“Changing Schools: Perspectives on five years of education reform”, Edited by Robert Peal
June 1, 2015
Changing Schools: Perspectives on five years of education reform has just been published. (Update 2/6/2015: It is now available for purchase in paperbook or for Kindle if you follow the link above.) This is a book on education policy which I contributed to. Here’s the info:
Changing Schools is a collection of essays by teachers, researchers and administrators who have been on the frontline of the dramatic changes taking place in state education over the last five years.
The authors assess the rapidly changing educational landscape and offer thoughts on where we go from here.
Chapters include:
- Academies and chains: When competition meets collaboration, James O’Shaughnessy
- Free schools: Making success sustainable, Katharine Birbalsingh
- Qualifications: What constitutes real qualifications reform?, Dr Tina Isaacs
- Assessment: High stakes, low improvement, Daisy Christodoulou
- Social media: Did blogs break the Blob?, Andrew Old
- Policy: Ten challenges for any government from 2015, Jonathan Simons
- Teaching: Teacher professionalism, training, and autonomy, Tom Bennett
- Charter schools: Lessons from America’s experiment with autonomy and accountability, Doug Lemov and Joaquin Hernandez
My chapter is about the world of education blogging, whether it has influenced policy and, if so, whether that is a good thing. I’d tell you about the other chapters, but I haven’t even got my copy of the book yet.
Other books with (smaller) sections by me are also available:
Scenes From The Battleground 
Hey – it is downloadable from Kindle right now!! I will look forward to reading it!!
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.
[…] Andrew is editor of Labour Teachers. Details of a book of essays on education policy he contributed to can be found here. […]
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[…] Andrew Old’s essay in Changing Schools considers the question: ‘did blogs break the blob?’ Andrew Old highlights the impact blogs had on the decisions policy makers took. He quotes Dominic Cummings (SpAd to Michael Gove from 2011-14): […]
[…] Sir Michael’s other shortcoming was that he took too long to realise what it would take to change the workings of the organisation. He inherited an organisation that was heavily invested in telling teachers the correct way to teach. He himself was fairly traditional, and perfectly happy to tolerate traditional teaching in his own school. He said as much right from the start of his time as HMCI, but it took over two years to get the message across to his inspectors that they were no longer the “child centred inquisition” in charge of driving out progressive teachers. His instincts were to defend his organisation from political pressure first, rather than to seek to change it. Other parts of his organisation, and many, many inspections reports contradicted his claims not to be enforcing a particular style of teaching. The full saga of how gradually things changed can be found by searching for “OFSTED” on this blog. My chapter in Changing Schools also provides some accounts from behind the scenes in the DfE about how concerns w… […]