Apparently one of the worst types of snake oil in education has been disowned by the DCSF.
According to this report in the Mail, Ed Balls has acknowledged that Brain Gym, the program of physical exercises that were meant to make kids think better, is without evidence.
I’ve only just discovered that Newsnight dealt with the issue more than a year ago:
I can only hope that BLP will be next.
As usual I have updated this guide for the holidays.
This blog is about the state of secondary education. There is an introduction to it here:
Here are a few posts I wrote purely for a laugh (although some of them perhaps make a point at the same time):
The following posts sum up what is typical in schools these days:
As well as the advice for teachers included in many of the other posts, I have written advice specifically for new teachers:
These deal more directly with my own personal experiences, or the experience of people I know:
I have also written a number of posts exploring and explaining how this situation came to be, discussing the arguments in education and suggesting what can be done.
I have also outlined what I would expect from schools willing to do put things right:
Here are my book recommendations:
Finally, I can now be found on Facebook (please “friend” me) or Twitter (please “follow” me).
(Just a short comment this time.)
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I once read on an IEP that a badly behaved, and occasionally explosive, student that I taught was thought to have “mild Tourects”. More recently, I read on the SEN register that there was a query as to whether a student had “Turrets Syndrome”. As usual I tend to assume that if something happens more than once to me at more than one school then it is probably happening at plenty of other schools too and so it might be worth commenting on.
For those of you who don’t know, Tourette’s syndrome is a neurophysical disorder where people manifest physical or vocal tics. In a minority of cases the tics can take the form of coprolalia, the uncontrollable exclamation of offensive words. There have been a number of television programmes about this type of condition, and it has entered popular culture to the extent where people have heard of the condition but are likely to think it always involves coprolalia. And this is where it gets involved in the SEN racket. Obviously, genuine cases of Tourette’s would, no doubt, be a special need and might need special help in some cases. However, the condition is rare enough that I have never taught a genuine sufferer and it would be pretty low down the list of conditions dealt with by SEN departments in schools. Unfortunately, the idea of people who cannot stop swearing has caught the public imagination. Unfortunately, the SEN systems in many schools are run by people who have neither any academic or medical education in neurophysical disorders, nor the common sense to look up these conditions on Wikipedia before attempting to diagnose them. All it takes is the fact that they have heard on the TV of a condition where people cannot stop swearing but it is not their fault. Now finding excuses for not holding children responsible for their actions is a major part of the purpose of the SEN racket. If you don’t know anything about Tourette’s, not even how to spell it, it sounds like a dream come true. Jordan and Lee didn’t swear at the teacher because she tried to make them work and they didn’t want to and had no fear of the consequences, they did it because they had that condition off of Big Brother.
There is no quality control for IEPs or SEN registers. Any old crap can be put on them. Even misspelt, misinterpreted conditions are acceptable. This is then passed on to teachers. Now some teachers, maybe a minority, read books. We have seen the word “Tourette’s” written down. We even have a rough idea of what it refers to. But we still have to pretend that if we get sworn at it might be a symptom of a condition, not a morally wrong act, because the SEN department has more power than we do. In the process people who have a genuine medical condition are going to be forever associated with badly behaved kids who choose to swear at teachers. There really is a little too much truth in this:
I recently received the following email:
“Hi Andrew,
Sorry for the direct email. I just came across your blog http://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/ and I wondered if I could run something past you that might interest you. I’m working on a landmark independent documentary film that is coming out on education and I wondered might it be of interest for your blog.
You can watch/download the trailer here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUODHGy60no
The film, titled ‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’, was inspired and guided by Lord Puttnam and Sir Michael Barber and explores the education system in the UK and asks whether the current system provides young people with the opportunity to develop their talents. High-profile figures sharing their personal experiences and views include Sir Richard Branson, Germaine Greer, Henry Winkler, Bill Bryson, Sir Ken Robinson and a wide range of education experts from around the world.
This thought-provoking film offers unique insight across generations and nations, and reveals a very inconvenient truth about education. The world is changing rapidly – but our education system is not keeping pace.
‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’ follows the lives of five Swindon-based teenagers and the challenges they face during their education. It reveals the dislocation between our education system and the rapidly changing, globalised world which is increasingly dominated by digital technology, and focuses on the need for fundamental change in teaching and learning
Lord Puttnam said: “I’ve no doubt that ‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’ has the potential to be a powerful catalyst for overdue educational reform. We need to provide all of our young people with an education that motivates them to learn, and enables them to discover what they are good at. ‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’ is intended to act as nothing less than a wake-up call.”
By exploring some of the more innovative approaches to education around the world, the film offers a glimpse of the future. It shows how much more flexible, exciting and engaging learning could be for young people – and how our education system could support them in identifying and making the most of their individual talents.
Following the premiere of ‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For’ on Tuesday 17th November the film will be released online on request at www.wearethepeoplemovie.com and will also be syndicated free with the Guardian on Saturday 28th November
You can view the trailer here I wondered if you would like to talk about it on your blog?
Thanks James”
I’m happy to oblige, James. Here is my review:
Despite the hype in some of the publicity, “We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For” is not in any way a film. The Guardian may have distributed it, but didn’t even see fit to mention it on the front cover. (Curiously today’s Guardian did give almost all the space above its masthead to publicising its free “Kings and Queens Wallchart”.) “We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For” is simply a party political broadcast for the ignorance party. It might be messianic about education, but education is about “skills and attitudes” not learning. As a result the traditional school, built as it was for getting the masses to learn knowledge, is utterly outdated. “Doing reading, writing and arithmetic” is mentioned only in a derogatory way. Even “sitting down” is repeatedly condemned.
A succession of voices, who are either representatives of the education establishment or minor celebrities, promote a familiar case. The argument is the usual one for dumbing down. The future is uncertain, therefore all knowledge is outdated and so children must be prepared for their lives by becoming “adaptable”, “flexible” and everything other than knowledgeable. Knowledge is conformity, ignorance is individual. A system that aspires to ensuring that all should have knowledge is repressive. A system that tests that knowledge is wasting time on rote memorisation and missing the big picture of a future in which nobody needs to know anything. The important thing is for students to “question the world around them”, which for some reason is incompatible with being taught how to answer those questions. Children must be interested, creative and have high self-esteem. The last hundred years of educational theory never happened. Education now is like it was in the Victorian era. We have to adopt the ideas that were popular in the US in the twenties and the UK in the sixties because these ideas are new; Summerhill School (founded 1921) is presented as an innovation. Education is about drawing out from children what is already in them rather than giving them new knowledge. Everything must be relevant. Vocational skills aren’t valued enough. If students haven’t learnt enough then it was a mistake to try and teach them. If students haven’t enjoyed learning then it’s pointless. All must have prizes. Henry Winkler and Germaine Greer say so.
Bollocks.
What makes it worse is the use of children. Child after child spouts clichés about education. How else can the filmmakers pretend their crap is for the sake of the children? Much concern is shown about the failures of the present system. Uneducated children have been failed by the system, nobody doubts this. But it takes the insanity of the zealot to blame educational failure on the academic focus of the education system, when anybody familiar with our schools can see that there is no academic focus for these children. This is a rant against authority in education, by the kind of people who do have authority in education. This is an argument for failed orthodoxy by presenting it as a radical departure. This is a polemic against academic standards by the kind of people who have already lowered the standards to nothing. This is an attack on the curriculum by the people who gave us the curriculum we have. This is an attempt to blame the failure of the educational system on the very values the system has already abandoned. This is a prolonged assault on a strawman education system that not only doesn’t exist, but would be far better than what we have now if it did exist. This is shameful lies combined with self-righteous sermons.
I am prepared to give some of the participants the benefit of the doubt, they might not have known how their contributions would be used, but too often the people who are already failing the next generation are given a platform to call for more of the same and explain how progressive, radical and compassionate it is to do so. It is such a colossal attempt to shift blame that you almost expect some of the interviewees to suggest that the Jews (or perhaps the freemasons or the Catholic Church) are behind our education system.
My hope is that for every Guardian reader who wastes their time on this call for ignorance justified as compassion, there are a dozen other readers who take the same amount of time to discuss with their children the content of the Kings and Queens Wallchart. The people I am waiting for are people who know enough history to have learnt from it.
Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra. Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to restore it…
…in bodily ills there is [no] difference about the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but he certainly wants health. No one says “I am tired of this headache; I want some toothache,” or “The only thing for this Russian influenza is a few German measles,” or “Through this dark probation of catarrh I see the shining paradise of rheumatism.” …
Chesterton (1910)
I went to a party not so long ago and met a couple of medical students. Among other things I was fascinated to find out that they have been told that when seeing a patient they should ask:
“How do you feel about this appointment?”
and
“What are your expectations about this appointment?”
I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that the trend that says professionals are meant to care more about people’s feelings than about their professional responsibilities has spread to medicine. However, thinking about it, I don’t think there is any danger of it getting anywhere near as bad as in education. In medical matters we might like the idea of doctors being compassionate individuals who care deeply about our feelings, but we remain absolutely clear on the fact that the main thing we want from them is to be restored to health. Faced with a serious illness we would rather be treated by Gregory House than Patch Adams. We can clearly see that a doctor’s bedside manner; approachability, even their compassion, are side issues compared with the effectiveness of their treatment.
Unfortunately, while we all have a good picture of what it is to be healthy, we don’t seem to share the same kind of insight into what it means to be educated. Newman (1873) asked:
If a healthy body is a good in itself, why is not a healthy intellect? and if a College of Physicians is a useful institution, because it contemplates bodily health, why is not an Academical Body, though it were simply and solely engaged in imparting vigour and beauty and grasp to the intellectual portion of our nature?
People have to ask themselves what education is for, in a way they would never ask what health is for. People speculate that education is for the sake of the economy; for social cohesion; for personal fulfilment; for gaining qualifications; for training revolutionaries, or for the preservation of tradition. As in so many other areas where the aims are less clear than medicine: “some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease.” Chesterton (1910)
Some of the things schools do now, such as encouraging students to make their own choices about illegal drug taking, taking kids skateboarding, or teaching them to express to value all opinions (especially their own) are to me little more that a diseases on the body of the school. Other parts of what schools do, no matter how desirable, are clearly not part of the aim of a school. So for instance, at an INSET recently, we were set the task of identifying from a list what was the purpose of a form tutor. Options like “to be friendly” or “to value each student as an individual” were put forward. All very worthy, but clearly these are virtues in a form tutor, akin to bedside manner in a doctor, not the purpose of a form tutor.
The other side effect of the vagueness of aims in education is that quackery and nonsense can never die, whereas ineffective medical procedures and treatments can, at least some of the time, be exposed. All that happens when a teaching method is found not to work in some way is that the purpose of it is adjusted. Bad teaching methods can first be put forward as a way to improve academic learning. When this doesn’t happen they can be put forward as a way of developing skills for adulthood. When this doesn’t happen they can be put forward as a way of socialising students for life within the school. When this doesn’t happen they can be put forward as a way of encouraging creativity, and so on indefinitely. By contrast, it is obviously unlikely that patients would be encouraged to keep taking medicine that simply doesn’t work by redefining the disease. Nobody is told: “well, this medicine hasn’t cured your rheumatism, but keep taking it, it might cure your broken leg”. Similarly, no doctor would view all “experimental” procedures as axiomatically better than established ones or be told that if a patient wasn’t getting better that the problem was not the treatment but their own unrealistic expectation that their patients should get better.
Teaching is just too far from being a science. The judgements cannot be clinical. We can imagine areas where doctors have to consider their aims (e.g. for procedures such as abortion or cosmetic surgery, or for conditions where there is no treatment or where treatments have significant side-effects) but most of the time they know what they are aiming for. By contrast, teachers have to make value judgements before they even start and continually revise them because a healthy intellect is harder to conceptualise than a healthy body. Teachers have to decide what an educated man or woman looks like, in order to teach their students the kind of knowledge and skills they will need to become one.
Then, of course, they will be told to stop trying and just entertain the students and raise their self-esteem instead.
References
Chesterton, G.K., What’s Wrong With the World?, 1910
Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University, University of Notre Dame, 1873
I used to wonder why teachers had it in for OFSTED, the school inspection agency. The inspections were a hassle, and very stressful, but they weren’t that often. If every five years somebody wanted to pop in and tell me my lessons were good then it wasn’t the worst thing in the world for me as a teacher. My experience was also that the judgements given by OFSTED inspectors seemed much better than those given by managers. They seemed more focused on learning and behaviour, and less on playing games and inclusions. As somebody who was concerned about poor schools then it seemed to make sense that this form of accountability existed and the schools which most failed their pupils would be identified.
My opinion has changed. OFSTED has ceased to be a regulator; it is is now a magic word. The word “OFSTED” has mystical power over teachers. It is used by the dark wizards of senior and middle management to cast a spell on gullible teachers which saps their will and turns them into bad teachers. It works like this:
If you have a bad idea then saying “OFSTED” turns it into a good one. For example: “Students should be working in groups every lesson. It’s what OFSTED will be looking for.”
If your staff don’t respect your judgement, then saying “OFSTED” reminds them of their wretchedness: “If anybody here thinks OFSTED is definitely going to consider all of their lessons to be excellent then you might have another opinion about this, but unless that is the case then you need to listen to what I’m saying.”
If you are a manager who isn’t very good at teaching then you can even things up by using the power of OFSTED to screw up other people’s lessons. For instance you can say “You must not spend more than twelve minutes in the lesson teaching, it is (or is going to be) one of the new OFSTED criteria” and people will believe you.
It is only a matter of time until senior managers cease to using any vocabulary other than the word OFSTED, and will be free to simply address the school at INSET meetings by saying “OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED” conveying meaning only by the pace at which they speak and the tone of disapproval in their voice when they are looking at anybody who is not as fully OFSTED compliant as themselves. (I believe this may already have begun to happen in some schools.)
Now, in almost every OFSTED I have ever been through there has been an intense period of advice from managers, LEA consultants, advisors and the like, usually based around trendy ideas and box-ticking followed by a last minute revelation that OFSTED actually want something completely different (and more obvious) like marking in books, schemes of work for every subject, results that suggest students actually make progress. Advice given pre-OFSTED is usually terrible, and I have got my “goods” in OFSTED observations by ignoring it. Better advice is available from asking teachers who have recently gone through OFSTED what they got it in the neck for, and being ready for trouble. At the last OFSTED I went through, on the Sunday before the inspection, the headteacher rampaged through my department looking in every exercise book for signs of marking, having only just realised that this was important. Having reached a state of apoplexy with what he found, he arrived at my classroom to find me sat there marking and was extremely grateful. I knew what I needed to do, even if the many expensive advisers had left it to the very last minute to suggest that this might be an issue.
This is because OFSTED is a bullshitter’s charter. People who nobody would ever listen to based on their track-record or their qualifications gain power through uttering the magic word and watching people panic. It doesn’t matter what OFSTED actually want, there is just enough ambiguity for people to pretend they have an insight and then watch everybody dance to their tune. Worse, they have this effect even on people doing a good job, who will only get worse by listening to bad advice. Forget results, forget teaching, forget what works, every mad initiative and silly suggestion is justified by the magic word.
Here’s my solution: get rid of performance-related pay, reward good results with OFSTED immunity. Schools where the results show students make good progress should not have their teaching and management inspected. Teachers who get good results should be given a notice to put on their door saying “Successful classroom, so just fuck off” which compels all inspectors to leave them well enough alone. Members of SMT for any school which gets an “outstanding” from an OFSTED should, either simultaneously or one at a time, be given the opportunity to slap the lead inspector in the face for wasting everybody’s time. Any headteacher who turns around a failing school should be allowed to go to Christine Gilbert’s house on New Year’s Day for the next four years and empty a bucket of live eels over her head and pee in her fireplace. Accountability needs to be about identifying failure and doing something about it, not bullying the successful into becoming more like the failures.
“Contrary to popular belief, the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to save you from having to think, because the brain is actually not very good at thinking… Compared to your ability to see and move, thinking is slow, effortful and uncertain.”
Dan Willingham (2009)
“Enjoyment of learning and attitudes … Are pupils happy with their work? Are they proud of it? Are pupils interested in their work and in what they are learning? Or are they easily distracted?”
OFSTED (2009)
“Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”
Homer Simpson
Learning is hard work. It can be interesting. It can be inspiring. It can be satisfying. It can be rewarding. It can even be enjoyable. What it can’t be is indefinitely easy. Unless you are wasting time learning trivialities, then even if you are a very fast learner you will reach your limit and sometimes find yourself out of your comfort zone. Eventually, you have to engage in the uncomfortable pursuit of thinking. Eventually, you are exposed to more knowledge than you can comfortably absorb without mental exertion. Eventually, you will feel at least some desire to give in. Eventually, you will require some discipline to make progress, whether it is your own self-discipline, or external pressure applied by your peers or your teacher.
Now, this is pretty much common sense. Isn’t it?
Well no. The belief that there is a short cut to learning is widespread. Perhaps we all have a special learning style, which if utilised would mean we grasp everything easily. Perhaps clever use of ICT can speed knowledge straight into our brains. Perhaps we can be taught extensively without ever losing interest, just so long as what we are learning is made “relevant”. Perhaps science can be relied upon to tell us the perfect way to be taught. Perhaps we can be guided to discover everything we need to know for ourselves without even having to be taught it directly. Perhaps, learning would become easy if we were taught a list of words to describe it. Perhaps, all the difficulty is simply a result of an undiagnosed medical or psychological condition which, if treated, would make learning easy.
This might all be nonsense, but it is what many people want to believe. It often seems that the people who believe it, even teachers who believe it, are rarely academic high-fliers themselves, but this just makes it all the more convenient to believe. Academic failure can be a result of teachers failing to make it easy, rather than our own weakness of will, or lack of ability, when faced with a challenge. Good teaching does aid learning, but now, instead of expecting good teachers to teach us more knowledge for the same level of effort, we expect them to teach us the same amount of knowledge while we make less effort. Suddenly a good teacher ceases to be one who taught us a lot, and becomes one who made us comfortable. Pleasure replaces achievement as the proof of good teaching. If it can’t be made easy it must be chucked out. If it can’t be made painless then it is cruel to inflict it. Students must never be forced to learn, or even suffer the indignity of failing to learn. The learning process becomes more important than the content of what is learnt and the most important thing a teacher can be judged on is whether their students had fun learning. A teacher who is more concerned with the depth of learning rather than the pleasure in learning must hate children. Mr Miyagi would have been a monster. Jamie Escalante was a disgraceful bully. Nobody must ever save us from ourselves. Nobody must ever make us achieve. We can all be happy failures, so long as nobody tries to make us succeed.
References
OFSTED, The quality of teaching and the use of assessment to support learning, Briefing for section 5 inspectors, 2009
Willingham, Daniel T, Why Don’t Students Like School, Jossey-Bass, 2009
Previously, I talked about Assessing Pupil Progress (A.P.P.), the latest bats-arsed initiative foisted on teachers in core subjects. It consists of a list of “Assessment Foci” (AFs) which have to be ticked off as students achieve them. I described how A.P.P. was incoherent, and based on ideas that had repeatedly failed in the past. I also expressed concern that it was being used for summative assessment in place of more reliable methods of assessment.
Here I will suggest how middle managers stuck with implementing A.P.P., i.e. those who can’t simply refuse, can do so without having to change their assessment routines very much, or making their department do anything too demanding.
Here’s my suggestion. Get your list of AFs. (I am assuming here that you have already been given these by whoever is forcing A.P.P. on you in the first place. If they haven’t there are a number of websites where you can find them.) In order to avoid identifying my subject, I will take the AFs, in the example that follows from the nursery rhyme “Monday’s Child”. Then, assuming you already test your students regularly (and extensively) wait until it is time for the next scheduled test. Then go through the test paper and pick somewhere between five and twelve questions (the more often you test, the fewer questions you will need) which match up well to some of the AFs. This will take a bit of time if you use a multitude of different tests, but, it shouldn’t be too difficult and if you have a large department should not take very long.
This should give you a list of key questions with corresponding AFs.
e.g.
| Question | AF |
| 2 | Student is fair of face |
| 3 | Student is full of grace. |
| 7 | Student is full of woe. |
| 8 | Student has far to go. |
| 10 | Student is loving |
| 11 | Student is giving. |
| 13 | Student works hard for a living. |
| 14 | Student is bonny |
| 17 | Student is blithe |
| 19 | Student is good |
| 20 | Student is gay. |
When teachers mark the test, they will mark it and calculate the grade/level as normal.
However, as well as this they will fill in a table like the following (which has been printed out for them) which lists the names of the students in the class and the key questions:
| Student/Question |
2 |
3 |
7 |
8 |
10 |
11 |
13 |
14 |
17 |
19 |
20 |
| Jordan Monday | |||||||||||
| Ryan Tuesday | |||||||||||
| Chantel Wednesday | |||||||||||
| Lee Thursday | |||||||||||
| Siobhan Friday | |||||||||||
| Jodine Saturday | |||||||||||
| Sean Sunday |
Teachers indicate where a student has got full marks on aquestion, or where a student has scored nothing.
E.g.:
| Student/Question |
2 |
3 |
7 |
8 |
10 |
11 |
13 |
14 |
17 |
19 |
20 |
| Jordan Monday | Y | N | N | ||||||||
| Ryan Tuesday | Y | N | N | N | |||||||
| Chantel Wednesday | Y | N | |||||||||
| Lee Thursday | Y | N | |||||||||
| Siobhan Friday | N | Y | N | N | |||||||
| Jodine Saturday | N | N | Y | Y | |||||||
| Sean Sunday | N | Y | Y | Y | Y |
This is the one extra bit of work for classroom teachers, however, it is something that can be quite useful for formative assessment. It is certainly something I have done without ever intending to use it for A.P.P.. This data can then be entered in a spreadsheet or database for all students. (Okay, this bit requires some work, but hopefully it can be passed on to admin staff.)
Now, either by setting up a database to do it for you, or by cutting and pasting from the spreadsheet (on Microsoft Excel, the “Paste Special” option may be useful for transposing) you can create a new spreadsheet or database table in which the questions have been replaced with the AFs:
| Student/AF | Student is fair of face | Student is full of grace. | Student is full of woe. | Student has far to go. | Student is loving | Student is giving. | Student works hard for a living. | Student is bonny | Student is blithe | Student is good | Student is gay. |
| Jordan Monday | Y | N | N | ||||||||
| Ryan Tuesday | Y | N | N | N | |||||||
| Chantel Wednesday | Y | N | |||||||||
| Lee Thursday | Y | N | |||||||||
| Siobhan Friday | N | Y | N | N | |||||||
| Jodine Saturday | N | N | Y | Y | |||||||
| Sean Sunday | N | Y | Y | Y | Y |
With each further test you can add to this data. You can leave the data in this format or use sorting (on a spreadsheet) or reports (on a database) to manipulate this data into something more individualised:
E.g.:
| Student: Ryan Tuesday | |
| AFs met: | Student is full of grace. |
| AFs to be met: | Student works hard for a living. |
| Student is good | |
| Student is gay. |
Use the grade given by the test for summative assessment, and present this AF-referenced data whenever you are asked for evidence of A.P.P.. I believe this is all a relatively small amount of work to comply with A.P.P., assuming you already have a suitable testing system in place. More importantly, it allows you to keep existing tests where they have worked well, and bolt A.P.P. on top of them, rather than replacing tests that work with A.P.P. bollocks.
That said, any further suggestions or enhancements to this method would be welcome. (Please don’t bother suggesting ignoring A.P.P. or forging all the data; the above assumes that you can’t get away with that.)
Parental Choice
December 22, 2009Parents have some choice of which school to send their kids to. Not a great amount because, surprise, surprise, the best schools are already full up. But since the eighties they can choose a school and, where there is space, their kids can go there.
For some on the left this is a great injustice. Middle class parents should be forced to send their children to really bad schools, because those schools would be better off with the children of aspirational parents conscripted into them. According to the theory, middle class students are a joy to teach and they raise morale and standards by their mere presence. I suppose by a similar argument hospital wards would be more effective places if we made healthy people stay in them. Maybe prisons would be happier places if we locked up more innocent people?
Of course, the reason that this is nonsense is that while the culture of a school is influenced by parental background, it is not the whole story. Middle class children who are surrounded by the underclass tend to either become either very quiet, desperately trying to hide from their peers, or they “go native” and behave as badly as anyone else. Schools are not changed much by fluctuations in their intake. You can throw as many sheep to the wolves as you like, the wolves will still act like wolves.
However, these days the pendulum has swung the other way. The fashionable idea, and, if the polls are to be believed, the policy of the next government, is that of increasing choice.
There are many variations on this policy. Some talk of “vouchers” as though giving a piece of paper to parents makes their choice more real. Others talk as if no choice currently exists and we were still in the 1970s. Many talk as if the problems of the system will soon be solved by the magic of choice and competition. Yes, it’s the 1980s again and this time reality is not going to stand in the way of this policy.
There are red-in-tooth-and-claw versions of this policy in which vouchers can be used to pay part of the fees at private schools, effectively redistributing resources from the majority to the most privileged minority. There are versions of the policy in which selection is brought back, making parental choice secondary to the choice of the schools. But the usual version of the policy, and the one the Tories are now proposing, is to have things basically the same as they are now but hope that by waving one’s arms wildly one can conjure up new schools from nowhere and, even more implausibly, stop anything too bad happening to the students still at the old schools.
Now there are quite a lot of people out there willing to run schools. Some are mad, but probably no madder than a lot of the people already running education. The problem is that we have already had several years of letting private groups run schools as part of the academy program. It has revealed that a) some of these people can make an excellent contribution to the education system and b) some of them can’t and simply piss public money up the wall. The fantasy ignores this and dreams that we can simply make it easier and easier for people to set up schools without getting worse and worse people involved in doing so. In some versions of the story schools will appear anywhere, in old office blocks or any convenient building. No problem. Some people believe that setting up and running a school is no more difficult than, say, running a car boot sale and once you get fifteen kids and a teacher you have a school.
Of course, the reality is something different. According to studies cited in Johnes (1993) primary schools need 70 or 80 students and secondary schools well over 1000 to be efficient. Lots of smaller schools are likely to waste a lot of money even if they are well run. If they are run by idiots (or should I say greater idiots than currently) we can expect even more money to be wasted. Either the private organisations involved are going to be given enough money to waste or they will think twice about risking their own money setting up a school. This is without considering the costs incurred in schools which are suddenly half-empty due to an exodus of students.
Of course, that’s half of the appeal of the policy. In the fantasy bad schools will lose pupils and go out of business, good schools will grow and new schools will meet any surplus demand. Unfortunately supply and demand don’t work quite so conveniently in education. There are considerable rigidities involved. People don’t want to change schools as often as they change supermarkets. Good schools don’t actually want to grow indefinitely. Why should they? If you have a successful school with 1000 students in it, why would you want to try and cope with any more students? It is possible that letting private companies run schools for a profit would create some incentive for this, but the Tories have said they won’t do this. More importantly, bad schools cannot be easily closed. There are two problems with closing schools, firstly you have to find somewhere for existing students to go, secondly you have to convince parents that they want their children to go somewhere else. The first can be an extremely difficult endeavour in the real world (as opposed to the fantasy world where you can apparently set up a school in your garden shed). The second is a policitician’s nightmare: hundreds of pissed off parents who are about to be seriously inconvenienced by relocating their children. Local authorities struggle with this in the situation where they have monopoly powers. How private organisations would deal with this is beyond me.
Of course, none of this is new. This is the reason why this policy was never followed through even during the free market enthusiasm of the eighties. However since then the Tories have a new magic word: “Sweden”. Sweden has opened up its school system to greater competition and it seems to have worked okay. To hear Tories talk about it you’d think it was some kind of utopia (as opposed to successful by low British standards but nothing to make Finland feel insecure about). The assumption is that we are just like Sweden: A monolithic, state-controlled, secular system with a pool of highly qualified professional teachers, just waiting to be energised by allowing greater diversity, such as private schools and faith schools, into the system, with competent local authorities who can be trusted to responsibly regulate the system.
So really, the only question to be asked is: how long is it going to take them to notice?
Reference
Johnes, Geraint. The Economics of Education. Macmillan Press, 1993
Posted in Commentary | Tagged Coservatives, politics, school choice, vouchers | 11 Comments »