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

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

Parallel Universes

If you find yourself scanning the pages of the NewScientist, are you baffled (as I am) when they tell us that quantum physicists and cosmologists speculate on the possibility that other universes may exist alongside our own? Then, beyond speculation and on a matter of fact, do you go along (as I do) with the philosopher author of Gray’s Anatomy arguing that there is no doubt about belief systems and ideologies having over long ages obstructed achievement of rational human progress?

For me in my reading armchair, book in one hand and periodical in the other, the coincidence of these two sets of ideas has resonated with one large aspect of the current plight of  public education. As we well know, this has suffered for all too long, since the ill-named ‘88 Reform Act, from regimentation and control – under a centralist dogma with the self-imposed blinkers that stultify and confine intelligence in one, flat dimension. But now witness the two different public attitudes – both in their way scandalous – offered by actors in the pantomime we are obliged to call government to two recent education reports – both blockbusters in scope and importance.  In this there appears to be little doubt but that our ‘masters’ assume they occupy a separate plane of existence from common mortals. 

Consider the government’s attitude to Professor Robin Alexander of Cambridge University and Oxford’s Professor of Education, Richard Pring.  Alexander’s Primary Review – the deepest enquiry in the field since the Plowden Report of 40 years ago – was blankly dismissed as ‘old hat’, while Pring’s Nuffield-funded Review of Education & Training for the 14-19s – a review of the sector never before tackled so comprehensively – has been virtually ignored. When results of explorations in such breadth and depth over many years conducted under the aegis of two of the UK’s premier universities  (which also figure among the top five universities internationally) are treated as dross or simply overlooked, one can only assume that the state politicos who condemn them live in a sphere so set apart as to be extra-terrestrial. Where one world derives its substance and strength from discovery and evidence in the living world of educational practice, the other in its weary fairyland demonstrates its tenuous hold on reality by cleaving to misplaced myth, like what Richard Pring in his Nuffield review calls ‘performance management’.

Is there another government office in the civilised world that could persist in such a weird life of denial? So weird that the DCSF, lately deserving to be known as the Department of Callow Schemes and Fantasies, has evidently acquired a further outer space character, earning perhaps the title of DLGM, the Department of Little Green Men?

Juvenile

“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

HIS STRONGEST SUIT

“Accountancy,” says Jack Straw, “does not appear to be my strongest suit.”   And he is not alone. One wonders how many ministers, or for that matter how many senior mandarins, would claim that accountancy was among their strengths, let alone their strongest suit.

Earlier this month the National Audit Office issued a damning report on Curtains and Soft Furnishings. The Department has under spent by £4.4bn over the past nine years. Its financial reporting and forecasting are not good enough. It is one of only three departments which does not use modern accruals accounting, old hat among many public bodies several decades ago.

Perhaps DCSF is hampered by its antecedents. Its predecessors used to talk fondly of their so called accounting officers, senior officers without any formal training in finance who were nominally in charge of significant budgets, often unsupported by any qualified accountant. The department would second competent middle ranking officers with no financial expertise to act as finance officers in their dependent quangos, and was surprised when the quangos said these worthy people were simply not capable of  conducting hard-nosed  financial appraisals of  anyone’s pet projects.

The Department has not been short of money. It threw £100 million to the Curriculum and Assessment Authority on a passing whim, without any public discussion or assessment of what benefits might be expected from spending that amount of money on any thing other than testing.

No-one, except perhaps the accountants themselves, would want them to determine policy.  But one would like to feel that our rulers knew enough to know when listening to an accountant might be helpful.

DIOGENES

The Department for Calculation of Scores and Fractions

Good old Diogenes! Now we know the real identity of the DCSF. He overturns a mistaken belief that it was the Department for Calculation of Scores and Fractions, such was its numerative reputation. 

Even so, a doubt remains about the standard of its own numeracy. For one of its organs said that it aimed to “create a school system shaped by parents that delivers excellence, etc. etc.”, yet the Government claimed elsewhere that quality public education was vital to the future wellbeing of the nation as a whole – from which it followed that it was every voter’s business, didn’t it? 

But here a certain arithmetical contradiction arose, some said; let’s do the simple sums!  Parents of children at school would amount to a good deal less than half the voting population. So if public education deeply affected all of the country’s future, how should its shape rest with a nominated minority?

Perhaps indulgence credited the DCSF for wanting to protect us against JS Mill’s “tyranny of the majority”; or for a modern take on old fashioned patriarchy – the notional parent standing as national paterfamilias for us all.  At any rate, we may have to hand it to the Department for an ingenious line in adapting our constitutional democracy.  Have Parliament or the people noticed by the way?  And who should order the DCSF back to school to relearn its numbers?

Juvenile