Two Stars and a Wish #9: A talk on behaviour; a blog about boys, and an article about reducing exclusions

I have decided to delay, for a few days, my third post on the Observer’s story about the DfE’s alleged monitoring of education experts. This is because I wish to take a break from the Twitter drama that seems to accompany any mention of that issue.

Instead, back to my regular series of posts about things I found online.

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Two great links and one I wish was better.

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A great video on behaviour and education myths

Student Behaviour & Dispelling Education Myths

I’ve heard Tom Bennett’s researchED talks many times in the wild, but I only recently discovered that there was one available online without the need to acquire a ticket. If you are a fan of Tom Bennett this is well worth listening to. Quite apart from being good advice and quite entertaining, it’s also the easiest way to counter-act the misinformation of those trolls who claim Tom advocates “Zero Tolerance” or thinks punishment is the main behaviour management strategy. That said, I can imagine some won’t be happy to see some of their cherished dogmas dismissed as myths.

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A blog post about the achievement gap between the sexes

Does it matter if boys underachieve?

This blog post by Greg Ashman reminds us all of what teenage boys are like, and why it is not in their best interests to give them too much freedom in lessons. It also points out why it might matter if men in our society are, for all their alleged privilege, poorly educated.

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A journal article about exclusions that makes no effort to be balanced or objective

(Re)moving exclusions: School exclusion reduction in Glasgow and London

This article compares the exclusion reduction policy in Glasgow with similar ideas being discussed in London. This is a reasonable topic for policy analysis. The Scottish education system is far more centralised than in England, and there have been huge changes in school discipline in Scotland with, until recently, little debate. Even scandalous failures are just shrugged off by policymakers in Scotland. The fact that Scotland could eliminate permanent exclusions, without passing a law banning them, shows just how little agency school leaders have in Scotland. The uncritical compliance of school leaders is particularly alarming in this case, given that a school’s policy on exclusions could determine whether children are safe in school or not.

Of course, an educationalist is never going to see value in perspectives from outside of the education establishment. The article describes group-think in Scotland as “the coherence of wide-ranging policy ‘voices’ across Scotland”. An unidentified academic is quoted as saying:

this whole range of voices were saying the same thing and repeating the same message and backing each other up in all sorts of ways … There was a period of time in which we just used each other’s names and we said the same thing on the platform again and again

This is framed as “national- and city-level policy networks” which are “reshaping perspectives” due to “a sense of responsibility among educationalists to contribute to the wider mission”. This is an incredible way to describe an unaccountable, ideological elite in policy-making in Scotland forcing schools to do really stupid things that teachers; the public, and anyone with common sense would know are wrong.

According to the article, the greater freedom of schools in England to follow their own course is a problem:

The fragmentation of English education in contrast to the Scottish system has long been observed: Arnott and Menter (2007, p. 262) wrote of the ‘increasingly fragmented schooling system’ in England, tying this to ‘marketisation and privatisation’, and suggested, by comparison, that the Scottish system is ‘relatively homogeneous’. The relative diffusion of power within London education is a significant barrier to effective policy coordination.

The unwillingness of OFSTED to force schools to be “inclusive” (i.e. tolerant of extreme behaviour) is presented as a negative:

The power of Ofsted as the school inspectorate was emphasised by many of our respondents—it was described as the body with most potential to be ‘the agency for change’ in education. The London headteacher we interviewed, however, stressed that current Ofsted practice did not encourage inclusion: ‘the latest Ofsted framework doesn’t give you much credit for the type of [inclusive practice] that we’ve invested in’. This tallies with the views of English Local Authority officials interviewed by Cole et al. (2019, p. 386), who ‘saw changes in school inspection criteria as curtailing approaches that had previously promoted inclusive practice’.

It refers to “the need for better incentivisation of inclusion by Ofsted and the Department for Education”.

While the conformity of the Scottish education establishment was praised, schools in London that listen to the wrong people and have the wrong philosophy are condemned:

…London respondents cited various powerful stakeholders who may be resistant to substantial reframing of relevant issues around inclusion and exclusions—including headteachers.¹ As one charity leader stated, headteachers can perceive measures to rethink punishments and to reduce exclusions as ‘taking powers away from them to handle challenging young people’. The London headteacher suggested that strict educational philosophies retain significant power at the highest levels, pushed by particularly influential school leaders, government advisers and multi-academy trusts: ‘those [strict] ideas are still very, very strong, particularly in the very influential corner of the system which is close to government, your sort of Tom Bennett, Katharine Birbalsingh, Harris [Federation], and so on’. One VRU [Violence Reduction Unit] staff member suggested that a number of schools within London were aligned with this more exclusionary philosophy.

Despite the bias, this is still research, not propaganda. And we should be grateful for its honesty. Many progressives still claim that education in England is centralised and hostile to debate. This article makes it pretty clear that the exact opposite is the case, even if that is presented as a bad thing.

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Thanks to Gwen for the graphics.

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