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From Terrible to Plummeting

20/10/2023

A round-up, I feel, of the half term’s voyage so far. Weather unseasonably warm until it was freezing for a day. HMS Tallis generally seaworthy, crew and passengers know the ropes. Purser struggling to make ends meet. All hands look relatively tidy and we haven’t been troubled by croc boots with mock spurs yet. Sea conditions could be better. Nautical imagery runs aground at this point.

Time to round up some thoughts on education ideas emerging from the party conference season. Labour policies are not very clear, which at least has the advantage over their being foolish. The Conservatives want to end A-levels. This is theoretically interesting and it may well be time for us to melt down the gold standard into a different gold standard. The dominance of academic A-levels over our whole system is worthy of close scrutiny and what it does to the many hundreds of thousands of young people for whom A-levels are absolutely the wrong answer. Time perhaps to consider whether a qualification designed for a tiny minority in a divided education system still recovering from the war is really the right way forward in perpetuity. Blimey, my mother did A-levels.
But this is not that time. Education is in crisis and we can’t rearrange these particular deckchairs. Especially as the tenure of the Captain is under serious consideration and he might not be around to steer through these icebergs. The system is flawed, but it has many strengths and it’s not entirely broken. It can wait until we reach a safer harbour, or at least some plain sailing.

Rishi Sunak is admirably obsessed with maths. It's obviously done him well and I’m entirely in favour of this general drift. We denigrate maths in this country to a ridiculous extent, just like we denigrate proper nutrition, early years teaching and the state of the railways. All of these are emergencies. All of them need well-qualified, valued experts to lead and run them. Maths, inescapably, needs maths teachers. We don’t HAVE maths teachers to meet the needs we have now. Where are all the others going to come from? You can’t outsource it offshore, Prime Minister. The education associations are right: this won’t happen, so best not to think about it. They’re not just being obstructive. We have other things to worry about. First, money. Second, teachers. A lively observer described that yesterday as having gone ‘from terrible to plummeting’. The third, or first depending on your school or your child is what we do about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

The number of children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) in England has gone from 220,898 in 2010 to 473,300 in 2022 to 517,026 this year. 17.3% of children have SEND, 13% need SEN support in schools and 4.3% have an EHCP. The biggest growth areas in SEND are Autism (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Children with these needs in particular often find school life quite hard. Many other children with SEND might not do so well with the monolithic curriculum we have in schools now and their results might not redound well on a school. Therefore, they are unevenly distributed. Some schools welcome children with SEND, others – not so much.

You would have thought therefore that the government might consider this a bit of an issue, especially as the SEND funding which goes to LAs doesn’t match the number of children or the needs identified on their EHCPs. Many LAs are in deficit on their SEND budget and have had to be given ‘safety valve’ bail-out money. Some LAs balance their own books but push the deficit down to schools – who are meant to do what, precisely? Getting an EHCP is inequitable and the pointier of elbow tend to win. Getting any help can be a desperate battle for parents. And these are the nation’s most vulnerable children.

Well, the government has thrown its brightest and best at the matter. Frequently.

…and as you can see, have really prioritised continuity and expertise in this area. Hmmm. I wonder why the situation has gone from bad to worse?

In other news, we had a wonderful African Caribbean Come Dine with Me and concert last night with staff as well as student turns and enough food to fell an ox. Three Year 7 boy dancers went down well with a happy crowd and a small follower demonstrated his own moves to me at break. I was hotfooting to meet with some serious Year 12 and 13s to try to work out what we could do as a school about the middle east horrors. Worry, express sadness and work for peace is our best guess. I was able to read them parts of the letter I’ve had on the matter from Gillian Keegan, Nick Gibb and Robert Halfon but, being good Tallis students, they felt that the Trappist option (silence, not brewing strong beer, you understand) was not a guarantee of better understanding for all. And yet this is a particularly difficult issue. We’ll reconvene after half-term.

Tallis life is endlessly fascinating. We need a week to recover from each other, but who’d want to be anywhere else?

CR
20.10.23

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Baggy at the Seams

15/1/2022

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I was wandering in science, and dropped into a cover lesson, all going well. I berthed near a pair of girls, one with green hair. They were doing something that required sheep drawing but were dissatisfied with their efforts. In this, I could help. Sheep figure frequently in RE what with the parables and so an occupational by-product means I can draw them pretty sharply, in the manner of clouds with legs. I demonstrated as much on the walkabout rota sheet. The ladies were not only delighted but could also remember the sheep-and-goats routine, so that’s a job done. Who needs performance management?

January requires new thinking even though it's halfway through the school year. I’m thinking about three unmanageable topics at once, just to keep me fresh.

First, as per, ethics. I talked to some young staff yesterday and we chewed over the values and virtues of the Framework for Ethical Leadership. The biggest ethical problems they identified – unsurprisingly – were the way we measure the value of a young person based on their academic scores, and the kinds of curricula we push them through. Wouldn’t it be better, several mused, for young people who struggle on our fearsomely overloaded GCSE courses, to be allowed to take very practical courses about looking after themselves and saving money?

Well, yes, perhaps all children need that, but the argument is multi-faceted. Why shouldn’t a child who cannot score at GCSE History be exposed to some of the stories and lessons from history? They need to be able to tell the difference between truth and revisionist lies as much as anyone else. The problem is in the qualification, which has to be the same for everyone and apparently, inexplicably, shamefully, has to have a third of below-pass grades (‘fails’ in normal person’s language). The problem isn’t with history, but the way we measure children using a qualification designed to prove some old lie about teacher slacking.

They’re not worried – and why should they be, learning to be a teacher is hard enough – about admissions. Mike Ion wrote about it in Schools Week last week and I couldn’t have put it better. He railed at the use of parental interviews, school fund requests, birth and marriage questions and the use of tests, all for y7 entry, and how the sharp-elbowed negotiate it all. The fact remains, he says, that secondary school admissions are ‘the secret scandal of our system, fostering delusions about consumer choice and reinforcing outdated perceptions of quality in education.

The outcome of covert selection practice is to produce an educational apartheid that creates vast areas of underachievement which then suck in vast amounts of public money to compensate for structural inequality.

My second issue is linked, about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). I’ve just seen a great article in the TES about SEND ‘magnet schools’. This is also to do with performance and admissions of course, but also with the limited understanding some educators have of their role in building up a good, national, comprehensive system.
It goes like this:

Bagpuss Comp has good provision for SEND, so increasing numbers of parents of SEND children choose Bagpuss over Rupert High. The Ruperts then say to any inquiries - we don’t have much provision for SEND, have you thought of Bagpuss? Neatly circular. Further, the money that Bagpuss gets isn’t equal to the provision specified in the Education, Health and Care Plan, and the likelihood of their meeting performance measurements is constrained. All the Bagpuss children get a worse deal, resources-wise and the clipboard brigade descend, with the usual range of results.

Some schools are really committed to inclusion. Some avoid it. How is that allowed?

You’ll recall my tedious attempts to communicate with G Williamson, late of Sanctuary Buildings, SW1. Nothing daunted, I may try afresh with Mr Zahawi who seems pretty efficient. He’s about to publish a consultation on SEND of which we Bagpie have rightly high hopes. I will report further on this.

I regret I don’t think even the SoS can help the third issue, to which all the above are stuck like glue. That’s of the retracted, restricted thinking of educators who take measurable achievement at 16 for their lodestone, inexorably drawn to it such that they don’t recognise the responsibility to map their own path so that their school makes sense as part of our national provision for all of our young. Does it increase results? No? Don’t do it, appears to be the mantra.

A colleague told me she was going to treat herself to a trolley now that the financial year is nearly up: a small pleasure. She needs a bit of help to get herself and her baggage from A to B. So do we all, but the hallmark of a good society is how fairly it distributes its goods, in both senses. I’ve told everyone who gets an email from me that I’m reading Sandel, and I often quote Rawls. There’s no better way to start a new year that with two philosophers. They say:

Those who have been favoured by nature, however and whoever, should gain for their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out. Societies should be arranged so that such contingencies work for the good of the least fortunate.

Or, as Anthony Crosland, another Secretary of State, said in the seventies:

The system will increasingly be built around the comprehensive school…..all schools will more and more be socially mixed; all will provide routes to the universities and to every type of occupation from the highest to the lowest….then very slowly Britain will cease to be the most class-ridden country in the world.

Everything needs tightening up. Over to you, Mr Zahawi.

CR
14.1.22

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On Golden Threads and Lemons

11/12/2021

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If I were a better physicist, I’d understand how time simultaneously contracts and expands. Why is it that watching the end of the year 7 Languages Spelling Bee – which took about 5 minutes – felt like such a blessed episode of calm in the week, while the five hours spent writing a zillion school Christmas cards seemed to disappear in the blink of an eye? Why is it that standing on the yard for 15 minutes in the cold feels like a lifetime but discussing feminism with year 13 for an hour was over in seconds with only a tenth of the arguments covered? Why is it that anyone wants me to give any more minutes of my remaining years to hearing about the reformed NPQs?

Once upon a time we had coherent way of entering teaching but a wide range of incoherent and usually meaningless ways to perk up your skills once you’d become a professional custodian of a dry-wipe marker. This wouldn’t do, obviously, because other countries do it much better and manage to keep hold of their teachers for longer. So, we invented the National Professional Qualifications and spent a few years oscillating like loons between making them compulsory or totally irrelevant. Now, everyone’s had to work for what feels like aeons on How to Do It Better. Result? Utterly incoherent ways of becoming a teacher, numberless as the stars in the sky, but a spiffy new set of free NPQs with, I kid you not, a ‘golden thread’ running through them.

Some of us have an incoherent hinterland in our own heads and can’t just accept a metaphor like that. Golden thread? Is it Ariadne’s? Is it close-binding all mankind? Does it twitch like Father Brown’s? Does it weave a magic spell of rainbow design? Why does it have to be dressed up so? If we had a system fit for grown-ups we could just say that we finally have a set of National Professional Qualifications that build on the same principles, from early career teachers to Heads, soup to nuts. We could say, as has one of its architects, that it has a clear structure, more coherence, a better evidence base, can be done alongside the day job rather than requiring Einsteinian time-bending and includes the SEND skills we all need. Why do we need jollying along like three-year olds?

Some of what we do in school is really quite hard. We have to think a lot, at the same time as preventing children from getting jammed in doors or falling downstairs. We have to consider the purpose of education while handing out glue sticks and marking A-level pieces. We have to explain what acid can do to people who might want to taste it to find out for themselves. We have to have a rationale for teaching Spanish grammar and Venn diagrams at a time of plague; volcanoes and poetry while racism, misogyny and climate disaster mess with the future. We have enough threads going on in our heads to knit a Fair Isle jumper. All we require of policy-makers is that they speak plainly and respect our intelligence.

I’ll get over the confounded golden thread, but it won’t solve the teacher crisis. We need more money in the system so that there can be more teachers so that the teachers we have can have some time to think. That’s how they keep them in other countries, as well as coherent training. We need both.

I worry about the future, of course, for all sorts of reasons. As well as all the above, there’s a nagging fear that people don’t expect enough of one another, enough seriousness or enough concentration. I’m sure that the golden thread is a lovely way of describing some worthy training courses but to me it doubles as a tightening noose of over-simplification in our education system caused by cheapness. What do I want in my metaphorical stocking? A system where more funding buys more time, where academic research is respected and teachers’ intellects taken seriously, for the long term.

I’m one to talk, though. I’ve been pointing at children and saying ‘no noses’ all week like a mad thing which has kept me amused as I hand out masks we can’t afford to children who forget where they’ve put them. I delayed the start of a meeting on the content of the visual arts curriculum by telling the trapped assembled about the plastic lemons my mother hung on her Christmas tree, which I’ve inherited. ‘Was it a recycling thing?’ one asked carefully. In the sixties? No, she thought they looked nice and she didn’t have much spare cash. I think a Christmas tree looks unfinished without them, but that just shows what you can do with a child’s brain if you start early enough. One year she experimented with a special total-lemon tree and we were all surprised by how dull it looked.

Perhaps the other thing I want for schools’ stockings is a bit of imagination in the system as well as coherence. There’s a lot of content in the NPQs but not much room for imagination or flair. That’s another consequence of parsimony: thinking deep and free takes time, which costs. When all your lemons look the same, even golden threads don’t make your system sparkle with the reflected light of the sheer joy of learning in communities of children.

CR
10.12.21

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

From Terrible to Plummeting

Baggy at the Seams

On Golden Threads and Lemons

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

​From Terrible to Plummeting

Baggy at the Seams

On Golden Threads and Lemons

MRS ROBERTS WRITES...

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From Terrible to Plummeting