News-wise the education scene has been comparatively calm this week. That is to say, no senior DfES official has resigned, no national attainment results have been published and there hasn’t been a curriculum overhaul [that’s scheduled for next week]. Announcements and judgements have nevertheless been made and it appears that no news [relatively speaking] doesn’t mean good news…
OfSTED has announced that the number of schools judged by the inspectorate to be failing or given notice to improve has remained steady. OfSTED found that the number of schools in these categories in September 2006 was roughly the same as in 2005. Is this to be interpreted as good news or bad news? Good news, say the inspectorate, as they yet again claim to have ‘raised the bar’ [much to the chagrin of the unions]. ‘We have raised the bar,’ argued Schools minister Jim Knight, ‘so that schools which previously would have avoided attention now find themselves in special measures.’ If this is true, knowing the damage that OfSTED ‘attention’ does, this news can in fact only be bad news.
Alarming government figures, also published this week, showed that a teacher suffers a ‘violent attack’ almost every day in England. The official figures were obtained by Liberal Democrat education spokesperson, Sarah Teather, by tabling a question to the Department of Work and Pensions. The response to this revelation has been concern about the impact of these attacks – both to teachers and the schools affected at large. What commentators have touched upon less is what lies behind an escalation of violence in schools. An escalation in anti-social behaviour amongst young people, both in and out of school, undoubtedly reflects increasing problems in the school system. Despite high expenditure on education, schools and class sizes have swelled and teacher retention is poor. Large classes do not allow teachers to give pupils enough individual attention; large schools foster anomie rather than a sense of community and ownership of one’s learning environment; constant teacher turnover means teachers are not able to build up relationships with their pupils. Add to that the fact that many pupils are under-stimulated by the curriculum.
One great mis-expenditure [from the list of many which have deflected money away from fundamental priorities such as reducing class sizes] is interactive whiteboards. This government has repeatedly been tempted to skip past the root problems in basic learning and succumbed to the temptations of technology. In the same way that an American proposal to provide every child in the world with a laptop seemed to be missing rather rudimentary steps to bettering the lives of African children, on a smaller scale getting hugely expensive whiteboards into every classroom in the UK seemed superfluous. It turns out, as many teachers suspected, to be pointless as well as superfluous. Research commissioned by the DfES – note: after widespread investment in interactive whiteboards - and undertaken by the Institute of Education, shows that not only do the boards fail to extend learning they can even ‘slow the pace’ of learning.
And finally, according to an attitude survey carried out by the QCA, teachers and local authority advisers don’t consider Othello to be a suitable text for 13-14-year-olds. According to the BBC, Othello doesn’t make the list of suitable Shakespearean texts as those polled didn’t consider the themes of ‘sexual jealousy and racism’ to be suitable for that age group. As television schedulers, however, seem to think that these themes are perfectly suitable for 13-14-year-olds, sheltering children from a rather better-articulated version seems a shame.