Layer 501 . . . Strictly, Dancing, Singing, Cooking, Reality TV, Brucie, Jamie, Gareth, Gok and Education

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Reality TV

The TV dance show thing is interesting, to say the least. In the first place, what's with the 'Strictly'? Obviously a reference to a crap 90's film called 'Strictly Ballroom' - but who cares? And now the whole silly TV phenomenon is known by practically everyone as "Strictly". It's silly because it manages to turn a very skilled and challenging activity - dancing - into a freak show cum peep show cum comedy show cum camp bitchfest.

Who watches? Every single age group, it seems. My 96 year old aunt thinks it's 'lovely'. For her it represents continuity and a link to the past. She has fond memories of years spent tuning in to the BBC to watch "Come Dancing" - a staple of my own family's viewing back in the monochrome years - when we had only one TV in the house, which we all huddled round in the winter, next to the coal fire. Impossible to escape to the bedroom in those days - too damned cold.

Aunt also has fond memories of our national treasure, the sainted Brucie, hosting popular 'family' shows such as 'Sunday Night at the London Palladium', with his stupid catch phrases and his dancing and his comedic schtick. How wonderful that Brucie is still with us, still doing his stuff. Not.

At the other end of the age spectrum there are teens and sub-teens who get off on the gorgeousness of the professional women dancers, the chance to check out the legs of popular celebs, and the attractiveness of certain of the male dancers. A family show indeed. There are saddoes all down the age range who love to letch at the participants, laugh at the bitchiness or nastiness of the judges, revel in the 'competition' aspect, and groan at Brucie.

And then there are the freaks. Thank you John Sergeant, Anne Widdicombe and others for providing such great entertainment. At least it's not the X Factor. At least they're not serious - they don't really believe they're amazingly talented and possess star quality. They aren't there to demonstrate their prowess as dancers. They do it simply to show that they can. Media whores will appear on anything - just as long as they're on the telly. Being famous and being a celebrity are serious occupations, it seems.

Thank goodness there are a few worthwhile 'reality' shows on TV. Gok Wan, Jamie Oliver and Gareth Malone have done some very interesting and worthwhile things. Jonathan Freedland wrote about them this week:

The success of The Choir's military wives suggests we're losing our taste for malice TV


No pantomime villain judges. And no losers. In the age of austerity we want shows that lift us up, not put us down

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/20/the-choir-military-wives-reality-tv


We've been told endlessly how shallow and materialistic, trivial and celebrity-obsessed, our society has become. It's another source of gloom, along with everything else life has thrown at us this year: earthquakes, war and scandal – all under a darkening sky of economic crisis. But this is the season when we try to focus on . . . causes for optimism, among them some small signs that our culture does not only elevate consumerism, cheap fame and a lust for riches, but other values too. And those signs can be found in the unlikeliest places, including the heart of crassness itself – reality television.


The military wives whose record is selling so fast are themselves a product of reality TV, the BBC series The Choir. The programme could not be more different from The X Factor. It is slow and gentle in style, but that's not the key difference to be celebrated.


Choirmaster Gareth Malone transforms a few dozen women on a Devon military base into a group able to sing together in beautiful harmony.


The months of rehearsal together turned them into something else. They started meeting at each other's houses, having informal rehearsals. They became bound together by the shared pressure to perform, whether at the local town or, eventually, at the homecoming ceremony for their returning men. "We feel like sisters now, helping each other out," reported one. 


Unlike The X Factor or its imitators, The Choir is not a competition: the only prize is a sense of camaraderie and communal connectedness, a prize everybody wins.


The choirmaster never tells anyone they cannot sing. The result is not just a sense of solidarity that was previously missing but a boost to individual self-esteem. One woman after another tells their young instructor that they have found a confidence through singing that they had lacked before – that at last they had done something in which they could take pride.


In an earlier programme, Malone . . . took a gaggle of young men, who previously thought they could do nothing with aplomb except drink, and turned them into a tenor section. There, as on the military base, he took what were fractured groups and turned them into a community – and gave them a voice.


Malone's earnest belief in music and its power to transform, his patience with volunteers who have never sung a note, and their clear, expressed gratitude to him for changing their lives, is impossible to fake.


In among the rough of reality TV and the like, it's good to know there are diamonds like Malone – but he's not the only one. Gok Wan with his how-to-dress shows is in a similar business, taking women who have lost all self-belief and pushing them to see themselves in a new, more generous light. There are no withering one-liners, no pantomime villain judges, no losers – and no prize but an injection of confidence.


The pioneer of this sub-genre of reality TV, aimed at lifting up rather than putting down, may well have been Jamie Oliver. The Jamie's Kitchen series in 2002 followed the chef as he trained 15 disadvantaged young people, with the lure of a job in his new restaurant. He followed it with similar ventures, persuading both school drop-outs and school dinner ladies that they could raise their sights.


It would be cheery to see a trend here, with Malone's chart victory over Cowell presaging an era in which nice prevails over nasty, when the joy of collective solidarity edges out the cult of the narcissistic individual. Such a trend might even be a function of the age of austerity: after all, when there's so much real pain all around, who wants to see fake malice on TV?


But even if it reveals no such wider phenomenon, the military wives – freed at last to express through music the pain and yearning they had long held within – and their success, along with the man who made it possible, are something to celebrate. And in these straitened times, we need all the causes for celebration we can find.

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Real Lives

The problem with all of this is that it's putting sticking plaster on people who are already injured and damaged. How did they get that way in the first place? Why do so many people in our society have such low self esteem? Why have they never before taken part in activities that promote solidarity and collaboration? Why do they have such low expectations, low skill levels, low self-confidence? Why have they never sung, danced, played an instrument in a band, cooked well, dressed with confidence, etc? How did they become so inhibited, so overweight, so withdrawn, so apathetic, so unhappy? Why is our society so bad at raising people who are self-actualised, who fulfil their potential?

The people who take part in Malone's programmes invariably thank him for 'changing their lives'. The point is - why do their lives need changing? Why does our society produce so many people whose lives are unfulfilled, unproductive and uncreative? What's wrong with our ways of bringing up children that produces such people? What's wrong with our system of education?

Check out the previous blog, and Mehdi Hasan's column. Start thinking about how we might educate our young people so that they grow up with a personal voice, the habit of creativity, and the habit of reading for pleasure and learning for its own sake. Start thinking about our need to have a national conversation about personal intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, physical intelligence, instinctual intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Start thinking about our worship of test and exam results and 'the intellect' - and the impact of such worship on underachievement in every other aspect of our lives and our learning.
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Layer 355 . . . SATs, Assessment, Gove, Free Schools and Academies, Young, Springsteen, Fry and Wagner

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Year 6 Stress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why I oppose free schools and academies

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

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

by Peter Downes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Simon Jenkins:

Another middle-class escape tunnel parents don't want

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

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

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Britain's Youngest Boarders

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

Brilliant. Shocking.

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

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

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Culture Corner

Neil Young: Le Noise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Bit More of Fry and Wagner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Er . . . no. That would be a fucking huge waste of money that could be far better spent on far more worthwhile projects and causes. Best keep those fantasies of Valkyries, galloping horses, flaming funeral pyres and palaces of the gods crumbling into dust right there in your head, Stephen dearest.
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Layer 231 . . . Ofsted is Failing . . . Comment is Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the new system takes no account of local deprivation etc etc etc this being seen by the bloated irrelevance as "excuses" or a slacker's charter.. well, we may as well give up now- I know that for most of the children in my school "learning" and "personalised learning" and "excellence and enjoyment" and all the other little aphorisms churned out by ed balls and his chums are way down the hierarchy of needs- a good square meal, a wash and not getting verbally abused at home (or worse) come way before that.
It's high time professionals in education grew a pair and just refused to co-operate with the irrelevant, punitive self serving industry of "inspection". C'mon the revolution starts here!
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Layer 173 Transforming Education, Facing Facts, and New Labour's Disastrous Policies.

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I'm struggling to keep up with what's been happening in the whacky world of education, what with announcements from the Tories about scrapping KS2 SATs so that Primary children can start enjoying school again, New Labour announcing they're scrapping the national literacy strategy, and everybody seeming to agree that education should be handed back to the professionals to ensure that children receive a relevant and appropriate education. Surely 2009 is becoming the glad new dawn we've been hoping for?

Last week Jenni Russell published an excellent article pointing out how and why more and more children are being forced into private tutoring and coaching for tests, which is creating ever greater inequality – at least in terms of test results. The only way to deal with this is through getting away from the idea that tests tell us anything other than how well children cope with tests. In my view, what's needed are proper systems for assessing and tracking pupil progress through appropriate sets of learning targets. Good schools already do this, whilst recognising that children are all different and progress at different rates.

See Jenni's column at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/20/private-tuition-education .

Out of nursery, into the rat race.

“Private tuition distorts exam results, disadvantages poorer families and obscures the real problems in our schools.

It's the naked competitiveness and target obsession of our education system that has pushed people into tutoring in such large numbers.

Now that pupils are being graded from the age of five, children who might have been allowed to develop at their own pace in the past are being told they're falling behind, and because they're being made to panic by anxious teachers, parents feel they have to respond too.

Parents believe that teachers are trying their best, but fear that staff are worn out and over-burdened by the ceaseless flow of bureaucracy and government initiatives.

First, the prevalence of tutoring means that the government's league tables tell parents very little about the teaching at a school. High scores indicate only one thing with certainty; that this school has a parent body who will give their children whatever support they need to do well in their exams. It isn't an assurance that the school itself will deliver those results.

Secondly, it means that poorer or less knowledgeable parents will fall behind in the competition, because they are unable to afford to do the same thing, or are unaware that it is an option. A fifth of parents from professional backgrounds have had their children tutored, while 5% of working-class parents have done the same. And thirdly, it successfully prevents a national discussion about real failings in the education system, because they are not being publicly recognised.

The question of what's been bought, what's fair, and what deserves reward is at the heart of our anguished debate about our education system. On the one hand, skills and education are undoubtedly good for the individual and for the country. On the other, they are also chips in an increasingly intense competition. Many parents are in a constant and uneasy debate with themselves and one another about the advantages they are buying or forgoing. Parents who condemn private education as securing privilege may think nothing of moving house, tutoring in five subjects, and doing their children's coursework for them.

Tiny differences in exam results can determine lives. When others start raising the stakes by engaging tutors then everyone else feels intense pressure to follow suit.

Schools happily collude in it, because it gets them what they want; better grades without the effort of it.

Only a fundamental reform to the system - less cramming, smaller classes, an education based on less testing and more on learning to think - is going to make any difference to this trend. If I had to make another forecast, it would be this - in five years, the proportion of tutored children is going to be sharply up again.”

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Please read the whole article, and then ask yourself how you feel about having it followed on the Guardian website by three advertisements for personal tutors. You certainly can't fault the Guardian for its business acumen, at least. The ads people obviously believed that Jenni's piece, by drawing attention to private tutors, might add a few more runners to the educational rat race, as do the advertisers themselves, of course.

I guess egalitarians are just voices in the wilderness. Very few Brits, at least, seem to give a damn about social justice or the long-term destructive effects on our children (and teachers) of so-called 'driving up standards'. Nobody wants to consider the fact that time spent on cramming for tests is time lost on developing creativity, imagination and a love of learning for its own sake. Our children are forcefully prevented from following their own learning agendas and discovering the things that matter to them as individuals. Imagine how we'd feel if someone did that to us? There's no stopping this juggernaut, though, is there?

I guess the thing we need to turn our attention to is what more we can do to provide good things and more opportunities for the children whose parents can't afford to, or choose not to, employ personal tutors. I'm now more certain than ever that every school ought to resource an extra hour or two at the end of the day for all the children who wish to to come together in rooms, libraries, etc, equipped with books and with wireless laptops on which they can enthusiastically follow up their own interests with the support of trained adults (possibly volunteer or paid teachers, and paid learning assistants).

'Catch-up' maths and literacy could also be individually and sensitively taught where there is agreement with the child (and his/her parents). During those sessions the children, even at Primary level, can have a lot of fun learning how to edit digital photos and video, how to create slide shows and Powerpoints, how to carry out more efficient web searches, how to copy and paste text from websites, etc, etc.

What parents can do, of course, is to encourage their children to read regularly – the best picture books and literature available. They need to read to their children very regularly from an early age. They need to encourage their children to write regularly, and for their own enjoyment. They also need to act as scribes for children who have things to say (which is all of them) but can't be bothered to struggle with composition. Use digital voice recorders whenever possible. This also implies that parents should talk and discuss everything under the sun with their children, letting them realise that they have individual voices, and thoughts and opinions worth listening to.

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On Friday Jenni had another excellent column in the Guardian:

On education, Labour failed our children.

The government has finally acknowledged that its centralised control of schools doesn't work – but for many, it's too late.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/26/labour-schools-national-strategy?commentpage=3&commentposted=1

There comes a point, it seems, when even the most obstinately blinkered of ministers and departments can no longer avoid the facts. One by one the totems of Labour's disastrous education policies are being dismantled.

Today's Guardian reports that the government is to abandon its national strategies for schools when it announces its white paper on education next week. That means that the much-loathed literacy and numeracy hours in primaries, with their rigid, minute-by-minute dictation of how every teacher must structure and deliver their lesson, will stop being compulsory from 2011. Instead schools will be able to make their own choices about what their children need and how they should teach.

This, coming from a department whose controlling and centralising instincts would have been applauded in a Soviet state, is truly revolutionary. It is a (very) belated recognition that treating children and classrooms as if they were car parts and assembly lines is a strategy that simply doesn't produce skilled, or educated, or motivated pupils.

The strategies don't work at any level other than the most superficial.

Teachers feel helpless when they are in front of classes that aren't grasping the points at the speed the national timetable lays down. There is no flexibility. The national plan compels a teacher to move on, no matter how many children are being left behind. Frantic booster classes at ages seven and 11 teach children the short-term tricks they must know to get them through Sats tests.

Even those who can keep up find the lessons stultifying. Some years ago English teachers in secondaries started reporting that 11-year-old children were arriving saying they hated the subject.

Should we be pleased that the government has finally recognised this truth?
I don't think so. I think the appropriate reaction is fury about the wasted years.

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Oxzen posted this response:

Good article, Jenni, and I agree with your conclusion - “the appropriate reaction is fury about the wasted years”.

Throughout these years you've been a very consistent voice criticising the government for the policies which they've now belatedly abandoned - although, as Onthespot points out, the national literacy and numeracy strategies were never compulsory, even though most schools and most LAs acted as though they were.

I think it's also fair to point out that the national numeracy strategy was never considered, by most Primary teachers, as particularly bad or inappropriate. It's the English strategy that was a total disaster. Its methodology was never researched or trialled to any significant degree, and never proven superior to the successful approaches researched and promoted by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, amongst other places, as well as respected educationalists like Prof Harold Rosen.

Ofsted's own research (“Yes He Can - Schools Where Boys Write Well”) produced a set of conclusions and recommendations that are totally at odds with the NLS approach. You can read them on Page 9 of the downloadable PDF: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Forms-and-guidance/Browse-all-by/Other/General/Yes-he-can-Schools-where-boys-write-well . I would strongly recommend schools that now wish to reconsider their adherence to the literacy strategy (as all schools should) to start with this document as a focus for their discussions. And don't wait till 2011, for the sake of the pupils.

More than ever we need young people who read widely for pleasure and information, who write capably and enthusiastically for a variety of purposes, including their own self-expression, who love learning for its own sake, who have a thirst for knowledge, who have a well-developed imagination and an ability to work creatively, and who have a well-developed set of life skills and thinking skills whose development has been enhanced and promoted by the study and sharing of great literature.

All of these outcomes of real education have been retarded and often negated by the arrogance and stupidity of politicians of all parties, plus their Whitehall & LA flunkeys, who have willfully and uncritically been flogging the culture of didacticism, target-setting, endless testing, league tables and punitive inspections these many years. Schools must now band together to develop their own best practices, to offer real education, and resolve never to forget the fury they felt for this regime and all that it did to pupils, teachers and schools. Never, ever, let it happen again.
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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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Layer 69 Getting Rid of Sats, Making Room for Learning.

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Time for a round-up of recent articles on Sats, lest we forget the importance of this subject.
Firstly, the wonderful Jenni Russell’s piece in the Guardian on July 28th. The strapline said, “The minister's brazen denial of evidence that his school tests damage children is typical of this government's culture.” If you missed it, then catch up here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/28/education.labour

Today there’s a column by Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, which begins well but ends in a total muddle.

On the one hand Mr Taylor says, quite correctly, that too many schools are drab, joyless, assessment factories, and that Sats are essentially “a guide to school’s willingness and ability to teach to the tests”. On the other hand he seems to be in favour of keeping ‘top-down systems of accountability’ and ‘quasi-market mechanisms’.

What we actually need are bottom-up (i.e. teacher-driven) systems for monitoring pupil progress that also benefit pupils and teachers.

Without any evidence, other than the detested, misleading and unnecessary league tables, Mr Taylor says that underperformance in schools tends to be concentrated in the poorest areas. How is he judging underperformance? In terms of the children’s enjoyment of school and enjoyment of learning for its own sake? Of the development of their creativity and critical thinking skills; of their enjoyment of literature, whatever their level of reading; of their progress in emotional and social intelligence?

No - he’s back to talking about underperformance in terms of what the Sats themselves are assumed to measure - the ability to do well in timed tests. Many schools in the ‘poorest areas’ have done an amazing job to take the majority of the most disadvantaged children to at least Level 4 by the age of eleven without turning them off learning altogether and without teaching to the tests or failing to provide a broad, rich and balanced curriculum.

As he himself says, “disadvantaged pupils need content that is engaging and relevant, but they can find themselves in institutions obsessively focused on avoiding failing-school status“. As well as curriculum content that is rich and relevant they also need teachers who show them respect, who know how to raise their levels of interest, enjoyment, confidence and self-esteem, and who themselves are treated with respect and trust.

Mr Taylor concludes that “the search is on for a system that combines accountability and transparency with the scope for every school to be a place of creativity and “invention“. Did he ever read, I wonder, “All Our Futures”? Many schools throughout this country rightly prided themselves on being places of creativity, imagination and excitement prior to Sats, league tables and the Ofsted regime being cemented in place.

As for accountability and transparency, there are schools that are already using ICT-based tracking systems which can identify precisely where individual pupils have reached in terms of clear targets for knowledge, skills and concepts within reading, writing, maths and science, on the basis of teacher-supplied information which feeds through every single month or every half term to the school’s central server at the touch of a button.

Electronic tracking of pupil progress through specific learning targets and criteria from the Early Years onwards is already a reality. Teachers have always monitored pupil progress - without rigorous formative assessment it’s impossible to teach effectively. Many schools have invested in computer-based tracking systems and can produce from it masses of data and charts for whole-school, key stage, age group, and individual class level, as well as data broken down pupil by pupil. Such assessment and tracking, which can be verified by internal and external moderation, by sampling and monitoring, is far more sophisticated and useful than anything Sats can provide.
What must be obvious by now, to Mr Taylor and to government, is that Sats never were and never could be of benefit to pupils or teachers. As the likes of Melanie Philips never tire of reminding us, they exist to measure, grade and compare schools, nothing more. The fact that they don’t even do that effectively because they’re such a crude instrument that inevitably distorts and narrows real teaching and learning is not going to make a jot of difference to the attitude of this government - which shows no ability to learn from its mistakes.
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Layer 47 Blair, Brown, Blunkett, Blinkers, Bullshit and Blindfolds.

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Back home from the peace and quiet of Somerset. The noise levels here at home today are quite intolerable. This has been happening for the past 3 weeks, thanks to the water mains being relaid up and down the street, but today it’s worse than ever. There’s nowhere in the house I can go to get away from the racket that’s being created by pneumatic drills, cement mixer lorries, men shouting, drilling, etc. It’s incredible.

Of course the minute I write all this down they’ve decided to down tools and have a tea break, and there’s blissful silence, at least for a few minutes. To be fair this particular team seem to spend as much time off the job as on it. Which at least partly explains why the works have gone on for so long.

Right now there’s not even the sound of children over in the school playground because it’s half term. Summer half term. There are no major roads where I live, so for the next few minutes I’ll be able to enjoy blissful, peaceful silence.

I’m desperate to have my quiet street back again permanently. Throughout the six months prior to these water mains works commencing I had to cope with noise coming from directly across the street, where the school was being rebuilt and enlarged. The sound of lorries and vans arriving from very early morning, from earth-moving machines, diggers, cement mixers, dumper trucks, drilling, hammering, sawing - all of it was sheer noise pollution. Enough to drive someone like me, who values and loves silence, totally crazy.

I suppose I should be less egocentric and give a thought to the poor sods who have to operate the angle grinders and pneumatic drills, and show some concern for their health - their lungs breathing in the dust, their ears being battered day after day by the grinding and drilling they’re doing.

Summer half term, and the weather continues dull, overcast, cold, windy and raining. At least down in Somerset, where the weather was even worse, it was peaceful and quiet!

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The War on Teenage Terror.

There’s yet more chatter on the radio about knife crime, and what we can possibly do about it. People yakking and blathering on about the shocking frequency of knife attacks and murders, and the need for teenagers to have positive role models, and adults who are consistent in what they say and do. So might that be consistent in their stupidity and cluelessness, just like the pundits?

Police Commissioner Blair says we need to talk about it more. Someone else says that knee jerk reactions may get some kids off the streets and locked away, but won’t solve the problem. And, errr . . . . that’s about it. Clueless.

This level of national discourse is appalling and shameful. Because all that people in power really want to do is tinker with the issues, apply sticking plaster to these running sores, and keep things pretty much as they are. The idea of a revolution, at least in consciousness, is very far from their minds. That’s the last thing they want - to have to think very differently about how we operate as a society.

At the moment they are incapable of thinking about and talking about what’s happening in terms of our national low levels of social, emotional and spiritual intelligence. They don’t even understand the concept of emotional intelligence, or emotional literacy as some prefer to call it. There’s no way they are familiar with the work of Goleman, for instance, let alone have any capacity to think about what an attempt to tackle these intelligences might mean in terms of the school system and indeed our national ‘culture’.

And yet a radical shift in our thinking and our ways of doing things is the only appropriate remedy for the trends that we see accelerating. It’s only a serious attempt to address the long term issues from the very roots of the problems that can possibly make any difference. Containment and punishment is not a solution or a policy that has any hope of success. And is this shift happening? Or likely to happen? Ha!

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The Standards and Testing Debate.

Estelle Morris, whom I wrote some very positive things about last week, had a column in the Education Guardian this week, which was pure bullshit. Idiotic, useless waffle of the very first order. I regret having to say such things, because it provides yet more ammunition for the political opposition, but then I AM opposed to everything this wretched government has done and is doing to the education system.

Morris’s column was headed ‘Genuine Engagement on this Testing Issue’, and it was anything but that. A good friend had cautioned me last week about being so fulsome in my praise of Morris, when after all she had consistently supported the government’s SATs agenda, and still does. Well here she is, writing and saying the most absurd nonsense.

She begins her piece by saying, “It is very difficult to have a sensible debate about testing”, and then goes on to prove her point by making idiotic assertions that have absolutely no validity. Here’s what she says:

“There was a time when the dividing lines in the testing debate were quite simply whether we should test children or not. That battle has been fought and won. Tests are an integral part of school life.”

Well, Baroness, you ought to know that the rest of the world doesn’t see it this way. Scotland, for example, has never seen it this way. Wales has just abandoned testing. Are these people all stupid? Or do they perhaps have some legitimate claim to having a correct point of view? And if so, then in what sense has the battle been fought and won?

Here’s the good, decent and caring Baroness, still a parliamentarian, still a Labour party member, seeing the world entirely in terms of the narrow debate within England. And yet she must surely realise there are still thousands of intelligent voices in this country, an increasing number in fact, who completely disagree with SATs and summative testing as means of describing and assessing children’s progress and achievement.

What she really means, of course, is that the debate within PARLIAMENT has been fought and won, and that’s all that really matters. She’s into realpolitic. She sees the world in terms of pure political power, and sure enough our politicians are overwhelmingly in favour of SATs and therefore there’s no point in debating testing any longer. There’s nothing like enough opposition to testing within the main political parties and within parliament, so we might just as well forget it and move on.

This is how politicians operate. New Labour has never been about principle and taking a stand, or showing leadership towards some legitimate ideological goals. It's only ever been about narrow political calculation and appeasing the floating voters. The realities of power, yes indeed!

They had a landslide in 1997, and also in the following election, and a massive mandate for radical change towards the type of society we ought to be, and they didn’t know what to do with it. There are no philosophers within New Labour, only ambitious technocrats and power brokers. People who consider themselves effective and efficient managers.

But I digress. Back to Estelle, bless her.

“Teachers use the (test) data to raise the standards further.”
And then she selectively quotes from the estimable Mick Brookes, gen sec of NAHT, to back up her assertions, which is a typically New Labourish thing to do, and leaves a very nasty taste.

“Data”, Estelle? What fucking data? Data that tells us how well children cope with tests, which effectively tells us nothing about anything important. What teachers actually make good use of is not tests but formative assessment (continuous assessment) which steers their teaching from day to day according to how well children are learning from day to day, week to week. Responding to end of Key Stage data helps no child whatsoever! This is nonsense!

Perhaps Estelle should pay more attention to the likes of Melanie Phillips, after all. Tests are there to measure the performance of schools - and that’s it, as dear Mel P will gladly tell you. But they don’t even do that effectively. And what if they did? What if they really did tell us how well schools are processing children through tests? Is that what we really want to know - what we really care about?

All good teachers and all good schools have systems for tracking children’s progress that rely not a jot on summative testing. They assess them in relation to clear targets for learning, in terms of outcomes in learning skills, concepts and knowledge. This is how progress is really assessed - continuously. If you really want to assess and rank how well schools are doing, then you ought to start by finding out whether or not they have good systems for formative assessment and tracking progress against agreed learning targets and outcomes.

We even know which skills, concepts and knowledge they ought to develop in emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence, and we know when children lack them, and no tests can give us this crucial information. Or any crucial information about children’s creativity, imagination and enthusiasm for learning. But then this government, and seemingly Baroness Morris, care not a jot for these things, and they don’t think parents do either.

But they’ll carry on wringing their hands about the crazy, angry kids on the streets and their culture of knives, gangs and guns. And they’ll carry on wondering what to do about these fallen children of the underclasses. And occasionally they may give a thought as to why our children in general are the most miserable in Europe, if not the world.

But will they ever do anything about it? Will they fuck.

Towards the end of her article Estelle tells us that it’s basically the decision of head teachers if their schools choose to restrict and narrow the curriculum and concentrate on teaching to the tests. She comes to the astonishing conclusion that if parents don’t want their children’s experience of school to be limited, restricted and impoverished, then they should speak up and say so.

And this is the most outrageous thing for her to have said. Having spent years battering it into the heads of parents (and teachers) that good test results are all that matters, and it’s through SATs tests that schools will be judged, for Morris to now turn round and say that maybe education should be about something wider and more important and maybe parents should speak up about this, and if they did then “I’m sure the schools - and the government - would respond” - this is pure evil. This is abdication of responsibility and refusal to take a moral as well as a principled stand on crucial issues.

This is someone who knows or at least suspects that children’s rights and well-being are being violated every day in most schools in this country, and that teachers and head teachers, in tough areas particularly (though not exclusively), are being driven to despair and beyond by government policy and the Ofsted regime, and she has the nerve to tentatively suggest that the decision to do something about it might rest with parents - that if they feel strongly enough about it then they have the power to change it!

She’s sure the government would respond? Yes - if there were to be a mass protest by parents on behalf of their poor bloody kids. But don’t expect the government to change anything for the better on behalf of the kids and their hard-working teachers just because it’s the RIGHT thing to do! Clearly that could never happen! Even if they understood what’s right for children and what ought to be happening in schools. Which they clearly do not.

It’s also ridiculous to imagine that this government will disown the policies it’s been pursuing for so many years, or expect them to recant all the reactionary nonsense it’s been purveying. That would be one massive U-turn too many. Which is why the way forward is in fact for this government to be given the bullet. In the hope that a Parliament with no overall majority might actually make a fresh start on looking at key issues anew, and having to argue and debate properly the issues that really matter.

I truly look forward to the day, which I’m convinced will arrive, when we emerge from our delusion and our collective madness and say what the fuck have we been doing to our kids all these years? And who’s to blame, apart from ourselves?

Who led us into this nonsense? Why were those children treated so badly? Why did they miss out on so much? Why were their childhoods so boring and impoverished? Why were they crammed and homeworked to within an inch of their lives? Why did they not come to love learning for its own sake? Why was their creativity and imagination so under-nourished? Why was their mental and emotional health so damaged? Why didn’t they learn to manage their emotions, and develop a sense of awe and wonder, and learn to value life itself? Why were their spirits so downcast and defeated before they even got going?

Step forward all those who really had a chance to change things from 1997 onwards. Step forward Blair, Brown, Blunkett, Miliband, Balls, and the rest of you. Yes, even you wee Jim Knight, and you Estelle. You were our ‘leaders’. On with the blindfolds.

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Layer 46 The Best and Worst of the English.

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The Best

I’ve said some pretty harsh things about England in my time, so this might be a good time to show some sort of balance in my opinions of our national life.

An English village can be a place of pure wonder on a day in the month of May. There are certain aspects of the English climate, the landscape, and the character of the people that have combined down the centuries to produce environments that are truly delightful.

Taking walks around my friends’ village this week it really struck me that there’s a visual, sensory and aesthetic richness that’s quite amazing. There’s unbelievable beauty in the buildings, their gardens, the natural flora and the way these elements combine within a relatively small place. It’s an environment that’s grown organically over the centuries, without any strategic planning as such, and it all fits snugly together in the most wonderful way.

First, there’s the stream that plunges down through the village from the moor, a stream that over the centuries has cut from the rock a steep-sided valley, in which buildings now cluster and nestle. The higher you walk, the more the sides of the valley draw together and the steeper they get, until the village abruptly ends with a single large house and its garden, right beside the stream, with immaculate lawns like the baize of a snooker table.

This property almost fills this top part of what is almost a ravine - and only a narrow track ventures around and beyond it, and makes its way further and higher, up into the woods and onto the moor.

The stream plunges over rocks and provides the musical backing track for your walk in this part of the village, splashing and gurgling its way down to the sea, about a mile away.

In this place the weather never gets so hot or so dry, or so cold, that it threatens the existence of the hundreds of plants that are to be seen here - both the native ones, like the silver birches and honeysuckles and foxgloves, and the strange and the exotic ones that the English went out and collected and brought back here from around the world.

Even on a dull day in May the colours combine in an amazing display of nature’s incredible palette. The lovely blues of the Californian lilac still abound here in May - much later than places further south and east. The yellow blossoms of the laburnum hang delicately here and there. The subtle lilacs of the wisteria, and indeed the lilacs, crop up frequently.

Trees are still in blossom everywhere. The cherry blossom season is over, but there is still white, pink and yellow blossom in abundance. The hawthorn is at its peak in May.

And then there are the shrubs. Pyrocanthus, rhodedendrons, roses of every colour, both standards and climbers, fuchias, and so much besides. Exotic shrubs I’ve never even seen before, alongside the common and garden varieties. We grow them because we can. Because we appreciate and adore their shapes, textures, colours, fragrances, beauty. This place is stunningly beautiful, not least because of the care and attention that has gone into planting and maintaining this variety of living things, down the years.

There are flowers all over the village. From the tiny ones growing wild in wall crevasses and between the rocks by the side of the stream, to clumps of irises, daisies, buttercups, etc, springing up everywhere. The daffodils and tulips are long gone, but their places have been taken by a seemingly infinite variety of others that avoid the frosts of the early Spring, but delight in these somewhat warmer days as Spring draws to an end.

There’s a proliferation of window boxes and hanging baskets, containing geraniums, pansies, violets, petunias, and a host of others.

Green! There’s a lush, fertile backdrop of every imaginable shade of green, everywhere you look. Grasses, hedges, trees, flowers, ferns, shrubs. Green - that speaks of the abundance of water, and of sunshine, but not too much heat or sun so that things dry out and turn brown or parched yellow. You can’t imagine things in this sheltered spot ever drying out. The surrounding hillsides are an unbroken mass of lush green canopies of trees in full leaf, climbing up towards the moors, clinging to their rocky purchases in the thin red soils.

Beyond the flora there’s the crafted and built elements of this environment, the products of our national imagination and creativity. The subtle and yet substantial houses and cottages that are gathered together in such neighbourly and intimate proximity. Their brick, stone, slate, wood and glass, in harmony and proportion. None of them trying to outdo their neighbours in any way that speaks of showiness or excessive pride in itself. Homes that are content to have two or three bedrooms, a cosy lounge and a kitchen. Everything that anyone needs for a good life, an equal place in the community. For here we are all equal, even if some are slightly more equal than others, as Orwell, a true English genius, would have it.

The village becomes a true community because of the buildings it shares, for all to use. And these too have their own beauty, and their own modesty. The main street of the village is where we find pubs, cafes, shops, galleries, tea rooms, guest houses and churches. All of these date from the early part of the last century, or the century before that, or even the one before that.

The best of the Victorian and Georgian architecture sets a standard that’s hard to measure up to for contemporary architects working to budgets that are either too tight, or in some cases too lavish. The English vernacular is all about substance, not show; modesty, not brashness. Its materials are for the most part local, and blend well into the landscape. They don’t try to dominate it, or stand apart from it.

The people here, like their buildings, the flora and the landscape, are calm, modest, harmonious, gentle, quiet, unassuming, warm and friendly. There’s a definite feeling that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which is as true for the people themselves as it is for the environment that’s been created over the centuries. They live for the most part in a spirit of mutual appreciation, cooperation, trust and respect. They organise art shows, charity events, concerts and cultural meetings of various descriptions. They are proud of their community and participate in the events that help to bring people together.

The pubs serve the best cask-conditioned ales, good wines and tasty food. The staff are friendly and attentive. There’s an atmosphere that speaks of lives well lived, of relaxed joie de vivre and interdependence. Here, no man or woman need feel like an island. In the winter time and early Spring log fires blaze their warmth from iron grates.

In the shops people take time to show recognition, to chat, to banter, to smile. Yesterday there was a small queue lined up at the counter of a shop, clutching their purchases - wine, beer, newspapers, magazines, various foodstuffs. “You know the saying - anticipation makes it more enjoyable”, said someone cheerily, to a customer who’d been standing in the line for a couple of minutes. “I’ve only got tampons and toothpaste”, said the customer, pensively. “Pity it’s not condoms”, said the next in line, to the great amusement of everyone within earshot.

Oh yes, our English wit and humour. There’s another priceless national asset.

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The Worst

I’m beginning to get very angry with politicians who claim they’ve been doing a good job for children, who like to polish their egos by saying they’ve been taking good care of young people. It brings to mind a routine by the brilliant American comic, Chris Rock. He berated parents who like to preen themselves by boasting “I take good care of my kids!” by yelling at them “That’s what you’re SUPPOSED to do, you idiots!”

This is what we need to say to politicians who boast they’ve spent millions on improving schools and opening more nurseries - “That’s what you’re supposed to do!”

To all the politicians who say they’re making sure more kids than ever are doing well academically - that’s what you’re supposed to do!

The question which then arises is, SO WHAT? What is it you’re NOT doing that you SHOULD be doing?

Do they now enjoy school more ? No.
Do they have a more positive attitude to learning? No.
Do they have more emotional intelligence? No.
Are they more creative and imaginative? No.
Do they read more widely and read more books for enjoyment? No.

Do they feel like they’re exploited and treated like pawns in somebody else’s game? Yes.
Do they resent more cramming for tests, having to take more tests and having to do more and more homework? Yes.
Do they feel more stressed and more anxious? Yes.

So what’s any of this got to do with taking better care of kids, as opposed to processing kids more efficiently through results factories? Nothing at all.

Which isn’t to say that lots of schools haven’t improved. But that improvement down to the efforts of the professionals in schools, not down to the amateurs, the career politicians.

When was the last time a politician came up with an original idea that could improve the lives of children? When was the last time a politician had a vision of something that could transform the lives of children and make them better and happier?

No, what politicians have done is convince even the educationalists that their job is to ‘prepare children for the world of work’. To convince parents that the way to judge a school is on its position in a league table. To convince teachers and head teachers that the only thing that matters is success in tests and exams. Or at least to make them fearful of the consequences if they can’t improve test scores and meet government’s arbitrary targets.

We used to be fearful of what would happen to the education system if it was governed by payment by results. Well we’ve got that, and we’ve also got a system that simply dismisses people if schools don’t meet government targets. And we’ve got an education service that’s allowed all this to happen to them.

I’m sick of it all, and it’s obvious that children are sick of it as well.

More of this tomorrow.