The Bleeding Heart Show

Blaming inclusion

When set against the context of the number of children you’ll teach throughout a school year, incidents of violent, abusive or threatening behaviour are actually quite rare. The occasions when a pupil dreams up allegations of abuse by a teacher are rarer still, and the occasions when those false allegations result in disciplinary action or a criminal conviction are even more infrequent.

That said, everyone’s heard at least one horror story about a teacher who’s been the victim to a malicious allegation. It does happen, and more can be done at school, local authority & central government level to ensure that good and safe teachers are protected from career-destroying fairy tales. Ending the atrocious policy of isolating accused teachers from contact with their colleagues would be a good place to start.

So it’s not like I’m ambivelent to or dismissive of a problem which does prey on a lot of teachers’ minds, and the general thrust of Jenni Russell’s piece on the topic is generally correct. Still, it is a Jenni Russell piece, and so every article must contain at least one moment of eye-watering idiocy:

Classrooms are becoming more difficult to manage because the policy of inclusion means that children with emotional, mental or physical difficulties are being put into mainstream schools without the extra support they need to cope.

Whether Russell is basing this on any actual evidence is unclear, but unlikely. For a start, when the DCSF asked researchers to look into the outcomes of inclusion (pdf), they found no evidence – none – of any relationship between inclusion policies and educational attainment. This means that whilst inclusion does not positively affect levels of achievement in a school, nor does it adversely affect it.

I’m also at a loss to understand what ‘extra support’ for support children with social, emotional & behavioural difficulties teachers are being deprived of. Every school in the country has someone responsible for organising provision for children with special educational needs, and they will often work with pupils, teachers, parents, social workers & psychologists to help each child achieve their best level of learning. Could there be more support? Sure, but we’d all have to open our wallets a bit more.

Admittedly, what we have now is an imperfect situation; it’s always going to be imperfect when you have finite resources but an infinite number of potential problems. But I think it’s worth remembering where we were before the policy of inclusion, which Russell blames for getting ‘violent’ teachers sacked. Before the journey towards integration and inclusion, most children with special educational needs were educated separately and as a result suffered castigation and humiliation. This meant that kids without English as a first language wouldn’t interact with their English speaking peers; that vulnerable kids would grow up lacking the confidence to fully participate in society; that children with mild disabilities would be mercilessly taunted as ‘spackers’.

If Russell wants to reverse this policy, shes’s welcome to go & vote for whoever will promise to do just that (the boys in blue might be a good bet). But the least she could do is be a bit more honest about what inclusion is, what it does, and that ending it won’t make teachers, pupils or the wider society any better off.

Ed Balls’ bungling of the Diploma

Personally, I think Barry Sheerman missed a trick when he accused Ed Balls of being ‘a bit of a bully ‘. If I were him, I would’ve asked whether he was also a bit incompetent.

The past few days have a number of bad headlines for the 14-19 Diplomas, the heavily-promoted new qualification which looked fine on Mike Tomlinson’s drawing board but has been blighted in no small part by this government’s own hubris.

In a story as striking for its gumption as its mendacity, the DCSF’s own advertisement for Diplomas has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for falsely claiming that the Advanced Diploma, which is meant to be the equivalent of 3.5 A Levels, ‘can get you into any university’. In fact, whilst there are plenty of universities which will accept your Advanced Diploma, there’s still very little enthusiasm for them in the elite Russell Group.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I happen to think that lying to young people – and about a decision as important & consequential as what subject they choose to study – is a pretty grubby act, irrespective of whether it was done by design or out of error. And we wonder why youngsters don’t like authority figures.

The second story is less shocking, but further underscores how badly the government has mismanaged the rollout of this qualification. According to the Association of Colleges, many learners are finding their Diplomas very hard, meaning that some colleges are reluctant to accept lower ability students, effectively cutting them off from what was meant to become the ‘qualification of choice’ . Parts of the qualification may need an urgent re-write.

This is bad news for two reasons. First, those students with below average scores are exactly the kind of people the Diploma was meant to help. By mixing academic work with vocational & skills-based learning, young people who had previously struggled with A-Levels might’ve found a better route to achievement & employment.

Secondly, it reinforces what has been the Diploma’s most crippling problem; its lack of credibility. New qualifications are always treated with suspicion & resistance, and that probably doubled when Balls got over-excited and dreamed publicly that they’d replace GCSE & A-Levels. He would’ve been better off keeping his mouth shut.

Not only that, but his department grossly over-estimated the number of students who would start taking the Diploma, fell 20,000 short of its target, saw it criticised for lacking academic rigour, rejected by the CBI, and then encouraged FE colleges to set them up whilst they were suffering a funding crisis. It’s been accused of being too expensive , damned for struggling to teach students the three R’s, has been incredibly awkward to timetable and accused of creating ‘SatNav students’ .

For those who see the Diploma as a potentially brilliant way of encouraging aspiration & social mobility, the way Labour has handled its introduction is dismaying. In a field so heavily scrutinised, and filled with such a diverse array of stakeholders, it was never going to be easy to bring the Diploma into mainstream education. But the gap between government rhetoric and newspaper headlines has become so cavernous that the very future of this qualification is being put at risk. A qualification will live or die on its reception from three groups: employers, universities and students. Right now, the Diploma is so tangled up in bleak headlines that none of these groups seem easy to impress.

There are, of course, exceptions to this bleak outlook, and local authorities would do well to study what they’re doing right in places like Bolton, which seems to have adapted to it incredibly well. But despite the valiant exceptions, the Diploma is still in trouble, and its future in the coming Tory government seems uncertain .

What’s become clear is that if the Diplomas turn into a failure, the blame will not fall on the people co-ordinating them, or those who’re teaching or studying them. No, the blame will fall squarely on the Department for Children, Schools and Families and its bungling Secretary of State. If that happens, being branded a bully will really be the least of Ed Balls’ problems.

About those thuggish teens

You might well have seen this already, but last week’s Guardian ran a survey of the attitudes of teenage boys and found that, in spite of the caricature, our young lads happen to be ambitious & mostly happy in their school/family/social lives. 

What did shock me, however, was seeing the extent to which this caricature dominates the media being proven with numbers:

In the survey, conducted by Echo, 78% of teenage boys said adults had a higher opinion of teenage girls than boys. An Echo survey earlier this year, commissioned by Women in Journalism, examined the language used to describe teenage boys in the media. The most common word was “yobs” (which appeared 591 times over a year), followed by thugs (254 times), sick (119), feral (96) and hoodie (60). More than 60% of the stories about teenage boys concerned crime, and 90% of these showed them in a bad light. Boys interviewed by the Guardian for a report in tomorrow’s Weekend magazine said they felt demonised by press and politicians.

Is there any wonder?

Gove & education: one last thing

I’ll quit this issue soon, but there was one other part of Gove’s speech last week which I found pretty irritating:

The body responsible for writing the curriculum – the QDCA – spends more than one hundred million pounds every year – and after hiring an army of consultants, squadrons of advisers and regiments of bureaucrats they still wrote a syllabus for the Second World War without any place for Winston Churchill.

I guess it’s always possible that he’s right. Maybe there’s some secret document doing the rounds, written by scores of ‘unaccountable quangocrats’ which does indeed remove Winston Churchill from the history curriculum. But it would have to be a secret document, because when you hop over to the QCDA’s website, you’ll actually find quite a few references to Britain’s Greatest Ever Tory. He’s mentioned here, here and here, in these guidance notes for teachers and, rather inconveniently for Mr Gove, in this rather unwieldy PDF (p22):

A world study after 1900: A study of some of the significant individuals, events and developments from across the twentieth century, including the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and their impact on Britain, Europe and the wider world.

[…]

Examples for 13: a world study after 1900 Individuals: Winston Churchill; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin; Benito Mussolini; Franklin Roosevelt; Mahatma Gandhi; Mao Zedong; Martin Luther King.

So what obscure document have I dredged up for this snidey little ‘gotcha!’ post? A little thing called the National Curriculum.

Now, I don’t really expect Michael Gove to have read the damn thing – I haven’t even done that myself yet, and I’m expecting to teach. But I do think it’d be a nice if he stopped telling other people who haven’t read it that hundreds of millions of pounds are being squandered to remove Churchill from classrooms.

This isn’t to say there’s uniform agreement on Sir Winston’s prominance in history classrooms, and I happen to think that people should be able to disagree in good faith without being accused of being either elitist or practicing ‘dumbing down’. Nor should it detract from the points in my earlier post that developing skills should take greater prominance over factual recall.

But I would hope that the least we could expect from a wannabe Secretary of State was having a decent fact checker on his staff. Perhaps we should set it as homework.

The Miseducation of Michael Gove

Given where I am and what I’ve decided to do with my life, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve been casting an apprehensive eye over Michael Gove’s plans for education reform. Like many people, I’m not exactly reassured.

I suppose it’s worth bearing in mind that there’s a difference between the harmless conference season patter Gove practices now and the more mundane – but massively consequential – steps he’ll take as Secretary of State. On arriving at the DCSF, he’ll hopefully be informed that most schools do, in fact, have school uniforms, that classes are often set by ability and that for all the horrid neglect of Winston Churchill in history lessons, kids are at least not being taught that WWII was won single-handedly by a smilin’ Joe Stalin. What plays well in the papers and to a conference crowd often gets forgotten or watered-down when the realities of government actually set in, and that probably holds true with these proposals as well.

But what I’ve found interesting – and very frustrating – about the past week has been what it’s revealed about Gove’s narrow, straightjacketed view of what learning is for, and how it’s best achieved.

For instance, take this list of topics Gove wants kids to be taught in history lessons. All our Greatest Brit hits are on there: the Roman invasion, 1066, the Bill of Rights, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Reform Act, both world wars (with particular emphasis on the awesomeness of a former Tory PM!) and something rather vaguely called “Modern history to the present”.

Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with having knowledge about these or any other areas of British (or even – gasp! – non-British) history, and it’d come in extremely handy if your son or daughter ever wanted to work in a museum or on Time Team. However, the emphasis here is on what is taught, when it should really be about what is learnt.

A few years ago, former Ofsted chief inspector Mike Tomlinson produced a report offering a vision for quite far-reaching reform of 14-19 education in which GCSEs and A-Levels would be replaced by a range of different diplomas. The suggestions were mostly ignored by the government but for two key areas: a range of diploma lines would be rolled-out (albeit very slowly), and the whole curriculum would pay much greater attention to developing skills.

It is this ‘skills agenda’ which is currently writ large on the education landscape. Under greater competition from developing economies than ever before, Tomlinson was just one of many people to identify the need for children to develop a generic, transferable set of personal, learning & thinking skills which could equip them to thrive in a jobs market that none of us can predict. The accumulation of knowledge is still important, but developing a child’s innate ability to acquire knowledge for themselves is equally vital.

These aims aren’t ‘fashionable nonsense’ dreamt up by an ‘educational establishment’ hobbled on ‘political correctness’; they were devised with the express wish of sustaining – nay, revitalising – the economic competitiveness of UK PLC.

Does the Conservative Party share these aims? If this prescriptive, restrictive list of history topics is at all representative of how the Tories view teaching, I would assume they don’t. It’s a list that reeks of rote learning; of cramming hundreds of tiny little facts in a child’s head, with less time to help them learn how to think, argue, critique, or imagine. What this kind of thing is really about is satisfying our mystifying fetish to test, test, test children into automatons.

I could, of course, be reading too much into a little list which was passed onto a curious journalist, and the Tories might be fully committed to allowing the skills agenda to flourish. Nonetheless, it’s important to ask these questions because Gove’s attack on educators was so broad, so uncharitable and so hyperbolic that it acted as though the past 10 years have been nothing but a long line of ‘fashionable nonsense’, ‘political correctness’ and miserable failure.

Such thinking would be deluded. Labour’s not got a great track record on education, but it has got some key decisions (Every Child Matters, promoting inclusion, developing skills) correct, and it’s always difficult to overturn good policy. Besides, times and attitudes have changed, teaching practices have altered, ways of thinking about teaching & learning have transformed and I suspect that Gove’s apparent intention to revisit the flawed old practices of the past will be met with even greater resistance than he currently expects. He may find, as another history-bound Tory might’ve said, that the teachers are not for turning.