What’s occurring?
The funniest line I’ve heard on television so far this year was spoken in a repeat of the very first episode of Gavin & Stacey. Nessa is preventing Gavin from entering Stacey’s house, and Uncle Bryn, the priceless Rob Brydon, seeing the altercation taking place, comes across the road, presuming that Gavin is a Jehova’s Witness doorstepper.
He says to little Gavin, with Nessa still looming menacingly over him, “Don’t go picking on ‘er, just ‘cos she looks like easy prey”.
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I don’t want to look like I’m picking on Nessa Gilbert, boss of Ofsted, but I can’t NOT take issue with her latest comments, as reported on the front page of the Guardian yesterday.
The headline above Polly Curtis’s report said, “Ofsted’s new mission - to get rid of boring teachers”. So that’s most schools closing down then. And why are teachers so boring? Because the majority of them have never received any training or encouragement to make learning interesting and relevant. And why is that? Because it’s not been seen as important these past two decades, since the introduction of the National Curriculum, SATs, etc. ‘Standards’ and attainment have been the only goal. Teachers have been trained, in both initial training and in-service, to ‘deliver’ ‘standards’.
Teachers have been micro-managed to implement National Strategies, teaching minute by minute according to the ‘rules’, guidelines and formulas set out in those strategies. The league tables and ‘value added’ scores have been the sole criteria by which schools and teachers have been judged, so is it any wonder that teaching has been reduced to cramming for tests, regardless of the actual needs or interests of pupils? Regardless of whether all that cramming is utterly boring and soul-destroying.
Ms Gilbert has been a major player in the ‘movement’ to ‘drive up standards’, by any means deemed necessary. Her career has been built on her apparent success in doing so, in her various posts in the education bureaucracy. I don’t think she’s built much of a reputation for having a commitment to making schools more meaningful, motivational and fulfilling for their pupils.
Ms Gilbert has a lot of gall. I’m not saying that teachers can’t be expected to work out for themselves what they should be doing in the classroom to make learning interesting and motivating, but it’s downright immoral and unethical to talk about getting rid of teachers unless and until there’s been an all-out systemic effort to re-train the current generation of teachers who’ve been bullied and battered and terrorised into ‘delivering’ ‘three part lessons’, into offering fragmented cramming instead of holistic learning, and drilling children through endless practicing for tests.
Why not start by getting rid of people like Ms Gilbert who have been the ones who are fundamentally to blame for the appalling state of much of our education system and the near-abuse of children and teachers for political and personal ends?
Here’s what it says in the Guardian:
Ofsted is to launch a crackdown on "boring" teaching in response to concerns that children's behaviour is deteriorating because they are not being stimulated enough in class . . .
[Christine Gilbert] told the Guardian the changes in the inspections would amount to a "crackdown" on boring teaching. "I think that it should do that. When I was a [local authority] director of education I wanted to know if there was a link between boredom and achievement. We did a piece of work on it and there was strong evidence that a lot of it was boredom."
The inspectorate's latest annual report, published in November, warned of "pedestrian" teaching in primary schools, and said pupils in secondary schools were too often set tasks that are not demanding enough of them. "The result is their loss of interest, their slow progress and, often, deteriorating behaviour," it said. Some teachers fail to inspire pupils by relying on textbooks and endlessly preparing for tests, the document warns.
Gilbert said: "People divorce teaching from behaviour. I think they are really, really linked and I think students behave much better if the teaching is good, they are engaged in what they are doing and it's appropriate to them.
There's what I would describe as low-level disruption where children are bored and not motivated, so they start to use their abilities for other ends. That then can lead to other children being distracted in lessons and so on."
She said that a focus on improving schools through the introduction of better and stronger management and head teachers "isn't enough" to make every lesson good - schools should be improving the quality of teaching too. She said reforms to the inspection process would make a difference
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"One of the things that we've been concerned to do in the new inspection framework is to really emphasise the importance of teaching and learning.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/05/ofsted-boring-teachers
So the new inspection framework “emphasises the importance of teaching and learning”. Fucking hell! What a good idea! Let’s all consider the importance of teaching and learning! Maybe that’s what schools should be doing?
This woman has in fact presided over an Ofsted inspection regime that’s generally not given a shit about what goes on in the classroom in recent years, apart from cursory visits by inspectors to a sample of classrooms so they can say they’ve checked to see whether their pre-inspection ‘hypothesis’ about the school being either good or bad on the basis of their ‘data’ bears any resemblance to what’s going on in the classrooms.
As for children’s day to day experience of school having some bearing on their attitude, behaviour and achievement - Ms Gilbert needed to ‘do a piece of work’ on it! Or rather she paid someone, probably quite a lot of money, to come back and tell her that there was ‘strong evidence’ that ‘it was boredom’ causing the problems and the underachievement. What does that tell us about Ms Gilbert’s understanding of children and learning? How the hell could boredom NOT affect children’s behaviour and attitude, Nessa?
And if you needed to know whether children are bored by what happens to them as they’re processed through schools, why not just ask them? The problem is that too many children are too polite, and don’t like criticising their teachers. Those that are brave enough to tell the truth, though, will tell you how frustrating and tedious, how pointless and dull they find most of what happens.
But what if the researchers had said they couldn’t prove any link between disaffection, boredom and underachievement, would Ms Gilbert have been quite content to let them go on being bored? And how come she’s been keeping quiet about these concerns till now? Does that strike anyone as a reasonable or moral thing to do?
Ms Gilbert’s utterings, as reported this week, are nothing more that useless, platitudinous statements of the bleeding obvious. What use is this woman? Can we please have some people of real wisdom with vision and enlightenment running our major institutions? Please? Soon?
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“The Academics”
Children who behave badly and are disruptive in the classroom were the subject of a Panorama report on BBC1 last night.
According to last night’s edition there are 750,000 Primary school children who regularly disrupt their class. Some of them have deep-seated social and emotional problems, whilst some of them are clearly reacting against teachers who fail to connect and stimulate, and a curriculum that’s for the most part unengaging and downright boring, meaningless and uncreative.
“It’s not all about academics”, said a tearful mother, clearly upset that the school seemed to care only for its academic ‘standards’, and had no time or inclination to meet the social and emotional needs of her child. Actually, for the most part, in most schools, it is indeed all about ‘academics’.
“They become verbally aggressive because they want our help”, explained a special support assistant. Swearing, shouting and kicking, Levi is taken off to the ‘quiet room’ - an empty space that’s basically a cell. “You can make a choice”, they tell him.
But he’s determined not to take part in lessons. Many children come from homes where there’s drug and alcohol abuse taking place virtually all the time, the programme tells us. Last year 18,000 pupils behaved so violently they had to be excluded from school.
Panorama looked at early intervention programmes to address root causes. Good old ‘nurture groups’ were being touted as the answer - giving the children the time and attention they need, away from the mainstream classroom.
They also looked at projects focused on working with parents on styles and skills of parenting. They claimed that academic progress is often better within nurture groups than in the mainstream classroom, because of the additional focused attention that’s provided.
“Emotional and social problems can’t be dealt with in a class of 30”, they said. Actually, they can, but Panorama didn’t want to concern themselves with what good teachers do all the time to help all pupils become socially and emotionally intelligent, should they happen to be in schools where this is seen to be a key part of the role of teachers and mainstream support staff, including pupil mentors.
So what’s the answer? Easy - encouraging the pupils to talk about their problems! Letting them reflect on their own behaviour. Enabling them to build positive relationships. Boosting their self esteem and increasing their motivation to learn.
Well, I think we knew this already. So why don’t schools usually do these things? Apparently only 4% of schools in the UK have a ‘nurture group’. I wonder what percentage have a whole-school policy that stresses the part that every adult needs to play in developing every child’s social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, and places as high a priority on these aspects of learning as they do on “the academics”?
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Speechless About Gaza
There was a major demonstration in London this weekend against what’s taking place in Gaza. We learn from the media that demonstrators were treated roughly, and possibly very harshly indeed, by the police. Thank goodness there are still people, young and old, who are willing to speak out and put themselves on the line to show their anger at what’s happening in Gaza.
What happened to them is absolutely nothing compared with what’s happening in Gaza itself:
“Incessant bombardment, no electricity, no water, and the hospitals are overflowing - how Gaza was torn apart”, says the Guardian headline.
I guess we all knew it would come to this. Israel, with elections looming and Bush going, needed to have one more fling at Hamas, to carry out one more ultra-violent operation in Gaza.
“It has never been like this before. The assault is coming from the sky, the sea and the ground. The explosion of shells, the gunfire from the tanks and the missiles from planes and helicopters are incessant. The sky is laced with smoke, grey here, black there, as the array of weaponry leaves its distinctive trail.
Most Gazans can only cower in terror in whatever shelter they can find and guess at the cost exacted by each explosion as the toll for those on the receiving end rises remorselessly.
As Israeli forces carved up the Gaza Strip yesterday, dividing the territory in two , the UN warned of a "catastrophe unfolding" for a "trapped, traumatised, terrorised" population.
John Ging, the head of the UN relief agency in Gaza, described the situation there as "inhuman".
"We have a catastrophe unfolding in Gaza for the civilian population," he said. "The people of Gaza City and the north now have no water. That comes on top of having no electricity. They're trapped, they're traumatised, they're terrorised by this situation … The inhumanity of this situation, the lack of action to bring this to an end, is bewildering to them."
The UN has been particularly angered at the contention of the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Ging also accused Israel of a campaign of destroying public buildings vital to the administration and governance of Gaza. "The whole infrastructure of the future state of Palestine is being destroyed," he said. "Blowing up the parliament building. That's the parliament of Palestine. That's not a Hamas building. The president's compound is for the president of Palestine."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/04/israelandthepalestinians-middleeast
The Guardian’s editorial says,
The last time the tanks rolled into Gaza in February and March last year, more than half the Palestinian casualties were civilian, according to Human Rights Watch. That pattern is now set to be repeated. After a week's aerial bombardment, the death toll already stands at nearly 500, of which approximately 70 are children and 27 women, according to independent Palestinian sources. Of the 2,650 Gazans injured, more than 270 are women and 650 children. So much for Israel's claim that their targets are Hamas militants. Even if you stretch the term to include policemen, this is a "surgical" operation in which civilians will die in their hundreds.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/05/gaza-comment-victory
Gary Younge, meanwhile, writes,
Over the last seven years the war on terror has been thoroughly discredited - not only morally, but militarily and strategically. Nobody listens to moderates, let alone to reason, when bombs are falling and people are dying. That is as true for the rockets that have killed a handful of Israelis as it is for the barrage of bombs and now tanks that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.
By erasing any prospect of negotiation, the violence did not weaken extremists but emboldened them. Israel may want to boost the moderate Fatah faction which governs the West Bank now. But Hamas's electoral rise was a direct result of the contempt the Israeli's showed them in the past.
Meanwhile, the Iraq war has left Iran - the primary sponsor of both Hezbollah and Hamas - with far more influence in the region than they would have had. On almost every front in almost every part of the world, including in the US, the war on terror is now seen as a colossal mistake. Only Israel did not get the memo. And it is now set to fail for the same reasons that America has.
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Nationalise the Banks
There’s was an interesting letter in the Guardian yesterday from Michael Meacher:
The banks are making monkeys out of the government. After hoovering up all this Treasury largesse to prop up their balance sheets, the banks are still - despite the crash they have now visited on the real economy - determined to save themselves rather than the customers they exist to serve.
It is surely now transparent to all that the only certain way to ensure that lending is resumed on the scale desperately required is to take public control of the banks, temporarily at least, to avert the worst crash since the Great Depression. Is it too much to hope, now that New Labour's neoliberal market fundamentalism is wholly discredited, that this is not a taboo too far and that common sense can now prevail?
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Blah to Blears
There’s also a letter from Professor Peter Latchford re the Blears comments on the ‘concerns’ of the white working classes:
Hazel Blears is to be applauded for drawing attention to the issue of white working-class attitudes to immigration (White working-class fears on immigration exposed in report, 3 January). But we have to be careful how we pick up the debate around this complex and divisive issue . . .
Hazel Blears is to be applauded for drawing attention to the issue of white working-class attitudes to immigration (White working-class fears on immigration exposed in report, 3 January). But we have to be careful how we pick up the debate around this complex and divisive issue . . .
We do know this: that being poor is a better predictor of negative attitudes to other groups - including other races - than is being white (or black, or Asian). We know that people who feel unable to influence things in their area are more likely to feel resentful towards people they see as different from themselves. We know that people who live among, and have friends from, different backgrounds are more likely to feel that society is cohesive.
There may well be an issue with the disempowered, isolated and impoverished white working class and their attitudes to immigration, race and integration. But the facts are clear: the cause of the issue is not whiteness, or even immigration - the real challenge to a cohesive society is disempowerment, isolation and impoverishment, as experienced by any ethnic group.
To describe the issue as "white working class" may be a necessarily emotive media and political device, but it runs the risk of perpetuating one key myth: the myth that breakdowns in cohesion result principally from differences between races.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/05/race-poverty-letter
Gazza Speechless
There was a documentary last night about Paul Gascoigne’s descent into his personal mental, alcohol-fuelled hell, and what his children and ex-wife did to try to help him out of it. Shocking and sad, and somehow inevitable.
Yet another documentary focused on Joe Frazier, who now lives in a rundown home in a rundown part of a rundown city. It seems almost incredible that someone of such sporting stature, known throughout the world in his heyday, could be allowed to slip so far down into such a pitiful state. Though to his credit, the man still has his faculties, and some kind of dignity.
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Blah to Blair
Listened to a vile interview on R4 this morning with Blair, talking about the situation in Gaza, speaking from ‘a hotel in Jerusalem’. He doesn’t deviate one inch from the line peddled by Israel, Bush and the rest of the Shock Doctors. What’s the use of this pathetic piece of crap? How much is he being paid for spouting this stuff?
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