Layer 388 . . . Education, the White Paper, and the Alexander Review

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Schools and the teaching profession in England stand accused of cowardice, complacency, confusion, disunity, lack of professionalism and lack of vision. Not by Michael Gove. By me.

Through failing to resist the assault on its professionalism by successive governments the teaching profession has forfeited its right to be seen as a profession, and appears to be a divided bunch of self-interested functionaries who simply do as they're told, even when the people doing the telling are plainly idiots and cretins who have NO clue as to the needs of learners and teachers.

Who are all these 'superheads', for instance, who have allegedly 'turned schools around'? To face in which direction? The 'Standards Agenda'? Teaching to the tests? 'Driving up standards? Uncritical adoption of governmental 'reforms'? Creating factory schools that constantly drill and coach pupils with league tables their sole concern? Yes you bastards - you know who you are.

Of course the best of the best have managed to achieve government targets without sacrificing concern for individual children and without letting go of a determination to provide schools that offer a broad and balanced and creative curriculum. All of which is much easier to achieve if you have a proper comprehensive intake of pupils and a stable staff.

But it's been a dog eat dog world, and it's likely to get even worse. Thanks to Gove and co.

Schools' sole concern from now on ought to be for the pupils and their families. That's to say, for the total wellbeing of their pupils, and not just their test scores.

Unless schools are enabling children to grow up loving school and learning to love learning for its own sake, and feeling that every day is enjoyable and creative, then they are failing in their duty. Schools are NOT businesses, and they have no business behaving as though test and exam scores are all that matter.

Take Primary schools. Why have they not joined together and said we're going to adopt wholesale the recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review? For the answer to this question, see paragraph 1 - above.

The headline on the front page of the Times Educational Supplement - no hotbed of revolution - on Friday October 16th 2009 said,

Alexander Review: Give us back our schools

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6025096

by Helen Ward

Biggest investigation since Plowden demands end to era of centralised control

The biggest investigation into primary education in a generation has demanded that England’s schools are reclaimed from politicians who have imposed a “state theory of learning” on teachers.

The final report of the independent Cambridge Primary Review, published today, calls for the depoliticisation of the classroom, with central control slashed to a minimum and funding pumped into schools.

The study, which has taken three years and draws on the work of more than 3,000 researchers, begins: “Ours is a public system of education which belongs to the people and is not the personal fiefdom of ministers and their unelected advisors.”

Its recommendations include that formal primary education should not start until the age of six, and that the current system of league tables and national tests be scrapped and replaced with a new system of accountability in which teacher assessment plays a stronger role.

Professor Robin Alexander, who led the inquiry, said he was irritated that the debate over education had been presented as a simple battle between “the trendy” and “back to basics” factions.

“The whole discourse has been hijacked by the mythmakers,” he told The TES. “This is about reclaiming the debate, it is about resetting the agenda for professionals.”

The final report, Children, Their World, Their Education, is being sent to every school in the UK, including secondaries and special schools.

It is the largest inquiry of its kind since Lady Plowden’s in 1967, but is more independent than its predecessor. The Alexander Review was funded by the Esmee Fairbain charitable foundation while the Plowden report was commissioned by the government of the day.

Many of its findings have been revealed over the last year and half in a series of interim reports, including an assertion that childhood is not in crisis, and that primary schools provide a safe haven for young children in a changing world.

John Bangs, head of education for the National Union of Teachers, said teachers would applaud many of the review’s conclusions, including the change in official primary starting age. “Professor Alexander is spot on that education is too important for the factionalisation of party politics,” he said.

As the report notes, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, as well as Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary have criticised the interim reports for containing “a collection of recycled, partial or out of date research”.

However, both the anti-centralisation and the subject specialist recommendations will appeal to the Conservatives, which have pledged to move funding from agencies to the frontline.

David Laws, Liberal democrat spokesman for education, said: “The strength of the report is that it’s not been commissioned by the Government and its terms of reference haven’t been unnecessarily restricted. It is able to recognize some of the achievements of primary education and progress made in the last decade while also being willing to be critical about those things that have gone wrong. We feel very strongly that the degree of micromanagement and interference is on a scale that would never have been tolerated and would have been seen as shockingly totalitarian 30 years ago.”

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Ah yes, David Laws. I remember him well. One of the main movers and shakers in the coalition negotiations, I seem to recall. Foxy little guy. Gove's counterpart in the LibDems.

As Kundera said, politicians rely on our forgetfulness. 

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Disadvantage lies at heart of primary review

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6025135

Robin Alexander praises schools as ‘the centre that holds when things fall apart’, but while rejecting media ‘myths’ of a generation in crisis he argues that more must be done to narrow the gap between vulnerable children and the rest. Helen Ward reports

Forty years ago, the Plowden report declared that at the heart of the educational process lies the child.

Now, the most comprehensive inquiry into primary schooling in Britain since then has laid out its vision of education. And central to its vision is the disadvantaged child.

“For this is our bottom line,” the Cambridge Primary Review states. “The education of young children matters immeasurably - to them both now and in the future and to our society. It matters to all children but especially to those who, in our divided society, lack the massively compensating advantages of financial wealth, emotional harmony and a home life that is linguistically, intellectually, culturally and spiritually rich.”

The review, which set out to examine how primary education can best meet the needs of today’s children, is indignant about the politicisation of education.

In the final report, edited by Professor Robin Alexander, the review’s leader, rails against media myths of failure and politicians’ ill-founded claims of success.

The report’s prevailing mood is underlined by its headline conclusions: reform Sats and scrap league tables, extend the early-years foundation stage to Year 1, rebalance the curriculum, train teachers to become educators not deliverers of ready-made lessons and carry out a full review of special educational needs provision.

The report is more than another shot in one of the many battlegrounds of education. It is deeply serious, foreseeing that “sensationalising headlines will do nothing like justice” to the breadth, weight and authority of the evidence. But it is readable and not without humour (among the 88 historical milestones it lists are 1969’s “back to basics”, 1992’s “back to basics again” and 1998’s “back to basics yet again”).

It is an ambitious attempt to go beyond governments, override spats and appeal directly to “all those interested in primary education”. It concludes with 75 recommendations that the 14 authors believe would provide the education and the childhood that all children deserve.

It begins by exploring the state of childhood, noting one father’s complaints about his son’s alleged truancy and failure to do his homework - comments made in Mesopotamia 3,500 years ago. Is the modern “crisis in childhood” real? What is the evidence?

Start by listening to children, suggests the report; 72 per cent say their peers are “kind and helpful”.

Health, education and respect for children have improved vastly. There are genuine concerns about equity, but the distorted picture of “blighted” childhoods prevents change where it is needed.

The review praises primary schools as “the centre that holds when things fall apart”. It praises the Government’s efforts to narrow gaps in educational attainment.

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the review was correct to draw attention to disadvantaged pupils and the inequality in the education system.

The report is independent, but it is responsive to the political landscape in which it finds itself. It advocates change in a system that seems to be constantly changing. This term, the Government is due to announce its final decision on the recommendations of Sir Jim Rose’s review, which was limited to the primary curriculum.

The Rose review recommendations, which have been widely welcomed in the profession, call for the national curriculum to be rearranged into six areas of learning and six essential skills, in an attempt to give teachers more flexibility. The new curriculum is due to be introduced by 2010.

But the Cambridge review calls for the process to be suspended. Sir Jim’s review has fundamentally missed the point, it argues. The problem is not curriculum overload, but a mismatch between what schools have to do and the skills of their staff. Primaries need more teachers and more specialist teachers in addition to generalist class teachers.

But how seriously will politicians treat its proposals?

As the review notes, some of its recommendations have already been taken up - including scrapping National Strategies - though ministers dismissed them when they were made in its earlier interim reports.

Professor Alexander knows only too well the risks that the final report’s calls may be ignored or even attacked as “off message”.

It concludes: “The Cambridge Primary Review is for the longer term, not the next election… its final report is not just for transient architects and agents of policy. It is for all who invest daily, deeply and for life in this vital phase of education, especially children, parents and teachers.”

In other words, it is for you.

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Key recommendations

End the “state theory of learning”. The Government should not tell teachers how to teach.

- Extend the foundation stage to age six. Have a single primary key stage.

- Prioritise narrowing the gap between vulnerable children and the rest.

- Undertake a full review of special educational needs.

- Follow Professor Alexander’s curriculum recommendations, including the creation of 12 aims and eight domains.

- Reform assessment; stop current Sats; scrap league tables; assess all areas of the curriculum and use sampling to monitor national standards.

- Undertake a full review of primary school staffing.

- Reform initial teacher training.

- Protect rural and middle schools.

- Protect and expand school libraries.

- End primary/secondary funding differential.

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FAQ

Q. What is the Cambridge Primary Review?

A. A three-year inquiry into the state and future of English primary education.

Q. Who is Robin Alexander?

A. Director of the review and fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge University. He was one of the “three wise men” who led a government inquiry into primary education in 1991. He has long advocated a more central place for oracy in primary education.

Q. How is this review different from Sir Jim Rose’s?

A. Sir Jim was commissioned and paid by the Government to look at the primary curriculum. Professor Alexander’s review has been funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and looks at the whole of primary education.

Q. What does Professor Alexander think about primary schools?

A. Primary schools appear to be under intense pressure but in good heart. They are highly valued by children and parents and in general are doing a good job. They do not neglect and never have neglected the 3Rs… For many, schools are the centre that holds when things fall apart.

www.primaryreview.org.uk

What the report says…

 . . . about teaching staff

England has 198,200 primary teachers and 172,600 primary school support staff - one adult for every 11 primary pupils. This is investment on a remarkable scale.

The class teacher system is taken for granted, but does it best serve primary pupils’ needs?

It arose because it combined cheapness and efficiency in the context of large classes, a basic curriculum and view of teaching as little more than drilling of facts and skills. But subject knowledge is the elephant in the room.

A national review of staffing and funding policy is required. And more specialist teachers are needed, especially in upper primary.

A two-year PGCE should be considered to help to achieve this. Initial teacher training should move away from compliance culture. The Training and Development Agency for Schools’ professional standards need changing as they encourage conformity rather than originality and do not recognise that experienced teachers need autonomy to be effective. Continuing professional development is often patronising.

Headteachers need to be supported so they can focus on leading learning. The current model in which the head is burdened with a proliferating range of responsibilities is no longer tenable for a single person.

Teaching assistants have liberated teachers from tasks that diminish time with children, but the use of TAs as teachers is not acceptable. They need training for working with small groups and children with SEN.

. . . about pupils

Legitimate concerns exist about children’s lives today, but the “crisis” of modern childhood has been grossly overstated.

For most children, perceived risk is much greater than actual risk. But for a significant minority the risks and deprivations are at least as severe as they are portrayed and it is here that attention needs to be focused. Social disadvantage blights the early lives of a larger proportion of children in Britain than in many other countries.

Britain is very diverse - and to an extent which at the time of Plowden would have been unimaginable. The transience and unpredictability of migration and the inadequacy of local information adds to pressure on schools. The review encountered evidence of discrimination against marginalised groups, within the education system as well as in society.

. . . about government

Assumptions and formulas for funding primary education should be reviewed. The staffing of primary schools should be led by the curriculum and the needs of pupils. A new funding formula is needed, preceded by a national staffing review. Excessive funding variation between local authorities and key stages should be eliminated.

The National Strategies have cost £2 billion. Savings arising from terminating them should be shifted from government and local authorities to schools.

Centralised reform has produced important and necessary changes in children’s services, but has gone too far in relation to curriculum and pedagogy. The role of government should revert to providing the administrative and financial framework, setting the goals and scope of the national curriculum and the broad standards primary schools should achieve.

Assessment should be reviewed and league tables stopped. Children’s learning should be assessed formatively throughout the primary phase and summatively before the transfer to secondary school. A separate system should be used to evaluate schools and monitor national standards externally, using sample testing.

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What's happened since this report was published? Anyone taken any note of it?
Not really. People like Balls and Gove have done what people like them usually do. And the Primary sector, to its shame, has kept its head down and failed to demand full implementation of the above.
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Layer 342 . . . Cambridge, the Ebb Tide, the Great Wave, Art, Education, Suicide, Apprenticeships and Arsenal

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And so to Cambridge. Such a strange town. So historic and academic, and yet so twee. So busy, and yet so boring.

The worst thing about Cambridge is the lack of pubs. Almost a complete lack of pubs. Why?

If you persevere in tramping around the whole of the town centre you might eventually come across a fine looking pub with a sign outside it advertising the fact that the local newspaper reckons it's the best pub in Cambridge. When you go inside, however, you notice a good range of real ales BUT ALSO very poor ventilation, a lingering stink of cooking, and horrible loud music. At which point, if you have any sense, you walk out. The Mitre truly sucks. Pity poor Cambridge if that's the best of its pubs.

Fortunately there's an excellent tapas bar nearby, with a decent, spacious interior and excellent welcoming staff. The food is good too, and they served the best draught Peroni I've ever tasted, which means it's very good indeed.

Apparently La Tasca is a nationwide chain. I really must get out more.

http://www.latasca.co.uk/cambridge/gallery/1851
http://www.latasca.co.uk/cambridge/gallery/1846

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The Fitzwilliam Museum's not really my kind of place, but it had one exhibition in just one smallish room that was totally wonderful - "Gifts of the Ebb Tide: Japan and the Sea in Ukiyo-e Prints."

The only print on show which was on loan from elsewhere was the famous Great Wave by Hokusai, which belongs to the British Museum. It's an image that draws you back to it constantly.

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

The rest of the prints in the exhibition were owned by the Fitzwilliam museum - the majority of them being prints by Hiroshige. Pretty amazing they are too.

http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=hiroshige&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=g7ttTLroKdO6jAe-q9n7CA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQsAQwAA&biw=1440&bih=625

It's interesting that Monet, reckoned by many to be France's greatest-ever artist, chose to fill his house in Giverney with Japanese prints, and literally nothing else in the way of art. Can't have a much higher recommendation than that.

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It's 'A' level results time and university clearing time, and almost back to school time.

I'm starting to think that there are two kinds of  people in this country. Those who give a damn about real education and its benefits, and those who don't. Those who realise that our education system isn't fit for purpose, and those who don't.

Then there's a sub category of people who realise that our education system sucks but haven't much of a clue what to do about it. There's a further sub category of people who think they have a clue or two, but haven't really.

This means that the number of people who a) care about education, and b) truly understand what needs to happen to it in order to improve it and make the system fit for the 21st Century, amounts to less than 0.001% of the population, at most.

Sadly none of them are politicians or journalists - the people who are elected to make decisions on behalf of we, the people, and those who are paid to write opinions which are then broadcast through the media in order to influence 'public opinion'. No wonder we're a nation of over-examined and under-educated fuckwits.

In the Guardian recently we find Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge University, apparently, who says,

University mustn't again be the rich's hereditary domain

Corralling the young into vocational factory farms or apprenticeships splits further the educated elite from those who service it

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/19/university-education-is-a-right-for-all

"Restricting access to higher education, in conjunction with vicious attacks on the support base of schools, wages and housing, only accelerates the drive towards absolute economic segregation.

A mature democracy thrives by widening access to higher education. Corralling young people into vocational factory farms does not equal progress. Life is not a television show where gruff millionaires airily dismiss formal education and magically transform eager young things into corporate high-flyers. What is masquerading as the good old-fashioned common sense of apprenticeships and skills over higher education is really the politics of dismissing the intelligence and abilities of ordinary people. We must fight hard to retain common ownership of education and have a real discussion about the role we want it to play in our lives and society."

Common ownership? What kind of a fantasy land is she living in? Our education system is directed by, managed by and constrained by a small number of politicians, bureaucrats and professionals who are UTTERLY CONVINCED that our education system, (which is mainly geared up to creating elites through examinations, and a system through which those so-called elites did very well themselves) is still for the best in the best of all worlds.

To imagine that regular people have any stake in our education system, let alone 'ownership', is pure fantasy. Nobody, but nobody, does well out of an education system that is 99% geared up for so-called 'academic' excellence and ignores the development of other intelligences as well as the need for critical thinking, creativity and use of the imagination. I may have said this somewhere before.

The system doesn't even help young people learn how to become autonomous learners - they need to find that out for themselves. As for developing a love of learning for its own sake . . .

"We must fight hard to . . . have a real discussion about the role we want [education] to play in our lives and society."

Who's involved in that fight then? It seems we have to fight hard to even have a discussion about real education. As for actually doing anything about it . . .

The Cambridge Review of Primary education has been and gone, and how many people even noticed its publication? It's pathetic. Practically nobody cares about the real learning needs of children and young people, or has any idea what they might be, or any idea about how schools (academies!), colleges and universities should go about meeting those needs.

We don't need education to "play a role" in 'our' lives and 'our' society. Whose society would that be, then?

 We need education to meet the real learning needs of people of all ages, actually, and to help with the development of all of our intelligences - not just the academic and the intellectual. We need education to help our people to find out who they really are, and to discover a personal pathway towards greater enlightenment and a proper way to live their lives. Naturally this would involve changing a great many things in our society - things that conservatives, including New Labour, including the majority of the bourgeoisie for that matter, are desperate to 'conserve'.

A few comments from CIF:

Tybo

The problem is class based. Because the Universities in the UK were associated as much with class privilige as with academic excellence, people without degrees were looked down on and not accorded the respect that they should have been.

That is an ongoing problem. But the answer is not to make everyone do dumbed down degrees. The answer is to raise the status and respect we have for people who achieve things outside of university and academia.

KingCnutCase

Countries such as Germany and South Korera manage to run thriving apprenticeship systems without tying themselves into paroxysms of progressive angst about the 'fairness' of university education vs vocational education.

They don't stuff 3rd rate educational establishments to the gills with gullible teenagers on debt-funded media studies and golf course management courses. They put people on proper vocational courses that lead to decent, well paid jobs in proper trades.

But it's ok 'cos our economy is so much more successful than theirs isnt it? Oh, hang on....

Bluejil

The whole of the system needs changing, starting at the primary level and with a curriculum that meets the needs of a 21st century society. Sadly, I do not see a vision of modern, viable education in the current government, but they sure will feel the affects of their delusions in ten, twenty years time when a great deal of the population is uneducated and unskilled and unable to find employment anywhere on the planet.

More from Tybo

I did mostly arts oriented things (very mixed at Keele) but what shocked me was that whilst my [non-university] squatting mates in Norwich were avidly reading Kerouac and Ken Keysey, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Braughtigen, when I did an American Studies class nobody else had read any American writers at all. Not a single fellow student.

The tutor treated me like I was Christ reborn - it was such a shock to him to find a student studying American literature who was actually interested in it.

95% of the students had not read a book since whatever they had been set for their A level English. They were there because going there was what you did to get a better job. Not because they had a scintilla of interest in what they were studying.

I hate to think what it must be like now.

Phoenixflabskin

As a number of posters have already noted, the fundamental problem is silly middle-class left-wing snobs like the author. The upper ranks of the Labour Party, and newspapers like this, seem to be stuffed with them.

Unwilling to countenance the idea that their own precious ones might not get a 'proper professional career', they then have to assuage their left-wing guilt by making sure that all the poor 'working-class' people have the same 'opportunity'. So you end up with an army of people with little or no academic inclination earning honours degrees in Sociology of Batwoman and Lesbotic Yoga from the University of Bootle, and if they're lucky and they know the right people ending up as Transgender Awareness Seminar Facilitators for the local council, or if they're not lucky end up on the dole with a mountain of debt, while proper useful jobs like sparks and plumbing get done by immigrants.

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An article by Julia Margo had the title "Learning New Ropes" in the newspaper, but on the website appeared as:

A way out of the mancession

A-levels and university are no guarantee of a job. Particularly for men, an apprenticeship is better

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/19/apprenticeship-unemployment-gender-gap

Some time ago a friend who had lost his City job confessed he had considered killing himself. I was appalled but not surprised: while men are being hit harder by the recession than women they are also seem to be showing less resilience in dealing with unemployment and economic insecurity.

[How the hell do we expect people to be personally & emotionally resilient when they've never had much of an opportunity to find out who they are, or develop much in the way of personal, emotional and spiritual intelligence?]

Academic qualifications appear to offer them little protection against unemployment . . .

Research by Mind has shown that up to one in seven men who become unemployed will develop a depressive illness within six months; two-thirds of men under 35 were out of work when they killed themselves.

This trend alone is enough for some to claim that a "crisis of masculinity" is on the horizon. But suggestions of a deeper, potentially seismic shift in our society should make politicians sit up and listen.

The emerging knowledge economy demands a new, softer skill set – empathy, sociability, confidence, resourcefulness. Women are perceived as being better at soft skills, and now they count for more. In the course of just over a decade, Demos research found, these skills became central to life chances: for those who turned 30 in 2000, such character capabilities had become 33 times more important in determining earnings.

[Softer?!! For 'character capabilities' read personal, social, emotional and spiritual intelligences.]

But character can't be taught in the classroom.

[No it can't - which is to say that you cannot learn "character" in the way you can be didactically taught maths and science - not that those things are best taught didactically anyway. However, classrooms ARE the best places for developing "character" - those other intelligences - providing teachers know what to do and how to organise learning so as to facilitate those sorts of essential development.]

If this issue in the classroom isn't addressed, boys, with a skill set that seems to become less valued by the day, will continue on the path to asbos rather than A-levels.

So what can be done? Interestingly there may be a genuine solution. Demos research shows that boys and young men can substantially boost employability, income and wellbeing by doing apprenticeships from age 16 instead of, or as well as, A-levels.

[So that's alright then - we can start work on 'developing character' from the age of 16, or as soon as young people move beyond GCSE.]

Boys who took apprenticeships were more confident, happy and skilled by the time they were 30 than their non-apprentice contemporaries.

Society needs to get over this obsession with A-levels as the gold standard if we want to give boys the chance to succeed in this new job environment. Rigging A-levels won't help. They need training to help them operate in the workplace, not qualifications that prepare them to fail.

[She calls it 'training'. Like you do with dogs. Especially dogs who "operate in the workplace", presumably.]

So here's someone who sees at least part of the problem, but in spite of her very privileged position as acting director of Demos - the leading so-called left wing so-called think tank - and presumably the 'beneficiary' of an 'elite' education herself - has very little clue about how to frame the problem adequately, let alone any real idea about how to transform our attitude and our approach to education from the Nursery onwards in order to make it fit for purpose.

Just another example of how far we have to go in order to promote any real change in how we do things on this island.

Julia - you're fired!

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Football Matters

Interesting news this week that Arsenal have decided to work with their supporters to encourage fans to buy part-shares and so gradually move the club towards becoming a supporter-owned community club, similar to Barcelona and Real Madrid, and most of the German clubs.

Arsenal step back from era of rich owners and offer fans a voice

• Club's approach is enlightened compared with debt-laden rivals
• What is the social value of the beautiful game?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2010/aug/18/arsenal-kroenke-usmanov-owners-fanshare

Arsenal  supporters will be invited today to buy shares in their club in affordable slices of the £10,250, which is the current prohibitive price of just one. The Arsenal Supporters Trust hopes that its scheme, Arsenal Fanshare, five years in the planning, will enable supporters to slowly build a meaningful stake and voice, and help preserve Arsenal as the only major Premier League club not owned by a single rich individual.

"Custodianship" is the trust's cherished theme; the principle that a football club exists for its supporters, not for speculators to exploit by buying up shares. Arsenal Fanshare allows ordinary supporters to make monthly contributions, from a minimum of £10 to a maximum £1,000, which will be pooled towards buying shares when they become available.

Remarkably, Arsenal Fanshare is enthusiastically backed by the club itself, as a means of encouraging fans to be participate and be "engaged", which is emerging as a core principle at Arsenal and the more enlightened professional clubs. The contrast with the open warfare between fans and absolute owners at debt-laden Manchester United and Liverpool could hardly be more marked.

"In the club's relationship with supporters, the important thing is that fans are valued and nurtured, not exploited," Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal's chief executive, says. "That's not only good for the club's soul; it is also ultimately good for the club overall, because engagement with our fans helps us to be healthier, more vibrant and successful."

"The aim is to increase supporter ownership and influence," Tim Payton, the spokesman for the trust, says. "The vast majority of our members and, we believe, most Arsenal fans, favour supporter involvement in the club and have no appetite for private ownership by a single individual, and certainly not for excessive debt. This is an opportunity for supporters to gain a voice, for a relatively modest contribution, and it should be a model for other clubs too."

Had the idea of mutual, democratic ownership been conceived, and the iconic examples of supporter-owned Barcelona and the Bundesliga clubs been understood 30 years ago, before the Premier League's pay-TV and commercial revolution, fans clubbing together might have had a chance of buying their clubs outright, even one as distinguished as Arsenal.

Arsenal offer 'fanshares' to dampen fears of takeover

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/aug/18/arsenal-shares-fanshare-supporters-trust

The sports minister, Hugh Robertson, told the Guardian yesterday: "This proposal at Arsenal is enlightened and forward-looking. Clearly it is for individual clubs to decide, but this is a model I'd like to see other teams explore."

Arsenal hail new model of top-flight club ownership

• Campaign for democratic involvement led by Supporters Direct

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/aug/18/arsenal-new-model-club-ownership

Previous comments about Arsenal here:

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2010/02/layer-257-philosophy-and-economics-of.html

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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.

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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.

…...................................

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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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Layer 206 . . . More Damned Targets

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Peter Preston, ex-editor of the Guardian, wrote another loathsome column in the paper on Monday, headed In Praise of Targets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/18/targets-work-topdown-cameron?

The sheer ignorance expressed in this article is beyond belief, and beyond a joke. Every time 'Presto' writes one of these reactionary columns he gets a deluge of correspondence explaining why and how the targets culture messes up education, health, etc, - but does he pay any attention? Of course not. Why on earth would he pay attention to the views of those who advocate a wholly different approach which focuses on the needs of children, sick people, etc, rather than the needs of politicians & their pals to "show results"?

The reason he should pay some attention and show some respect to professional opinion (eg the Primary Review) is that the least we should expect of Guardian writers is the ability to consider & to present both sides of an argument, with a reasoned refutation of one side if they disagree with it. Preston clearly hasn't read the Cambridge Review with an unprejudiced eye, and clearly hasn't understood it. Just like the tabloid writers he's maintaining that the Review says children shouldn't start school till aged 6, whereas Alexander & co have said no such thing. Why on earth would "working mums" be unhappy with the report, as he suggests, when no-one's advocated closing down early years classes or reducing the length of the school day?

It's not a question of "putting teachers back in charge of what's taught". It's about putting professional educators back in positions of responsibility for policy and practice (rather than politicians and professional bureaucrats) and determining through reasoned argument & developing practice which approaches produce properly educated young people and which ones do not - as happens in the countries at the top of the international performance comparisons. In countries like Finland there is continuing debate & challenge within the profession, not top-down political dictat & arbitrary targets that measure only what is measurable, with no proper assessment of children's progress towards being positive, self-motivated & independent learners who enjoy learning, literature & literacy.

Government targets, in this respect, do not "work", as Preston continues to maintain. They have the opposite effect, if anything, although most teachers do their best to retain their pupils' enjoyment of and interest in learning, within what has become a soviet-style factory system of performance quotas & targets, used as a basis for "performance management".

Mr Preston really has to stop dismissing pupils who "only" achieve a high Level 3 (3A) at age 11 as "fundamentally illiterate". He clearly has no idea what a high Level 3 consists of, and no idea how much progress has been made by many children with learning difficulties and other disadvantages when they are able to score a Level 3 in English and maths in a formal timed test. Most adults are for the most part "only" operating at Level 4 in their daily reading and writing, and the supposedly failing and illiterate children (according to Peter Preston) who have reached Level 3 in English by the end of Primary school have almost achieved that level. If they don't then go on and reach Levels 4 and 5 at secondary school it can only be because insufficent support and inadequate focus on literacy is on offer there.

The "force of a centrally imposed quasi-market economy" has NOT "transformed the situation", and neither has centrally-dictated methodology & pedagogy, if what we mean by "transformed" is "turned more children into better learners, more capable thinkers, more imaginative and more motivated seekers of knowledge, etc". The only thing that's improved under the last two governments is teachers' competence in teaching to the tests. Enough.

The Guardian should send 'Presto' packing in the same direction as Melanie Phillips, and tell him that as of now his views should be repeated ad nauseam where they belong, thereby freeing up space in the Guardian for more enlightened opinion. It's outrageous that Preston should be given space in the Guardian to smear those of us who agree with the Primary Review's authors as people who are motivated by "dogma and professional self-interest". These are Stalinist smear tactics. If anyone's dogmatic in this argument it's Preston & his ilk. For goodness' sake, even the Conservatives have become enlightened to the point of pledging to scrap both government-set targets and the micro-management of pedagogy & the curriculum in schools.

As for Mr Preston's conclusion that we should "make knowledge your target, and value those who can tell you on the frontline of information" - here's final evidence that he has no understanding of the issues and still believes that improved test and exam scores, obtained by whatever means, including paid cramming, are the same thing as a high standard of education that develops all of a child's intelligences, aptitudes and abilities, including their creativity and imagination.

The schools that are failing their pupils are mainly those that are abusing them by treating them as mere instruments in the achievement of production targets, thereby depriving them of a real education. Preston clearly knows nothing about the sorts of achievement that can't be measured by timed pen & paper tests, and neither does he care.
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Layer 125 Primary Review, Private Tutoring and Adult Education.

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Labour came to power in 1997, on that glorious sunny Mayday, with a nifty little catchphrase, Education, Education, Education, which seemed pretty stupid at the time, as a programme for progressive government, and looks completely hollow and meaningless now. Personally I’d have settled for something like Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, but no - it was all about education. That was all Tony could think of.

Well, we’ve learnt a lot since then, alright. They weren’t kidding when they said they’d come to power as New Labour and they’d govern as NuLabour, whose translation into NuSpeak turned out to be ‘Neo-Conservatism’ - from the Greek ‘neos’, meaning ‘new’, and ‘conservatism’, meaning . . . Conservatism. Meaning, ‘what we have we keep, we preserve, we maintain’.

We’d had the Thatcher and Reagan revolution - the overthrow of the post-war social democratic or vaguely liberal consensus - and by golly (Tony), or by God (George & Tony), we were going to keep it.

As for Liberty - don’t make me laugh. A surveillance society, detention without trial, Guantanamo, torture and rendition.

Equality - you are definitely joking. Tony and Peter were ‘intensely relaxed’ about the filthy rich, meaning, they were up their arses, and were getting on with joining their ranks.

And Fraternity - well buddy, can you spare a dime? We became a mean-spirited, violent, tax-cutting, tax-dodging, beggar-thy-neighbour society under Thatch, and, well, let’s just say - things can only get better.

The only example of fraternity I can think of since ’97 is George and Jeb Bush working together to steal the election in Florida, steal the presidency, and instigate the rule of George Cheney, the neo-con gang bang, the Project for the New American Century, and all that’s followed since 2001. Some Odyssey.

Tony, of course, was a great follower, and acted like George’s gormless, hick cousin from across the water. A great believer in trickle-down economics, deregulation, casino capitalism, privatisation, globalisation and might is right foreign policy. You could almost believe he’d done a post graduate correspondence course for a Chicago School masters degree in the Shock Doctrine, but it’s more likely he had a personal tutor assigned to him by the White House, with daily swot sessions in his study at Number 10. It’s the Oxbridge way.

I certainly can’t remember seeing anything in the ’97 manifesto about maintaining and promoting casino capitalism, tax havens, a housing bubble, financial meltdown, further privatisations, or billions squandered on illegal wars under the banner of a ‘war on terror’. I’m not sure I’d have voted for that. I’m not sure anyone voted for that.

So what’s happened to education, in the meantime - meaning schools, colleges, teachers and pupils? The Guardian’s headline on Friday pretty much summed it up.

“Tests blamed for blighting children's lives.”

Children's lives are being impoverished by the government's insistence that schools focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of creative teaching, the biggest review of the primary school curriculum in 40 years finds today.

Labour has failed to tackle decades of over-prescription in the curriculum and added to it with its own strategies in literacy and numeracy.

Children are leaving school lacking knowledge about the arts and humanities having spent too many years "tied to a desk" learning times tables, the head of the review, Robin Alexander, said.
"Our argument is that their education, and to some degree their lives, are impoverished if they have received an education that is so fundamentally deficient," he said.

The report says schools should be freed of Sats and league tables to allow them to make more decisions about what and how they teach.

The compulsory daily act of worship should be reviewed and a curriculum that values knowledge and understanding as well as basic skills should be brought in, it says.

Teaching unions, headteachers and major educational bodies all backed the plans, setting the government on a collision course with schools if it fails to consider the proposals.

So there we have it. It’s not so much on a collision course though - this appalling government of shysters and traitors has already hit the buffers in every single direction it’s taken the country. From landslide to train-wreck. There’s been a staggering arrogance, an ability to listen only to the neo-cons and their right-wing allies in the press and the City, and they’ve learnt precisely nothing.

They admit nothing, and they apologise for nothing. They’ve tried to position themselves in what they imagine is the ‘middle ground’, but assumed it was pretty much where Thatch was standing. Even the Tories and the Libdems are well to the left of them now.

So much for education and learning. So much for enlightenment.

The review finds:

• Children are losing out on a broad, balanced and rich curriculum with art, music, drama, history and geography the biggest casualties.

• The curriculum, and crucially English and maths, have been "politicised".

• The focus on literacy and numeracy in the run-up to national tests has "squeezed out" other areas of learning.

• The Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which sets the curriculum, have been excessively prescriptive, "micro-managing" schools.

The review accuses the government of attempting to control what happens in every classroom in England, leading to an excessive focus on literacy and numeracy in an "overt politicisation" of children's lives. Despite this too many children still leave primary school having failed to master the 3Rs.

Sats have also narrowed the scope of what is taught in schools, it claims, concluding: "The problem of the curriculum is inseparable from the problem of assessment and testing."

Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the proposals "have depth, credibility and, above all, respond to the realities of the primary classroom".

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: "Rather than continue to tinker around the edges of primary education we would like the government to heed the proposals and reopen the debate about the purposes of primary education."

Mary, dear, you’re being too polite. The “debate” has been going on since Plowden, since the last time anyone took a good look at Primary education, and concluded that it should operate in the interests of children and not teachers or anyone else, least of all the government, who have ruthlessly politicised education ever since Sunny Jim Callaghan (re)started the “great debate” back in the seventies. The needs of children are paramount - that’s it. There’s no debate. That’s it.

The needs of children are for a broad, balanced and stimulating curriculum that motivates all children to want to learn and to enjoy learning for its own sake, enabling them to develop social, emotional and spiritual intelligence as well as intellectual and creative abilities and critical thinking skills. There’s NO fucking debate. Why should we debate these things? The Cambridge Primary Review is right - the government, this government pledged to education, education, education - got it all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/feb/20/primary-school-review

“That's the way it is”, said the headline above yesterday’s Guardian lead editorial.

The literacy and numeracy strategies, admirable though they were in intent and even achievement, have spawned a target-dominated primary school culture which distorts the balance of early-years learning and which locks schools into a politically determined agenda rather than one that is centred, as originally intended and as any such policy should be, on the needs of the child.

The Alexander team have gone back to first principles. They have also delivered a shattering verdict.

At the core of the report is the conclusion that the government's preoccupation with tests and standards has become the cuckoo in the primary school nest. The report is positively in favour of the national curriculum. It is not hostile in principle to the focus on literacy and numeracy. But it is insistent that the prioritisation of measured standards in these fields, which Mr Rose's terms of reference do not allow him to question, creates pressures - particularly intense at the start and finish of the primary phase - which "increasingly but needlessly" compromise children's right to a broad and balanced primary education. The most prominent casualties of this distortion - which is driven by Whitehall's conviction that breadth is incompatible with "the basics" - are the arts, humanities and, in some cases, science.

The Cambridge report is one of those rare documents which one reads and then says: yes, that's exactly how it is, that's what is wrong with the way things are being done and, yes, that's the way a better system ought to be run. In the past, reports of this authority and quality were often commissioned by governments which were genuinely concerned to obtain the full facts and best advice for dealing with difficult problems - and respectful of politically inconvenient conclusions too.

Mr Alexander has written a report that ought to define the collective approach to primary education for a generation. When Rose is published too, there will be a huge opportunity to put the system right. New Labour rarely listens to advice it does not script or control. But this is an issue and a moment that should not be sacrificed to political dogma.

Rarely? How about never? Political dogma? Blimey - that’s all NuLabour understands. Being ‘on message’ is all that’s ever counted. The Bible according to Tony, Gordie and Peter. NuLabour’s fundamentalism is more like religious, rather than political, dogma, since it’s based on a message passed down by father, son and holy ghost, rather than anything scientific or testable.

Tony, of course, was the first PM for donkey’s years to father a child whilst ensconced in No 10. Gordie is the son of the manse, as well as the inheritor of the NuLabour leadership and legacy. I quite like the idea of Peter M as wholly ghost. The animating spirit of New Labour.

And as for Tony’s - “I did what I thought was right.” You thought? You fucking thought? So did Hitler, Stalin, and all the other power freaks and dictators, do what they thought was right. I don’t really think you can use that as a justification, Tone. That’s not a good line. What you should have said was - “I did some very bad things because I was convinced of my own unique brilliance. Sorry.”

Blair and Mandleson. Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. According to Wikipedia, “The Tweedle brothers never contradict each other, even when one of them, according to the rhyme, "agrees to have a battle". Rather, they complement each other's words.”

Do any of the NuLabour leadership ever contradict each other, or show any capacity for independent thinking? Robin Cook, the most intelligent and honourable of the Tweedle brotherhood, was the only one to resign over a point of principle - the invasion of Iraq. Could you ever imagine Tweedle-blears or Tweedle-brown or Tweedle-straw doing such a thing? Maybe there was fraternity after all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/21/primary-school-tests

Oxzen said this in Comment Is Free:

It's to the Guardians great credit that it made this piece today's lead editorial, and also made the Primary Review the lead story on the front page yesterday - "Tests blamed for blighting childrens lives".

This wretched government has indeed blighted the lives of a generation of children and teachers by continuing and making even worse the policies begun under Thatcher and Major. It has slavishly followed the prescriptions of the neo-conservatives in education - just as it did in finance and economics, in industrial policy, in the invasion of Iraq, and in justice and civil liberties.

It's time the more enlightened members of the present Cabinet spoke out and welcomed the Primary Review's work, instead of branding it as insulting to teachers and children, as reported by the BBC yesterday. The DCSF's instant denial that primary pupils are getting inadequate schooling does them no credit whatsoever.

More enlightened countries use continuous pupil tracking against clear learning targets, as well as formative assessment, to monitor how well pupils are progressing - not timed tests at the age of 11. Pupils have an absolute right to develop a love of learning for its own sake, and to develop their powers of creativity, as well as their personal, social and emotional intelligences, instead of being processed through results factories for the greater glory of politicians and bureaucrats who equate only test and exam passes with educational achievement, and actually believe the main purpose of primary schools is to begin grooming children for the world of work.

This flies in the face of what the more enlightened employers have been calling for, which is young people who have well-developed thinking skills, creative capacity, high levels of social and emotional intelligence and team working skills, and so on. If these aspects of achievement are not developed from the nursery stage onward then they are either stunted or not developed at all. The Primary review has rightly concluded that the current DCSF and Ofsted regimes have impoverished the learning that goes on in far too many of our schools.

Far too many of our children are suffering from stress, boredom and alienation. Thanks to government policy and its efforts to micromanage learning and teaching, what's been happening to many of our children, who, in too many schools, have been denied access to the sheer pleasure of learning skills and knowledge within the context of a broad, balanced and stimulating curriculum, has been tantamount to abuse.

‘GreatGrandDad’ posted this:

The historians of the future will look back on the National Curriculum as having been institutionalised child-abuse.

The teachers of the future (if the teaching profession resumes) will look back on the late twentieth century as the time when the teaching profession was destroyed and a misguided attempt was made to replace it with corps of curriculum-delivery operatives.

We bang up kids in schools for half their waking hours on half the days of the year. They deserve something less dreary than being 'drilled for the test'.

‘martinusher’ said,

Testing regimes in schools are just another example of a management culture that rejects the notion of workers as partners, they're merely production units that have to be monitored 24/7 to make sure they don't slack off. The process in schools has been interesting to watch. It starts with a tightening of budgets which leads to a decline in the environment ("Deferred Maintenance"), increase in class sizes and the dropping of subjects and activities that aren't part of the core curriculum. Gradually, over time, this leads to erosions in standards, a problem which is pinned squarely on the teachers so obviously they need monitoring (and constant retraining).

Anyone with half a brain can see what's wrong with this process, how corrosive it is, but it pervades all aspects of life, not just schools. Its part of a realignment of society, a realignment that fits with the idea of schools and universities being primarily training units for employers, turning out docile work units with appropriate skillsets.

‘ArseneKnows’ said,

As the farmer said

' T'pig don' get no fatter cos en keeps on weighin' en. '

The testing regime exists for political reasons only and the biggest reason for its failure is that it tests the children not the teachers and/or the system.

Give me a test, its marking scheme and a few examples of what a good answer looks like. Tell me my job is on the line if I don't produce a certain % of passes.

I can give you a class that has been coached in taking the test for 2 years, the required number of passes (very possibly involving a few strategic absences on the day of exams and a few well-timed exclusions) and a classful of students who have been cheated of an education and who are in many cases unable to operate without being spoon-fed.

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The Rose Red Empire?

I forgot to write some more last week about the Book of the Week, “Hackney: The Rose Red Empire”, - to remind readers not to listen to listen to it on Radio 4, and definitely not to buy it. Unless you’re into pompous twaddle passing itself off as poetic reflections. God, it’s bad.

It’s surely a sign of a crap writer when he uses idioms incorrectly; and a sign of a crap publisher when the bad usage doesn’t get spotted and subbed. What’s tolerable in an amateur blogger and self-publisher, for example, is completely unacceptable in a book that you’re asking people to buy.

He writes about Jayne Mansfield, many years ago, coming to the East End, to Haggerston, to open the annual show of the Hackney budgerigar society, and describes her as being ‘at the end of her tether’, when he clearly means she was at the end of her career, and past her sell-by date, reduced to making money from personal appearances at budgie shows.

There was nothing about her that spoke of being at the end of her tether, since she was described as being cheerful, smiling, still ‘glamorous’ and able to ‘perform’ well for a smattering of her few remaining admirers.

Being at the end of one’s tether, at the other hand, is like someone gritting his teeth and continuing to listen to over-written, supposedly ‘poetic’ bullshit that you’d really much rather distance yourself from, simply in order to perform his bloggerly duties, as it were.

Just for a laugh, though, do have a listen to some of it on the Radio 4 website. Do it quickly before it gets deleted.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml

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Springwatch 3

It’s now light before 7.00am, not dark till nearly 6.00pm, and some of the daffodil shoots already have the beginnings of heads. At the weekend I saw some delightful clumps of snowdrops in a local nature reserve. There’s a mature camellia in my street partly in blossom. Friends tell me there are crocuses out in the churchyard. Temperatures back above 10 - 12 degrees.
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