Two Stars and a Wish #10: Mental health interventions; censoring science, and research on exclusions

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Two great links and one I wish was better.

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A guest essay in the New York Times arguing that mental health interventions in schools may be harmful

This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers

For the last 8 years, vague talk of a mental health crisis in schools has been extremely common. However, in practice, this has led to blind faith in initiatives and interventions to address mental health that are not evidence-based. This American newspaper article describes several such efforts to address youth mental health that were ineffective or actually made matters worse. It discusses the reasons why that might be the case and points out the ways in which a focus on mental health might be bad for mental health. A particularly salient point is the following:

…by focusing teenagers’ attention on mental health issues, these interventions may have unwittingly exacerbated their problems. Lucy Foulkes, an Oxford psychologist, calls this phenomenon “prevalence inflation” — when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of “symptoms” and “diagnoses.” These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling.

Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart…

Continued here

Is the DfE keeping files on “education experts” who criticise their policies? Part 3

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The story so far

In Part 1, I discussed a series of Observer stories about the DfE “keeping files” on the social media activity of their critics. These stories were based on responses to Subject Access Requests (SARs) made by the individuals who were alleged to have been monitored. Some aspects of the stories seemed credible. There had been attempts to cancel some speakers invited to address DfE-funded events. This aspect of the stories was consistent with reports from other media outlets about the government’s excessive vetting of speakers. However, there was a lack of detail about the alleged monitoring of the DfE’s critics and very little description of the contents of the files. Most importantly, it was not confirmed that all the files had existed before the SARs were made.

In Part 2, I looked at responses the DfE had made to Freedom Of Information requests about the Observer’s allegations. The DfE had no records of an organised monitoring operation. It did give details of some circumstances where civil servants might look at social media, none of which amounted to the kind of monitoring of critics implied by the Observer’s story. The responses also pointed out that:

Where individuals make a Subject Access Request (SAR) to meet the legal requirements we are required to collate and provide copies of all the personal information held on them in-line with their request. In doing so this creates a SAR record, this record is only created to be able to respond to the SAR.

There is obviously a big difference between collecting every mention the DfE has of somebody and putting it in a file when they request it, and monitoring somebody and keeping a file on them.

Why the DfE is unlikely to have lied.

There are several reasons to think the DfE was telling the truth.

1) The behaviour of the writer of the Observer’s reports

While the Observer’s Anna Fazackerly could be found on Twitter taking a lot of offence at anybody questioning her story, she would change the subject when challenged about monitoring and keeping files. When asked directly if the files existed before the SAR, she claimed that something other than keeping files was “the key point”.

This was a remarkable response given the headline of one of the stories began with the words “Revealed: UK government keeping files…” and the print headline was even more explicit.

A later response was equally evasive, changing the subject from “keeping dossiers” to attempted cancellation of speakers.

Particularly noticeable is the mention of “all three cases I’ve written about”. The Observer had originally talked about the files of “at least nine individuals” and, later, the monitoring of “dozens” of social media accounts. When did that become “three cases”? Where had all the other cases gone?

2) The behaviour of the individuals who it was alleged had been monitored

I will be careful here, as I think it’s safe to say these people don’t like it when those they disagree with look at their social media or mention them. So you’ll have to either take my word for this or check their Twitter timelines yourself.

As far as I can tell, none of the individuals named by the Observer released their SAR responses to the public. And while it’s harder to check, I don’t think any of the “dozens” who were alluded to in the story, but not named, did either. Some individuals were particularly coy about what their SAR responses contained. Some objected mainly to critical comments, rather than being monitored.

Obviously, nobody has to prove anything to me or the other people who were sceptical of the story. However, it was noticeable that there were individuals who were extremely willing to acknowledge that questions were being asked and simultaneously extremely unwilling to provide answers. A remarkable amount of Twitter discussion seemed focused on attacking the motives of those who asked for more information. Some treated any request for clarification as a demand for evidence. Some found weak excuses to block people who were sceptical about the Observer’s story. There were even several comments about the involvement of lawyers, including a couple that seemed threatening. Some even claimed that there was no way the Observer would publish a story that wasn’t accurate! Despite all this, nobody chose to just show the evidence that there was a pre-existing file being kept on them for no reason other than their social media criticisms of the DfE.

3) An earlier report on the DfE and SARs

In July, there was a Byline Times article, written before the Observer stories, by an author who had access to at least some of the SARs responses. However, far from seeing this the way the Observer did, the article mainly reported on the speaker cancellation aspect of the story. It even repeatedly referred to the DfE “trawling” individual’s social media, rather than monitoring them. The one claim about “monitoring” in that article was based on internal DfE emails entitled “Social Media Digest – Afternoon” that briefly mentioned three tweets by the same individual. The emails and the tweets were months apart, even though “Afternoon” in the title suggests the digest itself would have been far more frequent. Why would such a flimsy example be given if there was good evidence in the SARs of critics being monitored and files being kept on critics? If the DfE was sharing an afternoon digest of social media content, isn’t it inevitable that many prominent edutweeters would be mentioned several times, and some might be mentioned many times? However, it would be extremely odd to describe that as “keeping a file” on them, or to suggest that it was they personally, rather than education social media in general, that was being “monitored”.

4) A Freedom of Information Request from 2022

In August 2022, a campaign group called Privacy International made FOI requests via Whatdotheyknow.com to many government departments, including the DfE, about “monitor[ing] social media of individuals in relation to investigations and intelligence gathering”. While it’s not the clearest of requests, it prompted the following response from the DfE:

The DfE Communications Directorate does not conduct monitoring, investigations or intelligence gathering on members of the public.

The fact that this, without any prompting in the question, refers only to the “DfE Communication Directorate” will I suspect be interpreted by some as evasion. However, this does mean that the DfE has issued denials about monitoring in September 2022 and November 2023. If the Observer story is to be believed, the DfE then admitted to monitoring individuals and keeping files on them in multiple responses to SARs made in between those two times. This seems unlikely.

That’s enough for now

The claims that there was monitoring of “dozens” of individuals and files being kept on at least nine people, merely for criticism of government policy on social media, appear substantially untrue. There may be some wriggle room for claiming that the routine reading and sharing of social media posts about education is “monitoring” but then the whole thing becomes ridiculous. If that’s what is meant by “monitoring” I could claim that I too am “monitored” by the DfE (along with almost 1700 other people).

I suppose we could provisionally accept that the claim about dozens of people being monitored was massively misleading rather than untrue. But if the “monitoring” claims did consist mainly of DfE employees reading, sharing and discussing public social media posts, then the comments that made comparisons with dictatorships were completely deranged. More importantly, we would still have the issue of “keeping files” or even “secret files” about critics for their social media posts (as opposed to other interactions with the DfE) which would still not seem to be true.

This was originally meant to be a single blog post. Then I kept finding more to add as it became apparent that while the Observer and its sources had many allegations, there were hardly any details about what had actually happened. This will, however, be the final post in this series of blog posts. I may return to this topic to discuss the issues around the DfE attempting to cancel speakers. While I am not shocked that the government doesn’t pay for people to oppose its policies, there appear to be genuine grounds for complaint if people are being messed around, or if the vetting process was in some way illegal. There may also be more for me to say about some of the individuals the Observer chose to present as innocent victims of “monitoring” by the DfE. Equally, there may be more to be found out about the DfE’s “social media digest”.

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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Is the DfE keeping files on “education experts” who criticise their policies? Part 2

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The story so far

In Part 1, I discussed a series of Observer stories about the DfE “keeping files” on the social media activity of their critics. These were based on responses to Subject Access Requests (SARs) made by the individuals who were alleged to have been monitored. Some aspects of the stories seemed credible. There had been attempts to cancel some speakers who had been invited to address DfE-funded events. This part of the stories was consistent with reports from other media outlets about excessive vetting of speakers. However, there was a lack of detail about the alleged monitoring of the DfE’s critics and very little detail about what was in the files. Most importantly, it was not confirmed that all the files had existed before the SARs were made. Sceptics, such as myself, had begun to wonder whether some or all of the files, had been created due to the SARs. We also questioned whether the files showed active monitoring of individuals. Could the files consist largely of emails, or minutes of meetings, where the names of the people who had made the SARs were mentioned for perfectly legitimate reasons? For instance, there is nothing sinister about civil servants reading and discussing education social media.

The Freedom Of Information requests

Several individuals had sent further Freedom of Information requests to the DfE to follow up The Observer’s allegations,  via the website whatdotheyknow.com. The first of these was from somebody who had become convinced by the stories that the DfE must be operating a “Twitter watch list”. They demanded to know the number and cost of “department staff employed to check social media accounts of teachers, education consultants & education speakers” and the number of people in those categories being monitored. The response stated:

The Department for Education (DfE) is unable to confirm whether it holds the information you have requested, because it estimates that the cost of determining whether it holds the information would exceed the cost threshold applicable to central Government. This is £600 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3½ working days in determining whether DfE holds the information.

On the one hand, this would indicate no record of any organised monitoring operation in the DfE. But on the other, it doesn’t actually clarify what, if anything, was happening. A follow-up request asked, “How many staff are employed within the department to monitor social media accounts of members of the public?” The response again indicated the lack of any organised monitoring effort, without clarifying what monitoring might occur:

Detailed role profiles are not held centrally. The only way we could accurately provide this data, would be to contact all line managers in the department to request the job profiles of each [of] their direct reports. In view of this, I do not consider that there is any way that the Department would be able to provide the information you have requested without exceeding the cost limit.

Further attempts to gain this information also failed on the same grounds, i.e. the DfE has no easily accessible record of people being employed to monitor social media.

Two later FOI requests on the same site received more detailed responses. One asked about the second Observer story, which mentioned the keeping of files on teaching assistants and librarians.

1. Please provide details of the DfE’s policies and procedures related to the monitoring of social media accounts and internet activity of teaching assistants, librarians, and education support staff.

2. What criteria or reasons justify the monitoring of individuals’ social media accounts or internet activity? Please provide any documented guidelines or justifications for such monitoring.

3. How long is the data collected through this monitoring retained by the Department for Education? Please specify the standard data retention period.

4. Has the Department for Education taken any actions, such as warnings or disciplinary measures, based on the information collected through social media and internet activity monitoring? If so, please provide details of a representative number of such actions or a summary.

5. Please explain the DfE’s stance on the importance of freedom of expression and privacy rights for education staff in the context of its monitoring activities.

The other FOI asked:

1.) How many files you maintain/social media accounts you actively monitor for criticism of Government Policy.
2.) What guidlines have been issued to staff who undertake this monitoring.
3.) What Data Protection assessment has been conducted before authorisisation for this monitoring was provided.

The DfE replies

Both requests received a very similar answer.

It is not the Department’s policy to monitor the social media accounts of those working in education, and there is no programme within the department dedicated to collecting intelligence on those who might be critical of government policy.

The response to the first of the two requests also included this sentence:

This includes teaching assistants, librarians and education support staff.

Then in both responses:

As is standard practice in most organisations, the Department carries out due diligence before engaging experts and speakers and this will involve looking at publicly available information.

We also use stakeholder commentary on a case-by-case basis to inform effective policymaking, for which it is important to listen to and consider a wide variety of views and perspectives.

For the public appointments process, due diligence might be conducted to assess a candidate’s suitability, including searches of previous public statements or social media.

A final section appears to confirm suspicions that the files were, at least in some cases, created to answer the SARs, and had not existed previously.

Where individuals make a Subject Access Request (SAR) to meet the legal requirements we are required to collate and provide copies of all the personal information held on them in-line with their request. In doing so this creates a SAR record, this record is only created to be able to respond to the SAR.

This seems pretty convincing to me. The DfE may look at education social media as part of their responsibilities, even at times looking up individuals when they have direct involvement with the DfE. However, there is no “Twitter watchlist” or organised monitoring of any individual over time. Of course, for a true conspiracy theorist, a denial is seen as more evidence. Even though the original story was based on responses from the DfE, some have claimed that a response from the DfE should be considered untrustworthy. So in my next post, I will look at a few reasons why it seems unlikely that the DfE was lying.

Is the DfE keeping files on “education experts” who criticise their policies? Part 1

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Strange stories about the DfE in the Observer

In September, the Observer published a story entitled “Revealed: UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity“.

Some of the details were about the shenanigans around speakers at DfE-funded conferences, and particularly the attempted dropping of the Early Years consultant Ruth Swailes as a keynote speaker at an event. This didn’t seem to add much to previous stories about the excessive vetting of speakers at events organised by civil servants or funded by government. However, the most sensational parts of the story were about the DfE monitoring of their critics:

Swailes, an independent consultant who advises schools and nurseries on early years education, was so shocked that she filed a subject access request, requiring the DfE to disclose any documents it held on her.

The results, which she received at the end of the summer, revealed that the department kept a file on her. It included critical tweets she had posted about Ofsted, England’s schools inspectorate, and noted that she had “liked” posts promoting guidance on teaching young children that was written by educationists rather than the government.

She said: “They have tried to silence me. What they did could have ruined my livelihood and still has the potential to.”

In support of Swailes, many other education experts who are known for challenging the government have now requested similar information about themselves. At least nine individuals have received what they describe as often very lengthy “files” on their views and social media activity. Some, including headteachers and university academics, are still waiting for responses.

It then lists the comments of several other Twitter users who had been discussed by figures in the DfE.

Another article entitled: “‘It felt like a dictatorship’: UK teaching experts hit out at government bid to cancel them” added to the names and the drama, but still did not fill in many more details. The following month, another article appeared: “UK government keeping files on teaching assistants’ and librarians’ internet activity“:

Exclusive: Department for Education monitoring social media posts from England-based staff for criticism of its policies

The government has been monitoring the social media accounts of “dozens” of ordinary teaching staff, including teaching assistants, and is keeping files on posts that criticise education policies, the Observer has learned.

Two weeks ago, this newspaper revealed how the Department for Education is monitoring the social media activity of some of the country’s leading education experts. Now evidence has emerged that the monitoring is much more widespread, covering even the lowest paid members of staff.

Ordinary teaching and support staff said this weekend that they were “gobsmacked” and angry after discovering that the department had files on them. Many outraged educators have rushed to submit subject access requests [SARs] compelling the DfE to release any information it holds under their name, after discovering there were files up to 60 pages long about their tweets and comments challenging government policy or the schools inspectorate, Ofsted.

Both times, social media was full of shocked comments and comparisons to various shades of dictatorship. Some of us, however, thought there was something fishy.

Who was the DfE alleged to have been monitoring?

Partly, it was who some of the “monitored” were. Every name in the two stories that appeared in September belonged to somebody who had blocked me on Twitter. There can be many reasons for this. Still, I think it’s fair to say they overwhelmingly tended to be people who were both controversial and prone to seeing themselves as the victims if anyone disagreed with them. How would people, who tend to feel mistreated when teachers, such as myself, argue with them or challenge their authority, react to the possibility of criticism from within the DfE? Might they feel driven to seek out and complain about anyone in government who didn’t defer to their expertise or respect their contribution to educational discourse? I think a deep dive into who they are is best saved for a subscriber-only post, but if you’ve been on Edutwitter long enough you would probably have seen some reason to be sceptical of at least some of them. In some cases, you might even laugh out loud at the suggestion that they had wanted an open debate but the DfE had prevented this.

What was the DfE actually doing?

The second reason for scepticism about the story was the lack of detail. Large files were being kept, but there was very little detail about what was in them. The things that the monitored individuals most objected to were mentioned in the reporting, and some more examples could be found in Twitter conversations, but what were typical items in the files? Did all the files contain the same sorts of things? Did any of the files show why the records were being kept? So few relevant details were available that some of us began wondering whether files were actually being kept. A Subject Access Request (SAR) asks for all information a government department or agency holds on you. Making the request creates a file. Is it possible that some of these files were only created because of the SAR and that no such file existed beforehand? Of course, if somebody was unknown to the DfE, the SAR would come back with nothing, but an individual could have been mentioned in writing by somebody at the DfE without it being remotely sinister. Some of those mentioned are likely to have had direct correspondence with individuals at the DfE. Somebody could legitimately be mentioned in emails or the minutes of meetings, and even if they are criticised then that does not mean the civil servants who did so are in the wrong. It seems good if DfE civil servants and ministers are watching and sharing the education debate on social media. Don’t teachers often complain that they think policymakers are ignoring them? Without details of when each of the files was created, for what purpose, and what they mainly consist of (rather than the most scary-sounding examples), it’s difficult to judge whether anything unexpected had actually been revealed.

Stay Tuned

So who was right? The Observer’s story, or the sceptics? Freedom Of Information requests to the DfE, apparently made by people who believed the Observer’s story, shed some light on this, and I will discuss these in Part 2.

Two Stars and a Wish #8: Changing your teaching; SEND, and suspensions in Scotland

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Two great links and one I wish was better.

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An interesting perspective on teachers not making changes to their teaching

Improving teaching: getting over the knowing-doing hump

The unwillingness of teachers to change their practice is hardly an obscure problem. It’s often presented as teachers having an ideological commitment to outdated and ineffective teaching methods. There is some truth in this; some teachers take a stance of moral outrage when they learn of effective teaching techniques that don’t fit their existing philosophy. This blog post, however, sees teachers’ resistance to change as something more sympathetic. Often it is simply a matter of having already found alternative solutions to the problems that the change is meant to address. Often teachers are slow to change even when they have nothing in principle against the change, or even when they have accepted that they should change.

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An article about the problems with the SEND system and in particular the practice of labelling pupils 

SEND: a label worth having?

I’ll give a warning that I don’t necessarily agree with the solutions suggested for changing the SEND system in this article, although I am now going to give them some serious thought. What, however, makes it an absolute must-read is the description of the problems with the current system. The overuse of the SEND label; the inconsistency and perversity in how labels are assigned, and the extent to which the labelling may do more harm than good are all discussed. In a way, these are problems that come up continually. Too often though, they are simply forgotten. Sometimes they are addressed with a slogan, rather than with any thought. The article also appears to be exceptionally well-referenced, and I suspect I will be returning to it to read many of those references in more detail.

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A newspaper opinion piece calling for even more lowering of standards of behaviour and safety in Scottish schools.

Agenda: We must end exclusions for care-experienced children

Scotland seems to be ground zero for the detonation of all the daftest ideas in education. Violence in Scottish schools (including at least one fatal stabbing) has been widely reported, and often streamed, since the powers that be took permanent exclusion off of the table. Even when this became a hot political issue, those responsible claimed the press was exaggerating and that, if anything, even more effort should be put into replacing sanctions with amateur therapy.

For one group of campaigners, the current level of violence is insufficient, and more must be done to allow children from the most difficult backgrounds to run wild. This article argues that suspensions (still called “exclusions” in Scotland) be banned for “the care-experienced”. This is justified with an appeal to the correlation between suspension and later imprisonment. It would only take a second’s thought to realise that this is no evidence that suspension causes imprisonment; violent or out-of-control behaviour is probably the cause of both. Also, no thought is given to the consequences for the victims of the behaviour that is to be tolerated. The fact that people are doubling down on an already disastrous policy in Scotland should be a warning to us all.

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Thanks to Gwen for the graphics.

The worst tactic of school shamers

The story of how a school was publicly shamed by a troll who used Freedom Of Information to gain the inspection notes and cherrypicked them for criticisms. This ideologically motivated attack came after the school achieved its second Ofsted “outstanding” grade while being led by “Britain’s strictest” headteacher.

Britain’s Strictest School

In January 2019, Magna Academy in Dorset received its second “outstanding” from Ofsted. This was a source of dismay to many educational progressives. The school was known for its no-nonsense approach to discipline and high standards of academic achievement. Headteacher, Richard Tutt was profiled in a Daily Mail article:

No talking in the corridor, mobiles confiscated for a week and public apologies: How Britain’s strictest headmaster turned around his failing school

• Headmaster Richard Tutt turned his school around by improving discipline
• He was accused of turning Magna Academy in Poole into a ‘concentration camp’
• He banned pupils from wearing coloured socks and talking in the corridors
• According to Mr Tutt, Ofsted’s verdict – and its new guidance – should embolden heads trying to halt the plague of low-level disruption endemic in some schools 

Richard Tutt doesn’t look like a tyrant. Friendly and affable, he speaks calmly and quietly rather than bellowing like a drill sergeant.

Yet it wasn’t long ago that the head teacher felt the full force of a backlash from parents who set up a Facebook campaign to pillory his efforts to improve discipline at a failing school.

He was even accused of turning Magna Academy in Poole, Dorset, into a ‘concentration camp’ – an accusation he admits marked the lowest point in his battle to transform it.

The school’s results spoke for themselves, but that just made the usual suspects even more determined to bring it down.

When trolls attack

In June 2019, a new account appeared on Twitter: @magnanotes. The account has now been deleted, so if you want to know what it was up to you have to search Twitter for “‘@magnanotes” and piece together what happened from the responses, descriptions and occasional screenshots. Here’s how I described what was initially reported to me:

I'm hearing rumours that the latest trick from school shamers is to use FOI to request inspection notes from the OFSTED inspections of the school the campaigners want to destroy.

This is not public scrutiny, this is digging up dirt. There is no excuse for doing this. pic.twitter.com/eFL4MVUcGr

— Andrew Old (@oldandrewuk) June 7, 2019

And that’s precisely what had happened. An anonymous troll had used Freedom Of Information to get the inspectors’ notes for Magna’s inspection. They then blocked almost every sensible person on edutwitter.

They then went through the notes, trawling for reasons to criticise the school. There was a long thread of 86 tweets, with pictures from the Ofsted notes and little comments. Some pointing out concerns raised by inspectors, some making ideological objections to the school’s philosophy, and some just being plain nasty. Most of this is now gone, but a handful of screenshots* remain.

 

 

There was nothing of substance there, and plenty of people who wouldn’t agree with the ethos of the school felt this whole thing was disreputable and, because of the effort that had gone into it, probably also quite disturbed.

When journalists join in…

One part of the attack gained broader attention, that inspectors had looked at the turnover of pupils. An article in Schools Week reported:

Ofsted ruled that a school with “exceptional levels of pupil movement” should remain “outstanding”, accepting the headteacher’s claim that youngsters left because they couldn’t hack the high standards.

Inspection notes from the watchdog’s December visit to Magna Academy in Poole, seen by Schools Week, reveal dozens of pupils leave each year.

No school should be able to be graded as ‘outstanding’ unless it can also demonstrate it is inclusive

The Aspirations Academies Trust, which runs the school, told inspectors that such movement was “exactly what is expected during the first seven years of turning a school around from special measures”.

Richard Tutt, the school’s headteacher, also told inspectors the movement was down to pupils not being able to hack its “high-expectations approach to learning”. Pupils instead shifted to schools with “more comfortable standards”.

The short inspection late last year was triggered by concerns over the high pupil turnover and converted to a full inspection.

Inspection notes, obtained after a freedom of information request, show Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) council told Ofsted that local heads reported their concerns over pupil movement to the regional schools commissioner.

Inspectors expressed a need to “triangulate” the reasons for pupils leaving, but the notes only show a list of where the pupils ended up.

They concluded there was “no hidden agenda” and “no sense of any inappropriate movement”.

Again, this caused some concern among teachers. Education journalists appeared to be working hand in hand with edutwitter trolls. Not for the first time, an accusation that had been investigated by inspectors and found to be unsubstantiated was being given media attention. More attention one suspects, than some schools that have actually been found to be off-rolling.

What happened next

After this, the @magnanotes account itself became increasingly unhinged. It started posting unflattering pictures of its normally attractive critics without permission:

This better not be the picture that comes up on Twitter when I share this story

That tweet, and I suspect others, were reported to Twitter, and all of a sudden the account disappeared and it was all over. Those who had defended the account, claiming that it was raising legitimate questions or that it was criticising Ofsted, not the school, went silent. Magna Academy seemed unaffected by this particular attack but later ceased to be influential when the MAT which ran the academy decided to make it more like other schools. This caused a collapse in the school’s results and the loss of its Ofsted outstanding grade.

Never Again

I hesitate to attribute a consensus opinion to Twitter, but I think most people, who actually work in schools, that had viewed the kerfuffle saw the whole affair negatively. No school should have its inspection relitigated on Twitter by a complete bampot; it also cast a shadow over inspections. Being inspected would be far more stressful if an off-the-cuff remark made by a school leader to an inspector can be released to the public and appear in the national education press. Particularly as inspectors’ notes about what was said in conversations are not necessarily accurately transcribed or representative of the school’s considered opinion. I think people hoped that Ofsted would be less willing to release information that could actually harm a school, although obviously, only lawyers could judge whether refusal to release that information would be legal under one of the Freedom Of Information Act’s exemptions.

As far as I can tell, for the next 4 years, nobody, not even the most disreputable and unpleasant school shamers, used these tactics again.

*I haven’t given credit to those who tweeted the screenshots as they may not want the attention. But please feel free to take credit in the comments.

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Sky News spreading misinformation about exclusions

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Are excluded children responsible for Croydon’s problem with violent crime?

There was a recent Sky News report about knife crime in Croydon. You can read it or watch a video here. Or you can read a Twitter thread by the journalist here. Croydon is portrayed as a dangerous place, with many problems and lots of violence. Although there is some reporting about absenteeism, the main message is that those involved in crime have been “kicked out of school”.

According to one interviewee – apparently talking about Croydon – “there are Pupil Referral Units popping up all over the place to accommodate all the excluded children”*.

Looking at the figures

One might be surprised to see the permanent exclusion figures for Croydon. 15 pupils were excluded in the 2021/22 school year. It was also 15 the year before. Before that, it had been higher, with 29 in 2019/20 and 36 in 2018/19. It was recently reported that there were 920 stabbings in Croydon since 2018. Unless each excluded child is particularly prolific or sustained in their criminality, the permanently excluded are probably not making a huge contribution here.

Of course, it’s all relative. How does Croydon compare with the rest of the country for exclusions? Is it a high rate of exclusions? The exclusion rate is calculated by dividing the number of permanent exclusions by the number of pupils. We can use this data to compare Croydon with the rest of England over the last 10 years.

It turns out that the permanent exclusion rate in Cro,ydon has been low for almost a decade and is currently incredibly low. Whatever is driving crime in Croydon, it is not a high number of exclusions.

There were some statistics in the report, although they did not show how few exclusions there were; they were about race. According to the article (and again in the Twitter thread):

More Black Caribbean pupils are excluded from school than any other ethnic group. In 2021/22, 44% of all exclusions were Black Caribbean despite only making up just over 10% of the school population. And it is a similar figure nationally.

One sentence here is true. Out of the 18 ethnic groups that appear in the statistics, more of them were black Caribbean than any other ethnic group. That’s because there were 4 black Caribbean pupils excluded in Croydon. No other ethnic group managed more than 2. although the previous year there had been 3 white British pupils excluded and only 2 black Caribbean pupils. When numbers are this small, they are likely to vary a lot from year to year. (Figures from here). Nothing else in the passage quoted above is true though. You may recall that there were only 15 permanent exclusions in Croydon in 2021/22. Four black Caribbean pupils do not make up 44% of 15 (it’s actually nearer 27%). And are the national figures “similar”? Not even close. Nationally, black Caribbean pupils make up 1.0% of pupils and 2.1% of permanent exclusions. Whatever issues the accurate figures raise, they are still less dramatic than the baffling numbers being used by Sky News. In England as a whole, where many schools have no black Caribbean pupils, the idea that the proportion of excluded pupils who are black Caribbean could be “similar” to 44% is absurd.

Finding where the figures come from

Normally when journalists get exclusion numbers wrong I can work out where they’ve got it from. They may have muddled up suspensions and exclusions. They may have confused black Caribbean pupils with black pupils as a whole. They may have used old data or a figure from an out-of-date study. These figures are trickier. We must assume that the comment that “it is a similar figure nationally” was just a mistake. Perhaps there are some subtle similarities between Croydon figures and the national figures and this was badly expressed.

The incorrect Croydon figures are more confusing, but the source can be identified. They can be traced to a presentation made at a CYP scrutiny sub-committee of  Croydon Local Authority in February 2023.

A slide from the presentation

This was months before the 2021/22 exclusion figures were released. It is not uncommon for councils to look at unofficial exclusion figures before they are confirmed in national statistics, so it is possible they had different numbers to look at. Exclusions can be appealed, and there is a year’s delay in the official figures that takes account of that. However, even the years before 2021/22 don’t match the official statistics, and some of the errors are quite large. It seems likely some LA official made a mess of this, presenting data that was not confirmed, or even just making calculation errors. This is why journalists should always check they have the latest data.  Some journalists and activists seem desperate to blame schools for crimes that are far beyond the control of the teaching profession. It really isn’t difficult to look up a few numbers and see if what you are being told makes sense.

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*The number of PRUs in Croydon has remained at 1 for some time, although the number of pupils attending has fallen drastically in recent years. Nationally, there are fewer PRUs than before the pandemic. Figures are here.

E. Coli and Behaviour Management

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A blog post everybody should read

I am one of many who think the best education blog post ever (or at least one of the best) is this one from Ruth Ashbee:

• E. Coli and Quality First Teaching

It’s tempting to repeat the whole post, but I’ll restrict myself to a couple of quotations and a brief summary.

There has been an outbreak of the E. coli bacterium at the Bella Sophia restaurant.

The local hospital has reported that patients being treated for the bug fall into two “key groups”: babies and the elderly.

Public health officials have called for the restaurant to improve on this situation. The restaurant owners are considering a few options. One is to collect data when orders are taken and to cook the food for twice as long as normal for those customers who are over the age of 65.  Another strategy is preparing food for babies using specially sterilised utensils.

Wait, what? This would be crazy. But I think this is what we often do when we look at closing the gap for underachieving groups in our classrooms.

Ruth points out that it would be insane to think the best way to stop old people and babies from becoming ill from food poisoning is to have lower levels of e. coli in the food given to old people and babies. She then argues that it is also insane to think that all pupils in underachieving groups, or all underachieving pupils, need special interventions aimed at them. While Ruth is not keen on the phrase “Quality First Teaching” she uses it to describe teaching that prevents anyone from underachieving in the first place. She considers that to be the best way to prevent some pupils, or groups of pupils, from falling behind. This can be contrasted with the strategy of identifying which pupils will fall behind and focusing on them.

So if you’re looking at key groups, to close the gap, diminish the difference and all the rest of it, that’s my recommendation: Look for Quality Teaching, First.

What happens if we don’t put teaching first?

The most obvious example of getting this wrong is where schools invest in special strategies to help Pupil Premium pupils, SEND pupils (as a whole), boys or whoever.  A huge contributor to those groups falling behind might not be their own difficulties or circumstances. They might be falling behind because when teaching is not what it should be, some pupils cope with this better. So, girls, pupils without SEND or whoever else isn’t identified for support, cope with the inadequate teaching and get ahead. At an individual level, there may be good reasons why certain pupils struggle and good reasons for particular pupils to get specific help. SEND pupils are probably the best example of this. Helping individual pupils with SEND makes sense; telling teachers “This strategy is good for pupils with SEND” as if they are one undifferentiated horde makes no sense at all. Targeting Pupil Premium students because they are Pupil Premium students is often encouraged, but there are good reasons (as laid out here by Becky Allen) to think it won’t close gaps. The conclusion I reached from reading Ruth’s blog post is if you make it as hard as possible for pupils to fall behind in the first place, you won’t need to worry about the demographics or identity characteristics of those falling behind. There will be so few of them that you can deal with them as individuals, not as groups.

Behaviour management

What I want to add here, is that we need to start thinking about behaviour management the same way. I’ve been reading and writing a lot lately about suspensions, exclusions and youth offending. One of the constant concerns is that the demographics of suspended pupils, excluded pupils and young offenders are not representative of the whole population. The most obvious statistical gap is gender. The latest suspension rate for boys is 8.96%; it’s 4.78% for girls. The permanent exclusion rate is 0.11% for boys and 0.04% for girls (from this source). Boys make up 83% of first-time entrants to the youth justice system despite being 51% of the relevant population (from this source). I suspect most schools that keep a database of behaviour incidents would find a similar pattern even for much lower-level indicators like detentions. Deprivation is another noticeable gap. The suspension rate for Free School Meals (FSM) pupils is 16.02% compared with 4.26% for non-FSM pupils. The permanent exclusion rate for FSM pupils is 0.20% compared with 0.04% for non-FSM (from this source). People often inaccurately claim that SEND in general is a risk factor for behaviour problems. In fact, the risk is so focused on SEMH pupils and pupils diagnosed as SEND in secondary school that it might well be the case that bad behaviour is a risk factor for being labelled SEND, rather than the other way around. However, it is not unreasonable to assume that there may be some additional risk of bad behaviour related to the specific special educational needs of some children even if we do not have the data to quantify it.

The analysis of disproportionate rates is often unhelpful. Some try to portray disproportionate exclusion and suspension rates as discriminatory and insist that there must be an inconsistent standard of behaviour expected, or that teachers are unable to appreciate the ordinary behaviours of those in high-risk groups. Some claim that the disparities result from problems that must be addressed: poverty (or more controversially, single-parent families) among the disadvantaged, or toxic masculinity among boys. Some claim that pupils in the groups with higher rates have “unmet needs” and that behaviour problems would be reduced or eliminated by addressing these needs. The assumption behind all of these claims though, is that to address the disparities, schools must concentrate their efforts on those with the highest rates of exclusions and suspension. This brings us back to where we started.

What if the problem is that behaviour is being dealt with ineffectively across the system, but that the consequence of this falls disproportionately on those who are more vulnerable? What if the most effective way to ensure that boys, the disadvantaged and other pupils at risk of poor behaviour behave well is to have behaviour systems where everybody behaves well? It is too often assumed that the worst-behaved would benefit from lower standards, because then they wouldn’t be punished as much. What if they would benefit from higher standards? I am phrasing that as a question because I don’t know if it’s the case or not. But it seems like there’s an easy way to test this. Most schools now keep pretty comprehensive behaviour data. It should be possible to determine from this which schools have the greatest disparities in behaviour between groups. And, in particular, it should be possible to see whether disparities in the behaviour data are bigger or smaller (or the same) in those schools known for their high standards of behaviour.

Two Stars and a Wish #7: Children on strike, decolonised maths and primary school exclusions

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Two great links and one I wish was better.

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A twitter thread with clips of a BBC programme about school protests in the 70s.

The Great School Kids Strike of 1972.

In 1972, pupils in N&W London went on strike in protest over school dinners, caning, and school uniforms. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/Q1wlW0sVGf

— James Theo (@JamesTheo) July 28, 2016

In 1972, the Marxist/Leninist group, The School’s Action Union, protested against the indignities of school uniforms; boring lessons, and a quantity of corporal punishment that was somewhat disputed. My words can’t do this justice; you just have to watch it.

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An article discussing in depth whether the latest fad in academia can apply to mathematics. 

The decolonisation of mathematics

“Decolonisation” is one of those words that change meaning depending on whether it’s being discussed with existing adherents, or promoted to those who still have reservations. When “decolonisation” is being promoted, it refers to educators covering a range of topics in the humanities that includes people of different ethnicities. This is pretty hard to oppose, except when all considerations other than ethnicity and race are thrown out of the window. However, when “decolonisation” is discussed by adherents, it can mean the promotion of particular extreme political narratives about race and opposition to anything that could be considered “Western”.

Mathematics is a bit of a test case for this, as maths is not an attempt to describe culture (or even people). It takes a massive leap to see maths as something that is not universal in its scope. It’s also the case that many of the fundamentals of the discipline are from India or the Middle East, undermining any attempt to characterise mathematics as wholly Western.

This article, while probably intended to critique ideas about decolonising maths gives a fairly balanced summary of the literature. It contrasts it with more conventional ideas about mathematics and exposes just how wacky some of the criticisms of “Western mathematics” are. It also discusses those points raised in the decolonisation literature that are reasonable and considers how they could be addressed. I’d be interested if anyone has any criticisms of the article; to me, it seems a remarkably fair-minded critique.

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A blog post about primary school exclusions misses out the most critical fact about primary school exclusions.

Primary school exclusion: The erosion of care in a performance-focused education system

This blog post is not the first time, BERA (the British Educational Research Association) has published anti-teacher propaganda. The post mentions the following as reasons for exclusions from primary schools:

• “misunderstandings of behaviour, dwindling school resources, and a culture of high-stakes accountability within the education quasi-market”;
• “mainstream schools operating in an education system that does not provide the time to appropriately care for children who sit outside of the neurotypical, middle-class ‘norm’”;
• “as an attempt to secure additional support and funding for a child with special educational needs”;
• “the pressure schools are under to ‘perform’, a pressure that diverts time away from children who require that little bit more”;
• “an education system dominated by neoliberal values”;
• “how performance pressures contribute to the erosion of care from the education system”;
• “a systemic problem”.

What isn’t mentioned as a reason for primary school exclusions? Bad behaviour. And, in particular, they omit the fact that (since schools were allowed to give multiple reasons for exclusions) more than half of primary school exclusions include the following as a reason:

• “Physical assault against an adult”.

As most adults working in primary schools are women, it should be noted that the writer of the blog post is erasing violence against women by hiding the actual reason for most primary school exclusions. We need to acknowledge that women are being attacked by young children (usually boys) in our schools. Educationalists are wasting everyone’s time with fairy tales about “neoliberalism” and prejudice against children for not being “neurotypical” and “middle class”. Fortunately, permanent exclusions from primary schools are incredibly rare, but we should be honest about the extent to which, when they do occur, they are likely to be necessary.

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Thanks to Gwen for the graphics.