What Might Have Been

It was sad to read the obituaries at the end of the year for Peter Newsam and Tim Brighouse. Both were visionary educational administrators, with a passionate concern to make good education available for all children. In any sensible country, people like them would have been in charge of the system - organising, encouraging, spreading the belief that all children matter.

Here, they were shoved to the fringes, part of the education blob that wasn’t to be trusted. Only division and competition could produce results, and anyone supporting teachers was bound to be suspect. That was the Tory view, but then Tony Blair came in, and decided it was his view too. Chris Woodhead was kept on, and Alastair Campbell talked disdainfully of “bog-standard comprehensives.”

Blair’s rightly remembered as the architect for our involvement in the Iraq War, but for me he’s just as culpable for his undermining of our schools. However many times he talked about “education, education, education”, as I remember it his impact was disastrous.

Educational Reform

You probably didn’t see this. The House of Lords has produced a report calling for an urgent overhaul of secondary education in England. Our system is too focussed on academic learning and written exams, and pupils need the chance to experience more practical, applied forms of learning. This isn’t totally unexpected; it echoes what’s been said for years by school leaders, academics and teacher unions.

But we’re England, so we do things differently. Other countries are astonished that we have allowed one opinionated individual without any professional qualification (you’ve got it - Michael Gove) to determine the character of English education for over a decade. This has always been a disaster, but with the shattering impacts of Covid and spending cuts, putting it right is even more urgent than it was.

Should we expect radical transformation from a Starmer government? Don’t hold your breath.

Managing Nuance

Some days you can see the Guardian editors at work, working out which stories belong together. On Wednesday they paired two transgender stories, illustrating very different approaches to this frighteningly complex issue.

In the first, the WI reaffirmed its policy of inclusivity. They’ve a proud tradition of taking progessive,tolerant stands on controversial issues, and were clearly not going to be stampeded into a kneejerk reaction. Melissa Green had thoroughly researched members’ attitudes, so she could confidently assert that “We’ve not been afraid to tackle things that cause us or other people discomfort in an effort to inform and educate and move society forward…We’re not always going to agree on everything. I don’t know why anybody would expect us to.”

From the sublime to the ridiculous. the government has been considering what advice to give t single-sex schools who are asked to accept transgender pupils. Education secreary Gilian Keegan is confident that this is really pretty simple - “We have to be sensible and have a big dose of common sense here. We can’t mix up sex and gender. We’ve seen what happened in Scotland when it got that round the wrong way.” So girls’ schools are free to reject applications from pupils who identify as female but whose legal sex is male. Neat and easy for the schools, and the girls for whom Keegan is obviously concerned. For the transgender students, not so much.

The Climate Book

Back in December (see blog entry for Jan 6 - “Glimmers of Light”) I attended the Guardian launch of “The Climate Book” on zoom. It was an inspiring gathering to set against the general gloom of the news, and now I’ve got the chance to see what the fuss was about, as Shropshire Libraries have the book on their shelves, and now on mine.

It’s brilliant. It’s not a passionate, fluent read, like “The Silent Spring.” It’s very bitty, lots of short chapters, but also substantial - 400 pages. But its forbidding form is a reflection of reality. The climate crisis is a huge, complex problem, which is actually a combination of tons of smaller problems - fires, insects, warming ice floes, deforestation, biodiversity…And Greta Thunberg’s brilliant achievement has been to get nearly a hundred experts each to write a short, clear chapter about their particular area of expertise. There’s some very big names here, and you wonder who else would have had the nerve to even attempt something on this scale. The contributions are all linked with her Thunberg’s overall commentary, clear and concise.

You wouldn’t want to read this over the weekend. I have it on the front-room table, and each morning I make a cup of tea, and sit down to read 15-20 pages, which might well mean three or four sections. that’s as much as I can take in, but I feel wiser, and increasingly I think that when this book has to go back to the library I’ll want my own copy, sitting on the shelves, so I can go back to it and remind myself what’s happening all the time.

Getting Tutoring Right

Way back during lockdown 1, when we worried about the impact this was having on kids in school, the government produced the National Tutoring Project. The idea was that sessions with tutors would help kids catch up, but there were two stipulations: the tutoring had to be 1:1, and it couldn’t be done by schools themselves - only the private sector could produce real quality.

So, just like PPE, the government invite bids, to see who can do the job. the ceiling is £62 million. Amazingly, a charity emerges, EEF, which makes a really good stab at it. They recruit good tutors, train them, and they’re able to work together with staff, and therefore with kids. some of what they do is groupwork. Within a year, they’ve exceeded their targets, and they’re confident they can continue to improve..

But the government have other ideas. They’re licking their lips at a bid from multinational Ranstadt, who reckon to do the job for £25 million (That’s right. Less than half what they expected to pay.) Of course, they bite their hand off, ditch EEF, and it’s all change. It’s also all downhill, because Ranstadt can’t recruit the tutors, appointments are made and not kept, and the whole thing falls apart. Ranstadt can’t put it right because they haven’t been paid enough.

And now Ranstadt have lost the contract, and the money will go instead to schools, who can decide how they’ll use it, and whether than will be 1:1 or groupwork, or a mixture. Which was always the right answer.

Management Style

One of the tired defences of Tory MPs making lots of extra money from outside jobs is that it enables them to bring in experience of “the outside world.” You could have fooled me. From the performance of cabinet members, it’s clear that few of them have any awareness of how organisations run, or how good businesses motivate their staff.

Take education. Now, apparently, is a really good time to step up the frequency of Ofsted inspections. Schools also need to be prepared to run mini mock exams at regular intervals, so that if Covid stops us running the proper exams then we’ll have a neat column of figures ready waiting for us to fall back on. Of course. Why didn’t we think of that before? In fact, why not run them every week? Who needs teaching if you have a test available?

Actual teachers, who work in schools and know what staff and pupils have been through during the last two years, can see both these strategies as self-defeating and disastrous for morale. But our leaders, inspired by the management style of a nineteenth century mill, blunder on regardless. That’s what you get, if the only qualification for running a ministry is to be able to chant “Get Brexit done!”.

P.S. You’ve also got to be able to make lunatic promises about the numbers of new nurses and police officers, knowing that those won’t happen either.

Shutting down the Debate

Ms Gopal, a Cambridge academic was due to speak to Home Office officials about the impact of colonial history on department policy. Sounds like a reasonable venture, you’d think, but it’s been cancelled. The rightwing blogger Guido Fawkes has dug up a tweet from February, in which the academic criticised Priti Patel, and he’s claiming the credit for the fact that her invitation has now been cancelled. Another win for nasty stirring, and surely a loss for the Home Office. Do their sources of information all have to support Priti Patel? There’s enough evidence of Home Office failure you for to think they’d be glad of as much help as possible, but with prejudice and cowardice in charge it’s very hard to see how anything’s going to improve.

Testing times

Possibly the worst in a queue of bad news stories today is the suggestion that “government advisers” are looking at revising tests for 14 year olds. As usual with this government, we are not talking about what’s best for kids, or what other successful countries do. (One of the key effects of Brexits that we should never, ever look abroad for good ideas. All the good stuff is already here).

No, it’s pleasing “the base” that counts. The voters they want to hold on to think that Gove did a great job in education, and we need someone like him back, to say that teachers are doing a lousy job and only regular, tough tests can ensure that our kids are actually learning. The actual consequences of this, for how time is spent in the classroom, for the ways in which pupils are asked to learn, are always and predictably disastrous, but they don’t care about that. They’re not in a real world, wondering how best to educate teenagers. They’re drawing diagrams, of rigour and robustness, in search of the headlines that will tell them they are tough.

Kate Clanchy

The saddest story this week for me has been the Kate Clanchy controversy. I’ve followed her for a long time - always liked her poems, went on a workshop she ran years ago, and more recently I’ve followed her career as a stunningly successful teacher of poetry to Oxford schoolkids from a variety of backgrounds. Her book about that is entitled “Some kids I taught and what they taught me” , and that fairly represents her approach - positive, altruistic, willing to learn. But she’s not perfect, and critics of her book have highlighted passages where she describes individual children with whom she’s worked - sometimes in a clumsy or patronising way, sometimes borderline racist. She made things worse by reacting to initial criticisms that they were “out of context” when in fact they were accurately quoting extracts from the book. Clanchy’s supporters - including Philip Pullman - weigh in with tough ripostes, including comparing the critics with ISIS - and that’s not borderline racist. Poetry Wales, who’d run an interview with Clanchy in their previous edition, went out of their way to apologise, distancing themselves from the harm and damage she’d caused - and presumably forgetting entirely about the qualities of this book that they’d been keen to publicise. It’s a can of worms, and a brilliant illustration of how the Twittersphere exaggerates and intensifies differences of opinion. Clanchy admits that she got things wrong, and sets down to rewrite parts of the book, but that is dismissed as insufficient. Nothing will do, it seems, short of total condemnation. And this is for specific phrases which are problematic, but never amount to more than 3% of the book.

Looking Ahead

Way back in the gloom of December 2019, I was - with many others - depressed about the result of the general election. not just that it didn’t go my way (there’ve been plenty of those) but that victory seemed to have nothing to do with the realistic future of the country. More important, it had no consideration for the generation of youngsters who are going to have to pick up the pieces.

My response was “Looking Ahead.” This is a set of plays for teenagers to act or read, and discuss and think about. There’s ten short plays, very deliberately targetted at current concerns - social media in football, knife crime, policies on drugs, surveillance capitalism. they sound heavy stuff, but I’ve tried to make it lively and accessible, and offer kids contrasting viewpoints on the various issues.

Finally, after interruptions from the pandemic and a lot of work by people other than me, this collection is coming out into the big wide world of schools. It’s published by ZigZag, a firm with whom I’ve worked happily for twenty years, and you can find it at https://zigzageducation.co.uk/synopses/11023-looking-ahead-10-original-scripts-with-activities?pod=11023?utm_source=Online&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=ZZTA

How to run a government

I’m interested in meetings. How they’re chaired, who decides what, how the time is allocated. As a deputy head, I was famous for running a meeting for senior staff, about “How to run a meeting” - and I don’t apologise for that. Meetings don’t run themselves, and if they’re left to do so without any thought or rational action, those attending will suffer.

So for me the big revelation from Dominic Cummings’ recent outburst was not exactly how incompetent Matt Hancock is, but the brief, vivid sketch of Johnson’s management style:

“He tells rambling stories and jokes, avoids any difficult issues, urging colleagues to ‘take it offline’ before shouting ‘forward to victory!’ doing a thumbs up and pegging it out of the room before anybody can disagree.”

Cummings isn’t the most reliable witness in the world, but in the light of that account I feel a lot clearer about how and why we’ve ended up where we are.

Just Google it...

It sounds so simple. Everything’s on the internet, so just stick in what you want, and up it comes. Well, not quite. I’m currently revising a set of plays for school pupils, that I wrote a year ago. One of them concerns Dr. John Marks, a doctor in Widnes who ran a revolutionary scheme back in the 80s, supplying heroin as a prescription for addicts. He almost stumbled into it by accident, and was thinking of closing it down - but the local police argued strongly for him to keep it going, because supplying good quality drugs, for free, was having a beneficial effect on the local crime rate. It sounds too good to be true, but it was a brilliant success, and was only closed down after American pressure, because it made a nonsense of their “Just say no” war on drugs. So much so radical.

My source for this was a long Spectator article from 1995. I’d found it on the net, kept the link reference and - as is required these days - included it in the school pack. The publishers wrote to say that the link didn’t work. They’re right - it’s gone. Between 2020 when I wrote the play, and 2021 when I revised it, this crucial piece of evidence has gone walkabout. I have my own printout of the article, and the precise date when it was published, but if your only criterion for evidence is “can I click on it now?” neither of those are any use.

Pimlico School

I noticed the news reports because, way back, I had a friend who taught there, and it’s always had a bit of a knoack for getting itself talked about. This time, there were pupil protests over changes to the curriculum, uniform policy and the siting of a union flag, all (surprise, surprise) attracting lots of media attention.

Just after the protest, the school principal sent a letter to parents, expressing regret but also admiration for the students’ “passion about the things that matter to them.” So far, so reasonable.

But now the chair of the trust that runs the academy (i.e. more powerful further away from the business of actual teaching) has sent a threatening letter to parents warning that any future disobedience by pupils will result in disciplinary action. It’s all about threats and sanctions, nothing about why they might be protesting in the first place. Not surprisingly, many parents are furious. It’s not going to solve the problem.

During the Covid crisis we’ve got used to- though we’ve not always been convinced by - government assertions that they were being guided by the science, listening to the experts. Thanks to decades of deliberate smears by government, nobody ever says the same about education. There aren’t any experts, we can all make it up as we go along, and if we’ve got power we can just tell the others what to do. What a recipe for disaster.

Education: where do we go from here?

Well, government algorithms made a mess of exams, so teachers fix their own grades. We’re behind with the testing programme, so teachers work longer hours and have shorter holidays. And kids have come back from lockdown unruly, so we need a drive on discipline.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m a passionate practitioner of and advocate for coursework assessment, but teacher grades need to be awarded within an overall national framework that’s professional and thorough. Simply racing through more tests won’t solve anything; the tests are the problem, not the solution. And the last thing kids need as they come back into school is the sense that it’s their fault, and they need knocking into shape.

If you look at how other countries are responding to the challenges of post-lockdown education, you envisage possibilities that we don’t dream of. And why? Because we have Gavin Williamson in charge. Alan Duncan’s diaries conform what was already obvious, that he’s simply not capable of doing this job. There’s only two people in the country who think Williamson should be there, and until Boris Johnson changes his mind on that our kids are in serious trouble.

Catching Up

I was never a fan of this government’s plan to helping kids to catch up. It was always about a rather abstract race, in which all the kids pursue the same course, but then the government scoops up the kids at the back of the queue, and gives them intensive sessions, 1:1 after school, so that they catch up on the bits they missed out, and we all end up equal. It was typical that they were going to pay private tutors to do this - no need to involve the schools and teachers where the kids actually were, and no sense of exactly what it’s like to be a kid who’s missing out at school, not attending regularly…Are these the sort of kids who’ll opt to stay for an extra session, with someone they’ve never met, while their mates are walking away to freedom?

It was no surprise that this scheme was disorganised, late, and failing to contact a large part of its target audience. Also predictable was that it’s financially corrupt. So one firm running this scheme is charging the school £21 an hour, and the the government a further £63 an hour. That way, the firm makes £84 for each hour of tuition. Guess how much the tutor gets paid? Yup, just the £15 an hour. You’ve met chumocracy, the curse of government attempts to combat Covid by contract; well, it’s alive and thriving in education as well.

Teaching them a lesson

One of the pleasures of Christmas is the annual round-up of news from friends and contacts I don’t normally see. Each year I look forward to hearing from someone I still remember as a bright sixth-former, although that’s more than thirty years ago and she’s now an acting head. Her account of what she’s had to cope with over the last few months breaks my heart, but also raises my estimation of her still further. None of which will matter to Gavin Williamson, who thinks he’s been placed on this earth to tell the teachers where they go wrong, and to give them incomplete and bewildering instructions at very short notice.

When I was training to be a teacher - yes, OK, it was the sixties - there were these magical little books for 3/6, Education specials, about a whole series of important issues. One of them was about Antony Crosland and Edward Boyle, (Labour and Conservative) education ministers. They had their differences, but both of them saw it as their duty to tour the country, offering encouragement and congratulation to the teachers who were doing the actual work. Those were the days.

The World of Zoom

Another Wednesday afternoon in lockdown. Same old, same old…Well, not quite. At 2.00 pm I’m joining a poetry reading by Steve Pottinger, which is also being beamed to students and staff at a college in Dubai, though for them it’s an evening gig. This is a Black Country poet describing a late-night bus from Birmingham to Wolverhampton…although as he’s also dealing with Trump, a Mexican woman who’s been “disappeared” and a young musician last seen near a Swansea beach, you couldn’t describe it as parochial. Whatever he’s doing, they love it. And so do I, but after ninety minutes I have to break off and have a quick cup of tea, because at four pm I’m watching the Putney debates.

A work-out for the mind, as lawyers and academics wrangle over the balance between the legislature and the executive, and distinguish between parliamentary sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy. But this all needs putting into context i.e. British history from the middle ages and the current practices of lawcourts across the world in ensuring social justice…Phew! But it makes a change from Brexit caricature about the will of the people. And it’s all there, available in the ether, for free. What did we do before zoom?

Learning from mistakes

You would have thought that the fiasco of this summer’s exams might teach the government a thing or two. No such luck. One of the things Covid did was to demonstrate how vulnerable our current system is, with its heavy dependence on the one-off exam, pupils seated in isolation, writing against the clock. There are lots of other things wrong with that pattern, as professionals can testify, but Michael Gove’s reign as educational supremo has established that as the sacred way of working, which must not be disturbed.

But there are alternatives. A group of Conservative MPs have produced an alternative proposal. They note that the British pattern differs from most other similar countries, and imposes high levels of stress on pupils. They argue that the Covid crisis is a good opportunity to re-evaluate what we do. One of the authors said “ I’m hoping that will be taken seriously and discussed. In the light of Covid, we’ve got an opportunity to look at other countries and ask if what we are doing is working for us and for young people.”

So far, so rational. But no, there’s not a chance. Our leaders like what they’ve got, and they’ll do just what they do at the moment, only with the mock exams instead. Or maybe they’ll do them three weeks later. But seriously question the pattern? Listen to someone else’s ideas? You must be out of your mind. It’s just like test and trace, and closing down towns in the North. Nobody could possibly say anything to which they need to listen. They won an election, so they get to make all the decisions, right?

Mind the Gap

Everyone knows that a key effect of the pandemic has been to widen the gap between the achievements of more and less favoured pupils. If you’re learning in lockdown it matters whether or not you have IT equipment, and the time and space in which to use it properly. So it makes sense to look for some way of compensating for this difference. In other countries, government would confer with teachers about how best to do this. not here. We know that the answer to everything is to buy a lot of money to a firm. So there’ll be private tutors (who can’t be practising teachers) who will swoop in to make the difference.

Only they won’t. This is an urgent crisis, but we know learn that this tutoring won’t be available until Spring 2021. No explanation offered by our rulers, but you have to guess that it’s dictated by the firms getting paid the money, that the optimum way for them to provide these resources and to make the necessary profit involves a few months delay while they get everything in place. that’s the cost of getting in the best. But it totally fails to grasp the nature of the problem, and the necessity for urgent action. In the grand scheme of things, the profit and loss accounting of government, “the needs of the pupils” comes a long, long way down.

The A level fiasco

Oh dear. How bad can it get? The minute kids were sent home from school, it was obvious that there would be a problem. Would they sit their exams? If not, what should we do? In intelligent countries, government got together with educational experts and teacher unions, to work out a solution. But not here. We’re the Gove-and-Cummings regime, where teachers can’t be trusted and it has to be done from the top. Fast and secretive, with maybe a couple of U-turns on the way if the press or Tory MPs get restive. Which gives us the organisational chaos and heartbreak for students that we’ve seen over the past few days. So, how do you react to that?

Two possible ways. A clear, honest recognition of the damage done, and a change of approach - listen to what Nicola Sturgeon says, about how her government got it wrong, and why the perception of pupils (particularly the least advantaged pupils) demands that the policy be changed.

Alternatively, there’s the Boris bluster - “Let’s be in no doubt about it; the exam results that we’ve got today are robust, they’re good, they’re dependable for employers.” No they’re not, and saying the same thing four times over doesn’t make it true.