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.