The Behaviour Guru: Tom Bennett's School Report

Bad Girls, Bad Girls- What You Gonna Do? Tips for Teaching in a Women's Prison

2012-03-03T11:02:00.001-08:00

'There better be PAL lessons or I'm fuckin' wreckin' the place.'

I was asked to advise someone working in a young offender institution. Because my experience is solely in secondary comprehensives, and I'm not entirely an ars*h*le, I asked someone who had more knowledge in this area. Obviously this flies in the face of current educational voodoo, which recommends that I instead discuss it in a group of other people who don't know the answer either, and then feed our collectively-conjoined ignorance back to the class as the new right answer. Or 'share ways forward', as they say in Hades. No, I went old-school and asked an expert.

Here's what an experienced women's prison teacher told me about managing classes- not quite a secondary comp, but perhaps we can just see it as an exciting further-education academy where break-out zones mean something else entirely, and the teachers actively discourage creative thinking in the workshop, particularly when it comes to fashioning crude katanas from toothbrushes and razorblades. The teacher prefers anonymity, for reasons of professional discretion, and not wishing to wake up next to the head of a guinea-pig:

"Six years of teaching art in women's prisons taught me the following tactics:

'I endorse this advice.'

Make the aim of the lesson clear the second they enter the room- these are institutionalised people who may find being in a room where they will have to make choices for themselves quite daunting until they warm up; this will cause anxiety, which could cause friction and start a lesson off badly. It will also get rid of anyone just coming in for a chat with their mates.

Keep everyone busy at all times!! Give a relevant book or magazine (have a stash of these) to anyone too dozy for whatever reason to work (prisons give out really strong anti-depressants). Remember they may not know how to read, so ones with pictures.

Be sympathetic but firm about the activity. Let there be a bit of chat in the first 10 minutes, as something is often going on back in the units/wings (officers being heavy-handed, lack of medication to control depression or drug addition, or a fight). Education block is where they can let off any anxieties and discuss problems without officers hearing. End it with a, 'Right lets get on,' otherwise it will interrupt the whole lesson.

Be over fussy and firm about any sharp tools in the room, make it very clear that safety is your priority- don’t be afraid to come across as prissy about scissors or cables; this will affect discipline. Inmates need to feel safe so they can relax and work, and no-one is going to put their head down and write if there is an unattended blade in the room- don’t underestimate the fear in the room; they are all really good at hiding it .

Don’t place the blame too quick in a confrontation; that will lead to a fight as everyone else in the room will feel obliged to take sides. Be firm and fair to both sides even if you know who the ringleader is. Use, 'OK, lets stop winding each other up,' or, 'Can this wait until after the lesson? I don’t care who's doing what, just get on with the project!'

Have a naughty list which will go to the officers at the end of the lesson. Leave prominently on your desk- you can be firm but jovial about this; it is childish, but you have no choice. Tell them that they are stopping others from learning and you from doing your job. Offer to take them off the list if they start to be reasonable and stick to this; don’t tell the officers. There is no real point in getting involved in punishment on the units (loads of paperwork-trust me). This will gain their trust and next time they see you they will remember that you won’t grass and will continue to behave.

Separate one of the disruptive ones and make them sit really close to you, even at your desk- often they just want some attention even if it is from you. You may have to spend the rest of the class in mindless chat but if the rest of the class is relieved from it, they will achieve more.

Bribery. Life in prison is unbelievable grim . Promise to finish the lesson with 15 minutes of doing something they want to do. Write a poem/ have some short ones for them to copy out/ have some crosswords photocopied/ word-searches/put on some music. At the end of every session I would bring out some A4 card, some really cheap and cheerful stickers- hearts or teddies and pens so they could make a card to send to their kids/ boyfriends/ girlfriends and I would help them make a simple envelope with recycled poster paper and double sided tape. This one-to-one task doing something that they want to do can be a great 'getting to know you' moment and a chance for you to get feedback on what they thought they had achieved in the lesson. Check with the officers what they are allowed to take back with them first, but giving them a small pencil or betting pens, some writing paper, can make their evenings locked up more bearable, and they will come back.

Use the officers-they will not hesitate to help you. Ask them to pop in half way through the lesson; this is always a last resort as I’ve never met a subtle officer, but your own safety has to be your and their priority."

I imagine it's a bit like this.

An interesting insight to how a safe learning environment is achieved in a very high-stakes environment. What I find fascinating is the universality of some of this; some things are constant no matter what or where you go. People need to know that there is a structure and boundaries to their space, and they need to know that there will be consequences to abusing that structure. They also need to know that the consequences can be in their favour, or contrary to it, depending on whether they cooperate with the good of the polis, or contravene it. Such is the nature of humanity.

Schools are not prisons (I checked in a dictionary), but a class is a class. In any school, the stakes are high enough, at least if you care about the future well-being of your students. But at least most of us don't have to worry about lockdowns, cell-checks and riots. Not yet, anyway.

Mind you, they don't have to worry about FFT or thinking hats. On second thoughts, maybe....

Raise a glass to all the teachers in extreme classes *Raises glass*

First they came for the people on Myspace: a moving poem

2012-03-01T09:43:00.004-08:00

First they came for the people on Myspace
And I did not speak out, because I was not on Myspace

Not many people were, TBH

Then they came for the people on Facebook
And I did not speak out, because I was not on Facebook

Because I'm not twelve

Then they came for the people on Pinterest
And I did not speak out, because I can only look at so many pictures of pancakes, dogs and sunsets

Then they came for the people on Twitter
And I was on Twitter.

But people speaking out was not a problem there, let me assure you.

Oh no.

Real Steel in the classroom: how we need to be more than robots to be teachers.

2012-02-26T02:16:00.002-08:00

Machine versus humans

Real Steel: boxing robots as a metaphor for teaching

For those of you who haven't, or will never, see it, Real Steel is a film aimed at the family market. It's set in the near-future, where boxing has been replaced with robot boxing.

Bear with me.

Hugh Jackman plays Charlie, an ex-boxer/ loser who bums around from fight to fight with an assortment of junk robots, always one step away from the gutter. Through an improbable twist, he gets temporary custody of his estranged 11 year old son; they start the film hating each other, and if you can't see the plot/ character arc sweeping down on you like the Valkyries then you need better narrative radar. It's a kids/ family movie, and I thought it was rather wonderful, but that's not the point.

REAL STEEL SPOILER ALERT

Now that I've chased off the last few of you, it's just you and me. Either you've seen it, or you don't intend to, or you don't care. Either way, take a ring-side seat with me for the finale. Like a deathless Rocky meme, Charlie and his son have restored a beaten-up Atari of a robot and got him through unlicensed fights until he's up against Zeus, the World Champion, a gleaming, sinister, black Ferrari of a tank with fists. Programmed with an onboard fight simulator that can anticipate millions of combat options, he is unbeatable.

Contrast Zeus with Atom, Charlie's reconditioned junk heap; he's a ruin, he's old, he's built from scraps and spares. But he can take punishment, and most importantly, he's got the ability to learn to fight from humans, as Charlie reluctantly demonstrates when he agrees to teach the robot his old boxing moves. Also, Charlie tends to take remote control of the robot for some fights. If you haven't spotted the 'tin man with a heart' symbolism by this point, I don't know what. The heavy implication is that Atom, the ruined loser on a comeback, is the simulacrum of Charlie; both are lost and broken; both restored by the faith of a child (which was also the name of Celine Dion's last Grammy-repellant, I believe).

This is what gives Atom the edge; Charlie's experience and skill, transmitted through Atom, makes him see how the fight needs to be fought. There's even a nice touch when, as part of a pre-fight ritual, his son makes Atom dance before he gets in the ring (and at one point he even makes the robot....do the ROBOT. I hugged myself with joy).

In the final match, Charlie/ Atom puts up a good fight, but Zeus is too quick and strong. On the bell of the fourth, Atom slumps down, his voice command and online computer fried by the battering. As a last resort, Charlie switches Atom to 'Shadow' mode; Atom (an ex-sparring droid) will simply copy every move that Charlie makes from the ringside. He is quite literally, fighting Atom's fight. The last few scenes as Charlie's son glows with pride to see his old dad making a comeback in the ring are surprisingly touching, and I'm surprised Disney didn't nail this one years ago. I won't give the fight away to you, but as Barry Norman once said reviewing Rocky IV, 'If you can find someone to bet on the Russian, hold on to him.'

And I realised what was nagging away at me as I watched this fine piece of inoffensive entertainment. The boxer in the ring, Atom/ Charlie, is the teacher in the classroom. Zeus is the avatar of best practise, the recommended recipe. On paper, Zeus is unstoppable, just as on paper, the formal requirements for a good lesson should result in a good- sorry metasatisfactory- lesson. This guidance comes from educational research, from ministerial dogma, from ideologues and academics who have barely set foot in the ring- sorry, the classroom. We are told constantly how to teach by people who have never taught. Their only evidence base is the Mystic Meg method of research that clearly shows whatever it was they wanted it to show. I don't mind ministers and concerned parties telling me what we, society should teach children- that's their elected prerogative. But I massively, massively resent being told to follow the program when it comes to how I teach. The skeleton is there as a safety net when you begin, but after that, instinct, judgement and intuition start to take over.

We are best suited to knowing how children learn, and should be handled to do so. Other people's opinions are important, but no one is going to ask me to step into the ring and tell me how to throw or take a punch if I try it and it doesn't work. Let them step under the ropes and see how they guard, block and combo. If anyone IN the ring has advice for me, I often take it. If someone watching it in the VIP rows, or from TV has an opinion, I consider it. But I'll make the last call myself, thanks. I'm the one with the black eye and the cauliflower ear.

Atom/ Charlie won their fights because they went off the map; because they understood that boxing is an art and a craft that relies on techniques as well as the improvisation of those techniques. So is teaching. There are notes, scales and chords we need to learn from others, but if we really want to play music, we need to bring ourselves to the piece.

The Tin Man has to have a heart. That's Real Steel.

FIGHT!

The Love of Money: How schools became Markets, and everyone lost.

2012-02-25T10:57:00.001-08:00

Reading John Lanchester's interesting Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay this week (and there's a publisher-suggested title if ever I saw one. Because every author secretly dreams of calling their book Whoops! Mind you, they used to get away with An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and such, so I suppose we reap what we sow). It's a good explanation of the recent boom and bust moneyquake that has underpinned- or excused- the austerity frenzy coming to a Lidls near you. Did you know that the RBS was the biggest company not just in Europe, but the world?

I did not know that.

The salient point he raises is to do with capitalism in general. He traces the current financial clusterf*ck back to the fall of Soviet Communism, and the removal of a direct competitor to the free market model of economic and political discourse. With this removal, he argues, there was less need for the capitalist economies to justify their superiority over the repressive, but undoubtedly more societally inclined (at least on paper) Marxist experiments. Until that point, capitalism, for all its flaws, had produced what Lanchester describes as the most admirable societies ever seen- not perfect, just the best ones so far. The cause of this, he argues, is that the jet engine of capitalism was yoked to the oxen of social justice. Efficiency, enterprise and opportunity were tied to the generation of the maximum dividend of personal gain, tempered with social responsibility.

And removing the great Satan of Communism as an immediate source of geographical and economic comparison (China is, let's face it, far away), meant that the economic engines were free to achieve escape velocity from those pointless, annoying liabilities we call justice and fairness. A triumphalist mentality emerged, where it was felt that capitalism could do no wrong, where it was felt that entrepreneurs should be freed from the shackles of taxation and restraint, and a free market should be more successfully realised. I mean, look at all the STUFF we have.

Fast forward through Thatcher, Reagan, and a worldwide surge in opportunism, Icelandic meltdowns and bank crashes, slow the tape as you approach the sub-prime tsunami that nearly drowned the world, and then let your finger drop on play when Fred the Shred gets his knighthood annulled (which will no doubt inconvenience him tremendously as he dries his tears with a handkerchief made of unicorn mane, and laughs from his golden throne on the Moon).

'Did we win?'

This is not 'Tom Bennett's blog on fiscal responsibility'. High finance crosses my eyes like Marty Feldman, as it does most of us, which is precisely why the banks now resemble the shop floor of your local Ladbrokes, and withdrawing money is like enacting the Schrödinger Cat experiment every time you go to an ATM. And this is the point; economics are now ruled by a priest class, so remote and dislocated from common comprehension that they wiled as much power as the priest class in any pre-scientific society. They are the shaman (and shawomen, increasingly) who read the runes and entrails of our financial futures, and dictate, almost entirely, political policy around the world.

When I get some time I will revert to my blog default and rail against economics as another example of the voodoo sciences that have crawled into the popular perception as real sciences, when in fact, no one knows anything, as William Goldman famously said about movies.

But I am a teacher, and I know schools. And I know what happened to schools at the same time as this impossible sense of exceptionality and superiority crept into the collective consciousness of the men in the City and the Street; the language of the marketplace crept into areas of public discourse where previously they had been seen as necessary evils at most. Of course I'm referring specifically to education.

Even when I started just under a decade ago, I was amazed by how much we were expected to gobble up the gastronomy of the bean-counter. Everyone remotely related to schools and children had become a stakeholder; we were expected to produce returns on our efforts. Children avoided- just- being referred to as customers in mainstream education, but we are devilishly close to the concept at all times. Don't believe me? Consider how much their views are now being taken into account, despite the concomitant lack of an obvious medium for the same communication from the teacher perspective.

I remember years ago I used to run one of many themed restaurants in the West End. No where before had I encountered the slavish 'customer is always right' mentality as I did here. One charmer put me up against a wall one night, hand round my throbbing jugular, and said he was going to 'F*ck me up.' Faith, dear reader, I lived. But the next day I was broken to learn that the company would pay him compensation and apologise to him; and I was told not to complain to the police, as it would damage sales, somehow. You might recognise some of the DNA from this incident in some schools, with their no-blame approaches to social responsibility.

'How do you sleep?' 'On a bed of money.'

We see some of the most foul examples of this marketisation in concepts like value added, or FFT predictions (used as targets), target setting and a million varieties of ways in which the business of education is forced into the double columns of the balance sheet. Have we reached targets? Have we failed them? If we do reach them, what are the new targets? Pass me the smelling salts.

Of course, this model assumes that education is amenable to being circumscribed by the language of the bank, and this is where the bomb goes off. Education is not the same as selling lemonade and rose water at a jumble sale. Perhaps you noticed? The product of our labour isn't easily numbered, weighed or measured. How we do it isn't amenable to regimentation or standarisation. The effects of our efforts sometimes aren't seen until decades later. Businesses run on the engine of arithmetic; but people defy this analogy with the abacus, because so much- my God, almost all, I should say- of our lives are not concerned with that which we can staple a number to. Our entire human experience is concerned with questions of meaning, value, emotion, desire and aspirations that are entirely resistant to enumeration.

Every time I see a number ascribed to something in education, I wince- a lesson, a school, leadership, the whole nine yards. I wince, as I witness yet another brainless attempt to shoehorn thoughts and dreams into the business end of a calculator. The two worlds barely intersect. They certainly don't coexist easily, and often, like matter and anti matter, they explode on contact with one another. Children do not- do NOT- get more intelligent by 5% every year, satisfying the budgetary- sorry, pedagogic predictions of a well run saucepan factory, predicated on the model of a infinitely expanding market, which is another fairy tale, incidentally. Our teaching certainly doesn't get better by the same. Yet we are assessed as if they are.

I am not anti-market; as Friedman said, show me a system that has worked better- but that doesn't mean that I welcome its presence in every facet of our lives. I don't judge my relationships by their numerical value, because such things are impossible to unearth. I do not love my family because they promise me secure returns on my investment. I do not teach because I add value to their grades.

I teach because I love them, and my subject. And I love both of these because I find them intrinsically valuable. Isn't that what life is at least partly about? Discerning what is valuable, and valuing it?

Not the market. Not making money. Not adding value that never existed anyway. Love. Not money.

Education Bloggers: What I Think I Do

2012-02-25T02:32:00.000-08:00

It is never too late to jump on a meme bandwagon.

My Way or the High Way? Why every teacher needs to be different

2012-02-18T08:13:00.001-08:00

One road?

I had to change a fuse today; what tool did you think I used? If you imagined something shaped like a screwdriver, then award yourself a pre-decimal BTEC (worth five A-levels in old money), and proceed directly to Oxford. If you thought instead of something like a lawnmower, then thanks for your interest, and we'll get back to you. Have you thought of Bangor?

What if I wanted to change a fuse on the Mir Space Station. Could I use the same screwdriver? I imagine not; I fancy that NASA have designed something with a torch and a magnetic strap. The concept of using different tools for different situations is not, I hope, a controversial one, although anything's possible on Twitter, I suppose (WHY YOU HATERZ HATIN ON SCREWDRIVERZ? etc)

Yet in the world of teaching, this concept is apparently inconceivable to many. I know this because the last twenty or so years in education have seen tighter and tighter screws turned on exactly how we teach and how we should be measured. It's a topic I return to like day follows night- the idea that there is a centrally prescribed 'best' way to teach, and that teachers must follow these methods or be sacrificed on the altar of Cerunnos, the Horned One. These methods, usually generated in the minds of theorists and speculative educational scientists/ homoeopaths become best practise, and we, the teaching community, brace ourselves for another drenching in slurry. Wellies on, umbrellas UP, everyone.

But I have never found teaching to be like this. While I instinctively reject any reference to tool kits and workshops that don't involve Castrol GTX and circular saws, I do like the analogy of teaching strategies as being like tools in a box; the hammer hammers, the spirit levels, the screw drives, the crow bars etc (that might not have worked. Keep writing, they might not notice). The point is that one uses what is required at the time, in that peculiar, particular circumstance. This proposition I hold to be self-evident. It leads to the following consequences:

1. My methods might not work for you

This sounds like career suicide for a man who devotes 1/3 of his waking hours to being an educational rentagob, but, with important provisos that I will detail later, it is true. My teaching style suits me; and because I am not entirely shit at my job, I know what works with my classes. I know what works for me, with my classes. Example: when I first started to not drown in classes, I realised that one of my most effective strategies with tough classes was to tell them stories. Worked a charm, and helped me build up relationships. Now that is not a strategy I advise to everyone, because not everyone can tell stories, nor could I do what they can.

We play to our skills, and to what works in the specific chemistry of the moment, of the relationship you have with your class. Remember 'Clear off scumbags' from Educating Essex? Course you do. Would you recommend that as a coda to every lesson in the UK? Of course you wouldn't. Was it appropriate for him at that time? Of course it was. That was the point the Daily Hate and others missed. He knew what he was doing.

There are some kids you'll teach who respect nothing but strength, who will punish you for any drop of kindness; there are other kids whom, offered an abstract hankie of concern, will drop and give you twenty. You learn which approach to take with which kid, and you use what works. What you don't do is stick with a one-size-fits-all strategy you expect everyone to love. People aren't like that. Students, I infer, are people.

And THAT'S the Gospel Truth

There is an important exception to make: human nature. People are identical in many respects; they must be, otherwise they would completely defy taxonomic circumscription. People, I argue tautologically, are people. That's why I (returning to my career-bothering suicide note, above) still believe I can advise and help others; because people do respond in broadly similar ways to each other. For example; we avoid what we dislike, we attend to what we enjoy- in that way I can comfortably recommend that you sanction against people who behave badly and reward those who do not. On that level, there can be very, very broad consensus. What I'm talking about is the finer detail of the student teacher relationships, and how people should learn, and how they should teach.

So, for example, sometimes in a class the teacher will enjoy thrilling levels of trust, and can comfortably send the class out to wander the streets with clipboards and machetes. Other classes need to be set in rows and columns, given short tasks and monitored like Alcatraz. Some classes can be trusted with the keys to your Jag; others need watchtowers and snipers.

That's why I think that a large amount of the debate in education, and over education is witless and meaningless. I remember reading the NME when I was a teen, and marvelling at how vicious the letters pages would get about the relative merits of The Smiths over, say, Duran Duran. They weren't really arguing about facts, but preferences. Similarly, when I hear teachers arguing that 'their' method is better than someone else's, and that all unbelievers must perish, I despair. What many people in this situation are actually arguing is that with their kids, in their classes, with their skill sets, such-and-such a strategy works. The correspondents should listen to each other, try to work out if there is anything transferable between their experiences, and then move on, safe in the knowledge that there may be no definitive, universal panacea to every classroom, every student.

2. International comparisons may be less useful than people hope.

Here come the educational consultants!

I know this may crush the ambitions of politicians everywhere when I say- and I feel comfortable saying this, because I'm a teacher and not some hard-on who worked in PR for a few years before becoming a minister for education- that what works in one school might not work in another school, because of the enormous amount of variables dividing them. So how much less comparable might the education systems of two different countries be? I know that the Scandinavian Tiger is currently getting more attention than Lady Gaga's knickers, but do you remember when Ireland was seen as the economic tiger, and a model which we should emulate? Or Poland? Or Japan? Tigers have a tendency to turn into scrawny Toms after a time. Perhaps they were on the upswing of a normal fluctuation model? Perhaps they're just different. Perhaps, perhaps. We don't know. If I hear one more 'We should be like the Finns because they [fill in the social blank]' then I'll chin someone. Maybe they do well because they like licorice?

Nobody. Knows.

I know schools where kids are allowed to come in on flexitime. Some schools let kids out at lunch. Some seal them in like a space station. Some have uniforms; some do not. Some of them are run badly, and some well. Some could do better by imitating others, and some have the balance right.

Hitting the right note at the right time is a craft and an art, for a teacher and for a school. What works at one point, with one class, with one school, might not work another day, with another cohort, in another area- or even over time. That's why teaching is hard- rewarding, but hard. There is no formula that we can all work towards; children- people- defy moronically precise classification and compartmentalisation. It's one thing that's so glorious about being human; our variability, our potential, our almost mystical levels of indeterminism. I call it free will.

What's the formula for a relationship, exact to three decimal places? Until someone can tell me that, every teacher has the right to their own methods. We are not reagents in a test tube, nor are we blocks in a Rubik's Cube. We are humans. Some of us are teachers. And teaching is not a science.

Who’s driving this thing? Leadership, and the dogs of the classroom

2012-02-17T05:19:00.001-08:00

'I don't feel my needs are being listened to enough.'

If you have never been driven through the frozen Norwegian country in the pitch-dark night, may I recommend that you add it to your bucket list? If you harbour a secret passion to reincarnate as Roald Amundsen or even simply to gasp in awe at the perspicacity of a dozen Arctic Huskies as they tear across Narnia and empty their bowels with abandon simultaneously, then it is the very thing. I heard Stephen Fry, the great arbiter of all things middle-class describe it as the most exhilarating thing he has ever done and while I cannot vouch for that claim- jumping out of a plane will evoke far richer echoes of imitating Hemingway-it is peculiarly vivacious.

And at points, also oddly soothing. I have often used the metaphor of a pack of dogs with a driver as a blunt instrument to illustrate some basic truths of classroom management. (I know that the mere proximity of those images makes some critics howl with horror- children as animals? The teacher as a driver of dogs? And that, my friends, is why it is a metaphor, and not a photograph.)

For example, every group of humans will, like dogs, vie constantly with each other for supremacy of will, a class no less. There will be leaders and followers, and a thousand shades in between. There will be dominant voices, and submissive whispers, and there is no guarantee that reason or kindness will attach themselves to either one. And the teacher, however gently he perceives his role, must be the voice of authority, the leader of the room. If he chooses not to be, out of some misguided perception of himself as a facilitator, or enabler, or if he wishes to be but cannot, then in very many classes, Lord of the Flies will be re-enacted, and you just better hope you’re not Piggy. Most kids are nowhere near this difficult; but that’s the point, it only takes a few kids to resist the rule of wisdom and age, and a tipping point of challenge is quickly reached, a critical mass of dissent that ruins the room.

That’s where I stand; it’s a bag of truths I have witnessed from the moment I walked into a classroom. Agree or disagree, you know the measure of me.

The dogs I met were beautiful- and I love dogs like a child loves dogs. Lean and eager, they sat in their harnesses, tense as tightropes and quivered as they anticipated their mission. Let no one disagree that animals cannot reason and imagine; these beasts knew exactly what was coming. With a Sami holler they raced off with complete and perfect abandon.

The pack of ten dogs was headed by two leaders, two alpha dogs. Often, I was told, they were female, and you can take that any way you want. They had to be two things; strong, of course, both in will and stature, and intelligent enough to know when a sensible order was given. Also, obedient enough to know a command from question. Behind them were pairs of males, then some females, and finally two strong males at the back. ‘The males, they follow the females,’ said my laconic French driver. ‘It is the way of things, no?’ There was more than altruism fuelling this ship, it seemed. Short of staffing every leadership team with hand-picked Amazons and supporting them with strong, sex-starved male deputies, there didn’t seem to be an obviously transferable point to take from this experience.

As we drove, the dogs occasionally broke ranks; to sniff at some wild trail, or the spoor of an Elk, to squabble with each other, or even just to attempt the aforementioned mid-romp duodenal acrobatics (squatting and running; quite a feat. Whenever the tail rose I mouthed the words, ‘Shields Up!’). Louis, the driver, didn’t crack a whip, or draw down the Heavens; he simply shouted the dog’s name, and added a tone that spoke volumes. It said; I see what you’re doing. But, trained from birth to expect consequences, they knew to go no further, and the path was achieved once more.

At the end I joined him in rewarding the dogs for running so well; exhausted, they were stoically grateful for his attention, and if one dog was over attended by a rugged scratch behind the muzzle then the others clamoured for equity of affection. Dog Heaven.

‘You have a good relationship with these dogs,’ I said. ‘Good control.’
‘You have to have a good relationship with them to have good control,’ he said. ‘You work hard with them to understand what you want from them- the training when they are young is the hardest part. Then they work hard for you, and you need to show them when they do well. We have a relationship.’

Would you say they trusted you? I asked. ‘Certainly they do,’ he said. ‘Without trust there is nothing.’ I was surprised to see such a close bond between the driver and the driven. There was no casual, utilitarian unconcern for them as merely a means to move a sled; there was a bond between them of mutual cooperation. He knew their names, their character, their capacities, and they knew him. But certainly he was no mere odd, tall dog to them. He had a specific job to do; he was the driver, and he had the first and final say in where they went and how far and fast they moved.

This is something classrooms have taught me. I tell every one of my classes that everyone in the room is important, and everyone has rights. That no one deserves special treatment over any other. And that means two things: first, that nobody must be allowed to place themselves above the general need of the class for selfish reasons, and that anyone doing so could expect to be treated with justice. And second, that as a teacher I was no more or less important than them, but I had a different role from them, which justified my greater authority. And it needed no more justification than that. That’s why I often invite and encourage student feedback in my lessons and of me, but never defer or devolve the authority of decision making. That is where student voice can be fuel for a professional, not a ballast. But when it escaped from the laboratories of the theorists, it became a monster, fed on pastures where it should never graze.

And as I was drawn on through the night, I asked myself, who was in charge here? Was it the dogs, pulling us along so swiftly? From afar you could mistake them as the leaders; certainly there is leadership within them. But their every decision was circumscribed, like a devolved parliament, by the authority of the greater body, in this case the driver. Was he in charge, with his Inuit commands handed down through centuries? But he only drove because I, as the paymaster, the client and customer, funded the expedition. So was I in charge? Up to a point; by I had no command over those dogs, nor they over me, nor any of us over each other. Where did power lie?

There were hierarchies within hierarchies, and lines of command that, even in such a small group, remained impervious to exact specification. He ordered. They pulled. I paid. We all knew our roles.

Everyone got to where they needed to be.

'You're here to learn about Satan.' How our schools are petri dishes for the Dark One, says everyone

2012-02-13T10:39:00.000-08:00

A teacher at one of the UK's most successful sixth form colleges has rocked the educational world by claiming that students there would be 'better off learning how to pay homage to Old Split-Foot.'

In a recent article in the TES Online, he claims he advised a student to 'stick his A-levels up his arse and instead work out better ways he can serve The Father of Lies by accelerating the Last Days of the Apocalypse.'

The chattering classes of education were swift in their rebuttal of Mr Cypher's unusual pedagogic methods. 'This is a disgrace,' said Mr Mendicant of the Church of the Telegraphed Soul. 'Worshipping Satan has been an outmoded, outdated way to get ahead in the world since the sixties. We thought we had managed to leave all that pentacle-drawing, blood-letting progressive incantation nonsense in the Dark Ages. Our children are expected to follow the modern, scientifically proven method of emailing their aspirations to the Dark Gods of Cthulhu, as best practise demands.'

Is this what you want. IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?

When asked to defend his apparently indefensible stance on cannibalism, devil worship and desecration of the graves of saints, Mr Cypher was unrepentant. 'But...but all I said was that kids shouldn't get too stressed out by exams, and maybe they should still try hard but....oh, I didn't say it very clearly, but....'

THE NEW SALEM SUN SAYS: BAN THIS DRAGON-WORSHIPPING LEFTY BEFORE HE KILLS AGAIN.

http://www.iainmartinpolitics.com/2012/02/13/what-michael-gove-is-up-against/

Son of Brain Gym: Dancing to Nursery Rhymes Boosts A-Levels or something.

2012-02-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

In other news: thinking burns calories.

Remember Brain Gym? It was a now-discredited theory that pressing your brain buttons and doing warm ups would somehow improve the cognitive development of your learning conversation, or something similarly moronic. It would be laughable, except that a sizeable purse of public money was spent promoting this ridiculous snake-oil. You know, money that could go to orphans and homeless people and that. I should know, because I was one of the recipients- I was a cultish recruit on the now-defunct Fast Track program (motto: Be the inspiration- from the classroom to the staffroom, which should give you some kind of idea how much we were hated), sort of a predecessor to Teach First. They threw money at us, really chucked it as hard as they could. One of the now-unimaginable training bonuses was a three day residential where we learned NLP (another dubious bag of serpents and spanners) where we were taught the uncertain joys of Brain Gym, and had it recommended for dissemination in the real world.

Fortunately the stake has been fairly firmly planted in the heart of the Brain Gym vampire, especially after Ben Goldacre's famous assault on it in Bad Science. But not before thousands of schools had wasted their time, and most importantly that of the students, on pointless, pointy-headed miracle crystal exercises that made extraordinary claims to efficacy but without concomitant extraordinary evidence. Any efforts accrued from Brain Gym could be replicated from giving your pupils a break every now and then and getting them to stretch their legs a bit. Which, you know, people do anyway, unless you treat your students like laboratory beagles (and even they get very long fag breaks).

And THAT'S what it's all about.

But the dead do not stay in their graves; they rise, they reek, and roam the edu-sphere, looking for new necks, fresh blood and brains. Fans of feeling sad and slightly intellectually superior weren't disappointed this week if they read the news that 'Moving to rhyme may boost pupil results.' What the research appears to be telling us this week is that doing exercises set to nursery rhymes helps children to develop. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP I READ IT ON THE BBC WEBSITE THEY DO NOT F*CK AROUND:

The Primary Movement project involves getting nine-year-olds to do set exercises to nursery rhymes and will be tested in 40 schools in north-east England. The exercises mimic the earliest reflexes made by babies and foetuses. The theory is that children can be held back if such reflexes persist. Trisha Saul from the Primary Movement project said: "Some of the songs and the nursery rhymes will be familiar, it's the movements that are different. "These are designed to replicate movements the foetus makes in the womb and the baby makes in the first six months of their life."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-1697141

Now, why on earth would anyone think that this was a thing that actually existed, rather than simply being a whimsical daydream of a theory? Because the ubiquitous research suggested it, in a study by the Queen's University Belfast in 2000. Blimey, they've taken their time to get round to doing anything, haven't they? Or maybe it's a testimony to the distance back anyone had to dig in order to get any academic support for this latest foray into the desperate world of educational fairy tale research. Maybe not.

The small scale little known research project found that children who carried out systematic physical exercises for a year gained 15-20 months progress in reading compared to a control group which did not do the exercises.

'Small scale'. 'Little Known'. It's not looking good, is it? They could have said 'obscure', but I think the Beeb draw a line somewhere. Trisha Saul, from the Primary Movement Project, said this:

"It's a bit like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but the butterfly still has bits of the caterpillar attached to it."

That's EXACTLY what it's like. What?

'I am a confident, independent learner.'

I had a look a Primary Movement's website (the body coordinating the project, which is taking place in 40 schools in England and Wales). It's far from illuminating, although it links to a sole credit- a press release from Queen's University, Belfast (oddly enough from 2006, and the article published by the no-doubt beyond beyond reproach Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs- available online only, of course- was in the November 2005 issue, so I don't know where 2000 comes from).

What it DOES offer is a number of courses that you can apply to take. There isn't a price list on it. I'm guessing it isn't free, for either the Foundation or Advanced Level certification. The website advises that as a parent, you should check if your local teacher is trained properly in the method, and suddenly it's getting a bit mystical and Alexander techniquey, and only the elect are chosen etc.

There is an interesting name that comes up again: Dr Martin McPhillips, who developed the Primary Movement program, and also appears as the author of five out of the seven published papers supporting the work of the PMP so boy, he's busy. As far as I can see, the research produced by the PMP seems to focus on children with SEN. I might be wrong, of course.

'The Primary Movement programme developed at Queen's University, Belfast has been shown to have a significant impact on reducing reflex persistence. It has been evaluated in a number of formal studies that have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.'

In a school-based study of children in their first year at primary school, it was found that the Primary Movement programme had a significant effect on the development of fine motor control(9). In another large, school-based study, involving more than one thousand children, it was found that the Primary Movement programme had a significant effect on ATNR persistence. This led to improved academic attainments in reading, spelling and mathematics

http://www.primarymovement.org/background/index.html

'I endorse brain gym. And anything else.'

That last sentence interests me, because that's where programs like this intersect with my work as a teacher. The PMP is, I'm sure, beyond reproach, has impeccable academic credentials, and works solely to promote the well being of children. Its authors and board are undoubtedly motivated by nothing but the noblest of motives. That last sentence is quite a claim. I wonder how they reached that conclusion?

My concern is that it is far from clear that instigating a program, however well endorsed, of physical exercises has anything like a substantial effect on a child's learning ability, and if it does, can be replicated on anything more than laboratory conditions, on all, or even merely most children. And that it is far from clear that such a program has any significant difference from any other program of simple physical exercises. That the suggested increases in learning can be accounted for solely by reference to the exercise program, and can't be accounted for by other means, such as the children and the teachers feeling that there should be some kind of benefit. Maybe, maybe, maybe. That's the problem with this kind of research.

The problem remains with ALL forms of educational research; controls aren't real controls; exact conditions can't be replicated and tested against. High causal density in human interactions means that causal relationships can rarely, if ever, be inferred from any pool of data, and researcher bias becomes overwhelming in both the design, execution and interpretation of any such project.

Meanwhile, in austerity UK, trials like this receive funding.

Social science. It's not a real science, is it?

Teacher Voice.

Bankers: 'Better at taking risks with your money than making friends'

2012-02-11T06:15:00.000-08:00

Russian Mafia: 'Applicants not vicious enough.'

People working in the finance sector are good at awarding themselves agreeable bonuses and managing their portfolios, but are poor at empathising with the needs of others or possessing a sense of humour about anything other than cruel jibes at the expense of the impoverished, a survey suggests.

Research by the Institute of Tautologies found that while they scored highly on tasks requiring avarice, egoism and the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, tasks that required collaboration, sympathy and sensitivity to the impact of one's actions were performed less well.

The Institute found that only 25% of leading financial institutions possessed any sense of social responsibility suitable for inclusion in humanity, while the remaining 75% received lower scores than the Cosa Nostra or packs of scavenging vampires in those areas.

Said one recent applicant, 'While I'm disappointed that I wasn't selected to join the lowest untouchable rank of their vile anti-life gang of aristocratic desperadoes, I can content myself with the fact that, even stacking shelves in Lidl provides more moral and spiritual nourishment than allying myself with the armies of The Beast.'

'And while I may be functionally illiterate and incapable of making a decision beyond which brand of Pot Noodle I choose to mainline for breakfast, I, at least possess a sense of humour. And, indeed, some friends,' he added.

To read the original report in full, click here.

Breaking Teacher Training News! Kobayashi Maru Test to be adopted as gold standard.

2012-02-08T06:59:00.000-08:00

'Live long...and fail, eventually.'

Teacher training providers in England and Wales have taken a bold and novel approach to next year's cohort of prospective classroom teachers. Instead of the usual post/ pre graduate routes of the BA (Ed) or the PGCE resulting in a portfolio of demonstrable experiences, future candidates will instead be subjected to The Kobayashi Maru, from Star Trek, as a final assessment.
Little known outside of friendless, internet communities of Trekkies, the Kobayashi Maru is a fictional training exercise that Starfleet officer trainees underwent; a computer simulation of a no-win situation, where participants could never succeed. Rather than seeing if they could beat the program, candidates were tested to see how they coped with no-win situations, in essence, being guaranteed to lose.

As one inspector explained, 'We were all up late one evening, caning a very agreeable bottle of Cockburn's port and watching Sky Movies, when Star Trek came on, and we thought, hello; there's something in this.'

'And then we read some newspapers where journalists kept talking about teachers failing all the time, and letting the kids down whenever someone doesn't get a degree in rocket science and become prime Minister. We looked at each other and thought: 'Kobayashi Maru.'

Tested to Failure

'In future, all teachers will be dropped into schools in sink estates with little or no training in behaviour management, a head full of guff about thinking skills and happy thoughts that we cut and pasted out of New Scientist, and a bullseye painted on their foreheads. Then we give all the kids air pistols and tell them 'he just cussed your mum.' Then we see who lasts longer than a week.'

'You know that bit in Die Hard 3, when Bruce Willis is made to walk around Harlem with a racist A-board strapped to his chest? We thought that was an effective way to train teachers to be life-long learners. 'Well,' he added, 'They'll probably learn something.'

'We feel that experiencing the sensation of perpetually failing in their placement schools, will prepare teachers for the experience of being constantly described as vile losers in the national press, and by Ofsted in general.'

Chief Inspector Spock is 334 Vulcan years old.

Dickens Bicentennial Celebrated by Not Teaching Dickens

2012-02-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. FML.'

As of next year, students will no longer have to study Charles Dickens- or any other text over 140 characters, or that cannot be summarised easily in a triptych about cats dressed as policemen and Harry Potter characters.

'We have to recognise that our children are cyber natives and 21st century learners, and we can't oppress them with our prescriptive notions about reading, writing and communicating with other human beings,' said the Children's Poet Laureate yesterday. 'A curriculum should truly enable our children to be life long learners in an uncertain, turbulent world where all knowledge is out of date before it's even been discovered, and we need to address that reading a book just doesn't facilitate their emotional discovery conversation in any way,'

When asked to give examples of how pre-21st century literature would be adapted for the curriculum review, she said, 'Check this out: turn Great Expectations into a series of unimaginative insults on Facebook Chat, and the kids can vote on whether they want Ms Havisham or Joe Gargery to go through to the next rap-battle. The most popular one at the end will be deemed the winner, and everyone gets a can of Red Bull, a Mars Bar, a 500 credits for iTunes.'

'Children can't be fannying about learning about Thomas Hardy and George Orwell- they've got virtual learning platforms to explore where they can all design paper-clips made of foam rubber, a hundred feet high. Or something. I'm not sure, Ken Robinson thought it was jolly exciting anyway.'

Claire Tomalin, a biographer of Dickens, agrees. 'They don't have the attention span any more. It's all that happy slapping and LOL cats, probably. They can't stomach a good four hundred page marathon full of loose, baggy prose and sentimental characters.' When asked if she was aware that many of Dickens' stories were serialised in the first place, and therefore read in short bursts, she pointed to the badge on her lapel that read 'Charles Dickens #1 Biographer.

'See that?' she said. 'F*ck off.'

Charles Dickens is 200 years old, and is a dead white guy who wrote very long text messages and wasn't on Twitter.

*with thanks to the masterful Peter Serafinowicz, showing how Dickens can still be integrated with a healthy, nutritious education.

Scenes of chaos as research shows factors of underachievement exactly what teachers thought they were anyway

2012-02-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

Circuses: 'not ideal for raising academic aspiration,' apparently.

Bedlam descended on the world of education as teachers reacted to the shock findings of recent research, which claimed that, among other things, children who came from families that take drugs, have no money, or don't value education, have less chance in school than others.

'I don't know what's real any more,' wept one teacher who asked not to be named. 'Previously I had thought that kids raised in crack dens with two absentee parents and a day job scraping rust from the underside of moving trains were my best bet in the GCSE sweepstake. Now nothing makes sense and I don't know if I should be teaching them about chromosomes or hitting them with a shovel.'

'Make the madness stop,' he added.

Researchers at the Faculty of Research and Facts were adamant that this information would revolutionise how we understand the link between 'having a hard life' and 'not finding things easy'. 'This shows once and for all that children who have hard lives often continue to have hard lives, flying in the face of the common sense opinion that they will eventually find a magic lamp with a genie inside it. Now that theory can be well and truly put to rest.'

Faced with claims that this research was just what everyone already thought, the Spokesman was defiant. 'This is completely untrue. Now it's in a list.'

Teaching Unions saluted the findings. 'Now that we've discovered the Holy Grail of understanding 'difficult' we can take this data and really start to make a difference,' he said.

In other news: People who earn less money 'are poorer than people who earn more.'

Educating Essex 8: The Parable of the Good School

2012-02-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

'Excuse me, can you tell me where Passmores school is?'

Ladies and gentlemen, I have BEEN to the mountain top. This week I visited the mother-ship of telly schools: Passmores, in Harlow. It was, of course, the event horizon of the Channel 4 edu-phenomenon black hole Educating Essex, which gave me far too much to write about a few months back, as the fixed rig docudrama attempted to peel back the curtain of schooling and let the public see what kind of wizards were pulling the levers. It was the hit you couldn't miss if you were a teacher. I wanted, perhaps for the first time, to draw a teacher-eye picture of what our favourite telly-comp was like from the inside, as opposed to a journalist's preferred storyline.

Not unlike an educational endoscope.

You're WELCOME.

It is, I must say, hard to miss Passmores, given that the front of the building (I say front; it's built in the shape of a starfish, or the Nickelodeon Splat!) has the name spelled out in wooden planking thirty feet high, in a manner that could enable identification from space, should the Mir satellite ever need to aim something at them. It's a quite spectacular build. I should point out that Passmores moved into a groovy new edu-plex towards the end of the series being filmed. Hawk-eyed viewers will have noticed that results day was celebrated in what appeared to be Blofeld's hollowed-out volcano, as compared to the Grange Hill film set that served as prior address.

Not a BSF identikit model, but a spectacular example of what can be done when teachers, as opposed to committees design a building for purpose, it's swimming in broad open spaces, light and eye-lines that reminded me of the Guggenheim, or more closely, the central court of the British Museum; the assembly hall was contained in the heart of the starfish (do starfishes have hearts? Or are they like inspectors?), to give you some idea of the scale of this building, and the roof, like the Old Lady of Bloomsbury, is a glass porthole. Vic Goddard, the towering, towering Godfather of Passmores, who had kindly invited me for the day, told me that he had been part of the team that harnessed up and helped to clean off the shower of avian guano that speckled it daintily. Which tells you, I think, a little bit about the kind of Head Teacher he is.

Very surreal to be somewhere that I had written so much about, and meeting people who might have been, as far as I could tell, CGI mannequins. Every now and then I bumped into one of the heroes of my previous blogs, and I would freeze for a second, access my files labelled, 'Did I say something sarcastic?' and then carry on.

The man himself, Vic. He is actually eight feet tall in real life.

If you've read any of the interviews in the Guardian, or seen the various TV appearances they've done, you will have encountered a frequent set of phrases used by most people to describe Vic Goddard: inspirational; enthusiastic; infectious; committed. Now, I've been to a few business guru seminars where the hard-on standing at the podium whipped crowds up into cultish frenzies; I'm suspicious of anyone described as 'inspirational' because cults of personality are almost exclusively built around men and women who cannot possibly meet the expectations of the crowd upon which they surf. But I spent a whole afternoon with Vic, and I am happy to confirm what I already suspected: the man is an genuinely inspirational Head. 'They'll carry me out of here in a box,' he said with perfect sincerity. Of course if

he blows town next month with a bag full of money and broken dreams I'll look stupid, SO I'M COUNTING ON HIM NOT TO DO THAT THING.

He really is the genuine article; I have no idea what he was like as a PE teacher (other than, as all PE teachers, villains), but he conveys the sense of being an excellent leader- totally focussed on what he wants to do, totally committed to the well-being of the children, totally driven to make it happen. Best of all, he doesn't possess what I often perceive in the committed: intolerance, the fart in the spacesuit of excellence. Achieving any kind of excellence required a focus like a laser, but the downfall of that single-mindedness is often the death of collaboration or humanity. Which doesn't make it a bad thing. But wouldn't it be an excellent thing to have that focus and still convey the sense that you gave a shit about the people you expected to carry out your vision? Take a bow, sir.

He took me on a tour of the school. Not an Ofsted serving suggestion, but just a general walk around 'the arms of the starfish' (which is also the name of a stag club in Soho, incidentally), past room after room of glass-walled classes full of children all working away, drawing, writing, turning the Tempest into a rap, the usual. Not one of them looked unruly or desperate; not one of them erupted into faux-outrage when we entered. There was even a cover lesson where the kids were working quietly (I KNOW!) in pairs, happy to answer questions. This wasn't something you could fraud for the cameras, and there certainly wasn't any 'days-out' jiggery-pokery with the naughty kids; this was a school where manners, respect and discipline were part of the atmosphere, and I have to admit, it was a beautiful thing. Maybe it was the CO2 monitors in every room, which, when they pipe up in warning, are answered by a designated pupil charged with opening windows. I AM NOT KIDDING YOU HERE THIS IS A SYSTEM THEY HAVE. Wouldn't it be simpler to have that automated? I asked, perhaps a little drunk on modernity and futurism. 'An extra hundred thousand,' said Vic.

(I was reminded of the scene in Running Scared, when the undercover cop asks the police garage to soup-up his patrol car, making it invisible, invincible, invulnerable. 'It won't be invisible till five,' replies the laconic grease-monkey.)

Of course, part of the wow factor is always going to be a beautiful new build with glorious attention to space, detail and utility. But the success of Passmores is so much more than that. I asked Vic to narrow down a bit on how Passmores enjoys such an atmosphere of calm and learning, and he had a practised but sincere response; consistency, a shared vision throughout the school communicated clearly to everyone, and reinforced by senior staff. Now I know from a variety of dodgy management positions that this is one of the hardest parts: first of all you have to have a vision, otherwise you deal with life as it comes, and endless other factors buffet you as they will; but next you have to acknowledge that you cannot do everything yourself; your job is to drive people in the direction you want, and let them to drive their people the same way, preferably with their buy-in, sometimes without it. The school chariot travels nowhere, and slowly, unless the horses all pull the same way.

Good example: the behaviour system at Passmores appears to be so tight that I couldn't slide a razor blade between its molecules: all detentions are collated centrally and displayed in the public space for all to see, 48 hours in advance. Meaty ones too- hours, hour and a half, enough to make most think twice. Kids who have a detention for laziness in class, low output, have a chance to hand work in before the hour of their sanction, to void the detentions- but they still have to turn up to have their status assessed. Best of all- and this is the clincher for me- the end of day registration, so all pupils have to report back to form groups (vertical age form groups, I might add- the one I entered resembled the auditions for Bugsy Malone), and if they have any detentions they get escorted back to the main hall, for collection by their captors and mentors.

It really was a joy to behold. Not because I enjoy seeing children assigned to the gaol, but because of the certainty of it, the difficulty for any child to elude it. Of course, they could just bolt, like any other sanction, but a member of staff is paid to analyse each day's detention attendance, and track/ pursue any fugitives. Simple; effective. What the anti-sanction brigade often forget is that the purpose of sanctions is to render themselves obsolete; that providing a deterrent to student misbehaviour is designed to make sure they don't incur sanctions in the future. And a deterrent is only a deterrent when it is believed to be inevitable, which in a school it can be, unlike, say, society, where justice and the jailer are easily given the slip.

I have to mention the toilets. If someone told me the staff dunnies in my gaffe were to be integrated with the students'- AND become Unisex, I would probably poke you in the eye with a marker pen and quit. But that's exactly what they did here....and it works, against every instinct and reservation I have about blurring the demarcation between students and staff, and the necessary invisible fences of probity and protection. They really are quite gorgeous: tall, sturdy, cleaned THROUGHOUT the day by dedicated cleaners who sign off an inspection sheet a la hotel toilets. Dyson hand dryers; a wash basin that could double as a chocolate fountain (another club in Soho, coincidentally enough); broad canopies of glass and light, and an entrance accessed through the broad pavilion of the corridor. Quite eye-popping. Caution demands that you should come back in two years' time and see if this egalitarian leveller can be maintained, or will it disintegrate through disinterest and decadence. Believe me, most cocktail bars don't have latrines like this, which in most schools are a grisly affair.

The toilets, Heathrow Terminal 5, VIP lounge. And Passmores.

And that's the point. Vic asked the kids what they wanted from the rebuild, and overwhelmingly they said, 'Toilets we can bear to be in.' Which put me in mind of the old maxim about restaurants; the attention paid to them reflects the care shown in the kitchen, which is absolutely, demonstrably true in my experience. How often do the staff give a damn about the facilities kids rub up against every day? An interesting exercise in perspective.

Man, the toilets here are better than my powder room and MY FRIEND THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THAT.

Point to make; every time we passed a kid in the near-silent corridors (I said to Vic, 'Is anyone IN right now?' '900 of them, yes,' he replied. I thought maybe they were Borrowers.), Vic either spoke to them by name, or mentioned a previous conversation they had had. Now, you don't get that kind of face recognition unless you spend a large part of your time on the beat, walking into classrooms and not buried in data sets and meetings with the LEA. I think it was this that most impressed me; just on a simple stroll around the school staff were highly visible, and senior staff equally so. Passive supervision, Vic called it; everyone sees everyone else, like Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and civil society occurs on a visible and subconscious level. Quite beautiful to see. And equally gratifying to see every kid speak with decorum, warmth and respect to Vic as we passed. I imagine Fonzie feels like this when he walks into Al's diner.

And, pleasingly enough I was also introduced to the Big Beast himself, the inimitable Mr Stephen Drew, whom we met while he was patrolling the corridor, looking for children with undone top buttons and inappropriate eye-liner so he could gather them into his sack and torture them. And, dear reader, I would like to exclusively report that the man's feet were entirely unshod; devoid of shoe; naked to the raw cotton sock. I cannot recall if the TV shown included footage of Harlow's Zola Budd padding around barefoot; I can only assume it's a tactic with which he can creep up on anarchist students, plotting sedition in complete silence. It's a thin possibility, but it's all I've got. You don't ask questions like that, although he claimed his office was hot, and I thought A-Ha! a flaw in this Utopian edifice. The Daily Mail can have that one for free: 'Half-naked eccentric disciplinarian stalks overheated laboratory school.'

S-Drew is equally impressive; an intelligent, friendly man whom, I imagine, is the same man in the corridor as he is beyond it. It's something that he seemed to share with Vic: an impression conveyed of being in exactly the right place at the right time, doing something you love, with dedication and care. Aristotle declared that the point of human life was eudaimonia- a kind of flourishing, matching one's potential to your challenges and developing thereby. I sense at least two men in a state of incremental eudaimonia here. And when the individual flourishes in his or her role, the community flourishes. And when the community flourishes, the individual flourishes, in a perfect integration of both socialist and liberal visions. I would not, I hasten to point out, like to get on the wrong side of Mr Drew. There's a sense that he would crawl over broken glass to support your education but also that he possessed an ENDLESS OCEAN OF STUBBORNNESS THAT MEANT HE WOULD NEVER GIVE UP TELLING YOU TO DO YOUR TIE PROPERLY UNLESS THE SUN WENT SUPERNOVA. Perhaps not even then. Good man.

The Inclusion Centre. No, I'm NOT kidding.

It's a school run on law, but also character; not simply a prison of sanctions and rewards, but also a community that understands why such rules have to exist and works to make electric fences and punishment unnecessary. It would be easy to diminish their success by claiming that the catchment is agreeable and supportive, and that such children naturally comply and collaborate; but that would be wrong, for two reasons: firstly, while it might be no Hackney or Easterhouse, it's no Hampstead either, with higher than average kids on Free School meals and SEN children. Secondly, communities like this don't just happen by themselves; they take years to evolve, with direction and continuous struggle. Vic told me that it took years to get the ship turned around, and get everyone trained into the systems he wanted. Now that they had, you could barely see the wires any more. But they were there, just the same.

I even got a chance to meet that other hero of Educating Essex, Russell King, of 'Clear off, scumbags' fame. The Daily Hate and others had a bit of a field day with him, mostly because his awesome one-liner became a catchphrase for the series (and me) and became emblematic of a certain type of media outrage, directed against what they perceived to be inappropriacy and unprofessionalism. Except that it wasn't; it was evidence of fantastic relationships, where humour and context could enable communication like that without harm or risk. It was a sign of an expert teacher, not a bad one. But then, how could the journalists from the Hate and others know anything about that? They don't know anything about schools, not a drop. In other words, they can be ignored, as I ignore the opinion of anyone who knows f*ck all about schools because they have never been inside one except as a customer.I spent half an hour with Mr King, and his compassion and commitment to students is fathomless. He even had articles on his wall about inspiring students to go to Russell Group/ Oxbridge Universities because, 'We don't have a sixth form, and if they want to get to top Unis they need to be working towards that before they leave here.' So, even though there's no direct benefit to himself or the school, he chooses to give kids a leg-up into better futures.

That's a teacher, if you don't mind me saying. A real one.

As we mingled with students at the end, Vic chatted away to Mollie, whom we saw on the show; edited for the glass box, she seemed belligerent and troubled; in the flesh she seemed funny, intelligent and personable. That is, of course, the problem with TV; it adds ten pounds to your ego and idiosyncrasies. You wouldn't recognise this school from the simmering stock pot of insurrection and angst that the camera portrayed. Of course you wouldn't: dozens of fixed-rig cams filming for a year, boiled down into seven, forty-five minute segments of drama and narrative. Of course, no one wants to watch people working quietly in biddable cohorts of near silence, so that's Showbiz. But it's important that we recognise what we saw.

This Playa got humps AND junk.

I asked Vic two questions that were deliberately cheeky. First of all, I asked him what was next for him? Without hesitation, he said, 'Why would I want to do anything other than this?' And I believe him. Here's a man doing what he loves, in excellent manner. In many ways, isn't that the life ambition of us all? The second question was, 'Will there be another series?' For the first time, I saw a flicker of fatigue wash over his face, which normally defaulted to positivity, enthusiasm and good humour the entire time I was there.

'Channel four want to. I don't really; it wouldn't be the same now. When the first one went out, no one thought anyone would watch it.' Like Big Brother, which started attracting even more pathological personalities as the fame snowball rolled along, a second series would have no point, other than to satisfy sequel fever. It would be like the Godfather 3, or the remake of the Italian Job.

I know that Ofsted calls Passmores- sorry, Passmores Academy now- an outstanding school. But who gives a monkeys what they think? I'm a teacher, and part of me saw this as a chance to review it, like a restaurant. Well, you know what I think about the toilets, and someday I'll tell you about Vic's 'special' sandwiches, so I hope you'll take my comments in the context of a man who works and breathes education, schools and kids: Passmores is an outstanding school. I spend half my time trying to dismantle and scorn the moronism that permeates and percolates through education in the UK. It is a relief, a detox and a rest-and-be-thankful to talk about an example of education working so well, of a school where the systems, the leadership, the kids and the learning all embrace and support each other. There's no such thing as a perfect school, and what works in one context may not work in another- in fact, I would say that it's guaranteed that they usually don't- but Passmores does a damn fine job of doing what a school needs to do with its catchment. It's very easy to say what's broken in education; far harder to suggest what 'fixed' might look like. Ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A.

Vic walked me to the reception as I left. A visiting year 6 girl in the corridor shouted after him, 'I wanna come Passmores!' as we walked away. You can't buy that kind of rep. It has to be grown from a seed. In the cab back to the station, the driver asked me if I worked there. I told him I was just visiting. 'A good school, that,' he said as we sailed into the golden evening sun. 'One of the better ones.'

And I thought: Passmores; one of the better ones. Not a bad epitaph.

Same picture as before, but ruder. And therefore funnier.

Clear off, scumbags.

Click here for previous blogs on Educating Essex:

Episode one
Episode two
Episode three
Episode four
Episode five
Episode six
Episode seven

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Let's say something so stupid we have to call it science: obnoxious, loud children 'learn better'

2012-02-02T17:02:00.000-08:00

My learning style involves everyone else not learning.

NEWSFLASH: A study of 12,000 baby Tyrannosaurus Rexes found that the larger, more aggressive calves with longer, sharper teeth tended to outperform their more civil, amenable peers in standardised herbivore intimidation tests (SHIT). This contradicts the commonly held view that agreeable, polite mega-carnivores would be more successful. This raises questions about the need for T-Rex mentors to consider other methods.....(continues in a similar vein forever and ever until everyone dies crying)

Comedy Gold dropped into my email box this morning; a timebomb of stupid that I normally associate with people 'standing on street corners, selling coloured pencils from a tin cup,' to quote the Hitch. Only this time it was a paper written by m'learned educational scientists at Durham University, and blazed on the BBC news website here. The claim was that children who shout out in classes do better than their kinder, lovelier peers.

If Charles Darwin read this report he'd be chewing his long beard like Gandalf and wondering what all the fuss was about. 'Competitive, unpleasant organisms unfettered by social mores or self-restraint get more of what they want' isn't exactly news. Nor is 'teachers forced by obnoxious organic alarm clocks to focus attention on hitting the snooze button until Hell freezes over.'

'The lead author of the research, Peter Tymms, head of Durham University's school of education, said that among children with ADHD symptoms, those who got excited and shouted out seemed to be more "cognitively engaged and as a result learn more".
"Perhaps those children also benefit from receiving additional feedback and attention from their teacher," suggested Prof Tymms.'

TEACH ME! TEACH ME!

YOU THINK? Noisy, greedy little attention-hoovers grab attention, do they? Well, KNOCK ME DOWN WITH A FEATHER. Who knew? Maybe they should ALL be like that, eh? Those quiet little f*ckers, keeping their heads down and working hard, what do they know, eh? Despicable little arse-limpets. They should step the HELL up and get some attention for themselves. Except....except if they all did that....then there wouldn't BE a survival advantage any more because the teacher would be split like a kaleidoscope into a million shards of fragmented attention. So for anyone to grab more attention than their peers they would have to....SHOUT LOUDER AND LOUDER UNTIL THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT IN THE COLD BROKEN UNIVERSE BUT THE BAYING SCREAMS OF CHILDREN HOWLING UNTIL THEIR THROATS HAD TURNED TO STONE.

Let's not do that.

'Ms Merrell, CEM's director of research and development, said she wanted to carry out further studies to see how pupils could be encouraged to shout out as part of the lesson.'

OH BOY OH BOY, I bet the teachers will be QUEUEING ROUND THE BLOCK for Ms Merrell to start doing her experiments in their class. Perhaps after that we can test the effect of letting kids fling faeces at the teacher like Barbary Apes. Form a line, comrades.

"We need to look more closely at this behaviour and how the interaction can be managed in the classroom."

The data suggests that this is optimal.

No, chum; we don't. I, and every teacher, know how this interaction can be managed in the classroom. You don't allow it. If we allow the loud mouths and the intemperate to dominate the time and attention of the teacher, to guzzle the oxygen of attention, to monopolise discussion and personal resources, then all we do is create a war of all against all, where the loudest, neediest and least agreeable come first. Which is fine if we are breeding the next generation of politicians, transvestite cabaret artists or X-Factor participants. Less so if we seek to sculpt human beings.

Other aspects of this paper:

1. The title: 'ADHD and academic attainment: Is there an advantage in impulsivity?' Are they kidding me on? Are they really asking that question? Normally Educational Social Science needs to be pretty brave to show its face round my manor, but this takes the whole packet of biscuits. Are they having me on? Ask anyone with an ounce of language and experience and they would tell you the answer to the question: yes, of course there is, sometimes. But it still makes you a dick. I look forward to the follow up: 'stealing things- does it mean you get more stuff?'

For F*CK'S sake.

2. 'However, it is also recognised that these behavioural problems can lead to children being excluded from pre-school and school from an early age, and that early interventions are promising.' Or to put it another way, kids who shout out and misbehave get in trouble a lot, and if you work hard with them to control themselves at an early age, they can improve. Which we already know. How do we know? We work with kids. Isn't that grand?

School Uniform? More research is needed.

3. In the 'alternative hypotheses' section of the paper, the writers scratch their undoubtedly pointy chins, and ponder their own fallibility:

'Could an unmeasured variable, such as the intelligence, confidence or knowledge of some young children be acting as the key causal factor? This is a possibility; only intervention studies could firmly establish a direct causal link.'

Say it isn't so! You think...you think it might be something else? You think maybe it wasn't just the shouting out that gave them an educational advantage? I love the cautious, wide-eyed uncertainty allowed to creep in at the end, as if they were scared to even ask the question: is it possible that human behaviour is so complex, that the causal density for potential explanations is almost infinite, and the possibility of exacting a clear predictive mechanism is next-to impossible? Let me answer that one for you: yes, it is possible.

It's possible that you wrote this paper before you wrote it. It's possible that you found exactly what you were looking for. It's possible that the first ten cars I see tomorrow will be red: does that mean that Friday generates a glut of scarlet Hyundais? If, every time I wake up on a Sunday morning I have a sore head, a wet mattress and a pocket full of sticky pennies, can I infer that Sunday mornings cause incontinence, cephalalgia and amnesia, or should I look to the pile of empty Laphroaig bottles surrounding my bed?

4. Most importantly, this paper actually only makes the claim that pushiness is a competitive learning advantage in the group that already displays inattentiveness; in other words, being quiet and well behaved still outweighs all the other factors in terms of educational achievement correlation, as you might expect. It's just that the shouty kids who are inattentive do better than the quiet kids who are inattentive. Now that's not so much of a claim,but in my opinion, the paper frames these themes in such as way as to present them in a more newsworthy and provocative, bone-headed light. The news article certainly does.

T-Rex: surprisingly good Value-Added.

Social science, I despair of you. You're not really a science are you? Like an ape pretending to be a prince, you can wear the robes and hold a sceptre, but you'll never pass the laws. You can hide behind as many abstracts, tables and T-scores as you like, but you aren't physics. You aren't chemistry. You aren't even biology. Until educational research remembers what it can do- act as a commentary on human experience, suggest and frame that experience- and what it can't- discern causation in anything more than the most rudimentary sense when it comes to human desires and direction- then I'll file papers like these squarely under 'that's nice, did you have fun writing it?' and turn to the classroom for the laboratory, the research, and the Petri dish of my teaching.

But more than that, I despair of the way that papers like this are presented in the national media. Normally sober and I'm sure, reliable journalists put things like this under the magnifying glass, cranking up the claims and turning a fairly standard investigation into data, into something beyond even the claims of the writers. The paper itself is no worse than many others, and was, I'm sure the result of many hours of dedicated enquiry and analyses. It isn't the author's fault that the factual conclusions of the research are so unremarkable, although it is their fault that the suggested implications are so knuckle-headed. But the BBC online news portal seems to be increasingly hyperbolic, as if no Thursday could be complete without a claim so absurd that the Krankies would have blushed to imagine it.

And of course, the real heart ache is that people will pick up on research like this, and attempt to shoe horn it somehow into the classroom, advising impressionable teachers to let their kids shout out because of some imagined benefit it brings. What kind of people? Normally people who have never taught in a classroom, never will, and yet have the kind of stones to tell people like you and me how children best learn. Get back in your pit, weasels. We have a job to do.

Teacher Voice.

Thanks to @Bio_Joe for passing on the paper to me, and highlighting the alternative hypothesese.
Read the paper yourself here. It's a barrel of laughs. At least it's short.

ZOMG! Ofsted are TOTALLY on Twitter. Jazz Hands!

2012-02-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the Ofsted Twitter feed. LET ME TELL YOU IT IS A HOOT MY FRIEND. It is either written by a very earnest and serious young person, or it is, in fact, the MOST FINELY CRAFTED PIECE OF SATIRE THE WORLD HAS SEEN. I prefer to believe the latter.

There are many Twitter feeds that I have absolutely no understanding of- literally, cannot fathom why they exist, like the Coca Cola Twitter account, or the ASDA feed. Who the HELL is following these soulless, corporate ad-drips? And yet, and yet, followed they are, in levels approaching the Biblical. Going down a level in Dante's Twit-ferno, we find accounts for abstract nouns like 'Friendship' and 'Caring', and yet we see an exponential rise in membership. Worrying about follower numbers is like worrying how many nipples you have- pointlessness squared, but I worry about a world where people think to themselves, 'What shall I follow? Who do I want to hear from? Ah yes, Fanta. And Happy.' Give me strength.

'Spare us, Lord Wishaw! We are peaceful. We have no weapons.'

But my Twitter-de Jour, the Special on today's menu has to be @Ofstednews. It really is an ironic joy, a breath of subversion in a cold corridor of conformity. It MUST be. What other explanation could there be for such fortune cookie classics as....

'We must focus inspection on the things that make the most difference to the lives of children & young people' Or....

'Evidence suggests the quality of leadership correlates to the quality of service that children & young people receive '

BROTHER YOU HAD ME AT 'WE'. This is better than listening to the Arab Spring on the World Service. My only advice to them would be they should integrate the Twitter feed with the surprise inspections, so they could announce their every step as they take them.

@Ofstednews CITIZEN WE ARE OUTSIDE YOUR CLASSROOM. CONTINUE TO TEACH NORMALLY.

@Ofstednews THIS TEACHER_CITIZEN IS NOT SHOWING EVIDENCE OF PROGRESS. PERHAPS THEY NEED TO BE TESTED IN FIRE?

@Ofstednews WHERE CAN YOU EVIDENCE STUDENT VOICE IN THIS LESSON? HAVE YOU USED STAKEHOLDER PREFERENCES TO INFORM PLANNING?

@Ofstednews DO NOT MAKE ME SUMMON LORD WILSHAW.

@Ofstednews LORD WILSHAW I CAN EXPLAIN... *acck* *chokes*

@Ofstednews #ff@mgove #ff@mossborneacademy

@Ofstednews I hoover like a junior minister in a reshuffle. Schedule some private surgery time this weekend

@Ofstednews OMG I can't believe Ofsted are saying this about you! Click here bit.ly/x4yourcomputerhasaids

There is nothing not to like about Ofsted's Twitter feed. Unless, of course, they start to make judgements about YOUR Twitter feed. Ofstednews, you can have that idea for free. Just give me 48 hours notice to think of something to say.

Teacher Voice: we need more than #askgove. Teachers need to speak up

2012-01-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

I'm warning you

Have you heard of Student Voice? Of course you have. If you haven't been interviewed by a twelve year old, or sat in the stocks of a 360 degree performance management assessment while your more feral EBD customers pelt you with mouldy tubers, then you, my friend, teach on the Moon.

Have you heard of Parent Power? Stupid question; when they aren't demanding to know why their children haven't completed their A-level in Further Maths in year 7, setting up a Free School, or crucifying you with league tables, they're logging onto the new 'Rat on a school' website designed specifically for people with personality disorders and bleak, flavourless lives to bleed their neuroses online while cry-w*nking into a sock.

Have you heard of 'Teacher Voice', the bold new initiative launched by the DfE to create a representative body that regularly polls and consults acting teachers, asking them about issues of pedagogy, how children best learn, what needs to happen in schools, classroom design, etc.?

NO YOU HAVEN'T UNLESS YOU LIVE INSIDE MY MIND. That's because it doesn't exist. Everyone BUT teachers has a megaphone in the meetings where nuts and bolts are cast. We don't even get an invite.

I am put in mind of this point because of the #askGove project that is currently lighting up the switchboards of Twitter like a pinball machine. It's an attempt, it says here, for the education select committee to get the views of teachers, ahead of a meeting with G-Diddy on Tuesday. Well, excuse me for pissing on your camp-fire of I AM LISTENING, but what on EARTH is this designed to prove? We can send him questions any time we like already. Does anyone seriously think that all their questions are being put, as we tweet, into a big sack, and the Education Select Committee will rummage round it, arm deep like Jimmy Saville, and pluck out something to ask M-Gove? 'Now then, now then, here's a question from Beth from Middlesbrough, and she'd like to know if you've ever gone full pelt with a tranny. Minister?'

I SUSPECT THIS IS NOT A THING THAT WILL HAPPEN. No, what will happen is that they ask the questions that they wanted to ask anyway, and use any goddamn data they fancy from the #askgove pool of tweets to justify their interrogation. It isn't an exercise in listening, it's exactly the opposite; it's an exercise in appearing to listen, which as we all know from classrooms is ANNOYING AS HELL. It's also deceptive, and patronising.

Who devises policy? Who decides how best children learn? Who works out if class sizes are important or not? Who creates systems of assessment? Who says if a subject, a skill, a project is workable, or a laboratory Frankenstein, engineered in a Petri-dish of good intentions? Everyone BUT us. Now does that sound sensible to you? It doesn't sound sensible to me. In fact, it sounds perverse. It sounds like education is the ball everyone wants to play with, and the ones who actually do...you know, the educating thing....are the ones most removed from its design and execution. Isn't that odd?

In the Land of the Deaf, the big-eared man is King.

It is my mission in life, because I am on a mission, to wade through the slurry and the offal of guano that rains on us like Satanic Manna every day, wave my tricorder at it, and decide one thing: good idea in the classroom or bad? Most of what showers down on us that was decided solely in a department of education, a cabinet meeting, a pow-wow with speech writers and focus groups, falls fairly and squarely into the latter category. I have had it up to here *indicates a spot between nipple and chin* with False Prophets telling us, the experts, what works, and what doesn't.

We, as a profession, have been muzzled, fixed as neatly as any castrato. When Ofsted ties its horse to the front gates and bowls in like Berty-Big-Balls, it consults the school leadership, the students, even the parents. How are teacher views taken into account? When, apart from the ballot box, when single issues conflate into a million others, are teachers asked to indicate their preferences for how they would like to teach, for how they think children learn, and what they think about the latest oh-boy initiative doomed to die, like mortal men in Middle-Earth?

Don't the Unions speak for us? Well, they have a different purpose these days, being focused more on pay and conditions- thanks for that, incidentally-than matters of pedagogy. They do act as a funnel for ideas and debate, but I don't think I'm ruffling any feathers here when I say that's not really what they're about any more. Also, their intrinsic aim of defending the lot of the teacher, while admirable in many ways, isn't the same thing as defending education itself, although it often identical. The GTC? The GTC is/ was a miserable embarrassment, because it could have been so much. It was meant to be a representative and regulatory body that ensured the profession was a profession. What it became also damned it; a punitive organ you only heard about when you had to cough up your fees so that you could receive a tatty circular sent to your previous address. Sometimes you heard about it when somebody got busted for downloading porn. It was the Vito Corloene of the quangos, awkward and unloved and it will not be missed.

'Oh we can HEAR you; we just don't have to GIVE a sh*t.'

And now there is nothing. The Schools Council, the GTC, all lost, like the library of Alexandria. Nobody speaks for us. Worse, we have even forgotten there is an us. We have lost consciousness. Never consulted, we now no longer even act surprised when we are not consulted. A generation of teachers have gone through the system who have never experienced what it feels like to question educational orthodoxies, who seem to be unaware that other orthodoxies, equally contestable, even exist. Teachers who have sat obediently through MAs and PGCEs who have never known anything other than the dogma of group work, of thinking skills, of learning hats, or levelled assessments, of value-added, of target grades and FFT, of green marking ink, of graded inspections, of skills-driven learning, of APP, personalised learning, AFL and positive behaviour management. We have become like the inhabitants of Huxley's World State in Brave New World, unable to conceive of other realities.

This situation will last as long as we permit it. We are legion because, of course, there are many of us. Every teacher needs to wake up; to remember that the duty they serve is greater than any directive or article of best practise. If you saw a child being man-handled on the street would you ignore it? I hope not. If you see a child's future being wrecked in an act of abstract abuse, should we look away. Worse; should we enable it? Of course not. Teachers, we need to speak up and tell people when they're doing it wrong. You have every right; YOU are the expert on education.

And what of the commentators, the Professors of Education, the advisers, the talking heads? They too have their place in the discussion on education. Their ideas are useful, and important too. For all the faults I sometimes paint, we need them to act as a check and balance on us, to detect the counter-intuitive flaws of the classroom, to advise and challenge. They also care about education, and often, they have skills we lack and need. But that isn't what they are right now. Right now, they are the ruling class, the Alphas to our Gammas. We barely register on the RADAR of the war room. In the Secret Garden of Education, the gardeners are now absent, replaced by flower arrangers. Like bee-keepers; they want the honey, but they couldn't make it themselves. If ministers ran a hive, they would probably advise apiarists to wake the bees up with Radio 4 and warm air because 'research suggests honey production accelerates in these conditions.' Either that, or they would slice each tiny insect open, looking for the honey.

So from now on, I invite you to remember that you have a teacher voice. We are the only missing guest at the party; in fact, there isn't even a seat for us.

Teacher Voice Manifesto:

Realise we are a marginalised group.
Admit that we know most about what happens in classrooms
If educational research contradicts classroom experience, and the shared experience of your peers, then defer its acceptance until the research has been explored and reviewed
Speak. Up. Raise your voice at every staff meeting; email the HELL out of people with whom you disagree.
Ask for explanations of every policy you feel is damaging and dangerous to children
Raise your points with line management, governors, anyone you feel needs to know.
Seek positions where you can influence policy yourself.
Discuss and debate and defend your experience in every arena, virtual and solid, from chat-rooms to the staffroom.
Always stay focussed on what we should be doing- educating children to the best of our ability- rather than what you are told to do: for example, raising the school GCSE rates. Such things are extrinsic goals, incidental to our objectives.
Campaign at all times for teacher views to be taken into account at every stage of interrogation and data sampling. Who conducts national surveys of what we think any more, unless they want to sell us something?

'PERHAPS YOU CAN HEAR ME NOW, F*CKER?'

Brothers and sisters, boys and girls, it's time to crash the party.

Teacher Voice.

Teacher Voice.

TEACHER VOICE.

League Tables: Teachers to blame for stupid people, new report shows.

2012-01-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

The league tables are out, and everywhere education analysts and correspondants are spontaneously giving birth parthenogenetically in their scramble to sieve and distil evidence that justifies exactly what they already thought. You can almost hear the collective sigh, from Whitehall to the Western Isles, as people look at exactly the same figures, the same data, and deduce completely different conclusions. Fill in the blank: '___________ category of students did better/ worse then ________ category of students. This clearly shows ___________. Glasses will flip elegantly between half full and half empty for about a week, I should think. And then, like December the 26th, everyone will clear the wrapping paper away, after a bit of a scrap, and think exactly what they always did.

If ever you needed proof that decoding data was akin to reading the entrails of a butchered goose, then feast your eyes over the bloody giblets of the educational commentatori over the next week or so. Let me know when it's finished, because my philosopher's soul cannot bear the simultaneous, effortless prestidigitation that accompanies the assertion that academies are both the solution and desecration of education's young dream, that lollipops, group work and independent learning tasks result in exponential rates of value-added, and a million other axioms welded, unwillingly, unwittingly to the innocent, unassuming figures.

I'll leave that to my betters. What I will do is pick up on the first wave of analysis I walked into; this article on the BBC News website. It was comedy gold, and managed to commit about five out of my ten favourite lazy education journalism clichés that I wrote about here. YOU WOULD ALMOST THINK THAT PEOPLE DID NOT READ THIS BLOG AND IMMEDIATELY AMEND THEIR WRITING HABITS.

1.'Just one in 15 (6.5%) pupils starting secondary school in England "behind" for their age goes on to get five good GCSEs including English and maths, official data shows.'

The crux of this proposition seems to be the quite spectacularly unspectacular claim that many students who start off secondary school with low grades/ results/ reading ages (insert your barometer) often fail to dazzle the world with their understanding of Proust and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle by the time they leave, as measured by average GSCEs. So let me get this straight- are you implying that kids who aren't doing well/ aren't too bright in year 7, are often still not doing well/ aren't too bright by the time they leave school? WHATEVER NEXT? People who eat too many buns often more overweight than other people? Short kids become short adults? Who knew?

Another beautiful assumption is that this kind of thinking requires that we accept there is a level they should be at by that point. Of course, what this means is that there is a statistical mean that most have reached. Which means there will always be some above and below that magical intersection of the many and the few. If everyone reached that point, then...the point would simply be moved higher. The headline might as well have read 'not everyone above average' and stood back in awe at itself.

2. 'The government data published as part of secondary school league tables suggests the majority of schools are failing struggling pupils.'

OH THE DATA SUGGESTS THAT DOES IT? WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME OVER HERE AND SUGGEST THAT? OH BOY I HOPE YOU DO BECAUSE MY FRIEND I HAVE A NEW TYRE IRON I WANT TO TRY OUT.

We're failing them again! Failing, I tell you, failing! Man, that is fighting talk. Every time someone falls over, someone has failed them. When a patient dies on the table, did the surgeon fail? Or did they die? When I see a KitKat wrapper on the pavement, have the rubbish men failed? Is a mugging a failure of the police? It's raining today. Did Michael Fish fail? This absurd, utopian framework, where anything bad that happens is evidence that someone somewhere has failed is laughable. I particularly like how the definition of failure here is 'not making everyone smart,' 'Not getting everyone 5 A*-Cs' (which was itself a target plucked from the ether) and 'not ensuring everyone succeeds.' Jesus CHRIST but that is a high bar to hurdle.

And that was just in the first two sentences.

By the time they got to:

'As expected, those from disadvantaged backgrounds (classed as those on free school meals or in local authority care) do less well.'

...I gave up. My satire muscles are sore from straining. New bollocks, please.

Crystal Bollocks 2: A response song

2012-01-23T03:43:00.000-08:00

'An empire will rise in the East...Danny Adams in 11F will get a B...'

Remember Response Songs? They used to be big in the charts, when popular songs would be replied to; I believe the hippety-hoppers still do it quite a lot. I had my own experience in the form of this blog (click here) by Mike Herrity, who has apparently been chewing on the issues raised in my recent blog on Value Added, and target setting in general . He did so in a such polite and thoughtful way; I must say, I wish that more people could hold a dialogue about education like this. A lot of the comments I get remind me of the sort of responses underneath online articles in the Daily Mail (‘time to end the great democratic experiment’ / ‘boil in the filth of your own excrement’ etc). So I thought I would do the same.

The first thing is to admit where I might have been clearer:

1. I conflated Contextual Value Added with Value Added. Value Added is a more general measure of absolute progress; contextual value added is the same, but taking into account the social and economic indicators I mentioned previously. Now there are significant differences between these of course- but they both still rely on the same principles of comparison, and estimation of average outcome:

From the Dfe itself, a reminder that CVA and VA share most of the same DNA:

‘CVA is not very different from simple VA. The basic principle of measuring progress from the KS2 test to qualifications attained at KS4 remains the same. However, a number of other factors which are outside a school's control, such as gender, special educational needs, movement between schools, and family circumstances, are also known to affect pupils' performance. CVA therefore goes a step further than simple VA by taking these factors into account and thus gives a much fairer measure of the effectiveness of a school.’

http://www.education.gov.uk/performancetables/schools_09/s3.shtml

'CVA is dead! Long live VA!'

See? We’re not so different, you and I, Austin Powers. So while I was playing hard and fast with the terms, I think my substantive point about its prognosticative powers remains, ie that it is a statistical estimate, and entirely devoid of predictive powers. As Mike points out, I am aware that neither CVA nor VA is intended to be used in a predictive way, not by the FFT, not by any serious statistician involved in its production.

But that's not the point: the point is that this is how the measures are used in schools. Believe me, most schools I work with DO use CVA and VA as methods for retrospectively evaluating school, department and classroom teacher performance. And they shouldn't. But they do. It's no good defending CVA/ VA by saying, 'ah but that's not what they're supposed to be used for.' They ARE used for that purpose. When Ofsted, or any other interested party comes in for an inspection tango, they don't look at your CVA/ VA and go, 'Let's just ignore this, shall we?' They get stuck into it, boots first, as a method of evaluating the school's performance. And teachers are called out on it. A mother might leave a credit card in the hands of a teenager 'for emergencies', but if the card is regularly maxed out in Top Shop and Nando's, then you'd think again about the strategy, just like I'd think again about how such data is disseminated.

2. CVA has been phased out, in response to the School White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, November 2010. Value Added is the current, new measure being reverted to. I hold my hands up to this one- serves me right for not keeping abreast, and it took a few kind people on Twitter to point it out. But like I say, Value Added still retains the intrinsic problems shared by CVA:

From the TES:

'The...review of the English exams system, conducted by Sir Richard Sykes and published this week, attacks the “implied precision” of CVA as “spurious”, which it says makes the measure “unfair” to schools, teachers, pupils and parents.

The review says it should be abandoned, along with value added, unless the “underlying validity to their methodology” can be proved. A leading academic said this week that it could take five years to develop a replacement measure....Professor Stephen Gorard, from Birmingham University, has warned about the dangers of the measure before it was even introduced. He said there was so much missing data and “measurement error” that the end result was a “nonsense”. “If the use of CVA continues I think there will come a time when it results in court a case,” he said.’

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6039788

I don’t know Professor Gorard, but I likes the cut of his jib.

Other points:

No, I don't use wikipedia as a source to justify my arguments! In the case he refers to I thought the Tweeter was from abroad, and might just need direction to a brief explanation of the term. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but like I say, it has no direct impact on the problems of CVA or VA.

He is so wise.

'What am FFT?' That was my darling writing style, not an error. See: Bizarro, Mongo from Blazing Saddles, Rudolf Steiner, et al. Oh, and I never implied that they are, like, 'the man', oppressing schools with their heavy data. They do what they do. They are entirely, I am sure, without spot or blemish. It's what happens to that data after it leaves their hands that I object to. They can sell it or give it away for all I care.

Mike Treadaway, Director of the FFT is 'horrified' at how schools use the estimates, you say? So am I! I don't blame him. But what people often fail to appreciate is that as soon as you issue estimates of what pupil x is statistically capable of achieving, using their peer group as a base line, then you ARE in the business of implying that a child should be reaching level Y. Trust me, if a pupil goes below the FFT estimate, you better believe that schools, parents and LEAs get on the blame bus. It's no good, saying, like Mr Spock, 'Ah, this child has defied the FFT estimate. How interesting.' No: it's clobbering time. Performance Management, SEFs (RIP), inspections, all lean on FFT data as gospel. This is how it's used in schools. That's why I think we need to cut up the credit cards.

One of my main problems with the concept of value added is that it’s a concept lifted directly from the market place: the difference between the sale price and the production cost per unit. It also refers to a feature of a product that goes beyond the standard expectation, like a car with a holder for a mug. It describes how a product increases in value as it goes along a production line.

What some schools see when they get data.

Now aren’t THEY lovely metaphors to use to describe the education of children? The answer’s no, incidentally. I mean, I get it, I understand what it’s trying to say, and there’s certainly some good in it- we all want to ‘add value’ to children- but the danger of metaphors lies in over-identifying the signifier with the signified. Education isn’t a commodity; a child isn’t a product. There are fundamental conceptual differences, and if someone doesn’t grasp that then they shouldn’t be in education.

An A isn't the target I set my children. It's the target I set for myself. The target I set for my children is that they try their damnedest, every time. Sure, for some kids that will mean I task them up differently, to meet their different needs. But the day I tell a kid I expect anything less than the best from them is the day I hang up my cardigan. They can get an A or they can get a D; as long as they- we both- tried our best. Run, Forrest, run!

The use of data in teaching is an interesting conversation; but the bean-counters have had their way for too long, and we have increasingly found that we now have a generation of teachers and school leaders who a) believe FFT data is predictive and b) have forgotten how to predict grades or set their own targets with confidence. It has been removed from the hands of the experts- the teachers, by people who are obsessed with accountability and market based models of education.

The problem is that schools aren't factories where ball-bearings are made. And a large part of what we do defies the spreadsheet. Children don't learn in smooth, incremental gradients. They stall; they reverse. They leap forward; sometimes years later. We don't deliver parcelled units of knowledge or learning; we teach; they learn. The process is abstract, intangible at times, and often maddeningly defiant of metrification.

Just like people.

The Bones Have Spoken: Is Value-Added Crystal Bollocks?

2012-01-21T12:03:00.000-08:00

It's gospel, mate.

NICK GIBB HAS HIS BALLS OUT TODAY! Calm down, major, his Crystal balls. Today's piñata is the Great Satan of Fischer Family Trust data, and the lesser demons of value-added and predicted grades, and boy am I going to beat the HELL out them.

He's- quite rightly- spoken out against the gamification of league tables, where schools, in an attempt to meet the success criteria dictated to them, put their shoulder to nothing but those criteria. Every teacher knows about this- intervention classes aimed at C/D borderline students; not entering the hopeless for final exams; press-ganging children into high-value BTECs for point score advantage, and so on. It's evil, but perhaps understandable when the stakes for schools are so high; let your slip show on the league tables, and you might as well load all six chambers of your gun with dum-dums and press the muzzle to your temple.

So what's the Funky Gibbon proposing? Stand easy citizens- schools will be exhibiting their Contextual Value Added scores from now on, not unlike a baboon, presenting its ghastly floral undercarriage. Gaze into the abyss, for it cannot be unseen.

Pick a Card...any card

Now I have a problem with CVA. Not me personally- my CVA is, thankfully, bulletproof, fireproof, and susceptible only to Kryptonite, and I only say that so you don't think I'm a bitter victim of its diabolic engines. I just don't think it's that useful. In fact, I think the way it's used, it's corrosive, and actively damages education.

In many ways picking a fight with predictions is an easy task, because I'm attacking the belief that we can tell what is going to happen about things that have not happened yet. Can you see where I might be going with this? Nobody can tell the future, not even with a great big telescope and all the data in the world. Not even then. While science has offered us many sweet meats and shiny trinkets in the fields of the natural world, it has yet to lift its petticoat in any meaningful way in the realm of something more stubbornly unpredictable: us. Human beings resist the reductive powers of physical determinism; we just won't do as we're told. This is why we are human, and not, say, a Meccano Set.

The problem is that schools are- now, at least- very much in the business of predicting the future. Why? Because..well, the simple answer is because Lucifer the Hoofed one rules this world, but that won't get me into the smart edu-blog clubs. The other answer is that we are required on an annual basis, to show that children have made good progress, not merely an A, or a B, but progress; that they have become smarter. The hope is that it's something to do with us. How do we show this? By comparing what they get to some notional projection of what they 'should' have obtained. And that's where the problems start.

If Little Davina or Limoncella start year 7 with a level 5 in English and Maths, then we know that's good- probably better than most of her peers. So you'd hope she'd leave with a bag full of A's at GCSE wouldn't you?

Your data manager, yesterday.

Most schools (and by most, I'm suggesting 100%) use Fischer Family Trust (FFT) or ALIS data to set targets for pupils. What am FFT? They're an organisation that sell data; they take the results of all the children in their data set, and then track the % of those children on, say, level 4 at the end of Key Stage 3, to see how many of them achieve an A or a B or a C at the end of their GCSEs. They then plot statistical projections of likelihood that Davina will get those grades.Sounds simple. On this level, it is. Then the problems start:

Here are SOME of the problems; I'll deal with more in a subsequent post:

1. Nobody but wizards can understand how CVA is calculated. Do you know how many factors are taken into account when constructing the predicted median for a school's grades? Here are, I think, the key ones:

pupils’ prior attainment
special educational needs;
English as an additional language;
pupil mobility;
age of pupils;
an ‘in care’ indicator;
ethnicity;
free school meals status; and
a measure of social deprivation.

These are then thrown into the tombola of certainty, the handle is turned, and the future is born, neat as an egg. When Einstein published his theory of Relativity, it was alleged (probably erroneously) that at that point, only a dozen men and women in the world could fully understand it. The number is even smaller for CVA calculus. It is a done deal; the High Priests have spoken, and we must genuflect to the wisdom of the ancients. I'm not saying they're lying or anything, I'm just saying I have a gut mistrust for any pupil prediction that can be obtained with NO KNOWLEDGE of the pupil whatsoever. This ties into my next point:

2. It's de-professionalises the whole role of the teacher. Excuse me? You want to say what one of my students is probably going to get this year....and you haven't even met them? You say that you DON'T sit in the classroom with them every day, working with them, talking to them, marking their books and correcting their mistakes? Well I do. I know my students. I can see their potential. I have my own data set I base predictions on, and it isn't one I can write down or reduce to an algorithm. It's in my mind, and my gut, and it's part of what being a teacher is about. My contempt for the practise of reducing children to points on a scatter graph is endless and bottomless. It could boil iron.

3. They're NOT predictions. I can't emphasise this one enough. EVEN THE FFT DOESN'T THINK THEY'RE PREDICTIONS. They are wise, the wizards of the Fischer Family. This is a common problem: often, research is published in any field, with sensible, delicate, cautious conclusions, only for the recipients (in this case, politicians, journalists and school leaders) to go OH BOY LOOK AT THESE COOL PROPHECIES WRITTEN BY THE WIZARDS IN THE MOUNTAIN. THESE ARE OMENS FOR SURE LOOK THE BONES HAVE SPOKEN.

Here's what the FFT actually have to say:

'The FFT Data Analysis project produces ESTIMATES of likely attainment. The estimates are calculated for each pupil and, from these, school and LA estimates are calculated. They are called estimates – not predictions or targets – because they provide an estimate of what might happen if your pupils make progress that is line with that of similar pupils in previous years.'

NOT predictions. NOT targets. That's because they're professionals, who are more than aware that we cannot tell the future. They're statistical guesses; they're probability fields; they are the statistical equivalent of saying that Summer will probably be hotter than Winter, but we don't know if it'll rain today or not. The comparison with the weather is appropriate: we know what water is; we know what heat is; we know what pressure is; but the enormous density of causal factors makes weather forecasting impossible for more than a few hours in the future. The Met office gave up long-term forecasts a long time ago. And humans, as I repeatedly point out, are a Hell of a lot more complex than a damp bag of warm gas in Brownian motion. (Most of them- I saw TOWIE once)

'What band should we use, oh omniscient one?'

So when the FFT says that a given child is estimated a B at GCSE, based on prior attainment data, once social and circumstantial factors have been accounted for, what does it mean?

Almost nothing. Almost nothing.

What it means is that many children with similar socio-economic and attainment levels achieved that grade. So what? Most children in Mozart's street didn't grow up to write The Magic Flute, but he did. Most children from Omaha, Nebraska didn't grow up to lead a black consciousness movement, but Malcolm X did. I taught a kid who scraped a C in bottom set RS, who scored a U in AS, and then an A at A2. The human spirit is a genie; it is absurd, noetic, a screaming eagle of ambition and indeterminacy. It is a ghost, a comet, a nuclear furnace of optimism and ambition and impossibility. It is also a disappointment; the anti-life, failure snatched from the jaws of victory. House prices can go up as well as down. That is what makes being alive so glorious and terrifying.

I have a knowledge of my children's predicted grades that approaches telepathy, because I know my subject and I know my kids. But every year I am knocked sideways by kids who exceed my expectations and those who ridicule them. Nobody can predict the future. Guesses are fine, but let's admit that's what they are.

Guesses.

Let's stop pulverising children with our bureaucratic assumptions about their potential. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be told by your teacher that your prediction is a D?

F*ck. That.

You know what my expectation of my children is? An A. For everyone. That's the target I set myself, and if I don't get it, well, I try again next year. I don't cry into my coffee, I just try again.

Here's a thing: what does it even mean to 'aim for a C, or a B'? Have you ever seen a kid revise, and try to get a B? It's nonsense. Kids try as hard as they can/ can be bothered, to get the best grade they can. If you set a child to run 100 metres, and they really bash their guts out on it, can you imagine asking them, 'What speed were you going for?' No. They just run. They just run. Target setting has become the fetish of 21st century teaching. It is another ravenous, ridiculous imported imaginary animal from the paradigm of the market place, where ambitions are plucked from the air- and they are- and called 'predictions', when they should be called 'hopes'.

When I worked for the Great Satan of commerce, every year our units were given sales targets to reach. Meeting them, would ensure we survived. Failing to meet these targets was an assured spell in the cooler. The targets were usually 'Last year's sales, plus 5%'. Brilliant. How long did you think it took for them to come up with that?

Aggregating outta Here

The market has infected the classroom, and I use the word infect carefully. It is a sickness that cuts down children, teachers and learning. It is already absurd that the economic model is predicated on infinite expansion, in a world that is plainly finite; it is doubly absurd to do so in a room full of children, nenulus and spectral a commodity as you can imagine, in an environment where they are learning, an abstract multiplied by an abstract. The Data Oracles pretend they are dealing in beans, when they are counting intangibles. They are trying to catch a fairy tale with an iron claw.

I have no idea what they have in their nets. But it isn't real.

I'm not finished with you, CVA *looks sternly at it*. Keep looking over your shoulder.

UPDATE: In response to some comments to this blog post, I've added another supplementary post to it here. I haven't changed this blog, because I think the discussion makes more sense if I jes' leave it as it is.

Newsnight, and the Dark Arts of Exclusion

2012-01-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

'Right- MANAGED MOVE'

Did you see Newsnight? DID YOU SEE NEWSNIGHT on Monday? It had a feature about Academies, and how they are linked to the DARK ARTS. Not, as you suspect, a reference to the Hogwarts curricular black hole into which new staff would annually tumble (sorry, that was DEFENCE against the Dark Arts), but a way to describe how academies seem to exclude a lot more strudents than LEA controlled state schools, with the implication that there's monkey business afoot.

The presenter said that, 'The most vulnerable pupils’ are at risk of being managed out of the system, sacrificed for the league tables. It’s funny that when people outside of education say the phrase 'vulnerable’ they often seem to mean the kids who write C*NT on the corridor walls and spit on each other. Vulnerable. Yeah, that’s what I think when I see them. They’re vulnerable. What bizarre dimension are these people from? When I hear non-teachers use words like that I feel a bit awkward, like when someone you think is nice uses a racial slur, or like when a child says, 'Is fire hot because it's angry?' and you go 'Aww, they don't get it, but it's sweet.'

It’s a great story: we have a favoured government initiative; we have a desperate need for that initiative to appear successful; and we have evidence that in order to obtain this evidence, such schools are prepared to sacrifice children on the altar of self-advancement. The BASTARDS.

But the whole piece was as empty as the inside of an atom, completely without substance. It was one of the oddest, and least informed pieces I have ever seen on Dame Newsnight. Let me be clear, I have no pro-academy axe to grind; they have advantages and disadvantages, like any initiative. They are neither the solution nor the cause of education’s ills. But this was Hogwarts-wash.

'When shall we three meet again?' 'Depends on the grading'

Here are the home truths about this situation; this is what really goes on in schools, not the partial perspective of the dilettante:

1. Schools hate to exclude pupils permanently. Why? Because it makes them look terrible. One of their success criteria, expressed through the medium of Ofsted, is how low their exclusion rates are. This is based on the idea that a school with high exclusion rates must have really bad behaviour OR be really bad at dealing with behaviour. Of course, this is the exact opposite of the truth. A school might have high exclusion rates because it has really difficult children in its locus, and in order for the school to function, there might be a high number of exclusions; imagine an area of high crime- you’d expect more arrests, more sentencing, etc. It isn’t pretty, but that’s the way the world is.

Except that’s not the way some people see it. High exclusions bad, they bah, which means you’re a bad school. So the most obvious things that schools now do to improve their AAA rating with Ofsted is...they don’t exclude. It’s as simple as that. If excluding kids gets them into hot water with the LEA or Ofsted, then exclude they jolly well won’t. If this sounds brainless, it’s because it is. It is not unlike tutting that crime rates are awfully high...so let’s get those bloody figures down by not arresting people. Crime rate down, job done! Oh dear, someone appears to have stolen my car. Doctor doctor, it hurts every time I do this; well, don’t do it then.

2. Permanently excluding is nearly impossible. Do you know how much paperwork has to occur before a child can be permanently excluded? LET ME TELL YOU IT IS A LOT. It is nearly impossible to exclude a child. Let me assure you that if a child is anywhere near being permanently excluded it is usually not because they have been misunderstood by a system that didn’t care. You have to tell a LOT of teachers to go fuck themselves to even get close. We are not talking about angels with dirty faces. You have to bring a whole drawer of knives in to start building up a charge sheet that will get you more than a few days out. Believe me.

3. If you can’t permanently exclude, what can you do? Well, you could temporarily exclude them. Much safer, and much easier to give them a few days in the ‘internal exclusion unit’ or whatever you call your isolation panopticon. Basically it means another room, out of regular classes, or perhaps a separate part of the school building. It’s part punishment, part rehabilitation, as they usually receive more one-to-one supervision and coaching.

4. What if you have a kid who hasn’t quite hit the permanent exclusion mark yet, but looks likely to get there? The ‘managed move.’ This is the Dark Art being criticised. It is VERY common in many schools- and I am setting my phasers to the whole state sector here- as a way of nudging the process along- rather than a family and school fighting each other in the courts, or facing an exclusion on their record, the parent is persuaded that the child isn’t doing well at school, and might be better off having a fresh start somewhere else. It isn’t an admission of failure, it’s an admission that things aren’t working. If you want to attach blame to that one, I’d start with the one pissing about in every lesson and telling their Head of Year to go f*ck themselves. I know, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Now, academies are in an interesting position. They don’t have to report to Ofsted for chocolate buttons so much. They’re freer to do as they please. SO OF COURSE THE’RE GOING TO EXCLUDE MORE THAN OTHER STATE SCHOOLS. I certainly would, if I had a school that wasn’t judged by such things, and the pupils deserved it.

'No come to me wid them aagiment deh. Chah!'

Because what’s at stake here is something more fundamental than just ‘are academies in league with Goody Gove’- what are exclusions for? And the answer is, to assist behaviour in schools. If a child has exhausted classroom behaviour management, and routinely exhausts the senior staff repertoire of tricks to avoid further mayhem, then the school must- MUST- reserve the right to say to the child, OK; we’ve tried everything we can. This isn’t working. Your behaviour is disrupting not just your education, but the education of scores of other children. You want to know what the single biggest problem in schools is these days? The thing that prevents your child from learning the most? Let me tell you: 70% of the teacher’s time is taken with 5% of the kids, because they muck about and cause trouble for everyone. Not content are they with sitting relatively still and getting on with work in a pleasant way. Oh, no, they were born for greater things; like storming out of rooms, ruining lessons, and bullying smaller kids. If someone stole something valuable form me, I’d call them a thief. When a kid does it in a classroom, by depriving others of education, they’re called troubled, or vulnerable.

Vulnerable.

Give me a break. How vulnerable do you have to be to tell a teacher they’re a dickhead? To punch a kid in the classroom because you’re in a bad mood? To screw up a worksheet, throw it at the teacher and say, ‘You’re a cunt- and a shit teacher.’? Make no mistake- this is what classrooms are like for many. These are the children who get permanently excluded.

We had a lovely example on the Newsnight clip- a charmer called Chloe and her mother Donna. You’d like Chloe. We first see her, playing with her Christmas present. A Kindle? No.

A Stripper’s pole. In her BEDROOM.

I AM NOT F*CKING WITH YOU HERE SHE HAD A STRIPPERS POLE. She described how a teacher DARED to try to confiscate her phone (which is their right to have and use in the classroom, as defined by the Geneva Convention), so she assaulted the teacher in the classroom. ‘But it weren’t that bad, because she didn’t fall over,’ she opined, wise as Socrates. This, it seems, was the girl we were supposed to feel sorry for. She attacked a teacher. And there was pressure to exclude her. I am NOT shitting you here. I would have excluded her twice, and then watched the reruns on More4.

Burn her!

One problem that Newsnight emphasised is that Chloe had been identified as having Special Educational Needs (SEN). Which sounds serious, as if she had a disability of some kind. But being identified as SEN only rarely involves being diagnosed as suffering from some legitimate problem. In most cases it means the child has been observed as behaving badly regularly, and then labelling them as having Emotional And Behavioural Difficulties. Which is to say, it’s a description of their behaviours rather than a metaphysically existent entity like a limp or a cataract. So to describe some one like her as vulnerable because they have a problem is the greatest piece of ontological sleight-of-hand possible, similar to the claim that people are obsess because they have a fat gland, or possess a gene that makes them talk during the quiet bits in films. It isn’t a condition; it’s character.

There are plenty of people willing to make this kind of argument in education, and unfortunately Newsnight just got on the bus. I don’t blame the parents of these children making excuses for their children. Actually, I do, but it's their job description. It's unforgivable that trained professionals often make the same philosophically bankrupt claims to determinacy. Vulnerable my righteous ass.

You see, it’s not that an exclusion is a desirable outcome- it isn’t, it’s a bad end to a mess. But it is the best bad end. If you don’t exclude, if you don’t have some terminal sanction, then what’s to stop a pupil just entirely ignoring all detentions, sanctions and deterrents? Deterrents don’t deter without some kind of teeth. Deterrents need to be uncomfortable; they need to make you uncomfortable. Once children see that misbehaviour won’t lead to consequences, then the meaner ones will reason, quickly and correctly, that there is nothing- NOTHING a school can do to them. So not having the option to exclude trickles backward into every classroom, and the charmless children can do as they please. The only ones that suffer are...well, everyone else. The kids who want to learn. The teachers. Everyone else.

There are a tiny minority of kids like this- whom exclusions are aimed at. But there they are. Prisons aren’t pretty either, but we need to have them. You don’t solve crime by banning prison. And with just a fraction of children experiencing the ultimate deterrent, the other children will realise that there are consequences in school, and life, and learn a valuable lesson. That schools are there for their benefit, not just as a holding pen where they can exercise their whims. That they are springboards for human ambition. Not everyone can see that.

Doom would be alone! The world's oddest comic about teachers. And the Fantastic Four.

2012-01-16T13:19:00.000-08:00

There exists, in at least one of the galaxy's infinite universes, a comic so bad, that even putting Doctor Doom in it can't save it. And it's about teachers. Here's the link. My blog can only contain so much..whatever it is. The horror. The HORROR.

Ten reasons why your sixth formers are late to lessons

2012-01-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

'WHY are you always picking on me?'

DfE Guidelines now suggest that the following reasons for being late to your lessons should be considered as acceptable:

1. It’s 'a bit cold' out.

Research has shown that, on average, the ambient air temperature of ‘outside’ is less than the temperature ‘inside’. This variance increases when one uses the average temperature of the air pocket inside a duvet as the base line. Teenagers may express this excuse in the following way: 'I read this thing, right, that said if they school goes below, like, ten degrees, right....it has to shut or it's breaking the law.'

2. It’s bare hot

Equally distressing as (1), above. If, at any time, the temperature in the school looks likely to exceed the exact, perfect preference of the student, then this entitles absence, on the grounds that, well, it’s nice. At this point, students should be entitled to request that all lessons for the rest of the week should be held in the park. Note that, making this request should be taken by the teacher as fair warning that the student will be unable to attend for the rest of the week due to the dangerous heatwave. See: 'I read this thing, yeah...'

3. Some Next Guy started talking to me in the street, yeah? And I was like, leave me alone.

And that’s why they’re late. This one is self-explanatory, of course.

4. I saw someone sneeze on television

Any indication that viral infections may exist, anywhere in the English-speaking world, are clear indications that the outside world, let alone the petri-dish of the school, is too dangerous to enter. This could lead, of course to...

5. I felt ‘really sick’.

Students in year 11 have an absence due to sickness rate of around 1 % or 2% in the average school. Amazingly, this escalates to around 25% in the sixth form. At first this might seem odd, or in some way indicative of malingering. Nothing could be further from the truth. The individual is best placed to self-diagnose, due to the internal, subjective nature of illness. If they say they’re sick, they are. Often, students can will themselves to feel nauseous and weak. This is entirely normal.

6. It’s ‘that’ time, Sir.

At the merest mention of the lady tummy, male teachers should act as if the ‘get out of jail’ card has been played. Interestingly, this syndrome is predominantly absent as a reason given to female teachers, most of whom have, presumably learned to cope with the life-threatening effects of menstruation through meditation and radiotherapy.

7. I don’t like the teacher

'We read a thing, right...'

In this situation, steps must be taken to ensure that the teacher is likeable.

8. I don’t like the subject.

Teachers should be encouraged to thank the student for turning up at all, in gratitude for their mere presence. As Kanye West said, ‘You should be honoured by my lateness.’

9. I’ve got problems at home.

This mustn’t be confused with genuine problems that some students experience, of genuine economic, social or personal hardship. This reason refers to, for example, a student staying over at a friend’s house the night before and having to get up half an hour early to make the train. It can also include the Monday Morning recovery cycle, after a night out on Merrydown and White Lightning. Teachers should be encouraged to view this reason as the most flexible of all. It is vital that sympathy is expressed to the student, otherwise they may have recourse to report you to the European Court in Strasbourg.

10. Jasmine’s even later than me.

'I need a long lie to function.'

Keep your hair on. It’s only a few minutes. Why are you always picking on me? See: 'Bitches Be Trippin'

Through careful attendance to this policy, teachers will be able to enable student voice, as expressed through the medium of sloping in half way through the lesson. They should also look at ways of ensuring that students are not late, for example by making sure that lessons begin after noon, and involve DVDs about pop stars killing each other and having group sex while driving Ferraris.

Thank you for your attendance.

The Pursuit of Happyness. Can it be caught? Or taught?

2012-01-13T04:42:00.000-08:00

Working title: 'The Pursuit of Money'

Happiness, happiness. The greatest gift that I possess? Ken Dodd, the noted pedagogue asked one of today’s most important metaphysical questions. But the Prophet of Doddyland brought us no closer to answering the ontological assumption that underpins his subliminal Socratic dialogue: what is happiness? Is it important?

I’ve written about this before, mainly because of two reasons: firstly, there is an annual news vacuum which journalists frequently abhor, filling it with stories about scientists discovering its secret formula (in a laboratoire, no doubt); secondly politicians are obsessed with Happiness indices as a comparative means of assessing relative happiness between nations. This of course ignores the obvious, that awareness of another’s happiness is, for some people, enough to destroy it in oneself. ‘It is not enough,’ Gore Vidal diabolically opined, ‘To succeed. Others must fail.’ This is particularly true if someone is happier than you, or if you are from the United Kingdom, where the joy of another is viewed suspiciously by many as a depletion of their right to complain their own failure to achieve their heart’s ambitions.

Another reason I come back to this is because there are those in education who frequently return to the claim that the purpose of education is to make children happy. This is often expressed by the sentiment that lessons should be engaging and enjoyable, and if they are not, then the lesson is a bad one. This is a lovely thought. But it suffers from the paradox of the inane reversal: nobody is seriously claiming that lessons should be deliberately made boring or disengaging. You hope that ALL your lessons are interesting and switch the kids on.

Sir Ken Robinson. 'Happy'.

But that simply can’t happen. The business of education intrinsically requires many actions that are, dare I breathe it, difficult. Learning is hard work; better learning is often very hard work indeed. Nobody became a Professor of Electronics by playing the Xbox. There are often fun ways of learning, and if you’re good at your job, you’ll be good at implementing them. But there is often the point where you concede, willingly, that in order to get anything done, then elbow grease must be applied. And while Mary Poppins assures us- correctly- that when you find the fun in the work then SNAP! The work’s a game, this is the exception. Incidentally, the answer to this conundrum isn’t to gamify lessons, or to transfer learning onto a virtual platform: the same principles of effort and concentration are necessary for learning to happen in any situation, traditional or radical. Just watch any IT lesson where kids stare at the screens like laboratory beagles if you don’t believe me. Just because it’s on a screen doesn’t make it fun or interesting. And if you don’t believe that, try reading the terms and conditions of your Smartphone online.

But the main distraction and obfuscation in this argument is in the definition of happiness itself. Can it, as Sir Kenneth suggests, above, be possessed? Is it être or avois? Funnily enough, Great Minds have considered this question before, so we don’t have to grope around the DfE best practise closet to work it out. Aristotle considered happiness to consist of flourishing in a flourishing community (Eudaimonia); that the greatest and most valuable form of happiness consisted of developing your talents and your virtues, and becoming a valuable member of a community, however abstractly one defines it. So I flourish by developing myself as a teacher, by being a better teacher; I obtain something more rewarding than mere sensual pleasure by doing so- I am satisfied. I surf a crest where challenge and development crescendo into each other in a sublime synthesis. This concept is well known to computer games designers, who try to make sure that games are neither too hard nor too easy for competitors to be deterred or bored by their activities. The perfect mean is the goal, throughout each level, and in many ways it is for us too: to be challenged enough to be tested, but not so much we give up and sink.

Mr Happy. 'Happy,' allegedly.

The meanest, least worthy form of happiness is mere sensual pleasure; not because it is worthless, but because, like the love of money, it is the root of many evils. The utilitarians like JS Mill, even though they based their entire philosophy on the pursuit of pleasure, knew that the mere pursuit of sensuality was a poison; that it would lead to a diminishing of the spirit, where all that mattered was feeling good. And if that’s all that matters, then you’ll do anything to achieve it. See: greed; addiction; selfishness, and a few other deadly sins. Pleasure is desired by all; but it doesn’t mean that pleasure SHOULD be desired by all, or that it was the only goal.

I have run nightclubs in Soho; I am familiar with several forms of pleasures; I have also known disaster from within and without. I am, in other words, just like everyone else. And my experience (with which Aristotle has been good enough to agree) is that few things valuable don’t require struggle and loss; that pleasure for its own sake is the mission of a moron; that the greatest rewards often come, like the sorrows of a parent, or the sleepless nights of the undergraduate- under the shadow of the thresher.

It is through knowing defeat that we understand winning. It is through suffering that we value the suffering of others, and learn to detest it. Happiness, pursued for its own sake, is the most miserable thing of all. Comfort is universally appreciated, but past a certain point where our basic needs are met, we must understand that comfort is not all there is to being human. The job of a government is, at least partially, to see that the community’s survival needs are met. The job of education is to teach children. We can’t teach them to be happy because you should only teach what you’re an expert in, and who amongst us is an expert in happiness? Or is happy? And what does it mean?

You want children to be independent learners, as is so painfully fashionable these days? Far safer that we teach children to be wise. Let them make their own mistakes. Don’t make them make yours.

Let them work out what happy is.

Peter Hyman's Groovy school: WELL weapon

2012-01-07T10:46:00.000-08:00

Grr! baby; very Grr!

Peter Hyman is BACK. Who he? Why, speech writer and strategist for Tony Blair, Head of his Strategic Communications Unit 2001-2003, and witch / spin doctor for New Labour. Frankly, I would rather have the word pervert on my CV than any of those bulletpoints, but to err is human, to forgive is divine.

What's he up to? Call-me-Peter, admirably enough for someone who called the co-architect of the Mesopotamian massacre 'Tony', learned his lesson; more importantly, he took his give-a-shit and bailed from the inner circle of Peter, Alasdair and Apollyon the Beast and took himself into the wilderness for forty days and nights. He left Team Tony and retrained as a teacher, starting off as TA. Five years later he made Deputy. Three years after that, he's opening the latest Free School, a la Toby Young.

This is a tale of two Peters; the one who, along with his boss Belial the King of the Bottomless Pit invented education policy on the hoof, in between hotel room and conference hall, who helped to design best practice and pedagogic orthodoxy for millions of children to suit the feelings and instincts of his boss, and ignore completely the people who could actually teach (teachers, natch). Don't believe me? Read his book 1 out of 10; it's all there. I have two copies. People buying gifts for teachers take care: duplicates are an occupational hazard, as the Countess of Wessex would no doubt agree.

I read this years ago, and it was an epiphany; for the first time I realised- with horror- that education, which has existed for as long as children have needed to know anything, was driven almost entirely by ideology, not only at the visionary stage, but also at the practical level, where efficacy and utility are essential. That the Masters of the Universe knew little about what actually happened in classrooms, and didn't even care to ask anyone unless they agreed with them. Immolated by this information, it liberated me as a teacher. I realised why things were, in some schools, so bad; why teacher training had, in some instances, gone down the tubes; I realised that I could say no, that I had every right to object, to teach the way that felt right to me, even if it ruined the blueprint of orthodoxy. In short, my illusions about my betters shattered, I was liberated to better myself, and to teach.

'I endorse this bold experiment.'

For that reason alone, my gizzards curdle at the thought of the Ghosts of Education Past set free on the Earth again. Let the dead bury the dead. But every life must be permitted the opportunity of redemption (God, I hope so), be it Bill Munny or Michael Henchard or Dick Nixon. I remember what it was like being in my twenties: I knew fuck all and talked crap and hurt people too, although my tragic errors weren't played out on the national stage. 'Nearly all men can stand adversity,' said Abraham Lincoln, 'But if you want to test his character, give him power.' Thank God I had little. Do you know how many Secretaries of State for Education were ever teachers? Would you like to take a guess? Prime Ministers? Speech Writers? Heads of Strategic Communications? I'll leave it to you as a sort of Starter; a brain teaser. Here's a clue: *fuck-all*. (Update: I have since been told of several ministers or near-minsters who have dipped their toes in teaching. Their relative scarcity still proves the point, though: most of those who tell us how to teach or run schools have never done either.)

Oh, Behave!

No, I can look past Peter Hyman his bawdy, libertine past, seducing education and leaving it weeping on the sheets in the morning. Even though he and his brethren in the coven of Belial The Ruler of This World were mostly career politicians from the moment they left the rarefied atmosphere of University Politics. Sweet Lord, even Plato thought that Philosopher Kings should be trained until middle age. These days, Our Glorious Leaders are plucked from the Russell Group and Fast-Tracked through ambition, ruthlessness and avarice into the Big Chairs. Nous, wisdom and experience account for little in a management culture that prizes youth, novelty and innovation, the trinkets of the infant.

I can forgive him that; I don't know him; I'm sure that he is a man of probity, conviction and compassion. In fact, from his actions subsequent to the Court of Bahomet the Reaver, we can ascertain that he is now driven by a desire to improve the world. This is the second Peter, the one who left High Office and took himself to the wilderness, working his way up, ever up, from a place close to the bottom. His ascent, like Willy Wonka's glorious glass elevator, couldn't be constrained by the limits of gravity, and he smashed through the glass ceiling and now he's the latest prospective Free School Head.

Head of innovation and Smurfs

For that, we must surely doff our hats; that ambition, that drive, that dedication to a goal, and the determination to reach a destination no matter how long it takes, is the laser light that can burn through steel, or perhaps the peaceful stream that can wear a ravine in the side of a mountain. Men like this laid the transatlantic cable, or walked to the South Pole. So what does Peter's Lyceum look like?

Educating Stratford

Well, for a start it's called 'School 21', which makes my heart sink and my inner satirist's viscera dance at the same time. He better be careful or he'll run into the same problem 20th Century Fox and 2000AD (the galaxy's greatest comic) had, he should last so long. It's a bit of a give away that he's fallen into the same trap that many of Sir Ken Robinson's acolytes have: the idea that present education taxonomies are unfit for this modern era, that the 21st century demands new paradigms and paper clips made of foam rubber, a hundred foot high, etc. This thinking is faithfully replicated all over the online prospectus (the school doesn't have a real-world site yet; appropriately enough, it's a virtual school at this point, and abstract, like money or Max Headroom).

The problem with '21st century skills' is that they are, as far as I can see, exactly the same kinds of skills that people have always needed to survive and thrive. Anyone who believes otherwise has been watching too many RSA Animations, and I get a bit sad and make *this* face (*makes face*) when I hear them banging on about jobs that don't exist yet and shattering factory-based models. For more see here.

Another warning bell goes off when I see proud adverts for the school's focus on Thinking Skills, and other examples of such rhetoric, as if such things can taught independently of content. The school doesn't exist yet, so time will tell, but whenever anyone in education starts banging on about such things, they've usually been supping the Ken Robinson's Barley dogma that children should be learning skills first and content second, as if understanding anything could somehow be contemplated without empirical data first and foremost. Heed, me Scrooge, heed me. Is this your future?

The new Head of Integrated Project Based Learning

'I want to prepare children for the 21st Century,' he says, as if we've been turning them out with flat caps and hob-nailed shoes into the workhouses of Georgian England before. Will they have iPads? I hope they have iPads. There are, to be fair, many solid aspirations that deserve to be mentioned in Peter's Project: small class groups, options of one-on-one teaching, a culture of aspiration and a clear behaviour ethos, and these are all admirable and just goals. But the Harkness table? (I can't even begin to tell you how awful this is. Just imagine something awful) Cross-taxonomy projects (why? to what end?)? A leadership program for every child? (Did you SEE what happened in Brave New World when they tied to make everyone an Alpha? No one hoovered).

Tony 'Morningstar' Blair's mantra was modernisation; as Peter describes in his book, it was his engine, as Thatcher's was privatisation. It seems Peter has caught this bug too, and this is the danger. Education is an ancient beast, with ancient provenance that can be boiled down to a very few simple basics that make it workable. Many of the least of the sins committed against education in this country have been so because they are merely pointless; the greater sins have been because they actually distract or detract from education itself. It is easy, as Blair often did, to look upon the mundane features of the form and condemn them as reactionary.

Head of Feelings/ Spells

But invention for its own sake is pointless, as is immobility. The beauty of the Free School idea is that the Masters are free from the shackles of decades of administrative mission creep. It is a sin against children to realise that freedom and then replicate the same pointless, empty educational vacuousness inflicted upon schools for the last three decades. There is, I have often mentioned, an enormous intellectual abyss in the heart of education: everyone thinks they can have a punt, because everyone has been inside a school. I heard Peter talk to Amanda Foreman (Historian) on Radio 4 and basically tell her what was important for children to learn about history. And I thought, blimey, you're confident.

And, because social science research apes the natural sciences in its claims of predictive powers and authority (but with little of its transparency, care or rigour), studies can (and are) brought in to justify contradictory viewpoints. Education research becomes a slave to the values of the bidder, and once again, anyone can have a go. You might as well try anything. It's the attitude that informs the adviser with no school experience and the minister who listens to him. It's the attitude that enables people with no classroom training to call themselves (and be listed on the school website) 'education experts'...and no one says anything. because no one knows what an expert looks like, or what one doesn't look like. I have some ideas; hit me up sometime.

Despite my apparent hostility and cynicism, I wish him well, as I wish any school well; I hope that the children there blossom and breathe, rising to heights that exceed their instructors, as we all wish. The online prospectus, the website is populated, at present, by pictures of happy children, propelled by awe and wonder, or as the prospectus says, 'a place of joy, wonder, discovery and imagination.' The funny thing is, that's what most schools and teachers strive for. But we know that education is hard work too; it's not all wonder and imagination; it's a marathon of dedication, distress, victories and failures in a constant, variegated stream. It is life, nothing less.

Peter's Dream School is, in its present, perfect Platonic form, very groovy. I hope that, when the dream reifies, it doesn't melt in the daylight like snow.

Behave, scumbags.