The Telegraph’s brilliant exposure of the behaviour of some exam boards should not be dismissed with a couple of sacrificial sackings. It revealed profound flaws, not just in our school system, but also in the way our democracy is currently functioning. The attitudes behind the scandal are closely allied to the self-serving atmosphere in Parliament that led some MPs to fiddle their expenses. Deception of the people had became the norm, whether it was creative use of second homes, or manipulating exam results. The rot always starts at the top, and getting rid of the hapless examiners who got caught will make little difference unless we go much further.

Read the rest at the Telegraph

Rarely has this been clearer than with the science curriculum, the compulsory elements of which have progressively turned into ’scientific literacy’ (essentially, an ability to parse a Guardian science article) rather than a course which imparts the basics of the scientific method and its most significant discoveries. In essence, science education has been hollowed out from the inside by the combined demands that it be immediately ‘relevant’ to everyday life and that it satisfy the particular interests of political lobbies (see our report, The Corruption of the Curriculum for more examples). Ironically, in the case of climate science, this is ultimately counter-productive: there is no better way of showing children how important the environment is to maintaining our way of life than teaching the fundamental sciences that allow us to better understand it in the first place. It is this very knowledge that has been chipped away through progressive changes to the national curriculum.

The “strong and informed” source alleges that classes described as not taking place due to “prison restrictions” did in fact not run as TMC failed to provide a tutor. In addition, the college failed to carry out many compulsory “diagnostic topics”, such as basic literacy.

Rob Wilson, MP for Reading East, whose constituency covers HMP&YOI Reading, has approached Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt and Skills Minister John Hayes. Hayes has referred the case to the SFA for further inquiries.

TMC denies any wrong-doing, championing itself as a “powerful voice for offender learning”. However, an Ofsted inspection carried out shortly before TMC replaced Milton Keynes College rated achievement and standards as ‘good’, and the IMB reported 1,321 inmates attending classes; by March 2010, this had plummeted to 641, and the IMB report repeatedly condemned various aspects of provision as “unacceptable”.

It is debatable whether TMC should have won the competitive tender at all. The IMB notes that a key reason for the decision to award the contract to TMC was that the college was the “[l]owest cost provider”, which, the report claims, “given the economic climate was on the face of it understandable”. Yet neither OLASS nor the SFA had properly determined whether TMC was capable of expanding its offender learning provision.

The recent claims should perhaps then be no surprise. Indeed, the report found that ten months after TMC took over, the Governor at Reading still did not have access to the contract. “How can the Prison Service (PS) be expected to ensure that prisoners….receive the correct entitlement to a key rehabilitation service”, the report rightly challenges, “when they are not allowed access to the contract that underpins the service?”

Nonetheless, TMC cannot be blamed entirely for the shortcomings. The IMB highlights a catalogue of institutional barriers to learning, many of which plague the entire prison estate. The facilities at Reading are “limited”, a problem which TMC, despite substantial funding in addition to the original tender, could do little to remedy. Moreover, with a chronic population churn, the type of prisoner incarcerated at the institute is increasingly unsuitable for sustained learning provision and current rehabilitation strategies. If TMC, or any other OLASS provider, is to achieve effective rehabilitative interventions, it must have the necessary time and continuity with prisoners – a sea-change which would require fundamental institutional reform.

IMB chairman for HMP&YOI Reading, Gordon Ross, remarked that “inmates who have volunteered or signed up for education are having to stay in their cells”, and rightly commented that this “in itself is poor and not leading to future behaviours we would like”. Provision requires offenders to be brought to classes, which in turn depends on prison officers being available to escort them. TMC cannot fairly be held responsible for staffing shortages elsewhere in the institution. Education providers can take innovative steps to reach offenders, such as teaching on the wings, however, this is far from adequate; wings are not quiet places, conducive for study.

Similarly, the prison was unable to meet its “out of cell hours per day” KPT (key performance target), undoubtedly hampered by the national recruitment freeze. More concerning still is that this daily target was only 8.4 hours, and in the fourth quarter of the year covered by the IMB, actual achievement fell to merely 6.6 hours. This is clearly insufficient – both for TMC to provide effective learning, and for offenders to gain the motivation and self-discipline that is vital for successful resettlement.

TMC is now meeting a far higher proportion of their targets, and it must be hoped that this trend continues. Yet without comprehensive structural overhaul, OLASS providers will continue to struggle to reach inappropriate targets with insufficient institutional support. Under the flaccidity of the current regime, it should be no surprise that ex-prisoners are reoffending – and with so little engagement and activity, perhaps it should equally be no surprise that inmates are rioting and rebelling against staff.

The facts of this saga simply defy belief. The family were temporarily living in Sweden but intended to return to the mother’s home country. Wishing to minimise the disruption caused to his education by the move, Christer and Annie Johansson chose to home school their son.

Assessing the impact of home education compared to school is problematic, not least due to the diversity amongst home educators. Nonetheless, it is difficult to understand how a parent’s decision to educate their child at home could justify such drastic intervention.

The Home School Legal Defence Association and the Alliance Defence Fund are now helping the family to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Michael Donnelly, IR Director for HSLDA, has condemned the case as “so egregious that the only explanation for the decision is that judges and social services authorities are simply trying to cover their tracks because they know they have grossly violated the basic human rights of this family”.

However, the extreme nature of the Johansson case has obscured a potentially serious underlying human rights issue. The right of a child to education appears in many international agreements, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 28). Yet, there is a need to balance the right of the child to education against the parents’ right “to ensure…education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions” (A2P1 ECHR).

Despite being a founding member of the Council of Europe, the Swedish Government has recently passed a lengthy education bill, threatening to issue parents with a substantial fine, or even remove their children should they attempt to educate them at home, in the absence of “extraordinary circumstances”.

The situation in England could not be more different. Roger Kiska, of the ADF, has argued: “This tragic case reflects what happens when a socialist bureaucracy is bent upon turning out cookie-cutter children, rather than respecting the individual differences of individuals and families”. At every stage, the DfE guidelines to Local Authorities on elective home education emphasise this need to acknowledge diversity; whilst education is compulsory, schooling is not.

Nevertheless, it is arguable that the balance in is England is skewed too strongly in favour of the parents. Although the local authority can intervene if it has good reason to believe that the parents are not providing a ‘suitable’ education (Education Act 1996, s.437(1)), it has no statutory duties to monitor the quality of home education, and no legal right of access to the home. Moreover, the guidelines specify that, where a parent elects not to allow access to their home or their child, this does not of itself constitute a ground for concern.

Indeed, it is unclear that under ECtHR case law home education is a fundamental right at all. In a case fought by Sweden, the Court held that the parents’ A2P1 rights are merely “grafted” on to the fundamental right of everyone to education.

More importantly, Art 12 UNCRC makes clear the need to support the right of a child “who is capable of forming his or her own views…to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child”. According to the Badman Review, although approximately 20,000 home educated children are known to Local Authorities, the real number could be in excess of 80,000. Of course, bringing in compulsory registration would likely increase the temptation to enhance other forms of prescription. However, more tightly defining the scope and role of home educators would not only better enable Local Authorities to provide assistance, but better protect the equilibrium of the rights of the child against the rights of the parent.

Somewhat ironically, Christer is now being held by the police on suspicion of ‘unlawful detention’, having taken his son home for one night without approval. Even though he informed the police where Dominic would be, Christer faces up to 10 years in prison. It is abhorrent that a parent should be so condemned by the state simply for exercising their parental right to choose the mode of their child’s education. However, whilst the English system is to be praised in this sense, it is essential that the voice of the child is not drowned out by the applause.

The British Humanist Association has been an outspoken critic of free schools, fearing that it will lead to a proliferation of faith schools able to select pupils on the basis of religious observance. Free schools will also be allowed more autonomy regarding their curriculum and ethos, which means they may add more religious instruction to their teaching timetable. Meanwhile, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has complained for opposite reasons. The new free schools will only be able to select up to 50 per cent of their pupils on the basis of faith, and they fear that it might now be ‘harder to set up any type of Jewish school, not just a free school, because of competition for sites and pupils’.

Coming from different perspectives on education, the common denominator amongst these complaints is a fear of parent choice. The Humanists want to deny parents the choice to educate their children in even a moderate religious environment. Instead, the Board of Deputies are concerned that additional choice might make it less likely that parents will choose the religious option for their children. This is actually one of the benefits of school choice: existing providers, including faith schools, should have to work harder to impress parents and keep pupils coming to their schools. The Board of Deputies should not be able to assume that they have a monopoly claim on Jewish pupils in areas where a faith school is established, and nor should the Humanists be able to restrict schools to following their preferred secular curriculum.

Prof. Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, seems to get the idea. He has endorsed the idea of opening free schools that focus on ‘free-thinking’ and scepticism that will not teach any religious values at all. Rather than being a threat to secularism in the UK, free schools offer an opportunity to test out their pedagogical and ethical principles in a way that has never been possible before. Rather than having to persuade politicians to alter an entire school policy, atheists can appeal directly to parents and show them what kind of results (both in terms of knowledge and personal development) humanist ethics can achieve. Meanwhile, faith communities will have to do the same thing, or else lose their pupils to successful innovators.

Indeed, a Civitas report, Disunited Kingdom by David Conway, found that allowing communities to bring up children according to their own values does not represent a threat to social cohesion as the more aggressive secularists have been apt to claim. Instead, it is the compulsory association of communities in comprehensive schools that can more readily provoke inter-communal tension. Allowing schools to project a robust and particular ethos (whether religious or secular) is something to be praised rather than feared.

As a lover of classical music, and a teacher of students who have been expelled from school, I find this outrageous. At the London Boxing Academy Community Project, where I teach mathematics, students complete their work with Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Brahms playing in the background. I find it fills the void of silence, which the students are often otherwise inclined to fill with jibes or meaningless conversation. But equally, I want the students to appreciate the finer things in life. I want them to be able and willing to listen to music that is truly beautiful. To be sure, it was a battle to get them to put up with it in the first place – ignorant students (’that’s gay!’) that they are – but now they have begun to appreciate it. One of the students always requests Luciano Pavarotti’s version of Nessun Dorma.

What Mr Walker is doing, it seems to me, is putting his students off classical music for life. What young person is going to do anything other than hate classical music for the rest of his days after having it forced down their neck as a punishment? It seems to me a wicked thing to do, to associate something that can bring such joy and calm into life, with the punishment, irritation and anger that pervades detention classes. Instead of inviting the students in his world, where Mozart is a source of pleasure, Mr Walker is imposing it, Gradgrind-like, as something alien to the students. That seems to me to be the worst form of education it is possible to provide.