An elementary lesson in politics?

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the new head of Ofsted, whom I've blogged about earlier, is in the news again.  I think we can expect this.  He realises that there will be 'some academies that won't do well' (these, incidentally will almost always be those unfortunate ones that will have originated from schools that have not 'done well' for decades because they are being measured against 'standards' that are, in their context, unachievable  -  see previous post). What usually happens in these cases is that the hapless first Principal, often a 'superhead' who has allegedly 'done very well' in much more favourable circumstances or even in apparently similar circumstances, departs within 12-18 months and some other poor *** is encouraged to believe that s/he can work a miracle.

Wilshaw asks how we can detect when things aren't going well in an academy and declares that 'we need some sort of intermediary bodies which can detect when things aren't going well, look at the data  and have their ear to the ground' because 'its's no good just relying on Ofsted' (well at least he's right about that).

He continues: 'these people would be non-political, in other words they would not be like LEAs responsible to a council, they would be people who would report directly to the secretary of state .'  So people whose jobs are totally dependant on keeping in with the secretary of state (and in this case we are talking about possibly the most bigoted and deeply ignorant secretary of state of all time) are 'non-political', but people who are ultimately accountable  to democratically elected local councillors are 'political'?

This quote could be the interesting basis for a question on a politics exam paper.

This man really is even more a prat than I had thought!

In reality, history will show that LEAs and their generally expert and committed staff worked unstintingly supporting and challenging schools so that they never came to the attention of Ofsted or anyone else looking for 'failing schools'.  They knew the schools and they knew the local circumstances.

I can predict already the kind of creeps that will be appointed to these posts: exactly the type of people who have become  -  under New Labour and Tories alike  -  the movers and shakers responsible for the replacement of perfectly good schools with academies in a plot reminiscent of  'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'.  Often people who have little or no experience of leadership and management, and/or who have never stayed in one place long enough to be found out, have been in a position to call the shots when principals are being hired or fired across a whole region.  Even heads with respectable records have been persuaded to become involved by the prospect of pocketing loadsamoney that has been robbed from all the proper schools trying to compete with academies.

Predictably, a comment from Stephen Twigg, Labour's shadow education secretary, shows an unseemly eagerness to claim that his party has already embraced this profoundly anti-democratic concept.

As ever we need to remember the maxim: 'Schools do make a difference, and mostly they make the same amount of difference'.

A sensible article about league tables here

Click here. That's not something you can say very often, especially when the author is Mike Baker, formerly BBC education correspondent and not known for seeing beyond the hype. I'm interested at the government's reason for abandoning contextual value added, the noble attempt to account for factors affecting results that are beyond a school's control. A simple example: if less 10% of a school's intake have a reading age equal to or greater than their chronological age, this is likely to have an impact on their ability to reach an arbitrary target which might be readily achievable by a school with a more balanced intake. The reasons for the difficulties that certain student populations have in achieving are what CVA attempts to allow for. The government says that CVA is too complicated for parents to understand. So they are happy to present parents with 'raw' figures, which tell you next to nothing about a school's real performance, because these are simple and easy to understand. The fact that they also happen to be utterly misleading is conveniently ignored.  Further proof, if proof were needed, that they don't care at all about the schools that are really struggling.  In fact, the more 'failing schools' they can identify, the more academies they can create.

I've always been interested in the amount of direct influence they have over academies.  This will be the subject of a future post.  I'll also be considering what parents really want from schools  -  there's plenty of evidence that  they value a lot of things other than 'performance'.

It was Labour that started it

I'm amused by the fact that David Lammy, a minister in the former Labour Government, is incensed that his old primary school - a popular, inclusive school - is being forced by Gove to become an academy (academies were invented by New labour) because it has been below SAT 'floor targets' (invented and set by New Labour) for several years (though the most recent figures show that has risen slightly above the 'floor target'). Incidentally, I have always thought 'floor target' a ridiculous concept invented by someone who is careless to the point of brainlessness in their thought and language - who ever aimed for a floor target? Someone should remind Lammy where all this manic dismantling of a good state education system started. Unless he's able to prove that he always opposed this madness, he really ought to keep his mouth shut.

Exams - what are they good for?

Obviously, if some schools have been able to gain an advantage for their students by attending a course with an indiscreet examiner that is unfair to students whose teachers have not been given 'inside information' about the questions they can expect. However, a much more important question is surely whether exams should be trying to find out what examinees know, or what they don't know. To put it another way, every examinee should know what to expect from a particular exam.

The best way of assessing students' work is, as has been proved time and again, by coursework over a period of time. There are all sorts of ways in which the teacher's assessment can be moderated, and I can see no problem about some of the coursework being done under 'exam conditions'. Any system which purports to test two years of students' learning by an exam at the end of that period is not fit for purpose, especially if that test will be marked by harrassed, poorly paid, and often under-qualified teachers in their 'spare time'. I speak as a parent whose son had two A level results upgraded on appeal. If everyone was as fortunate as we were in being able to pay out over £100 for each appeal, the whole system would pretty quickly be shown to be worthless.

The lies continue

I complained to the BBC about the dissemination of the Mossbourne lie - that Mossbourne Academy 'replaced' Hackney Downs School (see previous post).

Here's the reply I received:

I understand you’re unhappy because you felt it was inaccurate to state on the programme that Mossbourne Academy replaced Hackney Downs School.

Mossbourne Academy was built on the same site as Hackney Downs which was why we stated that it replaced it. Mossbourne rose from the ashes of Hackney Downs in 2004 with a new building on the same site, educating kids from the same area, and with the same problems.

Nevertheless I do fully appreciate your concerns with the programme therefore I'd like to assure you that I've registered your complaint on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s made available to all BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions on future BBC programmes and content.

Once again, thank you for contacting us.

I've replied, suggesting that they are merely repeating the same PR blurb that all the media are using, or they are all copying the same original story. The phrase 'rose from the ashes' appears almost as often as 'the worst school in the country'. You can imagine that the students burnt the school down! And then nine years later a new, infinitely better school 'rose from the ashes' (which were still around after all that time, imagine!), educating kids from the same area (but there are all sorts of kids in 'the area', even girls - HDS was a boys school - so that's one very significant difference) with the same problems. How does the BBC know this?

The whole story stinks and I'm certain that, at some point, this will become clear even to our hopelessly idle media.

Now the BBC repeats the big lie about Mossbourne Academy

On 'The One Show' last night there was a lengthy paeon of praise for Sir Michael Wilshaw, Principal of Mossbourne Academy in Hackney, which repeated the plain lie that his Mossbourne Academy replaced Hackney Downs School. As I've mentioned previously, this is impossible since Hackney Downs School closed in 1995 and the Academy didn't open until 2004. As there are lots of lazy journalists, the lie keeps being repeated. So far, there's no sign that St Michael is going to come out and burst the bubble by telling the truth but the more times the lie is repeated, the more stupid he'll look when the media wake up to the fact that that they've been conned (by someone, not St Michael you understand). The twin lie which is nearly always trotted out in tandem, that Hackney Downs was 'the worst school in the country', was also disseminated more widely by the lazy BBC. If they read this blog they wouldn't make fools of themselves.

I wonder why St Michael needed this exposure when he has already secured such a dream job? A couple of years heading up Ofsted and then, no doubt, the world's his oyster in terms of an even more profitable future.

Another fortunate knight

Yesterday's Guardian Education had yet another profile of an education knight who appears to have engineered a very successful, and no doubt very lucrative, career on the back of his 'success' as a headteacher. He was knighted by New Labour but made his name under the Tories, enthusiastically embracing Grant Maintained Status because of the cash it brought. He claims this was a pragmatic decision and that he had nothing against the Local Authority, so he seems to be another one with no clear principles. Indeed, it's beginning to look as though this is an essential requirement for someone who wants to be knighted.

After working as a civil servant, he managed to net himself a job worth £250,000 a year (and it's funded by the taxpayer) setting up Academies and therefore continuing to draw money away from other schools so that more and more schools can be seen to be 'failing', i.e. not keeping up with much better-funded schools. It's amazing how often people such as ex-Ofsted chief inspectors and other assorted government stooges end up in these kind of posts.

Educating Essex could educate the public

......because it shows a typical comprehensive school dealing very effectively with some extremely intractable young people in a caring yet rigorous way - tough love if ever I saw it. And this is what comprehensive schools are doing, day in and day out, up and down the country. It's also seems clear from the programme that no-one else in the school is suffering as a result of the time and effort spent on the difficult young people - in fact, everyone benefits from 'problem kids' being turned around. It will also be instructive for many people to see that difficult students can come in all shapes, sizes and, contrary to many people's preconceptions, abilities.

Oh, and eat your heart out Jamie Oliver. You don't need celeb teachers. You need ordinary teachers, of the kind you find in every comprehensive, doing things that are extraordinary, as they all do on a daily basis.

If you want to, you can call all these schools and teachers outstanding. Even if that seems to redefine the word. After all, the ******* have tried to redefine satisfactory.

New chief inspector may not stay long, says TES

Thank God for that!

Wilshaw - a damning postscript

Two things that are nearly always mentioned in the media's sychophantic coverage. It turns out neither of them is really true.

1) Wilshaw's Mossbourne Academy is always described as the successor school to Hackney Downs school. The reality is that Hackney Downs closed in 1995 and Mossbourne didn't open until 2004! It's true that the Academy opened on the site of the former school, but that's about it. The implication is that the two schools had a similar student population but no such conclusions can be drawn about the nature of the intakes of these totally distinct schools. I haven't noticed Wilshaw pointing this out.

2) Hackney Downs is always described as 'the worst school in the country' without any attribution of this quote. Guess what? It comes from the Tory government which decided that it must close. There were many reasons for the apparent decline of the school and they are rarely referred to. Why spoil a good story? In fact, during its twenty year history, this inner city comprehensive saw its intake change dramatically. Just before its closure, over 70 percent of the boys spoke English as a second language, half came from households with no-one in employment, and half the intake had reading ages three years below average. And its results were comparable with those of many schools with similar intakes. Yet Wilshaw is clearly happy to have his very well funded academy directly compared with a school that opened and closed in a different century and had a very different student population! Speaks volumes about him and about what schools in deprived areas can expect from Ofsted.

Two worrying appointments

So, Stephen Twigg has become shadow Secretary of State for Education and, as expected, Sir Michael Wilshaw is to be the new Chief Inspector.

Twigg, an archetypal Blairite, has already made clear, in his very first public statement as shadow Secretary, that he supports free schools. Only three weeks ago, his party leader told Andrew Marr that he opposed free schools, so this appointment certainly brings into question Miliband's judgement, and possibly his integrity. By contrast, Andy Burnham, Twigg's predecessor, also a Blairite when it was fashionable, had shown clear signs of moving away from the regressive education policies of New Labour, expressing his support for comprehensive education and describing free schools as a 'reckless gamble'. Twigg attempts to make his fundamental policy change more palatable by suggesting various tests that need to be applied. Essentially, he's asking that free schools should be the kind of institutions the government claims they are - contributing to narrowing the achievement gap between rich and poor and not impacting adversely on other schools, for example. But we already know that the majority of the first wave of free schools are not meeting these criteria so this is a rather pointless bit of gloss.

This is all extremely important as, if we are ever to have a sane national education policy, Labour must start putting forward ideas which are evidence-based and in line with a fundamental commitment to introduce comprehensive education - an idea which, of course, has never been tried nationally, but which has been very successful in those areas where it has developed (because these areas tend not to be metropolitan ones, they are ignored).

As for Wilshaw, it's already clear that he will be a disaster. Listen carefully to him here. He sounds like an egotistical windbag (count the times he uses 'I') claiming credit for miracles that, if they have been achieved at all, have been achieved by hundreds of people (is 'we' in his vocabulary?). The only viable education policy, if he is to believed, would be to clone him so that every school could be run by a Wilshaw.

And even if he didn't come across as such a pillock, his assertion that in future only schools with outstanding results - by which he undoubtedly means 'as compared with the national average' - will be judged outstanding by Ofsted demonstrates that he does not have the intellectual capacity to do the job that he has been given.

Deeply worrying.

Estelle Morris has a good idea!!!!

She's suggested that education policy should be evidence-based.  Now there's a thought!  Pity she didn't have the thought a few years ago when she might have been in a position to follow it up.  She was Secretary of State for Education after all.

Never mind, she's got it right now.  What is needed is a national campaign by parents, students, teachers, headteachers, academics, and anyone else who's seen the light to insist that any education policy in future is assessed to ensure that it is evidence-based.  Most of the education policies of the last few decades would have to be binned and schools would have to concentrate on what has been shown to work and not waste time and effort on things that cannot be shown to make a difference, e.g. compulsory uniform, national testing and setting.

Who would assess the evidence?  Morris quotes NICE and the Office of Budget Responsibility as examples of bodies that have been created to try to ensure that policies in other areas are evidence-based and these bodies are certainly making it more difficult for quackery and deliberate distortion and obfuscation to thrive.

Don't hold your breath though, education policy is too important as a supposed vote-winner for politicians to hand over control lightly.

Educating Essex

What an absorbing programme this is.  For once, even though there is the usual emphasis on difficult kids (which makes for good telly, even when you notice that the girl who is being abusive has been miked up) we get to see how an outstanding school (Ofsted category and who are we to disagree?) works.  That's not to say that all outstanding schools would look like this  -  every school is different   -  but here's one that operates in a humane, caring and intelligent way and delivers the goods  -  to everyone.  It's just one of  the schools up and down the country that do well for kids from a wide variety of backgrounds and are popular with their local communities as a result, i.e. that's the vast majority of schools, whatever the media may think.

A columnist in the Guardian suggested that if a school puts so much effort into sorting out the problem kids, the academically able, conformist kids (who are obviously far more important to newspaper columnists who know that their own kids fall into this category) will suffer.  Wrong!  It's not either/or.  Schools that care have an equal regard for all their students, which is why there are so many good schools even in areas where the majority of kids come from a deprived background.

I loved the way the programme showed how you can, and should, have a tough stance on bullying but then, on investigation, may discover that there is more to the story than meets the eye.  And the way the hard man deputy was prepared to reconsider his decision to exclude Sam when he saw how devastated the kid was made you realise again just how much the school was prepared to act in a thoughtful and humane way even when it meant a very public u-turn.

Take a look at this series if you haven't caught it yet.  It's a celebration of the bog-standard outstanding comprehensive.

The Next Chief Inspector?

An interesting article about Mossbourne Academy Principal and Hyperhead Sir Michael Wilshaw in the Guardian last week.  For once the interviewer retains a degree of objectivity and some scepticism about how the widely acclaimed rise in standards has been achieved.  This is something that has been of interest to me.  Has he discovered some hitherto unknown method of transforming a school?

All that is ever mentioned is that the school has a strict school uniform policy (join the club!) and an emphasis on firm discipline (ditto).  If it were as simple as that, there would be many more Mossbournes.  One very important factor is that the school, like so many academies, has had loadsa money!  That the school population has also been 'engineered' is suggested by some of the comments below the article and Wilshaw would not be the first head to have made use of this ploy.

It's noted that he sounds like a politician  -  always useful if you're making a pitch to become Her Majesty's Chief Inspector  -  and he agrees with Gove 'about most things', so I should think he's pretty much got the job already.

He does sound like a politician if only because there's very little indication as to whether he has any true principles.  He describes himself as a pragmatist and this most likely means he's a Groucho Marx kind of politician: 'These are my principles, but if you don't like them, I've got others'.

Wouldn't it be a good idea if these top jobs (Commissioner of the Met, for example) were filled in an open and transparent competitive process?  Had this happened previously we would have been spared some nightmares. Some good schools needlessly closed by a flawed process would still be providing a good service to their local communities And some teachers who are no longer with us would probably still be alive.

'Public' Schools

First, it's bizarre that we still use this name. I'd settle for fee-paying, or anything that more accurately described them. Anyway, a couple of points that have occurred to me recently:

 First, this article by Anthony Seldon brought forth these responses from the good old Guardian letter-writers. Saves me the trouble of having to say anything really, apart from noting that Seldon has clearly earned the right to be totally ignored in future.

Secondly, re the post on discipline  in state ( i.e. proper) schools, it's assumed by the ignorarmy that discipline in 'public' schools is excellent  -  that's one of the things people are paying for. I recently met up with two old school mates who were talking about another fellow pupil, Trevor  -  they had heard that he had died quite early after apparently living a solitary life. All that they knew was that he had been a teacher in a public school and had left 'because things didn't work out'. He then trained as a librarian but, coming to that profession quite late, did not get the kind of post he hankered after.

I was saddened and intrigued by this story and did some research, hoping to find the real reason why his teaching career, in a 'top' 'public' school, had ended prematurely. On the teacher memories section for this school on 'Friends Reunited' I found this:

Trevor Tremble


My poor history teacher. I really felt sorry for the guy - I enjoyed his teaching and he had a lot to say regarding modern history, but unfortunately, no-one gave him a chance.


Every class I went to was a complete riot, and no-one, except one or two, behaved themselves. It was difficult to keep a straight face when he started dishing out 40, then 80 blue, and then detention, much to the mock-surprise of the person he dished it out to.

If an Ofsted team saw a lesson like this in a proper school, it would be enough to put the school into special measures.

It is appalling that the kids who ended his teaching career prematurely and who probably contributed to his life ending prematurely often go on to take up leading positions in our society. No doubt this sort of sport is a good preparation for the Bullingdon Club and the Bullshit Club in Westminster.

I have no interest in discussing these dreadful places. They are only mentioned here because many people have such an inaccurate view of them and compare them unfavourably with proper schools. I actually believe that, like the House of Lords and the Monarchy, they have no place in a twenty-first century country.

End of the Shoesmith saga? Let's hope so.

Anything that unites the coalition and Ed Balls must be a cause for concern. Typical of Balls that when it has been conclusively found that he screwed up, wanting to appear a hard man, he still refuses to face facts and calls for a change in the law! And he's supported by 'the government' i.e. the civil servants who advised him are still getting it wrong.

A more sensible response would be for the government to review the amalgamation of education and children's services to determine whether it has in practice been in the best interests of children and young people.

A creature created by New Labour

(Click the title to link to the article)

One of those 'you couldn't make it up' stories. Particularly nauseating for me as I started my teaching career at the said Crown Woods School, one of the LCC's 'flagship comprehensives'. Was it as good as it could have been? Of course not; it was a school of its time, using corporal punishment, wasting time and energy on uniform and, in too many classrooms, offering only the same old crap. But, crucially, the leadership and most of the staff were passionately committed to the concept of the comprehensive school and the principle that all young people were equally important and deserved a high quality education. Some subjects, notably English, were taught to mixed ability groups and during my short time there a successful move towards less selective teaching groups took place.

Now wind on fifty years and we have a morally bankrupt self-publicist recreating a selective system within one school. People might understandably think that other schools have done this and it's true that setting has become ubiquitous and the even more dubious banding also exists in too many schools. But out and out streaming is rare and I cannot believe that anyone else would be stupid enough to create separate mini-schools with their own uniform, for God's sake! To compound this egregious enormity, some (don't know what happened to Arden, Dean and New) of the historic Crown Woods 'house' names are used to name the 'schools'. Admittedly, it wasn't great to have houses (the influence of public schools was felt even at the birth of the comprehensive school), and naming them after forests because the school was Crown Woods was always a bit naff but, see, I was tutor to Sherwood 5. I can still remember the names of the kids who made up this microschool (if you will) and it was an absolute joy to teach English to a group containing those who would now be classed as having special needs and those who would go on to uni. English ability was not, of course, evenly distributed but all of them had something to offer, be it creativity, expressiveness, organisation, the gift of the gab (always underestimated in schools for obvious but unworthy reasons), logical thinking, lateral thinking, dramatic skills, analytical reading and all the other qualities which English, properly taught, can foster.

Anyway, the point of this post is that this sort of monstrosity being created in place of the real Crown Woods would not have been possible had not the whole comprehensive system been so extensively undermined by the likes of Blunkett and even poor old Estelle Morris (remember the bargepole?) who probably resigned because she no longer felt able to spout the nonsense she was told to. As in so many other areas, Blair has a helluva lot to answer for.

Gove - a clarification on marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar

This link to the Channel 4 fact check site confirms that, whilst the original method - 5% of marks which could be awarded for 'correct' spelling, punctuation and grammar - no longer applies, pupils can still be marked up or down in those GCSE subjects that involve extended writing, according to their abilities in these areas.

Unlike Gove and Gibb I'm happy to acknowledge inaccuracies.

Whether this emphasis on 'correct' spelling, punctuation and grammar makes any sense is another matter entirely. There was an incisive letter on the topic from Michael Rosen in yesterday's 'Guardian'. Rosen contributed a very forceful chapter on the same topic to Hard Times for English Teaching which I edited for the Secondary Heads Association (now the Association of School and College Leaders). I don't own the copyright of course so can't reproduce his contribution, but I also wrote a chapter which explores this and related topics.

Gove's interview on the Marr show today makes it clear that he is also effectively abolishing modular GCSE courses in English, maths and science - they can still be modularised (i.e. broken down into topics as ever) but all the exams will have to be taken at the end of the course for reasons which are not clear but probably have as much to do with what Gove had to do when he was really immature. If you were designing exams from scratch, why the hell would you decide on a system that tested kids on things that they were taught a few weeks previously in the same way that you tested them on what they were taught two years before?

Gove, nothing if not predictable

The full story is here.

He's pressing all the right 'Daily Mail' buttons but most of what he says he's going to do has already been done by New Labour - coursework reduced, in the vast majority of subjects, to a tedious irrelevance, marks deducted for 'bad' spelling and grammar in all subjects (thereby invalidating the exams as measures of attainment), headteachers becoming entrepreneurs (like the head who managed to get the Department of Education to pay her the equivalent of her salary for work done for them when she should have been earning her salary by running her school perhaps), heads running chains of schools and so on. And to cap it all, Gove is marketed as this incredibly intelligent guy. Well either he's intelligent and knows he's talking bollocks, or he's completely stupid. It's already been pointed out that he's certainly talking bollocks when he refers to 'Newton's laws of thermodynamics'. Hoist with his own petard maybe? Because the fact that he has completely misremembered something he was 'taught' and that he 'learned' during the course of his rigorous education, that he doesn't know or understand something that he himself has actually chosen as an example of what should be taught and learned, makes one think that if most educated people, apart from those who become science teachers, would show equal ignorance in this or similar areas - and I'm sure they would - then it would probably be a lot more useful for today's young people to spend time learning about climate change.

Similarly, his fatuous generalisation from his own daughter's history experience is utterly worthless. It reminds me that the first Tory assault on coursework was by John Major and he was motivated by the fact that his son was finding that it interfered with his cricket nets, don't you know.

The one hope is that his flurry of rather desperate announcements in recent days is a result of his anxiety that the series of cock-ups he's been responsible for have put his job at risk.

Gove's next clever weeze

The main Guardian headline today: Schools told to raise the bar on GCSE results. Full story here:

This is simply a continuation of the New Labour approach: Keep raising the bar. The difficulty is, as readers of this blog will know, that it entirely overlooks the facts that schools' intakes vary, dramatically. There are some schools where, unless the intake changes and becomes more balanced, i.e. closer to the normal distribution of 'ability' (whatever that is), there is no possibility of ever achieving 50% grades A*-C including English and maths. You could put whoever you liked in as headteacher - Professor Michael Barber who knows everything that there is to know about improving schools (according to him), Christine Gilbert, head of Ofsted and former headteacher (who must have all the answers), Albert Einstein, or Gove himself, assisted by David Willetts (two and a half brains are better than one) and you'd still have a school with an unbalanced intake that could never reach the target.

Imagine how demoralising it is to be working in such a school and to be constantly told you are failing. And if by some miracle - an unexpected influx of brilliant asylum seekers, say - you achieve the current target, there's always a Blunkett or Gove to smash you back down again.

A good many years ago I wrote, in the journal 'Education', about how you can improve schools. Some of the references (opting out etc) are now out-of-date but essentially things haven't really changed, if anything there is now more encouragement and opportunity for unscrupulous schools to advance at the expense of their neighbours - schools create each other.

YOUR SCHOOL DEVELOPMENT PLAN

1)

Remember that it's all about money

and how to get it.

If you've got a lot

you can do almost anything.

If you haven't,

you'll struggle.

2)

You can opt out.

Not only will you have cash to improve your school

but, unless you're in a really crumby area

where parents don't know what they're supposed to think,

many parents will assume

that your school's better than the one down the road.

You'll become a popular school,

and you'll have more

money.

3)

If you've got a deficit

and you opt out,

your deficit will be wiped out.

Your neighbouring schools will pay

in the long run

but, hey, this is the (rigged) market.

Use their money

to improve your school.

Nice one!

4)

New legislation

allows a GM school

to move to a more salubrious area,

so if the good kids won't come to you......

5)

If you have a lot of land

sell it off to Tesco

or Macdonalds'

or BNFL

or

the highest bidder.

6)

Tighten up on uniform,

the more expensive and elaborate the better.

Not only will the right kind of parent

be attracted,

the riff-raff will stay away.

7)

Have a good name.

'King Edward' seems to work well

judging by the league tables (who says they're useless?).

You could try changing your name

but since it will take members of your local community

a decade or three

to stop calling you by your last name but one

this is a bit of a long shot.

8)

Be a church school,

or a former grammar school,

or a current grammar school

or a school in the suburbs,

or a school in the home counties

(avoiding urban areas smeared by OFSTED).

Most parents will assume yours is a good school.

9)

Avoid admitting

children with special needs,

truants,

bullies,

and other undesirables.

Not always easy,

but it gets easier

as you get more popular

and fill up.

Success breeds

success.

10)

Get rid of your trouble-makers.

Exclusion is effective

but can be problematic.

It's much simpler to advise parents

that they should find another school

and avoid the stigma of exclusion.

This way YOU avoid the stigma of exclusion

and if you're really lucky

your direct competitors

will be dumped on.

11)

Or you could, as a staff,

over a number of years,

patiently and painstakingly,

working with your parents,

your students, your governors (if you can find them),

your local community,

and, yes, from time to time, your LEA,

gradually prise up standards.

Despite the poverty, sickness,

unemployment, family crises, crumbling buildings,

lack of resources, budget deficit,

staff recruitment and retention difficulties,

drugs, violence, vandalism, security problems, intruders,

you can make unsteady

(three steps forward, two and a half back)

but obvious

progress

even in the ways which are measurable.

However, this will not stop

the Secretary of State for Education

from finding many and varied opportunities

to kick you in the teeth.

More lies from Gibb

'Minister concerned over poor pupil behaviour'

This is a headline in today's Guardian. The full online story is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/28/pupil-behaviour-survey-schools?INTCMP=SRCH

Whereas Gibb is commenting on the fact that inspectors have labelled pupil behaviour in 18.4% of secondaries as either satisfactory or inadequate, the percentage of schools found to be inadequate is 1% (the Guardian has 0.1% but there are 3225 secondary schools in England).

Lest you should think that the definition of satisfactory is somehow a condemnation, just ponder the words used in the Ofsted Evaluation Schedule to define the category:

Pupils behave so that learning proceeds appropriately and time is not wasted. They understand what is expected when asked to work on their own or in small groups and only gentle prompting is needed to maintain discipline. Around the school, pupils’ behaviour is orderly so that public spaces are safe and calm. Pupils are polite and generally respond appropriately to sanctions. Incidents of poor behaviour are uncommon.

Any parent would surely be very happy for their kids to attend a school where pupils behaved like this and surveys have repeatedly shown that they are. Yet instead of congratulating the 99% of schools for their amazing achievement, Gibb, by lumping the two categories together, is trying to deceive people into thinking that there is a problem.

It's outrageous.

You couldn't make it up

This seems to be the ultimate absurdity of an approach to school improvement that has become more and more discredited with each spineless piece of pandering to mindless government policies and prejudices:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12775784

O.K., parents are important, but all sorts of people become parents - Fred West, for example - and too many of them these days believe, or pretend to believe, that their child can do no wrong. Watching 'Jamie's Dream School' I was interested to see how apparently sensible the parent of the appalling Harlem was. Experience tells me that she would almost certainly not have been as reasonable had she not been on TV. The vast majority of kids who behave badly are as they are because of parenting deficiencies: put simply, their kids have been allowed to get away with things throughout their lives. Now Harlem may indeed be 'lovely' at times (Jamie's description), though I don't think we've seen any evidence of this, but she is also extremely egotistical. Her outburst at headteacher John D'Abbro was of a kind teachers are all too familiar with and in the following episode she was shown to be bent on total disruption, threatening extreme violence demanding the head drop everything because she thought her bag had been taken.

The fact that Jamie was left to deal with the issue of her outburst and the uncontested view that D'Abbro had been 'out of order' were as worrying as the assertion that Harlem needs anger management. She doesn't, though ego management is definitely required, but it may be too late.

D'Abbro had called the special assembly in order to make it clear to all the young people that certain behaviour was unacceptable and that there were limits to what would be tolerated. He needed, in other words, to remind them of his authority (or, if you prefer, the authority of the school, of which he is the representative). He was perfectly correct to tell them that he was in charge and Harlem was totally wrong to challenge him. Good order in schools is ultimately dependent on the vast majority of students accepting the school's authority. (That's not to say that there are no second chances, you're dealing with growing kids who have a great capacity to change, but all kids need to understand that challenging the school's authority incurs unpleasant consequences and the chances aren't unlimited.)

To get back to Ofsted's latest weeze, all schools, and particularly those in areas of great deprivation have groups of parents who they have ultimately to confront, to whom they have to explain that the behaviour the parents regard as normal will not be tolerated. As these parents are sometimes immature, bitter, twisted, and utterly incapable of taking part in a rational discussion, they will end up believing that the school is bad. And now here comes Ofsted inviting parents to badmouth the school to them and, if they gang up with their like-minded friends and put in enough complaints, they will get a 'result': the school will be investigated. And the chief inspector who has sanctioned this approach used to be a headteacher!!!!!

Jamie's Dream School

I could no doubt find a lot to say about it. Might be an entertaining programme and probably is, but I could not get past his trailer where he described his fellow performers as 'great teachers'. No they're not Jamie. As you would know if you read this blog, the ability to be a great teacher does not depend on you being very knowledgeable or very competent in your field (and there must be a doubt about whether some of his band are anything other than self-publicists). You need a complex set of skills and attitudes, along with a high degree of emotional intelligence, to be a good teacher, never mind a great one. But strangely, you may not need a comprehensive knowledge of the subject you are teaching; I've seen great teachers working outside their own subject area and still demonstrating their first class teaching ability. So don't be surprised if those 'teachers' who achieve any success at all are not the ones who are most pre-eminent in their field.

P.S. Re Starkey - I'd have taken bets that he would be a disaster. I don't suppose he's ever had any kind of training to teach, not that that would have made much difference to him even if he'd had the best teachers in the world

RIP SIP - LOL

Back again after a break when I was wondering why I bother. Now it's clear that Gove and Co are as ignorant and interventionist as feared and everyone who actually knows anything about how schools work should be exposing the dangers.

So school improvement partners are to go. I actually became a SIP - went through the pretty daunting assessment process, at my time of life - because I thought that the original concept (which owed much to a paper entitled 'Intelligent Accountability' written by former General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, John Dunford) was a sound one. Many heads felt that the local authority advisers assigned to their school lacked the experience and understanding to perform the role of 'critical friend'. There was also a recognition that schools had to interact with and justify themselves to far too many different organisations and people (many of them within the Local Authority). Thus schools would value the SIP as the conduit between them and all these people. Schools would have a 'single conversation' with their SIP and, by implication, would be required to have no other conversations with anyone else. Ha bloody ha! To give but one example, most if not all LA's have an adviser or officer whose role is to promote opportunities for the 'Gifted and Talented' (so many words to choose from and those idiots choose two words which are virtually identical in meaning and then assign them different definitions). This role also includes monitoring the extent that schools are catering for the Gifted and Talented. So this person visits the school regularly and finds out. This person quickly becomes very knowledgable about the whole field and where each school stands on the spectrum of provision. The best way for the SIP to discover how well a school is catering for G & T is to ask the LA G & T expert. The 'single conversation' would require that the SIP and only the SIP talks to the school about G & T. And LAs probably have only had a G & T expert because the government encouraged (or maybe even required) them to appoint one. I expect they're all being ditched now.

Which is the better model from the point of view of promoting G & T provision - every SIP doing the job in the school(s) s/he is responsible for or a central LA expert finding out about what's happening in every school?

The SIP program never really got off the ground because it was essentially privatised. A shadowy organisation called, oddly, 'The National Strategies' was given a contract to run the SIP program. It's apparatciks were a motley crew of people, many of them with little or no senior management experience in schools, who grabbed the original concept by the neck and squeezed, harder and harder, until all the essence drained out of it. They saw themselves as inspectors - of LAs and SIPs - and tried to ensure that SIPs also saw themselves as inspectors, working on schools rather than with them. Gradually good SIPs opted out or spent most of their time finding ways round the increasing prescription. Of course, the NS were only following orders.

Sometime I may post a little more detail about the methods that were used by the National Strategies gang, though maybe it's not worth it as they are being sent back to wherever they emerged from.

Finally, now SIPs, for all their faults, have gone and now LAs are being more or less abolished, where will heads find a 'critical friend'?

PS: Gifted and Talented

I wouldn't want it to be thought that I believe in the idea.

It may be that a very tiny proportion of the population are so giftedandtalented that they need a very different education from the rest of us. We might note, in passing, that this tends to be asserted, often by the proud parents of these prodigies, rather than conclusively demonstrated.

In any case, the possible existence of this tiny elite is no justification whatsoever for the Labour government’s dictat that schools had to select 5 to 10% of their pupils, stamp them as ‘giftedandtalented’ and arrange for them to have an enhanced educational diet.

Interestingly, the initial attempt to render this perversity more palatable by implying that ability in the arts, for example, could also assure one a place amongst the chosen, was first of all abandoned and then reinstated; clearly, there were power struggles within the politburo. People who are stupid enough to believe that this elitism will be a good thing say stuff like: ‘Those with learning difficulties get a lot of extra help, so why shouldn’t the very able get their share?’. This is a bit like complaining that the NHS is devoting too many resources to the sick and doing absolutely nothing for the incredibly fit and healthy.

But now the notion of the Gifted and Talented has become well established.

Some of us were brought up on the idea that everybody has gifts and talents, and the best teachers demonstrate the truth of this belief over and over again, though they sometimes have to dismantle whole haystacks to find a solitary needle.

Beam me up, Scotty.