Ideas

The Gardener

 Ideas, Inspiration  No Responses »
Apr 022013
 

This was shot in the Autumn of 2012, a season of rain, thunder and floods.  We asked the gardener to tell us about what he likes and dislikes and on some of his philosophical thoughts; he gave us plenty to think about.  I too wish I had someone to do my weeding for me, although I only garden when i am dragged, screaming outside.

With experience and maturity,  the need for meticulous planning disappears.  Someone who knows what they are doing can tell just by walking around and looking what their plans for the day should be.  In our world though, the planning is sometimes taken to be more important than the work itself.

 

Why schools close in snow, but didn’t in 1972

 Ideas  No Responses »
Jan 222013
 

Yesterday was a typical British Winter day with travel chaos, power cuts, abandoned cars and school closures. We all know it happens every year, and we all are pretty fed up with it.  This year though there has been a clamour of complaint against the school closures, after all, they didn’t shut when I was a lad.

This nostalgia is quite tiresome and also, I feel, ignorant of the context.  Schools close for safety reasons.  The safety of the Learners, on the way to the school site and moving around the school site during the day.  Snow fall puts a huge pressure on the one or two school facilities staff to maintain access and safety and snowfall during the day is often impossible to cope with.  Schools also close for the safety of their employees, teachers, dinner staff, administration and support staff and so on.  Everyone is entitled to work in an environment which doesn’t endanger their health.

In 1972 this was exactly the same, so why didn’t schools close then?

In 1972 schools were very local, learners and teachers were pretty much gathered from a catchment area of about a 5 mile radius. In bad weather people could either walk, share cars, or risk a dangerous bus ride or stay at home.  There were some pretty horrible accidents, does no one else remember the fatal school bus crashes in bad weather back in the day? Schools had on site caretaking staff and were generally smaller, they probably didn’t need to formally close because there was always someone close and the least they could do was open a hall for 5-a-side or run the library. We might not know if a school was closed because there was no local communication, if you couldn’t get to the end of the street you stayed at home regardless of whether the school was formally shut or not.  You couldn’t check on the internet, local radio or even phone anyone up.

Then, along came choice and parents were looking to get their children in to schools 10, 20 or 30 miles away.  Teachers also were choosing to travel huge distances. Now a school is not a local resource but a regional one and with every few miles added to the journey the more dangerous it becomes in bad weather. Health and safety is a completely reasonable reason to close any establishment and gung-ho heads who are demanding teachers and children should come in regardless of hazard are guilty of bullying, in my opinion. Let’s get a prosecution and an imprisonment, that should sort the thinking out!

Getting huffy on TV because your child care has broken down is not helping. Back in 1972 the mother was probably at home and there was no child care problem.

The snow is clearing today and normality has returned, work will be caught up, extra homework set and the panic will prove to be unnecessary…. again.

Free schools, just not disruptive enough…

 Ideas  No Responses »
Nov 162012
 

It seems awfully early to be calling this one but it does seem like the free schools initiative has bombed.  Sadly, I’m calling it.  Free schools, just not disruptive enough.

Let me explain.  In the business world, technology and the internet has allowed for businesses to disrupt the traditional.  Companies like Amazon, ebay, Etsy and Ocado have challenged the way we do retail and thrown some marbles under the feet of the dinosaurs.   Its painful stuff to watch but it has also brought benefits to consumers in the form of prices falling, quality of service, convenience and innovation. Having a disruptive force in your sector forces you to be creative and innovate and that should be good for everyone in the longterm.

Of course small independent bookshops will disagree with this view, as would lots of small and rural companies who may have had to close, restructure or be taken over by the largely foreign, non-tax-paying mega corps. Change is always painful.  But if you don’t evolve you don’t survive and the many years of profit taking and sitting on laurels has made lots of industries ripe for a disruptive challenge.

Education has been largely unchanged since the 1950s. It is very cosy, very biased and desperately in need of a rethink.  To my eyes some disruptive challenge would be an excellent thing. Why not have a school that has a school year that is sensibly designed, a curriculum that favours the learner, fosters creativity, employability, the vocational and the academic equally, allows specialism and excellence and doesn’t process learners by age alone?  That sounds like a free school to me.

But that is not what we’ve got.

Free schools seem to have done the complete opposite.  Stifling innovation, fixing the curriculum to the 1950s model, prioritising privilege or faith, damning difference and playing the traditional performance table games. Sadly it’s not innovative at all and has been done before throughout the 60 odd years since the post war reforms, and doesn’t work.  The “free” in free schools just means “free from the council”, or “free from the local area so my precious son/daughter can have the education I had and it worked for me”.

Not one of the new free schools has been a valuable piece of disruptive technology in the education development of the country.  So I’m calling it.

Free schools, a disruptive business model that wasn’t disruptive enough.

Four things…

 Ideas  No Responses »
Nov 132012
 

So what are the four curriculum ‘things’ we need government education departments to be clear on?

1 – The Functional stuff.  How to add up, communicate, operate a computer, calculate the size of a carpet and balance your cheque book… er.. online bank account.

2 – The Social Stuff. The stuff that defines the Englishness, Welshness, Scottishness, Britishness of our society.  This would be Citizenship, Civics, PSHE, Shakespeare, RE and the like.

3 – The Stuff employers want.  This is a little harder but it is the essential stuff that makes learners employable.  It’s more likely to be the likes of project management, customer satisfaction, creativity, attention to detail and problem solving, but might also include some subjects like English, Maths, Science, MFL and so on.  Maybe there are two routes here?

4 – The stuff learners want.  This might be the stuff to get them to FE or HE as well as the stuff that burns their interest and focusses their passion. It might be subjects, maths, physics, chemistry, music and art.  But it might also be engineering, robotics, computer gaming/programming/hacking, agriculture, plumbing or tap dancing.

So what proportion of each and in what school and when?

Saying “no”

 Ideas, Information, Personal Productivity  No Responses »
Oct 242012
 

I heard yet another tail of woe yesterday, a headteacher on the sick 2 weeks before an inspection, deputy and assistant heads in the dark, teaching staff demoralised. Rather sadly, it is a very common story which I hear far too regularly.

To follow the stereotype through I would expect the head to have had a leadership problem, not delegated sufficiently well and not managed the staff.  If this was baseball that would be her error, a stolen base and potential RBIs (hey, its the world series on Wednesday, Detroit versus San Francisco…). But in an organisation like a school the error is often not that easily attributed and I would look at the governors and the deputies as having let the school down as well.

Somewhere along the line someone didn’t say “no” when they should have.

Saying no is one of the hardest things to do in any workplace and something which is accentuated when the management structure is fractured or wobbly.  You should be able to say no without fear of retribution or ridicule.  You should be able to say no with a clear conscience and mutual respect. You should be able to say no, but I bet you can’t.

We are almost hard wired to not be able to do it.  It might be something we were trained out of in our youth, saying no to your parents, for example was not allowed and saying no to your own teacher was also something which would have led to a punishment of some sort.  You can check if you can say no, by doing the “sending food back in a restaurant” test… If the food is slightly cold what do you do?  Put up with it or send it back?  If you can send it back then you have most of the ‘saying no’ tools in your briefcase, if you struggle and would probably choose not to “cause a scene” then we need to do a little more work and go and look at assertiveness, one of my favourite topics.

Assertiveness is the cornerstone of being able to say no and we’ll come back to it in other posts.  You can find quite a lot of excellent material on line already.  It is also one of the best one day training courses you can go on. Crack assertiveness and saying no will follow…

Girls and physics

 Ideas, Policy  No Responses »
Oct 032012
 

I try not to jump onto here and rant about the latest headline, it’s often dodgy information presented in a sensationalist way.  I think this story is a good example of that. Apparently there are no girls studying A level physics, unless you are in a girls’ school.

The thing I want to mention is subjects and gender bias, rather than if this story is true or not.  In my experience it’s not true, I see plenty of girls doing science subjects wherever I go, maybe not enough, but that’s another matter.

What is true though, is that there are many subjects that show gender bias.  I went to a conference on it back in 1996 and I don’t see much change since then. Not enough girls do technology subjects, not enough boys do arts subjects, not enough girls do engineering, not enough boys do healthcare, travel and tourism etc. Despite work and effort though it seems to be a strightforward issue.  So how do you get around it?

Maybe its the subject that is wrong.  Perhaps purist approaches to subjects bring with them a long established and deep settled gender bias.  We can do lots of work on it and try to resolve it, but it doesn’t simply go away for ever. Perhaps if the subject was recast in something that was relevant across the genders the student intake would be equal. Perhaps subjects have had their day and we should be looking at new designations of curriculum, such as problem solving, materials technology, wearable electronics, and the like which bring currency and purpose and newness.  That’s a lot of “perhaps”… I know.

But nevertheless, maybe subjects have had their day.

Tripartite Skills Debate

 Ideas, Policy  No Responses »
Sep 242012
 

I’d like to welcome “No Full Stops in Education” to our team. You will immediately spot that she is far more intelligent than I because she’s keeping her identity secret.  Very wise.  So just to say she’s in a senior position in HE, with a deeply impressive and knowledgable history in education, policy and qualifications behind her. I look forward to her posts.

 

What a summer! I was lucky to be able to watch and attend the Olympics, what a privilege! I am still reflecting on the skills and talents of the athletes; what was it that made these people not only be good enough to get to the Olympics but for some of them to actually  be the best on the day and get either a bronze, silver or gold medal  and a few more than one? This was a celebration of people that had gained skills and became the best in the world.

So what has the DfE learnt from this summer of the excellent displays of vocational and knowledge-based skills in perfect balance? Oh yes, there was some  awkwardness around school playing-field statistics and policy, and competitive sports was being debated again! For me this was an opportunity to say yes, children can benefit from a balance of academic and vocational study, both of which they will need in the work place along with personal skills.

Is the debate for this tripartite of essential skills over as we move into Autumn and the demand for academic rigour is met? Or will the placement of David Laws in the corridors of Sanctuary Building make a difference?

Equivalent

 Ideas  No Responses »
Sep 242012
 

There is one word that has really damaged education over the last few years.  You might think that “rigour” is what I’m talking about, after all no one really understands what it is and can define it. But no, I think it is the word “equivalent”.

I see it all the time. There is a music business course being advertised at the moment which is “equivalent to a degree”.  There are courses being advertised leading to vocational qualifications which are “equivalent to 3 A levels”.  It is a word which is so misused and so misunderstood that we are currently butchering about in the school league tables like Sweeney Todd on the piss. Equivalent has ruined it for everybody.

In the world of business there is a clear understanding of words like “price”, “value”, worth” and “cost”.  We know that a Mars bar is a certain price in a shop, but a different price in a supermarket and a different price to the retailer who bought a big box of them from the cash-and-carry.  We also know that when you really, really want one you might be happy to pay twice the normal price for it.  This is basic economics and its understood and accepted. What is also clear is that Mars Bars have a very close competitor at Lidl that looks the same and tastes the same but is cheaper and called something else.  This product is an “equivalent”.  It looks like a Mars Bar, tastes like a Mars Bar and quacks like a Mars Bar. Equivalent.

Not so straightforward in education.  Is a Media Degree equivalent to a Politics degree? Are 3 Alevels equivalent to an apprenticeship? Is 1 GCSE in Maths equivalent to a Vocational qualification in carpentry? When you are building a house, of course, a carpentry qualification is far more valuable than a politics degree.  So does that make them equivalent, or is it that we just don’t understand ”price”, “value”, worth” and “cost”? I don’t think the answer is to get rid of everything because we cant express it as an equivalent of something else.

In English secondary schools at the moment, they are defining equivalent in terms of “Headline Measures” where large qualifications which might take days and years to complete are only valued as “1″ because the equivalence can’t be defined.

To me it seems straightforward.  Vocational qualifications are as valuable as academic ones. It is worth getting this qualification, it will benefit you in your career. The price of studying this subject is you will have less time to study that subject. Let’s stop talking about equivalent and start talking about value.

 

Why the Apple event on Wednesday matters to teachers…

 Ideas, Information, Technology  1 Response »
Sep 102012
 

Not a fanboy.  Please try to keep that in the back of your mind.  Yes, I’m typing this on a Mac, yes I have an iPod.  BUT I have an android phone, several windows PCs and a healthy understanding of the real world.  So please, don’t think this is just a fanboy rant, it’s not.  What it is, is an attempt to point out that we’re at a tipping point in education technology and that the next step, probably made by Apple at their product launch in San Francisco on Wednesday, could change everything.

We’ve had the iPad since the Summer of 2010, an incredibly thin device which uses a touch screen and can fit in an A4 envelope. It can access the web, seamlessly handle your email, manage your media content and a host of other tasks through a wealth of apps. As Steve Jobs used to say it’s “insanely great”. The iPad launched an industry wide rethink of what IT is, what it’s for and who should have it.  Now just about every IT manufacturer has a tablet device, there are a variety of operating systems, and app development is a major growth industry. If you still think IT is sitting behind a massive grey box and a 15 inch CRT monitor or that Microsoft Word and spreadsheets is what the IT curriculum should teach you have missed this revolution completely.

Many schools have ridden the crest of this wave and already brought tablet computers into the classroom.  Schools which issue their learners with their own iPads do exist. Units are being written as we speak allowing you to use tablet computers and mobile devices in art, music and media exams. Companies are already writing apps for classroom teaching, classroom management, assessment and support. The education tablet revolution has started but it it is, at the moment, in the hands of the enthusiast.

It is widely expected that Apple will launch a smaller version of their iPad on Wednesday (I’m not an Apple pundit myself, but Engadget and Macrumors will back me up here) as well as a larger phone, refreshed iMacs and iPods. It could be quite a day. The smaller iPad is a very interesting idea as it comes hot on the heals of the Kindle Fire and a host of other Android based tablet devices.  A smaller screen would bring limitations but it would also bring a cheaper price and perhaps a price so compelling that buying a class set, or indeed one for every learner is financially wise. In the UK you can get an iPad for £329 from the apple store, it’s not the latest model but it’s cheaper than a typical PC laptop. The kindle Fire is £129, just how much would a smaller iPad cost?

The Apple argument will be that the iPad is the only real tablet proposition for schools as there are apps in place, robust app quality control and apps in every subject and for every use. Guaranteed learner engagement in a sleek, brushed aluminium case. Android and the new Windows operating system (which is just around the corner) might argue with that, but the condition is clear.  If Wednesday goes the way the pundits are telling us, we may well be seeing the argument crashing on our desks this week.

If you are not going in this direction, parents will want to know why.

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