Excellent letter in the Guardian

It's always good to read a letter (the first one on the linked page) by someone with a bit more knowledge about a particular school and type of school in the news.

England's wonderful secondary schools

According to the BBC only 5 secondary schools failed to get at least 20% of their students to achieve 5 or more GCSEs at Grade C or above.  This is THE headline that the papers should all be carrying.  It is an astonishing achievement.  The BBC table does not show the contextual value added information that shows how well schools are really doing.  It's quite possible that the 5 schools that failed to achieve 20% are actually doing well, considering the raw material with which they have to work.

I haven't yet noticed any politician of any party congratulating schools and teachers.  I suspect that they are all such cowards that they dare not acknowledge the truth for fear of being portrayed as complacent about 'standards'.

As for Nick Gibb and Humpty Wilshaw.......watch this space!

But satisfactory is good enough.....

.....that's what the word means, as I've pointed out previously. Now the new chief inspector has decided to abolish the word as it doesn't mean what he wants it to mean  -  what we might call the Humpty Dumpty response ("When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean － neither more nor less.").  In future I will try to remember to to refer to Her Majesty's Chief Inspector as Humpty.


If anyone doubts that 'satisfactory' is a positive judgement they should study the criteria (click on the Adobe document link and download it.  It's hard to find anywhere else) used to make this judgement in detail and then decide whether they would be happy to send their children to a school that is able to jump through all these hoops.


Once again, it's all down to the wretched myth that a significant number of schools are failing.  Every time the system proves unable to identify enough 'failures', the goalposts are moved.  Is this any way to run an education system?

All you really need to know about Nick Gibb

The schools minister is quoted in the 'Guardian' today as having dismissed social and emotional learning as 'ghastly' and likely to distract from 'the core subjects of academic education'.

No comment required.

Incompetent teachers

They always have a go at this one eventually, whether they are original Tories or the New Labour variety.  If you start from the premise that a significant number of schools are failing (and if you're either a regular reader of this blog or well-informed about education you'll know that this is a false premise) then someone must be to blame  -  the Local Authority, headteachers, governors and, easiest of all to identify, incompetent teachers.

Do incompetent teachers exist?  Of course.  Are there very many of them?  There's no reason to think so.  It's being said that only 17 teachers have been 'struck off' by the General Teaching Council in a decade and that this shows that incompetent teachers are not being 'weeded out'.  You might equally argue that it demonstrates how infinitesimally small the number of incompetent teachers is.  Probably the real answer is that more than 17 incompetent teachers have left the profession during the decade, but only 17 have been 'struck off'.

Frequently, teachers who are identified as not being up to the mark 'vote with their feet' as soon as the school lets them know that they need to improve.  Often they leave before it even gets to this stage because the kids, as we all remember from our own schooldays, make life intolerable for them.

Sometimes, though, teachers who were once good and are now struggling (for any number of reasons) can have their careers revived by a sympathetic approach  -  the tweaking of the timetable, a lessening of responsibilities, appropriate support  -  and thus their invaluable experience continues to benefit schools and kids.  People like Gove wouldn't know anything about this kind of thing because they've probably never employed anyone.

We are regularly being told that procedures for rooting out incompetent teachers are being tightened up but still, it appears, they need tightening up again a few years later.  In reality, this country fortunately has employment legislation that protects employees from arbitrary and 'fast track' dismissal so most of the talk about speeding things up is just that  -  talk.  Gove is no different in this respect from a host of Labour bullies.

These fools always start from the wrong place because they NEVER look at the evidence.