, then fail to ask any awkward questions. Was Barack Obama's inauguration really the Second Coming?

I'm not trying to traduce or belittle the thousands of Afro-Americans, standing in the freezing cold with tears in their eyes. After living through the nightmare and bitterness of segregation a black face in the White House must have seemed like liberation day.

However, just how much does the rise and rise of Obama equate with or reflect the collective black experience in America? He was raised in Hawaii by his white maternal grandparents who paid for private education, from there he graduated to Harvard. True he had to overcome the prejudice and 'handicap' of his skin colour, but one or two black faces in the corridors of power cannot mask the every day life experience of the majority - poverty, poor housing and low educational achievement.

Obama represents hope after eight bleak years of George Bush, in a similar way Blair was hailed as a saviour after eighteen years of Conservative government - a skilled orator who dealt in generalities, Hope, Change.

Obama attracted record numbers of small donations from millions of supporters to his campaign fund, but he didn't raise the billions needed from that source alone, he needed the money from large corporations, in order to compete with Clinton and Bush.

In a crisis democratic systems use voting to vent social discontent through the ballot box. What was the contrast with the Civil Rights Movement? Millions were involved in debates, marches and they formed permanent organisations. In Obama's campaign his supporters were reduced to the role of cheerleaders for the chief. The Democratic Party doesn't debate or vote on policy the conventions are there to anoint the new leader.

Like all American politicians Obama subscribes to the myth of the ‘Founding Fathers’. So what did most of them have in common, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? They were white slave owners. Afro-Americans only won the right to vote some two hundred years later.

There was a massive groundswell for change, particularly after the banking crisis and the threat to people's homes and jobs. What will Obama do next? He will be judged on what he does not what he is.

2009-01-20T18:57:00.002Z

Barack Obama

Barack Obama is not George W Bush. That fact alone will guarantee him an avalanche of support and goodwill. Thousands of tearful Americans at the inauguration? For once it isn't hype and hyperbole, showbiz has been suspended. For the first few decades after it opened the only blacks allowed into the White House were slaves. Forty years ago some southern states still retained the notorious Miscegenation Acts, which outlawed marriage between black and white people.

There's a tendency to shout 'sell-out' from the rooftops before the incumbent has been inaugurated. However, Obama's campaign was long on rhetoric and generalities but short on specifics. On the health crisis, where 50 million working Americans are uninsured, he managed to outline a programme that was even more timid than Hilary Clinton's. The multi-million insurance companies covered all the bases by bankrolling both Bush's campaign and Obama's.

In education Obama supported Bush's misnamed 'No Child Left Behind Act'; if you though testing was bad in this country in America any school that doesn't reach national targets faces closure. The results of all this? The familiar teaching to test, narrowed curriculum and rampant cheating to avoid failure.Will Obama tackle the uneven property taxes, which ensure that a child in inner-city Chicago has $7,000 per annum spent on their education compared to $20,000 in the wealthy suburbs?

Teachers pay in America is set by the local school boards, so in many cases it is derisory, just one reason why its teachers are recruited from the lowest 30% of university graduates.

Obama has the hopes of the world resting on his slim shoulders, let's hope he doesn't flunk the test.

2009-01-18T08:19:00.002Z

Emancipate Yourselves From Mental Slavery!

I’m back! For contractual reasons I stopped blogging in December 2007. Sadly the sales of ‘How Not To Teach’ weren’t exactly in the JK Rowling league, as a consequence the retirement plans are on hold. So what’s happened since I ‘retired’?

In April we had the one-day NUT strike over pay. The one thing it did demonstrate is that unions are still a force to be reckoned with, thousands of schools closed down for the day. In many schools where the union had lain dormant for years, crushed by management dictate, there was a revival, the ‘green shoots of recovery’. Lively marches and meetings were held in towns and cities across the country. Unfortunately the union leadership didn’t follow it through, left the pay campaign on hold, as a result when they re-balloted in October there was a slim majority for action but the turnout was much lower.

The Knowsley Building Schools for Finance (BSF) ‘Learning Centres’ are almost up and running. Shiny new buildings, state of the art computer facilities… shiny new buildings, state of the art computer facilities, so that’s everything sorted, what else do they need? Ah… of course, teachers! Two years ago when the BSF process began Knowsley called all the secondary teachers together for a meeting, the unsubtle message was poor results = crap teachers. All the schools would close re-open, as ‘Learning Centres’ and teachers would have to reapply for their jobs, ‘we’re only interested in appointing ‘good’ teachers’. Or, ‘most of you losers needn’t bother applying’. Needless to say, ‘challenging’ classes, relentless pressure for results, there hasn’t exactly been a long queue of applicants, (after national advertising 8 people applied for the 5 ‘Learning Centre Managers’ posts – a.k.a. ‘Head teachers’) one school failed to get any applicants for the Head of the English Department. So many teachers have applied for redundancy money that the bar has been lowered to any mammal with a teaching qualification.

The creationist academy in Norwich has opened – courtesy of funding from Graham Dacre, the second hand car salesman, turned Pentecostalist preacher. I can’t wait for the science lessons – was the Earth created 3,000 or 6,000 years ago? Maybe they could employ Sarah Palin as a teacher?

The same predictable suspects spewed forth their crazy ideas, Ofsted that fount of joy, creativity and imagination, declared that there were ‘too many boring teachers’. Yes, I’ve met so many ‘inspiring’ Ofsted inspectors. The General Teaching Council wanted to know why more teachers hadn’t been sacked. This from the organisation that arraigned a teacher before one of its disciplinary panels for failing to return library books and calling a pupil a ‘waste of space’. There but for the Grace of God…

The big news from me is that I’m publishing a second book ‘I 8 Skool’, it’s the usual mix of incisive analysis, humour and rage.

Why go through the pain again? Simply because the education book market is so dire. There is Ofsted throttling the life out of schools and what have we got to read? The market is dominated by the comfort read, whimsical, heart-warming, homespun tales from a retired teacher musing about life in their old village school, carpet slippers on, cardigan zipped up, a handy cup of Ovaltine by his side. I haven’t tried to write a ‘warts and all’ account of teaching it’s more a view from the trenches gazing in horror at the gaping mortal wounds through which the lifeblood pours out.

Teachers? In ‘Redemption Song’ Bob Marley opinions that black people in Jamaica, before they can do anything, have to ‘emancipate yourselves from mental slavery’. It’s worrying the number of teachers that can’t imagine life without Ofsted, league tables and testing. At best we have become functionaries, uncritical automatons; at worst, dehumanised, demoralised prison warders patrolling an overcrowded, discredited penal institution.

Just how grim, how dire, how utterly joyless is the primary curriculum? Let me put it this way, if I had a ten year-old child ready to enter Year 6, that grind of revision, mock exams and testing, I would give up my job, live on baked beans for a year and home educate.

I read an interview with a head teacher in which he declared, ‘I admit we are an exam factory and I’m not going to apologise for it’. Like many children I’ve become increasingly school phobic, I no longer see it as a place for learning more as a venue for testing and assessment. We need to keep asking the question - what the hell are they doing to our children?

2008-12-02T16:06:00.002Z

Campaign for the Book

December newsletter

A hard rain’s gonna fall?

This is the grim assessment of the Local Government Association on the situation for public services after the credit crunch:

The economic slowdown has left town halls having to find more than a billion pounds of savings over the next three years to safeguard vital local services and keep council tax down, town hall leaders will say today.

The Local Government Association, which represents over 400 councils in England & Wales, is warning that the grim economic climate and rising inflation is forcing councils to come up with new ways to make money go further and maintain normal services.

New analysis shows that spiralling inflation has reduced the real terms value of money that councils receive in grant from the Government and through council tax. In real terms, the funding awarded to councils in last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review is now worth almost £500m a year less than the Government intended.

Already, there are reports of cuts around the UK. The Highlands and Aberdeen have faced cost cutting to their Schools Library Service and Wirral has announced ‘reconfiguration’ of its library service. The Campaign for the Book was launched in part to remind councils of their responsibilities and to support campaigns against cuts to library services. Please contact the Campaign with your stories. We will do our best to provide speakers for meetings.

Campaign summer conference
I can announce the details of the Campaign for the Book summer conference.
Campaign for the Book conference
Saturday, 27th June
King Edward’s School, Birmingham B15 2UA.

My thanks to school librarian Jean Allen who has secured the venue for us at a nominal rate.

I am aware that the Conference is now scheduled only a week after the School Library Association’s weekend event on June 20th and 21st. I am afraid there was no other date at which I could get a venue at reasonable cost. Some establishments were asking for between £2,000 and £7,000! I would urge anyone going to the SLA event to come along to Birmingham the week after too. Bodies like the SLA and the Campaign for the Book share a very similar vision. Consider it a busy two weeks to take a stand on behalf of libraries and reading for pleasure. The two events will complement each other.

One of the centrepieces of the conference will be a Question Time session on the future of libraries and reading. The following have already accepted an invitiation to speak: Roy Clare, MLA executive, Lyn Brown MP, Labour, all Party Parliamentary Group on Libraries, Ed Vaizey MP, Conservative speaker on Culture. I am awaiting final confirmation from the Liberal Democrats and from leading authors who will join the debate.

I will announce the remaining list of speakers once they have all confirmed. I would urge everyone in the Society of Authors, Cilip, YLG, SLA, the National Literacy Association, the National Association for Primary Education, the public service trade unions and publishers and the many individuals who have supported the Campaign to circulate the details of the Conference as widely as possible. I believe it can become a focus for debate about the future of libraries and books, supporting all the other groups and individuals who share our love of reading.

Organisation

These are the next steps:
1) Supporters circulate this newsletter as widely as possible.
2) Organizers issue the first leaflet advertising the Conference just after Christmas. Illustrator Steve Weatherill has kindly agreed to provide a cartoon for the first leaflet. Each month I will be asking an illustrator to design a different leaflet to sustain the momentum.
3) Final confirmation of speakers.
4) Collection of delegate fees. This will be set at the lowest level possible and include coffee, tea and a lunch. At the moment it looks likely that the cost will be very low indeed. Most speakers have already indicated that they will attend for the nominal cost of travel only and accommodation if at long distance. My thanks to them for that.

For further information, please contact:

Alan Gibbons: aagibbons@blueyonder.co.uk
agibbons@mobileemail.vodafone.net

Finland

2008-11-04T08:26:00.001Z

Interesting blog

2008-08-31T20:16:00.000+01:00

Mister Reeman videos

See Ofsted

2008-07-13T21:10:00.002+01:00

Check this out

The Insiders

2008-03-26T11:13:00.009Z

Film Premiere

Passport to Liverpool

April 2oth Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 7 pm

Bright Moon Films

See preview

2007-12-02T08:10:00.000Z

I'm not blogging for a while...

2007-12-01T13:15:00.000Z

Telling the Inconvenient Truth

Cynic or sceptic? I’ve come under attack in the TES Staffroom as the former. For the record I’ve never had any time for teachers who just whinge, in my time as a teacher I’ve always tried to ‘walk the walk and talk the talk’. If you want to judge my record – read the book.

It’s just that I don’t think I have to justify myself with reams of planning and to me testing children to death is a waste of time and effort. I didn’t come into teaching to ‘fill the pail’ but to ‘light the fire’.

As ever the TES Staffroom is the home for tedious pedants, one of them picked holes in my writing. Well I don’t profess to be the greatest writer and by its nature blogging doesn’t always give you the time to reflect, revise and edit. Strange though, they never offer any pearls of wisdom themselves.

If people want to correct me on factual errors that’s fine (thanks for the correction – it’s Higher Level not Higher Learning Teaching Assistants) and challenge me on ideas any time, that’s part of the process of genuine debate.

And while I’m on genuine debate, thanks to the Teaching Assistants Forum posters for their constructive comments. To mention the TES Staffroom again, most of the longer threads involve two people exchanging insults – haven’t they got anything better to do with their time, like marking tests?

Thanks for a great comment from Beckton Boy about my post on CPD, he’s written a tremendous piece on ‘training’, more please.

This is all coming round to this announcement - I’m suspending the blog for a few months, I’m involved in another project that will take all of my time, no it isn’t illegal and I haven’t been sacked… well, not yet anyway.

So let’s hope more primary teacher bloggers will pick up their pens and tell the ‘Inconvenient Truth’.

2007-11-28T18:12:00.001Z

Why is CPD so useless?

There’s a mania in education for renaming things, as though that act alone will change everything. To encapsulate the idea of ‘the cutting edge of new technology’, Computing morphed into Information and Communication Technologies. There’s probably many a recidivist Luddite that has smiled cynically at the notion as the network breaks down or the Internet crashes, just at that vital point during the lesson. In the same vane training has been replaced by ‘Continuing Professional Development’.

Was there ever a ‘golden age’ for training? Probably not, but one thing is for sure, training today resembles an arid desert, a yawning vacuum, an absolute zero, the dead zone. In years gone by the Local Education Authorities (LEAs) did have the staff and the funding to make some attempt at training teachers. Now all most of them can offer are the dire Literacy and Numeracy training that comes straight out of manuals from the Department for Children Schools and Families (DCSF). The training is aimed at schools in ‘intensive support’ so the default mode is, ‘Welcome crap teachers we will show you how to jack up your results and save you from impending doom’.

The rest of ‘CPD’ is delivered by private companies, usually one man and a dog operations run by teachers desperate to get out of the firing line. They usually range from the dire to the absolutely dire.

There’s a heavy concentration on ‘Behaviour Management’. Now any teacher needs to control their class, although I’ve known some fairly scary teachers who were able to ‘control’ their class, whether they could ‘teach’ anything is another matter. This training is dominated by the behaviour ‘gurus’. Usually it varies from the banal to the bleeding obvious.

‘Behaviour Management’ does suit those senior managers who live in the bunker of denial about bad behaviour in their school. It is of course all down to the individual teacher being able to cope with their class. This despite the fact that some of them may contain 4 or 5 pupils that belong in a penal correction institution.

It does make me wonder what people will make of educational literature in 100 years time. Any survey will show that the most popular books began with ‘Getting the Buggers To…’. Books that are based on the ability to survive the trench war between children and teachers.

Another favourite staple are the ‘Mr Motivator’ sessions with ‘inspirational’ speakers featuring talks where hundreds of teachers are herded together in hot, sweaty, cramped hotel rooms and lectured for hours about how children need… lots of room, plenty of water to drink and should be encouraged to ask questions.

I don’t know what it is like in secondary with all those subject specialists, do they meet together frequently to exchange ideas and model best practice? Possibly not because other schools are now ‘competitors’ you don’t want to trade any secrets with them. Most courses will be ‘How to jack up your GCSE results’.

As for NQTs with only a something like a half staying more than five years you would have thought they would be targeted for intensive training. That isn’t always the case, in my local authority most training is ‘twilight’, so only a tiny minority of NQTs attend.

Early on in my career I could see that training would be negligible or so dire I would need a strong course amphetamines just to stay awake. I completed an MA in Education Studies. However, in interviews there hasn’t been a flicker of interest, it has been about as relevant as an NVQ Level One in Basket Weaving, yes I do spend my spare time on useful hobbies.

There’s an element of Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ about CPD, because it isn’t ‘Continuing’, it isn’t ‘Professional’ and the only thing it develops is that reflex action – looking at your watch ‘when the hell is this session going to end?’

2007-11-27T16:50:00.000Z

Stuck for a Christmas present? Try ‘How Not To Teach’ by ‘Mr Read’

I can heartily recommend this book…

‘If you thought reading Gervaise Phinn was like drinking a warm cup of tea, this book will knock you over with the force of a vodka slammer. Mr Read survives the nightmare of planning, Ofsted and an incompetent head...He also takes the class to Ireland, the House of Commons and wins a film award. We guarantee "Christmas Lights", "The School Trip" and "Stressbusters" will make you laugh out loud. A searing indictment of our joyless, exam ridden primary curriculum...'it will take a bareknuckle fight to save its soul.' Down-to-earth and outrageously funny, this guide will prove essential reading for all teachers everywhere.’

Book Outline

Amazon

2007-11-26T17:59:00.001Z

Teacher or Teaching Assistant?

My post – Teaching Assistants = Teaching on the cheap? – attracted a few comments, mainly from… outraged teaching assistants. Regrettably they seemed to divide into either, we don’t do it like that in my school (well I was writing about the general not the particular) or they descended into personal insult, ‘you must think your teaching assistants are useless’. Welcome to the Internet the home of reasoned and cogent debate. I just wish some of the people posting would work on their comprehension skills, just to recap… ‘in my personal experience most teaching assistants would make excellent teachers - if they had the time and the finances to train.’

None of the posts really commented on or tried to analyse the massive rise in the numbers of teaching assistants and support staff over the last ten years. There was the ‘having fully qualified teachers in schools is just a pipe dream, we’ll never be like other European countries’. Yeah, we’re just the fourth wealthiest country in the world. It’s the same kind of logic in America, ‘we’ll never be able to fund a free and comprehensive health service’, - meanwhile 40 million working people go uninsured (see Michael Moore's ‘Sicko’ for more details).

I’m sure that in many schools teachers prepare detailed lessons for well qualified teaching assistants (1 in 8 have degrees or the equivalent) who work on integrating children back into the classes. However, on the other side of the equation no sooner was the ink dry on the 2003 ‘Remodelling Agreement’ and unscrupulous heads began to hire ‘cover supervisors’, the example in this article by ‘Colin Edwards’ doesn’t exist in isolation. In my friend’s school they appointed a cover supervisor with no English or Maths qualifications but the head felt he could ‘control’ the classes.

As for the Higher Level Teaching Assistants (HLTAs) 15,000 have been trained, but their pay and status hasn’t exactly improved. Many head teachers have only paid them the higher rate when they have taken classes. I stand by what I wrote in the first article children should be taught by a fully qualified teacher.

There are some interesting comparisons, there has been a wide scale survey on care for vulnerable children (The Children’s Workforce Strategy), and it examined other European countries. In relation to homes for looked after children in England they commended the staff for their care and attention towards the children. They also noted that 80% of staff are unqualified, only 1% of the children go into higher education and that many children have complex needs. Their recommendation is that all staff should be trained to degree level.

Teaching assistants do fantastic work with special education needs children, however they also have complex learning difficulties. Some of them have very poor writing skills but highly developed speaking and listening skills. Do most teaching assistants have the training to develop this? I’ll put my hand up now I don’t; I haven’t had the required specialist training.

When it comes to special needs teaching there is a class divide, it’s partly based on anecdote and personal observation (where is the research on the use of teaching assistants?) but in the leafy suburbs where classes are full and therefore under Local Management of Schools (LMS) the school has the money to pay for it, they employ qualified SEN teachers to take out groups of children. They also typically have fewer SEN children and parents who insist on their children being taught by a teacher.

In more ‘challenging’ schools they tend to have falling rolls and therefore less money, there’s more pressure on SATs results (farm the SEN children out, let’s concentrate on the borderline ones) and some of the parents aren’t the most forthright in advocating for their children’s education. To put it crudely a middle class child is ‘dyslexic’ and needs professional help whereas a working class child is just ‘thick’.

In this country spending money on teachers just isn’t thought to be of value. In the last ten years, instead of employing thousands more teaching assistants would it not have been better to have recruited more teachers? For me it was summed up in 1993 by Conservative Education Minister John Patten’s comments about replacing nursery teachers with a ‘Mum’s Army’ of unqualified staff. Maybe it happened anyway?

Teacher or teaching assistant? Let’s put it this way, if you were rewiring your house, would you choose Fred from the down the road who ‘knows a bit about electrics’ or a fully qualified electrician who could issue you with a safety certificate, once the work is completed? Why should we expect less for education?

2007-11-25T16:34:00.000Z

NUT Elections

The results of the NUT election for vice-president have been announced. Whilst you’re waiting with bated breath – a brief guide to the political groupings. The ‘moderates’ in the union are organised in the secretive ‘Broadly Speaking’ group, although confusingly many of the leaders are ex-members of the Communist Party. On the left the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance (STA) and the Campaign for a Democratic and Fighting Union (CDFU) usually cooperate together in elections.

In the vice-presidential elections Martin Powell-Davis stood on an independent platform - for national strike action over pay. During the transition from Management Allowances to Teaching and Learning Responsibilities (TLRs) there were strikes in over 100 schools where union members were set to lose pay. However, according to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), on a national scale, over 30,000 teachers will suffer pay reductions as they lose allowances over the next few years.

The voting figures (top two elected) were-

Goodswen 6,792 (CDFU)

Reed 5,603 (Broadly Speaking)

Harrop 4,084 (Broadly Speaking)

King 3,973 (STA)

Powell Davis 2,473 (For National Action)

Roberts 2,167 (One Union for Teachers)

The main feature of the election was the abysmal turnout, only 10% of union members voted. In part this is due to the general apathy in the teaching profession – will it make any difference if we vote in elections? There are also the years of inactivity where the teacher unions have become ineffectual insurance societies, they deal with members individual grievances, treating the symptoms but not the cause. Unions if they mean anything, should be there to take collective action in order to defend their members – you can break one stick but not when they are tied together.

The NUT have called some meetings this week over pay, however a Special NUT Executive Meeting was cancelled because the School Teachers’ Review Body were not due to report, this despite the fact that the government have given fairly clear indications that public sector pay rises will be restricted to low amounts. Unison members in the public sector ballotted but there was a low turnout and with only a narrow majority for strike action, the Unison national committee voted to accept the 2.475% offer.

Voting in elections doesn’t actually change anything but it is important to have people who will speak out on issues. Above all we need unions that are worthy of the name and not weak, feeble, inept insurance societies.

Previous post - Friendly Society or Trade Union?

Martin Powell-Davis Blog

2007-11-23T16:20:00.001Z

Joke of the Week

How do you know when you've had elephants in the fridge?

Footprints in the butter!

2007-11-22T18:58:00.000Z

Graded Lesson Observations

We’ve had another instance in a nearby school of a maverick, control freak head. This time she wanted to ‘grade’ lesson observations as either ‘emerging, evident or embedded’. With some help from the union, the staff all stood firm and she was forced to back down.

Even Ofsted don’t require lesson observations by line managers to be graded, after all they are the experts (?). Also line mangers have not been trained to the same ‘high’ level of Ofsted inspectors.

If lessons in schools are graded there is no appeal mechanism it is purely the subjective viewpoint of one manager. In many schools it would be used as a crude way of attacking any staff that disagreed with the head or senior management.

One teacher in another school had a lesson marked down because there was no differentiation, this was based on a twenty-minute observation. She appealed to the head because her lesson plan showed clear differentiation.

An enlightening book on primary education was David Winkley’s ‘Handsworth Revolution’, which chronicles how he developed an excellent school in inner city Birmingham using music, art and literature. He had some fairly trenchant comments about the drive to standardise and grade schools, teachers and lessons. He noted,

‘We can pile children into classrooms, but they are never as predictable as tins of baked beans on supermarket shelves. If one child in a class of thirty decides to throw a pencil during an Ofsted-inspected lesson, this will lower the lesson grade. Baked-bean tins, when weighed and counted, will not move, of have moods or cry.’

There was an interesting article in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) by London head Mike Kent, he explained how he didn’t go into classes with a clipboard but dropped into classes and talked to children and teachers.

‘It seems to me, therefore, that I'm very aware of what's going on in my school. But what I refuse to do is sit in the corner of a classroom with a clipboard, ticking boxes on the teacher's performance in an "Ofsted-approved" manner. What for? To produce automatons with identical approaches to everything? It's patronising, invasive and unnecessary. And who says Ofsted has got it right anyway?’

During an Ofsted inspection he was criticised for not observing lessons…

‘Naturally, the lead inspector didn't agree with me, and one of the recommendations was that I should get into the classrooms and assess formally. So for half a term I did just that. I became an inspector rather than a resource, and I learned nothing about my teachers and classrooms that I didn't know already. Then I went back to doing what I knew worked best. There is, I think, something lacking in schools today. It's called "trusting the teachers".’

2007-11-20T19:28:00.001Z

Teaching Assistants = Teaching on the cheap?

Teaching assistants do a fantastic job. I haven’t got any time for the kind of elitism that was prevalent in schools, teachers couldn’t be questioned and parents were kept at the school gate. The creation of a ‘walled garden’ left teachers open to attack by the forces of conservatism.

On the other side we do need well paid, well trained, teachers. It should be a job that people aspire to. What concerns me is the way that schools have used teaching assistants to casualise and de-skill the job. In one sense their role has changed from filling the glue pots, sharpening the pencils and washing the paintbrushes. The 2003 ‘Remodelling Agreement’, which allowed classes to be taught by teaching assistants or cover supervisors, exemplified this change.

The rise in numbers has been startling, over the ten years of the Labour Government teaching assistants in primary and secondary schools rose from 61,260 to 165,380 and other support staff from 75,200 to 147,000. In primary schools the number of teachers increased from 183,930 to 188,860.

There is no doubt that many teaching assistants have a wealth of experience to call on. However, when you look at the care of the elderly, the young, the sick, or the disabled then the profile of the workforce is always the same – female, part time, casual, untrained and low paid. 98% of teaching assistants are female, they work on average 26 hours, one in five have no permanent contract, they only need NVQ Level 1 (below GCSE standard) to work in schools and average pay in primary schools is £7.90 an hour.

In many primary and secondary schools children (particularly those with special needs) may spend most of their school day being taught by teaching assistants. Contrast that with other European countries, in most of them the job of ‘teaching assistant’ simply doesn’t exist. Apart from the caretaker and the admin staff the only adults in the schools are teachers. If they have extra money they employ teachers.

The presence of a highly educated workforce isn’t only a standard in education, take children in care, in Britain 80% of staff are unqualified and only 1% of looked after children make it to higher education. Contrast that with Germany and Denmark where a high proportion of staff have degrees and most children in their care go on to university. There is a similar position with nursery care, in Denmark every childcare worker has a three year degree, whereas in England 40% of staff don’t even have GCSEs.

Teaching assistants make it easier for teachers to manage the class, particularly if they take out some of the more troublesome pupils. On the other side many special education needs children have complex requirements that call for highly skilled staff. Where has been the research about the impact of teaching assistants in schools?

This isn’t an attack on teaching assistants; in my personal experience most of them would make excellent teachers - if they had the time and the finances to train. The bottom line is, if you had an accident who would you want to attend to you a St John’s Ambulance volunteer or a trained paramedic? If you were assaulted in the street would you want a special constable to deal with the situation or a police officer? In the event of a fire would it be a part time retained or professional fire fighter?

So who would you want teaching your child? A teaching assistant or a teacher?

2007-11-16T18:38:00.001Z

Joke of the Week

Horse goes into a bar and orders a drink.

The barman said, "Why the long face?"

2007-11-15T20:51:00.000Z

Joint Area Reviews

It’s incredible how Ofsted have spread their grisly tentacles into so many organisations. Their very presence pollutes, corrupts and creates a climate of fear.

From inspecting schools they have branched out into teacher training colleges, Local Education Authorities, further education colleges and childminders (numbers there have fallen from 90,000 to 60,000).

In local authorities, social services and education departments have been combined to form ‘Children’s Services’. They too come under Ofsted’s probing claws.

The inspections are known as Joint Area Reviews (JAR), when it comes to schools the inspectors trawl through the SATs and GCSE results. They then produce a list of ‘lowest performers’; I’m reliably informed that their first question to the local authority ‘suits’ is, ‘Why haven’t you sacked the head teacher?’

And they wonder why so few people want the job?

2007-11-14T16:41:00.001Z

Preaching to the unconverted

One of the main arguments used to support academies is that parental ‘choice’ will increase. Of the 84 academies that have opened 24 are sponsored by different Christian organisations.

In West Sussex the Woodard Schools organisation, which mainly runs fee-paying schools is considering academy bids for three schools. It is an Anglo-Catholic grouping with fairly ‘traditional’ views on most subjects. The most controversial academy bid is in Norwich where millionaire former used car-dealer turned Pentecostalist preacher Graham Dacre is proposing to takeover Heartsease School.

The National Secular Society revealed that according to the 2001 census Norwich had the highest proportion of non-believers in the country – 37%. Not only that the standard Pentecostalist positions are that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, abortion is ‘evil’ and homosexuality can be ‘cured’.

So how did ‘faith schools’ appear in England? The 1870 Education Act created School Boards to fill in the gaps left by existing voluntary or religious schools. The denominational schools (overwhelmingly Anglican) then found it difficult to compete; they lost teachers to the Board Schools which paid better salaries.

The Non Conformists (Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists) had several grievances – some of their pupil-teachers were forced to convert to gain employment. Parents had no choice but to send their children to a Church of England school, in 1900 the Primitive Methodists (a group expelled from mainstream Methodism at the start of the nineteenth century) calculated that in 1,976 preaching places, 1,124 of them only had an Anglican school.

The 1902 Conservative Education Act replaced School Boards with Local Education Authorities, however, for the first time money from the rates was given to fund ‘voluntary aided’ schools – overwhelmingly Anglican with some Catholic and Wesleyan Methodist as well.

The Baptists, Congregationalists and Primitive Methodists organised meetings and demonstrations to oppose the Act. The Baptist minister Dr John Clifford raised the slogan ‘Rome on the Rates’. They established a Special Resistance Committee and called for ‘passive resistance’ – the refusal to pay rates for denominational schools.

By December 1904 35,000 summonses had been issued and the process of court action began. In 1905 50,000 summonses were sent out and 150 were jailed, including 61 ministers. The Liberals promised to repeal the act and the previously ‘non-political’ Free Churches called for a Liberal victory.

However, their hopes were dashed as Bills to repeal the 1902 Education Act foundered in 1906, 1907, and 1908. The campaign of ‘passive resistance’ began to subside but even as late as 1909 thirty Non-Conformists were jailed for non-payment.

This week the ‘Guardian’ reported on Park academy in Sheffield, sponsored by another Christian organisation, the United Learning Trust. Plans for the new building reveal that there's to be a prayer room, much bigger than any of the classrooms. Its provisional name will be the “reflection room” but there will be no mirrors on the wall. The rumour is that this will be the school chapel by another name.

There is a long tradition of religious tolerance in England; most existing faith schools don’t exactly push religion down children’s throats. It will be interesting to see if this survives the tender mercies of the Pentecostalists and Anglo-Catholics. How many 15-19 year olds attend church? The national figure is 5% and in West Sussex it is 3.9%.

As the Primitive Methodists said in 1902, ‘All schools which receive public money shall be under public control’.

2007-11-13T21:06:00.000Z

Karen Reissman sacked!

On Monday November 5th Manchester psychiatric nurse Karen Reissman was sacked on 4 counts. Firstly that, when she was interviewed in December 2006 criticising the transfer of NHS work to the voluntary sector, she brought the Trust into disrepute. Secondly, for telling people that she was suspended and what for. Thirdly, for protesting her innocence. Fourthly, for allowing the press to print information, some misleading about her case. The fifth charge of misusing time was dropped. All the charges were gross misconduct and all sackable offences.

If this was Burma or Iran there would be an outcry from New Labour politicians. Not to worry, it's just happening here.

Reinstate Karen Reissman web site

2007-11-12T19:14:00.001Z

17,000 ‘poor’ teachers?

Another day, another negative headline. Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, pontificated that there were ‘about’ 17,000 ‘poor’ teachers. I don’t know where he got the figure from – the back of a cigarette packet? Possibly he extrapolated the number from those lessons that Ofsted deemed to be only ‘satisfactory’ – in some of the ‘light touch’ inspections observations have only lasted ten minutes.

The TES Staffroom featured a fairly sterile debate between those who blamed unruly children and their parents versus the ‘I know some crap teachers in my school’ postings.

Predictably Taylor ploughed straight into the ‘falling standards’ argument, ‘We’ve got 400,000 of our children attending low-attaining schools; 75,000 leave schools at 16 with hardly any qualifications at all…’ Well nothing about how the selective schools that he promotes help to produce ‘low-attaining’ schools. And what about that ‘golden age’ of selective education? Fifty years ago fifty per cent of children left school without any qualifications whatsoever.

Naturally in Taylor’s world the solution is clear, ‘…if you have weak heads of department you ask them to move on and you go out and recruit fantastic teachers.’ Easy in’ it? There ‘s a massive queue of teachers just waiting to fill those jobs.

Once again we have that neat syllogism – low attaining results = bad school = rubbish teachers. In my experience in most ‘challenging’ schools teachers who can’t hack it get out. Poor teaching? It’s even more likely to occur in ‘coasting’ schools with ‘good’ results, that’s where you’ll find ‘Leather patches’ who has always sat in the same seat in the staffroom for the past twenty years.

Schools and teachers in some areas are just set up to fail, the middle classes in some cities have raised the drawbridge and retreated to the refuge of selective faith or grammar schools, leaving the comprehensives as the latter day secondary moderns.

The recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Trust showed what a divided society we have become, in many large cities almost half the population exist in ‘breadline poverty’ – it is the norm to be poor. There’s also poverty of hope, ambition and aspiration. It’s in the ‘challenging’ schools that you get a massive turnover of teachers. My MA was a case study on a school that had been in special measures for five years, one of the English teachers told me that he came in to work every day with the knowledge that he would have to teach five English lessons and every one would be hell. The head of department had gone there because he wanted a ‘challenge’, he quickly realised the enormity of the task. Every day he would drive in his car to the big roundabout by the school, some days he just turned back home and phoned in sick. Shortly afterwards the entire English department left.

The shame is that the debate on teaching is polarised between the ‘excellent’ inspirational teachers featured in the ‘Teaching Awards’ (the alternative take is that they are workaholic geeks with no social life) or failure - the teachers fast tracked under competency procedures. What about the mass of teachers who don’t want promotion, like to see their families, have a social life and don’t want to work 70 hour weeks?

To attract and retain the brightest and the best the government needs to ensure that teaching is an attractive job by making the pay comparable with other graduate professions. Training is negligible in many schools, most people don’t start out as ‘bad’ teachers. Give teachers back autonomy over the curriculum, on that note interesting to see that teachers at Unity Academy in Teeside are balloting for strike action over excessive demands for planning. Teaching should be about inspiring children, not a paper chase.

Teaching really should be the ‘best job in the world’. You just aren’t going to raise morale with the philosophy of – we’ll shoot a few ‘pour encourager les autres’. Nice one Cyril!

2007-11-07T19:46:00.000Z

I'm not a great fan of award ceremonies and I probably stand a cat-in-hells chance of winning the 'edublog awards', it'll go to the sort of '100 things to do with glue pots and string' blog- nothing remotely controversial. But if you've got a spare minute...

Nominations would be gratefully received for category 3 - Best new blog and category 8 - Best teacher blog.

Might be interesting if I won...

Nominations

2007-11-06T16:17:00.000Z

Bishop’s Park

The Knowsley Building Schools for the Future (BSF) saga grinds remorselessly on. The national adverts for the ‘Learning Centre Leaders’ (a.k.a. ‘Headteachers’) posts produced a grand total of eight people for the five posts, two having already been filled internally. The recent interviews for the Prescot Whiston ‘Learning Centre Leader’ featured three candidates, two of whom had been rejected by the Halewood ‘Learning Centre’ and another who hadn’t even made the short list there.

Prior to the interview candidates were given material from the QCA about an inspirational new school in Clacton, opened in 2002, called Bishop’s Park. The glossy leaflet described its ‘curriculum like tartan’, the headteacher Mike Davis described how schoolwork was,

‘planned ‘from the perspective of a student engaged in inquiry across a swathe of ideas and competences, rather than a stranger visiting a series of disconnected subjects’. He describes it as a ‘tartan’, with the national curriculum subjects woven seamlessly together. Bishops Park uses the national curriculum to provide goals for its students, but subjects are not taught as discrete lessons. Instead teachers plan work around a particular theme for each half-term – 70 per cent of class time is spent on theme work. The themes meaningfully connect the learning content and skills, rather than separating knowledge into compartments. As this is the approach that many primary schools take, pupils tend to find the transition from year 6 to Bishops Park straightforward and stress-free.’

The Knowsley BSF proposals really are like the proverbial curate’s egg, there’s progressive educational ideas mixed up with ridiculous management speak and an over reliance on ICT. However, the major fault line running through it all is the attempt to blame teachers alone for the poor test results in Knowsley. Change imposed from above will just result in grudging acceptance.

Judging by the ‘consultation’ meetings most of the consultants have never been near a real classroom and certainly not in Knowsley. But, you might have expected that said consultants given the vast amounts of money they are paid would have done some basic research i.e., Googling ‘Bishop’s Park’.

They might have picked up the story from July of this year that Bishop’s Park is to close. The new school was built under the auspices of PFI and therefore took priority over other school building work. The basic problem was that there were already too many surplus places in Clacton. Bishop’s Park has only 500 pupils with a capacity of 900. The school serves a disadvantaged area but its results haven’t been spectacular, the pass rate at GCSEs was only 25% (A-C including maths and English). Essex Councillor Tracey Chapman told the BBC: “With parents displaying a lack of confidence and choosing to move away from the school it is necessary that we take action.”

It’s a fairly devastating comment on the way that innovation is viewed – if you can’t jack up the test scores - forget it! I don’t know what kind of school Bishop’s Park is; it sounds pretty inspirational to me. But I just wonder how long the new ‘creative curriculum’ will last in Knowsley if the results don’t improve? Yup, it’ll be back to testing, testing, testing.

Resistance is Futile

2007-11-05T17:03:00.000Z

A Fresh Start?

If you had any illusions that Gordon Brown would be any different from Tony Blair hopes were completely dashed with his, ‘we’ll close failing schools’ speech. Annual targets for improvement will be given to 670 schools where pupils currently get less than 30% passes A-C at GCSE (including maths and English).

This approach harks back to New Labour’s early days in office in 1997 when arch-Blairite loyalist and education minister Stephen Byers ‘named and shamed’ the ‘worst eighteen schools’ in England.

The model for closing down schools and reopening them as brand new schools came from San Francisco. Reconstitution – “improving” low performing schools by replacing (“vacating”) all of the adults in the building was described as the “My Lai approach to school reform - you destroy the village in order to save it.”

The plans drawn up by the San Francisco Unified School District included the phrase, “If individuals do not learn, then those assigned to be their teachers will accept responsibility for this failure and will take appropriate action to ensure success.”

The primary focus of reconstitution was an impoverished area known as Bayview Hunter's Point. Six schools were chosen to be developed as 'magnets' to attract parents and children, two schools were new and four existing ones were selected for 'reconstitution'. This meant, “Removing faculty and staff [including cooks, teaching assistants and cleaners] and hiring new faculty and staff committed to the consent decree vision, philosophy tenents and program.” To help implement reforms the six Bayview Hunter's Point schools received a massive infusion of state funds and extensive technical assistance.

In 1987 two more schools in San Francisco, John Muir Elementary School and James Lick Middle School were chosen for 'reconstitution', staff were removed at both schools but this time no additional resources were provided.

However, by 1989 it was clear that achievement levels in the district were still uneven, the court appointed a panel of experts led by Harvard professor Gary Orfield to review progress. In 1993 a further nine schools were declared 'reconstitution eligible' and given one year to improve. As a result three schools were selected during 1994-5 and five more the following year. Once again teachers were singled out for blame and long-standing, experienced teachers were advised that ‘just good enough’ was ‘not good enough’.

Reconstitution made it difficult for schools to attract qualified and experienced teachers, in one school 24% were unlicensed and in another 70% were long-term supply teachers. The reconstituted schools still failed to show any signs of measurable improvement.

Gary Orfield, who chaired the committee of experts that launched the San Francisco experiment, was forced to recognise the limits of reconstitution, “My basic conclusion is that this is like open heart surgery. It is necessary in some cases, but very costly and needs a very strong supporting team to give it a reasonable chance at success. It should not be done on a massive basis because it requires a great deal of investment in leadership in creating a brand new school in a situation which is inherently difficult.”

The English version of ‘Reconstitution’ was ‘Fresh Start’ – close the school and make teachers reapply for their jobs. The scheme never really did recover from that car crash moment in 2000 when four ‘super-heads’ resigned in one week, including Carole McAlpine who was featured in a high profile Channel 4 documentary about Firfield School in Newcastle.

The Times Educational Supplement (TES) surveyed Brown’s ‘worst performing’ schools based on test results and found that from the Ofsted inspections a third were graded ‘good’, 54% were satisfactory and only 16% were ‘inadequate’. Now I’m not saying Ofsted are infallible they certainly aren’t, but if anyone is going to fail a school it’ll be them. Schools in ‘challenging’ circumstances have to jump through hoops just to get a grudging ‘satisfactory’.

How the hell does the government think they will attract heads or teachers to schools that will ‘fail’ due to an arbitrary pass rate? Some schools have been caught in a cycle of failure. The most notorious case was Bradford Academy-

· 1963 opens as Fairfax community school

· 1992 ‘named and shamed’ in the first official league tables

· 1994 placed in special measures with the threat of closure

· 1996 re-launched as Bowling community college

· 1997 out of special measures

· 2000 reopened as a Church of England school - Bradford Cathedral community college

· 2002 placed in special measures

· 2004 out of special measures

· 2007 Bradford Academy opens in September

What is interesting is that Brown’s macho ‘name and shame’ doesn’t seem to extend to big business. Despite a falling share price and sales the chief executive of B&Q still walked away with a £150 million pay off, did Brown comment on that? Then of course there’s Northern Rock, bailed out to the tune of £18 billion and only one board member, Matt Ridley, has resigned. Silent on that one too Mr Brown.

When it comes to education there is of course another way, you can trust teachers and promote a comprehensive system where parents have a good local school to send their children to.

2007-11-04T06:57:00.000Z

Scrap the GTC

More from the 'Scrap the GTC' blog-

‘Child porn sir gets school ban’, ‘Stressed Out Deputy Head Drank Vodka in the Boiler Room!’ ‘Willy row Miss fired’ and ‘PE Sir, 32 romped with pupil’ – are just a few of the tabloid headlines that the disciplinary cases heard by the General Teaching Council have generated. Set up in 2000 the GTC set itself the task of “Championing teachers and advocating change and improvements on their behalf.” Its primary function was to maintain a list of registered teachers and hear disciplinary cases.

The GTC didn’t exactly make an auspicious start billing itself as “the voice of teachers” it instantly ran into union hostility, was it trying to usurp their role? It hastily changed this to “the voice for teachers”.

The planners then erected an unwieldy, creaky edifice called the Council. This body was composed of four sections,

a) 13 people directly appointed by the Secretary of State.

b) 17 members from other quangoes, obviously working on that sound playground principle -'if we let you go on our quango, we can have a go on yours'

c) 25 teachers - elected in a turnout so low that the dullest parliamentary by-election would struggle to emulate it

d) 9 nominees from teacher unions

Even the elected members came from a national ballot and therefore had no identification with or responsibility to a particular area or constituency. This increased the impression of a remote, inaccessible and distant organisation.

After an attempt at “voluntary” contributions resulted in a derisory 14% return the government stepped in to bale them out. We had the surreal scenario of the government sending out a lump sum of money to teachers, and then telling them to send it to the GTC, who processed the cheques.

So the GTC has continued, disregarded by most teachers another unloved orphaned quango competing in the alphabet soup of education – TDA, QCA, OFSTED. The GTC has heard over 100 disciplinary cases at an average cost of £12,000. However, it hasn’t been able to expedite this core function, the average time for a first hearing after a case is referred is over a year.

Apart from the lurid tabloid headlines there have been ridiculous cases like the teacher arraigned before a GTC disciplinary panel for “making silly faces and derogatory remarks about other members of staff, mimicking silly walks and using foul language.” In October 2007 Keith Robinson, a teacher with an unblemished record of thirty three years, was cleared of ‘failing to return library books’ and calling a teenager who swore at him ‘a waste of space’. There but for the grace of God go most of the teaching profession…

Concern has also been expressed by serving members of the GTC about the new ‘suitability declaration’, will teachers have to declare any indiscretions, even those which happened in early adulthood, or personal matters on a GTC form? Would failure to reveal this information lead to sanctions from the GTC?

The statements that underpin the GTC code of conduct are also being reviewed, it currently reads, ‘Registered teachers may be found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct where they seriously demean [my emphasis] or undermine their pupils, their parents, carers or colleagues…’ Under a proposed review this would be changed to ‘cause upset or distress’, a statement so vague that almost any allegation would meet the test for a hearing.

Other concerns centre on the ‘suitability check’, which could be extended to any motoring offence, other than a 3 point fixed penalty, which would be considered as a relevant conviction in terms of ‘unprofessional conduct’.

If those proposals now ‘under review’ weren’t bad enough we have the plans to bring in ‘active registration’ whereby teachers would have to prove that they had undertaken continuing work-based learning. Despite reassurances that this would only apply to supply teachers or those who had taken a break from teaching, the GTC Wales are considering plans for all teachers to record the training they have undertaken on an online database.

Has the GTC won the trust of teachers? The elections for teacher representatives in 2004 saw a turn out of only 10%. The National Association of Schoolteachers carried out a survey, of the respondents 88% felt the GTC was ‘ineffective’, this later led to the GTC threatening them with legal action after they were accused of misusing funds.

To lift its profile the GTC has sent out a free magazine to teachers, now you might have expected a witty irreverent publication chock full of letters, comments and articles by … teachers. No such luck, look away now, another teacher-free zone. I wrote a piece for the GTC magazine only to be informed that they didn’t take material from teachers because,“objectivity isn’t achieved by a teacher who might be too close to his/her subject,” So the alternative is a bland, safe, ‘house style’ nothing that reflects teachers’ despair, cynicism, humour, hope and elation.

GTC representatives have warned that scrapping it would leave registration with the government. I really don’t ‘buy’ that argument. If you bought a second-hand car that leaked oil everywhere, the engine misfired and the gearbox jammed and you took it back to the dealer, only to be told, ‘our competitors are worse than us’, you wouldn’t be impressed.

Teachers deserve a fast, efficient, responsive regulatory body not this slow, bloated quango that has never won teachers’ trust or confidence. Scrapping the GTC isn’t the most important issue facing teachers; I don’t wake up in the middle of the night thinking ‘We’ve got to scrap the GTC’. But in the spirit of ‘My Name is Earl’, let’s start with number 97 on the list. That’s why I want to stand in the GTC elections on a simple slogan – ‘Scrap the GTC’.

If you want to stand as a ‘Scrap the GTC’ candidate contact me on scrapthegtc@aol.com

2007-11-03T07:58:00.000Z

‘The adverb is not your friend’

The Primary Review researchers have indicated that reading standards have barely risen over the last fifty years and that children are bored with reading. Could this be anything to do with the dull, prescriptive and grammar-laden curriculum?

Last week, as PPA cover teacher, the script was a lesson on adverbs from ‘Jolly Grammar’. Yes, a whole lesson on adverbs. For the introduction I was instructed to,

‘Revise proper and common nouns, pronouns, adjectives, possessive adjectives and verbs.’

This for a Year 3 class. I’ll be honest and you can summon Ofsted and institute the fast-track capability procedure, but I’m a bit hazy on at least two of them.

There aren’t many books on the process of writing but one of the best is Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. He has some fairly blunt advice on grammar, in one section he writes that,

‘The adverb is not your friend… Adverbs like the passive voice seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind… With adverbs, the writer usually tells us that he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.’

I drew the immediate conclusion, after scanning the lesson plan, that there is dry tedium, absolute boredom, the vast vacuum in space that lies beyond the reach of the most distant quasars at the edge of the known universe and then there is ‘Jolly Grammar’. I’ve got to admit that I did stray from the lesson objective a smidgeon. I read to the class ‘Grandfather’s Pencil and the Room of Stories’ by Michael Foreman.

He imagines a pencil writing about its time on the shelves in a shop, as part of a tall tree; there’s the story of the table and how it tumbled down a surging river; the floorboards were once part of a great ship ‘with cream sails and a black flag’. The boy in the story grows into an old man and his grandson discovers the pencil underneath the floorboards, his companions have been,

‘a bent pin, an old gold coin and a whale bone button. Oh, the tales they told! The whale button remembered when it was part of a great whale and…’

I got the children to write their own story about the pencil. I wrote one about a magic pencil that was held prisoner by an evil wizard. I don’t want to spoil the ending but he did escape with help from his friend the sharpener.

In Michael Forman’s story there’s whole sections of beautiful prose, ah, imagination, creativity, the joy of language and hardly an adverb in sight!

2007-11-02T06:36:00.001Z

Joke of the Week

Latest space mission, rocket blasts off into space with an Ofsted inspector and a monkey on board.

The monkey opens his instructions-

· Fire booster rockets
· Establish radio link with base
· Check orbiting position
· Move solar panels into place
· Institute science experiment
· Maintain vital life support systems

The Ofsted inspector opens his instructions

Don’t forget to feed the monkey

2007-11-01T17:21:00.001Z

All Shall Have Prizes?

The newspapers and television carried extensive material last week on the ‘Teaching Awards’. It wasn’t exactly the blanket coverage that ‘Big Brother’ or ‘I’m a Celebrity’ generates but at least it shone the spotlight on teaching in a positive way.

I’ll have to come clean though, I’m not a great fan of any award ceremonies not least the ‘Teaching Awards’. Here we have one of the most prescriptive curriculums in the world that has taken power and autonomy away from teachers, add in the daily discourse of derision from the press and Ofsted, the testing psychosis – it hasn’t created a happy or well-motivated workforce.

Even Ted Wragg, who helped to found the Teaching Awards in 1999, noted that there weren’t many winners from Gasworks Comprehensive. I decided to do a little bit of research on the Primary Teacher regional winners. Ofsted reports always carry some information on the socio-economic background of the school, although ‘poverty is not an excuse’.

The average Free School Meals (FSM) for English primaries is 15.9%. What sort of schools did the regional winners come from? FSM figures were-

East Midlands – ‘well below average’

East – ‘relatively low’

North East – ‘lower than the average’

North West – ‘low’

South – ‘half the national figure’

South West – ‘below average’

North – ‘average’

West – ‘average’

London – ‘very high’

South East – ‘above average’

West Midlands – ‘challenging economic and social circumstances’

I’m not claiming it’s any kind of scientific survey and you could probably claim that the mean average (guess what I’ve been teaching in maths this week?) is close to the national figure, but on the other hand 6 out of 11 below the average isn’t very representative either.

Why aren’t teachers from schools in ‘challenging’ circumstances nominated? One of the main reasons is that schools are solely judged and defined by exam results. I remember a few years ago one of our rare downwardly mobile parents said to me, ‘Justin’s grandmother has just seen the league tables in the Daily Telegraph and wants to know what he’s doing in such a terrible school’. Yeah, thanks for that.

The Teaching Awards doesn’t really make allowances for the special skills that many teachers in tough schools utilise. I remember a few years ago there was a television programme about an independent school head who went into a ‘bog-standard’ comprehensive to ‘show them how it’s done’. After a few days she taught a lesson, it was a disaster, she didn’t know how to differentiate for the different ability levels, her delivery was dull and pedantic, she had no empathy whatsoever with the children. Then their own teacher took a lesson, yes, he’d taught in the school for many years and knew all the children’s parents, but the lesson was spell-binding – well paced, laced with humour and he engaged all of the children in learning. He was incredibly modest afterwards (I’d have had a massive grin plastered all over my face), he admitted the class could be ‘difficult’. The independent head slunk away blaming the ‘unteachable’ pupils.

Maybe it’s just that teachers in ‘challenging’ schools don’t want to be patronised and ‘slavered over by D-list celebs’.

TES letter 2004

2007-10-31T18:55:00.000Z

Jacking up the results

This is a story about two education ‘leaders’. A few years ago my friend taught at a Catholic primary school in Knowsley, it was as they euphemistically call it ‘challenging’. The economic and social profile of the area was bleak, high unemployment, family breakdown, alcohol abuse and drug taking. There were very high numbers of children on the special needs register.

The school survived and thrived due to the dedication of the staff and the headteacher who was much loved by the teachers, pupils and parents. However there was one thing that his Christian conscience wouldn’t allow him to do and that was pressure vulnerable 11 year-olds to pass exams purely to please the suits from the Local Authority.

Predictably the SATs results were terrible. A Local Authority brown nose ran the Infant School, so 7 year-olds were drilled to pass tests. They arrived in Year 3 with totally unrealistic National Curriculum Levels, but it heaped the pressure on because the ‘value-added’ scores in the Juniors were dire.

There was unremitting pressure on the school, Improvement Officers grilled the head and consultants came in and rubbished the Literacy and Numeracy planning. Eventually a senior education bod came in and asked in incredulous tones why the head had been in the same job for twenty years. Well, he’d just devoted his life to the school. That was the final straw, he took early retirement.

A succession of ‘super-heads’ came in, jacked up the results, staff left in droves, the ‘super-heads’ moved on, onwards and upwards.

In Knowsley it wasn’t only the SATs scores that ‘improved’ GCSE results rocketed up. In 1999 only 23% of students gained 5 GCSE passes at A-C level. After a critical Ofsted report, Steve Munby was parachuted in as Chief Education Officer.

By 2005 the pass rate had shot up to 43%. The ‘Guardian’ wrote that it was all down to the ‘mild-mannered but dynamic’ Mr Munby. So how did he do it? Ruthless pressure on heads to get results and the use of GNVQs to boost test results, one pass counted as four GCSEs.

In 2005 Munby left to become the Chief Executive of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL). A few months later the GCSE tables were reconfigured to include passes at English and Maths, Knowsley plummeted to the bottom of the table.

The latest figures for 2007 make interesting reading, the bottom five local authorities for passes at GCSE were-

Bristol 31.8%

Barnsley 31.2%

Sandwell 29.8%

Hull 29.7%

Knowsley 26.4%

Of course we can’t judge Steve Munby by results, because he has moved on. That’s the way it works in education, jack up the results by whatever means necessary, move on up the career ladder and leave someone else to pick up the pieces.

2007-10-31T06:40:00.000Z

A Waste of Space

The Times Educational Supplement (TES) has an ‘exclusive’, yes, the earth shattering news that the General Teaching Council’s (GTC) board could be slimmed down from 64 members to just 12.

The current board is composed of –

a) 13 people directly appointed by the Secretary of State.
b) 17 members from other quangoes, obviously working on that sound playground principle -'if we let you go on our quango, we can have a go on yours'
c) 25 teachers - elected in a turnout so low that the dullest parliamentary by-election would struggle to emulate it
d) 9 nominees from teacher unions

Teachers with banners outside parliament with the slogan ‘Save the GTC’? It isn’t going to happen. Let’s just say that the GTC isn’t exactly teachers’ favourite quango.

Their latest wheeze has to been to float the idea of ‘active registration’. Teachers would have to prove their ‘commitment to, and participation in, continuing work-based learning’. English performance management frameworks require schools to identify teachers’ development needs. So it’s claimed that this measure would just apply to supply teachers and those coming back to teaching after a break.

Everyone wants a well-trained teaching profession. However, privatised supply agencies aren’t exactly in a rush to supply free training for teachers. The GTC Wales have also proposed that all serving teachers would have to enter the training they have completed on an online database – more intrusion into teachers’ working life.

One of the main reasons why the GTC is so unloved are the ludicrous cases that come before their disciplinary panels. One teacher was arraigned for “making silly faces and derogatory remarks about other members of staff, mimicking silly walks and using foul language.” There but for the grace of God go most of the teaching profession.

The most notorious case involved Scunthorpe secondary teacher Keith Robertson, he had an unblemished record from thirty-three years of teaching. At his hearing in October 2007 he was charged with ‘failing to return library books’ and calling a pupil who had sworn at him and accused him, incorrectly, of losing course work, a ‘waste of space’. Robinson told the deputy head another pupil had ‘a great big back and backside’. This remark was made in confidence to the deputy head in his office; he then reported the matter to the head. Robinson was cleared of unacceptable professional conduct. Average cost of GTC hearings? £12,000.

Truly a ‘waste of space’.

2007-10-30T18:42:00.000Z

The Ridings

Sad to see that The Ridings School in Calderdale is to close, you don’t regenerate a community by closing its school down. The Ridings came to national prominence in 1996 when teachers threatened to walk out on strike over poor behaviour, an Ofsted hit squad was sent in and it was labelled, ‘the worst school in Britain’.

The Ridings was battling to succeed against almost impossible odds-

· The locality where it draws its pupils from is one of poorest in England
· It was competing against two grammar schools and a faith school
· The school was formed from an amalgamation of Ovenden Secondary School and Holmfield High School

The closure is further proof that the blunt club approach of Ofsted doesn’t work. The House of Commons Education Select Committee noted that failure could send schools into a spiral of decline. Some 43 schools judged to be in serious weakness in 2001/2 had declined further and were placed in special measures the following year. Of those schools placed in special measures between 1995 and 1997, 40% subsequently closed.

The Ridings was temporarily rescued when Peter Clark was parachuted in as head teacher, he subsequently wrote ‘Back From The Brink – Transforming the Ridings School’. When he arrived he found that 75% of pupils had below average reading ages and 40% of the Year 7 to 9 pupils had reading ages more than three years behind their chronological age. He swiftly solved the discipline problem because Calderdale Council seconded almost every Education Welfare Officer (EWO) to patrol the corridors.

After further ‘super-heads’ were appointed results improved, the 2003 GCSE results showed that the proportion of students gaining at least five good GCSEs or the equivalent had risen from 7% to 25%. But despite the attempts to ‘turn the school around’, the last published results, from summer 2006, showed that only 4% of pupils achieved the benchmark of five good GCSEs including English and maths. The local authority's figures for 2007 indicate that the number will have risen to 13%.

The problems remained, in particular the school found it difficult to attract teachers and after being branded ‘the worst school in Britain’ it is only half full. The closure of the school is a sad comment on our fractured society, who would have thought decades after selective education ended that through the remaining grammar schools, faith schools and academies we have an even more pernicious selection system?

2007-10-29T18:17:00.000Z

The Testing Lottery

New research by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows just how much national school tests are a lottery. They found that children born in August did far worse than those born in September.

At present primary school children start in the term after their fifth birthday so those born later miss out on whole terms.

Of today’s eight, nine and ten year olds, 80% of girls born in September reached Level 2 or better at the age of seven. But only 47% of those born in August reached the magic Level 2.

The gap narrows with older children. At 11 64% of September born children reached Level 4 or better, compared with 48% of August babies.

At age 11, August born girls are 25% more likely to be assessed as special education needs (SEN) and for boys a 14% greater likelihood.

The effect was the same regardless of class, race or region.

More and more evidence and research piles up to show how worthless and unreliable testing is. Not only that it has completely distorted the school curriculum. The only people in denial? Step forward the Department for Children Schools and Families.

2007-10-28T18:45:00.000Z

Flogging a dead horse

I’m still fresh from the joys of being the PPA cover teacher… apart from those afternoons with Year 6 – the collective attention span of a gnat. The special education needs children work in small groups during the mornings, but there is that afternoon slump when they don’t have individual attention. The academic term is ‘learned helplessness’. Some afternoons it’s more like ‘flogging a dead horse’. [This term alludes to the difficulty of getting any extra work from a crew during a celebration held by British crews when they had been at sea four weeks and had worked off their initial advance that was often one month's pay. At the expiration of the first month of the voyage it was at one time customary to hoist in the rigging a canvas effigy of a horse.]

We’ve also got our fair share of children that have done the ‘Grand Tour’ this involves trying out all the local primary schools before the parents finally run out of options and realise the problem is their child and not the school. During PE Eric (who was expelled from his last school for hitting the teachers) runs off out of the playground. I have to take everyone back in to find him.

You always have to give children some leeway, make allowances. That horrible pupil can grow up into a sensitive, caring adult. On the other hand there are some children… well it wouldn’t surprise you if they turned out to be a complete wretch of human being. Katie has come into school reeking of nit lotion and Adam has made a few sly comments. This afternoon he excels himself by going up behind her pointing and shouting in a loud voice, ‘Urhh, they’re crawling everywhere’.

Some of the children laugh and I have to usher Katie out in floods of tears to find the learning mentor. I blast the class and later our learning mentor comes back and talks calmly to the class. She gives each child a note and asks them to write something positive about Katie and to admit if they did laugh. Children are refreshingly honest and apologise to Katie.

There are compensations, those interesting conversations at break time. Keith is always rushing to tell me about his birds of prey. He goes into great detail about feeding the birds day old chicks. But last night they must have forgotten because the sparrow hawk has eaten the owl.

Later I return to one of my favourite themes which is ranting and raving about full stops and capital letters (this is Year 6)! I catch Peter drawing but he informs me it’s his sketch of the new Titanic and he’s offered me a job as part of the crew, I decline his generous offer.

Near to the end they start throwing rubbers behind my back and I go into ballistic mode and threaten a class detention, the day grinds remorselessly to an end.

Karen asks for a ‘private word’ at the end of the lesson, I’m a bit worried. But she tells me that she’s heard about my pet mouse dying, am I ready for more pets? Her stick insect has laid 79 eggs would I like some? I decline this offer as well.

Next day I’m back with my favourite class Year 1, you can always ham it up there. I’m left with a bag containing lower case letters and I inform the children that they have to be very quiet because a family of earwigs is living inside the bag. I take out each letter very gingerly and carefully, the children are captivated. Naturally as I take out the last one I get ‘bitten’.

Minimal amounts of planning, no rotten testing, Year 6 only on occasions – cover teaching? I’m Lovin’ It!

2007-10-19T19:32:00.001+01:00

Joke of the Week

Why don't polar bears eat penguins?

Because they can't get the wrappers off.

2007-10-18T19:14:00.000+01:00

Alan’s Utopia

You can always rely on Ofsted to totally demoralise teachers, this ability is neatly encapsulated in the farce known as ‘the annual report’.

In order to ‘raise the bar’, satisfactory (OED ‘meeting expectation or need, good enough, adequate’) has become the new ‘inadequate’. The headline figures were 51% of secondaries outstanding or good and 49% satisfactory or failing.

I know some ‘satisfactory’ comprehensives where teachers achieve minor miracles every day, battling against the odds; disaffected pupils with low self-esteem and uninterested parents. But no they’re not even ‘satisfactory’ now but ‘inadequate’.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of where the ‘good or outstanding’ schools are. Research by the London School of Economics showed that 90% of schools in special measures were in poor areas.

Why have Ofsted? You need rigorous inspections to ensure that children have high quality teaching? Part of the aura, myth and downright lies surrounding Ofsted is that before their inglorious reign began schools weren’t inspected.

When I was researching for my MA (a case study on a school in special measures) I came across a little known book by Leonard Clark ‘The Inspector Remembers – Diary of One of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools 1936-1970’. There are some interesting passages –

‘I spent most of my time visiting and reporting on, the schools for which I had responsibility… I was able to meet and enjoy the company of the children and their teachers… Visiting schools was our bread and butter, and we did so regularly, we got to know them very well… a visit consisted of either half a day, a full day, or two or more days, according to the size of the school.’

The argument was that they became too close too schools. However, like other public services they were cut back, run down and then deemed to be failing. Ofsted replaced them with their punitive raids every four or five years.

Sadly there’s little debate about the condition of our schools, when it comes to literature it’s dominated by ‘the comfort read’ – prime example is Gervaise Phinn’s series ‘The Other Side of the Dale’, his whimsical tales about being a school inspector. Just to prove that the homespun, stereotypical Yorkshireman is not confined to education it has also invaded television – prime example Alan Titchmarsh’s ‘The Nature of Britain’. In a perverse way it reminded me of the ‘Teachers’ Awards’, everything is relentlessly, sickeningly, annoyingly upbeat. Now I know that the reintroduction of the red kite and the great bustard is fantastic but on the other hand we have the precipitous fall in the numbers of common birds like the sparrow and thrush, the decline of amphibians and thousands of miles of hedges uprooted and hundreds of ponds filled in by agri-business. Predictably none of this intrudes into Alan’s sunny little utopia.

The paucity of debate in education is stunning, just go to the TES Staffroom if you wanted this confirmed. Endless contributions about trivia – Is Kate McCann guilty, Bad Hair Day!! and Wogan’s Waddle. The Primary Review, testing or Ofsted? They just don’t attract comment. It’s a serious and sad indictment of the teaching profession. I had to smile because the TES web team invited posters to write blogs of 300 – 400 words, it isn’t so much putting forward a coherent argument more the inability to string more than 4 or 5 words together without resorting to the personal abuse that the Internet is infamous for.

So it’s been a fairly depressing two weeks – the Primary Review and stressed out children, the obesity epidemic, under 5s ‘failing’ at writing and half of our secondary schools are rubbish. There’s that old quote from Gramsci, ‘The pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will’, there’s been more of the former than the latter.

2007-10-18T06:40:00.000+01:00

Test the foetus?

Falling standards? First create your moral panic – by whatever means necessary. There was a great example of that this week with the news that our latest group of failures are the under fives (no honestly). Forty per cent are struggling to write their own name and only 58 per cent of five-year-olds were reaching a “good level of development” in writing. One in three children (35 per cent) did not reach a good level of development in linking sounds and letters, for example through recognising and saying words such as “red” and “dog” or “pen”.

Once again our results obsesesd system has opened itself for ridicule. In most European countries formal education doesn’t start until the age of seven. Many children don’t develop fine motor skills until that age, they aren’t ready to write. Couldn’t the authors of the report have written in large capital letters at the start ‘STARTING FORMAL EDUCATION TOO EARLY ARRESTS CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT’?

What next give the foetus a range of tests, interrogate the sperm? Let’s not go there. As Ted Wragg was fond of saying, ‘When it comes to education irony is dead’.

2007-10-16T18:42:00.000+01:00

Stressed Out?

The Primary Review has been the most comprehensive pieces of research about the impact of testing on primary school children and the opinions of teachers, parents and governors.

They held 87 sessions in 9 different locations and interviewed 757 witnesses - they included 197 pupils, 72 teachers, 64 non-teaching staff, 74 parents, 60 headteachers and 83 community representatives.

Some of the themes were; the wider world; what makes for a good school; good teachers and testing. As it was an academic study it was replete with caveats, qualifications and even evasion. But on one central issue that of testing it was fairly unequivocal – it’s not popular.

Children commented on testing –

SATs were ‘scary’, made them nervous and anxious, and put them under pressure. But equally:
• ‘tests tell teachers, and us, how we are doing’
• ‘parents want them’
• ‘children should be tested to show that they have done well and have been listening’
• ‘tests help children know what they have learned’
• ‘we need SATs to find our potential, and gaps in our understanding.’

Yet they understand that the stakes may be high:
• ‘it’s important to do well for secondary school’
• ‘tests get us into private schools’ (sounding 2, in an affluent area where many parents preferred private secondary schooling for their children)
• ‘high grades give you confidence.’

And, from ex-primary pupils in the selective secondary school:
• ‘Tests concentrate on the high flyers. The rest are written off before they get to the SATs. The teachers are not available to help the rest of us.’

Teachers were-

Unanimous that SATs:

• put children and teachers under intolerable pressure;
• are highly stressful;
• constrain the curriculum, especially in respect of the arts and humanities;
• subvert the goal of learning for its own sake;
• undermine children’s self esteem;
• run counter to schools’ stated commitments to a full and rounded education;
• turn the final year of primary schooling into to the wrong kind of educational culmination – a year of cramming and testing;
• disadvantage those children whose parents cannot afford to pay for private SAT coaching.

Parents were –

at least as hostile towards SATs as other groups. They deplored the ‘pressure’ of SATs, especially in Key Stage 2. Some claimed that too much emphasis on tested achievement in a narrow range of competences leads to a ‘mental shutdown’ and can put children off education altogether. Others, referring specifically to younger children or those with special needs, believed that they may be neither ready nor emotionally prepared for such demands. Some even noted a relationship between SATs, league tables, house prices and hence the social character of whole communities. In such circumstances, as one parent commented, ‘SATs only benefit estate agents.’ What parents really needed to know was (i) whether their children were progressing satisfactorily, (ii) what problems they were encountering, (iii) whether they were happy.

Yet there was a certain ambivalence here, because parents also recognised that SATs were a passport to success. Nowhere was this more marked than in Sounding 2, in an affluent south London suburb, where the session palpably changed gear when parents ceased deploring the pressure to which their children were subject and acknowledged that they were partly responsible, not least in paying for regular private coaching to maximise their children’s chances of achieving Level 5 in the KS2 SATs, which in turn would lead to success in the entry examination for independent secondary schools.

Primary Review director Professor Robin Alexander said that young children faced a range of pressures.

"What people wanted to talk about was the stress of government tests, then life outside school, road safety, physical dangers, the sense young children are having to grow up too soon."

The most predictable quote came from the mis-named Department for Children, Schools and Families,

“The government does not share the view that children are over-tested. Tests help parents and teachers monitor the progress of children and ensure they get the help they need."

I don’t hold out any hope that the Primary Review will change the mind of the government, the House of Commons Select Committee on Education asked for evidence on testing and 51 organisations wanted change, the only one that didn’t was the DCSF.

It’s teachers have the power to stop testing – if they did but realise it.

2007-10-15T18:59:00.001+01:00

Going Dutch

It’s a beautiful, crowded part of the planet. A prosperous country, in the Unicef survey on ‘child happiness’ it came top, partly due to parents close relationships with their children and the lack of exam pressure in schools.

Children stay in primary schools until they are twelve and then take a test that will determine whether they follow a vocational or academic path at secondary level.

Schools have a large degree of independence and the provinces have been stripped of any control, but as in England central government sends out reams of circulars. The pressure falls on headteachers and there is a national shortage of heads.

The integration of the Muslim minority has been controversial and new language tests are being introduced for immigrants.

I was staying in a prosperous small town, but with rising house prices young people are forced to move out. You can get a false picture, while I was there a 14 year old was stabbed to death at a school in Amsterdam.

What is clear is that there aren’t the same stress levels amongst children and as the most cycle friendly country in the world they should keep obesity at bay.

2007-10-10T19:45:00.000+01:00

Holland

No posts for a few days, I'm away in Holland. Not a holiday but an education visit. Should be interesting to compare their school system.

2007-10-10T18:17:00.000+01:00

Faith Schools

In the name of “diversity” the government are giving huge amounts of money to religious groups to establish schools – part of their agenda to marginalize democratically elected Local Education Authorities. Since 1997 112 applications have been submitted by faith organisations to take over local community schools, 103 of them were supported and many more are being considered as part of the academy programme.

You might well ask – what is the relevance of religion in western societies? Are they actually a good role model for schools? The Church of England is tearing itself apart over the issue of gay bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams twists in the wind between the African churches who believe homosexuality is an “abomination” and the more liberal North American Anglicans who provide most of the funding. The Roman Catholic Church has been rocked by child abuse scandals involving its priests and bishops (this has nearly bankrupted some dioceses in America) and affairs between priests and women parishioners. I’d also like to know how democratic is an organisation that does not tolerate elections (except for the papacy), believes in the infallibility of the Pope and refuses to allow women any meaningful participation. Alternatively I wouldn’t be happy with mosques controlling schools; even the more mainstream have questionable attitudes on homosexuality, evolution and women’s dress codes.

So these organisations that give out the aura of crisis are being allowed an increasing influence in schools. This is despite the fact that in our increasingly secular society organised religion is disappearing at an exponential rate. According to the Church of England’s own research, based on declining attendances, it will cease to exist in 2050, at the moment over half of the congregations don’t have anyone in the 18-34 age group. For non-conformism the picture is just as bleak, by their own projections the last Methodist will attend a chapel in 2037. The Roman Catholic Church is struggling to staff its churches with priests; in 2005 just 31 men were in training, a slight rise on 2004 when only 27 started. According to some researchers the mosques have an equal attendance compared to the Church of England. Do we want hundreds of schools controlled by the immams? I’m not raising this from the point of view of Islamophobia – I don’t believe any religious organisation has a place in education.

Faith schools cement divisions in society and exclude the poor. The Institute of Research in Integrated Strategies carried out research in Inner London, they found that 41% of children in the immediate proximity of Church of England primary schools received Free School Meals, yet only 32% of them attended the schools, for Catholic primaries 42% received FSM but only 28.3% found their way into the playground. The ‘Guardian’ revealed a starker and disturbing example close to former Education Secretary Ruth Kelly’s constituency in Bolton. Canon Slade Church of England took in 258 children from 87 different primary schools; one quarter of them lived outside Bolton. However, the eight closest schools geographically sent only 39 children, Castle Hill the closest primary (only 10 minutes walk away) didn’t send any children and the next closest Tonge Moor sent only three. In an ethnically diverse area the school is almost 100% white, it has only 6% of children with Special Education Needs against a Bolton average of 27%. There was a telling quote from one of the parents on the “economically disadvantaged” estate where the school is sited, “We can’t go to that school… it’s not for the likes of us.”

Children are usually chosen to attend faith schools based on their parents involvement and attendance at church. Every year there are miracle conversions as parents who want their offspring to attend a socially selective school begin to worship at an appropriate church, as soon as their children are accepted they drop the church like one of the hot cakes they used to bake for them. Some clergy resent the time and effort they are forced to expend in writing references for parents they know will abandon their church at the first opportunity.

I don’t have a problem with churches involving themselves in education, as long as it is on a voluntary basis, again they need to get their own house in order first; in 1905 56% of children attended Sunday Schools in 2000 it was estimated that only 4% chose to attend. According to another survey by the Christian Research group, there are now 700,000 children under the age of 15 attending Sunday schools, compared to 1.4 million in 1979.

Every time I see ‘Church of England’ or ‘Roman Catholic’ on a school board I have to smile because that’s probably one of their only financial contributions, over 95% of the funding for faith schools comes from the state in other words from our taxes. There’s also the blatant discrimination where governors can stipulate that the candidate must be as “active communicant” yet these same teachers will have the pick of jobs in community schools as well.

Britain is a fairly tolerant secular society without any anti-clerical tradition, more the Vicar of Dibley than the Da Vinci Code. Yet this tolerance is being stretched by the increasingly bizarre organisations emerging to gain state funding. The local diocese controlled most Catholic and Anglican schools and the governors came from the local church. The new breed of faith schools are being fronted by unelected unaccountable trusts or foundations. Sir Peter Vardy, the wealthy entrepreneur behind the Reg Vardy chain of car dealerships, sponsors the Emmanuel Foundation. It became the subject of controversy when it was disclosed that pupils in its schools were being taught the Old Testament belief that God created the world from nothing in six days.

The history of faith schools reveals some interesting examples; in the early nineteenth century the Anglican, Catholic and Non Conformist churches competed against each other to educate the children of the poor. In the latter part of the century the state played a more prominent role. The Conservatives attempted to regularise and involve the churches through the 1902 Education Act, this created voluntary aided religious schools where the government would pay 95% of the costs. Only the wealthier Anglican and Catholic churches were able to bear this cost, the non-conformist churches complained that their children would be forced to attend a school and be indoctrinated by a faith they did not support. The Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists organised the Passive Resistance Movement, by 1905 over 50,000 summonses had been issued for non payment of rates, 150 people were imprisoned including 61 ministers of religion. The failure of the 1906 Liberal Government to repeal the Act helped the emerging Labour Party to win non-conformist voters with their espousal of secular education.

Most research shows that faith schools make little (if any) difference to test results or children’s life chances. If you’d have said twenty years ago that a Labour Government would fund fringe religious organisations to teach creationism to school children you would have been regarded as a fantasist. Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland world of education.

2007-10-10T06:05:00.000+01:00

Ketchup in their veins

And Lo! The National Council for Educational Excellence that contains some private sector top bosses have spoken. What were they advising schools on? The ruthless pursuit of profit, their ‘concern’ for the environment or how to transform a state basket case like Railtrack into a model for safe practise?

No, they are worried about ‘variability’ between schools and how to ensure ‘consistency of performance’. So McDonald’s have offered training for school leaders. Managers with ‘ketchup in their veins’ will run courses on leadership, team building and stress-management.

Now I know they have done a great job turning shopping centres into ‘clone towns’. But somehow the prospect of McSchools, every pupil in the same uniform, studying the same curriculum in identical schools just doesn't appeal.

Maybe they could start by explaining why McDonald’s annual staff turnover is over 60%?

2007-10-09T18:17:00.001+01:00

Outrageous Blackmail

The government have been struggling to reach their target of 400 academy schools. Businesses haven’t exactly been rushing to invest £2 million. Private schools have been lured with the offer that they’ll need to contribute… nothing! Lord Adonis told them, ‘we need your DNA’. Some religious groups have sponsored academies but even then the financial results are not spectacular. In May 2006 ‘The Guardian’ revealed that four academies had not received a single penny from their sponsors and of the 27 up and running only £26 million had been paid. The latest government advice is that “endowments” will be offered over the years.

On October 8 the Norfolk County Council Cabinet voted to back the Heartsease Academy – this is the takeover bid backed by millionaire former second hand car dealer turned Pentecostalist preacher Graham Dacre. At the meeting there was plenty of disinformation about Heartsease ‘causing concern’. This despite the fact that the recent Ofsted in February 2007 said it was ‘improving’ and the Key Stage 3 results were among the 100 most improved. So teachers bust a gut to improve the school and you’re still useless.

The basis for the academy vote was a public ‘consultation’, 258 responded and 62% were in favour. The governors and staff were opposed.

Other academies have selected pupils, which has meant some local pupils were unable to gain admission (ask any head the easiest way to improve results is to change the intake). Or they are based in run down communities with a high percentage of ‘challenging’ children and merely replicate previous failures.

The academy programme is hardly a triumph for local democracy, housing, social services and now education is removed from local control and handed over to charities, businesses or ‘independent’ trusts.

At the council meeting the member for children’s services Rosa Monbiot made an ‘impassioned’ speech she said,

“This opportunity to put £20m into the community will regenerate the community. Why shouldn't we give teachers improved facilities and better IT? Let's give the children the wow factor. A superb new building will inspire them and encourage them to stay on to get qualifications. We want these children and this community to do well.”

Nothing could sum up the outrageous blackmail of the academies better, the government will only invest in communities if you cede control of your school to any old dodgey creationist millionaire.

What about local democracy? Well the average age of councillors is now 58, 40% are retired. I’m not raising this as ageism, just that any council should fully reflect and represent the local community. It’s no surprise that the turnout in local elections hovers around the 30% mark.

Most Pentecostalists believe that dinosaurs only became extinct a few thousand years ago. They didn’t, they’re still here, sitting on the benches of the Norfolk County Council.

2007-10-08T06:33:00.000+01:00

The Knowsley ‘Stampede’

The Knowsley ‘Experiment’ rolls on, this is the plan (under Building Schools for the Future) to close eleven secondary schools and re-open them with seven ‘Learning Centres’. The old curriculum is being jettisoned, classrooms are being replaced by ‘Learning Zones’ and teachers will become ‘facilitators’. Instead of boring old local authorities supplying services private sector companies will do the job.

National adverts have appeared for headteachers (One hundred lines ‘I must not be a Luddite’)… sorry ‘Learning Centre Leaders’. Two internal candidates have been appointed but two other headteachers who applied weren’t up to scratch, so five positions were externally advertised.

Naturally you would assume that there would be a stampede of ‘blue sky thinkers’, ‘innovative leaders’ and ‘visionaries at the cutting edge of new technology’ desperate to become ‘Learning Centre Leaders’.

I’m sure the applicants were high quality… it’s just… well… OK since you ask only eight people applied for the five posts. What put people off? Possibly the prospect of ‘jack the results up or here’s your P45’.

Still with all the shiny new computers in place the brand new buildings who needs teachers or headteachers? (200 lines ‘I must not be a Luddite’) Sorry ‘Learning Centre Leaders’.

It can’t fail. Can it?

Resistance is Futile

2007-10-07T06:45:00.000+01:00

New Philanthropy?

Some charities do an excellent job – I always donate to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and Guide Dogs for the Blind. However, there’s always that residual image of Lord and Lady Bountiful graciously distributing alms to ‘the deserving poor’.

Right up until the creation of the welfare state in 1945, charities played a dominant role in health, social services and housing. What they couldn’t do was create a national framework with minimum statutory provision – they didn’t have the resources. Instead there was a patchwork of competing charities with services varying widely between different cities.

When I was in America most schools depended on handouts from foundations, trusts or charities. It was almost a way of life, every school hired staff working full time on various bids. One charter school had a well connected board member who raised $1 million in donations. But most money was time limited so it was a hand to mouth, feast or famine existence.

On a national scale ‘New Philanthropy’ has become an institution with its main cheer leader Bill Clinton and his ‘Global Initiative’.

At a recent bash in the Sheraton Hotel, New York, Clinton lured a thousand of the world’s richest, each paying $15,000 for the privilege. Just to add some glitz and glamour Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) attended.

Last year Americans donated $295 billion to charities, equal to the Gross Domestic Product of Poland. 65 million US households gave an average of $2,000 each.

New Philanthropy has risen alongside an increase in inequality – according to official figures 12.3% of Americans live in poverty.

However, most of the charitable donations don’t reach the poor. About a third of gifts are made to religious organisations and much of the remainder is handouts by rich people to already rich institutions – museums (in 2005 the Metropolitan Museum of Art was given $26.52 million in private donations – in 2000 one donor gave $73.7 million), Ivy League colleges (Harvard received $196 million in 2005 and got $50 million from the Ford Foundation in 1998) and being America, pets scooped up 2% of the total.

By one estimate, only 10% of charitable donations go to projects working with people in poverty.

Whilst we can’t match the scale of ‘New Philanthropy’ we have our own version with Red Nose Day, Children in Need and high profile donations by business men and pop stars. What’s missing in all this? The role of government.

When it comes to education you can use taxes to fund an equitable well resourced comprehensive system (Scandinavia) or you can rely on charitable handouts in a patchwork of unequal selective schools (America).

Which model is England moving towards?

2007-10-06T11:11:00.001+01:00

Clutching at Straws?

I was involved in a ‘consultation’ process once, even though 97% of the responses were against the scheme, the sponsoring organisation said that they were ‘unrepresentative’ and went ahead any way. I take a fairly jaundiced view of ‘consultations’ they are usually just a thinly veiled sham so it’s possible to say ‘we did ask people’.

The consultation of people living on the Heartsease estate in Norwich has come out in favour of the proposed academy sponsored by millionaire second hand car dealer turned Pentecostalist preacher Graham Dacre. It wasn’t exactly an even sided debate, the local churches were in favour, former Education Secretary and local MP Charles Clarke backed it, also there were all those glossy leaflets showing a state of the art, environmentally friendly new school. Who could oppose it?

Apart from opposing the general principle of a local authority handing control of a school over to an outside organisation, there were other compelling reasons. The Pentecostalists unlike the Quakers don’t exactly do ‘quietism’, their mission is to aggressively proselytise and convert. There are also those other little details like their belief in creationism (the earth was created 6,000 years ago), abortion is ‘evil’ and homosexuality can be ‘cured’. Just to prove how inclusive they are, all gay people are banned from being ministers.

The Governors of Heartsease voted against the academy as did the Norwich Council Scrutiny Committee. So what’s changed? Well of course there is the consultation, a whopping 62% were in favour. As local councillor George Nobbs said, ‘the public have spoken’. Or did they? Only 258 responded to the consultation.

Given this ‘mass’ public support Network Norwich are now claiming that the academy is ‘certain’ to go through the council meeting on October 8. Education officials have also claimed that Heartsease School is sill giving ‘significant concerns’, this despite being an ‘improving’ school.

Will an academy make any difference? The results from the current academies are not exactly spectacular.

Anti-Academies Alliance

2007-10-05T07:06:00.001+01:00

Joke of the Week

So I said to the school cook, ‘There’s a fly in my soup.’

‘Don’t worry’ she mused, ‘the spider on the bread will get it.’

2007-10-04T18:22:00.000+01:00

Training at Pet Primary

I wasn’t in the best of moods, the start of a stinking cold, a day with Year 6 (afternoons the collective concentration span of a gnat) and a training session (in lieu of a staff meeting) at the local authority’s pet primary – 3% Free School Meals and excellent SATs results.

Let’s just say that Pet Primary isn’t universally popular with other teachers. Those in ‘intensive support’ schools are routinely sent there for ‘re-training’. You’re guaranteed to get that supercilious smile, ‘Welcome crap teachers from the slummy council estate school, we will show you how to teach’.

Needless to say they never take up that reciprocal invitation to come and teach some of those ‘challenging’ classes at Crap Primary.

Pet Primary has a Media Room, Parents’ Room and myriad other facilities. When we’d fought off the council’s closure plan, despite not having a library, or parents’ room, or any storage space, they insisted that we give up two spare classrooms.

Pet Primary seems to have plenty of smiley teachers who could audition for the ‘Stepford Wives’. But away from the manufactured utopia of Pet Primary the reality is that there is a high turnover of teachers who really don’t want to work 14 hours a day and triple back every display. The school constantly recruit NQTs who move on once they discover there is more to life than wall to wall planning and laminated resource sheets.

Normally I hate graffiti, it really looks ugly and disfigures buildings. However, I’d have to make an exception of ‘Adbusters’ who make changes to advertising hoardings. On this occasion I was really tempted to get out my indelible marker pen. All round Pet Primary were wooden plaques with ‘This school is a magical place to learn – Ofsted’.

According to research by the London School of Economics 90% of schools in special measures are in poor areas, schools in the leafy suburbs rarely, if ever, fail an inspection. What could failing schools put on their plaques?

‘An underachieving school that fails its pupils’

‘Children should be achieving more, the teaching is poor’

‘This school does not give value for money’

I know it is on a different historical scale but on the same theme, how about these plaques?

‘A lively church that serves the community well – The Inquisition’

‘A well-run concentration camp that gives value for money – the Waffen SS’

‘This court is a credit to the justice system – the Khmer Rouge’

Why give these monsters credibility?

2007-10-03T22:11:00.000+01:00

Liverpool Unites?

The ‘Liverpool Echo’ has initiated a purple ribbon campaign for Rhys Jones called ‘Liverpool Unites’. The four aims are – more police: tougher sentencing for possession of firearms; a better witness protection programme and gun controls.

At first glance you couldn’t disagree with any of the demands, but will it end gun crime? There was a police crackdown last year in Norris Green with many people sent to jail as a result. However, as one local youth worker noted, “a younger group has come up to take their place.”

What does the Liverpool Council ward profile tell us about Norris Green? 40% of people of working age are unemployed, 44% don’t have any qualifications, household income in 2004 was £17,115, against a Liverpool average of £22,511 with a national figure of £23,244. When it comes to the government’s Neighbourhood Statistics, out of 32,428 Super Output Areas (SOAs) half of Norris Green is in the most deprived 1%, the rest is in the bottom 5% and one small area (the ‘posh end’) is in the bottom 10%.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime?

You can’t say that it’s simply all about poverty, the counter argument is that despite the mass unemployment of the 1930s crime was lower. However, on the other side there wasn’t the blanket advertising of an aspirational society, in the 1930s most homes didn’t have anything worth nicking and the unemployed didn’t have mobile phones or i-Pods to steal. Gang culture has actually bought into the aspirational society they want a share of designer fashions, fast cars and bling.

Violent crime affects people in different ways and it’s easy for middle class people in nice houses in their tree lined avenues pontificating about crime, they don’t have to suffer from nuisance neighbours or feral children patrolling the streets. A few years ago a friend of mine who was an active trade unionist lost his son, there was a fight outside their house and he’d gone out as a peacemaker, he ended up getting stabbed. His father was understandably devastated and was mixed up in some fairly dubious ‘law ‘n’ order’ campaigns.

There was a seminal moment during the 1988 American presidential elections when a journalist asked the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis whether he would want the death penalty if his wife was raped and murdered. Dukakis went into liberal academic mode and warbled on about the statistical ineffectiveness of capital punishment. He just came over as a cold fish. If it happened to my wife? Yes, I’d personally want to gouge the eyes out of the perpetrator, however we’re not talking about the vengeance of the individual but how a civilised society should deal with horrific crimes. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

Chastened by Dukakis’s experience, when Bill Clinton was campaigning in the 1992 elections he went back to Arkansas to watch the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, who had an IQ of 70. Though courts decided Rector was mentally competent to be put to death by lethal injection, evidence suggests otherwise. Rector's prison guards called him “the Chickman” because he thought the guards were throwing alligators and chickens into his cell. On the night of his execution, Rector saved the slice of pecan pie to be eaten before bedtime, not realizing his death would come first. Rector was executed by lethal injection. It took medical staff, with Rector’s help, more than fifty minutes to find a suitable vein.

The tabloid press have done their best to completely hijack the ‘law ‘n’ order’ debate by the fundamental dishonesty of latching onto personalities. There was the campaign to ‘Free Tony Martin’ and more recently the News of the World crusade for ‘Sarah’s Law’ - the public would be informed of the location of convicted paedophiles. Almost all professional associations from the police to social workers were opposed. Why? Because paedophiles would go ‘underground’. A more successful experiment has come from church groups in America based on the notion of ‘keep your enemy close’. A small group ‘adopt’ an offender and meet with them every week. It has been controversial with some denominations, because there is an insistence that church attendance is compulsory.

The ‘law ‘n’ order’ campaign starts with a pretty bleak view of humanity – blanket coverage by CCTV, more police, ID cards, compulsory finger printing. The slogans? ‘Keep off the streets!’ ‘Lock yourself up!’ ‘Distrust your neighbour!’

Born out of the most horrendous circumstances, there are more inspiring alternatives. In 1993 an IRA bomb went off in Warrington, twelve year old Tim Parry and three year old Jonathan Ball were killed. Colin and Wendy Parry set up a Peace Foundation, they wanted to know why another human being could undertake such a despicable act, they met politicians and para-military leaders in Northern Ireland and encouraged children from both religious communities to visit Warrington.

The Tim Parry and Jonathan Ball Youth Centre is an absolutely inspiring place. I was a youth worker in inner city Liverpool and we had a converted air raid shelter with the strip lighting, it gave it a more than passing resemblance to the film location of Prisoner in Cell Block H.

Their permanent legacy is one of hope and reconciliation.

I’ll sign off with an international crime statistic – the more equal the income distribution in a society and the greater the chance of social mobility - the lower the crime rate.

2007-10-02T22:00:00.000+01:00

Oops Done It Again…

My posting about the head of Norwich ‘independent’ school (he spoke out in support of the Heartsease academy) obviously upset someone from the Worshipful Company of Dyers. ‘Anonymous’ wrote-

Some facts about Norwich School and the Dyers: Norwich School's association with the Worshipful Company of Dyers began in the mid 20th Century and is nothing to do with the School's foundation. The Dyers assist one independent school (Norwich) and several state schools in London. The Dyers provide generous funds to supplement Norwich School's bursary provision for low income families. There are no known occurrences of Dyers' offspring ever receiving financial help.

The School allocates approx. £500,000 to assist pupils who would not otherwise be able to attend. Many of those pupils live in difficult circumstances with minimal family income.Independent schools are more effective agents of social mobility than most state schools - even the grammars. Were you aware, for example, that approaching 50% of 'working class' Oxbridge undergraduates came from independents via bursary schemes?

Mr Read,Your comments are based on prejudice and conjecture it appears. You have concocted a story about the Dyers' Co. and Norwich School that is totally untrue and presented it as fact.

You seem determined to knock independent schools - no matter what good they do. But at the very least - please get your facts right and stop promoting these misleading untruths.

Sorry about getting the foundation of Norwich School wrong, but quite how the Dyers got involved with the school in the mid 20th century is puzzling, surely there were more deserving cases? Couldn’t they have found some impoverished dyers?

As for the ‘low income families’ they have assisted, why don’t ‘independent’ schools publish how many children are eligible for Free School Meals, state schools have to, it isn’t the only measure of poverty but is fairly reliable.

‘Independent’ schools as ‘agents of social mobility’? That really is a new one on me. I’ll make this challenge to ‘Anonymous’ why don’t Norwich School publish the details of parental income? Should make interesting reading.

2007-09-30T19:54:00.000+01:00

The Bill Gates Fan Club

It’s amazing how council’s ‘media relations department’ never seem starved of cash. They may be cutting back on courses for teachers, repairs for computers or support for schools, but there is always money there for spin. Knowsley is no different, it spends thousands on a full colour monthly tabloid, ‘Knowsley Challenge’, that tells everyone what a fantastic job the council and councillors are doing. Strange though, the turnout in local elections struggles to reach 20%.

Knowsley teachers have got inured to the roller coaster ride that is education. In 1998 Knowsley GCSE results were amongst the worst in the country, only 23% of students got 5 A – C passes. Steve Munby was parachuted in as Chief Education Officer and by 2005 the pass rate (through judicious use of GNVQs) had shot up to 43%, the Knowsley ‘miracle’ was hailed and some grudging praise filtered down to teachers.

That same year Munby departed to become the chief executive of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL). A few months after he left the government reconfigured the GCSE tables to include passes at English and Maths, Knowsley plummeted to the bottom of the local authority table, behind even the DfES’s favourite whipping-boy Kingston upon Hull.

In their bid for Building Schools for the Future (BSF) finance the council complained about teachers’ ‘low expectations’ of their pupils. Knowsley have now become the poster boys for the BSF experiment. At the recent Labour Conference Education Minister Jim Knight said,

“It is an example of best practice which is a shining example to others. It is about transforming education and Knowsley is leading the way.”

New schools and brand new equipment who could complain about that? The problem is that the building programme has gone ahead without involving teachers, true ‘consultation’ meetings have been held, but they are more in the form of a propaganda rally where any questioners are shot down in flames. Microsoft are also involved and may be supplying new equipment, although interestingly even ‘The Bill Gates Fan Club’ a.k.a. Becta, have belatedly acknowledged that schools could save thousands of pounds by using cheaper alternatives like Open Source.

So the brand new schools are ready stuffed with their state of the art equipment, the pupils are there in their new school uniforms raring to go, what is missing? Mmm, ah yes, the teachers. Knowsley have used those old clichés ‘zero tolerance of failure’ and ‘poverty is no excuse’ to encourage teachers, they believe ‘the kids might be difficult, but basically, the teachers are crap’. Two Knowsley head teachers who applied for jobs as ‘Learning Centre Leaders’ have been rejected. So what hope have teachers when they apply to become ‘facilitators’ or ‘coaches’?

When the Liverpool North Academy was created by merging two schools, that was the excuse to cull all the old lags who were over 40. So most of the teachers who knew the children were cleared out, NQTs came in and discipline has been a problem ever since.

Similar experiment have been tried in San Francisco, in the 1980s they ‘Reconstituted’ some schools, this involved sacking all staff – teachers, janitors, cooks, cleaners and replacing them with new staff. In the long run results didn’t improve, there was a large turnover of staff and some schools either closed or were ‘Reconstituted’ a second time. It became known as the ‘My Lai Approach’ – you destroy the village in order to ‘save it’.

Recently the ‘Blue Skies’ consultants came up with another wheeze – ‘Dream Schools’. Ten schools were chosen, but they weren’t the worst based on test results. To this day no one knows why they were chosen. Nine of the principals left and teachers had to be re-interviewd for their jobs with the prospect of increased hours. Again results haven’t improved and there has been a large turnover of staff.

So the ‘Knowsley Experiment’ is ready for take-off, the schools will be built under the auspices of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), that has been such a success elsewhere, that venerable charity Microsoft is on board and a platoon of NQTs are waiting for the call, it can’t fail. Can it?

Resistance is Futile

2007-09-29T18:25:00.000+01:00

Message Boards

What is it about Internet message boards? Don’t expect intelligent debate or reasoned argument, somehow the anonymity of cyberspace seems to induce petty point scoring, smart-alec one-liners or just downright abuse.

My posting on ‘Jolly Grammar’ elicited some of these responses in the TES Staffroom. I’m not criticising the TES, it’s the only forum where teachers can let off steam; the unions don’t do it, not does that ‘voice of the teachers’ the General Teaching Council. But it’s a shame that the usual suspects dominate the discourse – don’t they have anything better to do with their lives?

‘Network Norwich’ is a web site devoted to the activities of the local churches. I’ve posted several times about Graham Dacre’s plans to takeover Heartsease School and run it as an academy. I’ve continually asked the same three questions of the millionaire second hand car dealer turned Pentecostalist preacher –

1) Does he believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago?

2) Does he think that abortion is ‘evil’?

3) Does he think that homosexuality can be ‘cured’?

One typo in a posting (I spelt hear as hearq) gave a certain Mr Long the chance to question my ability to spell, although he did spoil it all by calling me a “whimp” and asking if I needed to change my “proffesion”. Naturally I instantly went into teacher mode and corrected his spellings.

Therefore, I’m grateful to Mr Lind who wrote a thoughtful piece,

In your posting of the 22nd Oct, you asked Mr Dacre to reply to three questions.
Could you please tell me why these three particular questions are so important? Surely Mr Dacre's answers to these questions, what ever they may be, should in no way influence the outcome of the Academy. What you are inferring is that if he answers "yes" to any or all of these questions then he is not fit to fund, or be involved with, a school which will adhere to the standards already set down nationally by the education authorities.

Or are you inferring that if Mr Dacre says "No" to your three questions, he'll be a fit a proper person to run the Academy, and that you'll publicly withdraw your opposition?

But wait a minute! Wouldn't that be just what you're campaigning against; a bigoted viewpoint that only has one answer, with no debate?

I’ll come clean straight away, I’m opposed to all academies, whether their backers are creationists or not. I just don’t support handing over state schools to private organisations or individuals. Of course the government claim they are ‘popular’ with parents and are over subscribed. So there is Gasworks Comprehensive with its peeling paint, rotten window frames and leaking roof; next door a brand spanking new academy opens. Yes, a bit of a no-brainer, it will be ‘popular’ with parents.

I’m also opposed in principle to faith schools. There’s no evidence that they improve children’s academic performance. In effect the state gives churches massive subsidies to run schools, they pay all the wages and 95% of maintenance costs. Interestingly when this system was introduced with the 1902 Education Act it was the Baptists and Methodists that led the campaign of civil disobedience, thousands refused to pay rates and scores of ministers were jailed. Only the Anglicans and Catholics had the resources to run ‘faith schools’.

Numerous academic surveys and investigations have shown that ‘faith schools’ reinforce social divisions. This is particularly the case in inner-London where both Catholic and Church of England schools select pupils from wealthier backgrounds compared to the social composition of the area where the schools are sited. The most notorious example, exposed by the ‘Guardian’, was Canon Slade School in Bolton.

The other argument is why are school being handed over to Christian organisations when their own congregations are in free-fall? According to the Church of England’s own figures, if you extrapolate the attendance graph, by 2050 it will cease to exist.

The Heartsease bid is the most troubling one thus far. In general there is the secrecy and duplicity surrounding academies. Schools have to publish exam results under the Freedom of Information Act; because academies are ‘independent’ this stipulation does not apply to them. There is the lie that academies are replacing ‘failing’ schools, Heartsease has had its problems but is now an ‘improving school’. Of the original 25 academies none of them were in special measures or under ‘notice to improve’ orders.

You could also ask, ‘what experience does Graham Dacre have of education?’ On the one hand I don’t believe that you should leave everything to the ‘experts’ but on the other side I wouldn’t want open-heart surgery delivered by a team from St John’s Ambulance.

Then we come onto the issue of Graham Dacre and ‘traditional Christian values’. I’ve got friends who are Catholic and Church of England but they wouldn’t touch creationism with a barge pole, they want tolerance towards people with different sexual orientations and for their children to receive balanced information about abortion.

How would the new Heartsease academy be run? Let’s be honest, the Pentecostalists don’t exactly hide their light under a bushel. An academy governing body would have one parent and one local authority rep; the rest would come from the foundation that has funded the academy (they will run the school in perpetuity). Where is the proposed funding for Heartsease coming from? Graham Dacre’s Lind Trust is putting in £1.95 million and the Church of England Diocese of Norwich £50,000, some mis-match there. Although a sceptic might argue that the C of E are good cover for a Pentecostalist take-over.

So just what does Graham Dacre believe in? For some time he belonged to the Assembly of God influenced Proclaimers International. He split away in December 2004 to form his own church and then in March 2007 merged with Mount Zion Family Life Centre to form the Norwich Family Life Church. On their web site Mount Zion mention a number of ‘world-class speakers’ that they have had the ‘privilege’ of hosting – faith healer Henry Hinn, witch finder Rick Godwin and the late Ed Cole, who had some interesting advice about condoms,

“ [they] don’t protect people, they protect lifestyle. Condoms are porous with each pore approximately fifty micra. Human sperm is 400 micra and cannot pass through. But the HIV virus is 4 micra. Four dozen passing through is not a guarantee of protection from disease. Safe sex is done with your wife. No wife, no sex.”

Traditional Christian values? I’m sure that Graham Dacre and his supporters must read ‘Network Norwich’ but in all these months none of them have deigned to reply to my three questions. I’m sure many Heartsease parents would want answers to the questions. Is someone who believes in creationism a fit and proper person to run a school? Would there be informed choices about abortion and sexual health in the new academy? How would they deal with homophobic bullying? Some research points to half suicide attempts amongst teenagers coming from gays or lesbians.

The Canadian web site Religious Intolerance reported that the Pentecostalist Assemblies of God viewed

‘the issue of homosexuality as not a matter of discrimination but of morality. Thus, in order to preserve the moral and spiritual health of the nation, gays and lesbians must not be granted equality with heterosexuals. Homosexuality is regarded as a conscious choice; a lifestyle; the implication being that an adult can change their sexual orientation. They believe that all sexually active gays and lesbians are destined for hell. However, those who repent and accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour will be converted to heterosexuality and attain heaven. A homosexual is not permitted to join the denomination as a member. Thus, ordination is out of the question.’

You can allow democratically elected councillors and officials to run schools (it isn’t always perfect) or you can allow narrow-minded, intolerant bigots, who just happen to have a few millions to spare, to launch a take over bid. I know which one I’d choose.

The point is Mr Lind, how can you have a debate with someone who won’t enter into dialogue and hides or disguises their views?

At the risk of repeating myself I’ll ask the same three questions to Graham Dacre

1) Does he believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago?

2) Does he think that abortion is ‘evil’?

3) Does he think that homosexuality can be ‘cured’?

Waiting to hear from you Graham.

Anti-Academies Alliance

2007-09-28T17:36:00.001+01:00

Joke of the Week

Why did the hedgehog cross the road?

To see his flat mate.

2007-09-27T17:48:00.000+01:00

Google Books

‘How Not To Teach’ is now on Google Books, so you can read some sections of it. There’s divided opinion amongst authors about the service, does it breach copyright and how much do authors earn? Based on royalties received so far I wont be retiring to that villa in the south of France just yet.

2007-09-26T18:32:00.000+01:00

A Tank Full of Piranhas

There are moments in teaching when you feel a complete and utter heel, usually because a careless or unintended remark upsets a child. Through experience you know where some of the potential land mines are sited, you have to carefully navigate around them. ‘Mothers’ Day’ can be problematic for children in care or those being brought up by their grandparents.

This year as cover teacher for PPA (that’s Planning, Preparation and… something beginning with ‘A’) I get to teach in different classes. You know that some children will always try it on with a supply teacher or any new face. That class you had under the thumb will chance their arm. The permanent primary class teacher has a whole arsenal of weapons at their disposal, in particular those all-important jobs to bestow or withdraw like pencil monitor and merits or house points.

Discipline should of course be a whole school issue; here the key is consistency and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!). In our school we follow the three strikes on the board and detention rule (we also have the ‘smiley side’). It generally works firstly because the children hate losing a playtime and secondly it is instantaneous.

It wasn’t always so, our old headteacher Erica didn’t really ‘do’ discipline, along with most of the other parts of her job description. I discovered the ‘discipline issue’ early on when I sent a child to her; they returned after half an hour with stickers all over their shirt and within a few minutes were worse than they were before. ‘I’ll send you to the head,” is usually one of your trusted reserve weapons in primary schools. Sending children to Erica was about as effective as feather duster in a bare-knuckle fight.

One child, Marvin, was a trainee psychopath; he was constantly pinching, kicking and thumping other children. One day I found a child lying in a heap in the corridor. Marvin had repeatedly slammed his head against the door handle, he cheerfully admitted it all, the child had been, ‘winding him up’. Erica started to give him a stern lecture, I had to walk away, later she told me that he was ‘so sorry’. Marvin appeared back in class with an evil grin plastered all over his face. I was convinced that if he did succeed in killing anyone Erica would send a stiff letter home to his dysfunctional family.

Luckily we had a succession of capable deputy heads who took on the role of enforcing some semblance of order and disciplining the small minority of miscreants. Mrs Moore could have fun with the children but when push came to shove she had the kind of scary voice that could penetrate the deepest reinforced concrete bunker, and a stare that could turn children into stone, verily she could have frozen hell. Detention meant children sitting in silence doing work. Such was her fearsome reputation that even some of the most recalcitrant Year 6s still quail at the mention of her name.

Last week I was teaching partitioning with Year 3. It was one of those mornings when you became aware that the bright promise of the new school year has begun to fade. Maybe it was the dull weather, but a collective lethargy had set in. You begin to wonder, ‘Is it me?’ Have you not explained it clearly enough? I got the class back together and clarified it again… glazed expressions, children fiddling with shoes, staring out of the window.

Teachers should always be patient, but you can have bad mornings too – the memory of the holidays a distant blur, the long stretch until Christmas, another imposition from the government, a chance remark by a colleague that throws you off balance, that costly repair on the car, the darkening mornings. Eventually I snapped, ‘If I don’t see more effort some of you will stay in at break time with Mrs Jones’ – our new deputy head.

I carried on with the explanation but still the glazed look of utter incomprehension from half the class. Then I spotted Peter with tears rolling down his cheeks, as I carried on he was desperate to answer every question although it was hard to understand his replies.

After I’d sent the class back to their desks I called Peter over, he was accompanied by his friend Chris who had his arm around him trying to console him. I taught Peter’s sister last year and you could tell the parents wanted their children to succeed, homework was always excellent, reading folder completed, notes from school replied to.

I asked Peter what was wrong. Now he has a speech impediment and in his highly charged emotional state the words came out in flood, a relentless unstoppable torrent at high volume, ‘DEE, DUM, DAT, DOO, DAT, DEE, DAH…’ Every thirty seconds or so he would pause and his lungs would heave in more air. I sat and listened sympathetically, after a few minutes he dissolved into tears. ‘OK don’t worry’, I sent him back to his desk. Peter carried on with his maths work, tears welling from his eyes like an unquenchable spring. Tiny blots of salt stained tears marking his book.

Later I called his friend Chris over and asked him quietly what was wrong, ‘Sir, he’s terrified of having a detention with Mrs Jones’. I summoned Peter over and gravely examined his Maths book. ‘Peter, we only give detentions for very naughty children and that isn’t you, is it?’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve tried really hard this lesson and that’s all that counts.’

Thinking about it I’d been way too harsh, Year 3 for goodness sake. You forget those school landmarks, those rites of passage; the journey from Infant to Juniors is a big leap for some children. There’s that fear of the unknown.

Detentions in our school are usually confined to the usual suspects and for the old lags it holds no fears – in the same way that Norman Stanley Fletcher viewed prison as an acceptable risk in a criminal career. Peter just couldn’t bear the thought of explaining to his Mum that he’d been in detention.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression, rewards have always featured strongly in our school, all stick and no carrot never works particularly for the vast majority of children who do want to learn. In nearly every case our ‘problem children’ come with a lot of baggage. I’ve taught in schools with perfect order and discipline but it was like being in a penal colony. Schools should be happy places. The other side is that children have a right to learn.

Luckily children have short memories, at playtime Peter and Chris were racing round the schoolyard. In the afternoon I moved on to gym with Year 2 and got them walking along the upturned benches. ‘Next week you’ll be balancing over a tank full of piranhas’. ‘Whatever!’

2007-09-25T17:41:00.000+01:00

‘Jolly Grammar’

Whenever I hear those New Labour spin words like ‘modernisation’ and ‘reform’ I think of Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ and believe the opposite. For public services they usually lead to privatisation and the introduction of a low cost provider. In short, black means white.

Ever since the introduction of the ‘Literacy Hour’ English teaching in primary schools has been over laden with grammar and word or sentence tasks. Children need to be immersed in the spoken language and to gain a love of story telling. As Michael Rosen commented ‘The Gruffalo’ grips children’s imagination and they want to find out what happens at the end, they engage with the character.

Instead literacy has been reduced to a dull mechanical exercise replete with targets and levels. I’m not arguing against grammar it is of course the framework around which language is constructed; in the same way every building requires scaffolding. However, the same metal poles can produce a hideous carbuncle or a beautiful structure that lifts the human spirit.

Could anyone explain why we need whole lessons that instruct children about the small number of words in the English language that use silent ‘b’ or ‘w’ or ‘k’?

As teachers we are trying to get children to ‘buy into’ reading against the competing attractions of television and DVDs. Why bother to read when it just a decoding exercise?

A classic piece of marketing is the ‘Jolly Grammar’ series it conjures up pictures of bright-eyed enthusiastic children merrily filling in work sheets. Please don’t call it ‘Jolly Grammar’ kindly rename it, here are some suggestions- (with the help of the thesaurus)

· ‘Dull Grammar’

· ‘Uninspiring Grammar’

· ‘Tedious Grammar’

· ‘Monotonous Grammar’

· ‘Lacklustre Grammar’

· ‘Lifeless Grammar’

· ‘Mind-numbingly boring Grammar’

2007-09-24T19:34:00.000+01:00

51 to 1

Any sane person might believe that if every organisation, quango or expert was giving the same advice the government would listen. Think again. Asked to give evidence on testing in schools to the House of Commons Education Select Committee, there were 51 submissions asking for change. Among them were-

· Scientific and maths organisations like the Royal Society

· The five teachers’ unions

· The General Teaching Council

· The OCR exam board

Even Ofsted called for change but also had the temerity this week to blame truancy on ‘boring lessons’, nothing to do with the testing culture of course, just useless teachers. Reminded me of Doctor Frankenstein refusing to take responsibility for the monster he had created.

Naturally the Select Committee are taking their time, the submissions were made in July but sometime in November they will get round to reviewing them. Now I know that teachers get a lot of stick for the amount of holidays we get, but when it comes to MPs you really are talking about most of the summer and autumn. Naturally they need time for their consultancies, directorships and appearances on Celebrity Big Brother. How is one to manage on the paltry wages?

Predictably, the one organisation to support testing was the Department for Children, Schools and Families, “The benefits of a national system of assessment have been immense.”

I don’t see the testing system changing any time soon. When does this government ever listen? The exceptions? The great ‘Fuel Tax Revolt’ – which was part popular uprising, Poujadist protest and reactionary insurrection (some of the leaders later stood as BNP candidates). Faced with this groundswell, the government swiftly made concessions, fearing that the contagion would spread. This week with queues growing exponentially outside branches of Northern Rock we had the bail out of the building societies, although the government was able to pose as the ‘friend’ of the small investor. Shame this wasn’t extended to the thousands of pensioners who lost everything when their bosses raided the company pension fund.

Who could scrap testing? Teachers. The NUT balloted primary school members in 2003 and 86% were prepared to take strike action, but the turnout was only 34% and ‘union rules’ stipulated that it had to be 50%. There was a very effective ‘Anti-SATs Campaign’ that went into hibernation after the result. Now is the time to re-ballot.

The DCSF have pointed to trials of new tests, which pupils will take twice a year as an alternative. Don’t be fooled they are worse than SATs, they are just SATs writ large for every year in Key Stage 2 and pupils are expected to move up two sub levels each year i.e., 3C to 3A. This would inevitably be used in Performance Management and to inform Payment by Results.

This sounds to me like another sham ‘consultation’. The one organisation that didn’t feature was ‘The Daily Mail’ and of course Rupert Murdoch – between them they inform every decision made by this government.

Read Warwick Mansell ‘Education by Numbers’

2007-09-23T16:03:00.000+01:00

Friendly Society or Trade Union?

If 95% of teachers belong to a trade union why do we have low pay (for a graduate career), Ofsted, performance management and long hours?

Trade Unions replaced Friendly Societies in the nineteenth century. Only the better-paid, skilled workers could afford the high fees. Friendly Societies were known as the ‘sick and burial clubs’, they provided some kind of safety net before the state began to assume that function. They didn’t negotiate directly with employers for increased pay to alleviate poverty; it took collective action by trade unions to achieve that.

During the 1990s the concept of the Friendly Society was re-invented with ‘credit-card trade unionism’ – strikes were outdated; all that members wanted was cheap finance deals. Out went shop stewards or union reps, branch meetings and conferences. The only relationship the member needed (as with their credit cards) was with the national HQ. There’s an interesting section in Naomi Klein’s book ‘No Logo’ where she describes how some charity and voluntary groups went along this route as well, the drawbacks were the loss of active members and a high turnover from the new recruits who didn’t necessarily have any loyalty or commitment to the organisation.

If you looked at the condition of the teacher trade unions you could describe them as fairly comatose. The NUT had a turnout of 22% in the last General Secretary elections and out of the 27 seats on the National Executive only 9 were contested. However, last year just to prove there was still life in the old dog yet, when Management Allowances were scrapped in favour of Teaching and Learning Responsibilities, where the union was strong, there were strikes in over 100 schools. Basically to get more money you had to prove you were jacking up results, no payments for pastoral care.

Management Allowances payments were protected for three years, but research by the School Teachers’ Review Body shows that 30,000 teachers will eventually lose pay and 22% of schools, mostly primaries, said they had no plans to make any TLR payments.

The National Association of Schoolteachers (NAS) have gone a step further and signed up to the government’s ‘remodelling of the workforce’ agenda and allowed payment by results, cover of classes by non-teachers and the scrapping of Management Allowances (under pressure from their members they had to support a limited number of strikes, just to show they really weren’t a tame pussy cat of a union).

Whilst the NUT has stood alone in opposing all of this, it has been fairly tame vocal opposition; they haven’t actually done much to shake the Government, who because of this can safely ignore them. At this year’s NUT Conference there were unsuccessful calls for national action to protect pay and conditions. At the recent National Executive meeting the two main left organisations, the Socialist Teachers’ Association (STA) and the Campaign for Democratic Trade Unions (CFDTU) combined with the moderate ‘Broadly Speaking’ group to support an anodyne motion on pay that didn’t mention national action. The only Executive members to back national action were Linda Taaffe and Julie Lyon-Taylor.

I’m not saying that teachers are straining at the leash, champing at the bit to come out on strike, they aren’t. There’s also the sort of knee-jerk reaction that you get from groups like the Socialist Workers’ Party who shout out in a very loud voice, ‘All Out Strike! NOW!’ over dirty cups in the staff room sink. However, if there is one lesson from TLRs it is that isolated strikes in a handful of schools will not protect pay, for that you need national action.

In support of this principle, Martin Powell-Davis is standing in the NUT Vice-Presidential elections, he also spoke out on this issue at the NUT National Conference. I’m not claiming that just supporting candidates for national positions will change anything. There is a long and inglorious tradition of radical oppositionists being elected as General Secretaries or Presidents and then becoming as bad, or worse, as the clique they replaced. What is more important is to get members active in the union, to have reps in every school, well attended branch meetings and a sovereign national conference that actually debates issues relevant to teachers.

The STA and CFDTU are also standing candidates (the Judean Popular Front have declined to nominate anyone) so there are accusations of ‘splitting the vote. However, the election is based on Single Transferable Voting (STV) so the ‘wasted’ votes of an unsuccessful candidate are re-allocated to other candidates.

Martin is, by all accounts, one of the most effective branch secretaries in the union (always good to have someone who can walk the walk and talk the talk). He is also a member of the Socialist Party (former Militant Tendency) the left’s version of the ‘Flat Earth Society’ – clinging on to outdated theories. I’m not trying to organise some kind of ‘red scare’ I’m sure his opponents are more than capable of that. On many issues I’d completely disagree with Martin, but on national action to defend pay I’m with him all the way.

I always try to vote on the issues and the wider background. For teachers the choice is clear, a pale imitation of a Victorian Friendly Society or an effective national union.

TES Staffroom Debate

Martin Powell-Davis Leaflet

Elect Martin

2007-09-22T07:34:00.000+01:00

Read this health warning first!

The glossy adverts for the headteacher posts (sorry ‘Secondary Learning Centre Leaders’ – what an old Luddite) are nestling there in the pages of the education press. The enticing appeal from Knowsley pupils is ‘Make us feel like VIPs’.

All ten Knowsley secondary schools are being closed and replaced by seven ‘learning centres’ built under the auspices of BSF. Two of the existing heads applied for jobs at the new ‘learning centres’ but were rejected. What hope is there for Knowsley teachers when they apply for their jobs?

I had an interesting post from ‘anonymous’ during the holidays. Maybe potential applicants would like to read it?

‘I read with interest your comment regarding the appointment of headteachers to the new learning centres in Knowsley, but was dismayed by your assumption that headteachers have complied with the BSF programme.

‘From the beginning of the project headteachers have challenged many of the proposals in the BSF programme but have encountered the same vague responses to questions that you allude to. Heads have found themselves in an untenable situation, dealing with half-truths and unclear responses when trying to get information about working conditions, curriculum plans, hours of opening and career prospects for staff in secondary schools. Add to that the issues around loyalty to the communities of parents and young people that we serve and you should appreciate the lack of power and influence that has caused so much frustration.

‘ Heads who applied for jobs in the new schools did so in the belief that they might be able to salvage something from this disaster - by retaining quality staff in schools they could at least provide some stability and continuity for the young people who are the subject of this ill conceived experiment.

‘The appointments process for the leadership posts has ensured that critics of the BSF programme have been weeded out and the letter to all staff from the Chair of the Staffing Commission is also sending out a clear message. There is an LA mantra that the headteachers and teachers in Knowsley are not up to the job, despite the massive improvements in achievement and attainment over the last 5 years. Sadly the new “palaces of learning” will open with exactly the scenario you describe - I wonder how many of the BSF architects from the LA will be around to see this revolution happen?’

Resistance is Futile

2007-09-22T07:04:00.001+01:00

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel?

It’s hasn’t been the best of times for the Heartsease Academy– this is the takeover bid by millionaire former second-hand car dealer turned Pentecostalist preacher Graham Dacre.

Far be it from me to accuse their supporters of ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ but support for the Heartsease Academy has come from Jim Hawkins the head of Norwich School, a fee paying ‘independent’ school.

Looking at their web site you might be forgiven for asking ‘what does a head from a socially selective school know about the state sector?’ But who I am I to question my superiors? Fees at Norwich school are almost £10,000 a year, but there is of course help in the form of ‘scholarships’ that account for 20% of fees and means-tested ‘bursaries’ that can cover 100%. Strange though, the ‘independent’ schools never publish the numbers of pupils on Free School Meals.

Like many other ‘independent’ schools it owes its existence to a charitable organisation, in this case the Worshipful Company of Dyers. Schools were established in the 16th and 17th century to assist the impecunious sons of the guild members. Pardon the cynicism, but could they provide an exact account of the numbers of distressed dyer’s offspring currently receiving schooling at this hallowed establishment?

Jim Hawkins informs us that, “The traditional Christian values that its founders wish to be at its centre will, in my view, be crucial to its success.”

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on current Christian theology but ‘traditional Christian values’? Even the Catholic Church gave up on creationism in the nineteenth century.

I’ll repeat my questions to Graham Dacre-

· Does he believe that the earth was created 6,000 years ago?

· Does he believe abortion is ‘evil’?

· Does he believe homosexuality can be ‘cured’?

Still waiting for an answer Graham.

Anti-Academies Alliance

2007-09-21T06:36:00.000+01:00

What has changed?

Some devastating research by the Sutton Trust on Oxbridge and top university admissions, over a five year period they investigated the progress of 1 million teenagers.

The report documents the extent to which a few highly socially and academically selective schools dominate admissions to the country’s leading universities. 200 schools accounted for approximately half Oxbridge admissions whereas the other 3,500 schools supplied the rest.

The study also suggests that the differences in the admissions rates to elite universities cannot be attributed solely to the schools’ average A level results, and that other factors are at work – particularly at the most successful schools.

Key findings

Oxbridge admissions

· 100 elite schools – making up under 3% of 3,700 schools with sixth forms and sixth form colleges in the UK – accounted for a third of admissions to Oxbridge during the last five years.

· At the 30 schools with the highest admissions rates to Oxbridge, one quarter of university entrants from the schools went to Cambridge and Oxford universities during the five years.

· The schools with the highest admissions rates are highly socially selective. The 30 schools are composed of 28 independent schools, one grammar, and one comprehensive. The 100 schools with the highest admissions rates to Oxbridge are composed of 80 independent schools, 18 grammar schools, and two comprehensives.

· Overall, the top 200 schools and colleges made up 48% of admissions to Oxbridge during the five years, with 10 per cent of their university entrants going to the two universities. The other 3,500 schools and colleges accounted for the remaining 52% of admissions, with one per cent of their university entrants going to Oxbridge during the period.

Admissions to the 13 universities ranked the highest in an average of published university league tables. The list comprises: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Imperial College, London School of Economics, Nottingham, Oxford, St Andrews, University College London, Warwick and York.

· 100 elite schools – making up just under 3% of 3,700 schools with sixth forms and sixth form colleges and centres in the UK – accounted for a sixth of admissions to the 13 top universities during the last five years.

· At the 30 schools with the highest admissions rates to the universities, seven in ten of university entrants from the schools went to this group of leading universities.

· Again these schools with the highest admissions rates are highly socially selective.

The 30 schools are composed of 28 independent schools, one grammar, and one comprehensive. The 100 schools with the highest admissions rates are composed of 82 independent schools, 16 grammar schools, and two comprehensives.

· Overall, the top 200 schools and colleges made up 29% of admissions to the universities during the five years, with 49 per cent of their university entrants going to these universities. The other 3,500 schools and colleges accounted for the remaining 71% of admissions, with ten per cent of their university entrants going to one of these universities during the period.

Admissions and A-levels

· The proportion of university entrants going to Oxbridge from the top performing 30 independent schools was nearly twice that of the top performing 30 grammar schools -- despite having very similar average A-level scores.

· At the 30 top performing comprehensive schools, only half the expected number of pupils are admitted to the 13 top universities, given the overall relationship between schools’ average A-level results and university admissions.

· At the 30 top performing independent schools, a third more pupils are admitted to the 13 top universities than would be expected given the schools’ average A level results.

What has changed in the last 100 years? Everything and nothing.

2007-09-21T06:10:00.001+01:00

Joke of the Week

How many infant teachers does it take to change a light bulb?

Seven.

One to change the light bulb and six to 'share' the experience.

2007-09-20T06:16:00.000+01:00

“Healthy” chips?

Those wonderful people at ‘McCain’s’ sent me the following e-mail -

Hello there,

I came across your blog “Mr Read: How not to teach” and having seen that you like writing about various issues relating to literacy in schools, I thought you might also like to take a look at a new educational website called “The Potato Story” (www.thepotatostory.co.uk).

The Potato Story has been launched by McCain Foods in support of the nationwide “Year of Food and Farming” campaign. Aimed at primary school children, the website incorporates interactive learning tools and information on food provenance, plant growth and nutrition to help engage school children in ICT, literacy and numeracy. Everything is aligned with the National Curriculum at Key Stage 2.

I’d really like to send you some more information so please let me know if you find the website interesting and think it would be useful.

Thanks!

Gerel

This raises some interesting points; McCain’s obviously employ people to monitor the blogosphere. As TV advertising becomes increasingly ineffective - multi-channels, people not watching adverts, the ‘hidden persuaders’ have had to resort to more subtle means. Product placement has begun to feature prominently in films, the worst example being ‘Run Fat Boy Run’ – one enormous advert for Nike.

Naomi Klein in ‘No Logo’ detailed some of the ‘creative’ methods advertisers use. Drinks companies employ students to hang around union bars and engage people in conversation about their ‘favourite’ drinks. The most devious one I read about was a text service that won a contract from a football club to supply fans with updates. Despite extensive advertising in the club programme the response was poor. A PR company hired some casually dressed young people to go into some of the pubs on match day. They had a ‘petition’ with them, one of their mates had been disciplined in work for receiving text updates, they got out a mobile and showed the fans the updates and just happened to have a screwed up advertising leaflet in their back pocket…

With the obesity panic multinational firms are battling to change public perceptions. McDonald’s conceded the biggest PR own goal with the McLibel trial and then the humiliation from ‘Super Size Me’. It’s true that McCain’s new ‘healthy’ chips contain low amounts of fat and score highly in comparison with other chips. However, the concept of ‘healthy’ chips is a bit like ‘healthy’ sausages, it’s a misnomer, a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. The message we should be giving to children is eat fruit and vegetables, but that doesn’t include mounds of potatoes, however they are dressed up.

As for the ‘free’ curriculum materials I certainly wont be using them. It’s a bit like ‘cause-related’ marketing i.e., computers for schools. It’s just one step away from the dubious ‘sponsorship’ deals that blight American schools. Advertising can be found on book covers, half of their students received free exercise books with covers advertising Frosted Flakes and Lays Potato Chips. There are also branded menus in school canteens; coupons from fast food companies as rewards for reading; sponsor’s logos on schools buses, websites, sports fields, gyms, libraries and playgrounds, also school events can be paid for by corporations.

Thanks for your e-mail kind people at ‘McCain’s’ but my reply is based on two words, the second of which is ‘Off’.

2007-09-19T17:58:00.000+01:00

Reinstate Karen Reissman!

By all accounts the recent TUC Conference was one of the biggest yawnathons in living memory – grey men in grey suits boring each other to death. In 2006 28.4% of the workforce were trade union members, the largest fall since 1998. Only one in six private sector workers belonged to a union.

Millions of people believe in the principle of union organisation. Why don’t they join? They think that unions are ineffective and secondly they are worried about victimisation.

The ‘Reinstate Karen Reissman!’ website makes interesting reading-

On Friday 19th June, Karen Reissmann, a psychiatric nurse of 25 years, was taken out of an important meeting with a vulnerable client on the direct orders of managers of Manchester Mental Health & Social Care Trust. She was suspended due to her long history of UNISON involvement and vociferous opposition to cuts in services - formally, this was described as "engaging in activities which have seriously affected the reputation of the Trust" and "...no longer having confidence in her as an employee". The third allegation relates to a possible misuse of her time. Karen is still in the dark as to what this relates to, but like most nurses working for MMHSCT, continually works longer than her contracted 37.5 hours per week!

It is worth noting that Karen was promoted to the post of Senior Practitioner on the very same day she was suspended - So much for the Trust having no confidence in her as an employee!

Karen has a long history of making comments to the press, opposing cuts in service, opposing the marketisation of the NHS which is increasingly being fragmented and privatised and speaking out about the consequences of this.

The same happened in teaching, Birmingham NUT school rep Eileen Hunter was sacked when she spoke out against the repressive behaviour policies her school was implementing. She was summarily sacked, the national leadership of the NUT responded in the time-honoured fashion by – sending a stiff letter to ‘The Times’. Bet that left the head quaking in his boots!

87% of Karen’s Unison members voted to take strike action. To date the TUC haven’t exactly busted a gut to support the campaign.

Free speech? That’s why this blog is anonymous!

2007-09-18T06:15:00.001+01:00

30,000 teachers lose pay!

Some interesting statistics from the School Teachers’ Review Body-

· 220 secondary heads now earn over £100,000 a year, including 70 out of 82 academy heads

· A third of secondary heads are in the top section of the pay scale and earn over £78,000 a year

· Average hours for secondary heads fell from 65.1 hours in 2000 to 57.6 hours – but still a job for insomniacs and workaholics

· In inner London 45% of teachers are in the first five years of their teaching career

· Half of teachers who were eligible to progress to the upper pay scale (UPS) didn’t apply

· 30,000 fewer teachers received teacher and learning responsibility payments (TLRs) than held management allowances

So congratulations are in order for that government poodle of a union the NAS that signed the agreement scrapping management allowances. Doubtless this will now appear in their next recruitment leaflet.

JOIN THE NAS – WE NEGOTIATED WAGE CUTS FOR 30,000 TEACHERS!!

2007-09-17T10:43:00.000+01:00

Winifred Robinson and Norris Green

You can take it as a given that tabloid journalists are useless, drink-sodden, foot-in-the-door, cheque-book-journalism hacks. They don’t even take themselves seriously and just compete for the Lunchtime O’Booze Award. If you expected better from the ‘quality’ newspapers think again, most articles are poorly researched and they faithfully regurgitate everything that is fed to them by company PR departments. The press barons never interfere with editorial freedom and the fact that Rupert Murdoch owns 174 papers worldwide, all of which supported the Iraq war, is entirely coincidental.

There are of course exceptions, some journalists are prepared to ask awkward questions and offer their readers original insights. In my naivety I used to think that Radio 4 had higher standards. Winifred Robinson grew up in Norris Green ‘a decent hard-working place’ in the 1960s, after the murder of Rhys Jones she returned to find ‘a community in thrall to teen gangs, drugs and guns…’

Norris Green was built in the 1920s as one of Liverpool’s first ‘over-spill’ estates. It also provided homes for workers at new electronics factories like GEC on the East Lancashire Road. The estate had three and four bedroom houses, bathrooms, hot running water and gardens front and back. As late as the 1960s when the main alternative was the Rachmanite private rented sector there was a queue of families waiting to get into Norris Green.

So what changed? Take a walk down the East Lancashire Road and all the factories have gone, land is being sold for ‘redevelopment’ – retail parks, used car lots and warehouses. There was the great council house sell off during the 1980s that left the poorer stock for social housing. Council rents rose and with mortgage tax relief it was cheaper for young couples to buy. With councils squeezed for cash housing repairs were the last priority. All that left some council estates as ghettoes composed mainly of the retired and unemployed.

What stands out in Robinson’s article is the lack of any basic research, if she’d taken the trouble to look at Neighbourhood Statistics or Liverpool Council’s ward profiles she might have gleaned some information. Out of 32,428 Super Output Areas (SOAs) half of Norris Green is in the most deprived 1%, the rest is in the bottom 5% and one small area (the ‘posh end’) is in the bottom 10%. 0.29% of housing is in Council Tax Band ‘C’ or above against a Liverpool average of 20%. 40% of the working age population are unemployed. The average income in 2004 was £17,115 for Norris Green, £22,511 for Liverpool and the national average was £23,244.

Robinson reminisces about the past ‘standards of good behaviour’ and the need for ‘authority to be restored’. However, as one of her interviewees notes a big police operation a year ago led to many being jailed but “a younger group has come up to take their place.” I wonder why? Of course people in Norris Green want security but they also want jobs, better housing and leisure facilities.

Presumably Robinson was given the job to add some ‘local colour’. Who does she interview? Bob Croxton a 43 year-old ex-convict who runs an agency to rehabilitate young offenders, Allan Devon who was a professional musician during the 1960s, Linda Beiri a middle-aged tenant, Councillor Colin Eldridge, 82 year-old Margaret Hignet, Angela Williams the retired Infant School Head and finally she talks to some mums waiting outside the school. So here is this article on the youth drug gangs of Norris Green and whom does she fail to interview? Got it in one – young people. Of course given the circumstances people might not want to speak on record to a Radio 4 reporter. I wouldn’t have expected interviews from the front line of the drugs war, but to go there and not report any comments from young people? Not to include any facts about deprivation?

Words fail me.

2007-09-16T19:07:00.001+01:00

Heartsease Academy Goes Pete Tong!

The proposed takeover of Heartsease School in Norwich appears to be going all Pete Tong. Millionaire second hand car dealer turned Pentecostalist preacher Graham Dacre (standard Pentecostalist positions are that the world was created 6,000 years ago, abortion is ‘evil’ and homosexuality can be ‘cured’) wants to run the school as an Academy.

The Norwich Council Scrutiny Committee have already voted against the proposal, now the governors at Heartsease have registered their opposition. Maybe the prospect of creationists having a majority on the new governing body didn’t appeal.

The public consultation closes on September 21, then on October 8 the Norwich Council Cabinet will discuss the proposal. Even then Education minister Ed Balls could override any local decision.

Fred Corbett, the council's deputy director of education, said “This is a great opportunity for the community around Heartsease High. If the decision goes against the academy this time round, I think that will be Heartsease's chance gone.”

I thought these people were meant to follow directions from the Council? They haven’t given up, Building Schools for the Future (BSF) will give them other opportunities to hand schools over to wacky religious groups.

Anti-Academies Alliance

2007-09-15T18:14:00.000+01:00

BREAKING NEWS!

It was the Iraq war that convinced me that the Rolling News Programmes (Sky, BBC) demonstrated that old law – more means less. Less analysis, less comment and less in-depth reporting.

The disappearance of Madeleine McCann has confirmed that ten-fold. Like jackals circling their prey the media haven’t been able to leave it alone. Breaking news, in a red box constantly appears at the bottom of the TV screen as another titbit is fed to the waiting hordes.

This ‘human interest’ story was perfect for the Rolling News Programmes, constant ‘updates’ the grieving parents, the suspect Murat and then that twist as the McCanns were named as ‘aguidos’.

The journey of the McCanns back to England was followed in excruciating detail. The TV commenting on all the media present… That ghoulish interest by the on lookers waiting to catch a glimpse.

There’s that old quote about the press, ‘Power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ How the hell do you describe the coverage on the McCanns? Words fail me; the best thing is to switch off.

Read the ‘Guardian’s’ incomparable Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn.

2007-09-14T06:32:00.002+01:00

Joke of the Week

I took the wife on a cruise last month and as we were gazing out over the ocean she said, “You remind me of the sea.”

“You mean I’m wild, untamed and romantic?”

“No, you make me sick!”

2007-09-13T16:18:00.000+01:00

'If'...

Supply teacher left the following comment on public schools.

You plead guilty to agreeing with the call for the abolition of public schools. I have often heard this from fellow teachers but I don't think that you can really have thought it through.

If they were abolished then there would be another 660,000 students for the state sector to deal with. So you not only take the fees paid by those parents out of the education system but you also impose massive additional costs on the state system. Are you expecting those fees to somehow be transferred into the state system? Obviously they are lost to education.

How can you say that the private sector leeches on the state system when in fact it removes the cost of 660,000 students from the system and the government still collects their parents' taxes to pay for other children's schooling.

I believe that most private schools provide free places for deserving local children which must be charitable.

I am constantly amazed by how many people criticise those who choose to spend hard-earned income on education while seeing nothing wrong with those spending their money on bigger and better cars or other worldly goods.

I am a teacher in the state system.

Thanks for the post you’ve made some good points. It is true that the funding of public schools is a complex question. There is the argument that they ‘save’ the taxpayer money. On the other hand claiming £100 million in tax relief by posing as ‘charities’ really is taking the p***.

Abolishing public schools? It’s in the far horizon on the political radar. Even if the day came I don’t envisage a final cataclysmic end in the spirit of Lindsay Anderson’s film ‘If’ or bulldozing the buildings to the ground (although in certain cases this might appeal). Why not use the buildings and extensive sports facilities for all children?

Does the public school system ‘save’ money for the taxpayer? The exact same argument is put forward in relation to private hospitals and the NHS. The problem here is that a section of the population remove themselves from society, the logical extension of this is America’s ‘gated communities’ – in some states they comprise of 25% voters. Taxes are cut to the bone and public services wither on the vine. Nothing exemplified this better than the collapse of the levees in New Orleans or the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. When I was in Cleveland this year you could travel round the city on brand new freeways, as soon as you went into the poorer areas it was dodge the pothole. In other countries public spending is viewed as a social necessity, public sector workers are well rewarded financially and not constantly abused by the media.

It certainly may be the case that people opting to spend money on education are merely exercising choice and should be commended as opposed to those who waste money on fripperies like fast cars. In my view education is a human right, once you make it a commodity that can be bought and sold in the market those with the largest financial elbows will get to the front of the queue. Even if you believe in the free market surely the best way of organising society is through a meritocracy? Why is it that 50% of places at our most prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge, go to children from public schools?

Some middle class families do scrimp and save to get their children through public school. I would however, in some cases, have to question the motivation is it educational or social? Do they just want to keep Daphne or Edwin away from Gary and Beyonce at the local comp? We don’t want them mixing with the local oiks.

The top public schools charge at least £20,000 in fees, so they are accessible only to the wealthy elite. What sort of public schools do the middle classes attend? The minor public schools, where in many cases the education is no better than the state sector.

As for the ‘free places for deserving children’, exactly how many do the public schools offer? What percentage receive Free School Meals? Suddenly the public schools become all coy and mutter behind their manicured hands. In the 1980s the Conservatives established the ‘Assisted Places Scheme’ to give ‘poor people’ the chance of a public school education. It became a charity scheme for the Distressed Gentlefolk, a good tax dodge for the self-employed. In some cases people declared themselves bankrupt just before their children were due to attend school and then emerged like Lazarus into a new business venture.

Part of the ‘Daily Mail’ agenda is to promote the interests of the ‘respectable majority’ against the ‘chavs’. I don’t see it that way. We are developing into a society where wealth and privilege is being entrenched for a minority of the population. Rupert Murdoch received £14 million last year in wages, shares and bonuses and top business executives are retiring with pensions of £1 million a year. Meanwhile social mobility has all but ground to a halt.

Public schools are bastions of class privilege - they make everyone poorer.