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

Myths and Mindsets

Fiona Millar writes in the Education Guardian (14.4.09) of her altercation on the radio with a former Tory politician (unnamed but obviouly true to type) who had nothing to say on public education but it was cynical. “Failing state schools “, with the implication that they were all like that, was the central mantra.

It is constantly astonishing how a combination of bat-witted ignorance and largely southern, class-ridden attachment to an unquestioning belief in the superiority of private education can close its eyes to the long, steady advance of public education over the years – the  eloquently titled ‘Long Revolution’ of the social philosopher Raymond Williams. Distortions and half-truths persistently fostered by coteries of the bourgeoisie self-isolated in their mentally gated enclosures, detached from the real life of the nation, through endless repetition have become pronounced by them as facts – when they are merely artificial ‘factoids, the neat term coined by Norman Mailer.

And why did ‘county and voluntary schools schools’ in the old days of local education authorities – technically and in law ‘maintained schools’ – come to be known in the middle class parlance as ‘state schools’, the sub-text being that these were by nature inferior to private schools?  The so-called ‘public schools’ and the ‘independents’ were never besmirched, were they, as a form of parasite institution, sponging on the state – and so on the backs of ordinary, honest citizens – through charitable, tax-evading status.  The estimable AH (Chelly) Halsey, once Professor of Sociology at Oxford, never referred to them but as ‘commercial schools’. Pity the moniker never took on. Too near the bone of mercantile sharp practice?

The other unending faslehood is of ‘local authority control of schools’, as though the LEAs fettered the minds and activities of their schools – so far from the truth it’s laughable. In the days pre-’88 the teaching profession, burgeoning as it was in the universal system promoted by the noble 1944 Education Act, enjoyed as much freedom as the general culture, defined for schools mainly by its examination industry, allowed them.  Never before in the whole of history did so many teachers enjoy so much freedom from interference upon their vocation, as they carried forward all manner of curriculum developments along with advances in the analysis and exploitation of learning processes. 

All this achievement, of course, was halted in its tracks when it was ignored by the really giant myth, the one that justified the pernicious 1988 Education Act through unsubstantiated claims of school system underperformance.  That myth is all that still holds the walls of the Edukremlin together, as its denizens try to hold to the mindset that continues living the lie that the ‘88 Act was necessary; they do so with less and less power of conviction, in the ofir yet unspoken acceptance that their shallow ligitimation has been rumbled.  The ‘Reform’ of the Baker-Thatcherites was a big ideological con-trick.  Their present successors in government know this, and they know that you and I know it, and you and I know that legions of commonsense parents, closer to their local schools than the Edukremlin can ever be, know it too.

An end to the smoke screens of myth and the trickery of myth makers! Their presence over the last twenty years has tried educationists to the limit.  Prospect of another generation of such nonsense must be intolerable.

Juvenile

Verb. sap.

Not my lines below but those of Baroness Shirley Williams, Secretary of State for Education 1976-9 closing an article in the Education Guardian, 3.3.09 .

“In all sorts of ways, including promises of new buildings, pressure is being brought on community schools to opt out of local authority control. The declared emphasis of the government is on “driving up standards” but the evidence that these do that is at best mixed. Teachers have been compelled to conform to a ceaseless flow of directives, regulations and notes of guidance. Not only has their professional autonomy been undermined; their morale, attested to by the annual inspectors’ reports, is persistently low.

What may trouble the department more is the evidence that the UK is slipping in respected international league tables, that its educational standing is only a little above the average, and that the improvement in standards has slowed down. Perhaps the time has come to ask whether the pendulum, swinging towards intense regulation and control from the centre ever since 1988, has swung too far?”

Any words of mine would have had more acid, but level-headed judgment from a mild-mannered lady, the more pointed for its moderate tone, will be seen clearly to be on target. No doubt, though, that the apparatchiki in the Edukremlin will be calling for the flak-jackets – and as usual for the earplugs, while stocks last.

Juvenile.

The Building Racket

Headline – “School fined for calling a halt to drilling outside exam hall”. The rules of contract dreamed up by the Edukremlin’s ‘Building Schools for the Future’ did not allow for any flexibility in a rebuilding programme, so a school in Surrey had to pay £16k for a period of silence.

Shades of Avon. Lost in time (but not in the memory who have such a gift) that county council, now happily defunct, went mad from an imported disease which made it irrestible for them to send their works department to interfere in school life – like insisting on digging trenches in infant school playgrounds during term time. Local education officers, after an unequal fight in defence of schools, had to call on their professional network and thereby engage political pressure at the highest level for common sense and order to be restored. Now schools are on their own, defenceless in face of central bureaucracy.

In the bad old days BB, LEAs managed huge building programmes with inter-professional consultation, little fuss and no threat of punishment. AB, the impersonal, mindless State can never have it in to to act so sensibly; it has no capacity for the light hand and fine tuning.  Now schools have to pay for common sense. One of the more ingenious new taxes.

What’s it worth to forego that and return to the domestic sanity of devolution?

Juvenile

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