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.