Breslin Public Policy

Jeremy Corbyn might be bad for Labour, but is he good for politics? And does the "Corbage" factor say something about how we currently 'do' politics?

2015-10-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

I reproduce below the full text of a piece that I've just written for the New Statesman and which appears on their website. You can view it on the New Statesman's site here, or you can just read on...

Okay, let’s start with my honestly declared position on this. I don’t think that a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn is likely to win in 2020, and winning in 2020 must be the absolute priority if we are to protect the most vulnerable in our society from what will, in effect, be a third Conservative government. Dismantling pubic services and institutions is easier than building them and a third Tory term would see the end of any local authority role in education, a decapitated NHS and the end of the welfare state as we know it. As Labour’s candidate in Hemel Hempstead at the general election and somebody who fought virtually a full-time campaign for the six months leading up to the election, I found no appetite on the doorstep for a profoundly more left wing proposition in precisely the kind of setting where Labour must win if it is to form a government with a decent majority again. A hearty conference speech may stir the souls of delegates but, for me, it doesn’t change this reality.

Nonetheless, all my instincts tell me that for those stunned by Corbyn’s election to simply fight much of what Labour’s new leader stands for, and that his election has delivered, would be utterly the wrong response. The ‘give us (nearly) the price of a pint’ and we’ll give you a vote’ approach to the leadership election was comic in its conception and execution and leads me to the conclusion that our party now has the best democracy that money can buy, but its consequence has produced, or at least could produce, unintended outcomes that stretch beyond the election of “Jezza”, and one of these could be good for politics, even if it is bad for Labour.

Whatever happens to our party over the next few years, Corbyn’s election is another manifestation of the same phenomenon that has given us Nigel Farage on the right, the rise of the SNP in Scotland, and Donald Trump in the US. Domestically, I’m tempted to call it the “Corbage Factor”, a combination of names that is likely to upset each of these arch political opponents in equal measure, but not a suggestion that they either agree on policy or on strategy. Whatever his failings – as judged by this self-confessed recovering Blairite who remains proud of much of what the Blair and Brown governments achieved - Corbyn is a man of integrity and sincerity with none of the nasty selfish nimbyism that is at the core of everything Farage stands for.

The Corbage Factor is not about a congruence of politics or motive; it is about a rejection of the mainstream, same-age, same-suit, production-line politicians that adorn both front benches. The supply lines that gave us John Prescott on the left and Ken Clarke on the right no longer exist; the ladders into modern politics – internship, PPE or something similar (usually at one of three or four elite universities), a post in a think tank and then, without a blink, a safe seat have given us our smartest, best qualified politicians ever, but our most unworldly and disconnected – identikit clones that look and sound the same and whose advisers have given us everything from the Tory’s “Pasty Tax” to Labour’s “Tombstone”. In popular culture, voting has never been more popular – think X-Factor, Strictly and Big Brother - but formal politics itself has never been less respected and, this time, the charge that “you’re all the same” has some truth, at least at first glance.

This is the terrain in which the Corbage Factor flourishes, even if the apparently working class heroes who give it it’s name are anything but that: a prep school boy and a city commodity broker. How ironic that the three SPAD-ish clones – for that is how they came across and are seen as - that Corbyn beat can genuinely claim just the kind of working class backgrounds that the victor might have romantically wanted for himself.

But there is good in this, and a real opportunity for our politics: an enormous number of people in party membership, a level of discussion in pubs and cafes about politics that I can’t previously remember (one that seems to still be flourishing several weeks after his election), a new youthfulness to many in these discussions and a promise to do politics differently. Of course, Cameron and Clegg promised something similar in the Rose Garden five years ago, but nobody expected these inauthentic production line leaders to deliver. With Corbyn they think that this serial rebel might just do so (even if the past few days have shown that he’s not quite sure how to deal with his own rebels). No more the ‘retail offer’ of what I have previously called the SPAD-ocracy. Corbyn’s attraction isn’t just his policy offer; indeed, it might not even be his policy offer - it is the way in which this offer is being made. Middle England might not buy his policy, but some will buy the compassion, kindness and honesty that he has pledged to bring with it.

I still don’t think that this will be enough to help us to win in places like Hemel – a town that by origin should, as I argued in a post-election piece for the New Statesman blog, be Labour to its core. To win in places like Hemel we need to capture the support of those who have been the very beneficiaries of the innovations of Labour governments of the past – free universal health care, comprehensive education, access to good quality social and private housing significantly before the onslaught of middle age – and we need to support the aspirations and hopes of those voters today. I don’t think that Corbyn’s policy offer does that, but his impact on our politics might be a fine legacy, one that none of the other candidates could have delivered.

In sport there is the notion of ‘taking a hit for the team’; in electing Jeremy Crobyn as leader – and through embracing the tens of thousands of predominantly young people previously un-attracted by our over-professionalised and managerialist politics – Labour may have risked consigning itself to opposition for the medium term, but if politics is re-energised in the process, Labour may just have taken a hit for democracy, and given it a boost that is long overdue.

Publication date announced for latest Breslin and Moores guide: Curriculum 2015: your guide to the new qualifications landscape

2015-10-23T17:11:00.001-07:00

Today, again working in partnership with Cambridge University Press, Mike Moores and I signed-off the text for the third of the three guides that we are publishing this autumn with Cambridge University Press. Curriculum 2015: your guide to the new qualifications landscape is a professional development guide for school and college leaders, curriculum and pastoral managers, and classroom teachers in secondary and further education, and is now at the printers.

The publication of this latest guide follows the publication earlier this month of Starting A levels: your guide to exam success, the second of two student and parent guides. At the end of September we published the first student and parent guide, Starting GCSEs: your guide to exam success, making it three texts in a little over three weeks. Both are featured in a previous Breslin Public Policy blog.

Very broadly, the student and parent guides seek to provide a generic induction into examination study, an outline of how the exam system works, an explanation of the key principles behind the recent reforms, and guidance on study skills, revision techniques and exam room strategy, while the teacher guide focuses on the implications of the changes for practitioners in schools and colleges, and related changes to the inspection and funding frameworks and to school and college performance measures.

We are immensely grateful to Michael McGarvey and his team at CUP for commissioning the series and for supporting us throughout, and to members of our Expert Panel who have reviewed earlier drafts of the three publications. The guides mark the launch of CUP's new series of GCSE and A level texts, designed to support the new specifications published this year and emerging over the next three years. You can view their new texts here.

All three publications are available FREE to download, with the first two available now and the latest from Monday 2nd November. You can download Starting GCSEs here and Starting A levels here.

On a personal note, and as I said at the launch of the first two guides, I have loved working with Mike Moores on the books. Mike has been a mentor, guide and friend since the outset of my teaching career and, in writing these books and last year's summary of educational research and policy over the past 40 years for the British Educational Research Association (BERA): 40@40: a portrait of 40 years of educational research through 40 studies, we have fulfilled a longstanding plan to 'get a book out'. Indeed, with this series of three now being published, you could say Breslin and Moores authored books, are a bit like buses - you wait a long time for one, and then several come along at once!

You can download our earlier, and very positively reviewed, BERA text here and, for a limited period you can get hard copies from the BERA office. There are also a limited number of hard copies of our new guides available, but strictly on a 'first come - first served' basis.

We would welcome feedback on the guides and enquiries from schools and colleges willing to trial the texts; feel free to forward this note to friends and colleagues, especially if they have children starting GCSEs or A levels or if they work in secondary or further education!

Our new guides for GCSE and A level students, published by Cambridge University Press, are available to download FREE now!

2015-10-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

Today, working in partnership with Cambridge University Press, we launch Starting A levels: your guide to exam success, the second of three publications to mark the launch of CUP's latest series of GCSE and A level text books. You can find out more about CUP's extensive range of educational resources at: https://www.cambridge.org/ukschools/.

The three 'quick reference' guides - two for students and parents and one, published later this month, for teachers, curriculum and pastoral managers and school and college leaders - are written by Mike Moores and myself, and draw on our extensive experience as teachers and examiners. Copies of the latest guide and its earlier stablemate, Starting GCSEs: your guide to exam success, are available FREE to download.

You can get Starting GCSEs here and Starting A levels here. The third title in the series, our forthcoming teachers and school and college leaders' guide, Curriculum 2015: your guide to the new qualifications landscape, will be available through the Breslin and Cambridge University Press websites in due course.

We are grateful to Michael McGarvey and his team at CUP for commissioning us to produce the guides, and to members of our Expert Panel who have reviewed earlier drafts of the three publications.

On a personal note, as I said at the launch of the first guide last month, I have loved working with Mike Moores on these books. Mike has been a mentor, guide and friend since the outset of my teaching career and, in producing these texts and last year's summary of educational research and policy over the past 40 years for the British Educational Research Association (BERA): 40@40: a portrait of 40 years of educational research through 40 studies, we have fulfilled a longstanding plan to 'get a book out'. Indeed, with this series of three now being published, you could say Breslin and Moores authored books, are a bit like buses - you wait a long time for one, and then several come along at once!

You can download our earlier, and very positively reviewed, BERA text here and, for a limited period you can get hard copies from the BERA office.

We would welcome feedback on the guides; feel free to forward this note to friends and colleagues, especially if they have children starting GCSEs or A levels or if they work in secondary or further education!

Kids Company: a tale of what happens when charismatic leadership meets weak governance?

2015-08-07T16:57:00.001-07:00

Whatever the actual story of the failure of children's charity, Kids Company, the truth is likely to be much more complex than the media fixation with the apparent failings of its erstwhile leader, Camila Batmanghelidjh. Batmanghelidjh is a tabloid editor's or TV producer's dream: forthright, articulate, and spectacularly flamboyant. Most charity CEOs can deliver on the first two of these qualities - they are invariably committed to their cause and knowledgeable about it; few can match Batmanghelidjh on the third: her style, her sheer presence, and her ability to be taken seriously because, rather than in spite of, her very visual refusal to follow the mainstream.

And whatever, the current calamities, and Batmanghelidjh's role or otherwise in creating them, it worked: Kids Company quickly attracted a strong public profile and the kind of celebrity endorsement and 'high net worth donors' that most charities can only dream of, apparently delivering the reach and impact to match. With Batmanghelidjh for competition, many other charity leaders couldn't hope to force their way onto the breakfast TV couch, Newsnight or Question Time, or into No.10. Often, to their irritation, she could.

But a series of problems typically result when organisations (be they charities or corporations, or pubic institutions such as schools or colleges) grow or change quickly, especially where a sole charismatic leader is the driving force. Herein is likely to lie the tale of the failure of a charity that, whatever its flaws, helped to change the landscape in its field, made a wider public much more aware of a set of vital issues around the care and wellbeing of young people, and did a lot of good for a lot of those young people along the way.

Three of these problems are likely to be especially pertinent here: First, as is common when an organisation grows quickly, it fails to develop the systems or culture to support its own growth; second, when it does so under charismatic leadership, there is a tendency to think that no such systems are needed, both by the leader and many of those who follow - a state of affairs that is often almost impossible for insiders to challenge and in which effective succession planning is difficult to put in place; third, those with governance responsibility at Board level (and this is the case in companies, charities and educational institutions) find themselves in awe of the leader they are charged with holding to account. In short, the CEO (or head teacher or college principal) is insufficiently challenged by those with a governance responsibility, with a weakening, and sometimes a failure, of governance the inevitable result.

At this stage we do not know what happened between Camila Batmanghelidjh and her Board of Trustees, but the various issues now being aired in the media - concerns that range from financial mismanagement, to over-dependence on statutory funding, to child safety - are properly those that ought to have attracted Board scrutiny from the outset; the outcome - the charity's closure this week - would suggest any such scrutiny was insufficient. Certainly, this outcome cannot and should not simply be addressed through a narrative that distastefully celebrates the fall of a once-celebrated and quasi-celebrity leader. A failure of governance, and perhaps of a Board in awe of its charismatic leader might provide a more plausible explanation, or at least the starting point for a discussion in which many will find familiarities.

Time for a new approach to education, a long-promised 'great debate' on education and a focus on educational purpose?

2015-06-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

An edited version of my piece on Labour's failure to offer a coherent narrative on education at Election 2015 has just been published on the website of Progress, the progressive think tank aligned to the Labour Party but not part of it. You can access the Progress website at www.progressonline.org.uk, but for ease I reproduce the full piece below:

“Directors of School Standards - I mean, is that it? Is that all Labour can offer on education?” Not my words but those of an experienced and exasperated headteacher at a secondary school in Hemel Hempstead, where I stood in May as Labour’s Parliamentary candidate. I was sitting in his office with the Conservative incumbent, Mike Penning - who was subsequently re-elected - and the candidates from the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP. It was about three weeks before the election and we were there to take part in a school ‘question time’ event for parents and the local community, organised by the school’s AS level Citizenship Studies students.

The head in question ought to have been a sympathiser, as should the senior staff members at two other Hemel schools who offered similar unsolicited appraisals of Labour’s education offer. In fairness, he gave us all a hard time; not so much “you’re all the same” as “prove to me, you’re not all the same”. And, in a world of homogenised politics and same-size politicians delivered to us through the slip stream of PPE, internship and a stint or two in the think tanks, it’s a fair challenge. Labour’s offer on education, and I say this as a teacher by profession who has spent thirty years in the system, was unimaginative to say the least, and all the poorer because we had had five years to think it up.

What sort of stuff did we put forward? No more than thirty in a class in primary schools, something that we’d pretty much delivered in the post 1997 years and which remains broadly in place, the afore mentioned school standards directors, qualified teacher status for all (surely, a given rather than a ground-breaking policy), a poorly explained Technical Baccalaureate that promised to reinforce rather than bridge the academic-vocational divide, an obligation to make students study English and Maths to 18, and a consumerist offer on childcare and student fees that did little to address how each system works - and its inequities. The foregoing ‘long’ campaign had seen reference to a clunky approach to teacher registration that felt like another device for policing the profession, the usual strategy-free platitudes on standards, a promise to stop the creation of new free schools, and to tweak the current A level reforms.

Talk of a new School Leadership Institute, support for the notion of a College for Teaching and plans for Master Teacher Status sounded like a direct rehash of three (good) post 1997 innovations - the National College for School Leadership, the General Teaching Council and Advanced Skills Teachers. Only the pledge to maintain education spending in real terms stood out, but, frankly, this wasn’t believed on the doorstep or in the staffroom: “Come on, you’re all going to cut spending, aren’t you?”

For many in education, politicians on all sides are starting in the wrong place. Educationalists at every level have had two generations of largely technocratic reforms - some good, some less so - but no discussion of why we do what we do, and no real attempt to involve professionals and parents - or students and their future employers - in any discussion.

From a Labour standpoint this is all the more galling because, in one of the most recognised addresses from a Labour premier, James Callaghan - speaking at Ruskin College, Oxford in October 1976 - had famously sparked calls for a “great debate” on the future of education”, although he never used the phrase itself. Almost twenty years ago, in the run-up to the 1997 election, I contributed a chapter to an Association of Teachers and Lecturers sponsored collection, Take Care, Mr Blunkett, entitled, Twenty years on – the great debate that never was. I could have given this piece almost the same title. Labour progressives should spark and lead that debate and do so now.

The focus of our conversation should not be on how GCSEs, AS and A levels are structured, whether fees are reduced or how many we have in a class, or even how we feel about performance tables and Ofsted. This is absolutely vital stuff but it should flow from our debate, not precede it.

Critically, discussion should start with a focus, as Callaghan did almost forty years ago, on educational purpose and it should involve education’s many stakeholders asactive participants. We should start by asking, “what do we want”, in the phraseology of the great British educationalist Richard Pring, “the educated 19 year old to look like?” Whatever their perceived ability, what qualities, skills, knowledge and values do they need to prosper as individuals, and what characteristics do weneed them to have to prosper as a society? Literacy and numeracy, yes. But what about physical and mental wellbeing, self-confidence and citizenship, creativity and compassion, drama and dance, enthusiasm and enterprise, an appreciation of the arts and humanities, an exposure to professional and vocational learning? And if we can’t deliver all of this, let’s discuss priorities, and how we can be creative in our approach to these.

And, finally, let’s wonder aloud about the kinds of schools, colleges, training providers and universities – and the kinds of professional – that we need to deliver our agreed priorities. Education, Education, Education? Yes, emphatically. But more than this: what kind of education, when, where, for whom, and with what purpose?

So, what is great leadership? Some thoughts inspired by the Windsor Leadership Trust

2015-06-02T04:28:00.000-07:00

I've just responded to an e-mail from the Windsor Leadership Trust (http://www.windsorleadership.org.uk/windsor-programme) who are marking their 20th anniversary by compiling a series of essays and shorter pieces on leadership to be published later this year.

It's a really valuable initiative from a great organisation. I've responded to their invitation to talk about leadership in 200 words. Go on, why don't you do likewise, whether you consider yourself a leader or not? And if you don't fancy 200 words, you can offer your thoughts in 20!

Here is my 200 word submission:

Leadership is lonely but collaborative, charismatic but systematic, strategic but opportunistic. Leadership is about being in control but having the confidence to let go, about taking risks while ensuring the wellbeing of others, about the crossroads between courage and commonsense. Leadership means understanding the tensions and contradictions in leadership itself, rather than seeking to airbrush these from existence. Most of all, leadership is untidy and messy, utterly refusing to accept the order and structure of the textbooks sold in its name, but always willing to learn from these sources, and every other.

Great leadership is about creating independence rather than requiring dependence, about enabling people to fulfill their potential but as part of a more widely shared dream, about building teams that pull together rather than fall apart, about sharing success without always getting the deserved credit for it. It’s about the ability to respond to challenges while maintaining direction, about the willingness to consider alternatives, about doing the dull stuff too.

Maybe we should stop seeking great leaders – a search destined to end in disappointment and disabling to us all. Maybe we should focus on acknowledging great acts of leadership. Maybe we are all capable of such acts. Maybe.

So, where did it all go wrong? My reflections on being Labour's candidate in Hemel Hempstead

2015-05-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

It is almost a year since I've posted on the Breslin Public Policy blog, but with the election behind us, the business about to be relaunched and my adventure as Labour's candidate in Hemel Hempstead complete, if ultimately unsuccessful, I thought that I'd share my thoughts on the campaign, as published on the New Statesman website yesterday. You can read the full piece here: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/candidates-lessons-hemel-hempstead

In it I offer a candidate’s eye view of the challenges facing Labour in the wake of our May 7^th defeat. As a former CEO at the education and participation charity the Citizenship Foundation, I connect arguments about the rebuilding of Labour as a mass party with the broader issue of renewing democracy. In particular, I explore the thorny issue of how Labour combines a message about challenging inequality and poverty with one that is positive about supporting the aspirations of many who should or could be Labour supporters. Set in the specific context of a post war new town, one in which Labour has had recent electoral success, I pose questions about how Labour has lost the ‘affluent worker’ and how it might re-win this group, and constituencies like Hemel Hempstead, in the years ahead.

Enjoy the read, and welcome back to the Breslin Public Policy blog - the long silence is over!

Ofsted herald new focus on "the curriculum, SMSC and governance" and "preparing pupils for life in modern Britain"

2014-07-10T23:13:00.001-07:00

The following note - about the soon-to-be-published inspection framework - has just been circulated to inspectors who have been told to expect summer training in anticipation of a September launch:

"The revised (inspection) handbook will ... place a greater importance on the curriculum, SMSC development and governance, with the expectation that inspectors really understand how schools are tackling these areas, developing their pupils and preparing them for life in modern Britain. Much more robust evidence will need to be gathered so inspection teams are in the position of being able to make secure judgements on these essential aspects of the evaluation schedule."

Those of us who have campaigned for SMSC, Citizenship, PSHE and Community Cohesion or who have warned about the risk of an emerging governing gap in our schools in the Academy and Free School era will allow ourselves a wry smile; the long overdue focus on "preparing (pupils) for life in modern Britain" is precisely what effective Citizenship Education is all about.

Perhaps Michael Gove might now acknowledge that marginalising areas like Citizenship in the curriculum and Community Cohesion in the inspection framework was an error of judgement and policy. He could go further and recognise that through building inclusion in our classrooms and our school communities, these areas of activity are not a distraction from the achievement, standards and school improvement agendas; they are the foundations - the social glue - that creates the environment in which the achievement of a much wider group can and should be built.

Tackling the rise of the "SPAD-ocracy"

2014-06-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

We reproduce below a letter from Tony Breslin published in The Guardian on Monday 23rd June:

How ironic that in a week when Michael Gove has become the latest politician to disown the outpourings of a (former) Special Adviser, or "SPAD" (Gove forced to disown senior adviser after attack on Cameron, 17 June), the Guardian’s investigations reveal that almost half of Labour's candidates in key marginals are “ex-special advisers, party workers, researchers, lobbyists or former MPs” (Labour picks Westminster insiders for key seats, 18 June).

The emergence of what might be termed the "SPADocracy" confirms the absence of meritocracy and enshrines an inequality of access and influence at the heart of our politics; it is bad for democracy.

While the rise of the so-called "professional" politician has brought some benefits, the dominance of the SPADocrats across both front benches and beyond leaves Parliament more cut-off and remote than ever, and confines policymaking to a clique of bright young things who know everything and anything except the price of a loaf of bread.

Dr. Tony Breslin

Director

Breslin Public Policy Limited

Sport in schools: levelling the playing field

2014-06-20T02:40:00.002-07:00

Another day, another set of unfavourable comparisons between the state and independent sector, but if ever there was a playing field that needs to be levelled, it is the sports pitch. During London 2012 I had the privilege of working on the Get Set education project, a multi-faceted programme developed by Nick Fuller and his education team at LOCOG. One of my tasks was to prepare a set of 13 case studies, spanning the whole of the UK and highlighting great practice in primary, secondary and special schools. Our focus was on how these schools had used London 2012 to engage their pupils and their communities in sport and in extolling the kind of Olympic and Paralympic Values that Michael Gove might now, post Trojan Horse, want to define as 'British'.

I don't know if Ofsted have picked up on the resultant publication, Get Set Case Studies, in their report - like most busy practitioners, I'm forced to live off the headlines. Whether the inspectorate did fall up on our paper or not, every opportunity should be used to highlight the great work at these state schools: castigation has its place but is not always the best route to improvement - the kind of detailed exemplars that we provide, across over 50 pages, might offer a different way forward, notably for those schools keen to learn how success might be achieved.

That said, Sir Michael Wilshaw is right to point out the shortcomings of sports provision in too many of our state schools, right to point out the link between sporting success and academic achievement and right to say that this is not all about funding and facilities (even if the playing fields of Eton, Rugby and Harrow are credited not just with the production of our sporting superstars but many of our politicians, our captains of industry and our military elite), but he is wrong to allow these observations to contribute to an ongoing narrative that continually paints the state sector as always the poor relation.

Yes, too few of our Gold Medals were won by state educated competitors and the worlds of cricket and rugby union, in particular, are sports in which state educated pupils are under represented but we do need to celebrate those state schools - and those inspiring state school based PE teachers - that have given us Ennis, Farah, Pendleton, Rutherford and many others.

The School Sports Partnerships that Michael Gove so hastily abolished on coming to office enabled state schools and state school based practitioners, often without the best facilities, to share resources and coaching expertise and to work with local independent schools and colleagues based there. Perhaps Mr Gove could make a start on the national strategy that Mr Wilshaw rightly calls for by reversing this decision, and re-energising those partnerships while the memory of London 2012 is still fresh and while many of the relationships that formed the partnerships remain in place. That might level this particular playing field, and give competitive sport and high quality physical education its proper place at the heart of every child's education.

From 'Trojan Horse' to 'Great Debate': time to decide what we want from our education system?

2014-06-10T02:33:00.001-07:00

There is an inevitability about the Trojan Horse tale that ought to act as a warning to all involved in education reform, especially those promoters of freedom who wish to release schools and their governing bodies from an onerous state, casting them free to flourish in the 'big society'.

Let's just look at the sequence of recent educational reforms: first, promote a reductionist view of the curriculum in which the wider social purpose of schooling is ignored or marginalised as a distraction from the standards agenda (rather than as the means of building the inclusion from which greater achievement for a wider number might grow); second, 'set schools free' from what remains of this reduced curriculum as part of a broader package of freedoms that come bundled with academy status; third, allow local authorities, over a period that dates from the early 1990s, to wither from their role as the builders of bridges between local schools and some sort of check on standards (not that they were every especially good at this); fourth, do all of this against the backdrop of a mantra of parental choice, a model that leaves the communities with the lowest levels of social and cultural capital to fend for themselves without support, sometimes against those who might not act in their best interests. Finally, and just for good measure, remove Ofsted's responsibility to inspect statutory duties, such as the responsibility to promote community cohesion - a duty inspected until Michael Gove deemed this unnecessary in 2010. The introduction of the duty had dated from the last Government's response to the London bombings. As I and a group of colleagues at the Citizenship Foundation discovered a few years back, it had begun to have just the impact that Michael Gove now seeks. Our findings are summarised in a report for CFBT, School Leaders, Community Cohesion and the Big Society.

So, where from here? Well, as Joe Hallgarten and his colleagues argued in a recent RSA report, Schools with Soul, and, from a different standpoint, as former Labour Premier James Callaghan called for almost forty years ago, let's have a debate about the purpose of education; yes, grades matter (and they matter most to those in our poorest communities) but schooling has a wider purpose, and in a publicly funded education system, every young person has the right to a broad and balanced education that prepares them to succeed as employees and thrive as citizens in a diverse, multi-cultural and multi-faith society. And, if we're going to place parent power, school freedom and autonomous governance at the heart of the reform programme, let's make sure that we have the support and development structures that enable those who step forward into governance and related roles in this new landscape to develop and apply the considerable skill-set required to do the job effectively. Let's also be clear about where any constraints on this freedom sit. What do we want our schools to be free from? What do we want them to be free to do? What demands do we make on all schools, whatever their intake or objectives? And what support systems will schools, especially those serving our most marginalised communities, need if they are to deliver on these shared system-wide responsibilities?

Finally, let's take a long hard look at our inspection system. There can be little doubt that Ofsted has played its part in improving practice in our schools over the past twenty years, but as Sir Michael Wilshaw has recently conceded, a service delivered by third party out-sourcing businesses is hardly one that is easy to quality assure. And the tumble from 'outstanding' to 'special measures' that some of the Birmingham schools have experienced within the space of a year or so underlines this point, raising questions about the reliability of the inspection system across the board in the process.

These questions about how we inspect schools need to be addressed, but let's start with the question of what schools are for, and what statutory duties we require all schools to fulfil. Our schooling system, and our public services more broadly, ought to be open to public scrutiny. But school leaders, classroom teachers, governors, and parental and community activists have a right to know what is expected of them, and what they are being scrutinised for; those who feel wounded by the Trojan Horse inspections have a point about shifting goalposts. Perhaps it is time to redefine where these goalposts sit, and to do so not on the whim of ministers at the heart of a moral panic but through a public debate about educational purpose, and the freedoms and constraints that we need to deliver whatever we decide this might be.

Why UKIP might have done us all a favour

2014-05-24T06:07:00.000-07:00

None of the main parties can be complacent about UKIP's support in this week's local and European elections and none should presume it will simply disappear. This is about much more than migration or Europe; UKIP are the lightening conductor for a public mood that sees nothing for it in a disconnected, professionalised politics staffed by the bright and young but hopelessly unworldly children of the think tanks. It is hard to find a frontline politician in any of the main parties that has worked outside the Westminster Village, or it's own weird suburbia.

This separation of politics from everyday life is accentuated by the tendency of these frontbenchers to surround themselves with 'Special Advisers' and think tankers who come from the same exceptionally narrow demographic and through the same career path as themselves and who, as Ed Miliband may now belatedly realise, can't tell you the price of a loaf of bread. The current one dimensional track to a Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet post (you know: Politics, Philosophy and Economics at one of three or four universities, followed by a Westminster internship, a few years in a favoured think tank and appointment as a Special Adviser) is no longer cutting it. It emphases that 'politics' is another world and, more importantly, excludes those beyond its boundaries from playing their part.

This kind of politics explains how we got to a place where the leadership of the governing party met in a university drinking club and the leadership of the opposition was contested by two brothers. Do we need any further evidence that the routes into politics are too narrow, too disconnected? Where in modern politics do we find the former business leaders, trade unionists, teachers and journalists for whom politics is a second career, informed and inspired by the experience of a first on the 'outside', in factory, office or community, in industry, commerce or the third sector?

The problem is especially acute for Labour precisely because of its claim (and genuine aspiration) to represent what the PR people now demand we call 'hard working families'. We need to reopen and broaden the routes into politics and engage individuals and communities in discussions about the kind of politics and communities that we need; as we've seen in these elections, if we don't, UKIP will step into the gap.

Of course, Labour did better in London, but national politicians would do well to remember that London is not typical of the country as a whole. It's time to look again at how we 'do' politics, and from where we recruit our politicians. If this week's UKIP surge makes us do that, it might have done us all a favour; let's wait and see.

Research and the Teaching Profession: important new report launches today

2014-05-16T16:30:00.001-07:00

Today marks the launch of the Final Report of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and Royal Society of Arts (RSA) inquiry into the the role of research in teachers' initial and continuing education.

The report, Research and the Teaching Profession: building the capacity for a self-improving education system, which I was asked to draft for the Inquiry's Steering Group, argues for a renewal of teachers' professional identity - one which has research literacy and research engagement at its heart. It contends that a profession equipped in this way is required if the UK's education systems are to develop and sustain the capacity for self-evaluation and self-improvement.

Focused on teachers in Early Years, Primary, Secondary and Further Education, the report offers recommendations on a range of issues for policymakers and public agencies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Taken together these recommendations are designed to encourage the development of a research-rich culture in schools and colleges, settings in which practitioner-led research informs and renews practice in the classroom and beyond.

The report also calls for a stronger relationship between teachers and school leaders involved in research in different schools and colleges, and between educational practitioners and members of the wider research community, based in universities and elsewhere.

Read the full report at the BERA or RSA websites.

Schools with Soul: time to give SMSC its proper place at the heart of the school improvement and transformation agenda?

2014-03-12T17:02:00.001-07:00

Although attending to the “Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural” development of the pupils and students in their care has been a statutory responsibility for primary and secondary schools since 1944, what counts as ‘SMSC’ has had, as the Citizenship Education expert Ted Huddleston has noted, various iterations over the years. At different points the initials and emphases have changed and in different periods the nuances and meanings ascribed to terms such as “social”, “moral”, “spiritual” and “cultural” have meant different things. In addition, particular themes have periodically emerged that might either be seen as a legitimate part of the wider terrain that SMSC occupies, or which have significant implications for those working on this terrain. For example, in recent years initiatives focused on Citizenship Education, Employability, Values Education, Resilience and Character Education have all come to the fore, and all have a contribution to make to the broader and evolving SMSC agenda. Whatever its precise articulation, though, SMSC has been viewed as a good thing. The challenge for policymakers, school leaders and practitioners – and all who work with them – has not been its ‘worthiness’; it has been the fact that it’s meaning has rarely been scrutinized or ‘nailed down’, either by schools or those charged with supporting or inspecting them.

This has been the concern of the authors of a new RSA report on this issue published this week, a team led by the RSA’s Director of Education Joe Hallgarten and which I have been proud to support as part of a broader advisory group, one that has included heads, middle leaders, classroom practitioners and others who have an engagement in the broader SMSC enterprise, including a range of national figures in the field.

Nobody would suggest running a school that does not attend to the social, moral, spiritual and cultural well-being of young people but giving SMSC its proper place in a culture dominated by ‘tests, targets and tables’ has proved especially difficult for school leaders and all who work with them. Schools with Soul reminds us of the costs of failing to do so, as have the efforts of those concerned with what might be broadly termed the wider social curriculum over many years. Schools with Soul calls into question not just the unintended consequences of the justified aspiration that every young person should achieve their full academic potential but the very way in which we organize schooling, and secondary schooling in particular. You can read about Schools with Soul and download the full report and associated papers here: Schools with Soul

The dominance of the subject curriculum and of a very particular view of what constitutes a school ‘subject’ has continually marginalized (and sometimes ridiculed) so-called ‘newer’ subjects (think sociology, media studies, citizenship) while confining anything that cannot be packaged so neatly (think PSHE in its many iterations) to the often-lost world of cross-curricular themes or the margins of tutor time, in there with the register and the homework diaries - ‘everywhere but nowhere’ as I have been heard to claim on more than one occasion. So it has been for SMSC, and with the old hierarchy of knowledge firmly re-established in the new English Baccalaureate and a firm commitment to developing teachers’ subject knowledge (that’s certain teachers and particular subjects), the prospects might not look good for something as broad and apparently undefined as SMSC often has been.

That’s why this new report does three really important things: first, it makes us pause for thought about the purpose of education – grades are vital (I know, I went to a secondary school in the 1970s where four of us in my year group got five or more A-C grades) but so are the qualities and skills of confidence, character and resilience and dispositions that are pro-social, culturally-diverse and values-rich. Forget that and we end up with the ‘greed is good’ culture that has given us the banking crisis, the debacle of the MPs’ expenses scandal and the ‘have it all’ attitudes of celebrity culture, whatever the grades achieved by the protagonists.

Second, it proposes that we put the educational reform bandwagon on hold while we reflect on what the purpose of our educational endeavours might be. As Professor Richard Pring asked a few years ago in the report of the Nuffield Foundation’s Review of 14-19 Education, “what does it mean to be an educated 19 year old at the beginning of the 21^st century?” Seventeen years ago I published a short chapter (in a book anticipating Labour’s 1997 landslide entitled Take Care, Mr Blunkett), that reflected on James Callaghan’s Ruskin Speech and carried the heading “25 years on: the great debate that never was”. Schools with Soul makes it clear that that debate remains to be had, and that it remains as important as ever; we should take the report as our starting point.

Third, it offers strategies that teachers and school leaders might use to bring the distinctly un-soft skills at the heart of the SMSC agenda to reality in our classrooms and our school communities. Everywhere but nowhere is not good enough; thankfully, the report offers some pointers that might be of benefit not just in addressing the ‘non-subject’ components of SMSC (and, yes, the subject curriculum can play its part here) but in supporting other areas afflicted by the curse of cross-curricularity: work-related learning, students’ physical and mental health, careers education and guidance, employability and so on.

The report’s deeper message is simple though: attending to the social development and personal wellbeing of students, which is what good SMSC does, should never be an after-thought or add-on from the ‘fluffy corner’, to be dealt with when we’ve met our targets numeracy and literacy, or whatever. It must sit at the heart of school improvement and transformation strategies designed to close the cap, raise attainment and build inclusion, especially in our most-challenged schools and our most deprived communities.

SMSC is not a distraction from the ‘standards’ agenda; it is the new standards agenda, the new standard by which we should judge the success of our educational efforts – attainment and achievement flow from inclusion and wellbeing; they do not precede it. Requires improvement is the report’s clarion call: without attending to their social, moral, spiritual and cultural development – and their physical and mental wellbeing – our attempts to ensure that all of the young people that we work with fulfill their potential are surely destined to failure.

High grades or the whole child: a false choice

2013-12-13T14:08:00.000-08:00

The responses to both the PISA statistics and the Chief Inspector's report are depressingly familiar, with those who believe that more assessment will drive up achievement (usually on the policymaker side of the fence) cast against those (usually on the practitioner side) who claim our children are over-assessed and over-tested.

This false divide has pervaded the education debate since the 1960s. Schooling has to be about more than just assessment and assessment has to be about more than SATs in primary schools and GCSEs in secondaries. But there is an important role for these forms of examination, partly because children and parents deserve feedback on progress, and partly because the exchequer needs to know whether substantial public investment brings a worthwhile return for children, young people, their parents and society as a whole; testing provides one means of measuring this.

We need to have the 'great debate' about the purpose of education that James Callaghan called for at Ruskin College back in 1976 and we need to decide on, as Professor Richard Pring argues, what qualities we want the educated young person, of any background or ability, to have by the close of statutory schooling. As any successful leader in any sector will point out, we need to decide on purpose and objectives, then the means of achieving them. In education, we endlessly tweak the means without having the courage to address the discussion about purpose and objectives. How are we to achieve educational success without deciding first on what it looks like?

And what might it look like? That would be to pre-empt the debate, but let us decide that we can 'have our cake and eat it'. The best schools, state and independent, primary and secondary, are not afraid of formal, traditional assessment. They embrace it but it has no more than its proper place; they do not allow it to become 'high stakes' for the young people in their care and they align it with projects that develop the whole child and the young person as an effective citizen; they put as much focus on the development of confidence and character, on sporting achievement, on having the confidence to speak out in public in an informed way, on the opportunity to benefit from work and community experience, and, of course, on the sciences, the arts, the humanities and creativity.

Critically, they do not make false choices between endless examinations or developing the whole child, between an academic and a vocational curriculum, between maximising attainment and building inclusion. We should be informed by their example, not by spurious comparisons with completely different societies, some of which have their own educational challenges in spite (or because?) of their PISA success. The headlines might suggest that Sir Michael Wilshaw sits squarely on one side of these divides. His record as a Headteacher in Hackney and Newham suggests that he struck a better balance. That is the demand we should make of our schools today.

A summary of this post was published as a Letter in the Evening Standard on Friday 13th December 2013

Citizenship, a lost bag and an act of kindness: a good news story

2013-08-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

It's never been the stuff of this blog to go 'personal' but I must relate this story of human kindness, honesty and optimism. Just in case you've put down the newspaper or turned away from the rolling news with its tales of dishonesty, dishonour and the rest - a world where nobody can be trusted, everybody has their snout in the trough and integrity is forever the victim of greed (be it the banker, the politician, the tax evader or the benefits cheat).

Today we got back from our holiday - a lovely week in Madeira, in which we'd experienced nothing but friendliness from everybody we met. It was a lovely journey back even if we were met by a rainy Monday afternoon - our bags came straight off the belt (always a sign that things are going well). We grabbed them and the connecting bus to London Luton Airport's APCOA mid-term car park. We were home in an hour and all seemed well until we realised, an hour later, that our gadget bag (laptop, iPad, kindle, camera, the boys' 3DS consoles and their games - you get the picture) was missing. I never thought that I knew so many expletives or that I could utter them so quickly: £3,000 or more of kit and a whole lot more personal and professional history, up in smoke. I'd left the bag behind - either on the connecting bus, at the bus stop or by the car.

Well, the world is not as dark as the papers and the TV tell us; somebody spotted the bag - a lovely woman, who left a message that I only picked up after I'd started heading back to the airport. She had checked the contents, realised their value and found my mobile number on a Breslin business card. She handed the bag in to the APCOA team, who also left a message, one that I only picked up when I arrived back at the airport.

People at airports are in a hurry, rushing to catch a flight or to get home - we were hurrying to get home, but also, and critically, to get into the car and out of the rain. I don't know whether she was intent on catching a flight or getting home or, like us, just out of the rain but the heroine in this story didn't rush - or at least stopped rushing - to check the contents of our bag, to find our contact details, to make the phone call and to walk the length of the car park - and airport car parks are long - to hand our bag in; an act of kindness, generosity, honesty - everything that we are told day-in and day-out has vanished from our society; it hasn't and the lovely man in the car park office told me that similar expensive kit and personal valuables are handed in every day.

Some readers of this blog will know that I spent nine years leading a wonderful charity called the Citizenship Foundation; the core belief that drove - and sill drives - that great organisation is that the prosperity of society depends not simply on GDP but on the active committed, effective engagement of individuals as citizens. By this way of thinking, society needs people who are, to draw on the title of the Foundation's primary school programme - "go-givers" not just "go-getters". The woman who handed in our bag is a go-giver - she may be a go-getter too and there's no harm in that but I have no way of knowing. But I do know that she took 30 or perhaps 45 minutes out of her airport rush for somebody, a family, she didn't know. And, she is not alone; as other forgetful users of Luton's airport car parks can gratefully testify.

Perhaps its not just about building the 'big' or 'good' society but realising, in spite of the headlines, that there is much to reaffirm about the society we already have, albeit that we can't and shouldn't duck the responsibility of working together to 'fix' the bits that are not working. I suspect far more people would have given the bag in than made off with it, as the popular narrative might have us believe.

I'm relieved that citizenship is alive and thriving, and that kindness, generosity, integrity, trust and honesty are as well; I'm also relieved to have that laptop, my wife's i-pad and the boys' 3DS consoles. Phew, you bet I am!

Child poverty: what do young people have to say about it?

2013-07-16T05:46:00.000-07:00

Breslin Public Policy release new paper on child poverty

We are pleased to announce the publication of our new paper, A Series of Doors: young people talking about the experience of poverty, based on work originally undertaken for the Office of the Children's Commissioner, as part of their response to the government consultation on child poverty conducted earlier this year.

We reproduce the News Release that we have just issued and commend the views of the young people to all with an interest in this area.

News release

For Immediate Release: 16 July 2013

New publication

“A Series of Doors”

Young people talking about the experience of poverty

A Breslin Public Policy paper[1] informed by work carried out for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner[2] as part of its response to a government consultation on child poverty[3]

Poverty is like a series of doors. One door is being poor, another door is being autistic, another door is being a young carer; another door is living in a bad area… The more doors there are, the more keys are needed to open them and people don’t care enough to make the effort to open them all

As this comment demonstrates, children and young people who experience poverty can be highly articulate and insightful about their lives, but their voices are too seldom heard, especially by those in power. At the invitation of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, we brought a group of these young people together in Westminster to help inform policy. In this paper their voices are given prominence. They reflect on the issues that matter to them: Money, Access to services, Education, Employment, Community and home life, Aspirations, Access to transport, Networks.

Dr. Maggie Atkinson, Children’s Commissioner for England, said:

Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child and young person has the right to express his or her views, and to have those views heard and taken seriously. That right is hugely important for those who live in poverty and on the margins of society. This document provides a powerful example of the fundamental and essential job of amplifying their voices

Dr Tony Breslin, Director of Breslin Public Policy, said:

The voices of children and young people continue to be excluded from debate about their experience. Much of the literature on child and family poverty is pertinent and incisive, but comparatively little of it presents the voices of first hand experience

These young people were thoughtful, articulate, provocative and insightful. They contributed their views in an inspiringly positive and participative spirit, and it was a privilege to work with them. Their energy and honesty deserves close and sincere support from all who have the power to help make a difference to their lives

Kate Green, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty, said:

This paper is a wake-up call to all of us charged with the responsibility of addressing the challenges of poverty as experienced by children and young people. Too often, we conduct an adult-to-adult debate that ignores where poverty hits hardest - on children and young people

The paper, and the associated report to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, can be accessed through the links in the Endnotes below.

Contacts

Tony Breslin, Breslin Public Policy: 07973 885 915; tony.breslin@breslinpublicpolicy.com

Kevin Harris, Breslin Public Policy: 0773 042 9993; kevin.harris@breslinpublicpolicy.com

We will be pleased to arrange access to young people who participated in the event and are prepared to speak about their experience of poverty.

[1] The paper, A Series of Doors, is available at:

http://www.breslinpublicpolicy.com/images//ASeriesofDoors.pdf

[2] A Series of Doors is based on an event held in February 2013 organised by Breslin Public Policy for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. It uses direct quotations from the children and young people recorded on the day, together with some comments from supporting adults who accompanied them, and written contributions made by the participants during a specially designed workshop activity on the day.

[3] The report produced by Breslin Public Policy for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, Young People Talking About Poverty, is available at:

http://www.breslinpublicpolicy.com/images//YoungPeopleTalkingAboutPoverty.pdf

Ed Miliband and the re-building of trust in politics

2013-07-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

Today's speech by Ed Miliband is powerful stuff and an honest, appropriate response to Falkirk but this is not just about 'Labour and the Unions'. Below I share more of my personal experience than is usual on this 'company' blog - experience of Labour's Parliamentary selection process itself. I've framed it as an 'open letter to Ed Miliband'; in fact, it's an open letter to all in politics...

Trust in Politics and the selection of Labour Party Parliamentary Candidates

An open letter to Ed Miliband

Dear Ed

We worked together when you were Minister for the Third Sector at the Cabinet Office and I was CEO at the independent charity, the Citizenship Foundation. I have been a member of the party since the age of 16 and have long held a commitment to the importance of political engagement in all its guises.

My own recent experience of the Labour Party's parliamentary selection process has, though, been extremely disheartening - not because of the behaviour of some trade unions (which you are right to tackle and challenge) but because of the behaviour of a local party so determined to install a favoured candidate (one named as such on the ‘inside’ from the beginning) that it failed to long list a range of talented candidates on the grounds that it had been overwhelmed with applications. It subsequently provided local members with a shortlist of two (which hardly amounts to a 'list' at all), who then selected the long-tipped individual, the one that the local party had sought to 'protect' from challenge throughout the process. This individual may prove to be a terrific candidate but they deserve to pass the test of a fair, rigorous process and others deserve the right to enter the contest.

My request from the local party for feedback was refused (I was told that detailed notes were not taken and no scoring mechanism was used – it seemed that standard equal opportunities practice had yet to influence the process of selecting parliamentary candidates, at least in some local Labour Parties) and discussions with the regional party proved fruitless because the local party had, I was assured, 'followed the (now revised) rules'. Conveniently, this selection was held under the ‘old’ process, one that was revamped earlier this year.

My point is that the commitment to deal with those who seek to unfairly install candidates on behalf of trade unions (while welcome) is insufficient if it is not matched with a commitment to reform local party selection itself, to tackle local (albeit declining) fiefdoms and to end that other privileged (and increasingly dominant) route into parliament - from intern to think tank to special adviser to safe seat.

Open primaries may or may not be an answer (and I think that it is right to explore their potential) but, as you argue, a better and more open, more inclusive politics certainly is. As somebody who has worked on the ‘project’ of building trust in politics for over a decade and who now works as a public policy analyst committed to opening up access to politics, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues with you and to assist the party's efforts in this regard.

I do hope that whoever is charged with sifting responses to your speech passes this one to you. In any case, I welcome the debate that you have started.

Best wishes in all that you are seeking to do.

Yours,

Tony Breslin

Director

Breslin Public Policy Limited

0330 660 0525 / 07973 885 915

tony.breslin@breslinpublicpolicy.com

www.breslinpublicpolicy.com

Apprenticeships and Vocational Education programmes: destinations of choice for middle class learners?

2013-03-11T18:21:00.001-07:00

Monday was the start of National Apprenticeship Week and, courtesy of an invitation from Fred Grindrod of the the TUC's UnionLearn team, I spent the morning at their Annual Apprenticeship Conference. As the son of a skilled manual worker - my father was a fitter and turner in the factories of North and West London - and the recently appointed chair of a new awarding body, Industry Qualifications, the future of apprenticeships is of personal and profession interest. That future is closely tied to the value that we place on skilled manual work and, in what some might consider to be the language of an earlier age, on 'craft' and 'trade'.

The truth is that, as a society, we have never given the kind of status to craft and trade that we ought to have. No matter that today's apprenticeships lead, rightly, to far more than the factory floor and that they flourish in other areas, notably the service sectors. For too long white-collar has triumphed over blue-collar, academic over vocational, professional over technical, lawyer over engineer. Too often young people who end up on a 'vocational' curriculum have landed there because they have fallen off the parallel but higher status 'academic' track; sometimes, they have ended up on a "work related" programme because they have been thrown off the mainstream curriculum for behavioural reasons: "throw the naughty boys a car engine" goes the cry. How, if that is the kind of curricular and behaviour management practice that we condone, will we ever 'sell' engineering and science as high status degree options?

After the better part of two decades championing the advantages of (an academic) higher education, we are beginning to question whether this is the only way to "widen participation". Clearly, high quality, rigorously assessed vocational pathways, such as those offered by the apprenticeship framework, can offer a viable alternative - and an attractive one to young people given the emergence of university fees, student debt and graduate unemployment.

But our snobbery is longstanding. The Education Secretary's utterances on his (not entirely satisfied) aspirations for the National Curriculum Review and his late, unlamented E-Bac have reinforced a hierarchy of knowledge in which the less conventionally academic is for the less able and in which, for the middle classes, vocational 'options' are for other people's children.

How can we, in National Apprenticeship Week, address this? Four concrete steps might help:

Recast what we mean by 'breadth' in curricular terms - 10 GCSEs or four A levels is not a broad curriculum but 10 (or four) variations on a theme - "Vocational Education" should be redefined as "Professional and Vocational Education" (an unashamed re-pitch to the middle classes) with every young person having a professional and vocational element to their studies at Key Stage 4 and 5;
Build a new partnership between schools and FE colleges, such that we create genuinely integrated 14-19 pathways that allow us to make this new breadth a reality;
Place authenticity at the heart of this new curriculum entitlement with internships, mentoring programmes, work shadowing opportunities and work experience placements at the heart of what our education system offers, such that these become a central component of the education of every young person;
Embrace Andrew Adonis's call, made at the conference, for a root and branch overhaul of Careers Education - and of Information, Advice and Guidance services for young people more broadly - and for the extension of UCAS's role such that it becomes the national broker for apprenticeships as well as for higher education opportunities - the better integration of tracks from any apprenticeship pathway into higher education ought to be one thing that should follow from this.

Taken together, these steps might just begin to make professional and vocational pathways, such as those offered through apprenticeships, the chosen progression options for an increasing number of aspirational, middle class students and their parents.

Only when we achieve this can we begin to move towards a better parity between the academic and vocational domains. Lord Adonis is right to argue that as many young people should progress into apprenticeships as into higher education. It is vital, though, that each track attracts learners from across the social range. Widening participation doesn't just mean getting working class and minority ethnic students into university; it means a broader social mix entering the full range of educational and training pathways that a reinvigorated approach to professional and vocational education can offer.

Annual GCSE results debate misses the point: passes matter when we're clear on purpose

2012-08-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

Without the annual GCSE and A level results season, bad weather and an off-message Prince, what would the press report in August? It is depressing, though, that while (until last August, at least) the results have improved year-on-year, the media and political treatment of this story has not.

Let's start with a bit of context: we've spent the best part of 25 years building an educational culture that has replaced the 3 'R's with the 3 'T's: tests, tables and targets; not all the outcomes of this shift have been negative but we should be wary of one: exams designed to assess the progress and ability of individual students are being increasingly translated into devices for assessing the effectiveness of teachers and schools. Against such a backdrop, a degree of 'teaching to the test' is inevitable.

Moreover, when schools are cast in competition with each other and where teachers can select the syllabuses their students follow by choosing between examination boards that are also competitors, the rigour of the examination itself is an easy victim - schools that select tough examinations will get fewer passes and be assumed to be worse schools with worse teachers; examination boards that design tough exams, or even overly innovative ones, will lose customers. In a market that is worth more than that for secondary school text books (a sign that the system is seriously out of kilter), the testing agency, usually one of three dominant awarding bodies, is a reluctant guardian of standards.

Further, when one form of examination, the GCSE, is defined as the standard bearer (whatever that standard might be) there are other unintended outcomes. Subjects never suited to GCSE assessment - often those with a practical, technical or creative orientation - are only able to secure their place on the timetable if they are forced into this assessment form or if an alternative form of assessment is granted GCSE 'equivalence'. Thus, a vocational course in, say, hairdressing is granted an equivalence with a GCSE in, say, History, a fact represented without distinction in top-line school performance data. This renders the resultant league tables less comparative than their clean A-C headlines suggest. Although the options to do this have been much reduced in recent years (and the tables are more sophisticated), the process has claimed another victim: curriculum breadth and, in particular, the uptake and status of vocational courses: schools are discouraged from adopting courses that do not have a league table currency while, if they do adopt a course from that diminishing range of vocational qualifications that still offer GCSE equivalence, it is assumed that this is a ruse to score in the league tables rather than to broaden the curriculum.

The upshot? Young people of all abilities take a GCSE dominated curriculum in which 10 GCSEs is assumed to constitute breadth. It does not; it constitutes 10 variations on a particular assessment theme. Where in this is the place for good quality professional learning for all, for the development of the skills for effective citizenship, for the pursuit of a range of sports, for good quality and highly regarded personal development programmes? In short, the bright follow a curriculum that denies them breadth but gives them grades, those deemed less able chasing in their shadows. Too often, at the other end of the scale, learners are channelled onto 'vocational' programmes, there not out of informed choice but because they have fallen onto a default curriculum that confirms vocational and practical learning as a poor relation to the academic mainstream. If the UK wants to raise the status of areas like engineering, technology and science, throwing the naughty boys a car engine is no way to do it. And nor is a narrowly academic English Baccalaureate.

The solution (or a first step towards it)? As we are beginning to argue through our Transform Education project, we need to stop obsessing simply about grades and performance measures and start asking questions about what kind of education system we need in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, what kind of young people we want to emerge from it, and what educational breadth really looks like.

Yes, let's measure the performance of this system and, yes, let's measure the progress of young people through this system (and with real rigour using a range of tools) but shouldn't we start by asking what we want and need it to do?

Beyond the Bradford Spring: lobbying, party-funding, trust and transforming our politics

2012-04-03T15:07:00.004-07:00

The debates on Newsnight this evening about the Bradford West by-election and the role of lobbyists in our democracy, and the related and long-standing concerns about 'cash for access' and party funding serve only to underline the obsolescence of how we currently 'do' politics. How did we get here? It seems to me that several factors have converged to produce this state of affairs, but I'd like to make three observations in particular:

The professionalisation of our politics has turned Westminster into a stronger gated community than any that new-build suburbia can offer - access to this community is through a subterranean (and invisible to most) network of internships, lobbyists and think tanks, where a new generation of 'straight from college' (Oxbridge or similar PPE preferred) special advisers are honed, themselves merely serving apprenticeships for elevation (sorry, election) to Parliament itself;
For those seeking to influence politicians (honourably, as is usually the case, or otherwise), buddying-up to this network is vital, with the outcome that experienced business and third sector leaders spend a disproportionate amount of their time chasing these influencers - by purchasing access through the professional lobbyists, sponsoring (usually governing) party activity in some way or treading the wine reception floor, seeking to happen upon the youthful bag carrier for the minister concerned;
For those wanting to access politics (that is, to be politicians) , especially those who might have 'done something' beyond this Westminster Village, they find the gates all but closed - one unintended consequence of the professionalisation of our politics is the end of the parliamentary road for the mid-career trade unionist, community leader or business executive who fancies their chances at the polls.

For me, these three developments produce at least three negative outcomes:

Disconnected politicians with whom we share no history and for whom we have no empathy: trust in politics is the victim and every ignored protest march or expenses transgression strengthens the sense that voting doesn't change things (even if it might) and politicians don't care (even, as I suspect, most of them do);
Bad policy: just as voters are cut adrift from politicians, practitioners are largely ignored by these 'not so special' advisers - with the result that impractical but headline hugging policies are foisted on professionals who are often locked into performance frameworks that have come from the same planet;
The separation of the formal and informal political spheres: in earlier times the youthful rebel might have become the seasoned campaigner and the mid-life parliamentarian; as noted above, this is increasingly not an option. The result is a separation between the politics of protest and the politics of process, between the 'civil' and the 'civic' as some commentators put it - this separation is bad for democracy itself.

All of this produces disenfranchised citizens. Empowering citizens means creating a politics that isn't accessed through the secret codes of the gated community but through the kind of rich civil society that emerges when individuals realise that they can have an influence without writing a cheque, or selling their soul in some other way.

To do this we need to build an education system and a community engagement culture that gives potential voters the knowledge, skills, confidence and desire to hold their politicians to account, and enables them to self-organise (to lobby), personally and collectively such that the professional lobbyist is obsolete. How about a strengthened (rather than abandoned) Citizenship curriculum in schools and free to access 'social impact' courses in every FE and adult education setting, developing skills in community leadership, public speaking, negotiating and accessing the media?

The result would make for a Big Society to which might all want to belong. And we'd get better politics and politicians too.

Stephen Twigg MP, Professor Geoff Whitty CBE and Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson in sparkling form at the launch of Transform Education

2012-03-14T08:19:00.003-07:00

Thanks to the masses who packed into the Thatcher Room at Portcullis House, Westminster last night to celebrate the launch of Breslin's Transform Education project (www.breslinpublicpolicy.com) and who heard Stephen Twigg, Geoff Whitty and Maggie Atkinson in sparking form - we've thrown some of their comments out through Twitter (@UKpolicywatch) but these soundbites can't hope to do their efforts justice.

Thanks also to our partners at GlobalNet 21 for helping us to stage what will be the first of three meetings and, we envisage, a much bigger project.

From the ensuing discussion a series of key questions emerged and readers of this blog might want to ponder them further. Here, in no particular order, are just some of them:

What purpose (or purposes) do we want (and need) a twenty-first century education system to serve?
What do we mean by 'breadth' in education, and in the curriculum in particular, and how do we ensure such a curriculum for all learners?
What does meaningful, purposeful engagement-building learner voice or youth participation look like and how might it support the broader educational enterprise?
What do we mean by professional, practical and vocational education and what is its place, status and purpose in the curriculum of all young people?
How do we best support the challenged, the challenging, the looked after and the otherwise vulnerable?
How do we introduce transformative change, especially in the highly structured context of the modern secondary school?
What can secondary practitioners learn from those in early years and primary education, those in the youth sector, those in the 'alternative' education community and those in adult education and FE?

Comments and additions to the list are welcome. Let the discussion begin!

Stephen Twigg MP, Professor Geoff Whitty CBE and Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson to speak at the launch of Transform Education

2012-02-08T07:14:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to announce that Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Stephen Twigg MP, Professor Geoff Whitty of the University of Bath School of Management (and formerly Director at the University of London Institute of Education) and Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson are to speak at the launch of Transform Education on the evening of Tuesday 13th March at Portcullis House, Westminster.

This is the first in a series of three meetings, staged in partnership with GlobalNet 21, exploring the challenges facing educators in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. The focus of the debate at this first session will be on rethinking policy and practice with regard to curriculum and achievement.

Further details about the Transform Education project and about the event, including how to register for an invitation, can be found on our website, breslinpublicpolicy.com.

Tickets will be allocated on a first-to-respond basis.

Breslin Public Policy Launch: many thanks to all!

2012-02-08T02:54:00.000-08:00

Many, many thanks to all of you who helped us to celebrate the launch of Breslin Public Policy last night - really, really appreciated and a fantastic evening with lots of bustling and productive conversation. It was great to bring so many people together, drawn from across the fields of policy and practice. Connecting these too often separate realms is key to everything we do.

If you had intended to join us but were unable to do so on the evening, or if you simply couldn't make the date, do stay in touch - we hope to see you at our next event, for which you will receive an invitation shortly.

I am also pleased to confirm that, following our free charity raffle, we will be making donations of £100 to Medicins Sans Frontières, School Home Support and Age UK. We're proud to give this sum to each of these great causes, our own attempt to do Responsible Business and demonstrate Corporate Responsibility.

For those of you who were not there, the charities were chosen by our winners: Francis Sealey of GlobalNet 21, Anne McHardy of McHardy Farrell Media and Carly Mason of V. We will be making the donations this week.

The good news for the three winners is that they also get a voucher for a meal for two and a bottle of wine at Charterhouse Bar, kindly donated by Charterhouse. We will be in touch with the winners shortly to confirm how to claim your voucher.

Many thanks to Phil, Janice, Ed and the team at Charterhouse for a great evening - a lovely venue and already established as the home of one of our favourite networks, Convergence.

Thanks, also, to Richard O'Sullivan and Phil Ventre at Callisto for developing our branding and our website concept and design, to Helen Wiles at Helen Wiles Zine for building the website and to Grace Pluckrose-Oliver for making our first short film, which you can view on the site: http://www.breslinpublicpolicy.com/.

On the site you will find details about the various prjects that we are currently working on, or have previously worked on. Early partners include The Bridge Group, V, CCE England, East Sussex County Council, the Diana Award, Navigation Learning, Character Scotland, the British Olympic Foundation and the British Paralympic Association; we are grateful to each of you for your support and for inviting us to work with you.

Our next event, which we are staging in partnership with Global Net 21, is the launch of our signature education project, Transform Education. This will take place at Portcullis House, part of the Palace of Westminster on the evening of Tuesday 13th March.

This is the first of three meetings in which we will explore the challenges facing us as we seek to build education systems and develop approaches to learning that meet our needs in the first part of the twenty-first century. The focus of the first meeting will be on issues of curriculum and achievement in the school sector.

We are thrilled to confirm Stephen Twigg MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Professor Geoff Whitty CBE of the University of Bath's School of Management (and formerly Director at the University of London's Institute of Education) and Maggie Atkinson, The Children's Commissioner for England, as our speakers. You can get a sense of what we will be discussing by listening to the podcast on our site, produced by Francis Sealey at GlobalNet 21.

In the meantime, thank you again for celebrating with us last night or for helping us to get to this point in some other way. Your support has been greatly appreciated.

Now the work begins.

What shall we do about vocational education?

2012-01-31T08:33:00.000-08:00

Education policy is full of contradictions and mixed messages and today's announcement on the declassification of vocational qualifications, in terms of their status in school league tables, is a case in point. For the past 35 years - since James Callaghan's acclaimed Ruskin College speech calling for a great debate on what we want from our education system - every Secretary of State has spoken at length on the importance of vocational education, about bridging the academic-vocational divide and about the need to provide the right kind of labour supply to our once great engineering and manufacturing sector.

The practical moves have, though, been much more tentative: GNVQs appeared to flourish briefly post 16-but never became firmly established at Key Stage 4; Key Skills never achieved the foothold in our schools that they did secure in our more vocationally inclined FE colleges; in the same era the notion of "disapplication" briefly allowed students who struggled with the full National Curriculum at Key Stage 4 to drop particular subjects in favour of a programme of "work related learning"; Ruth Kelly rejected Tomlinson's key recommendation that the Diploma model should be applied to both academic and vocational programmes, although there was a retrospective attempt to do just this during Ed Ball's tenure in Great Smith Street; Michael Gove, supported by his traditionally-inclined school secretary Nick Gibb, has been clearer, appearing to be much less fond of vocational 'relevance' and much more fond of academic 'rigour', albeit while his colleagues at BIS have been calling for a resurgence in the apprenticeship system, something that the unintended consequences of tuition fees might help deliver.

The flirtation with disapplication let the vocational cat out of the academic bag: disengaged, unmotivated, less successful, or maybe just less able? Step out of the mainstream and into the also-ran world of alternative curricula. Throwing the naughty boys (for it were usually they) a car engine was never the way to boost the status of vocational learning or that of the careers in engineering and manufacturing that such an education might lead to. Thus, vocational programmes have too often come to represent a curriculum that learners fall onto rather than one that they might aspire to; of course, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: able students, and schools that want to serve able students, shy away from vocational learning while schools in more challenging circumstances and more disadvantaged intakes reach for this 'relevant' curricula because it suits 'their kids' - and with points in the league table, who might blame these schools for grasping at the appearance of parity and a measure of educational success? This is hardly a recipe for attracting our most able into engineering or design or manufacturing. Rather than closing it, phoney parity emphasises the gap between the academic and the vocational domains: a failure for all.

The problem is that, taken alone, today's action further depletes the status of vocational learning without any attempt to meet the real challenge: the need to transform it. The news on the abolition of the parity that never was should have been coupled with a cross-party commitment to deliver the best vocational education in Europe within a decade, not as an alternative to the academic route but as a part of every child's education. Three steps would be helpful in this respect.

First, all secondary schools should be inspected not just on curriculum rigour (which the promotion of the E-bac seeks to demonstrate success in, albeit clumsily and unimaginatively) but on curricular breadth. Following the Secretary of State's desire to 'free teachers from prescription', schools might be encouraged to be creative in how they demonstrate this but demonstrate it, they must. Thus, any school that does not open up opportunities that ensure an entitlement for every student to participate in high quality work related learning (and, for that matter, learning programmes focused on the development of creativity, curiosity and effective citizenship) should not be able to achieve 'outstanding' status because of the narrowness of its curricular offer. A programme composed of ten GCSEs is not a broad one - I write as a former GCSE Chief Examiner - but a curriculum that adds to the E-bac an excellent vocational component, a community service element, good quality citizenship education and a real exposure to sport, the arts and creativity is.

Second, and at the same time, we should re-conceptualise vocational education as professional and vocational education; this is the 'nudge' to the middle classes that such learning is something for their children to seek out rather than to walk away from. Degrees in Law, Medicine, Marketing and Finance are profoundly vocational in nature; how about opening up learning in these spheres in our schools - taster programmes, summer internships, curriculum modules, delivered in partnership with the professions concerned? Anybody who wants to take a look at examples of such work would be wise to look at the Citizenship Foundation's excellent and long-standing Lawyers in Schools programme and their mock trial competitions - for they constitute brilliant vocational education, even if their aim is to educate about the law more broadly.

Third, let's do all of this while thinking not about parity but about complementariness. It should never have mattered whether a course in hairdressing or bricklaying or business studies is equal in status to one in geography or history or French. It does matter that every young person experiences a curriculum shot through with a strong dose of high quality professional and vocational education, whether the outcome is a career in carpentry or surveying, medicine or law.

Today feels like another assault on vocational learning; it doesn't need to be - let's make it the start of something new.