Education Log
Archive of Previous Reports
Thousands to be struck off special needs list
Children with special needs join the list of unsustainable burdens.
... schools are abusing the system to disguise poor teaching and climb league tables.
For the first time, rigorous screening measures will be introduced to prevent pupils from being classed as having special needs when they have merely fallen behind or caused disruption in class.
The bureaucratic process used to identify children with the most severe special needs will also be scrapped and replaced with a single assessment covering education, health and care ...
Ofsted has claimed that as many as 450,000 “special needs” children are actually no different from other pupils.
Many are simply underachieving because of a culture of low expectations ...
Tel 15 May 2012Clegg and Cameron's cruellest day
The IFS says education funding is cut by 13%, the largest cut since the 1950s.
Early years take a heavy hit, yet that's where deprivation is best countered.
Over half of schools say they use Clegg's pupil premium to plug holes in their other spending: some are using it well to re-employ education welfare officers lost in the cuts.
The IFS says the lost education maintenance allowance did well at keeping poorer pupils in post-16 education. But Michael Gove, speaking to private school heads, asserts: "Deprivation need not be destiny."
He says Finland has equal outcomes with less spending – but he ignores Finland's place as one of the most socially equal countries, while Britain is one of the most unequal.
In the real world, Gove's free schools take half as many pupils on free school meals as average while his academy scheme gives top schools extra money.
Every Child a Reader brilliantly rescues six-year-olds from failing to read, but this year 9,000 fewer will get this programme that shoots the deprived ahead permanently.
So until ministers' deeds match their words, they would do well to be quiet about social mobility: it only angers those who care ...
Gdn 14 May 2012 Unsustainable BurdensPoor pupil cash will not be ring-fenced
Nick Clegg sets out plans to break private schools' grip on establishment
Clegg, launching a two-week drive on social mobility, which he sees as one of the central goals of his deputy premiership, will set out in a speech on Monday how he wants the £1.25bn pupil premium to be used by schools.
In the following week he will join forces with Alan Milburn, the acting social mobility and child poverty commissioner, to inject energy into the year-old social mobility strategy.
They will look at the role of university access and preschool education, and at possible new measures of life chances that go beyond the current array of child poverty targets ...
Gdn 11 May 2012Poor pupil cash will not be ring-fenced
Clegg and Cameron's cruellest day
Schools 'will compete' for £10,000 pupil premium award
Michael Gove: public school domination 'morally indefensible'
Social Mobility
Police investigate riding lessons and sex games at academies' expense
... an audit investigation team from the Department for Education (DfE)revealed "serious failings" in the running of the Priory Federation of Academies Trust.
... the report reveals how Mr Gilliland and the trust's former finance director Steve Davies used their federation credit cards whilst in France at a centre bought by the Trust for residential trips "to purchase items at supermarkets and meals at restaurants".
Examples cited in the report include a Christmas Day purchase at a restaurant of lunch for £314.84p.
The report also reveals that Mr Davies was not a qualified accountant, adding: "Mr Davies is a sailor and is currently sailing his boat in the Caribbean."
The Priory Federation runs four government-financed academies in Lincolnshire ...
The Trust ... said the Education Funding Agency, which carried out the investigation, had graded its auditing systems as "outstanding" only a year ago.
Ind 28 Apr 2012Champagne culture at Emma Harrison's A4e
A4e employee forged signatures to boost job placement numbers
Police investigate riding lessons and sex games at academies' expense
... an audit investigation team from the Department for Education (DfE)revealed "serious failings" in the running of the Priory Federation of Academies Trust.
... the report reveals how Mr Gilliland and the trust's former finance director Steve Davies used their federation credit cards whilst in France at a centre bought by the Trust for residential trips "to purchase items at supermarkets and meals at restaurants".
Examples cited in the report include a Christmas Day purchase at a restaurant of lunch for £314.84p.
The report also reveals that Mr Davies was not a qualified accountant, adding: "Mr Davies is a sailor and is currently sailing his boat in the Caribbean."
The Priory Federation runs four government-financed academies in Lincolnshire ...
The Trust ... said the Education Funding Agency, which carried out the investigation, had graded its auditing systems as "outstanding" only a year ago.
Ind 28 Apr 2012Champagne culture at Emma Harrison's A4e
A4e employee forged signatures to boost job placement numbers
Jamie Oliver in blistering attack on Michael Gove over poor school diet
Oliver says that some academies are buying in food that would fail the nutrition tests that maintained schools have to meet.
Others are making money from vending machines packed with sweets, crisps and fizzy drinks.
Under the national rules, which are applied to other state schools, vending machines can only sell healthy snacks such as fruit, nuts and bottles of water ...
Gdn 22 Apr 2012
Doctors turn on No 10 over failure to curb obesity surge
Calories to be cut by major food and drink companies
We must demonise junk food for the sake of our children
Obesity linked to money insecurity in affluent nations
Schools: academic theory, practical problems
Corporate cronyism comes to education ... and no place for Ivan Illich!
... the end of the year Mr Gove will have made academies of most English secondaries.
There was little time to worry about the decidedly mixed results of the American and Swedish free school programmes from which Mr Gove hails as inspiration: his plans were swallowed without touching the sides.
His rhetoric of school freedom sounded soothing, and for the most part drowned out nagging doubt that bulldozing the old devolved ecology of education in favour of bilateral private contracts between providers and Whitehall might concentrate power instead ...
Gdn 09 Apr 2012ivan illich: deschooling, conviviality ... lifelong learning
Education policy
Literacy progress has stalled
Sir Michael has set out a plan to raise national standards in literacy in England.
Addressing leading head teachers and literacy experts, he questioned whether the present target for 11-year-olds was challenging enough to help prepare them for secondary school.
He also said parents should be told their child's reading age as well as how they were doing against national targets.
Ofsted, he said, would focus "more sharply" on literacy in its inspections, and on phonics training for new teachers.
The government believes a stronger emphasis on phonics will improve literacy levels ...
BBC NEWS 15 Mar 2012
Reading check for six-year-olds rolled out One in 11 boys leaves primary school 'unable to read'Ofsted inspectors say literacy standards 'fall short'
Ofsted criticises Three Rs 'initiative overload'
A good job is hard to find for Britain's young unemployed
A number of possible remedies have been mooted.
For those who believe that young people are pricing themselves out of the labour market, the solution is to make the minimum wage less generous.
Given that the rate for 18 to 20-year-olds is less than a fiver an hour, and for 16 to 18-year-olds is £3.68 an hour, it is hard to say that the minimum wage is unduly generous, particularly given rising transport costs for those travelling to work.
Germany's highly advanced system of apprenticeships is also much admired by some UK politicians, and there is no doubt that the withering away of extensive on-the-job training has played a part in making the transition from education to work far more difficult for young people in Britain.
Ultimately, though, the problem boils down to this. Demand for labour is weak, and cost-conscious employers are not inclined to hire young workers.
Government policy should have three aims: an education system that prepares people for work, a macroeconomic policy that generates sufficient demand and a system of financial incentives to persuade employers to give school leavers and graduates a break.
Gdn 07 Mar 2012Understanding Society: Findings 2012
Tech Skills to Pay the UK's Bills
The UK's Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector contributes £81bn of added value to the UK's economy.
The sector is the largest in Europe and employs over a million people who contribute 10% of GDP ...
What the figures don't show is the technology investment gap in the UK, also called the IT skills gap.
This is a problem that technology firms, and any organisation seeking to hire skilled technology staff, are facing right now.
The CBI's Building for Growth report that showed over 40% of employers struggle to fill these skilled roles; over half expect this to increase ...
Everybody I speak to in the IT industry agrees that the lack of job-focused IT skills in UK school leavers and graduates is causing recruitment problems in the technology sector at a time when we wrestle with unemployment across the country ...
Huffington Post 06 Mar 2012
The schools crusade that links Michael Gove to Rupert Murdoch
The education secretary has close ties to Murdoch and would be a key figure if he attempts to move into the UK schools market ...
Gdn 26 Feb 2012 Michael Gove Titillation and Diversion Westminster Sleaze
In the absence of crap detection Janet Daley's Feudalist Neoliberalism Rupert Murdoch
EMA replacement 'failing young poor students'
EMA provided students from lower-income families, with incomes under about £30,000, with weekly payments of up to £30 a week. All students had to do to get it was to attend the courses they were studying.
The government's £180m replacement Bursary Fund is only targeted at young people who are in care, leaving care or on income support, with the most part being pumped into a discretionary fund run by colleges.
But Barnardo's in-depth study, looking at 51 disadvantaged youngsters and the colleges they attend, suggests that cuts to funding and confused targeting is leaving many vulnerable young people without enough means to carry on learning ....
The charity's chief executive, Anne Marie Carrie, said ...
"The Bursary Fund is an unfair and totally inadequate replacement for the Education Maintenance Allowance ...
BBC NEWS 07 Feb 2012 A 'modern and compassionate party' Inequality
Quarter of children performing poorly due to problems at home
Researchers from the University of London's Institute of Education and the University of Sussex analysed the intellectual development of 18,000 children between the ages of nine months and five years.
They found that children were likely to have stunted intellectual development if they were exposed to two or more disadvantages, such as having a parent who suffered from depression, and living in an overcrowded home.
Some 28% of the children they studied came from families that faced two or more disadvantages. In most cases, these children had a considerably reduced vocabulary or behaved worse than their peers.
In their study, multiple risk factors in young children's development, the academics highlight 10 situations that can impair a child's development.
These include living in an overcrowded home; having a teenage mother; coming from a family with poor basic skills or a history of drug or alcohol abuse.
Some 30% of the children analysed in the study came from families facing one of these disadvantages, but it was only when children faced at least two disadvantages that their development was impaired ...
Gdn 07 Feb 2012 Inequality
A very neoliberal catastrophe Family BreakdownCLS
Cameron unveils £448m plan to help 'problem families'
New-style 'nappy curriculum' will damage childhood
Marxist means to Neoliberal ends: the global movers and shakers need a massive reserve labour force to keep wages flat. To this end both parents are expected to work, while the under fives step onto the first rung of the ladder of Governmentality.
In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, academics and authors said that controversial education reforms are robbing under-fives of the ability to play and leading to the “schoolification” of the early years.
The comments come just days after a report from the National Audit Office warned that a £1.9billion-a-year plan to give all children access to free nursery provision has failed to improve pupils’ results in the first few years of primary school.
Sue Palmer, a literacy specialist and author of the book Toxic Childhood, who signed the latest letter, said:
“The EYFS has helped skew early years practice towards formal methods at an even earlier age, so it's no surprise the National Audit Office has found nursery attendance makes no difference to children's attainment at seven.
“Tinkering with the current statutory requirements of the EYFS won't put things right.
"We need a radical rethink of the way we treat our young children in the UK, and far greater attention to the realities and subtleties of child development.”
Tel Feb 2012
Governmentality The Blank SlateAnti-EYFS petition grows
Open EYE
A tick-box attitude to toddlers
Big banking sector amplifies risk of inequality
In a series of chapters for the forthcoming publication Going for Growth, Journard outlined Britain's weaknesses.
Almost one in five of people aged between 25 and 34 do not have five good GCSEs (or their equivalent), and academic performance is dramatically affected by parental performance, much more so than in other comparable rich nations.
Another issue, said Journard, was that 40% of women were in part-time employment – 15% higher than average among rich nations – which was "almost certainly" related to the fact the UK had some of the highest childcare costs, equivalent to more than 45% of the average wage.
The OECD called for education spending to be better targeted so the poor benefited more from proposed reforms.
"The pupil premium is a good idea but we still feel that it could do more to benefit disadvantaged students," it said.
It also called for a shakeup of the way housing is taxed, questioning why house sales did not attract capital gains tax ...
Duval said Britain's council tax regime was "highly regressive" and needed reform.
"In England, the tax liability for properties over £320,000 is only twice the liability for properties of £70,000 and three times the liability for houses under £40,000. Low-income households are entitled to a council tax benefit. However, the takeup is only around 65%."
Duval said the OECD advocated a replacement with "a property tax based on current market values or a land tax".
Gdn 23 Jan 2012 George Osborne Inequality Whither Britain? Log
Colleges are 'failing miserably' to reflect society, according to the Liberal Democrat deputy leader ...Universities must cut private schools intake, says Simon Hughes
Hughes told the Guardian:
"Every university should, wherever their fee level is, but specifically for a fee level above £6,000, recruit on the basis of no more people coming from the private sector than there are in the public as a whole ...
"I don't believe you have to look to the private sector to give you the quality of exam results and ability to make up the numbers to fill the places." ...RichardWhittingtonGuardian 07 Jan 2011
7 January 2011 11:21PM
No; the fault is not with the universities and their admission policies, it is with the abysmally low standard of the National Curriculum foisted on state shools during the New Labour days.
The problem is that the universities have not dropped their entry standards to reflect the lowering of quality of state school applicants, favouring by default privately educated pupils, whose schools were not bound by Labour's ideological constraints.
I've seen the science content of the National Curriculum. It is absolute crap. This is what Simon Hughes should be railing at.Simon Hughes: universities should limit private school intake
University fee plan for poorer students 'not workable'
Cash grants allow real experiments in school science
Schools are encouraged by the UK's top scientific body to bring cutting edge science into the classroom.
Projects, funded by the Royal Socieity, include bioreactor being built by secondary pupils in Cornwall to test the viability of getting fuel from marine algae.
And a particle accelerator is being built by a team of Nottingham teenagers.
The Royal Society offered £45,000 in grants to bring science alive.
Each school will receive up to £3,000 and the opportunity to work with scientists and engineers from leading universities and industry ...
BBC NEWS 06 Jan 2012
School admissions fraud rises in race for best places
When 'choice' meets rationing ...
Data obtained by The Daily Telegraph suggests that around 420 mothers and fathers entered false information on school application forms to secure access to the best primaries and secondaries this year.
In most cases, families living miles from schools used grandparents’ and friends’ addresses within catchment areas or temporarily rented property within walking distance to secure places.
Other parents falsely claimed children had been baptised to get them into faith schools and some councils even reported examples of adults attempting to enrol infants in primary school before they were old enough.
In all, more than 700 children are believed to have had their school place withdrawn over the last five years after mothers and fathers submitted false data on forms.
The disclosure comes amid intense competition for places ...
Tel 25 Dec 2011 "I'll do as I like"
Free school £21m private contract plan
... the plans have raised political sensitivities about the boundary between free schools funded by public money and the involvement of the private sector in state education ...
Chris Keates, general Secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, said:
'It is nothing short of scandalous that the future of our children and young people is now up for sale to the highest bidder." ...
The local families wanting to set up the school in Suffolk say that it will address the need for a secondary school in the area ...
The group wanting to set up the free school, Sabres Educational Trust, is proposing that it should be managed by a profit-making company, IES UK ...
Gordon Warnes, chairman of Sabres said he hoped that "Breckland Free School will become part of a worldwide network of international schools providing an amazing array of opportunities for students and community" ...
BBC NEWS 13 Dec 2011 Tory Education 'Reform'
Towards two-tier schoolingSabres Educational Trust
Internationella Engelska Skolan
We shall shame schools that 'muddle through’
Dave's Daily Drivel: Today it's schools, tomorrow ... who knows?
... free schools ... revolutionising education ... what’s happening is fantastic ... shock troops of innovation ... smash through complacency ... relentless about combating entrenched failure ... sort out league tables ... toughening up exams ... freedom to make their own choices ...
Tel 14 Nov 2011 'Divi' Dave Log Tory Education 'reform'David Cameron goes to war on Britain's 'coasting schools'
Education spending 'falling fastest since 1950s'
The [Institute for Fiscal Studies] report says that after a decade of rapid growth in funding schools and universities, the UK is now facing the largest cut in education spending over any four-year period since at least the 1950s.
"Having risen by historically large amounts during the 2000s, the UK's education budget is now set for an historically large fall over the next few years," says senior research economist Luke Sibieta.
As a share of national income, the IFS is projecting that public spending on education will fall close to the level of the late-1990s - when it dipped to 4.5%.
It had not previously been at such a low level since the early 1960s.
But these spending cuts will not be evenly spread ...
Among the areas with the deepest spending cuts will be capital funding on schools, which ... will be more than halved ...
The IFS warns that the biggest long-term losers could be early years support, youth services and 16-to-19 education in England.
They will lose an estimated 20%, but unlike universities, the IFS suggests their cuts will not be offset by private funding ...
BBC NEWS 25 Oct 2011 Coalition Log Cutting the Deficit
Towards two-tier schoolingEducation spending 'falling fastest since 1950s'
Reading check for six-year-olds rolled out
The use of non-words in tests demonstrates the likelihood that reading is seen by its sponsors as a passive activity.
Schools Minister Nick Gibb said:
"There is no doubt we need to raise standards of reading.
"Only last month we learnt that one in 10 boys aged 11 can read no better than a seven-year-old.
"The new check is based on a method that is internationally proven to get results, and the evidence from the pilot is clear - thousands of six-year-olds, who would otherwise slip through the net, will get the extra reading help they need to become good readers, to flourish at secondary school and to enjoy a lifetime's love of reading.
"This study finds that the check will be of real benefit to pupils but takes just a few minutes to carry out, is backed by most teachers and is liked by most children." ...
BBC NEWS 16 Sept 2011
In the absence of crap detectionNew reading test for six-year-olds 'waste of money'
Reading test for six-year-olds to include non-words
Mapping boys' reading ability
Eleven-year-old illiteracy 'unacceptable'
Half of boys, age five, 'struggling in basics'
England slides down world literacy league
Reading and maths standards falling in Britain, says OECD
Four in 10 primary schoolers failing three Rs
£500m literacy drive is a flop
England falls in reading league
UK children 'reading too early'
Ten years of bold education boasts now look sadly hollow
Whitehall emails reveal the hidden costs of promoting free schools
Civil servants were urged that the New Schools Network – a charity providing advice and guidance to set up the schools – should be given "cash without delay", in a disclosure which will heighten concern over the government's lack of transparency about the wider free schools programme.
The charity, which is headed by a former Gove adviser, was subsequently given a £500,000 grant.
No other organisation was invited to bid for the work.
The award was made after an email from Dominic Cummings, a Tory strategist and confidant of Gove, called for:
"MG telling the civil servants to find a way to give NSN cash without delay."
Cummings went on to work for the charity on a freelance basis ...
Gdn 29 Aug 2011 Michael Gove Westminster SleazeNew research claims to show “for-profit” schools are great ...
New Schools Network
First group of 24 'free' schools to open next month
The successful candidates ... include a couple of existing schools which have converted to "free" status: the Maharishi School in Lancashire, which follows the beliefs of the former Beatles' guru and introduces its pupils to yoga, and a long-established independent school, Batley Grammar, which has forsaken selection so that it can receive state funding.
The religious groups include the first state-financed Sikh school, the Nishkam School in Birmingham; two Jewish primary schools in Haringey and Mill Hill, north London; a Hindu school, the Krishna-Avanti Primary School in Leicester; and a Church of England school, St Luke's in Camden, north London, an area where there is a shortage of school places.
Then there is the West London Free School pioneered by the journalist and author Toby Young, which will provide a "traditional" academic curriculum with an emphasis on Latin ...
Ind 28 Aug 2011 Micheal GoveMichael Gove's free schools to teach etiquette and fine dining
WLFS: Curriculum
West London Free School
'Great news'
Anti Academies Alliance
Q&A: Academies and free schools
What do we know about free schools?
Michael Rosen
Toby Young's battle to set up a new school
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
West London Free School
Toby Young
Anatomy of a very British 'revolution'
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Ivan Illich
Radical Pedagogy
Google's Eric Schmidt criticises education in the UK
Dr Schmidt told the audience of broadcasters and producers that Britain had invented many items but were no longer the world's leading exponents in these fields.
He said: "If I may be so impolite, your track record isn't great.
"The UK is home of so many media-related inventions. You invented photography. You invented TV. You invented computers in both concept and practice.
"It's not widely known, but the world's first office computer was built in 1951 by Lyons' chain of tea shops.
Yet today, none of the world's leading exponents in these fields are from the UK."
He said he had been flabbergasted to learn that computer science was not taught as standard in UK schools, despite what he called the "fabulous initiative" in the 1980s when the BBC not only broadcast programmes for children about coding, but shipped over a million BBC Micro computers into schools and homes.
"Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made.
"That is just throwing away your great computing heritage," he said.
He said the UK needed to bring art and science back together, as it had in the "glory days of the Victorian era" when Lewis Carroll wrote one of the classic fairy tales, Alice in Wonderland, and was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford ...
BBC NEWS 26 Aug 2011
Overseas workers preferred to unskilled school leavers in job market
This report touches on one of the deepest problems facing education for life with neoliberal free markets: the 'product' is expected to be both docile consumer and skilled worker.
School leavers are being pushed to the back of the jobs queue as Britain's employers increasingly turn to migrant labour to fill vacancies ...
The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development ... said companies wanted action from the government to improve the work prospects of UK school leavers.
When asked, respondents identified literacy (53%) and numeracy (42%), as well as good customer service skills (40%) and good communication skills (40%) ...
Gerwyn Davies, public policy adviser, CIPD, said ...
" ... The government therefore needs to redouble efforts to ensure the education and skills system is fit for purpose to ensure young people can find a foothold in an increasingly competitive jobs market." ...
Gdn 23 Aug 2011 Global Labour Market Youth Unemployment
A 'tide of vulgarity' 'Pawns or Players'?
Pupils 'shoe-horned' into EBacc subjects
The government should "think again" about the introduction of the English Baccalaureate to secondary schools in England, says a committee of MPs.
The so-called EBacc requires pupils to gain good GCSEs in English, maths, two sciences, a language and humanity.
But the Commons education select committee says it risks "shoe-horning" pupils into inappropriate subjects.
... the cross-party MPs' report says it should not be "up to a group of politicians" to decide which individual subjects should be given priority.
And it questions whether the EBacc should even be given that name, when "it is not a baccalaureate as generally understood" ...
BBC NEWS 28 July 2011
'Two Britains' qualifications gap emerges
There are huge local variations in levels of education within Britain's adult population, reveals an analysis published by a lecturers' union.
It shows "two Britains" divided by a wide educational gulf, says the University and College Union.
In the Glasgow North East constituency 35% of adults have no qualifications, compared to only 1.9% in Brent North ...
The figures from the Office for National Statistics, and analysed by the lecturers' union, show the percentages of people aged between the ages of 16 and 64 without any qualifications in parliamentary constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales, up to December 2010.
It reveals concentrations of low educational achievement - including parts of Glasgow, Birmingham, Derby and Bradford, where more than a quarter of the adult population is without a single qualification.
The lowest-achieving region for education is identified as the West Midlands - with 26 out of 29 seats in the area below the national average in terms of the proportion of adults without qualifications ...
BBC 26 July 2011
Higher EducationWest Midlands 'worst' for educational qualifications
Graduate gloom as 83 apply for every vacancy
Graduate gloom as 83 apply for every vacancy
Re-balancing the economy? Not while the rewards are in financial 'services'!
The banking sector may have taken a battering in the court of public opinion, but financial services are still by far the most popular employers.
Investment banks and fund managers can now expect to receive more than 232 applications for every place.
The next most popular industry is energy, water and utilities with 187 applications for every vacancy.
Three-quarters of the companies surveyed insist that a 2:1 degree is the minimum requirement for the CV to make it past the first round.
London and the South-east continues to dominate the graduate recruitment market, offering more than half (54 per cent) of all vacancies in 2010-11.
More vacancies (14.6 per cent) are likely to be offered in accountancy than in any other career area ...
Ind 28 June 2011Universities shake-up eyes greater competition
'About Wall Street jobs, wealth, and the cultural distortion of America'
One in 11 boys leaves primary school 'unable to read'
In 1975 the Head of the City of Manchester's Remedial Guidance Service told me that fiftern per cent of the city's pupils needed specialist help with reading.One in 11 boys in England - one in seven in some areas - starts secondary school with, at best, the reading skills of an average seven-year-old.
According to data obtained by the BBC's Today programme, 9% of 11-year-old boys fell well below expected standards.
But in Nottingham that proportion was 15% and the situation was only marginally better in Derby, Manchester, Rotherham and Telford.
The government is bringing in a reading check for six-year-olds.
Education experts said it was hard for children struggling at age 11 ever to catch up ...
BBC NEWS 17 Dec 2010The Durham University study, led by Peter Tymms, concluded that the National Literacy Strategy, which includes the “literacy hour” daily English lesson, had made a “barely noticeable” impression on reading standards, which had barely improved since the 1950s.£500m literacy drive is a flop
The Times 02 Nov 2007 Education for the Good SocietyMapping boys' reading ability
Eleven-year-old illiteracy 'unacceptable'
Half of boys, age five, 'struggling in basics'
Struggling pupils promised one-to-one tuition
Government to roll out reading programme
Underfunded primary schools fail to teach basic literacy
Hundreds of authors urge PM to tackle child illiteracy
England slides down world literacy league
Reading and maths standards falling in Britain, says OECD
Four in 10 primary schoolers failing three Rs
England falls in reading league
UK children 'reading too early'
Ten years of bold education boasts now look sadly hollow
David Willetts is trying to conjure away the
dangers of higher education reform with the magic word 'choice'Universities - under consistent attack for three decades and from all political parties – now take the final step across the Rubicon.
With the removal of all national funding from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and its drastic reduction in others, higher education in the UK has ceased to be a public good.
It is now a wholly private and tradable commodity ...
... [Willetts] plans to introduce a new system of “kite-marks” validating degrees and providing customers with the information they need to make a purchasing decision.
These kite-marks will indicate how highly employers rate universities so that, as Willetts was quoted as saying,
“At last, students will be able to see the courses that can get the jobs they aspire to and those that do not perform well”.
This is a very particular way of determining the quality of education.
The question it raises is not ‘Who will educate the educators?’ but ‘Who will assess the assessors?’
Waving his left hand, Willetts tells prospective students that they won't have to pay any money, will be free to choose whatever university they want and will be better informed about the products available.
But with a wave of his right hand, he makes the public university disappear, invites a range of new interests to access wholly new income streams flowing out of the pockets of students and their families, and puts in place mechanisms by which the government set the criteria according to which universities will be judged ...
openDemocracy 15 Dec 2010Ministers declare war on degrees without prospects
Anger as science excluded from new diploma
Thousands of youngsters taking science, languages and religious studies at GCSE face being written off as ineligible for the Government’s new English baccalaureate, it emerged yesterday.
The Government’s White Paper on education last month, said it would be awarded to anyone gaining five A* to C grades in English, maths, a science, a language – modern or ancient – and a humanities subject.
However, ministers have now announced some GCSE science and languages courses will not count towards it..
In addition, GCSEs in religious education will not be considered as a humanities subject ...
Applied science and language GCSEs, taken by more than 20,000 youngsters, were excluded from the list of qualifications to be recognised.
In addition, only history and geography would qualify as a humanities subject ...
Information technology is also not on the list of subjects to qualify for the ranking.
One observer said: “It seems you can get it for studying biblical Hebrew but not a modern day understanding of technology.” ...
Independent 14 Dec 2010 Education for the Good SocietyA look back to the School Leaving Certificate
'English Baccalaureate' to combat drop in academic GCSEs
'Great news'
Letting the Ideology Show
Napoleon Gove can dictate its terms but the school curriculum is bogus
RE 'could be marginalised '
Why does Gove believe dead languages and Ancient History are more important ... ?
School reforms 'could lead to more segregation'
Creating a market between schools is exactly the name of the game.The warnings come in the department's own economic assessment of the Schools White Paper, which was presented to Parliament by Education Secretary Michael Gove last week.
The Gove regime will create a two-tier system.
The pupil premium will not over-ride parental pressure to ensure that 'their' school is 'oik' free.
So the 'oiks' will remain in council-run schools which will be seen - like the old secondary moderns - to be second class, and second rate.
Costs will go up since a market needs surplus places.
As with the NHS, so with the schools: the attempt to provide a service free and run it as a market is an oxymoron.
It describes how the changes it is making to the schools system - increasing the number of autonomous academies and free schools, and reducing bureaucracy around school admissions - will create more of a market between schools ...
[The report] warns of an "increase in stratification" and says "there is a risk that parents select schools based on peer groups, where schools compete to attract particular groups of people, where barriers to choice result in segregation" ...
The report also looks at the government's policy of allowing private and voluntary providers to set up so-called "free schools".
It suggests there are high costs associated with the plans. These include the extra start-up costs and higher costs linked to what will probably be a small number of pupils in such schools.
It says: "There may be lower running costs but these may be offset by the diseconomies of scale associated with small schools.
"A degree of surplus places is necessary in encouraging school choice and competition between schools and this will provide some benefit where standards are increased, but there is also cost to providing surplus places which should be noted." ...
BBC NEWS 02 Dec 2010
Weak teachers the biggest problem in schools – Ofsted
In the watchdog's annual report, inspectors found 37% of teaching was merely "satisfactory".
The quality was too "variable" and not good enough in half of England's secondaries and over two-fifths of primaries.
Almost half of schools (45%) were judged satisfactory or worse this year, with 8% rated inadequate.
Gilbert said: "The weakest area, and the area that I am most concerned about, is teaching. In many of our good schools we see pockets of weaker teaching.
"There is too much teaching that is dull and uninspiring. This means that too many young people are not equipped well enough to make the best of their lives." ...
The report highlights good performance in academies – state schools independent of local authorities.
Of 43 inspected, 20 were deemed good, and 11 of those were outstanding ...
(3 were judged inadequate. Most of the academies inspected were formerly failing schools.)
The report says: "There are some common characteristics to outstanding teaching in academies.
It is achieved by establishing very high and shared expectations across all classrooms.
Learning is often highly structured, informed by teachers' excellent subject knowledge."
Guardian 23 Nov 2010Ofsted
"If you are a head teacher you'd want to get the best results you could and so you seek out the best awarding body offering the best way forward.'Sleight of hand' used to push up grades claims expert
"The awarding bodies know that and so they make it possible for everybody to succeed.
"So everybody is pushing at the edges of the rules. It's the professional foul really, it's the sleight of hand - everybody is testing the tolerance to the limit."
This is the view of Professor Mick Waters, a former director at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority ...
Speaking to 5 live Investigates he also claims that the new exam regulator for England, The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) is a "toothless" watchdog ...
Ian McNeilly, Director of the National Association for the Teaching of English, echoed these concerns, and warned that standards are also being watered down by allowing pupils to keep resitting key exam modules to improve grades ...
BBC NEWS 07 Nov 2010
UK schools fall in global ranking
The survey by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) is designed to compare standards between different education systems around the world.
In 2000, when 32 countries took part in the survey, the UK came 7th in reading skills - but the figures for 2009 show that out of 65 countries, the UK has fallen to 25th place.
Countries such as Poland, Estonia, Canada, Norway and Singapore are above the UK in reading ability, in a table headed by South Korea and Finland.
The study also includes regions within countries - and the Chinese school systems in Shanghai and Hong Kong are among the most successful.
If Shanghai had been a country, it would have been the single most successful in this global survey.
A quarter of pupils in Shanghai were able to tackle complex maths problems, compared with an average of 3% across the OECD survey.
In maths, between 2000 and 2009 the UK has fallen from 8th to 28th and in science from 4th to 16th ...
BBC NEWS 07 Dec 2010PISA 2009 Results
What lies below the surface of the student protest?
As noted here on OurKingdom by Niki Seth Smith, the media can be relied upon to draw on the usual assortment of 'types', stereotypes that enable dismissal of the student movement and its arguments as ‘hippy’, anarchic, or childish.
Whilst the media play this game, student groups across the country are occupying their universities and carrying out teach-ins, seminars and workshops ...
To judge the legitimacy of the student protest simply by its image would be to ignore the motives of the protestors and the wider significance of their actions.
Firstly, they are protesting against the prospect of rising fees and decreasing funds in Higher Education.
This issue is specific to the student’s situation, and protesting against them could be seen, at least in part, as driven by self-interest.
Then there is criticism of the marketisation of the university system, which is seen as part of the coalition government’s ideological attack on public services.
However, there is also the question of political disaffection and economic injustice.
The student protest is in part a reaction to a longer process starting with Thatcher and passing through New Labour, the expenses scandal and the financial crisis.
Politicians are increasingly perceived as separate from citizens, as are the rich from the poor.
The protest is not simply against Nick Clegg’s promise-breaking or the Torys’ elitism, but the political system as a whole, and it is not limited to the students.
As noted by Anthony Barnett, the reaction of many has been: ‘At last somebody is protesting’ ...
So far, large sections of the media, the police force and the political classes have sought to de-legitimise and dismiss the students.
But as the protesters’ disaffections go beyond Higher Education reform, dismissal of them is tantamount to avoiding debate on a wider series of social and political issues ...
openDemocracy 04 Dec 2010
School reforms 'could lead to more segregation'
Creating a market between schools is exactly the name of the game.The warnings come in the department's own economic assessment of the Schools White Paper, which was presented to Parliament by Education Secretary Michael Gove last week.
The Gove regime will create a two-tier system.
The pupil premium will not over-ride parental pressure to ensure that 'their' school is 'oik' free.
So the 'oiks' will remain in council-run schools which will be seen - like the old secondary moderns - to be second class, and second rate.
Costs will go up since a market needs surplus places.
As with the NHS, so with the schools: the attempt to provide a service free and run it as a market is an oxymoron.
It describes how the changes it is making to the schools system - increasing the number of autonomous academies and free schools, and reducing bureaucracy around school admissions - will create more of a market between schools ...
[The report] warns of an "increase in stratification" and says "there is a risk that parents select schools based on peer groups, where schools compete to attract particular groups of people, where barriers to choice result in segregation" ...
The report also looks at the government's policy of allowing private and voluntary providers to set up so-called "free schools".
It suggests there are high costs associated with the plans. These include the extra start-up costs and higher costs linked to what will probably be a small number of pupils in such schools.
It says: "There may be lower running costs but these may be offset by the diseconomies of scale associated with small schools.
"A degree of surplus places is necessary in encouraging school choice and competition between schools and this will provide some benefit where standards are increased, but there is also cost to providing surplus places which should be noted." ...
BBC NEWS 02 Dec 2010 Education for the Good Society
Gove's 25-year-old ex-adviser given £500,000 free schools grant
Pro-free schools lobby group won project work – which was not advertised – to offer impartial advice on the proposals ...
[Rachel] Wolf, now 25, worked as a special adviser to Gove while he was shadow education secretary.
The [New Schools Network] ... which describes itself as independent, was set up over a year ago.
Mystery surrounds its other sources of funding because it has refused to reveal the names of anonymous donors.
In a response to a request from the pressure group The Other Taxpayers' Alliance, the Department for Education confirmed no other tenders had been sought.
It said: "[New Schools Network] has been active in this area for some time and was effectively the only organisation capable of providing the level of support needed by the number of interested parties quickly enough to enable the first free schools to open by September 2011." ...
The network's business plan which was used to apply for the grant, which was also released under a Freedom of Information request, has been heavily redacted and does not include any figures ...
Guardian 27 Oct 2010
Are our liberties threatened by the fear of real freedom?
Our liberties are threatened by (a) the corporate agenda pursued by the media (b) the diversionary tactics of corporate capital (c) the anaesthesia of consumerism (d) the educational failure (deliberate?) to inculcate crap detection, and finally the ennui of a cumulative infantilismThe liberal left is suffering from intellectual amnesia about the attack on liberty that happened under New Labour ...
Strong and controversial views on any topic, religion, ethics or politics remain unacceptable in the present cultural climate.
Even the “absolutist” position on free speech that AFAF holds is no more than that of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty but it is seen as extreme ...
The cultural climate that is the legacy of New Labour has created a new intellectual mood that requires that we hold moderate and uncontroversial views.
It is a new, therapeutic, intellectual elitism, a civic quietism in which holding strong views or engaging in heated debate is only appropriate in formal situations such as the many faux debates in “Youth Parliaments” and the like ...
Independent 07 Oct 2010
Given that education is meant to be the key that unlocks the barrier to social mobility and we have spent a fortune on our schools over the last couple of decades, why is the social gap no longer narrowing?What's wrong with our schools?
Or, to put it in nice simple language, why do rich, thick kids do better than poor, clever children?
If you take exception to either the language or the sentiment, do not blame me.
I am quoting the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, who also said that other countries are moving ahead faster than we are and it is getting worse ...
So what happens when the disadvantaged children go to school?
By the time they are 14, they are two years behind their more privileged peers and by the time they hit 16, they are massively less likely to go on to higher education, let alone the best universities.
In other words, the gap widens during the school years, rather than narrows ...
The social gap is not about the extremes - Wellington College at one end and Kirkby at the other. And the elite will always be with us.
No, the real battle is being fought on the centre ground - the territory dominated by what David Cameron calls the sharp-elbowed middle class.
People like him, he says, and his wife. People like me and, perhaps, people like you. People who feel they are already being squeezed in this age of austerity.
We have the advantage and we want to hold on to it.
It is not that we want to do down the most deprived; it is just that we want to do the best by our own children.
And if we end up hijacking the best schools for them, the politicians are no more likely to clip our wings and risk our displeasure at voting time than they are to shut down the independents ...
BBC NEWS 19 Sept 2010Unequal Opportunities
Aimhigher
Toby, don't kid yourself. You are the status quo. The status quo for a hundred years was about selection and segregation.Michael Rosen on Toby Young's Free School
For a short period, this was broken down, largely at the behest of middle class people many of whom found their children were being excluded from grammar schools by use of the IQ test.
We had always had comprehensive primary schools, (amazingly, no problem for anti-socialists), and then came comp secondaries. In most places, this was a fantastically successful experiment with more people benefiting from education than had ever enjoyed it before.
In some places, where social problems beyond the control of the school were and are a big deal, some schools have struggled. And bit by bit, the comprehensive ideal has been eroded through, yet again, selection and segregation. Your school, Toby, is just another example of that.
There's nothing 'radical' or 'free' about it. We pay for it, and you do the selecting and/or segregating.
You don't have to work with other schools, or with the rest of the community of your area to work out how this works out for the best for everyone.
That was the charge of LEAs. Your 'freedom' is the freedom of 'do your own thing' with a small group of children who are being sliced off from what 'the rest' are doing. And we pay for it.
As it happens, I'd also be very interested to see if any of these 'free' schools actually absorb any of the progressive ideas of education or simply reproduce the ideas of the private sector.
So I wonder, will any of them challenge the status quo where children have no control over what they learn, how they learn it, what systems are used to segregate, divide, stream and set them, what systems are used to reward and punish them, what systems are used to run the material fabric of the school.
It is largely through this system of no-control, no participation, that we learn to respect the status quo that tells us that we are indeed better and worse than each other (as explained by test results and smiley face charts that reward, detention systems), that the majority of us aren't clever enough to run anything, and that in many circumstances we are 'not good enough'.
However, if you divide off high achieving kids into special high achieving schools (largely because their parents were high achieving) you also teach these children that they are better than other people and should rule over others.
Guardian 06 Sept 2010Michael Rosen
Our education system is collapsing into a form of mass indoctrination
The problem is that we live in a world where if it's not measurable, it cannot be commodified, therefore it's useless.A liberal education has too often been replaced by an indoctrination of the young in the answers they need to memorise and regurgitate for exams.
Pupils are being prepared for a world where no one's wants to know what they think, or what they know - in the sense of knowing how and why, rather than what - and the last thing the 'movers and shakers' - who meet up in Davos every January - want is subordinates who ask awkward questions.
It is so all pervasive that we simply do not see any longer what has happened, and the education establishment – teachers, academics, administrators and those in the quango penumbra – does not acknowledge the impoverishment rather than the flowering of the lives of our young people.
This sad story extends far beyond the shores of Britain: in the emerging superpowers in the East, students sit inert in large school and university classrooms, passively absorbing material dictated to them by grey men and women, which they repeat in their essays and dissertations, straining every sinew to produce the "right" answer.
The creative, the imaginative or individual response is marginalised, and the whole process of education with schools and universities becomes mechanised and industrialised: mass-production factories of the mind ...
Independent 17 July 2010
Schools Minister: children are deprived of knowledge
A generation of schoolchildren has grown up without knowing who Miss Havisham was and thinking Nelson won the Battle of Waterloo, Schools Minister Nick Gibb said yesterday.
In his first keynote speech since taking office, Mr Gibb – who is responsible for the delivery of the national curriculum – made it clear he believed schools no longer put enough emphasis on imparting knowledge to pupils.
He called for an emphasis on "facts, data and narrative" in history and "the rich language of Shakespeare" which, he said, "should be the common property of us all". He added, speaking to an education conference organised by the think-tank, Reform: "Yet, to more and more people, Miss Havisham is a stranger and even the most basic history and geography a mystery."
A survey of first-year history undergraduates revealed that twice as many students thought Nelson was in charge at the Battle of Waterloo rather than Wellington.
Ninety per cent could not name a single British Prime Minister of the 19th century.
"Knowledge is the basic building block for a successful of life," Mr Gibb said ...
Independent 02 July 2010
Social mobility in England 'lags behind other countries'
The study – commissioned by the Sutton Trust – suggested that pupils born into families with a history of underachievement were still much more likely to be resigned to low-paid jobs when they grew up.
Sir Peter Lampl, the charity’s chairman, said failure to improve social mobility risked pushing the UK to the “bottom of the class in education’s world order”.
"Education mobility points the way to the level of future social mobility in this country,” he said.
“While there are some signs of progress, we are still not serving the needs of the current crop of school pupils as well as we should and parental background remains a much more significant determiner of children's life chances in the UK than elsewhere.” ...
“A major obstacle to education, and consequently social mobility, is therefore the high levels of social segregation in English secondary schools.”
Researchers at Essex University analysed the test scores of thousands of children born in 1989/90 ... and compared them with results of equivalent exams by children born at a similar time in other nations.
The findings show that in England, 56 per cent of children of degree educated parents were in the top quarter of test results at the age of 14, compared with just nine per cent of youngsters whose parents left school without any O-levels – a gap of 47 percentage points.
This was twice the equivalent gap seen in Australia – 23 percentage points – and bigger than the 37 point gap in Germany and 43 point gap in the US ...
Telegraph 26 Apr 2010Parents' class is the key in England's exams system
Top comprehensives 'more exclusive than grammar schools'
'Communitarian Citizenship'
Neoliberalism and education
Labour has had three terms to sort out schools, years in which it has tipped money into the system on a scale that may never be repeated.Debt should not overshadow education in the election campaign
Yet, as with the health system, unprecedented levels of investment have yielded disappointingly little ...
The government's response has been to throw money at problems in the hope they will go away, while concentrating on achieving instant superficial improvements by erecting new buildings.
Alongside this, it has been enslaved by the notion that big is always better and that vocational and technical subjects should always be prioritised over academic ones.
It often assumes that schooling is the same as skilling. It is also obsessed with controlling teachers through targets.
Targets can deliver. But in the end, a target culture reduces education to bureaucracy and crushes initiative ...
Whichever party wins control after the election, it will need to start thinking more holistically about what education is for. The debt crisis looms large, but we must not allow this issue to blot out everything else in the campaign.
If there is one thing more important than sorting out debt, it is sorting out education.
Independent 06 April 2010Testing can undermine children's rights
The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and better education than their parents is lower in Britain than in other western countries ...OECD: UK has worse social mobility record than other developed countries
Highlighting the UK's lack of social mobility, the Paris-based thinktank said the chances of a young person from a less well-off family enjoying higher wages or getting a higher level of education than their parents was "relatively low" ...
It added that there was a hefty wage premium associated with growing up in a better-educated household and a corresponding penalty for being raised in a less-educated family ...
In the UK, the OECD found that 50% of the economic advantage that high-earning fathers have over low-earning fathers is passed on to their sons.
By contrast, in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries, less than 20% of the wage advantage was passed on ...mugclassGuardian 10 Mar 2010
10 Mar 2010, 1:58PM
In my town, if you live in one of the less well off area, your children will go to one of three schools, all of which have just received damning reports from Ofsted. For a bright child from a low income family there is no hope. You will be educated in a school with high truancy, high level of behavioural problems, high levels of disruptive behaviour, a high teacher turnover and frequent teaching by supply staff.
My husband and I were fortunate to benefit from the grammar school system, and although our families were both low income we went on to excellent universities and good careers.
Labour have managed to achieve great equality - the equality of ensuring that if you are from a poorer background, no-one will do well. They have achieved equality of failure.OECD
A Family Affair
Frustrated pupils 'bored by their factory schools'
UK low in social mobility league, says charity
Drop GCSEs. We should be teaching our children to think
... surprisingly, children spend very little of their time in school thinking. There is almost an unspoken deal: we'll spoonfeed you the required nuggets of information to pass your exams if you behave and do your homework on time. Our education system is not designed to get children to think. Why?
Because even now, after some streamlining of subjects, teachers have huge amounts of content to plough through. Because teachers often do not have the techniques or confidence to engage in open-ended, probing questioning. Because in some schools there are crowd-control issues that get in the way.
There is perhaps one further reason. We don't prize thinking in this country. We are suspicious of the intellectual; it's almost as if we believe too much thinking is not a good thing ...englishhermitObserver 16 August 2009
16 Aug 09, 12:50am
Careful now. Who is going to man the call centres and work in the banks if they have been taught to think?
There are too many jobs about where thinking is not only not required but would preclude selection for the job in the first place.
What is required is the ability to follow instructions on the screen without deviation from the script.
Beep. Beep. Ching. Beep. Beep. Ching. It's the machine people from Planet Screen.
Education for 'precarious citizenship' and the Rose Report into Primary Education
The Rose Report appears to reprise most of the educational controversies of the last fifty years, many of which were thriving when I was at teacher training college in the early sixties.
In those days it was received 'wisdom' that primary schools were about creativity, and the ownership and control of schools was non-controversial: the LEA provided the money - such as it was - and a very weak inspectorate left teachers to get on with it.
Now, as The Independent's leader rightly indicates, the Tory-Gove agenda is about taking schools away from what Margaret Thatcher called 'socialist' LEAs, and preparing them for the day when the IMF tells the UK to privatise them.
A bureaucratic-centrist curriculum will almost certainly not be privatised - another indicator of the corporate state - and what is learned will continue to be a political football along the lines of a sterile debate between 'modernist' versus 'traditional' modes of learning.
AC Grayling raised a crucial point about the curriculum in his New Scientist article "The importance of knowing how" which distinguished between knowing facts, and evaluating them.
Critical thinking is, arguably, the last thing politicians like Balls and Gove would wish to see developed since their nostrums might then be subject to the closer inspection which they deserve.
However, it is impossible to divorce education from the society in which it is embedded, and neoliberal society (oxymoron!) expects - without spelling it out - that children be equipped to enter a global economy in which employment carries endemic risk and uncertainty, and previous social support systems are ebbing away.
The dilemma is the extent to which this is made explicit, and also the extent to which the process of education enables pupils to challenge the theoretical basis of such an economy.
Such a curriculum would also - justifiably - raise the profile of both the ethical and ecological considerations which the current global economy ignores.
Government's failure over the past decade has been in overloading the curriculum, imposing too many tests and attempting to manage schools directly from Whitehall.This is not the radical reform primary education needs
And there is scant evidence that ministers have learned from past mistakes. Only this week they announced that education on "emotions" should be compulsory in primary schools from age five.
Sir Jim himself acknowledges that the existing curriculum has grown too "fat". But it is not clear that his recommendations would trim it.
What our primary schools need is a clear and concise list of knowledge and skills that children should possess by the time they move into the next level of education.
Once that has been established, the job of policymakers is to step back and give teachers the freedom to impart knowledge in the manner they deem appropriate.
The proposal last week from the Conservative education spokesman, Michael Gove, to extend the secondary academy system to primary schools points the way forward.
Giving schools the freedom to run their own budgets and decide how best to teach the curriculum looks rather more like the "fundamental" reform the primary education sector needs than anything the Government has produced. The Independent 01 May 2009Computers key in primary review
Jim Rose: education becomes a sideshow
Jim'll fix it
Neoliberalism and education: the autonomous chooser
The importance of knowing how
What counts, and what's counted
MPs call for simpler curriculum
Teachers 'de-skilled'
The national curriculum for five to 16-year-olds in England is too heavily controlled by government, the Commons schools select committee has said.
The curriculum should be slimmed-down, according to the cross-party committee of MPs.
And schools should only have to follow the curriculum in the core subjects of English, maths, science and ICT.
The government has accepted some reform is necessary, but says the curriculum is crucial to raising standards.
The committee's report said there should be a cap on the proportion of the curriculum prescribed by central government.
"Our view is that it should be less than half of teaching time," the report said.
It said teachers had been "de-skilled" by high levels of central government guidance and prescription.
"At times schooling has appeared more of a franchise operation, dependent on a recipe handed-down by government rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers." ...
BBC NEWS 02 April 2009
Focus on fact is stifling schools, warns top head
Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.
The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.
In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education. "Many parents, many teachers, will recognise it. Schools need to be liberating places, but it is very hard to do it with the utter throttling, choking straitjacket of the national examination system curriculum," he told the Observer
In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers.
One option would be banishing national external exams until the age of 18, as they do in the United States. He also argues that GCSEs and A-levels, should be "swept away" in favour of exams, such as the International Baccalaureate, with its primary years, middle years, and diploma-level programmes ...
Observer 08 March 2009Laureate attacks poetry teaching
Sats put primary pupils off science
The importance of knowing how
This education system fails children by teaching them to parrot, not think
What is education for?
What's counted and what counts
Drop GCSEs. We should be teaching our children to think
... surprisingly, children spend very little of their time in school thinking. There is almost an unspoken deal: we'll spoonfeed you the required nuggets of information to pass your exams if you behave and do your homework on time. Our education system is not designed to get children to think. Why?
Because even now, after some streamlining of subjects, teachers have huge amounts of content to plough through. Because teachers often do not have the techniques or confidence to engage in open-ended, probing questioning. Because in some schools there are crowd-control issues that get in the way.
There is perhaps one further reason. We don't prize thinking in this country. We are suspicious of the intellectual; it's almost as if we believe too much thinking is not a good thing ...englishhermitObserver 16 August 2009
16 Aug 09, 12:50am
Careful now. Who is going to man the call centres and work in the banks if they have been taught to think? There are too many jobs about where thinking is not only not required but would preclude selection for the job in the first place. What is required is the ability to follow instructions on the screen without deviation from the script. Beep. Beep. Ching. Beep. Beep. Ching. It's the machine people from Planet Screen.
Education for 'precarious citizenship' and the Rose Report into Primary Education
The Rose Report into the reform of primary education concerns itself with none of the issues raised on this page.
Rather, it appears to reprise most of the educational controversies of the last fifty years, many of which were alive when I was at teacher training college in the early sixties.
In those days it was received 'wisdom' that primary schools were about creativity, and the ownership and control of schools was non-controversial: the LEA provided the money - such as it was - and a very weak inspectorate left teachers to get on with it.
Now, as The Independent's leader rightly indicates, the Tory-Gove agenda is about taking schools away from what Margaret Thatcher called 'socialist' LEAs, and preparing them for the day when the IMF tells the UK to privatise them.
A bureaucratic-centrist curriculum will almost certainly not be privatised - another indicator of the corporate state - and what is learned will continue to be a political football along the lines of a sterile debate between 'modernist' versus 'traditional' modes of learning.
AC Grayling raised a crucial point about the curriculum in his New Scientist article "The importance of knowing how" which distinguished between knowing facts, and evaluating them.
Critical thinking is, arguably, the last thing politicians like Balls and Gove would wish to see developed since their nostrums might get then be subject to the closer inspection which they deserve.
However, it is impossible to divorce education from the society in which it is embedded, and neoliberal society (oxymoron!) expects - without spelling it out - that children be equipped to enter a global economy in which employment carries endemic risk and uncertainty, and previous social support systems are ebbing away.
The dilemma is the extent to which this is made explicit, and also the extent to which the process of education enables pupils to challenge the theoretical basis of such an economy.
Such a curriculum would also - justifiably - raise the profile of both the ethical and ecological considerations which the current global economy ignores.
The Independent 01 May 2009Neoliberalism and education: the autonomous chooser
The importance of knowing how
A 'privatised superstate'
'Flexicurity'
Free trade – or fair trade?
'Neoliberal communitarian citizenship'
Protectionism: is it so bad?
150,000 children unable to read and write at 11
More than 150,000 children are unable to read, write and add up properly by the time they are 11, yesterday's primary school league tables revealed.
The figures showed for the first time the percentage of youngsters failing to reach the required standard in both maths and English.
In all, just over one in four of the 600,000 age cohort (26 per cent) fell short of what was expected of them.
In 797 schools, fewer than half the pupils reached the level expected of an 11-year-old in the two core subjects ...
Opposition MPs seized the overall results as evidence of poor standards in schools. David Laws, the Liberal Democrats' schools spokesman, said: "It is shocking that there are still hundreds of schools which are not equipping the majority of their pupils with the basic skills they need."
However, the results are the best achieved since the tests were introduced in 1992 – 81 per cent achieved the required level in English, 79 per cent in maths and 88 per cent in science. There were weaknesses in writing, with only 68 per cent of pupils achieving the level expected of them, compared to 87 per cent in reading ...
The Independent 02 April 2009GCSE basic skills pledge scrapped
Employers warn over falling literacy
Reading and its Cultural Politics
Fahrenheit 451
Warning over narcissistic pupils
The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils' self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned.
Dr Carol Craig said children were being over-praised and were developing an "all about me" mentality.
She said teachers increasingly faced complaints from parents if their child failed a spelling test or did not get a good part in the school pantomime.
Schools needed to reclaim their role as educators, not psychologists, she said ...
BBC NEWS 16 March 2009
Students who think they can do no wrong
The student was in his third semester at university. He hadn't turned up to half the seminars he was supposed to and I hadn't seen his face more than once or twice at the compulsory lectures. Now he had made an outraged appointment to see me to ask why I'd given his end-of-module assignment a third.
I explained that it was full of mistakes in language, without any kind of structure, and showed no real signs of planning, thought, or revision. I had been generous, I thought, in not failing it altogether. He looked at me, muttered "Unbelievable," three times, and then made his case. "But that," he said, "is just your opinion."
There may be many problems evident with students and pupils in the education system today, but one of them is certainly not self-esteem.
Self-esteem, so trailed in the wider culture, seems to have taken the place of estimation in importance. It genuinely didn't seem at all funny to my student that he should consider his own valuation of himself as much more important than what older, more distinguished and more experienced people thought of his efforts. So long as he admired himself – and no-one has ever explained how "self-esteem" differs from amour-propre – all would be well ...
Philip Hensher 16 March 2009
Focus on fact is stifling schools, warns top head
Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.
The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.
In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education. "Many parents, many teachers, will recognise it. Schools need to be liberating places, but it is very hard to do it with the utter throttling, choking straitjacket of the national examination system curriculum," he told the Observer
In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers.
One option would be banishing national external exams until the age of 18, as they do in the United States. He also argues that GCSEs and A-levels, should be "swept away" in favour of exams, such as the International Baccalaureate, with its primary years, middle years, and diploma-level programmes ...
Observer 08 March 2009Laureate attacks poetry teaching
Sats put primary pupils off science
The importance of knowing how
This education system fails children by teaching them to parrot, not think
What is education for?
What's counted and what counts
Cambridge attacks poor-quality teachers
Mr Parks, director of admissions for the Cambridge colleges, suggested that potential teachers “who have a choice and could do something else” currently “run a mile from teaching” because of several problems, including bureaucracy, pupil behaviour and stress.
He said: “One has to hope things are going to improve, but I can’t think there’s any way of turning the ship around easily.
You can invest in buildings and reform of the curriculum till the cows come home, but the bottom line is if the teachers aren’t inspiring the kids I don’t think ultimately there’ll be a major difference made.” ...
FT 20 February 2009
When the lights go on
A few weeks ago Chris Haworth, the deputy head of Our Lady's RC Sports College in north Manchester, fetched a bin and threw his lesson plans into it. Then he threw the national curriculum after them.
It was just a bit of drama, of course, and he had to retrieve them all after the staff training day was over. Otherwise Ofsted, who visited last month and found the school improving fast, would have had very stern things to say.
Haworth was trying to illustrate his view that our knowledge-driven, exam-focused education system does not cater adequately for the needs of the fast-developing adolescent brains of the pupils he teaches.
"Our national agenda is really knowledge-driven," he says. "I want to put that to one side, to make young people confident learners so they can come at problems and offer solutions to them." ...
Guardian 06 May 2008
One in 11 boys leaves primary school 'unable to read'
In 1975 the Head of the City of Manchester's Remedial Guidance Service told me that fiftern per cent of the city's pupils needed specialist help with reading.One in 11 boys in England - one in seven in some areas - starts secondary school with, at best, the reading skills of an average seven-year-old.
According to data obtained by the BBC's Today programme, 9% of 11-year-old boys fell well below expected standards.
But in Nottingham that proportion was 15% and the situation was only marginally better in Derby, Manchester, Rotherham and Telford.
The government is bringing in a reading check for six-year-olds.
Education experts said it was hard for children struggling at age 11 ever to catch up ...
BBC NEWS 17 Dec 2010The Durham University study, led by Peter Tymms, concluded that the National Literacy Strategy, which includes the “literacy hour” daily English lesson, had made a “barely noticeable” impression on reading standards, which had barely improved since the 1950s.£500m literacy drive is a flop
The Times 02 Nov 2007 Michael GoveMapping boys' reading ability
Eleven-year-old illiteracy 'unacceptable'
Half of boys, age five, 'struggling in basics'
Struggling pupils promised one-to-one tuition
Government to roll out reading programme
Underfunded primary schools fail to teach basic literacy
Hundreds of authors urge PM to tackle child illiteracy
England slides down world literacy league
Reading and maths standards falling in Britain, says OECD
Four in 10 primary schoolers failing three Rs
England falls in reading league
UK children 'reading too early'
Ten years of bold education boasts now look sadly hollow
To fix broken Britain we shall start at school
David Cameron writes in the Daily Telegraph:
The biggest challenge facing Britain today is mending our broken society. That will not happen overnight: long-term social change needs long-term thinking. And the Conservatives are the only party doing it. We are showing how we will do more to support families, because responsible parents give children the secure and loving start they need. Last week, we laid out our plans to tackle Britain's crime crisis, through reforming our police, tougher sentencing and increasing prison places.
But a long-term plan for tackling social breakdown has to include fixing our education system. Take any marker of our broken society, and educational failure lies at its root. Four in every five youngsters receiving custodial sentences have no qualifications. More than two-thirds of prisoners are illiterate. And nearly one-third of those excluded from school have been involved with substance abuse.
The evidence is clear: if we do not get education right, we will not get our society right. So what is happening under Labour? Forty-three per cent of 11-year-olds cannot read, write and add up properly. Last month, more than 20,000 pupils left school without a GCSE. And right now, more than a million young people are not in education, work or training. Labour has not just presided over educational failure, it has also overseen glaring inequality. At the age of seven, children on free school meals are 19 per cent less likely to do as well in core subjects as those who don't get free meals. By GCSEs, this gap rises to 28 per cent.
Should we accept this? Absolutely not. Take Sweden. There, standards have been raised by allowing innovative organisations to set up new schools in the state sector, championing excellence and giving parents more control and choice. Compare this to Labour's methods: obsessive micro-management and rigid attachment to old-fashioned ideas has entrenched deprivation, shut doors and closed minds. ...
Telegraph.co.uk 02 September 2007
Grabbing a headline with the National Curriculum
"The guy's a bird brain"
A real education service would not require the minister to dabble in curriculum, er, 'development' via an almost weekly torrent of initiatives.
Former Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, was emblematic of this particular fever.
He 'ordered' schools to teach the classics - such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens -
to 11 and 12 year olds:
Policy director of the National Association for the Teaching of English, Ian McNeilly, who is also an English teacher, said:
"For students who are not yet ready, teaching texts of such linguistic complexity is completely counter-productive."
He accused Mr Johnson of trying to secure a few more votes from Middle England "by not allowing standards to slip".
"But you don't have to do that by shoe-horning a classic author into the classroom," he added.
"The guy's a bird brain. If he wants to make an informed decision he can give me a ring. His decision is completely uninformed."
BBC NEWS 16 February 2007
The wrong row
The real risk is not dumbing down, but an unduly narrow focus which rewards spoon-feeding over critical teaching and leaves stressed students with little time to read round.
Pupils may reject subjects that interest them in favour of those they think it easier to do well in.
Figures yesterday showed a revised, "more accessible" maths A-level not only produced many more top grades, but also attracted more students.
Anything that encourages 16-year-olds to study maths is welcome, but it is sad if it can only be done by emphasising the certainty of success rather than the challenge. ...Leader | The Guardian | 18 August 2006
There is more to education than exams
North London student Tom Greene argues that the needs of examination markers is now driving education:
This process (marking) would be fine if it was reflecting the work that was done by students, rather than shaping what and how is taught to them. Exam preparation, and increasingly education, is now about adapting to this system; forcing an examiner, wearily red-penning through piles of paper, to give you that top grade. Students are drilled to jump through hoops that the examiner is holding.
Exam preparation is part of education - but they shouldn't be one and the same thing. The mechanical exam process is moulding a mechanical education. In traditionally opinion-orientated subjects such as History and English Literature, subjectivity is being replaced by a clear-cut method of approaching exams. For GCSE English you have to write essays that conform to three-word criteria (eg "Inform, Explain and Describe" or "Analyse, Review and Comment"). In AS English the coursework and three-hour exam are all marked under five "Assessment Objectives" - I know all five off by heart.
Tom Greene | The Independent | 17 August 2006
The Price of the Curriculum
The content of the curriculum is of crucial importance, not
simply in deciding what pupils shall study, but - more important - in deciding what shall be left out.
The price of any curriculum is the other curriculum that might have been; the other person the pupil might have become.
But for now, it's the plaything of the latest 'here-today-and-gone-tomorrow' politician, making her/his way up - or down - the
political greasy pole.
Examples of headline-grabbing 'initiatives' - which were probably chip wrappers within days - include:
All pupils to learn about slavery
Shakespeare 'for five-year-olds'
Classrooms focus on 'Britishness'
Teaching Cookery
Pupils to get five hours of arts lessons a week
Parents urged to read to children
Curriculum for 'changing society'
Schools 'must act on Brother row'
Compulsory history lessons on Britain's role in slavery
Range of sports to woo pupils into exercise
Schools to teach 'British values'
£10m boost for singing in primary schools
Neoliberalism and education: the autonomous chooser
This paper presents a Foucauldian analysis for the argument entitled Neoliberalism and Education: the Autonomous Choosers - it is about the constitution of the self.
The argument is that through self-constitution, the subject is implicated in its own governance.
The argument locates self-constitution as a discursive formation within a neoliberal discourse that is problematic as a mode of governance: Michel Foucault’s notion of Governmentality as a neoliberal disciplinary mode of self-constitution.
In a neoliberal culture (as in any other), the individual is usually unknowingly implicated in creating a subjectivity that fits within the prevailing political rationality. And, as Marshall has argued through his notion of neoliberalism, (unlike liberalism) has no internal spaces within which to contest values.
But it is a contention of this paper that individuals actually have agency and some will seek spaces within which to critique values.
To the extent that governmentality denies agency it has a problem. The dialectical nature of liberal critique implies that change is continuous and progressive.
Therefore, as critique advances, neoliberal subjectivity would be an unstable entity given the additional problem that the subject is continuously involved in (re)form.
It is also a contention of this paper that continuous reform to the economy, society, education, and hence the self, exudes a false notion of progress.
Under conditions of (re)form, the self itself becomes unstable as part of this (re)forming world.
The instability stems from the requirement of the self to (re)form, (re)form [and (re)form ad infinitum], to meet the challenges of neoliberal enterprise culture. Under this force, whatever form the self arrives at is merely an interactive moment in a process of (re)form ...Conclusion
Although many people will agree with certain aspects of both points of view, the philosophical gulf that separates the two sides – capital/liberal, neoliberal/enterprise - is immense.
Both sides, however, recognize that control of the monolithic government schools system is one of the most important strategic objectives of the war.
Liberals and the liberal left have had no real response to these changes, either intellectually or in practice, except to provide critique and/or to repeat the principles and policies of the past.
If Foucault is correct, what is needed in response to neo-liberalism is an increased caution, and an increased imagination and inventiveness, for there is a complex problem space brought into play by such neo-liberal reforms.
The form of the human being is being changed by education, language, politics and practices. A neo-social-democratic response is needed as an approach to these crises of the welfare state and the increasing demands for autonomy.
This is but another critique and it may just be to reiterate the dark side of the “progress” of the human sciences to which Foucault drew our attention.
But there may well be spaces and antinomies for a resistance to a demeaning form of education and its associated demeaning notion of human being.
'Radical Pedagogy' 2002Governmentality
Towards Education for the Good Society
5.28pm
Helen Jones (Lab) returns, suggesting that there is much in this bill that is beneficial.
"But I deeply regret that I cannot support the government's measures.
"There are two things we need to do in education: transfer skills, and transfer values. And you cannot 'sell off' that second process.
"But that is exactly what we are proposing to do ... "
I want now to return to the original question - What Should We Teach? - and pose it in a different way:
What Do We Need to Know? ... Who Do We Need To Be?
- Basic Skills, including IT;
- Those aspects of geography and history which will allow us to "place" ourselves in the wider context of where we are and from whence we have come;
- An inquiring, scientific attitude of mind imparted by experiment and discussion;
- An understanding of the fallibility of beliefs and opinions;
- Empathy with and concern for others, imparted by history, geography, drama and role play, and role models from people, from all times and cultures, who have demonstrated in their lives a care and concern for others;
- What is Society? Compare and contrast, for example, the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami with the aftermath of Hurricane Katerina
- An exploration of the causes of conflict and war, and of conflict resolution;
- An understanding of Gaia, and of the planet's ecological limits.
These aims are very largely absent, since the society from which they came has given way to that of the autonomous individual, and the commodified citizen, both chattels of the corporate dystopia.