Sound good?
One of the claws in the velvet glove is that the shorter programmes of study will be more academic and written, and practical subjects may not be as practical anymore. This could mean as you progress through the national curriculum and into KS4, music, Arts, CDT, and so on will end up being assessed by a single written paper…
Computer Science is going to be the first subject that is added to the eBacc since it’s introduction, as reported on the BBC here.
I must say congratulations to the computer industries for their lobbying and persistence, I’m happy to see the subject classed as a real science and getting the recognition it deserves. Geeks rejoice. It is pretty sad though for RE and the Arts who are once again snubbed and relegated to the bottom of the class, they have been lobbying just as hard and just as forcibly. I’m guessing this is true evidence that the Government still think the arts and RE are pointless.
In related news Good egg Kenneth Baker has just published his book “14-18 – A New Vision for Secondary Education” which questions the policy of forcing learners to stick to academic subjects until they are 16. I never thought I would agree with him but I quite simply do. Learners with a passion at 14 should be able to specialise…
Now I’m not sure yet on the mechanics of adding computer science to the eBacc and if that means you can drop the other science subjects or mix and match disciplines, so I will check on it and get back to you. I’ve also got Ken Baker’s book on order and will review it as soon as it arrives.
10 For x = 1 to 100000
20 Print “Just what on Earth is he playing at”;
30 next x
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.
I tend not to comment much on HE as there are others on here who have a lot more insight and experience than I. But the last post, at the end of last year, was on free schools and how I thought they had, by and large, not achieved much. A news story on the BBC today reports than the group behind the New College of the Humanities, in effect a rich kids private university, are to have a go at doing the same thing for secondary education.
The story is currently here.
The HE version is headed by a gang of well known professors, authors, ex-politicians and TV personalities and is recognisable by charging £16,000 a year as opposed to the usual £9,000. They can get away with it at HE because their degrees are ‘franchised’ from a different university and they don’t have to go through the rigmarole of setting up their own quality systems, they use their parent’s systems and procedures. In effect a private arm of a university with big name lecturers turning up once in a blue moon. The £16K doesn’t surprise me though. If you look at the fees charged by overseas establishments you might be surprised. I heard recently of Berklee School of Music being $60,000… not sure if that’s a year or for the entire course though.
The thought of a secondary school version of it makes me uncomfortable because what we’re basically doing is setting up a private school, not a free one. Setting up a private school is fine, if that is what you say you are doing, but setting one up with public money and calling it free when it is anything but, sounds like fraud.
I do still think that the current vision of education is completely flawed and I am desperately worried for learners, the arts, progression and the country as a whole in ten years’ time. I do like the idea of disruptive principles and challenging the curriculum. But there are only going to be rich kids benefitting from this, and that is not fair, honest or helpful.
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.
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?
You may be interested to see that Sir Kenneth Baker is the Chair of the Edge Foundation, there are lots of pics of him at the Six Steps for Change launch on their flickr feed http://www.flickr.com/photos/edgefoundation/ Yes, that Kenneth Baker, tory minister under Thatch, he who gave us “Baker Days”, the National Curriculum and SATs. Having said that though he also deeply understands the vocational world and is doing a great job at Edge. Some Conservatives do understand the real world, I was sorry to see John Hays go from his post in charge of FE and Skills in the last re-shuffle and worry deeply about his replacement.
He’s not my favourite Ken Baker though, that is Kenny Baker, the actor who was inside the R2-D2 costume in Star Wars.
On a similar line to Edge’s initiative is Free Education, http://free-education.org who are trying to wrestle education from the hands of the politicians and are currently fund raising and mobilising. As long as education is in the hands of people who don’t understand it we will never really make any true progress.
All good stuff.
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?
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.
QTS has been a hard won victory for teachers over many years. The “professionalisation” of the industry was something which the unions have been after and also something parents have demanded. Quite right. The thing is though, here’s the thing, the thing that will get the million angry comments and threats of unsubscription, the thing is though, that it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Teachers are not made excellent by having QTS. Many QTS teachers are excellent. Many not-qualified teachers are excellent. Some QTS teachers are awful.
This news item highlights the independent status of academies and kisses bye-bye to the QTS closed shop. A good thing. It also brings in further challenge and threat and pressure onto teachers who are largely doing a brilliant job. A bad thing. You can do this good thing, bad thing for ever though. I’m looking forward to a measured and calm debate on what qualifications truly mean, what are required for what tasks and what skills teachers should have to actually teach. Any chance of that? I doubt it.