Civitas Blog

[This commentary by Prof. David Conway was originally written on 10 June 2008 - it is reposted here so it can be linked to John White's response to Conway's claims]

This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the national curriculum. To mark the occasion, last week London University’s Institute of Education held a conference on the subject.

There a former professor of the Institute John White delivered a diatribe against the national curriculum, arguing it to be in urgent need of radical overhaul, if not wholesale replacement.

The past month has the seen the Government’s SATS exam system implode in the bureaucratic equivalent of an ageing star collapsing into a black hole. There were delays to the SATS results and claims that the delays were just to make sure that the release was orderly and complete. Then the release this week was neither orderly nor complete with some results delayed until September and head teachers have been forced to send poorly marked or unmarked exam scripts back to the company, ETS Europe, that is meant to be managing the scheme. There was blood on the radio 4 airwaves this morning as John Humphrys eviscerated Ken Boston for the QCA’s handling of the scheme and it turns out ETS Europe have managed to score a lucrative £156 million 5-year contract to administer the SATS marking.

If anyone were seemingly less well-suited to be in charge of the country’s education system, it is surely the current Secretary of State for Schools, Ed Balls.

For anyone to be qualified for that job surely demands that he or she should have some modicum of feeling for what the purpose of education of is.

Yet, judged by the account he is reported to have given of its purpose in last week’s Times Educational Supplement , it is clear he hasn’t a clue.

This week Gordon Brown gave us his assessment of the factors thwarting social mobility in Britain today. Where he was right, was to point to the impact which unemployment had on social mobility under Thatcher. Where he was wrong, was to ignore the role which his very own government is playing in thwarting social mobility today – again through unemployment.

Schools in the state sector in Sweden can offer the acclaimed International GCSE (IGCSE) science qualifications that have been denied to British state school pupils by the government, according to Swedish Lessons, a report published today by independent think-tank Civitas.

Education secretary Ed Balls announced this week that the lowest performing secondary schools, as judged by the number of A*-Cs at GCSE, will be closed or replaced if they do not demonstrate an imminent 'turnaround'.

The National Challenge, as the proposed strategy for aiding these turnarounds has been termed, is modelled on the London Challenge scheme. As the Times Education Supplement comments, the London Challenge has courted controversy by advising schools to focus on those GCSE pupils who are borderline C/D – thereby on boosting the results in the crudest terms, rather than on whole-school learning. If, as the precedent of the London Challenge suggests, ‘failing’ schools will become ‘successful’ schools by bolstering the grades of a particular group of pupils through intensive exam preparation, then the reality is that for the majority of pupils these schools will remain unchanged. (Yet the government will have achieved the results it needs as evidence that it is improving schools.)

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), New Labour’s most relied-on think tank, has proposed that the 'long' summer holidays (shorter than in most of Europe) be abolished in a bid to curb what has been referred to as the ‘summer learning loss’ amongst pupils from deprived backgrounds. The report, ‘Thursday’s Child’, co-authored by Sonya Sodha and Julia Margo, argues that a new system of - essentially - school holiday dispersed through the year, needs to be introduced. Their proposal entails shortening the summer holidays to just four weeks.

Wednesday 14th of May will see the inaugural London Boxing Academy Gala Dinner. The aim of the evening will be to raise awareness about and money for the invaluable work that the Academy is doing.

IPPR’s latest report, ‘Those Who Can’, accurately highlights many of the new pressures that are now impacting on teachers, including a greater demand for skilled school leavers in the economy, changes in family structure and even artificial pressures generated by political agendas. The funny thing is their solution for dealing with these pressures is not the common sense approach: to set teachers free from these bureaucratic and political demands so that they can deal with the genuine needs of children. Quite the opposite!

It is of no great surprise to read in the Times Education Supplement (TES) today that a majority of parents were not sympathetic to the National Union of Teacher’s strike yesterday. Aside from the obvious reason – having to make childcare arrangements for the day – a large number of parents felt that teachers should be satisfied with their pay. (A teacher’s basic starting salary in the UK is currently £20,133, with an additional £4,000 London weighting, whilst the average experienced teacher’s salary is around £34,281).

Gala Launch Night Event - ‘Lessons learnt teaching excluded youth in a boxing academy'
from 6.30pm Thursday 24th April
Williamsons Tavern, Bow Lane

The news that Poole council used surveillance powers designed to track down terrorists to spy on an ordinary middle-class family they suspected of not living in the correct catchment area for their chosen school is not as surprising as it first seems. The government is, after all, fully aware that there exists in this country an organised group that propagates an infectious ideology which considers government officials to be mere obstacles to their goals. Arranged in tightly knit ‘cells’ (usually of two senior operators and one or more younger members), the group as a whole communicates via an informal network of personal contacts, workplace colleagues and Internet forums.

Via Tim Worstall, we learn that Polly Toynbee is falling out of love with the Swedish model just as the Tories are gaining interest in it. In the past, responses to a columnist’s claims could only be aired in a carefully guarded newspaper’s letters page. Now many online editions of columnist articles have comment facilities and the global nature of the Internet means that responses from around the world can be almost instantaneous with the original claims. The Local (which provides news about Sweden in English) has picked up on Toynbee’s article and has picked out a few inaccuracies. It is also worth looking briefly at her comments on the Swedish school reforms…

In this week’s Times Education Supplement (TES), Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of Tony Blair, has a comment piece entitled ‘Low-cost lessons from the independent sector’.

Celebrate, for a new national agency has been born! “Ofqual will act as the independent guardian of standards across the qualifications, tests and exam system in England.” The mother is the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which henceforth will be known as the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA). The raft of independent and international evidence consistently contradicting the QCA’s now annual claim that exam standards are being maintained has prompted this move. We should, however, remain sceptical that merely splitting up the QCA into two national agencies, both of which still report directly to ministers (rather than parliament), will finally get a grip on grade inflation.

The question at the heart of Lord Goldsmith’s review of citizenship, published this week, was essentially how to unify a diversified population through the school system. (Via a virtually unanimous ridiculing of his proposal that teens pledge allegiance to the Queen, was undoubtedly not what Goldsmith had had in mind.)

It is a dull refrain, but again the education news conveys a troubled picture for England’s schools. Take just three of this week’s main education stories: a record number of children not getting into their (or rather their parents’) first choice of school; research evidence that faith schools are taking a disproportionate number of middle-class pupils (read being chosen by middle-class parents); and finally reports of former education secretary Estelle Morris’ attacks on the government’s initiative overload which has failed to impact on the gap between rich and poor.

School children are to be mandated 5 hours of ‘culture’ a week by the latest government initiative. This hour-per-school-day prescription seems to be the government’s answer to every education issue, as it defines more and more of every state school schedule through Whitehall guidance. This follows on from the five hours of mandated sport a week designed, in part, to tackle obesity. Bureaucrats should be careful not to overdo this wheeze. After all, secondary schools still have to cope with teaching maths and English to pupils who didn’t manage to pick up those basic skills during their …err… compulsory numeracy and literacy hours at primary school!

More findings have come in from Cambridge University’s Primary Review and they’re not positive.

The Primary Review, led by Cambridge University’s Robin Alexander and launched in 2006, is an independent inquiry into the state of primary education. This week the Review has launched three reports, touching on testing and assessment, the curriculum and international comparisons. Each report identifies fundamental misgivings about primary school arrangements in this country, however the most damning findings are on our testing and assessment arrangements. The Review’s conclusions have prompted the Times Education Supplement headline ‘Tests fixation sets England apart’ – which might well be re-headed ‘Tests fixation sets England back.’

Is the government right to introduce compulsory cookery classes for 11 to 14 year olds? A question on many people’s lips following this week’s announcement that pupils in the first three years of secondary school will spend an hour a week, for a term, learning to cook.

There isn’t that much one can add to this Telegraph report other than to say that it was almost inevitable: independent schools are going to come under increasing regulation in order to ‘justify’ their charitable status. Obviously, merely providing a good standard of education to 500,000 British children just doesn’t cut it anymore as a public benefit. Independent schools have continually shown up state education, if only by drilling their pupils for national exams much more effectively. Now many have started to transcend those standards altogether by taking IGCSEs instead, having found the depth provided by normal GCSE courses an insufficient challenge for their pupils’ abilities. This could not be allowed to go on.

A society enjoys social cohesion when, between its members, there exist associative bonds sufficiently strong as to dispose them to be mutually civil and solicitous of each other’s welfare.

Associative bonds between the members of any society will be strong in proportion as they share the same beliefs, values and tastes, or at least certain important ones.

Without being mutually civil and solicitous of each other’s welfare, the members of no society can for long sustain themselves as a single society. Hence, social cohesion must always be a desideratum of any political society that wishes to remain viable.

Universities are having to pick up the pieces of the government’s emphasis on targets and testing, according to today’s Times Education Supplement (TES). The TES refers to a report published in the Times Higher Education which has found that schools are failing to equip pupils with the knowledge and skills which they require for higher education. As a result, universities are resorting to catch-up courses and even considering extending degrees by a year ‘…to accommodate the extra time remedial work takes in the first year…’

Via Samizdata, we learn that the government is getting into the broadband Internet business, intending to create a million new compulsory ‘customers’ for the big Internet Service Providers by ‘requiring parents to provide their children with high-speed internet access’. The government claims it has been putting ‘pressure’ on companies to lower their broadband costs. How much pressure is really required to make a deal with corporations that involves giving them millions of customers who are not allowed to say no? I imagine a rather limp handshake would be sufficient.

This week we were told that the diploma for sixth-formers, the Advanced Diploma, to be introduced next year, will be worth 3.5 A-levels in the league tables. The Higher Diploma, taken at Key Stage 4, is to be worth seven A*-C GCSEs – an equivalence which the Times Education Supplement (TES) gently points out that is ‘…on the high side’. The same could be said of the Advanced one.

Our recently published children’s reading and writing course, The Butterfly Book by Irina Tyk, has become a hit in the run up to Christmas. In the wake of one Daily Mail report, the office telephones have been positively buzzing with calls from parents (and grandparents) eager to offer the gift of literacy to young members of their family. We have reported before on the efficacy of books like the Butterfly Book. Simplicity is at the heart of this successful method. It is called ‘synthetic phonics’ although that is just a new name for a traditional method that has long been used to teach children to read. All it involves is teaching the correspondence between the 44 sounds of the English language and the 26 letters of the alphabet. One course is enough to teach the vast majority of the underlying principles of our language, giving children a toolkit of skills that allow them to unlock literature for themselves.

Was it Ted Cantle? John Denham? Charles Clarke? Hazel Blears?

Wrong, if you thought that it was any of these.

According to John Stuart Mill, and I have not come across anything to contradict his claim, it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

This week the government announced its “Ten Year Plan”. The positive about the plan was that the government recognises that there are severe problems in the education system, particularly in the primary sector. The negative however, is that too many of their solutions critically miss the point. For example, testing. Balls indicated that he took on board some of the criticism of testing in schools; however he made clear that he perceives the issue to be testing young children. The real issue is the politicisation of testing.

Yesterday Ed Balls, the secretary of state for children, schools and families, unveiled the government’s plan to make Britain "the best place in the world for our children to grow up in" - writes Claire Daley and Nick Cowen.The so-called “Children’s plan” aims to tackle crucial education and social issues facing children today in the light of recent critical reports by Unicef, which have sparked concern over the state of British childhood.

The government has faced criticism for generating policy which “lacks vision”, so the question is, could the new proposals really revolutionise the British childhood (as Balls has pledged), or it is simply a new excuse to flood teachers’ desks with directives and undefined reviews?

The idea of poetry being taught in our primary schools may come as a surprise to some. How would poetry fit into Ofsted’s tick boxes, after all, how would it be tested in the Sats? Actually very well - the way that the government has stipulated it be taught.

Final straw for government's education record: world's most comprehensive assessment of pupil knowledge and skills crushes UK government claims of rising school standards.

Continue reading "PISA - Show's over: international study exposes government standards charade" »