Bad Science, Bad News

Before we start shooting at the new regime, a last crack at the old one. It arises from a summer reading of Ben Oldacre’s ‘Bad Science’.

In this tour de force of  excoriation of snake oil merchants he highlights a learning assistance programme called ‘Brain Gym’. An import from the wackier reaches of California, it was allowed to appear on the website for the Young Gifted and Talented Programme supported by the old DSCF.

‘Brain gymnastics’ purport to improve blood supply to the frontal lobes of the brain by a number of improbable contortions of hands and neck. This process, it alleges through a fog of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, stimulates the brain’s seat of rational thinking.  Mr Balls in his day accepted to the Commons Science & Technology Committee that ‘Brain Gym’ had “little merit”. Nevertheless, ‘Brain Gym’ was taken up apparently by many hundreds of schools, and reference to it is still to be seen on Ed’s former department’s website, as though permanently endorsed by government.

The fact that it is there demonstrates how, so casually, a thoughtless bureaucracy can impinge on the minds of earnest and credulous people – in this case teachers, all too scientifically illiterate – looking for a quick fix to a believed problem.

The ‘Brain Gym’ example is hard to beat as a study in how easy it is for central bureaucracy to fail to control itself or be controlled against making mischief in promulgating ideas.

Ideas in the hands of bureaucrats who don’t know what they are doing have the potential to be dangerous – as ‘Brain Gym’ could be if it weren’t so daft as (as thankfully a number of sceptics’ contributions to the website attest).

The new mastermind for schools, Mimsy Gove, claims he wants to see an end to his department’s fiddling with the school curriculum and its delivery. Behind his pretensions to localism, however, his essential centralism leaves him firmly in the rank of usual government suspects. We shall see soon no doubt what he’s really made of.

Juvenile

The Biter Bit

The Institute for Government has just produced an analysis of government malfunction. Featured in the Sunday Times (17 Jan 10), headlined ‘Whitehall revolts’.

Unseemly as it may be to indulge in schadenfreude, yet perhaps a vinegary smile may be forgiven at certain extracts from the IoG’s report, as for instance: ‘Whitehall and the Treasury have few tools beyond the brute force of political edict’; ‘all the worst bits of policy making come from the centre’;  ‘conspicuous lack of a coherent strategy . . coupled with an obsessive attempt to micro-manage policy’; ‘what comes out of No 10 is lots of barmy ideas –   here is a problem, let’s have a knee-jerk reaction to it tomorrow’.  And so on. 

Don’t these comments on central government in general ring a bell with all those who have fretted for twenty years on a lower plane, the condition and development of our public education? 

How was it, one wonders, that the combined force of our superintelligent Whitehall mandarins didn’t wonder themselves where the centripetal tendencies they had colluded upon with control-greedy politicians in the last pre-millennium decades were leading them?  Did they not realise the risk of constitutional corruption that the centralising mindset, once established, would lead to?  If not so, can it be that our vaunted civil service has turned out to be after all just a covey of machine men, Soviet style apparatchiks, heedlessly ushering the country into a mire of governmental decadence that the rest of us mere citizens should be ashamed of – whenever we wake up to, and stand up to, the centralist fiasco foisted on us?

On the way to that awakening and revolt, for us who once served a purpose initiated by the ‘44 Education Act, with its ideals of localism and of advancement of the public good as a whole, let us weep for their casual effacement by the cult of central control – as we survey the incoherent wreckage of a non-system it will have left all of us.

Juvenile

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

“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

AN OPEN LETTER TO MR MICHAEL GOVE MP

Dear Michael

You are so often in my living room with your fellow News Night Review panellists I feel we are old friends. It’s always fun to hear the sparky late night chat about books, theatre and the arts.

So I hope you won’t mind my mentioning another matter you seem to take an interest in, the future of our nation’s schools. You are reported as saying you would like schools to be free to determine their own curriculum and their own budgets, answerable to parents not the local council.

Some of what you suggest is well within the main tradition of English education. In the nineteenth century it was the state which determined the curriculum, not local school boards. For most of the twentieth century central government and the exam boards influenced the curriculum through their regulations and teachers were free to choose their own methods. A few local authorities developed what might be called specialist schools, but curriculum and teaching methods were pretty well no go areas for local councils. At the same time, councils like Cambridgeshire, Sheffield and Inner London allowed their schools discretion to spend funds as they chose. Ken Baker seized on these examples and mandated local financial management for all schools. 

At the same time he took control of the curriculum. Only since his day has the Orwellian term “state school” come into common use. But like Thurber’s man who fell over backwards in trying to avoid falling forwards, you make a great mistake in supposing that parental power is the antidote to state power.  The recent brouhaha in Woking shows what can happen when a strident faction comes to dominate a parent body or a governing body. Facing similar problems many schools have enjoyed disinterested support from their local authority. Serving the whole community in their area the local council have a broader and more permanent interest in creating successful schools than the ephemeral group of parents who happen to have children at a school at any time.

I’m sorry to write at length, but with your Scottish independent school background and your heavy commitments to News Night, I thought you might appreciate a quick resume on England’s maintained schools.

DIOGENES

FAIRER THAN EVER?

Ed Balls may think schools admissions are fairer than ever. Researchers say they are too complex for parents to understand. Can’t both be right can they?

It’s a problem which will not have bothered the young eleven-year old Ed very much on his way to Nottingham High School thirty years ago. Perhaps the system in Nottingham was both complex and unfair. 

Elsewhere small boroughs and great cities alike could and did manage things very much better even in those dark ages. Primary schools linked to a named secondary school, a guaranteed place at that secondary school for every child, and the opportunity for parents to opt for any other secondary school in the city. Every effort made by primary and secondary teachers alike to ensure a smooth transition from one linked school to the next.   Typically eight or nine out of ten parents accepted the school where they had a guaranteed place, and another was offered their second choice. Almost all the rest got their third choice. A simple  system. Satisfaction high.

Curtains and Soft Furnishings sold a lot of its archives to a second hand book dealer some years back, but perhaps if Ed had time to search what is left he might be surprised to find some useful examples of good local practice well before the centre imposed one London based model on the whole country.

Diogenes

JOINED UP GOVERNMENT

“Creating a unified system of education and training for under 19s makes clear sense.”

The imminent “transfer of 14-19 funding for further education colleges to local authorities will strengthen 14-19 arrangements”, and “sixth form colleges will rejoin the local authority family.”  “All the funding for sixth forms, sixth form colleges, and the contribution of FE colleges… will transfer… to local authority ring fenced budgets.” This “will in no way affect” the “autonomy that colleges have to determine their mission and curriculum.”

And there are plans, or so I’ve heard, to create about forty clusters of local authorities and colleges to plan and provide all the courses needed for larger areas than one education authority.

This, claims government, is “ joined up government AT ITS BEST.”

Perhaps, Juvenile, you may have heard or read somewhere that in the Dark Ages well Before Baker England had Local Education Authorities with a duty to provide joined up education and training for the people of their area: with specific grants for this very purpose. And were there not Regional Advisory Councils to help little clusters of these authorities? 

It’s a bit surprising is it not that government has decided to resuscitate a quaint old medieval institution like the local authority? But I guess they know best. 

I dare say you and your rustic fellows out in the sticks will enjoy much libation and quaffing to celebrate this latest turn of the Whitehall wheel, and may even raise as many as two cheers for Curtains and Soft Furnishings.

Diogenes