Some Talk of Alexander . . . .

I am prompted into action by words of the former professorial director of the London Institute of Education, Peter Mortimore, in the Education Guardian (3.11.09) on the Cambridge Primary Review, the most important undertaking in this area  since the report of the Plowden Committee of forty years ago. Yet it was brusquely rejected by the Schools Minister, Mr Coaker (of Coketown surely). Peter Mortimer’s final words (and figures) can scarcely be bettered: 

“ . ..  The pity is that politicians, who pollsters tell us are trusted only by 13% of the population, can so easily make fools of themselves by endeavouring to close down all thinking outside their own. How much wiser to welcome new ideas and give civil society, including teachers – who are trusted by 82% of the population – the chance to debate how best to improve the education of our young learners.”

Fortunately the modern hero Alexander does not call for any old British Grenadier to come to the rescue. In standing up stoutly in public in defence of his team’s years of extensive research in great depth he has given a shining example to us all. Moreover, the strength of his Review is reinforced by its independence of government funding and so of any taint of government mindset and ideology. There is resonance here with the situation of Professor Nutt, the eminent pharmacologist, who (the Home Secretary believes) should not give vent to thoughts divergent from government ‘policy’ outside his Advisory Council in a lecture or anywhere else (perhaps even in his sleep?).

Scientists are consequently up in arms about their intellectual integrity. Other undisputed experts, like Alexander, have an equal right to be angry in parallel circumstances. I’d go further and say that the whole of the professional corps of this country had better watch out for attacks from an executive dictatorship that will insist on having its petulant way and that, as we have seen throughout the scandals of the last summer affecting the whole of the political class, is seriously out of touch with the minds and the tried experience of real people. Let that corps take warning from the battering suffered by the teaching profession in the public education service, their understanding of children’s needs subjected to the diktat of mechanically minded central government for the last twenty years – their capacity to rebel weakened by government’s grip on them as assumed servants of the state, an assumption that immediately tells that it does not begin to  understand the core values of the education it presumes to command.

So, aux armes, citoyens professionaux! And for a start let all educators rally to the barricades behind Alexander! It is more than high time to face down the die-hards and dead-heads and show them the true spirit and strength of the so long derided “education establishment”.

Juvenile

A View from the Foothills

In his engaging memoir Chris Mullin recalls visiting old family friends on Christmas Day, 2004. 

Malcolm, who teaches in the local primary school, found himself one day “teaching a class of six watched over by three OFSTED inspectors who were , in turn,  watched over, by three of Her Majesty’s Inspectors.”  “You couldn’t make it up,” says Mullin.

What kind of a world is it where big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, and little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum?

Diogenes

U-turn if you have to

This old bird, always keen to garner crumbs of comfort, cannot resist hoping to share with any who may not have seen it the text of a letter by Averil Lewin of Ely in The Guardian (29.06.09). She says:

“What a good idea for education to be less centralised. What we really need are organisations which could advise schools on current best practice; give ongoing support and guidance to schools which they really knew well; oversee admission policies to be fair to all; and be accountable to the local community. What would be a good name for these? Local, dealing with Education, and with some Authority. Let me think  . . . ”

The famous Thatcher word above (slightly adapted), used when the lady desired to show a certain steely determination, comes home to roost on Master Balls’s patch. There could be a number of causes of his change of heart – and we could be cynical about some – but if one of them is the realisation that a clanking state bureaucracy cannot ever find the the power let alone the wit to manage ‘the life of the mind’ as exemplified among the values that should inspire public education for a population of sixty million, well – hallelujah!

On the day the Vatican claim to have found the true burial place of St Paul it may be fitting for us to celebrate another minor damascoid revelation. Just a crying pity that the powers that be took the wrong road twenty or more years ago and so missed the right vision.

Juvenile

EDUCATION; Out of sight, out of mind? – A reply

Dear Diogenes

What’s missing?  I’d suggest to Balls-Mandelson and their cortege that they should all be made to sit down quietly and read, line by line and word by word, the first Reith Lecture given by Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard (printed in full in The Times last Saturday and no doubt elsewhere). Then they should be subjected to a test on it (a superior SAT?), conducted with the utmost rigour, and be obliged to give their answers in public. Sandel, starting his series with a blow at the corruptions of the market approach, ends his first sally: “We have to debate case by case the general meaning of . . . [public] ’goods’ [health, education, etc.] in the proper way of valuing… The hope for moral and civic renewal depends on having that debate now”.

Hearing a replay of the lecture, I noticed that David Willetts was there and put up a sensible question. So was Miliband (Ed) –  but nobody appeared to have joined the audience from government education offices. Did they assume that a disquisition on social philosophy would be outside their remit – or just knew it would be above their heads?

So, no debate? It was said of the Victorian masses before public education came in withe 1870 Act that they were sunk in “dense ignorance “. A century and a half later the masses are no longer ignorant. Any such handicap seems to have migrated up the ranks and taken hold in circles of government. Time we groundlings helped to start them on a course of adult education?

Juvenile

EDUCATION: Out of sight, out of mind?

Dear Juvenile

You’re a sprightly observer of the cosmos, so I wonder whether you can tell me what is going on.  

When you and I were young and Adam was a boy universities were seats of learning. And we had colleges, of education, further education, and higher education, a veritable educational galaxy. A central Department of Education presided over the nation’s schools and all these universities and colleges as well.

Nowadays it seems the Government has no use for a department of education, or indeed for ministers of education. In between promoting Business,Innovation and Skills, First Secretary Mandelsohn will  turn his  powerful mind to knocking some sense into the nation’s colleges and universities in much the same spirit as Thomas Cromwell made sure the abbeys and monasteries did their bit to relieve HenryVIII’s financial problems.

Perhaps he will have a word with Governor Schwarzenegger who has a wizard scheme for solving California’s budget deficit. American kids are so au fait with the internet [after all, California is the home of Silicon Valley] the Governor thinks the schools should cancel their book orders and go over to internet teaching. Sounds good, a strikingly innovatory programme which builds on skills today’s kids acquire at their mother’s knee. Unless their mothers are among the 30% who have no internet at home.

I’ve a funny feeling someone is missing something rather important about education. What can it be?

DIOGENES

“We, the People…”

In the current furore, if the PM means what he says about devolution of power to localities, the issue of governance of public education is a prime one. It goes far beyond the simplistic policies of the last 20 years, with their demagogic concentration on schools and parents’ part in their operation. 

The vision of a universal, intraconnected system of provision and expectation embodied in the 1944 Education Act, one that was aborted by the 1988 Act and its shallow focus on mechanisms and consumerism, needs to be recovered. 

The Nuffield review of 14-19 education and training offers a new focus.  Commenting on it with disarming liberality, a recent 3rd leader in The Times quotes the philosopher Michael Oakeshott “who saw education as an initiation into the world of ideas, a world that evolved from the conversation among the generations of mankind, and was fed by the voices of poetry, of science, of history, of philosophy”.  That conversation will continue – but it belongs to the  whole of society, not to bits of it selected by ephemeral politicians. 

Looking locally, all the electors and taxpayers in communities, however these are defined, should be enabled to take part. A progressive democracy, already well informed, needs ever more opportunity to go on developing its civic mind and its social and cultural perceptions. It needs the space in which to see itself as inheritor of the past and custodian of the path into the future, and it needs the platform to express itself so. Practically, this means full scale interchange of information and view between local electors and Parliament, through the medium of  MPs geared to that purpose.

The means to this end go well beyond the government’s recent legislation on ‘sustainable communities’. Its whiff of patronage, passing down crumbs of position as though power were a gift to be conceded from on high, shows the feudal attitude the centralist state holds on power: as it were a finite commodity to be cut up and distributed in chunks, rather than really how it should be understood – as an elastic entity capable of expansion through manifold sorts of diffusion, a matter of relationships between parties, of mutually understood agreements, with conscious and continuous participation by the people in the whole realm of social management. 

It used to be thought that local authorities could play a part in bringing such ideas to pass. They have perhaps been overtaken by what John Keane in his new master work “The Life and Death of Democracy’ describes as diffusion of power into the form of a ‘monitory democracy’ involving a strident multitude. of disparate agencies pressing their interests on formal structures of government. If this is so, let new local structures for popular expression as a whole be invented. Let the people en masse find a new voice – the essential way for our modern polity to be refreshed and go forward in health. And where better to make a new start than with public education, the central arena for playing out the scenario on the way to an enlightened future? 

Forget all that the 1988 Act and its small-minded sequels stood for! Time for it to be declared dead meat.

Juvenile

CLEANING THE STABLE

A written constitution, clear rules about allowances and expenses, and open vetting of any claims made: these are among the remedies mooted to clear up the MPs expenses scandal.

Why have ministers and members been so slow to adopt for themselves measures they readily imposed on local councils?

For some years now every council has had a written constitution. Some, perhaps all, of these constitutions include a list of the “allowances” [amounting in effect to part-time wages]  to be paid to councillors,  and a note of what additional expenses they may claim. The guidelines usually say councillors must obtain approval for any additional expenses before incurring them. And in the best councils the Standards Committee, with strong independent outside  membership, consider each year a full list of all the claims made. The Committee also consider and may challenge a list of any gifts or hospitality worth £25 or more that any councillor has received

If anyone believes the system is being abused, and the Committee are satisfied that a prima facie case has been made, they will require the Council to appoint an investigator to carry out a full enquiry. They also have the power to discipline any councillor who does not observe the ethical code of conduct which councillors must sign. Among other things the code says councillors should do nothing which might bring their office into disrepute, and nothing to confer an improper advantage on themselves or anyone else.  Anything remotely like the joint parliamentary committees, depending as they do on sponsorship, would be something for any half awake Standards Committee to pick over.

Here you have an open, clean, effective system. While Parliament dithers about setting up something similar at the centre, and we all know how long it’s likely to take to move that mountain, how about transferring many more functions to bodies which are already wide open to public scrutiny, the local  councils?

Or are we pushing at an open door? Are we watching the unfolding of some devious plan to strengthen local authorities, undermine the centre, and provide a dramatic occasion to decentralize?

DIOGENES

FAITH AND EDUCATION

Not faith schools, but faith in the people in schools: in pupils, students, teachers, and even governors.

Tyrrell Burgess [1931-2009] was both a humanist and a man of faith. He believed passionately in people’s innate ability to shape their own learning and measure their own progress. He promoted records of achievement for pupils to record the progress they made towards self-set goals. At the University of East London he encouraged students to devise their own study programmes, rigorously assessed by distinguished outsiders. He devised teachers’ own records to help them measure their own progress. He founded the National Association of Governors and Managers [NAG’M] to stimulate informed support for each school and prod the authorities charged with maintaining them. 

Of course he’s not alone in having faith. The government, for instance, have unbounded faith. They put their trust in regulatory systems: in, for example, a prescriptive curriculum to which they add new elements almost daily. Not so long ago citizenship was added. Then came careers education and competitive games. Then healthy eating. This week it’s first aid. Only the dedicated can find their way through the jungle of Statutory Subjects with a Statutory Content, Statutory Subjects with a non-statutory content, and non-statutory subjects.

And Burgess would surely be horrified to know that the Law for Governors now runs to almost 240 pages, and that his beloved governors, volunteers all, may be subject to legal action if they fail in any of their 26 statutory duties.

This ridiculous aggregation of controls would confirm Burgess’s trust in Karl Popper. In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper argued that the most undesirable societies are those where centralized planning is imposed and dissent disallowed. Open discussion is the best way to ensure that social policies are improved before they are implemented. The most desirable form of government is one in which bad or incompetent rulers cannot do much harm.

As things stand, for all the rhetoric about autonomy for schools, a detailed control system has been created, and could fall into the hands of a wilful Minister. The present political imbroglio offers just a glimmer of hope. Could a new Savonarola rise to inspire a huge bonfire of the stifling administrative vanities of the last twenty years? Tyrrell would love a tribute like that.

“SCHOOLS MISS OUT ON CASH SURPLUSES”

“2000 SCHOOLS IN DEFICIT”

“HEAD TEACHER SUSPENDED IN BONUS ROW”

Three recent headlines tell the same story.  The country’s education service lacks effective financial management. The National Audit Office says Ed Balls’ Department could have spent another £250 million on schools last year. That’s the Ed Balls who would be Chancellor of the Exchequer. But the Department he runs now just does not have proper modern accounting systems.

The Audit Commission is equally concerned that 2000 schools regularly run a deficit. They lack the nous to manage their own modest budgets.

And the Chair of Copland Community College Governors has admitted that the school spent several hundreds of thousand pounds on bonuses for senior staff. The local authority has suspended the Head, Deputy Head and Bursar while the whole business is investigated. The Secretary of State is delighted Brent Council has taken decisive and swift action to investigate this grave situation.

These three reports highlight the same problem. No one now doubts that fifty years ago local councils exercised unnecessarily detailed control over spending on their schools and colleges. Many, led by authorities like Cambridgeshire, London and Sheffield, gave up this detailed control, and managed to combine control over the overall budget with  freedom  for schools to maintain their own premises, and decide their own priorities in staffing,  equipment and materials.

In 88 Baker extended local management to every school and transfered responsibility for monitoring and controlling expenditure to governing bodies. At a stroke more than 25,000 schools became small businesses, managed by heads appointed for their educational expertise, and overseen by governors who do not necessarily have the skills or time for financial management.

Local authorities may have run too tight a ship. No-one said their controls were ineffective. The best education departments appointed management accountants a generation before the DCSF heard about accruals. It is high time to restore and strengthen this middle link in our education service.

DIOGENES

A STEP IN THE DARK

The Basildon Academies are looking for sixteen outstanding managers. Each will lead a ‘college’ of 150 students, providing inspirational leadership and a senior presence throughout the working day. Their job is to create a positive ethos and ensure students observe the Academies’ core values, high expectations and strict code of conduct. They must focus constantly on student welfare and think strategically to respond to student needs.

Teaching experience and qualified teacher status are NOT required. They do have to be graduates who can demonstrate empathy for young people and strategies to support and inspire them. They must be able to communicate effectively with students, parents and colleagues.

These Heads of College will have wide ranging responsibilities for student welfare. How will they win the confidence and trust of qualified teachers, some with long experience of PSHE and pastoral care?

They will be well paid, these so called Heads, on £37000-£43000 a year. With on costs the sixteen posts will cost over £800, 000 a year. Or is it perhaps the case that these posts are not pensionable, and the whole scheme is some sort of gang master’s scam?

This is public money. How it is spent should be transparent. What steps will be taken, what steps have indeed been taken, to make sure it is money well spent, not just the passing whimsy of an eccentric sponsor given a blank cheque by an indulgent government?
 
DIOGENES