More Educational Excellence Everywhere

Surprisingly, political interference in pursuit of a myopic vision of 'excellence' in education results in failure, distress and demotivates students. Wodathunkedit????

The government’s overhaul of primary-school assessments has turned into a shambles, according to the teachers who will have to carry them out from next month, with complaints that seven- and 11-year-old pupils find the new standards too hard and too confusing. 

The new spelling, punctuation and grammar tests came in for particular attack from those who responded to the National Union of Teachers’ request for comment, with 86% of those saying that the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, should cancel this summer’s assessments. 

More than 5,000 primary-school teachers in England responded to an NUT request for their opinion, and virtually all agreed that the new assessment levels were inappropriate for the pupils, given their age, and was likely to brand many as failures. 

More than 90% of teachers at key stage 1 and key stage 2 said much of the material in the new spelling, punctuation and grammar tests – nicknamed Spag – was too advanced or inappropriate for the age groups being tested. 

Christine Blower, general secretary of the NUT, said many adults would struggle to answer the demands of the new assessments. 

“I can tell you that quite a lot of people who ply their trade by writing in English are incapable of getting 100% on the key stage 2 Spag test,” Blower said. 

One teacher told the NUT survey: “The terminology for Spag is a constant cause of stress for children who find it all confusing. They are feeling like failures because they can’t remember the four different types of nouns, or they are confused by the fact that some things can have several different terms.” 

Another said: “As a year 1 teacher, I am finding myself teaching complicated whole-class grammar in order to prepare them for next year when some of my children still can’t write their names. It’s setting the majority up for failure, no matter how much you prepare them.”

Nothing promotes educational excellence everywhere like setting kids up to hate school and to think of themselves as failures from an early age.

Why is it every government feels it has the God given right to interfere in Education?

Here's a crazy idea. Why not give teachers a bit more freedom and independence to make their own decisions, based on professional experience and with promoting excellence, critical thinking and enthusiasm in their students?

If the Conservatives think the chicken killing and pig slaying industries are competent to regulate themselves, why can't education?

Skoolz

One minor measure in George Osborne's budget, which has been generally overlooked in the fuss about sugar taxes, is his scheme to turn all the schools in England into academies.  Academies are tax payer funded, independent schools which aren't required to follow the national curriculum.

Given the state of the national curriculum, post Michael "Memorise them Kings!" Gove, that might seem to be not a bad thing.  But it is.

Even Tories realise this.

Leading Tory councillors across the country, dismayed by key elements of the education white paper outlined by the government last week, are calling on education secretary Nicky Morgan to rethink her policy of compulsory academisation for all schools. 

Their concerns echo those of many teachers and parents, who took part in rallies in London and many other towns and cities on Wednesday, to protest against the government’s forced academy programme. 

Around the country, councillors – many of them lifelong Tories who have devoted decades to working with schools in their areas and in many cases improving attainment – expressed profound reservations about the changes. 

The government’s white paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, says all schools that have not begun to convert to academy status by 2020 will be directed to do so under new powers. Councils will lose responsibility for the remaining maintained schools, the majority of which will be expected to join multi-academy trusts, regardless of performance. 

“I feel really angry,” said Melinda Tilley, cabinet member for education for Oxfordshire county council, which covers the prime minister’s Witney constituency. 

“If it’s not broke don’t fix it. I don’t think schools should be forced. We’ve been supportive of the government’s agenda. We were going along quite well, helping schools to convert where we could. Now all of a sudden they are going to force the rest of them. It makes my blood boil. I’m put in a position where I can’t protect schools. One size does not fit all.”

Educational Excellence Everywhere is a great name for a white paper on education.

Just as you can tell a country that ostentatiously includes the word 'democracy' or 'democratic' in its name is nothing of the sort, you can tell straight away that these measures will not foster educational excellence anywhere.

Fundamentalist wreckers in the English education system

There's been a lot of ink spilled by the Daily Mail about supposed fundamentalist Muslims trying to take control of English schools.

As part of a rather unIslamic sounding operation called 'Trojan Horse,' they are trying (Shock! Horror!) avail themselves of the powers and rights to influence school governance that are available to everyone and make sure (again, Shock! Horror!) make sure the schools reflect the character of the communities they serve.

 It is worth noting that English state schools are not secular. They should be, but they aren't. There is actually a legal requirement that religion is part of the school - collective worship and religious education are mandated. It isn't 'learning about religions' - otherwise there wouldn't be a option for parents to withdraw children.

The story does has some worrying aspects, though the whole thing I suspect is grossly exaggerated - it is the Daily Mail, after all. Much, as I said, has been made of this by the Mail and the gibbering hate press, in between the unending stream of articles about 'halal' slaughter.

Meanwhile, a fanatic has successfully infiltrated the education system, at the highest level, and is causing havoc. he is twisting and perverting the education system, re-allocating money to fund his pet projects at the expense of mainstream schools that do not fit his blinkered vision of what good education 'looks like.'

The fanatic is called Michael Gove.

In a dramatic escalation of tensions, the Lib Dems confirmed highly damaging leaked information from a senior government source, who said that Gove had secretly taken the money from the Basic Need fund for local authorities last December, in the face of stiff opposition from the Lib Dem schools minister David Laws. 

The Basic Need budget is given to local authorities to ensure that they can provide sufficient school places for all children in their area and it is crucial when there is heavy pressure on pupil numbers. 

The government source behind the revelations tore into Gove, describing him as a "zealot … so ideologically obsessed with his free school experiment [that] he's willing to see children struggle to get suitable school places". 

This was done, said the source, because Gove had let the free school budget spin "out of control". 

Last month this newspaper revealed a secret plan to focus support on failing free schools because of the "political ramifications of any more free schools being judged inadequate".

A sickening, hateful monster, trying to twist the education system because of a warped, nasty idea of how things should be.

The Mail doesn't seem to worried about it, of course.

My own frothing aside, this latest spat between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems does raise the (inevitable) question of how the coalition is going to end.

 The Lib Dems have made massive efforts to support the Conservatives, and have seen their ratings decline to single figures as a result. Nick Clegg was regarded as the future of politics once, remember? 

The Lib Dems will have to 'uncouple' at some point before the election. It would be really stupid of them to go in still propping up the Tories.

Why not now?

A year of 'constructive opposition,' supporting the government on confidence votes and supply votes, would allow the hatred to subside and let the party re-establish some sort of non-coalition identity, and also show how an alternative formal coalitions would work.

Cameron, of course, can not dissolve parliament and call an election - he gave up that power in 2010 in one of the few genuinely good things this government has done. Parliament remains, even if the coalition splits, or even if the government loses a confidence vote.

I doubt the Lib Dems would actually want to topple the Conservative government. They'd prefer to let it limp on as a minority administration, depending on the Lib Dems or minor parties for continual support, tormented by the MPs it relies on to survive from day to day.

But they could. So there's a possibility of UnEleKTUD EdD getting into Downing Street before any one votes for him!

League tables

The Telegraph reports on the continuing problems confronting the English education system, where exam boards have been expose as corrupt, conspiring with schools to debase tests.  It's something for Johnny Key to think about, before he foists yet another ill thought through, imbecile notion upon us.

The current system has created “perverse incentives” in which multiple examiners strip content out of syllabuses, stage training seminars for teachers and sell textbooks packed with exam tips to help schools inflate their overall scores, it is claimed.
In a damning report, the Education Select Committee accused boards of setting tests that make “lesser demands of students” to boost their share of the market.

This has been driven by a league table system that has created “significant downward pressure” on schools to secure basic passes at the expense of promoting a rounded education, it warned.

Making schools compete like football teams was truly, spectacularly stupid.  Schools live or die by their reputation.  A low league table position destroys that reputation.  We have no way of knowing if that position reflects institutional incompetence; or if it represents an achievement as they are converting non-achievers into achievers; or if it suggests a school is maintaining standards and is being overtaken by other institutions offering low quality assessments.

I can think of nothing that the Tories did in the 80s or 90s that exceeds the stupidity of introducing league tables.  And John Key is content with them being brought in here.  Probably, he thinks this will be an easy win - the education sector will oppose it, and this will give National an opportunity to split the teacher-parent coalition that formed over class sizes.  The education sector will be portrayed as secretive and furtive, trying to conceal important information from parents; parents will be told, again and again, that this will help them make an informed choice in the best interest of their child.  That nagging insecurity that afflicts middle New Zealand will be aggravated into a full panic and National will be able to erase the memory of its recent humiliation over class sizes.

But the long term consequences - which John Key seems to think are negligible - are apparent from the convulsions racking the English system.  Perhaps that is the goal though.  Perhaps National strategists are thinking a decade ahead, and envisioning a time when NCEA will appear to have been discredited as schools are driven to compete for places on league tables.  Perhaps John Key isn't the naive, unthinking fool he presents himself as, and the ploy is really a cynical attempt to discredit NCEA and justify its abolition.

Readin' and writin'

This might seem a bit a propos of nothing, but it originated in a discussion I had about the presence of scribes and readers to assist students, with limited reading or writing, in exams. The context was a discussion about their use in Britain, where they seem to be quite a new thing - or more likely, they're becoming more common now, and people are starting to notice them.

It seemed a fairly alien idea to my British counterparts, but scribers and readers aren't uncommon in New Zealand. The reasoning behind it is that if someone has crippling dsylexia / very poor handwriting or whatever, it may impact on their ability to perform to the best of their ability. Also, there's the question around what are we trying to assess? If we leave students who are struggling to read or write to do it themselves, every assessment becomes a de facto test of that - which isn't much use if the subject is geography and you're actually trying to assess their knowledge of African demographics, immigration push-pull factors and whatever.

That's why, in English for example, teachers and examiners are allowing 'non standard' English to be used in CERTAIN SITUATIONS. For example, if a student writes a brilliant elucidation on MacBeth's character, but does it in txtspeak, that would be permitted, because what is being assessed is the student's grasp of Shakespeare, not their ability to write formal English. In a formal writing assessment, of course, txtspeak would be right (or write) out.

Of course, in an ideal world, students would all be able to read and right adequately. But we don't live in that sort of world. Instead, we live in a world where handwriting is becoming rare. How are we communicating just now? How many of you write with a pen and paper as a predominant part of your job? How many kids grow up without using pens and pencils at home, because drawing and colouring in is just not something they're encouraged to do any more? That's where the problem originates.

The problem's a lot bigger than just pandering thick kids. There's a whole move away from handwriting, which will soon be a practice limited to the middle classes and above, as a status symbol. The filthy proles will go back to making their marks on important documents, just as they did a hundred years ago, or leaving thumb prints or DNA samples or something.

The idea that everyone should be able to read and write is actually very modern and anomalous. Historically, the majority have generally been illiterate. We're just returning to business as usual, after a brief, entirely laudable, experiment with egalitarianism.

I suppose the Daily Mail's next step will be a campaign questioning why we waste money educating these scum at all.

Education, education, education

A spectacular example of The Telegraph trying to have it both ways:

raft of reforms introduced by the last Government – including a new curriculum for pre-school children and a generation of Sure Start centres – have had no impact on five-year-olds’ understanding of the basics.

An analysis of more than 117,000 children over an eight year period showed pupils’ early reading and picture recognition ability had actually declined slightly in the last decade.

The report by Durham University suggested that failure to develop key skills at a young age could hold children back throughout compulsory education and in later life. (1)

Not how they loudly proclaim that the Labour reforms to early childhood education have had, "no impact on five-year-olds' understanding of the basics," and then add they are actually getting worse in some areas. Only further down the article, they're forced to confess that,

An analysis of results showed a “statistically significant decrease” in children’s reading and shape recognition over eight years and a corresponding rise in maths results.

However, in both cases academics insisted differences were small and not “educationally significant”. (2)

See what they're doing there? In the opening paragraphs, they point out areas where a decrease was observed, even though the wonks behind the study say the decline isn't significant; and then they claim there's been no impact at all on the mastery of the basics - even though the study points out there has been a positive impact on mathematical ability, of an equally significant (or insignificant) magnitude.

There is something wrong with education, however, and I don't think it is something that wil be solved by throwing money into classrooms - though that will help. More teachers, smaller classes, better facilities will go someway, but won't resolve all the problems that confront parents, students, teachers, employers and everyone else who makes up interested society. Because the problems don't really lie in the classrooms. Dispatch once and for all myths about 'trendy teaching,' insidious creeping leftwing PC prizes-for-all ideology, and how all that is needed is the return of God and the cane to make everything better.

The problems originate in the whole messed up nature of the world schools exist in. Individualistic, selfish, me-me-me-now-now-nowism is so ingrained that the idea of actually having to work for something leaves a lot of people - not just school kids - completely baffled. Parents have children and are staggered to learn that they actually have to work - Quite Hard - to raise them into proper little people instead of feral beasts. Children are shocked to learn that they have to actually work to attain success at school. Employees are vaguely under the impression their employer is an entity that exists only to let them piss about online all day, and get paid for it. The whole world is awash with pitiful. selfish, short sighted and shorter minded, callow neo-barbarians who think the time it takes a modem to warm up in an insufferable imposition on them.

We live in a pretty fecked up society, where people are rootless and community is a quaint and archaic notion. We celebrate this anonymity, this alienation from a sense of belonging. It's an essential part of the doctrine of individualism, a consequence of our modern convenience culture. You can't, after all, really be a properly selfish little monad if you feel you belong somewhere and you're part of something as suspiciously collective as a community. heaven forbid that you might feel a sense of duty towards something other than yourself and your immediate family. People can move about pretty much as they please and live where they like. Unfortunately, we're still pretty tribal in our outlook and don't find this very comfortable, and it leads to isolated, anonymous cities, sundered families - who wants to look after aging relatives, anyway? move away to London, and claim you can't possibly afford a bigger house for them ... Which in itself is another symptom of our misbegotten up social priorities. In terms of education, it leads to a rootlessness, an unwillingness to invest emotional capital and effort in the process of learning. If it is all about me, why should I listen to you, or learn stuff that will make it easier for me to fit in with you? You should learn how to fit in with me ...

Wailing about a lack of discipline in school is describing a symptom, not a cause. The problem is the change in the kids coming into the class, not the abscence of flogging - if they were the same sort of kids that you remember from whatever 'Golden Age' delusion you entertain, then it wouldn't matter. Good kids would behave well regardless of the discipline or lack thereof. The problem is, there are more and more problem kids disrupting classes and - in spite of the howls from predictable quarters - there isn't much that 'more dicipline' can do for them. They don't know how to cope with conflict, or respond to authority. They tend to get worse when challenged, not back down. And they wouldn't be frightened of caning or strapping, because that requires a degree of control over their own behaviour which they're not actually capable of, and, even more depressingly, a lot of them would be used to far worse at home.

I do not buy into the idea there has been a deliberate trend towards mediocrity so that all can achieve at the expense of the very best. There has a broadening of what is studied. Kids in the 1950s didn't learn about computing, boys weren't taught to cook, girls (and bright boys) didn't do wood work, no-one learned Japanese and so on. If we're going to increase depth, we have to accept a narrowing of subjects - and that can't be done because parents and politicians immediately wail that "Standards are slipping" if there is any move away from offering Latin and Glorification Of The British Empire Studies. Anyway, I think it's a bit of a myth that there was 'excellence' back then. There was less to learn, and people were herded into specific areas. The best of today are probably the equal of the best then, and the numbers achieving Besthood are probably about the same. Though they may be best at Japanese instead of Ancient Greek.

The archetypal teenager - sucking on a fag on her way to school, yawping into her mobile and pausing only to make an obscene gesture at a passerby or pull her sagging jeans up over her arse - isn't a symptom of the failure of modern education, but of changes in modern society. Mobile phones, cigarettes for all, obese, surly, lazy, unruly, low attaining students, they all have their roots in the wider community, not in the classrooms. If schools aren't performing adequately, it's because society itself is a miserable mess, not because the tawse was banned or because no-one studies Latin any more.

I'd say it is more to do with consumerism and the modern trend for instant gratification (school isn't sexy or fun), the amount of cash people think they have (since the whole country is living on debt and other people's money, we only think we have it, we don't really) which allows them to access far more fun and enjoyable products, and inculcates an attitude that everything should be continuously pleasurable for no significant effort, and a general trend towards selfishness and individualism - hardly a new thing, but now promoted as a virtue.

This doesn't apply to the children alone, but the parents as well, who are often failing to take responsibility, because they have had the same virtues instilled in them, and are now dismayed to find out that having children isn't actually all fun and gratifying, and even if they do want to make the effort, they struggle because modern life is so demanding and expensive that they can't physically stretch time out to include both parents working, maintaining a home, and adequately parenting.

As long as we continue to put the emphasis on careerism, individualism, consumerism and quick gratification of selfish desires, the problems in the schools and in society in general ain't going to go away.

1 - "Labour's pre-school reforms 'failing to raise standards'," by Graeme Paton. Published in The Telegraph, 14th of December, 2010. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8199247/Labours-pre-school-reforms-failing-to-raise-standards.html)

2 - ibid.