Newsnight with Paxman

What a contrast! Newsnight with Paxman, in the red corner  Ed Balls,  the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and in the blue corner his would be successor, Michael Gove. Two cocky little independent schoolboys in a juvenile wrangle, bandying figures and giving no sign that either of them has an informed understanding of teaching and learning or a calm or reasoning frame of mind. On the next night, Dr Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner, graduate of Mexborough Sixth Form College and a trained teacher with vast experience of teaching, inspection and management, asked to comment on the latest care scandal: calm,  thoughtful, and judicious. 

Which would you trust to run the best Department?

DIOGENES

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

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.

AN INNOCENT ABROAD

Poor Ken Boston. Forced to resign, and traduced, he believes, by Ministers. After a distinguished career in Australia Ken Boston came full of hope to head the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. He did not know about Powell’s Law. Here in England public service lives tend to end in failure, as Enoch Powell said of political lives, unless by chance they are cut off mid-stream at a happy juncture.

If only Boston had searched the files. Consider what has happened since the government decided it ought to know what was going on in ‘the secret garden’ of the school curriculum. In the beginning the Minister created a Curriculum Study Group. Within a couple of years this Group joined the long standing Secondary Schools Examinations Council to form the Schools Council. Soon after a major government inspired reform, Ministers scuttled the Schools Council and split its responsibilities between a Schools Curriculum Advisory Committee and a Secondary Examinations Council. 

After many days these begat a National Curriculum Council and a Secondary Examinations and Assessment Council. And NCC and SEAC begat the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. And SCAA knew the National Council for Vocational Qualifications and they begat the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. And its chief priests Nick Tait and David Hargeaves sojourned  only a short while in the tents of the QCA, and its mighty ruler Sir William Stubbs was summarily dismissed by the Chief Minister.

We hardly need to know how often Ministers urged Ken Boston to stir himself, or if they ever did. What is clear is that Education Ministers and their officers have no regard for what was one of the great glories of England’s unwritten constitution, the arms length relationship between government and public bodies.  The moment Ministers take office they contract a pathological itch to interfere.

If only Ken Boston had exercised ‘due diligence’ he might have chosen a quieter, well respected role at home. And if only Government were transparent we would all know how much they have poured down the drain in redundancy payments, early retirements, legal fees, and out of court settlements.

DIOGENES

LEARNING TOGETHER: INCLUSIVE SCHOOLING

Faith schools seem to do pretty well in the league tables. But look more closely and you see they do it by top slicing the local community. The other schools in the area do rather badly. The presence or absence of faith schools does not affect the overall results.

This does not mean their impact is neutral. Their admissions are often based on parents’ or pupils’ religion or belief. When recruiting or employing staff they are allowed to discriminate on grounds of religion or belief. They are not required to provide an objective, even handed programme of religious education. Faith schools exist to promote a brand; they segregate. Social cohesion is rarely one of their concerns.

The ACCORD coalition for inclusive schooling aims to change all this.   Christians, Humanists, and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers were among its founding members. Its Chair is a Rabbi, and supporters include Hindus, Sikhs, the chair of the Muslim Foundation and many others.   Inclusive schooling means doing away with discrimination in admissions and employment, and every publicly funded school providing comprehensive and objective religious education and having inclusive and inspirational assemblies instead of compulsory acts of worship “of a broadly Christian character”.

ACCORD already has strong allies, among them the Liberal Democrats and the National Union of Teachers. And there are other interesting signs of people moving away from old entrenched positions. The Anglican Archbishop of Armagh says it is time to think about joint Catholic/Anglican schools in Northern Ireland. And in their Easter messages both the retiring Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and the Archbishop of Canterbury said Christians should lead by example; Christian faith and values should not be imposed. 

At a time when the government seems eager to have more faith schools, when it is impossible to discover the secret agendas of some of those promoting academies, and when Surrey County Council is facing damages of more than £400,000 for failing to protect head teacher Erica Connor from false accusations of religious phobia, ACCORD’s is the voice of reason and tolerance.

DIOGENES

STATE SCHOOLS

My soul mate Juvenile seems to have some trouble with the term “state schools”. I’m puzzled. Why not call a spade a spade? The state, our state, has run schools for a long time in pursuing two of its key tasks, defence of the realm and maintaining law and order.

The state has been running its own schools for 300 years or more, from the Royal Hospital School in 1694, to Welbeck, the Defence Sixth Form College, reborn in Leicestershire in  2006. When the armed forces need highly qualified people the state founds a specialist school. The Royal Naval Dockyards had their apprentice schools from the 1840s, the RAF its Halton from 1917 and the Army its Harrogate from 1947. The Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne [1903] and Dartmouth [1905] took boys at 13 to make officers of them.

And the state very properly made sure there were schools for servicemen’s children. The Duke of York’s Military School was founded in 1803 for the children of serving soldiers, like the 45 schools run today by the Service Children’s Education Service. In mid nineteenth century government paid the Home and Colonial Schools Society to “train” some of the unlettered women who followed the troops and taught army children.

Ever since Lord Palmerston began accrediting reformatories the state has also accepted some responsibility for educating young prisoners. Arms length bodies like local authorities, voluntary bodies and even private contractors run most of the secure homes, training centres and young offender institutions which corral prisoners of school age. But for 80 years [1902-1982] the state was directly responsible for Borstals and their programmes of education and training. Borstal was perhaps the archetypical English “state school”.

And, by one of those quirks which make English government an unending pleasure, what few state schools we had were run by the Home Secretary or the Defence Secretary, not by Secretary Balls or any of his ministerial predecessors.

“State schools” have an honoured place in history. Let’s not debase the term. Or does its casual use reflect the people’s intuitive grasp that our state now strides jackbooted into every classroom?

DIOGENES

BABY P AND THE MINISTER

Ed Balls thinks he made the right decision. But Ms Shoesmith, Haringey’s former Director of Children’s Services, is taking her case to an Employment Tribunal and is also seeking a Judicial Review of the events leading to her dismissal. Her advisers evidently think there is at least a scintilla of doubt about the legitimacy of what was done. Why does Mr Balls feel the need to go on defending his decision in public?

Watch this space.

Diogenes

THE LITTLE RED SCHOOL HOUSE

The Little Red School House was at the very heart of American communities. That was where the children of immigrants from all over the world became Americans, playing and learning together. And where they still go to schools serving their own locality.

Instead of fulminating that the Office of National Statistics is playing politics by reminding us that one in nine UK residents was born abroad, Phil Woolas and his ministerial colleagues should be asking what policy implications this has. In some parts of London the person next to you is more likely to come from a different ethnic or cultural group from you than anywhere else in the world.

There may be formal tests of Britishness for would-be citizens, but where are Britain’s Little Red School Houses? Instead of promoting community schools where the whole population plays and learns as one, the government seems bent on encouraging division and difference through semi detached academies and a proliferation of faith schools.

Our man from California was amazed when he visited faith schools maintained by a local authority. The very idea seemed at odds with what he understood by community and nation building. 

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

BABY P: SHOESMITH SACKED, ED BALLS ESCAPES

If Baby P had died in Austria the Minister would have resigned, says our man in Vienna. In England, I patiently explain, children and families are a local responsibility so if anything goes wrong one or two councillors step down and it’s the Director’s head which rolls.

But surely it was Secretary of State Ed Balls who fired Ms Shoesmith? His prints are there. Doesn’t that mean he is responsible, and that he should carry the can when things went wrong?

Or is this a new version of the old story?  The story of power without responsibility, the prerogative as Kipling put it of the harlot throughout the ages.

Diogenes