How they do it in the independent sector

As a teacher, ever felt envious at the outstanding results achieved in private schools? As a parent, ever longed for your child to go to such a high-achieving school, if only you could afford it?

A friend of a friend who works in just such an institution tells how they do it. Apparently, if a child looks unlikely to achieve the highest grades, the parent is made to pay for the examination entry. That way, the child can be written off as an external candidate and therefore won’t ‘count’ in the school’s examination statistics.

Neat, eh?

Beats getting the parents to write the coursework essays (something else they do) or get the parents to pay for private tutoring (ditto).

Chancellor ‘protects’ schools’ budget so Michael can have more ‘free schools’

A true friend to our schools

To hear in today’s spending review that the government is ring-fencing money for education is supposed to make us all breath a deep sigh of relief. Of course, it’s the usual sleight of hand. We should be deeply concerned that money for the ideologically driven ‘free schools’ programme will get a massive boost at the expense of what the country really needs. Schools are still crumbling in the wake of Gove’s decision to axe the Building Schools for the Future plan but we can apparently afford to fork out to refurbish a disused warehouse to make it into a ‘free’ school where no new school is needed. What about the looming crisis over primary school places? Maybe the market will sort that out! And interesting that George Osborne knows in 2013 that in 2015-15 exactly 180 of these schools will spring up in response to consumer demand!

Oh good, the ‘pupil premium’ is still with us which, as everyone knows, is used creatively by schools to make up for short-falls elsewhere. Local Councils lose out big time in the ‘spending review’ so schools will have somehow to compensate for the services they used to get. And now all those civil servants will be in the same boat as teachers and will lose their annual increments. Repeat after me “public service bad, private enterprise good”.

Cuts in the Business Department budget will mean student grants will stand still at £3387 and the further education budget is being cut by £260 million. Not all good news then.

Campaigning in the local press against the Nottingham Free School

I made a statement on behalf of “Hands Off Our Schools” yesterday, a little bit of which is quoted in an article in today’s Nottingham Post.

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/Online-petition-bid-scupper-chances-new-free/story-19394804-detail/story.html#axzz2XIse6i3N

Letter about the ‘free’ school in Nottingham Post

Here is the text of a letter which, in edited form, appeared in the Nottingham Post, Monday 23 June (text in italics did not appear in the newspaper):

“I feel I must respond to Cllr Philip Owen’s letter (‘Free schools will raise educational standards’, 15 June). I’m no apologist for Labour so I’ll let Cllr John Peck defend its record and his remarks, but Cllr Owen’s comments about ‘free schools’ must be challenged.

Where is the evidence of the “enthusiastic support” for the ‘Nottingham Free School’ which, according to him, is the only reason this ‘virtual school’ (it currently only exists on-line) is about to spring into the real world? These parents, currently clamouring to be allowed a free school are, apparently, dissatisfied with existing  provision, which will surprise the many good schools in the Sherwood area where, it is rumoured, this school will be sited. If these schools  are so poor, maybe any available resources should go into improving them rather than starting from scratch in a hastily refurbished derelict building somewhere (remember, they’ve got just over a year to conjure up a fully-functioning school from thin air).

Free schools are “influential in driving up standards”, claims Cllr Owen: tell that to the parents of children at The Discovery (free) school in West Sussex, just rated ‘inadequate’ by OFSTED. As for offering greater choice, in my experience what parents want is a good local school they feel happy to send their children to. 

Not the site for the new ‘free’ school (probably)

In any case, looking at the ‘Nottingham Free School’ website, I can’t find very much in their ‘offer’ that’s different from any other school, apart from an option to do Latin and LAMDA public speaking exams. Even then, don’t expect them to keep to that ‘offer’ since they are still apparently planning to share resources and staff with their ‘sister’ school, the ‘Trent Bridge Free School’: they don’t seem to have noticed that the Department for Education and Science turned down the TBFS application! They, like Cllr Owen, need to keep up with what people actually want and what is happening in the real world, not indulge in some ideological fantasy.

Colin Tucker”

Also posted on ‘Hands Off Our Schools’

Have teachers REALLY been failing their brightest students?

When the chief inspector of schools says this, as he did a couple of weeks ago (you may have forgotten, so quickly do things move on), most people will not have the time to explore what he has said in order to contradict him. It’s a serious charge and — if true — one we should take seriously. He claims that secondary schools have consistently been letting down the brightest students and he quotes some compelling evidence to back up what he is saying. However, he is more than wrong – he is also deliberately contributing to the ongoing narrative about teachers with low expectations and an examination system that is not rigorous enough.

It’s difficult to know where to begin. Wilshaw has taken the Key Stage 2 test data and compared what the highest performing pupils in those tests (at the end of their primary school education) went on to achieve at Key Stage 4 (GCSE). The ‘fact’ that so many failed to achieve their ‘potential’ seems to be compelling evidence that something has gone wrong in the intervening five years. But there are other ways of interpreting this ‘evidence’ and, of course, arguments that undermine the ‘evidence’ itself.

1. Adolescence : the bright, enthusiastic 11-year-old may lose that enthusiasm as the hormones kick in although, of course, it is part of the teacher’s job to work with that and use teaching techniques that encourage and motivate. Not sure how easy that’s going to be with Gove’s new curriculum and exams!
2. Expectations : Wilshaw’s argument is based on what pupils are expected to achieve. Quite recently, schools learned that students were ‘expected’ to achieve ‘three levels of progress’ which means that a pupil gaining Level 5s at Key Stage 2 (the highest possible at that age) ought to achieve at least Grade Bs at GCSE and, for the very  brightest, a grade A or A* is expected. Quite what these ‘expectations’ are based on I’m not sure. Not evidence, certainly. And which of these grades should it be? Again, not clear unless you are privy to the data indicating which pupils gained ‘5a’ (towards the top of the mark range) or ‘5c’ (at the lower end, nearly Level 4) which, as far as I can see, is not easy to obtain on a national scale. If a child does not fulfil this ‘expectation’, the secondary school is deemed to have failed. It is actually becoming clearer that A grades are now firmly expected of Level 5 pupils. [I’m told that there is a world of difference between a 5c and a 5a and the suspicion is, that primary schools are nudging the results so that pupils who should get a 4a are ‘tipped’ into the 5c category – see next paragraph].
3. Reliability : but, let’s for the sake of argument accept that a child gaining Level 5 at KS2 ought to go on and achieve Grade A at GCSE: how reliable is that Level 5? The answer is, not very. The Key Stage 2 tests are different from GCSE in that they are sat on one day as opposed to consisting of coursework tasks and tests set on an examination day. We also know that Year 6 teachers report starting the preparation for the tests, to be taken in May, as early as the previous September, with students ‘hot-housed’ for months in how to get the highest possible marks. The other thing I have, sadly, to report, is the many anecdotes I have heard over the years of practices that amount to cheating. Not only are primary schools unused to setting up examinations but teachers and headteachers are so desperate for their school to do well that they go way beyond what would be possible in a secondary school where invigilation is done by paid outsiders and teachers are not even allowed in the examination hall. One Year 11 student was told a few months back what grades she was expected to get. Somewhat aghast (she’s a bright student) she asked how these ‘targets’ had been arrived at. A senior member of staff patiently explained to her about KS 2 SATs, three levels of progress and so forth, whereupon she just laughed and described how, back in Year 6, the headteacher had gone round the exam hall where SATs were in progress, looked down at the pupils’ answers and, where he didn’t agree, grunted, took the pen from the pupil and amended the scripts. It’s hard to believe Wilshaw, Gove and their acolytes are unaware of these stories but what have they done to investigate and tighten up? The same is true further back down the line. Why are Year 6 teachers and heads so desperate to do well? The answer is that THEIR results too will be judged against how far pupils have progressed since the Key Stage 1 SATs at the end of infant school. There the reliability is even more suspect, since the work is not externally marked nor even externally moderated. Teachers attend moderation training and, providing they ‘pass’ (ie ‘moderate’ examples in accordance with the guidelines) the marks they award their pupils will be accepted. The whole edifice is constructed on unreliable premises, but Wilshaw wants secondary schools to stream their pupils on the evidence of highly suspect KS2 data. Most secondary schools DO stream from very early on in Maths and English but gave up using the KS2 results a long time ago. Instead, if they can afford it, they’ll use the NFER Cognitive Ability Tests (CATs) which are thought to give an indication of ability and attainment that is untainted by context or background. These USED to be used as the measure by which GCSE targets were set and judged but, guess what, they weren’t ‘rigorous’ enough so we had to start using the far less reliable SATs.
4. Catch 22 : having said all of that, does the evidence indicate that in secondary schools, students at the highest level fail to make those three levels of progress? Well, if it genuinely is three levels, no. The evidence I found on line was for the years 2007 – 2011. At Key Stage 2, the percentage of children gaining a Level 5 in Maths and English was fairly level at around 21%. The percentage gaining a GCSE Grade B or higher in Maths over the same period was a little lower, averaging around 16% and for English it was almost the same, at just over 20%. Although results are ‘steady’ there has been a general agreement amongst experts that GCSE English and Maths have got harder over time so that ‘stagnation’ of results is actually improvement, Of course, these were not the same cohorts of children (eg the 2007 KS2 SAT group would have taken their GCSEs in 2012) but does suggest that vast numbers were not being ‘failed’ as Wilshaw has suggested unless, that is, all those Level 5s were ‘expected’ to achieve an A ort A* at GCSE. In that case, he may have a point: in English, over that 2007-2011 timescale, students achieving A or A* were around 11.5 %, in Maths a little lower again at around 10.8% average. However, if Wilshaw is saying the 21% of pupils who got a Level 5 should have gone on to get As or A*s, can we imagine the commentary about ‘dumbing down’, ‘race to the bottom’ and so on if they had actually managed it? This really is a ‘Catch 22’. Teachers are accused of failing their students by not getting them the highest grades in the sorts of numbers that would have had them accused of having dumbed down and ‘failed’ their students!

If you have managed to follow my arguments thus far, well done! No doubt someone much cleverer than me can delve deeper into the statistics and use them to prove me wrong and Wilshaw right – I fear that is the nature of statistics. In summary, however, what I have tried to show is that

• the system is set up to be so competitive between key stages and their teachers that we cannot, in all conscience, claim the KS1 or KS2 results are reliable;
• even if we could, and the expectation that children will make ‘three levels of progress’ is reasonable, the evidence suggests that, looked at one way, they may not be far off doing that;
• looked at another way, if schools HAD managed to get all their ‘Level 5s’ A or A* grades at GCSE, the government and its ‘fellow travellers’ like Wilshaw, would be crying ‘foul’ and claiming the system was letting down our ‘brightest’ in a different way.

So, by all means, let us use the data generated by what is by now decades of tests and results but let the teachers and schools use that data to guide them as to a child’s potential and, by all means, let us have high — but not unrealistic — expectations of all our children. But let’s NOT have politicians or chief inspectors using the data to make inflammatory and inaccurate remarks about teachers.

History is written by…?

So Michael Gove is about to announce a radical re-drafting of the History National Curriculum in an apparent response to the clamour of criticism his initial proposals received. The political response is to lampoon him for yet another ‘climb-down’ or ‘volt-face’ (I’m sure he’d prefer the Latin version) whereas the sensible response should be to welcome the fact that he appears to be prepared to listen and change his mind. Of course, it’s difficult to be that magnanimous to Gove and, no doubt there are, in any case, other, deeper, underlying reasons for the change of heart.

History is one of those subjects about which we often see fierce debate. I’ve been interested for a long time, going way back to my own A Level experience, which I was recounting to two young people of my acquaintance a couple of days ago. They had just finished their second year A level exams in History and were aghast to discover that, as far as I could recall, I was taught from one text book and, more or less, regurgitated what I had learnt in the exam. Their experience was of being required to comment on sources presented to them, unseen, in an exam and to make comments based on their own knowledge of the subject area. They had also completed a demanding piece of coursework for which they had had to conduct their own research which included finding so-called ‘primary sources’. We all agreed that, far from being ‘dumbed down’, as far as History at least was concerned, I had had the easier ride more than 40 years back.

The essential difference seems to be that History as it is now taught acknowledges that there is not one accepted version of ‘what happened’ and students are encouraged to develop their own understanding based on an analysis of the information available. I know from my own continuing interest in History that interpretations of events shift depending on the information available. For example, my initial understanding of the Second World War was gleaned from listening to what I have to call ‘primary sources’, my mother and grandmother, who lived through it. What they didn’t know about, of course, was Bletchley Park, ‘enigma’ and so on which, when considered, changes one’s view. Something similar will, I think, happen regarding the First World War, starting in 2014 as we begin centenary commemorations. I also recall visiting a museum in Soviet Prague in the 1970s and being shocked by the labels which told me about something called ‘The Great Patriotic War’, the Russian name for WWII and even more shocked to find out how many millions of Russians/Soviet people had been killed. Even the dates were different: for the Czechs, the war began in 1938!

I’d be interested to hear from any current teachers of History out there who would care to offer a more detailed and better informed critique of the pressures on History teachers to ‘teach’ a particular version of ‘what happened’. As Churchill (no longer required teaching on the National Curriculum apparently) said, “History is written by the victors,” although, I’m not sure who they are in the current context!

I told you so!

Don’t suppose anyone recalls my post of 26 February : “Pupil premium is a con”, but what I said then, based on my own limited research and anecdotal evidence, is now backed up by a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank. So, sorry, but, “I told you so!” Click below for the BBC coverage:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22955368

Campaign against the Nottingham Free School

The DfE has approved a new ‘free school’ to be established in the Sherwood district of Nottingham. The local ‘Anti-Academies Alliance’ group, ‘Hands Off Our Schools’, has opposed this and the sister ‘Trent Bridge Free School’ (which was NOT approved by the DfE) from the word go. It will continue to campaign against the school being set up. The local MP, Vernon Coaker, and the new Labour Nottinghamshire County Council Education Chair, John Peck, have both publicly come out against the school. The following has just been posted on the ‘HOOS’ website:

“We will be repeating our successful ‘stall’ in Sherwood, where we understand the new ‘free school’ is due to be established. Reaction from members of the public to our campaigning literature was extremely positive and many signatures were collected on a petition. We will be there again on Saturday 13 July, from 11 am, outside the Co-op in Sherwood Shopping Centre. If you can come along to help distribute literature and talk to members of the public, you will be very welcome.

We will also be giving out leaflets to parents at primary schools close to the expected location of the ‘free school’. This will be in the week commencing Monday 8 July. If you are available to help (you would need to be there by about 8.20 am) please contact us via the ‘Contribute’ button or by email if you are a member of our email group. We will then tell you the exact location of the school we will be visiting on each day.

We are also making plans to continue the campaign into the new school year including lobbying Year 6 parents at ‘open evenings’ and a public meeting in Sherwood. Information will be posted here as soon as arrangements are finalised.

Please look out for letters and articles in the local press. Join the debate if you can.

This school does not yet exist and is by no means a ‘done deal’: they haven’t even announced where the school will be housed! We believe a campaign of information can prevent them persuading Year 6 parents to make it a ‘first choice’ when they complete their applications in late September.”

Please click here to visit the HOOS website and show your support with a comment.

It’s official: anyone can be a teacher!

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/why-should-soldiers-be-fasttracked-into-teaching-8651058.html

Good to see that something sensible has come out of the Department of Couldn’t-Make-It-Up with Nick Clegg (what a hero!) putting the boot into Elizabeth Truss’s mad scheme for improving nurseries by increasing the child-adult ratio. However, in case you thought sensible was the new mad, this was immediately followed by the even dippier ‘Tommies for Teachers’ initiative (or whatever snappy title they’ve decided to give it). I think this was the winner of last month’s D of CMIU competition to find the most imaginative way to insult teachers a bit more. For those who haven’t been paying attention this means that anyone exiting the military can be fast-tracked into the classroom including, if they inconveniently don’t have one of those degree thingies, only having to do a couple of years of school-based training (I make that a degree in  one day a week for a year. Now that’s what I CALL dumbing down!)

Fortunately for me, a young man over at The Independent has done a very good hatchet job so go read at the link above.

Most important meal of the day

Well done to Blackpool Council for its decision to provide free breakfasts for all which, according to some interim research they’ve had carried out, is having a positive effect. However, it’s a concerning situation.

On the one hand, it seems to be a sign of the times — increasing poverty in our affluent society — but, there again, I have occasionally seen it and it was rarely to do with lack of money. After all, how expensive is it to give a child a bowl of cereal or a bit of toast and some juice? It seems to me to be more the product of ignorance and lack of organisation. I have certainly come across parents whose households were so disorganised that they didn’t get up early enough or, for example,  hadn’t planned to have milk in the fridge the night before. And, despite all the publicity, I suspect there are adults who don’t get the need for proper nutrition to aid health, growth and concentration.

I taught in an area that wasn’t wealthy but wasn’t poor. Some parents would just give children some cash for breakfast and/or lunch and I would see these kids as I drove past on the way to school, staggering out of the local mini market with a giant bottle of cola and a large packet of chocolate biscuits. Cashless catering can help but only if the parents pay the school directly so the child is forced to have the healthier food available in the school cafeteria. So, I support moves like Blackpool’s but I do think there’s a limit to this kind of intervention.