Layer 379 . . . Education, Supporting Teachers, Changing Schools, Ken Robinson, and a Royal Wedding

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Aaaaaarrrgggghhhh! Camilla described the announcement of the royal engagement as "wicked"!!!!!!!!!!!

According to Wikipedia, William Windsor (known as Billy), was a goat who served as a lance corporal in the 1st Battalion, the Royal Welsh, an infantry battalion of the British Army, from 2001 until 2009.

William and Kate are both 28 years old and complete twats. Embarrassingly so.

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For more on the value of silence, and on instinctual intelligence and intuition - visit Layer 104.

Also this page in the London Review of Books for a list of books about silence -

http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/home.php?cat=418

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Start The Week

"Through poetry we can make the people we love live forever."

On Start The Week this week there was a conversation about the way in which a great poem can make someone - i.e. its subject - immortal. A great poem can capture the absolute essence of someone. The really great thing about Dylan's tribute poem to Woody Guthrie is that it captures the spirit of the man and his life without really describing the man at all - simply likening him to a lamp or a candle or an oil well, or the magnificence of the Grand Canyon, or a bringer of hope. That's real brilliance.

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Education Oxzen

Katharine Birbalsingh and John Bangs were on the radio yesterday talking about underachievement and behaviour in English schools. Ms B, of course, created a stir by speaking out polemically at the recent Tory party conference.

How to improve classroom discipline, eh? Hmmmmmm.

Ms B believes we need to be 'a lot harder', impose 'a lot more structure', and 'show less compassion' towards the problem kids. Oh well - that should do it.

Thankfully John Bangs spoke really well about the need to make learning "far more exciting, far more relevant". He accused Ms B of talking 'hyperbolae', though he meant hyperbole. He recommended we pay attention to what people like Tony Sewell say about anger management, about motivating kids properly, and about using 'a range of disciplinary techniques and classroom strategies'. He also pointed out that it's not helpful to make generalisations about schools.

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To really understand what's wrong in our most challenging schools it's worth reading the whole of an article that was published in today's Education Guardian.

Why are new teachers leaving in droves?

Nearly half of all newly qualified teachers leave the profession within five years. Charlie Carroll went on the road for a year, working in the most challenging schools, to find out why

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/16/teaching-problem-schools

The idea, when it came, was fully formed, sparked by a surprising statistic I read one morning in the staffroom: nearly half of all England's newly qualified teachers were leaving the profession within their first five years.

I wanted to know why.

So I took to the road to find out:

I spent a year travelling through the 10 areas of the country that were deemed as having the most challenging schools, one month in each, and teaching in those schools. By witnessing the frontline, I could find an answer to why so many teachers were fleeing the profession, and I could journey through my own country – and experience it as I never had before.

My working day was dominated by confrontations with aggressive, disaffected or miserable teenagers.

These were children with a proliferation of asbos; children on terrifyingly high dosages of Ritalin; some with criminal records and, already in their short lives, histories of violence.

I had also seen in these challenging areas some wonderful schools, which, beset as they were with their difficult intake, would still thrive against the odds – three of the schools I had worked at in particularly difficult areas had achieved outstanding status in their most recent Ofsted inspections. What was it, then, that set these schools apart?

It had felt to me in these schools that a teacher really could make a difference. Supported by good and hands-on senior management teams – rather than by shadowy headteachers who rarely enter their classrooms – the teachers knew that any sanctions they implemented would be backed up, which empowered them, in turn, to support and encourage their students to achieve to the best of their capabilities. In one school, when a pupil shouted an expletive at me, the head put him on a temporary exclusion for swearing at a teacher. This kind of thing is what counts.

My aim had been to find out why so many teachers were leaving. And I think I did find my answer – a score of them, in fact, and a few ideas about what can be done to make things better. In order to stop teachers leaving, it's useless throwing money at them (no teacher teaches for the money), or implementing structural innovations such as academies or free schools. Instead, changes need to be made at a much more fundamental, frontline level, which involves supporting teachers and assisting them to support their students to learn and achieve to their maximum capability – which is, after all, what teachers train to do.

Such changes are not dramatic or expensive. They merely require a slight shift in the cultural attitude. With more power to stop violence in the classrooms, with more freedom to exclude those students who cannot cope with mainstream education, with smaller class-sizes, with an enhanced communication between teachers and parents, with protection for teachers against the overwhelming fear of litigation, with the encouragement of a zero-tolerance approach to such unacceptable misbehaviour as violence and psychological abuse (such as cyber-bullying), and with the removal of the league table culture – where schools are unfairly ranked by a cold system of results-based numbers – perhaps teachers would be encouraged to remain in their profession and continue to provide the service so invaluable to this country's future.

I still teach, and at times still love it, but I don't know for how much longer. For, until such changes are implemented, it is this teacher's opinion that the professional exodus will continue.

• Charlie Carroll is a pseudonym. All names have been changed. On The Edge by Charlie Carroll is published by Monday Books, price £8.99.

The great thing about this piece is that hits the nail right on the head. Yes, there are poor teachers who can't cut the mustard and can't cope, but there are also thousands of teachers who would be able to cope and even do well if they had the proper backing of senior management that are determined to get to grips with the really challenging kids and their families. It's true that this requires the determination to spend hundreds of hours of unstinting attention focused on the aggressive and disruptive kids, talking with and counselling children and parents - but there simply is no other way.

You try to understand why the kids are unable to show proper self-control and why they lack so much emotional and social and spiritual intelligence. Then you make it very clear to them where the boundaries lie, and what action will be taken if they fail to control themselves, fail to opt into the school's ethos, and fail to keep within the boundaries. You then apply the sanctions you have outlined in your discussions, which will be gradual, and not harsh, but will eventually end with fixed term and even permanent exclusions.

Of course this assumes that the school is also doing its utmost to make every part of every day worthwhile for the kids - enjoyable, stimulating, rewarding, creative, satisfying and motivating. The child has to WANT to come to school.

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Ken Robinson and the Coming Education Revolution

Everyone who's interested in education simply has to take a look at this brilliant video of Ken Robinson talking about education and schools, and changing paradigms:

http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/elearning/video-sir-ken-robinson-changing-education-paradigms-rsanimate/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded

http://www.sirkenrobinson.com/

Also this TED talk:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4964296663335083307#

See also Layers 162, 171 and 233. 

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Here's something I've missed about Sats, the schools' boycott, the NUT, the NAHT, and Gove

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315657/End-SATs-11-year-olds-2-years-teachers-boycott.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1192939/Tories-pledge-abolish-SAT-tests-11-year-old-children.html
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Layer 355 . . . SATs, Assessment, Gove, Free Schools and Academies, Young, Springsteen, Fry and Wagner

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Year 6 Stress

Children like being tested, they just don't like Sats

Really? Shouldn't this say children like learning and achieving, and having their achievements recognised?

A survey of 1,000 children carried out by the Wellcome Trust shows that children are surprisingly positive about assessment, but they don't think Sats are the best method

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/21/sats-survey-children-positive

A significant new report published today by the Wellcome Trust and seen exclusively by Education Guardian points out that the Sats debate has never canvassed opinions from those at the heart of the matter – children. The trust commissioned academics at Queen's University Belfast to rectify that, carrying out an extensive survey polling 1,000 children, plus parents, on their views of how key stage 2 assessment takes place in primary school.

While the report shows overwhelming support from both children and parents for primary school assessment, it records a strong preference for non-Sats testing.

"Children are more sophisticated than we often give them credit for: the survey results show that they understand why they need assessment, but they also understand the difference between a test that simply measures their ability, and one that gives them feedback and helps them learn."

In the survey, 95% of students said science assessment was "useful", but only 10% said Sats were the best method for finding out how well they were doing in the subject. The reason for that disparity, according to the Wellcome research, was that children liked tests that give them feedback and a consequent chance to improve, but they didn't associate those benefits with Sats.

"Kids get no individual feedback with Sats – just a mark. The tests are not about individuals – and our research showed that children know this, and they know it's not very good," says Bell.

Another concern flagged up in the Wellcome report is the burden placed on children to perform. The researchers highlight one child's comments in the survey that Sats "make you less confident because there is a lot of pressure".

That is a real concern, says Bell. "Schools know that Sats can have a huge effect on their ranking, so many put significant effort into ensuring that the measuring of their kids on Sats day goes well. But it just brings more pressure on kids, and all that time spent doing revision means schools end up losing the richness of the curriculum because Sats dominate everything."

The report also recorded the "largely negative" impact of Sats on children's home life, with year 6 and 7 pupils reporting "feeling stressed or nervous, being made fun of or bullied over their marks, and even talking of assessment causing break-ups between friends". One year 6 child admitted: "My family push me too much and my friends get all nervous and angry and don't want to be friends anymore."

The Wellcome report concludes that children know the value of assessment, but that it makes them stressed and they would prefer it to be broader, including investigations, projects, presentations, and end-of-topic (rather than end-of-year) testing. Bell is now sending the findings out to policymakers, including those involved in the current curriculum review, as well as teachers and education ministers, hoping to bring about change.

"It's not a case of throwing Sats out completely, but designing them more carefully so they're testing what we want to be testing – individuals," he says. "The current system makes pupils stressed, there's too much pressure on producing particular results. We need to remember that we are dealing with children, who need support and help."

Pardon? After all that's said in the report - it's bleeding perverse to say that SATs should continue, rather than being scrapped in favour of proper tracking systems that make use of formative assessment backed up by a certain amount of in-school testing.

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Why I oppose free schools and academies

The coalition government's education policy is incompatible with the basic principles of the Liberal Democrats

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/20/libdemconference-freeschools-academies

by Peter Downes

The academies bill was rushed through parliament in July with a speed and urgency normally reserved for anti-terrorist legislation.

The substance of the act we now have on the statute book is potentially a very significant threat to the stability, fairness and viability of our educational system.

Gove's educational vision is based on a number of fallacies. I want to concentrate on just five.

First, he is very keen to liberate schools from "local authority control". Local authorities do not "control" schools. They used to.

It is the head and governors who make the vast majority of the decisions as to how the school functions. The LA is there to provide a whole range of services and support, including: curriculum advice and challenge;
coordination of admissions; and the cost-effective provision of enough school places for children coming through the system.

Clearly some LAs perform these functions more effectively than others but there is no justification for dismantling a structure that has an essential and invaluable role.

The greatest interference in schools today comes not from local authorities but from central government: a highly prescriptive national curriculum and shelf-loads of guidance; an oppressive inspection regime; an obsession with targets and putting schools into categories; and a never-ending stream of education acts and hundreds of regulations.

Gove's accusatory finger of excessive control should be pointed at central not local government.

The second fallacy is that there needs to be a massive upheaval in the school system because of parental dissatisfaction with schools as they currently function. This is simply not true. The latest DCSF survey of parental views on the schools their children attend shows that 94% of parents are extremely satisfied, very satisfied or fairly satisfied with the school their children attend. A very small minority have serious reservations. These need to be addressed, but there is no widespread demand for schools to be revolutionised.

An Ipsos/Mori poll recently reported that 96% of parents want their children to go to a good local schools within the local authority family.

There is no popular support for a root and branch reform on the scale envisaged by the academies act.

Fallacy number three is that changing the structure of the school system raises standards. The idea is that you call schools by another name and re-organise them and standards will somehow rise. The academic research on pupil performance gives a different finding. Dylan Wiliam, from the London Institute of Education, says it's not the school you're in that matters, it's the classroom. So our national efforts should be focused on improving teaching and learning rather than on an expensive and distracting administrative re-structuring.

Fallacy four is the idea that academies and free schools are part of the localism agenda. Nothing could be further from the truth. I quote from the DfE website: "The Young People's Learning Agency will fund, monitor, regulate and handle complaints about academies." This isn't localism – it is a massive centralisation of our school system.

The most dangerous fallacy of all is the idea that the principles of the market place can be applied to state-funded education. "Good" schools are expected to expand; "free schools" will provide competition so that under-performing or failing schools will have to improve their performance or wither and die.

Just as the supermarket drives the corner shop out of business, so it will be with schools.

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Simon Jenkins:

Another middle-class escape tunnel parents don't want

He may see them as a way of saving children from local politics – but Gove's free schools are just a blackboard Tea Party

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/21/middle-class-escape-free-schools

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Britain's Youngest Boarders

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00txn31

Brilliant. Shocking.

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The BBC's Battle of Britain programmes continue to be superb:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11022335

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Culture Corner

Neil Young: Le Noise

Neil Young's latest is frightened, confused, and a bit of an effort. All good signs, says Alexis Petridis

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/23/neil-young-le-noise-cd-review

Le Noise demands more effort than some listeners might be willing to put in, but at its best, it repays that effort pretty handsomely. In that sense at least, it pretty much sums up Neil Young's entire career.

deadflowers94
Brilliant album, Neil's best since Sleeps With Angels and probably my favourite of this year.

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Bruce Springsteen: 'People thought we were gone. Finished'

Hobbled by legal wrangles, a frustrated Bruce Springsteen turned Born to Run's optimism on its head – and Darkness on the Edge of Town was born.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/23/bruce-springsteen-darkness-edge-town

Springsteen is in Toronto, where The Promise, a documentary about the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, is receiving its world premiere at the city's film festival.

The notion of "authenticity" will always attend Springsteen, owing to his espousal of the basic human values of community and civility in tandem with material wealth, a paradox that coalesced around Darkness on the Edge of Town. Consequently, The Promise offers a valuable insight to Springsteen's motivation at a key moment in his life.

As work proceeded throughout the second half of 1977 and into 1978, Springsteen's conception for the new album hardened. He had become influenced by the film versions of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, and John Ford westerns such as The Searchers, whose themes of essentially decent men assailed by external forces resonated on a personal and increasingly political level with this shy product of working-class New Jersey. He began posing himself Big Questions: "How do you make a way through the day and still sleep at night?" "How do you carry your sins?"

"I veered towards music that I felt would speak of people's life experiences."

"Thirty five years staying connected . . . That's why I think the band continues to improve. You can't be afraid of getting old. Old is good, if you're gathering in life. Our band is good at understanding that equation."

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A Bit More of Fry and Wagner

Stephen Fry's at it again with his Wagner obsession. (see also Layer 346)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/sep/23/stephen-fry-wagner

You can't allow the perverted views of pseudo-intellectual Nazis to define how the world should look at Wagner.

All of us who love Wagner are familiar with another argument, where people will say: "It's too powerful, there's something wrong with music that can have that much effect." Is it earned? Is it too much? Is it manipulative? Is it unfair for music to have this unbelievable ability to make one shake in quite that way? There are those who disapprove of Wagner purely on that aesthetic ground.

There are those of us who "disapprove" on the grounds that there is FAR more enjoyable music available, and life's far too short to waste it on bombastic, germanic, martial bollocks like Wagner. Is it earned? Is it lovely? Is it too little? Is it pretentious twaddle? Is it mad posturing? Is it squawking, screeching, twittering tish tosh twattishness?

Perfect music (Ride of the Valkyries) for a mad murdering US Air Cav commander like Kilgore in Apocalypse Now to play loud as his Hueys bombed, rocketed and machine-gunned the shit out of Vietnamese villages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz3Cc7wlfkI&feature=player_embedded

Stephen's ambition is to produce, at enormous expense, an animated version of The Ring.

Not a cheesy cartoon, but a truly serious animated Ring. Because – let's face it – in the last five minutes you've got a Valkyrie getting on a horse, galloping into a flaming funeral pyre then being covered by the river Rhine, while the palace of the gods crumbles into dust in the background.

Think what you could do with beautifully and properly presented animation. So my ambition is to one day meet a Russian oligarch billionaire who has a passion, because it would cost a huge amount of money. But wouldn't that be fantastic?

Er . . . no. That would be a fucking huge waste of money that could be far better spent on far more worthwhile projects and causes. Best keep those fantasies of Valkyries, galloping horses, flaming funeral pyres and palaces of the gods crumbling into dust right there in your head, Stephen dearest.
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Layer 294 . . . Heads, Tests, Preston, Maitreya, Zen, Bodhisattvas and Low Points In Human Existence

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I don't know whether to draw attention to this or not, but Peter Preston is back in the Guardian today with another pile of crap about schools, headteachers and SATs. Depressing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/02/teachers-sats-test-boycott-union?

What can one say that hasn't already been said? Thank goodness for CIF and all the Below The Line contributors. But why on earth does the Guardian continue to give this man space for his ludicrous views? If he's so desperate to have them published he ought to take them to the Daily Mail, which is where they belong, along with those of Melanie Phillips & Co. Which reminds me - she seems to have gone quiet lately . . .

Oh no she hasn't. Or if she's piped down a bit, she's still churning out her stuff in plenty of places. If you really want to know where - http://www.melaniephillips.com/

See also:

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/10/layer-206-more-damned-targets.html

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2008/10/layer-78-education-regulation-and.html

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The Maitreya

This Maitreya thing is really quite interesting. I found this today on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitreya

Maitreya is a bodhisattva who in the Buddhist tradition is to appear on Earth, achieve complete enlightenment, and teach the pure dharma. According to scriptures, Maitreya will be a successor of the historic Śākyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The prophecy of the arrival of Maitreya is found in the canonical literature of all Buddhist sects (Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna), and is accepted by most Buddhists as a statement about an event that will take place when Dharma will be forgotten on Earth.

One mention of the prophecy of Maitreya is in the Sanskrit  text, the Maitreyavyākaraṇa  (The Prophecy of Maitreya). It implies that he is a teacher of meditative trance sadhana and states that gods, men, and other beings:

    "will lose their doubts, and the torrents of their cravings will be cut off: free from all misery they will manage to cross the ocean of becoming; and, as a result of Maitreya's teachings, they will lead a holy life. No longer will they regard anything as their own, they will have no possession, no gold or silver, no home, no relatives! But they will lead the holy life of chastity under Maitreya's guidance. They will have torn the net of the passions, they will manage to enter into trances, and theirs will be an abundance of joy and happiness, for they will lead a holy life under Maitreya's guidance." (Trans. in Conze 1959:241)

This all sounds like standard mainstream Buddhism, which, to a Zennist, is . . . a little simplistic.

By the way - this guy is huge!

In Theravada Buddhism, a bodhisattva is one who is striving for full enlightenment (Arahantship in Pali), whereas in Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva is one who has already reached a very advanced state of grace or enlightenment but holds back from entering nirvana so that he may help others.

Maitreya's coming is characterized by a number of physical events. The oceans are predicted to decrease in size, allowing Maitreya to traverse them freely. The event will also allow the unveiling of the "true" dharma to the people, in turn allowing the construction of a new world. The coming also signifies the end of the middle time in which humans currently reside (characterized as a low point of human existence between the Gautama Buddha and Maitreya.)

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The Election

A low point of human existence? It certainly will be if Cameron & Co are in Downing Street by the end of this week. Or at least a low point in the sad recent history of this country - downhill all the way from Thatcher and then on through the eras of Major, Blair and Brown. If people can't see by now that neo-conservative ideology and neo-liberal economics have created the financial disasters, and they still want to elect sons of Thatch such as Cameron, Osborne and Gove, then we really are at a very low point.

The good news, however, is that the polls are still showing that solid support for the Tories is around the levels that Michael Howard achieved - the low 30%s. This is no more than their core vote - i.e. there will always be this nucleus of reactionary and self-serving opinion, come what may. In any normal distribution there will always be a hard core of about one third who don't give a shit about anyone but themselves and those who are already well off. The opposite third will tend to put the good of society as a whole above their own (financial and material) self interest. The middle third will always have a vague belief in 'fairness'.

Had New Labour done the right thing at some point during the past decade we'd already have a political system that would, through proportional representation, guarantee government by the more enlightened two thirds, keeping in check the one third who are basically either dupes and idiots or fat cats and would-be fat cats.

I used to think you couldn't really blame the wealthy for wanting to protect their own interests against those who'd like to have a more equal society, but since the publication of The Spirit Level even they should be able to see that the haves as well as the don't haves actually gain from greater equality. That's to say - they'd see if only they were looking. Enlightenment and clear vision, however, are not on their agenda.
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Layer 291 . . . Fitness, Fatness, Fighting, Boycotting and Voting

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It's been a busy week - mainly trying to keep up with the outpourings in the press about the election and the debates. Too busy reading to do any writing.

Too Fat To Fight

It seems the biggest threat to the American armed forces is the stark fact that so many of their potential recruits are considered too overweight, and therefore incapable of being effective killers. I'm not sure what sumo wrestlers would make of this.

This is on a par with Arlo Guthrie being turned down by the draft on the grounds of being a convicted criminal - having once been fined for dumping litter. Guthrie, clearly, didn't want to be drafted into the army to go and fight in VietNam, whereas the fatties . . . It shows a great lack of faith in being able to slim them down during basic training. Still - it's for their own good. You can't be too careful when you're out there trying to project  military power.

There's physical fatness, and there's spiritual fitness and fatness. The majority of New Labour's troops were clearly too fat to fight against social injustice and inequality. Why else were they so fucking ineffectual during the last 13 years? They were indolent, sluggish, bloated & moated, expenses-fiddling comfort-lovers, the vast majority of them. You can expect someone like Nicholas Soames to be nothing but a useless reactionary tub of lard, but corporeal lardiness is clearly no indicator of fitness for purpose when it comes to fighting for a better world for the less well off, since the majority of the New Labour crowd were not morbidly obese in anything but a spiritual sense.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8655651.stm

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'Vote for me, I'm flawed'

Meanwhile, Suzanne Moore, left wing journalist and columnist, and longtime resident of Hackney - well-known wearer of lipstick and fuck-me shoes, according to Germain G - has decided to stand for election in Hackney North & Stoke Newington - the safe seat of Dianne Abbott. Go Suzy!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/30/suzanne-moore-independent-candidate

http://www.dalstonpeople.co.uk/news/Q-Independent-Candidate-Hackney-North-Stoke-Newington-Suzanne-Moore/article-2036702-detail/article.html

http://twitter.com/moore4hackney
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/03/gordonbrown.davidcameron
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Guardian Goes LibDem

Under the headline 'The liberal moment has come' the Guardian today declares its support for the LibDems, with the proviso that people should still vote Labour in Labour/Conservative marginals. Exactly. THIS IS A SINGLE ISSUE ELECTION. All three of the major parties stupidly support drastic cuts in public services. The one big issue now is to  get  a referendum on proportional representation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/30/the-liberal-moment-has-come

Polly Toynbee also comments on tactical voting and proportional representation:

Next Saturday at 2pm, after the election, an instant-response protest is planned in Parliament Square by a score of democracy groups demanding proportional representation and pressing Nick Clegg to accept nothing less. If everything hangs in the balance then reform can still be won.

But if Cameron has won his majority, this event will be a mournful wake. The sound and fury will signify nothing: winner takes all, however huge the majority that voted against him. Your vote is indeed precious, so use it tactically to win reform so that you never need vote tactically again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/01/precious-vote-apathy-tactical-voting

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Also Too Fat To Fight?

Many headteachers will be quavering at the thought their pay will be docked if they fail to implement SATs tests in their schools, even though the NAHT and the NUT have passed resolutions supporting a boycott of the tests. Headteachers are in many ways a wonderful group of people, but it can't be denied that their lack of fight and lack of determination to do right by their pupils has allowed successive governments to inflict things on our schools and on our education system that should never have been tolerated. Time to finally stand up and be counted.

"School governors have been told by the government they could send heads home if they boycotted the tests.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls wrote to them setting out their responsibilities and what action they could take if their head took part in the joint NUT and NAHT boycott.

The National Governors' Association (NGA) says it is not clear it would be legal to send heads home and is asking the government for details.

They say there is a "huge climate of uncertainty".

Neither union has mandated the heads and deputies it balloted to take part in the action.

This means it is up to individual head teachers to decide what action to take and no-one will be thrown out from their unions if they go against a boycott."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/10094201.stm

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Jon Stewart rocks! -


http://tv.gawker.com/5528164/jon-stewart-mocks-the-laughable-tameness-of-british-political-scandals
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Layer 276 . . . Going Forward, Easter Weekend, Spiritual Intelligence, Christian Brothers, a Zen Son, and Vincent Van Gogh

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Going Forward

I hate people using the expression "going forward" when they mean "in future". Where did this bollocks come from? NO regular person says "going forward". It's management-speak, think-tank speak, government speak, and I fucking hate it.

Some jerk on the radio just now said, "We need to have all of this in our policy going forward" - which is a sentence that needs neither "going forward" nor "in future" - unless someone means it's something that we should NOT have in our policy right now, but WILL need it to be policy at some future date. In either case, nothing and nobody is "going forward".

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Easter

Easter came and went quite pleasantly, with some decent sunshine and warmer weather towards the end. The first of the flowering cherries out in the street is in full blossom - well ahead of the others. The neighbours' magnolia is just starting to open out. The forsythias are still at their peak of yellowness.

Feeling motivated by the sunshine yesterday I managed to re-pot a number of houseplants, and sowed several packets of seeds in various trays and containers. Hopefully this will be a good year for sunflowers. Hopefully it'll be a good year for sun.

Good Friday

There was an item on the Today programme that began with the question, "Will you be going to a church this Easter weekend?" No. Obviously.

It led into a discussion about the "wider place of spirituality in society . . . a sense of the divine . . . the place of particular institutions in society . . . a general loss of faith in the old imperial God . . . belief in a 'higher power'".

There was a consideration of "something else going on . . . belief in 'a god' without membership of a particular institution . . . a sense of the divine that's more subtle than the church version".

Some geezer from the "Institute of Social Change" (David Voas?) reckons that two thirds of us believe in a higher power of some kind, but don't belong to a religious institution. There are only one million regular church attenders in Britain, and only one sixth of us have a firm belief in God. However, most people think there's "something out there" - "something powerful that can't be ignored". The new 'post-Christian' spirituality movement includes non-godbotherers such as Buddhists and paganists.

Many people have a new kind of "faith", but reject a "simplistic, authoritarian teaching that no longer appeals". Something new may be emerging - something that sees connections between different faith traditions.

All of which I find quite encouraging - if EVEN the people of Britain are starting to sense the existence of a spiritual intelligence that connects all people all of the time.

http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/socialchange/

..........................................

I forgot to mention in the last blog that Emma Thompson spoke very movingly about the loss of her father, in terms of missing his warmth, his generosity, his wit, his calming influence . . . "

Clearly he was an extremely spiritually intelligent individual. A giver and not a taker.

......................................

The teaching unions have their annual conferences at this time of the year, and they've been talking about boycotting SATs again. Why? I thought they'd agreed last year that they shouldn't have anything more to do with the damnable things.

On the Today programme Alan Smithers and also someone from the Sutton Trust (Lee Elliott-Major? Lee Elliott (major)?) talked about the need to sort out our Early Years education and "exam overload". Smithers talked about the government running schools centrally as "franchise factories".

Sutton Trust man concluded that we need to "radically re-think education".

Clearly, however, neither of these guys has any idea about what to DO. Knowing the way Smithers leans politically - he of the private "University of Buckingham" - you have to assume that when he talks about radical changes in the Early Years he's probably wanting 'formal' learning (phonics, etc) to begin even earlier, in order to try to boost attainment.

Why does a flagship programme like Today insist of wheeling on such know-nothing pundits who clearly have no recent or relevant experience of children, teachers or schools, let alone any coherent ideas about the kind of revolution in education we really need, for the sake of all our children.

http://www.suttontrust.com/

.......................................

Easter Monday

Start The Week - Radio 4

Three cheers for the Archbishop Rowan Williams - for blurting out that the Catholic church (in Ireland?) is now an institution that has "suddenly lost all credibility".

["Suddenly"? Well done all of us atheists and non-believers who realised this a long time ago!

How typical of Blair to convert to RC just as all this shit hit the fan.

But how come nobody's talking about the church's Christian Brothers sect and their decades-long involvement in child abuse of all sorts, including beatings, humiliation and sexual assaults? I first heard about these people about 30 years ago from someone who'd had personal experience of what the priests and nuns got up to in their schools. 30 years down the line I've recently realised that by no means everybody has even heard of the so-called Christian Brothers.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_of_Christian_Brothers   -   see section on 'Scandals'.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/thousands-raped-in-irelands-christian-brothers-schools-14308329.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6350520.ece

Williams talked on the programme about honesty and truthfulness as being necessary if Christianity is going to survive. So even the Archbish has his doubts about the survival of Christianity!

Phillip Pullman, the well-known author and atheist, was also on the programme, talking about his new book which praises "Jesus - the man", but condemns "Christ - the church - the institutionalisation of a 'spiritual vision' ". Large bureaucratic structures do it no justice, especially when they betray the real teachings of Jesus.

Professor Mona Siddiqui pointed out that Sunni Islam doesn't have any bureaucracy.

Williams mentioned that the Quakers don't either. But he was concerned about "ensuring consistency down the centuries", and therefore the need for a bureaucracy. Sounds like some kind of C of E inspectorate - Offgod.

He also said the life of Jesus created an 'explosion of ideas', and therefore there was a need for an organised Christian bureaucracy to package and market what it saw as the key ideas.

Mona Siddiqui spoke about the Davos meetings of the World Economic Forum in which many of the most powerful business leaders have said their businesses don't have an "ethical framework". Apparently they would like one!

However, the majority of those businessmen, whilst they're apparently keen to give money to "good works" after they're made their fortune, don't really want to switch to an ethical business framework which might inhibit their ability to accumulate scandalous levels of profits and salaries.

Philip Pullman pointed out that the profit motive will continue to dominate above all other considerations, besides which, the directors of companies are legally constrained NOT to 'do good' - and only to maximise profits for shareholders.

Pullman also reminded listeners that values, morality and ethics have NO direct link with religion, as such.

David Baddiel, also an atheist, was also on the programme, chipping in some thoughts about relativity, truth and sources of empathy.

The Archbish had the last word, claiming that the universe comes from God. So there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum

........................................................................

A Third Way?

Why can't these Christians and Muslims (and atheists) understand the concept of spiritual intelligence, the importance of pursuing enlightenment through direct experience and meditation, seeking inner truth, and developing lovingkindness?

Which would they rather have - a planet without any religion but with all the people holding peace and lovingkindness in their hearts and souls, just as Jesus and Muhammad urged - or a planet full of people who believe in 'God' but who go around killing and abusing one another?

The idea of a God and a Supreme Being is completely useless. So are popes and archbishops who claim to speak with and on behalf of 'God'.

Why was there no Buddhist on the programme? Is it just a numbers game - like, we have very few Buddhists in this country and therefore the Buddhist viewpoint can be completely ignored, no matter how useful, logical and sane it may be?

No - let's just focus on the useless, the illogical and the plain insane, and we'll call it "faith". We're all quite familiar, comfortable and secure with that.

...................................................

How many parents in this quaint little country can say they're blessed with a child who quotes them the sayings of the Zen masters? Like mine said to me yesterday - "One often meets his destiny on a path he takes to avoid it."

He also told me I shouldn't make a habit of thinking about worst-case scenarios when considering options and actions. Dat's ma boy!

.................................................

Vincent

There was a fabulous programme on BBC1 yesterday  - Vincent Van Gogh: Painted With Words. Every word spoken by the characters or the voice over was written either by Vincent himself, or his brother Theo, or another contemporary.

Many years ago I bought and read a book of the correspondence between Vincent and his brother, but having it brought to life so vividly on the screen, accompanied by close-ups of the paintings and drawings, was mesmerising. Catch it on iPlayer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rzj61/Van_Gogh_Painted_with_Words/

I hadn't realised that in his determination to "make himself useful to those he saw suffering around him" he'd tried to become both a teacher's assistant and a church minister. Having failed at both, by the age of 30, he poured his spiritual intelligence and energy into his art, which he realised was truly his vocation. A man of the people, he identified strongly with peasants, working people and outcasts. The works of Dickens, and his descriptions of the squalor and poverty of the working classes, made a huge impression on him. He also read Zola - "The supreme chronicler of the oppressed and tormented working classes".

He wrote to Theo, "In art one must give one's heart and soul"

He had a passion for Japanese prints, which was also shared by Gauguin and Monet. He loved their colour and their compositions.

In February 1888 he moved to Arles, and reveled in the vivid colours and the quality of light.

"I revel in the heat - like a cicada! I don't need Japanese prints here!"

Soon, however, it became clear he was suffering from bipolar disorder.

"So many days pass without me saying a word to anyone. It worries me to spend so much time on my own."

He fantasised about starting an artists' colony in the south. He painted pictures of sunflowers to decorate his rooms and his studio, anticipating the arrival of Gauguin.

He said, "Let me quietly continue my work. If it's that of a madman, then too bad."

However, he discovered that working and "screwing" were incompatible!

In October 1888 he took off a slice of his ear, which he presented to a prostitute.

"I wouldn't exactly have chosen madness, had there been a choice."

By May 1889 he'd more or less come to terms with his 'madness', and was alternating periods of 'extreme excitability' and 'amazing creativity' with being completely unable to work.

He did several paintings of The Reaper working in a cornfield, having visions of Death cutting down humanity.

Eventually he went to live in an asylum - the St Remy sanatorium - where he became calm and lucid, and passionately devoted to his painting. Most of the time.

In July 1890 he went to Paris to see his brother, who had a new child. He suddenly felt like a liability. "Living at your expense, I feel the pointlessness of my life."

His final works were of black crows, flying above cornfields. They were possibly an attempt to express sadness, and extreme loneliness. He then walked out into the fields and shot himself in the chest. He was 37.

Theo wrote, "There was nothing anyone could do. Life weighed so heavily upon him."

Barely 6 months later Theo died of syphilis, at the age of 33. Could it be that Vincent knew that his brother was terminally ill?

.............................................

Questions

Given that Vincent was simply a brilliant artist, and had no idea how to go about selling his work, how much effort had his brother really made to sell the paintings on Vincent's behalf?

What's it mean to say that life "weighs heavily" upon someone?

Maybe great artists are those who truly apprehend the human condition, in all its brilliance, and all its joy, and also in all its misery and pain. Such sensitivity, such capacity to feel incredible amounts of loneliness and isolation, for example, in oneself and also in other people, as Vincent certainly did, must surely be unbearable from time to time.

Vincent's real tragedy, I reckon, was needing to rely on his brother for funds, and the feeling of being a burden that came with that. He surely lacked - bizarrely - self-respect and self-esteem. He didn't see himself as "successful". He didn't have close friends or a partner who could care for him through his periods of depression, who could tell him how wonderful his art was. Lacking friendship, close family, intimacy, laughter, and ordinary day to day joys in life, no wonder he came to feel that life was pointless.

............................................

I think what we now know about depression and bipolar disorder is that there's no way to properly address the inability to feel any joie de vivre if one's brain isn't regulating its production of serotonin properly. Perhaps bipolar disease simply means that production of serotonin swings wildly between under- and over-production, whereas straightforward chronic clinical depression is simply due to a long-term failure to produce sufficient serotonin.

It seems pretty obvious that such conditions - such chemical imbalances - are exacerbated if for any reason we also fail to produce any of the pleasure chemical endorphin.

These things are becoming maybe less of a mystery, but are none the less problems that are difficult to address for a whole lot of people.
.

Layer 231 . . . Ofsted is Failing . . . Comment is Free

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We're nearing the end of Let's Kick Ofsted week, so here's another selection of colourful and concise comments from the Guardian's Comment Is Free pages.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/23/flawed-ofsted-fails-inspections?

HappyBirthday
23 Nov 2009, 1:38PM
It's about time this ridiculous regime was seen for what it is. It's anecdotal evidence, but I bet it's easily repeated all over the country. Ofsted go into schools having already decided which schools have failed.

 My friend was deemed inadequate because two 10 year old boys decided they wanted the same ruler for a few seconds (bickering politely in whispers so the class was not disturbed!). They sorted it out amongst themselves (one decided to use another ruler) and did not interrupt the lesson. In fact, they finished all their work as directed and worked hard. The teacher was at the other end of the classroom and hadn't noticed as all equipment had been provided to groups before the lesson. The Inspector focused on this as the only incident of the teacher not having control of the class. She was failed despite the whole class working hard and there being no other incident in the lesson. Ofsted are just unaccountable bullies.

scodman
23 Nov 2009, 1:43PM
What more can one expect from a government obsessed with spin, news management and tomorrow's headlines.
Almost every time I sit down to my boiled egg and open the newspaper, I read of a new education initiative. Perhaps this Government now thinks that it is part of the media and, like newspapers, needs to come up with a new headline every day.
Isn't it time that the whole quangocracy was booted out and a system devised that leaves education to teachers and parents? It must be freed once and for all from the pernicious machinations of Labour's Ministry of Social Engineering.

bitzadog 
23 Nov 2009, 1:50PM
HMI was once a serious and respected organisation. The process of politicising its replacement OFSTED began with the Tories and the pompous idiot Woodenhead, but its now made worse by the ludicrous stretch of its role to include social work with children. Yet another self inflicted bullet in the foot of a government of which teachers and social workers once had some hope. Tragic.
 
dukeofmarlborough
23 Nov 2009, 1:55PM
So our benevolent bully government have invented yet another bloated, centralised bullying check box system which has actually turned out to be a total waste of money, a demoralising episode for workers who are already underpaid and overworked...........well there's a surprise.

mawbags
23 Nov 2009, 2:11PM
Measuring, Targets, Performance
Have destroyed every facet of public service with this ridiculous obsession with measuring the unmeasurable. They reward cheating and exploitation and force people not to see fit what to do with what is presented in front of them, but are forced to act in ways to achieve imaginary points.

asheroy
23 Nov 2009, 2:49PM
This appalling organisation should have been scrapped long ago. The voice used for propagating so called "best practice" as devised by the morons in government and relayed down the line by fools who cannot stand up in a class without falling over their monopoly flags of truth.
For too many tears we have lived with these talentless meglomaniacs inspiring an education system based on targets, form filling, one size fits all pedagogy and a wealth of exams which measure nothing.

socialistMike
23 Nov 2009, 3:19PM
Sickening, but all too bloody predictable, seeing tories blame Labour for Ofsted. It was a tory creation, developed to get rid of local democratic accountability that we used to have under the Local Education Authorities. It has always been weilded as a politcal tool to hammer the education system. The whole idea was corrupted from the start. Like league tables there was always a dual aim behind the policy - to rank schools and to allocate funding on that basis. We need to seperate these two things since, quite obviously, in any rational world not dominated by the interests of the richest, funding should go to the schools that need help most, not take money away because a school happens to have a greater than average number of poor students, and thus a greater than average need in educational terms.

Instead of abolishing this unfair, arbitrary and undemocratic setup New Labour not only continued it but retained that elitist Chris Woodhead - a man who hates public eduction as a concept, it seems - as its head. Another pathetic Blairite triangulation that lost them support in one of their real heartlands - the teaching profession and won 0 tory voters to new labour (tories don't care about education, only making it more class biased).
Let's go back to local democratic control of education again and have a good school in every neighbourhood as our aim, and end the poisonous involvement of rich and fundamentalist zealots in education.

FishKid
23 Nov 2009, 3:29PM
I am a Secondary school teacher in London.
I lost my faith in Ofsted, finally, the day it came in and awarded the school in which I work an "excellent curriculum" - this is a school where the curriculum has narrowed so much that pupils can drop Art/History/Languages at the age of thirteen and where Work-Related Learning/ and various BTEC courses rule all. I've spoken with kids who cannot even recall conducting an actual experiment in a Science lesson - to give you some idea - they just watch video recordings of them.
Ofsted is guilty of many things, but it is the watering down of subject choices in pursuit of League Table glory which is destroying meaningful education. Just as long as kids get GCSE grade Cs in English and Maths - that's all that matters.

People would weep if they knew what was going on. Happily for those who
perpetuate this culture, the average parent is quite easy to hoodwink.

dunmaglass
23 Nov 2009, 4:53PM
I know a school in Solihull that has been wrecked by a Headteacher who's only concern was passing OFSTEDs. The kids are out of control, the best teachers have deserted her mad regime, and all that matters in this school is pulling the wool over the eyes of the OFSTED inspectors which she has managed to do three times.
I suspect there are many schools just like this one.
Many new Heads have been selected by Authorities because on interview they convince Local Authority inspectors, and the ignorant mass of school governors, that they have the wherewithall to get the school through OFSTEDs.
Now wonder education is in such a bloody mess!

Downing
23 Nov 2009, 5:01PM
1 Ofsted was created by Ken Clarke
2 They used to be led by highly trained Registered Inspectors with a long history of successful teaching 3 Inspections used to comprise a team of 4-16 in a school for 3-5 full days
4 All aspects, subjects and teachers were inspected.
5 A Parents' summary and value for money statement was given in the report.
Now
1 1/2 inspectors are in for 1/2 days
2 Inspectors have very little experience in inspecting all aspects of the school
3 Few lessons are observed and only a small sample of teachers, thus their experience is diminished and thus their expertise
4 No value for money statement is provided in the report which is about two pages long.
I personally challenged the judgements of an Ofsted inspection in 2007 (350 children inspected by 1 inspector in 1 day). It took over a year to prove my case through the use of Freedom of Information Act (I was a Registered inspector for 15 years and retired in 2004 disgusted at the new regime). Finally, the Adjudicator agreed with me that the inspection was poor and the school should be reinspected. I am still waiting for the re-inspection and parents have been duped now for two years.

deborahlewis
23 Nov 2009, 5:04PM
I have been a primary school teacher in various roles for 17 years. The curriculum is geared towards passing SATS and OFSTED. The children are suffering, the curriculum is not child centred. We are not educating chilren, we are schooling them. It is an educational abuse of childrens minds.

Fozzie
23 Nov 2009, 8:33PM
I know a primary school that came very near the top of its local LEA league table--in terms of value added--this year that has been put into special measures. The head, advisors and other heads in the borough were astounded. And even the inspectors were embarrassed saying that the new regime leaves them with no option.
The new inspection regime brought in by Balls is grossly unjust because the weighting given to value added has been vastly reduced. And as the article states, schools cannot be rated good if they have low exam results--no matter how much valued they have added.
Schools in sink estate areas where exam results tend to be low are now in an impossible situation. No matter much they succeed in pushing up value added, they can, and are, being put into special measures if test results are low. This has created an immense morale crisis.

AniBrooker
23 Nov 2009, 8:59PM
OFSTED inspectors are draconian torture for teachers, students and any kind of residual ethos of free-thinking within education.
I have a tendency to waffle but where these people are concerned, after watching them maul my school and its mostly wonderful staff to pieces, it is very simple:
Go away - and never, ever return.

Devongooner
23 Nov 2009, 8:59PM
I have been a teacher for 26 years. I have been through many HMI and Ofsted inspections. My main gripe with Ofsted is the lack of constructive feedback to individuals. I have never had any useful or helpful comment from an inspector. So the exercise is NOT about making teachers better.

It does not help schools identify weaknesses, any decent school will know this already.
The new style inspections are even worse. Ofsted visit the school for TWO days (inspections ARE expensive, so lets cut the number of days and get the school to do loads of the paperwork in advance!), how can they possibly get an accurate impression in that time? Some comments above about how schools can 'put on a show' for the inspectors, papering over the cracks are spot on.

Ajay100
23 Nov 2009, 11:23PM
The greatest disservice to education was the removal of HMI through the introduction of Ofsted.
HMI had credibility and above all a sense of wisdom that left schools feeling valued. School improvement was presented within a positive framework. Schools were encouraged to develop and were supported.
Professionally if there were enough bravery amongst out leadership teams in our schools we could bring this system to its knees . . .

AdamTut
24 Nov 2009, 9:03AM
"I'm sorry if this is going to upset some people but as a parent I'm glad Ofsted is out there inspecting, because there's no one else doing it."
With respect, Realistic, you've missed the point of most of the comments above. It's not that teachers or parents don't want inspections - it's that they want inspections that are helpful, evidence-based, and conducted by experts, not driven by box-ticking and hoop jumping, and that actually contribute in a meaningful way to children's welfare. As did HMI in its day.
I'm a parent too, as well as a school governor, and I can assure you that Ofsted inspections for the most part have precisely the opposite effect to what is intended - not because teachers and schools don't want to be inspected, but because inspections are ludicrously bureaucratic, look at the wrong things, and are clearly driven by political expediency rather than by any real desire to improve children's education and safety.

petecrockett
24 Nov 2009, 1:10PM
In response to Realistic Parent . . .  Finland disproves your argument. One of the best education systems in the world without an overbearing inspectorate, league tables or testing.

BlueH
25 Nov 2009, 10:32AM
I have a wife and daughter both teachers and both being made painfully aware by their LAs that their looming Ofsted inspections are likely to downgrade them from their ratings at previous inspections, or worse, put them in special measures purely on the basis of "failing to safeguard children" . Stories abound of schools being put straight into special measures on day 1 of inspections, regardless of how good they are educationally. This purely on one persons subjective view on one aspect of the school's performance. I know of another school where a manager at a meeting of the management team said they had never known such a tense depressed atmosphere pervading the whole team, purely because of this issue. For teachers striving to do their utmost in difficult schools often with very challenging children, this is one more piece of stress they don't need.

Now of course no-one is suggesting children should be anything but safe, but have our schools suddenly become such dark and dangerous places? Of course not. So why is this witch hunt happening? Well this is the organisation who gave Haringey childcare dept a favourable report just after Baby P died and for which they were roundly criticised. Ofsted are just symptomatic of our blame culture society and are now ensuring they cover their own backsides, but at what cost? Demoralised and stressed heads and teachers distracted from their real job of educating our children, with Schools reluctant to do anything that smacks of risk or innovation.
Recruitment of Primary Heads is already in crisis, soon it will be a job nobody wants with consequent impact on standards.

wildskel
I agree with pretty much all I read above- I'm a primary teacher in a school in a very deprived area. we got ofsteded in June under the old system and had some character who probably hadn't been in front of a class come in and "observe" me for 20 minutes before making his judgement. I declined his offer for feedback, much to his surprise but what did he really know either about me and my teaching, the children, or in fact about teaching per se?

So the new system takes no account of local deprivation etc etc etc this being seen by the bloated irrelevance as "excuses" or a slacker's charter.. well, we may as well give up now- I know that for most of the children in my school "learning" and "personalised learning" and "excellence and enjoyment" and all the other little aphorisms churned out by ed balls and his chums are way down the hierarchy of needs- a good square meal, a wash and not getting verbally abused at home (or worse) come way before that.
It's high time professionals in education grew a pair and just refused to co-operate with the irrelevant, punitive self serving industry of "inspection". C'mon the revolution starts here!
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Layer 210 . . . Education, Equality, Transformation and Alexander

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There were two columns in the Guardian yesterday that were worth reading on the subject of education.

Firstly, in the Response column, Warwick Mansell, author of “Education by Numbers: the Tyranny of Testing”, wrote a piece under the heading,

Targets are not the way to make schools accountable
Sats tests cause pupils great harm and the information they provide is often of little use

Peter Preston, in discussing the Cambridge primary review, repeated misconceptions which regularly feature in the debate about whether the current system of holding schools – and other public services – to account is working effectively (In praise of targets, 19 October).

First, he said that "around a fifth of all children moving on to secondary education at 11 remain fundamentally illiterate". In 2009, 20% did indeed fail to reach the government's "expected" level – level 4 – in English tests. But most of those achieved level 3, which has been defined, for reading, by the people who set the tests, as "pupils read a range of texts fluently and accurately". Level 4 was originally set at what the average pupil would achieve.

Second, Preston suggested that parents would be worse off if they "didn't know exactly what was going on" through the Sats tests. But this overlooks whether the information provided by the Sats is actually of much use. A report by Ofsted last year said schools could boost their pupils' performance in the maths tests without building underlying problem-solving ability, partly because the tests do not assess it well.

The English tests have been criticised for a mechanistic mark scheme which can overlook and marginalise imaginative writing. And the science tests were abandoned last year following widespread complaints from scientists that they sidelined practical science work.

More fundamentally, most of the difference between schools' Sats results is the product of pupils' backgrounds, while the artificial quality of the results generated after months of teaching to the test is reflected in many secondary schools' decisions to re-test pupils when they receive them.

Third, he implied that those – such as the authors of the primary review – who criticise this system simply want a return to the past and to do away with accountability. But the review was clear that it was not a question of whether there should be accountability, but of which type.

The targets/league tables/high-stakes testing system is widely disliked by teachers. But it is also letting pupils down. And while the "cerebral leader writers on the Times" may like it, other intelligent, disinterested people – including scientific and mathematical organisations and exam boards – have serious reservations about it: the government's was the only one of 52 submissions to a parliamentary investigation two years ago which backed it.

Read the rest of this piece here -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/23/cambridge-review-sats-targets

The quality of some of the comments on CiF after the article is enough to make anyone despair, but thankfully Warwick Mansell came back at them with this:

It's not the fact that children are tested, but the tests-plus-accountability system: the league tables, targets, Ofsted inspections, performance pay system which rests on the tests and says that the be-all-and-end-all for a school is its test scores.

Some schools clearly do resist this pressure, but for others it can and does lead to a narrowing of the curriculum so that non-tested subjects are marginalised, a narrowing of the school experience in the tested subjects towards months of revision/test practice in the run-up to the tests - official survey data suggests the typical school spends 10 hours a week on test preparation in the four month run-up to the KS2 tests - and a reminder to all children that they are being judged only in terms of test performance over a few days.

Here is some evidence on the downsides, taken from my website www.educationbynumbers.org

I'm not a parent myself, but I would say the best way that people can react to this system is not to obsess about the test levels, and the league table scores.

The evidence below is a set of selected quotations from evidence submissions given by various organisations to the 2007 Children, Schools and Families investigation into testing.
- Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education: The continual testing and practising for tests has resulted in a narrow and impoverished mathematics curriculum, and poor quality teaching of that curriculum.
- Institute of Educational Assessors: We may be churning out individuals who can pass tests and who can achieve good results to a given, known test but who cannot necessarily apply their knowledge and skills to other situations, hence the concern from employers about skill levels among young people.
- The Royal Society: It is clear that aspects of our current assessment system are holding back students and teachers performance and creativity, contributing to a declining popularity in the physical sciences and mathematics and inadequate recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in these subjects.
- Hampshire County Council: The assessment regime has become enormously burdensome for schools. National Curriculum (NC) tests have now expanded out of all proportion to their usefulness. It also calls for a more humane system.
- General Teaching Council: Tests are used for too many purposes and this compromises their reliability and validity. The tests can depress pupils motivation and increase anxiety. They do not adequately serve the interests of parents or pupils and they lead to a narrowed curriculum and encourage ‘teaching to the test.
- Institute of Physics: We believe that current assessment arrangements are promoting too narrow a range of skills and understanding, principally there is too great an emphasis on testing students ability to recall facts. This leads to a situation where there is insufficient teaching for understanding or creativity, with accompanying negative effects on students motivation and enjoyment.
- Association for Achievement and Improvement through Assessment: We believe the current testing system is limited in measurement of childrens performance across the National Curriculum programmes of study.
- Campaign for Science and Engineering: We do not doubt that students appear to work harder at school than those of ten or fifteen years ago, but too much of this extra effort appears to have been devoted to the narrow and unremitting demands of national tests.
- The Wellcome Trust: Primary teachers felt that national tests had a negative effect on childrens enjoyment of science, because of the increasing tendency to ‘teach to the test. An over-emphasis on curriculum content and pressure to prepare for national tests were felt to reduce opportunities for investigative work and lead to science frequently being taught as a collection of facts.
- Institute for Public Policy Research: The current national tests do not provide highly reliable or valid measures at the level of the individual pupil...The current assessment and accountability framework can impact on valuable elements of assessment such as assessment for learning. This can happen through narrow and shallow learning, questions-spotting and risk-averse teaching.
- Association of School and College Leaders: Assessment in Britain requires a radical review. In England, young people take externally set and marked examinations at the ages of 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. The system is at breaking point as more and more examinations have been added to an already over-examined system.
- Mathematical Association: Coaching for the test, now occupying inflated teaching time and effort in almost all schools for which we have information at each Key Stage, is not constructive: short term ‘teaching how to is no substitute for longterm teaching of understanding and relationship within and beyond mathematics part of a broad and balanced curriculum.

…..............................................

Meanwhile, on the Leaders page (Comment & Debate), Lynsey Hanley, author of “Estates: An Intimate  History”, wrote this piece -

Equality, not education, is the key to individual transformation

Political parties fail to understand or address the root causes of the country's failing education system

Reading the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments on the "extraordinarily anxious and in many ways oppressive climate in education at every level" that has been created in the 20 years or so since the imposition of the national curriculum, made me wonder yet again about the wisdom of the competing parties' plans for education: whether Labour's lowering of the starting age and expansion of the academies programme, or Tory proposals for parents to open their own state-funded "free schools". Politicians on both sides talk of education as the key to individual and social transformation – as Michael Gove put in his conference speech, "the opportunity to choose [one's] own destiny" – but none properly address the link between education and social segregation.

It comes down to economics: what you're worth, in other words. Those who are valued the least think the least of themselves and others. Those who are valued the most think well of themselves and award themselves, as they are rewarded, with education and mobility to attractive, affluent areas largely untroubled by the difficulties experienced by people in poorer ones.

This week, figures released by the University and College Union have shown the extent to which Britain is polarised by access to education, money, safe surroundings or their lack. Dividing the data available on qualifications by parliamentary constituency allows you to see the vast discrepancies between areas. In Bootle, for instance, you're far more likely to have no GCSEs than to have a degree, whereas in much of the south-east the opposite holds true. Areas are becoming less like each other, and less easily averaged out, over time.

Schools without banding and lotteries for places – though these practices are becoming more common – become microcosms of the area in which they operate. Successful schools are those where staff and students feel as though they can take charge of the raw materials of life and shape something good out of it; the less successful are those which struggle to find evidence that such a thing is possible. As an adult, the difference between being seen and unseen often comes down to how well you're able to articulate what the matter is.

The affluent and highly educated concentrate themselves in areas such as Sheffield Hallam and Richmond, gathering so much power that they can afford to pretend that power is irrelevant; poor and low-educated communities are so stymied by the imbalance that they come to believe they have no power.

Attempts made by the mainstream British political parties to interpret the needs of the "white working class" – and, as is the government's current strategy, to throw money at the symptoms of malaise rather than to address the causes – is a classic example of how social stratification leads to the warping and splitting of common values. A deep lack of entitlement and confidence felt by working-class people, structured in large part by a combination of powerlessness, poverty and snobbery directed towards them by those who are better off, ought not to be confused with the entitlement to "Britishness" that's often invoked by the same individuals.

Starting school at four, or attending a spanking new academy with no social mix, won't alter this relationship between perception and experience because neither proposal has equality, the healer of divisions both real and imagined, as its driving motivation.

Read the rest of it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/22/schools-reform-equality-failure

I'd be interested to know what readers think of the comments on CiF about these two articles. Forget about MoveAnyMountain though – it's understood that MAM is a raving long-winded neanderthal.

oxzen@yahoo.co.uk

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In today's paper have a look at this -

Ed Balls accused of 'lashing out wildly' at primary school review findings
• Head of review says Labour does not listen
• Growing anger among teachers at response

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/oct/24/primary-schools-edballs

It's by Polly Curtis, the education editor.

The man behind a major inquiry into primary education today accuses Ed Balls and his ministers of "lashing out wildly" and dismissing his review findings without properly reading it.

Robin Alexander, head of the Cambridge review of primary schools, said the Labour government refused to "listen, engage and learn" from independent advice in its "micro-managed" system.

Writing for the Guardian's Comment is Free website, he sets out how the government's response to the review betrayed the fact that ministers had not properly read it, setting out inaccuracies in how both they and their Conservative shadows described it.

Alexander's intervention comes amid growing anger in schools and teacher groups about the government's dismissal of the review. It also comes after a tumultuous week in which Balls was accused of being a "bit of a bully" by Barry Sheerman, the chair of the Commons committee for children, schools and families, after he appointed Maggie Atkinson to the role of children's commissioner. He also faced heavy criticism at the national children and adult services conference in Harrogate.

The Cambridge review, the biggest inquiry into primary education in 40 years, was published last week after a three-year process which produced 31 interim reports, 28 surveys and thousands of submissions.

In a 600-word document it concluded that schools are in "good heart … highly valued by children and parents and in general doing a good job," but condemned the centralisation of the system under Labour and how the curriculum had shrunk to a narrow focus on the 3Rs.
t suggested schools should replace formal teaching with play-based learning until a child turns six and that national curriculum tests – Sats – should be replaced with improved end-of-primary tests.

The Cambridge review received support from every teaching union, agency and school support group but the government – led by the schools minister, Vernon Coaker – accused the review of being "out of date" and failing to acknowledge programmes that were under way to review testing, special educational needs and maths teaching.

Today, Alexander writes that after the government "instantly dismissed" the inquiry, "the review's email in-boxes [were] overflowing with messages not just about the findings that the press focused on – starting age, testing, centralisation – but with expressions of spluttering outrage shading into quiet despair at last week's statement."

"Nobody expects ministers to have the time to read every massive report that lands on their desks, not overnight anyway," he concludes. "But serious questions must now be asked about the advice on which the government's response was based, the advisers who provided the minister with such a hopeless script, and the wisdom of approaching a general election as the government which refuses to listen, engage and learn."

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said it had received a letter from Alexander about the issues raised in the article and would respond in due course.

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Robin Alexander's piece is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/24/cambridge-review-primary-education

The government's instant dismissal of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review has become as a big a story as the report itself. The review's email inboxes are overflowing with messages not just about the findings that the press focused on – starting age, testing, centralisation – but also with expressions of spluttering outrage shading into quiet despair at last week's statement from schools minister Vernon Coaker.

Coaker said that by virtue of having started three years ago, the report was out-of-date. What a strange and desperate ploy. One would have thought that this testifies to its depth and thoroughness, especially as when pressed this week by the select committee to explain, Ed Balls wrongly claimed that the report had ignored the Williams maths inquiry (mentioned on pages 38, 46, 49, 433 and 436), the "expert group" on assessment (seven mentions) and the Lamb special educational needs review (the report argues for an SEN review with a broader and different remit).

That was not all the minister got wrong. Like many others, he (and, in this matter, the Conservatives) misrepresented as a bid to raise the school starting age our proposal that the government's early years foundation stage should be extended to age six, thus confusing curriculum (which is what the EYFS is about) with organisational structure. Although we said that, in light of international evidence, the starting age needs to be discussed, that was as far as we went. Get the early years curriculum right, we argued, and school starting age is no longer an issue.

Hopefully this will be another nail in the coffin of the sinister Ed Balls and the execrable New Labour hierarchy.
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Layer 208 . . . Imagination, Education Policy, Truants, Bullies and the Recession

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I'm working my way towards writing about the Primary Review in some detail, but in the meantime here are some letters from Monday's Guardian on the subject of the Alexander report -

Lack of imagination in education policy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/oct/19/primary-education-cambridge-report

Michael Rosen wrote -

The Cambridge review is absolutely right about calling for the abolition of Sats (Too much too young: start school at six says key report, 16 October), and I support this summer's boycott. Sats have turned the primary curriculum into a desert of work sheets, short extracts and a fear of failure.

In the English Sats, examiners have unleashed an abuse of the empirical method by making the reading of literature into a tedious and stunting exercise in fact-spotting, even as children themselves have been reduced to percentages and scores. I have been a school parent continuously for 30 years and visited hundreds of schools. In all that time it has never been any use to me that any child, mine included, be talked of as a number or a level.

The government's education policies were devised without a public debate about how children and teachers learn. You can only do this through the four processes of observation, investigation, discovery and discussion. In fact, finding out about learning has to be at the heart of every teacher's and every school's practice. Children's work itself should be built upon the four processes, with imagination and play as part of the mix.

In the very first key stage 2 Sats paper, the candidates were asked to say what was in a matchbox in a story by Jan Mark. The only correct answer was "nothing", and yet the fun of the story is that the children "fill" the matchbox with their fantasies and ideas. "The children's imagination" would have been a wrong answer. Sats have turned many classrooms into places where children's imagination is always the wrong answer.

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Fiona Campbell
London

The danger that we face in sending our children to school at four is that by the time their brains are ready for reading and writing they are utterly alienated from the school environment. And yet ministers are only echoing what so many middle-class parents believe, that we must get our children reading and writing as quickly as possible so that they can keep up in a competitive world. It is a tragedy, because in reality their brains have other things that they need to be learning through play, as the Cambridge report highlights. We need to stop this endless haste to make our children grow up, and allow them to enjoy their short childhood with play-based learning in nursery-style settings, but until society as a whole understands that, ministers will not be able to back the Cambridge report.

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Chris McDonnell
Little Haywood, Staffordshire

Robin Alexander is to be congratulated. The business of young children is play – play that informs and secures a platform for later, more formal learning.

The current pressure on four- and five-year-old children to meet a target-based curriculum not only inhibits their own development but adds to the stress at home, where parents feel the need for their child to achieve against the background of the larger school group. My own experience over many years as headteacher of a primary school convinced me that getting it right in the early years was the touchstone to later success. Now seeing my grandchildren in the primary years, I am even more certain that we are asking too much, too soon.

Ministers have been quick to dismiss this report as "disappointing". I would suggest that it is disappointing that a report of this significance is so easily dismissed.

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Tim Nichols

Through play, children follow naturally evolved learning instincts, which stimulate the endocrine system and activate biochemical pathways that promote neurone growth. Neuronal networks become established for basic skills and the architecture of the brain is gradually prepared for learning higher skills.

Push children into formal learning before the basic architecture is ready and they will learn slowly, without enjoyment and enthusiasm, developing negative attitudes towards education. The poorest children – without a private nursery education or a lavishly equipped playroom to stimulate them – are less likely to be ready for formal education at four or five years. So disadvantage becomes entrenched and they fall behind.

The government's dismissal of the Cambridge review and dogged commitment to early formal education is a naive attempt to appear serious about literacy standards. Sadly it is ministers' own lack of scientific literacy that will result in failure and damage to children.

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On the Guardian website today is a column under the heading -

Truants, bullies and the recession  

We must help families torn apart by truancy, not criminalise them – but the services that help troubled children are under threat

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/21/education-bullying-truancy-recession-care

This is in the education section of the website, and presumably in the paper itself. It's not a particularly inspiring piece of work, by Francis Gilbert.

The news that truancy rates are soaring won't surprise many teachers like me. Figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families show that children skipped more than 8m days of school last year. The reasons for the rising numbers of skivers are manifold, but I think there is one big underlying reason: the recession is really beginning to bite in many households.

In the UK, 4 million children live below the poverty line and the situation is getting worse: charities such as Save the Children are seeing families of four trying to feed themselves on £20 to £25 a week. That means that lots of children are living in households under severe stress, frequently working illegally or carrying out household chores for parents who need them at home.

It concludes -

A survey by Beatbullying suggests that as many as one in three children truant because of bullying, with 20,000 bunking off school for the same reason. This survey was carried out nearly four years ago now when times were good; the new official statistics suggest that the problem has become a lot worse. Proper investment in public services was never more needed more than in these recession-hit times.

This is Oxzen's response on CiF:

As is obvious from all these [CiF] contributions the causes of poor school attendance can be complex and hard to tackle. Unesco reported that British children are the unhappiest in the developed countries, and yet we've seen no government acknowledgment of that appalling assessment, let alone any sign of being concerned about it, or any ideas about how to improve the state of childhood in this country. Ed Balls won't even accept the recent criticisms of our Primary school system as outlined in last week's Cambridge review.

All that this government has ever talked about is improving test and exam scores and 'cracking down on bullies'. Everything else has lip service paid to it. This very week The Guardian published a Peter Preston column 'In Praise of Targets' repeating the same old rubbish in favour of the targets and league tables culture that has done nothing to improve the wellbeing of children or their enjoyment of school, let alone produce better educated and more enthusiastic learners.

If even the Guardian can't stop repeating the idiotic mantras of those who can't see that cramming pupils for tests is not the same as providing a better education, then what hope do we have, short of expecting the Conservatives, who at least have pledged themselves to get rid of the politically motivated targets and the micromanagement of the system, to do better.

Parents must demand, for the sake of all our children, that the system is changed, starting with the recommendations of Professor Alexander's Primary Review, in order to make our schools places of genuine learning which pupils of all abilities, interests and aptitudes are eager to attend, and where all their intelligences, and not just IQ, are developed by every teacher every day.

Learning to be socially and emotionally intelligent, learning to be non-violent, learning about anger management, and learning to be creative and imaginative, as well becoming academically able, are fully on the agendas of all schools in high-performing countries like Finland and Denmark, and they could and should be in Britain as well. Some of our schools are already doing very well in this regard, in spite of a system that barely supports it or encourages it, but sadly not nearly enough. Hence the high rates of truancy and exclusion.

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Did I Hear You Write?

I'm a huge admirer of Michael Rosen, for his contributions to the education debates as much as his work as a writer, performer, broadcaster and artist. Here are more of his pieces from the Guardian's pages -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/michaelrosen

See also - http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/06/layer-168-michael-rosen-jim-rose-ed.html

http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/did_i_hear_you_write_rosen_michael_i016262.aspx

Here's where you can buy this excellent book for 60p -

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/michael-rosen/did-i-hear-you-write.htm
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