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.

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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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Layer 205 . . . The Alexander Enquiry, and More Banker's Bonuses

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The Alexander Enquiry

Alexander's report is published today, and our New Labour government has already rubbished it (again), calling it “out of date” and “a backward step.”

Whereas the Daily Mail has spoken out against our Stalinist schools system.

What we need is an alternative term of abuse to “Stalinist”, since this is a bit . . . inappropriate? . . . and I'd suggest Blairist, which is a term I'm convinced is almost as vile as Stalinist these days, and of course absolutely appropriate since Blair (with Mandelson and Brown) was the chief architect of the type of State command and control system we're used to seeing in this country – a system that's gone way beyond what even Thatch attempted to do to us.

If my mind wasn't made up before it sure is now – there's NO WAY I could consider voting for Labour at the next election. The sheer stupidity and philistinism of their response to Alexander's inquiry is both breathtaking and appalling.

It should also be noted they've done little substantial for constitutional reform, for reform of the banking and finance system, or for reform of our way of doing politics. They're fucked, the whole lot of them.

Please read the report itself and also these commentaries.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6338700/Primary-review-start-formal-lessons-at-six.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1220741/Stalinist-schools-Labours-centralised-control-primary-education-driving-standards.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/oct/16/schools-report-critical-of-labour?CMP=AFCYAH

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Bonuses Are Back – Thanks To OUR Money

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/goldman-sachs-bankers-bonuses

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1220506/Gravy-train-bankers-JP-Morgan-plans-bonus-bonanza-quarterly-2-3bn-profit.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/15/paying-price-myth-banks-fail

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/15/goldman-sachs-banking-bonuses

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I Am The Walrus

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/15/humpty-dumpty-children-rhymes
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Layer 197 Home Time, Keith Floyd, Primary Education, Lehman's and the Shock Doctrine Reversed.

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Last night's television provided two wonderful and unexpected programmes.

1)    Home Time – BBC2 - by Emma Fryer & Neil Edmund

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/01_january/19/hometime.shtml

"Sitcom. Gaynor Jacks, aged 29, returns to her mum and dad's house in Coventry after running off to find her place in the big wide world when she was 17-years-old

Emma Fryer plays the lead role of Gaynor Jacks who returns to her hometown – Coventry, home to her mum and dad's house, and home to her three best friends.
Aged 17, she ran off to find her place in the big wide world, but now aged 29 she's back with her tail between her legs."

"Lucy Lumsden, BBC Controller, Comedy Commissioning, says: "It's incredibly exciting when a new writer/performer comes along with a story to tell that is close to their own experience. Female-led and with a strong sense of place, we eagerly await the world of Home Time which explores the themes of growing up and longing to be different."

The series was commissioned by Lucy Lumsden and produced by Baby Cow, the makers of the award-winning Gavin And Stacey and The Mighty Boosh."

You can watch it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mx9yr


Directed by Christine Gernon  and produced by Ted Dowd, who both worked on Gavin and Stacey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Fryer

The main character's final words in this first episode were, “I'm so sorry. But I was only seventeen. You know what I mean?”

Edge of Seventeen video with silly visuals but excellent sound quality for Stevie Nick's great track:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVqCWakQFf4&feature=related

2)    Keith Meets Keith

"Documentary about the funny, thought-provoking and moving encounter between the man who 'deconstructed television' years before the phrase became fashionable among the media-savvy, and a protégé who has continued that tradition."

"Actor and documentary-maker Keith Allen was hugely influenced by TV chef Keith Floyd's anarchic presentational style, and is determined to track down his long-time hero. He finally locates him in rural France.

Both known for their wild lifestyles, it's unsurprising that the two Keiths immediately hit it off. The result is a compelling profile of Floyd's life, as well as his musings on the current TV chefs, the mendacity of television, the state of modern Britain, and the human condition."

And then this morning Floyd goes and dies of a heart attack.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2009/09/15/newsflash-keith-floyd-dies-as-keith-allen-documentary-about-him-screens-on-channel-four-115875-21674795/

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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/sep/15/keith-floyd-chef-television-dies

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213559/BREAKING-NEWS-Keith-Floyd-dies-heart-attack-aged-65.html

You can watch the programme on the web, here:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/keith-meets-keith/4od#2970765

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On Radio 4 today -

From Abacus to Circle Time: A Short History of the Primary School

“Education journalist Mike Baker traces the controversial changes to the ways we have educated our youngest children over the past 150 years, from the rigidity of the Victorian age to the occasionally anarchic, experiential learning of the progressive 1970s.”

Traditional v progressive?
Facts v child centred?
Open plan and activity led learning?

The Primary Review is about to be published, and this series is a serious effort by Mike Baker to understand the history of Primary education in England.

Classes of 40, sometimes 2 combined into 80, weren't unknown in the past. Far from it.
Lots of caning, sitting in rows, learning tables and poetry by heart.
The Blunk popped up to say “It was more difficult for me than for other people – the whole intention was to get information into the heads of individuals.” Hmmm. Difficult, eh?
Should England still have SATs tests?
We now think knowledge, skills and experiences are at the heart of education, it seems.
Was the 'golden age' post-Plowden really as good as nostalgia suggests?

In the beginning, the purpose of schools was to make children obedient, God-fearing Bible readers.

Then came new thinking about child development – from Dewey, Montessori, at al. We started to believe that schools and education should be based on activity and experience rather than 'knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored'.

The Hadow report – with a major section on child development – was 'revolutionary' – according to Prof Robin Alexander, who is leading the Cambridge-based Primary Review, shortly to be published in full. He also says Dewey was hugely influential.

But Hadow made relatively little impact, and in spite of this progressive thinking Victorian practices were still dominant. As was the expectation that working class kids would just follow their parents.
Then came the Plowden Report in 1966-67 – a major review of Primary education
Shirley Williams spoke about the way in which the 11+ dominated primary schools in the 40s and 50s. Tony Crosland, as the Minister of Education, was determined to get rid of it.
Plowden herself was mainly concerned with the joy of learning and emancipating teachers and children from 'the terribly narrow curriculum.' The profession began to seriously consider the real reasons for children to learn – from a fundamental interest in and fascination with with their world, which could   motivate them to learn through the sheer enjoyment of learning.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mltgf
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mk74t#synopsis

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Wasted – Channel 4

You have 28 days left to catch two really excellent programmes on the way in which skunk and cocaine fuck people up. Difficult to watch, but worth it. People with kids should consider recording these.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/wasted/4od

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Shock Doctrine, Continued

It's the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers' collapse - the event that triggered the worldwide financial crisis. The recent TV documentary on it showed the head man of Lehman's yelling at his staff - “Crush our enemies!” And there we have it in a nutshell. This crazed individual didn't see competitors - he saw only enemies. He didn't want to compete with them - he wanted to crush and kill them. A megalomanic totally off his trolley, using language that betrayed his total lack of emotional intelligence.

This was a guy who was being paid incredible amounts, unbelievable millions, and managed to lead his company to the biggest bankruptcy in history. It was a financial disaster ten times bigger than the collapse of Enron. Lehman's were 40 times leveraged, which means they were working with practically no money of their own, and for every dollar they actually had on deposit they owed the money markets 40 dollars.

Clearly the people at Lehmans thought the company was far too big for the government to allow it to go bust. In a sense it was, and it was really a stupid government that did stupid things that just sat back and allowed the bankruptcy to happen, instead of just stepping in and taking the business into State ownership - which they couldn't bring themselves to do for purely ideological reasons. I guess there were also plenty of 'enemies' that relished seeing it go down.

Thankfully Brown and Darling weren't so stupid and they did act to take failing banks into public or part-public ownership. But they've done nothing since. The Shock Doctrine ought now to be used by the likes of Brown and Obama to transform our societies. This means swift and radical action, justified on the grounds of the necessity of preventing any future financial crises. This means passing legislation to break up the banking cartels and monopolies, capping executive pay, banning bonuses, taking a controlling stake in the major banks, and forcing them to make loans to solvent or near-solvent companies and individuals, instead if withdrawing credit and forcing them to go bankrupt.

It also means cutting all future expenditure on weapons of mass destruction, raising taxes on the rich and super-rich, cutting expenditure on state surveillance and spying, scrapping identity cards, and capping the pension entitlements of anyone 'earning' more than £100,000 per year. No-one should expect a 'pension' of more than £40,000 a year. If anyone 'needs' more than that, they should fucking work for it. Greed is NOT good. All monies saved on these pensions should be ring-fenced to pay a higher minimum wage.

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Obama and the Money Men - Obama Warns Bankers

From yesterday's Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/video/2009/sep/15/obama-warns-bankers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/14/obama-speech-wall-street

President Barack Obama delivered a stern warning to Wall Street today that bankers must scrap "quick kills and bloated bonuses" in favour of a new sense of social responsibility as the first anniversary of Lehman Brothers' spectacular bankruptcy dawns with a sense of fragile hope for an economic recovery.

"There are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we are recovering, they are choosing to ignore them," said Obama. "We will not go back to the days of reckless behaviour and unchecked excess that were at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses."

Obama has come under pressure from liberal Democrats, and from leaders of European nations, to be tougher in cracking down on bonuses and on unfettered risk taken by top US institutions.

"It was a collective failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street and across America that led to the near collapse of our financial system one year ago," said Obama. He told bankers that they should not wait for legislative action forcing them to translate financial products into plain language, put executive pay up for shareholder votes and alter bonuses to focus on long-term, rather than short-term, performance.

"Many of the firms that are now returning to prosperity owe a debt to the American people," said Obama. "It is neither right nor responsible after you've recovered with the help of your government to shirk your obligation to the goal of wider recovery, a more stable system and a more broadly shared prosperity."

The Obama administration's plans to avert future crises include a sharpening of financial regulation to cover hitherto free-for-all markets in hedge funds and exotic derivatives, tougher powers for the Federal Reserve to monitor banks considered "too big to fail" and shareholder votes intended to counter excessive pay deals in corporate boardrooms. Mortgage companies will be obliged to hang onto part of every loan, rather than selling them on to shed risk. But the White House has backed away from earlier efforts to cap bankers' pay."

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Lehmans – one year on: have we learned the lessons?

The apocalypse has been averted but banks have returned, unfettered, to business as usual.
Check out this piece in the Guardian on whether lessons have been learned.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/14/lehmans-one-year-after

"Britain should stop dragging its feet and promote global reform on capital requirements for banks.

The credit crunch was not just a financial collapse, but the collapse of an ideology – that the wider and deeper markets became the greater the public good. What response have we had to the crisis at this level of ideas? Virtually nothing.

With the notable exception of Adair Turner there is, as yet, zero sense that those in authority have made any real attempt at the fundamental reappraisal we clearly need.Hardly anything seems to have been learned in terms of required regulation.

Banks that were "too big to fail" have got bigger. Flawed incentive structures continue to promote short-term profit-seeking rather than social good. So we have protected private profiteering and socialised its risks. Meanwhile, speculative behaviour in global commodity markets can still cause a repeat of the recent crazy volatility in world fuel and food prices, which created so much havoc in the developing world. This opportunity wasted by governments – reflecting the lack of basic change in the power equations governing capitalism – will prove to be expensive. We should brace ourselves for an even worse replay of the financial crisis in the foreseeable future. And the lopsided government response – benefiting those responsible for the crisis without adequate concern for the collateral damage on innocent citizens – may give public intervention a bad name, at a time when we desperately need such intervention for more democratic and sustainable economies.

Tragically, The global crisis is still managed by policymakers holding fast to the disastrous Bush-Paulson legacy. Fooled into believing the crisis is over, by a stock market bubble, they share the pathological belief that the market knows best; that banks cannot be fully nationalised or obliged to lend at low rates; and that while wages and incomes fall, top directors can ignore inflation when awarding themselves bonuses and pay.
Sadly, because lessons have not been learned, there will be no policy tools left to deal with the next banking crisis – due in 2010, if not sooner.

The collapse of Lehmans Brothers and the chaos that ensued taught governments an old lesson they had forgotten: finance is too important to be treated like just another industry. No, a system to make payments and extend credit is an essential utility, just like water and public transport. That's why the British taxpayer has shelled out hundreds of billions to keep the entire banking system afloat. Ever since learning that lesson, however, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have done their damnedest to forget it, again – and to talk instead about arms' length management and (tired old theme, this) Britain's comparative advantage in financial services.

A short-term mindset is still the rule of the day. If a banker, trader or executive can make a bet that yields them riches in the short term and makes the rest of us pay over the long term, who thinks that bet won't get placed?" 

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Eddie Izzard

1100 miles, 43 marathons in 51 days, running for Comic relief. The guy's incredible. Mad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/sep/15/eddie-izzard-charity-run

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Gary Younge

As usual, an excellent piece in yesterday's paper by the wonderful Mr Younge:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/13/afghanistan-war-on-terror-viagra

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Ashley Seager

Keeping up the good work:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/14/unemployment-figures-recession

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/07/financial-crisis-happen-again

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Google

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/sep/15/google-crop-circles
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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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