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

SHADES OF THE PRISON HOUSE begin to close

Upon the growing boy…

And girl. 

The Victorians were great ones for order. They sought it in well-planned institutions. For Paupers, there were workhouses; for Patients, hospitals; for Prisoners, penitentiaries; for Pupils, schools. Unless you happened to be a solvent, healthy, honest adult, there was a purpose built institution waiting for you.

Stone walls do not a prison make… but the Victorians did their best to constrain both  teachers and pupils with a straitjacket made of prescribed curriculum, standards, and payment by results. And now in the biggest independent survey of primary schools for forty years Robin Alexander and his colleagues have found that the nation’s children are still imprisoned by a narrow curriculum and teaching to tests and league tables. After ten or twelve years of this sort of stuff they are probably ripe for boring repetitive jobs in farm, factory or office. It’s just a pity there are not so many jobs like that left in the Western world.

No wonder some parents choose independent schools or Education Otherwise; that’s education otherwise than at school, perfectly legal provided the education matches the child’s age, aptitude and ability.  Independent schools have their own social and academic straitjackets.    Education Otherwise is constrained for each child  by what resources, human and material, are available.

It’s up to local authorities to ensure that every child in their area is well educated, whether at school or elsewhere. How many authorities manage to do this properly?  How many have the wit, imagination and capability to actively support parents who prefer education otherwise?

As one who lived in a tub and taught on the streets I wish Graham Badman well in reviewing the arrangements for safeguarding the interests of children who are educated otherwise. But I do not suppose his brief will allow him to get to grips with the most urgent issue: that it is high time to review what a liberal primary education should be in the 21st century.

Diogenes