Education Archives - Tired and Emotional

Conclusions & suggestions

Part 10 of Gender and achievement

Looking back on my 90’s thinking, I wonder if the emphasis on relative achievement by gender might not have been simply a proxy for social disadvantage and its profound impact on school and individual performance. Not a great deal of work was done on the issue raised by Samuel Jonson of ‘Which man, Sir, which woman’; on what the circumstances were which prompted a good number of girls and even more boys to do less well than their peers. Gender is after all, in this context, a pretty crude group discriminator. Of course we need analysis and data to identify individuals (and groups) who do less well in our schools but the evidence suggests that there is one overwhelming influence on relative achievement in a schools system that provides astonishing levels of resourcing and facilities for the wealthy when they opt out of our state schools, enables the better-off who stay in the state system to access successful schools because they can afford to move to and live in their catchments (Parental choice, but only for some parents) and, until recently, looked with equanimity on schools which gamed the system and off-rolled – the latest refinement of off-rolling is apparently strongly encouraging parents to opt for home schooling.

What teachers do and how they behave remain the most significant factors impacting on learning, and when we talk of learning organisations and of ‘reluctant learners’, we should be clear when considering what strategies are best pursued, that disaffected learners may be found across the whole school population.

Achievement issues are best seen and considered as if through ever decreasing concentric circles. We should consider the national picture, the local (LA or MAT) picture, the school picture, the departmental picture and the classroom picture. At the macro level, of course there is a role for local and national agencies in, for example, mapping patterns of literacy and numeracy so that resources can be effectively targeted but the two levels at which improvement can be achieved most effectively are the school and the individual classroom. The national and local pictures offer a context within which to examine patterns of achievement within a school but an examination of the school picture has to precede effective intervention and action.[3] A key question for leaders and teachers and for further research is where the balances should be struck between how best to organise for teaching and how best to organise for learning and how best to teach the subject and how best to structure classroom activity so that all pupils can achieve.

It remains important to analyse the relative achievement of groups, whether defined by gender, feeder school, socio-economic status, subject choice or any other filter. But gender is a less strong determinant of achievement than social class and we should note that disaffection and underachievement are not uniquely male characteristics. As ever, a focus on learning and teaching and an appropriate learning environment will have a greater impact on achievement than a rigid uniform policy and heavy-handed exclusion/isolation room regimes.

A recent report on the underachievement of Black Caribbean and white boys in London schools identified:

seven key ‘best bet’ areas for action to improve outcomes for all pupils from early years to post-16 study and training, but in particular black Caribbean and free school meal-eligible white boys. These areas were selected following an extensive literature review, alongside engagement with a wide range of experts and stakeholders.
‘Boys on Track: Improving support for Black Caribbean and Free School Meal-Eligible White Boys in London’, LKM, The education and youth ‘think and action-tank’ https://www.lkmco.org/

The seven areas which, clearly would benefit all pupils and have little to do with underachieving ethnic group or gender specific strategies were:

1. Enhancing pupils’ emotional wellbeing and mental health.

2. Working with parents and families, involving them in their children’s education.

3. Securing access to high quality early years provision.

4. Raising teachers’ expectations and addressing their biases.

5. Recruiting and retaining a more diverse teaching workforce.

6. Enhancing access to work experience opportunities, careers guidance, and support into employment.

7. Encouraging peer support among young people.

Despite the constraints imposed on teachers and teaching by a Govian curriculum, underfunding and a model of external accountability which constrains and limits professional judgement and innovation (for teachers and managers) a focus on methodology and pedagogy is the best way to help more young people in a school to thrive in education. Exclusion, whether by setting and streaming, exclusion rooms or off-rolling may be a short-term survival strategy for schools but not for their pupils.

[3] I recall inspecting a Catholic school some years ago which had as a priority raising the achievement of boys; in fact the school should have been far more concerned with the relative underachievement of girls which they had failed to notice.

Emasculation

Part 5 of Gender & Achievement

There is evidence in many schools, and perception in many others, of a kind of disengagement among groups of young people, which, while it may not be new, is causing increasing concern. The focus, these days, is on boys and young men, who, the argument goes, may feel disenfranchised in a whole range of areas of life. They bring to school low self-esteem, low aspiration, and little or no hope or expectation of achievement. Much the same argument was rehearsed a few years ago about working-class girls, denied opportunities to achieve within schools and encouraged in many ways to believe that: ‘the business of home-making and the early rearing of children is a big part of their lives while for men the equivalent is to earn enough to support their wives and families.’

In the 1990’s primary school combined core subject test scores for London’s 32 education authorities showed a clear correlation between the proportion of unskilled families and low test scores. Richmond, Bromley, Kingston and Kensington & Chelsea achieved the highest key stage 2 results while Barking, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham recorded the lowest. Furthermore, second chance learning was and is more likely to benefit women than men. In the 1990’s, irrespective of structural economic and industrial change such as the decline of the coal industry which had devastating local impact, men who achieved less at school were less likely to benefit from later training and development. (Research by Ian McCallum referenced in Social class linked to results, Times Educational Supplement, 18th April, 1997)

It is striking that men…..do not seem, on average, able to enhance their employment prospects. This gender-related difference is particularly interesting, mirroring as it does, the relative fortunes of men and women in the British labour market as a whole, with women doing much better than men in recent years.

The 1990’s were a period then, when powerful economic changes increased male insecurity and hit hard at feelings of self-worth and self-confidence among significant numbers of boys and men. Now we have much higher levels of employment but diminished and diminishing incomes and a welfare ‘safety net’ so full of holes it fast-tracks claimants to despair, whatever their gender. It should be noted though, that the view of men as somehow diminished by circumstance and uncertainty, as lacking confidence and self-belief and being particularly vulnerable, is not new. Pat Barker paints a similar picture of men as the threatened species 100 years ago, unable to adapt to change:

He didn’t know what to make of her, but then he was out of touch with women. They seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space.
Regeneration’, Barker, P, Viking, 1991

Similar arguments though, have been asserted and still are, about girls and women, competent but not confident, and handicapped by low aspirations and limited horizons. 1990’s research into gender and aspiration revealed a trend for boys to have ambitious but unrealistic ambitions and relatively unconnected medium-term goals, while girls had low aspirations, and realistic short-term goals, which, on the whole, they achieved.

Students with more defined goals seemed to be more motivated and having an incentive to focus more closely on their work.

boys were more vague…girls tended to be more specific (though often with stereotypical and low aspirations)
Differential Achievement of Girls & Boys at GCSE’, Warrington, M & Younger, M, Homerton Research Report No. 4 ISBN 0-9522249-7-6

Perhaps what has changed in the past twenty+ years is the aspirations of many girls, encouraged, year after year, by public recognition of their higher attainment when compared with that of boys.

It is possible of course, that both boys and girls are vulnerable to that low aspiration, low self-esteem syndrome, but boys are prone to attacks of bravado: the issue then is the extent to which schools reinforce or counter these self-images. This view of male vulnerability sees men as less stable and with an equilibrium which is more prone to disturbance. In support, statistics such as those below are called into play:

In 1991, 886 women committed suicide in Great Britain. In the same year 3,007 men committed suicide. Seventy-seven per cent of all suicides were male. For every dead woman there were nearly four dead men……Since the early 1980s the rate of female suicide has nearly halved, the rate of male suicide has gone up by nearly 5 per cent. Although men are[5]prime ministers, presidents and chairmen, they constitute the bulk of alcoholics and prisoners as well. They display a greater propensity than women for sexual perversion, fetishism and dysfunction. They form the vast majority of the homeless beggars ….: in America 86.5 per cent of all people arrested for vagrancy are male. Men live on average, lives that are 7 per cent shorter than those of women. They are more likely than women to suffer heart attacks, lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and strokes…..
Not Guilty -in Defence of the Modern Man, , Thomas, D, Weidenfield & Nicholson, London, 1993

All this male dysfunction was found in a 1990’s world where access to drugs, pornography and social media figured to a far lesser extent than now but the statistics show little change in the fragility of the sense of self-worth for many young men and an increasing number of young women. While more women are ending their lives than in the past, in this at least, men are still proving more effective than women.

In England and the UK, female suicide rates are at their highest in a decade. Rates have increased in the UK (by 3.8%), England (by 2%), Wales (61.8%) and Northern Ireland (18.5%) since 2014 – however increases in Wales and Northern Ireland may be explained by inconsistencies in the processes for recording and registering suicides in these countries, see pages 29-30). Rates have decreased in Scotland (by 1.4%) and the Republic of Ireland (by 13.1%) since 2014.

Male rates remain consistently higher than female suicide rates across the UK and Republic of Ireland – most notably 5 times higher in Republic of Ireland and around 3 times in the UK. They have decreased in the UK (by 1.2%), England (by 3.8%), Scotland (by 4.1%) and Republic of Ireland (6.4%) since 2014. Rates have increased in Wales (by 37.3%), and Northern Ireland (by 17.5%) between 2014 and 2015 – however these increases may be explained by inconsistencies in the processes for recording and registering suicides in these countries, see page 15).
Samaritans, ‘Suicide statistics report 2017’ Including data for 2013-2015

And the press tell us, and it is true now as it was in the 1990’s, that:

Four times as many boys as girls are excluded from schools…boys far outnumber girls in units for difficult and disturbed units…….Looking ahead to the adult world, many see confusion and uncertainty: unstable relationships, broken marriages; frequent changes of job; poor employment prospects for the unskilled.’
The Independent 25/4/96

2015/16 figures suggest that the many, many education reforms of the last 25 years have done nothing to improve the poor fit between many learners and their schools. The evidence tells us that boys do less well than girls; it does not tell us that all girls do well and if we use relative deprivation or ethnicity as discriminators rather than gender we may be closer to identifying causal factors.

Over half of all permanent (57.2 per cent) and fixed period (52.6 per cent) exclusions occur in national curriculum year 9 or above.
A quarter (25.0 per cent) of all permanent exclusions were for pupils aged 14, and pupils of this age group also had the highest rate of fixed period exclusion, and the highest rate of pupils receiving one or more fixed period exclusion.
The permanent exclusion rate for boys (0.15 per cent) was over three times higher than that for girls (0.04 per cent) and the fixed period exclusion rate was almost three times higher (6.91 compared with 2.53 per cent).

Free school meals (FSM) eligibility

Pupils known to be eligible for and claiming free school meals (FSM) had a permanent exclusion rate of 0.28 per cent and fixed period exclusion rate of 12.54 per cent – around four times higher than those who are not eligible (0.07 and 3.50 per cent respectively).

Ethnic group

Pupils of Gypsy/Roma and Traveller of Irish Heritage ethnic groups had the highest rates of both permanent and fixed period exclusions, but as the population is relatively small these figures should be treated with some caution.
Black Caribbean pupils had a permanent exclusion rate nearly three times higher (0.28 per cent) than the school population as a whole (0.10 per cent). Pupils of Asian ethnic groups had the lowest rates of permanent and fixed period exclusion.

Source: Permanent and Fixed Period Exclusions in England: 2016 to 2017, DfES, 19th July 2018

And we know that failure in school is not a bad predictor of a relatively chaotic later life.

…within any society, while it is generally young men who are violent, most young men are not. Just as it is the discouraged and disadvantaged among young women who become teenage mothers, it is poor young men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods who are most likely to be both victims and perpetrators of violence.
The Spirit Level pp132, Wilkinson and Picket, Penguin Books, 2009

What happens to children, boys and girls, who bring to their schools a sense of their own and their families’ lack of worth or potential? They are unlikely to thrive because their behaviour patterns are about avoiding failure and avoiding the reinforcement (often public) of that failure.

The motivation to protect their sense of self-worth results in pupils using a range of tactics to avoid damage to their self-esteem. Pupils who interpret messages about their performance in a negative way are also likely to infer a range of other beliefs about themselves, and teachers, which are likely to lower their self-esteem…..they may adopt tactics……..to persuade others……….to hold them in positive regard. Such….might include disengagement from learning tasks by direct action (such as disruption) or by indirect action (such as work avoidance)
Making a strategic withdrawal: disengagement and self-worth protection in male pupils, Chaplain, R in School Improvement: what can pupils tell us? OSBN 1-85346-393-0

[5] (most)

‘Jim Saves the Day’

Almost everything in this tale is true – only the names and facts have been changed to protect the guilty.

Jim, the deputy Head was a burly, overweight man in his early sixties. He wore thick-lensed glasses and seemed to spend most of his time patrolling the corridors. He was no time-server but he had seen (not to say done) a lot and not much got to him. He’d seen war service, like many of the older teachers in the early 70’s, and come back shaken if not stirred.

London secondary schools in those days were staffed by an extraordinary collection of teachers. History was taught by a German professor of philosophy who had sought asylum as the Nazis came to power. He was a remarkable and civilised man who found himself teaching in his later years, not in the University of Heidelburg but in an inner London school full of alienated and antagonistic boys. The headteacher was an ex-actor (whether failed or not I don’t know). His thespian skills came in handy though. He kept his distance from the pupils but was always available to talk to members of staff in need of ten minutes R&R before going back to the front. Of the younger bunch I remember a charming and cultured American, let’s call him Ogden, who played in the Scratch Orchestra, Brian, who actually wanted to be a teacher, and Lilly. Others came and went before I knew their names, turning up in the morning and sometimes legging it at lunchtime. I stayed six months or so and was thus one of the longest serving teachers. I had no great desire to teach; I had just been walking past the school when a long shepherd’s crook shot out and dragged me in – well almost. A friend of mine had discovered that ‘supply teachers’ earned what seemed a princely sum and just needed a degree. Lacking any better idea I followed him down to County Hall (now the Park Plaza Hotel, County Hall London – ah well that’s progress), proved I was a graduate and was in. New Cross (now yuppy New Cross – how much progress can we take?) was my school’s location. All I had to do was walk to Highgate tube, ride to London Bridge, get a train to Brockley and then walk half a mile up the hill to the school. Fairly newly graduated and therefore a highly accomplished sleeper, I found this journey pretty traumatic let alone having to work at the end of it. The only thing I think I accomplished during my time at the school was to quit smoking because I realised it was that or die running for a train.

The school, a Victorian red-brick (well as red as London pollution allowed) was named after an illustrious and long-dead Londoner and had a large tarmac playground surrounded by railings but no blade of grass within realistic reach. It was a challenging place to start or end a teaching career. It was multicultural before the concept existed and contained an ethnically diverse mix of boys and young men, many of whom were already traumatised or traumatising. There were significant numbers of poor whites, extremely large Turkish lads, first and second generation Afro-Caribbean boys, a good many Chinese and a smattering from other countries. These ethnic groups seldom mixed though they would unite against the youth of others schools or neighbourhoods. The Afro-Caribbean lads were particularly fond of insulting me in dialect if I asked why they had not brought a pen to school. Thinking about it now I can understand their irritation. The answer was pretty obvious; no pen – no writing. Thinking a bit more about it now I think many were embarrassed at their lack of literacy. Having been educated at Beacon Hill Secondary Modern School I didn’t take it personally. They were named after imperial heroes; Nelson, Wellington, Winston, Montgomery, or more rarely Wilberforce, a hero of a different kind. Occasionally a Napoleon would come along, suggesting imperial loyalties could become strained.

The staff room was a kind of sanctuary from ‘the front’, a place to wait and tremble before going ‘over the top’. It smelt of stress and cigarettes and visibility was limited by the smoke haze. My initial surprise at the way cigarette ends were casually dropped on the carpet and stubbed out with a foot rather than bothering to use one of the many ashtrays didn’t last long; soon I was stubbing with the worst of them.

Walls separating classrooms were simple wooden partitions so noise carried. This was something I came to appreciate when two Turkish ‘boys’, each weighing around 14 stones decided to fall out and rolled about the floor grappling and generally trying to kill each other. Desks and chairs were scattered as if they were stage props. Eventually they collided with a dividing wall which shuddered and almost gave way, bringing one of the few experienced and competent teachers into my room. I doubt he could tell who was the teacher but he magically restored order without totally humiliating me.
The bonus about teaching there was that supply staff, intended to be temporary stand-ins for permanent staff, could stay until they retired or died – if they wished. The staff turnover was such that there were always vacancies. Plus, people called me ‘colleague’ rather than ‘Oi You!’ – well not the boys obviously. And, when I closed the classroom door, I was free to do whatever I chose – as were the boys obviously.

I was taken on to teach English so was a tad confused when I was given an RE timetable for my first week. It turned out that the RE specialist had suffered a heart attack and would not be coming back.
“It’s not really my subject.”
“Don’t you worry about that son,” said Jim, smiling.
“But what shall I do with them?”
He thought for a second, perhaps remembering the war in the desert, and then said, “Tell ‘em a story,” patted me on the back and was off.
So I did, beginning with the immortal lines, “Now then, hands up if you know what a desert is.”
It didn’t end well.

It didn’t take me long to realise that my English timetable was actually being taught by Lilly, who was an art teacher. She was one of the nicest young women imaginable and I can’t understand how she survived in the school. She didn’t stay though. She came in one day with a black eye, the product of a troubled relationship and an abusive partner, and left soon after. I probably should have stuck to RE, where I could do less damage and access divine forgiveness, but instead I went off sick and then went into school when “not quite well enough to go back in the classroom” to discuss my timetable. Such was their desperation to at least have someone in front of most classes that I got the English timetable and Lilly reverted to art. God knows who taught RE.

After about three months or so the Head of English, who caned boys and taught the GCE group, announced that it was time for the annual test. He suggested we all draft a few language questions and round off with questions on whichever reading book the group had studied.
“Reading book?” I offered.
He looked at me and said, “Haven’t you been reading a book with them?”
I thought this was a bit rich given that my induction consisted of being told how to find paper for my pupils in the unlikely event of their deciding to put pen to paper.
Fortunately, my leader had a solution: “Forget the book questions then.”

I discovered there was a whole cellar/air-raid shelter full of books and wandered down to select some appropriate texts. It didn’t take me long to work out why they were still in the cellar. Most were heroic stories of young white chaps who got up to horse-play at their public schools but were sporting and on the whole ‘good types’, proto-Bullingdon Club I guess. The plots often involved ‘the hols’ and discovering a German spy signalling to the off-shore submarine in the middle of the night just outside of somewhere like Charmouth.

The books were called things like “Jim Saves the Day” and “Jack of the Third Remove”. The idea of trying to read one of them to the lost children of a lost Empire was not appealing.

My happiest memory of the school was of a summer’s day when the staff took on the boys in the annual cricket match. It was played in a south London park on a glorious, sunny afternoon. The mood was relaxed and everyone was in a good humour. I was not in the team and had no involvement or responsibility. The staff team consisted largely of canny veterans but with a smattering of younger teachers. They batted first and reached a respectable total of around seventy – it would have been more but for some terrifyingly quick fast bowling from one wonderfully athletic Afro-Caribbean lad. Some of the staff, having faced one ball spent a lot of time making sure they were not facing him again and then, if they could find an opportunity, getting out without getting maimed.

The boys’ batting was, on the whole, mediocre; they were nervous and uncoached and we were cruising to an easy victory. Then the fast bowler came in to bat. Even at fourteen he was brilliant. He began caning the bowling, hitting fours and the occasional six and not deigning to run for a single unless it was to make sure he kept the batting. Eventually he had punished every bowler we had. We needed one more wicket to win but there was no way to get him out. Then Jim, the portly deputy head, showed himself. He hadn’t bowled and had barely batted but he decided to bowl an over.

I’ve heard it said that the reason the Swordfish biplane torpedo-bombers managed to disable the Bismark was because the ship’s radar-controlled guns were calibrated for a minimum attack speed which was faster than the attack speed of the Swordfish. No-one who mattered could believe we would attack the most powerful warship afloat with such suicidally slow aircraft. As a result the Bismark’s shells exploded well ahead of the ponderous aircraft. “Vorsprung Durch Technik”?

On that hot summer’s day Jim was our Swordfish squadron. He didn’t run, he ambled up to the crease. When he released the ball it made only marginal progress against no breeze and landed just outside the batting crease. On landing it changed direction. It didn’t really need to because the batsman had already played at the ball well before it reached him, clearly not believing anyone could bowl so slowly. It took Jim two more balls to take the wicket. The batsman played and missed all three and the third ball removed his stumps. The honour of the staff was safe.

Jim had saved the day – again.

One size fits all….when it’s a straightjacket

I worked in schools for a long time, teaching or helping teachers and leaders so I knew, and regretted, the failure of many schools and teachers to cater for all kids. Many young people thrived in schools, most did o.k. and some just didn’t fit.

The balance shifted over time. I started teaching in London in the early 70’s and many of the kids I encountered found the mismatch between school and the rest of their world impossible to reconcile. School was pretty much an irrelevance and they got out as soon as they could.

Things improved through the late 70’s and eighties. The curriculum became more relevant and the exam structure was organised to cater for almost all young people. Things were a long way from perfect; many teachers bought the lie that intelligence was fixed and had too low an expectation of what their students could achieve. Others though felt a reasonable aspiration was that all students should be encouraged to achieve as highly as they could in a system that had no upper or lower boundaries. There was high variability, high achievement, high levels of inclusion and a general consensus that teaching should engage the interest of young people and that learning was not the same thing as teaching – child-centered learning made a huge difference but was equated by Conservative Secretaries of State with satanism.

Even with the improvements of the early 80’s still some children didn’t fit; they were awkward and different, perhaps because of what they had already experienced at home or in school, perhaps just because they were outliers. In a factory they’d be put on the reject pile or sold as seconds (“slight flaw in stitching”). Generally they were put on the reject pile at school too, pathologised and often removed from lessons to spend increasing amounts of time in exclusion rooms, called things like ‘remedy’, ‘time out’ or ‘learning support’ centres or sent home or to another school. All of that still happens or course….except in some academies where the ‘problem’ is tackled at source though some illegal QA when pupils are recruited……

In 1990, Kenneth Baker and Margaret Thatcher chipped in with the National Curriculum since it was apparently absolutely vital that every child studied the same things across the country. I won’t dwell on the irony of current Conservative policies bringing ‘freedom’ to academies, ‘free’ schools and UTCs to teach what they like. In the early 80’s Local Authority advisers were ordered by good old Ken Baker into primary schools to make sure the statutory percentage of each subject was being delivered each week…maybe that’s what they mean by Local Authority bureaucracy. Anyway the national curriculum and the levels and testing machine unsurprisingly alienated and disenfranchised even more kids. Today things are probably worse than those dire days in the 70’s. The straightjacket approach to young people – ‘think this, believe this, do this, learn this’ (think the ‘Prevent Strategy’ without the dobbing in of strange kids with strange ideas) is producing some remarkable results, particularly for young people in the following groups : Young offenders; looked after children; LGBT; BAME; children with a Disability; Homeless Youth; Young People in gangs and Unemployed young people.

Key Statistics

One in Four (26%) young people in the UK experience suicidal thoughts;

ChildLine (UK) has revealed that it held 34,517 counselling sessions in 2013/14 with children who talked about suicide – a 116 percent increase since 2010/11;

Among teenagers, rates of depression and anxiety have increased by 70% in the past 25 years, particularly since the mid 1980’s;

The number of children and young people who have presented to A&E with a psychiatric condition have more than doubled since 2009. (8,358 in 10/11; 17,278 in 13/14);

55% of children who have been bullied later developed depression as adults;

45% of children and young people under the age of 18 detained under s.136 were taken to police custody in 2012/13.

Stats from Young Minds: http://www.youngminds.org.uk

I guess this is what ‘Rabbit in Headlights’ Morgan means by standards of achievement. Her recent NUT appearance was scary for what it revealed about her understanding of the impact of government policies. She highlighted the large proportion of negative messages on the NUT web-site as saying something about union attitudes and seemed not to understand that there might be some kind of link to her policies. She seemed to think she was being inspirational and conciliatory:

“There isn’t another government just around the corner, to be frank,” she told delegates in Birmingham. “Teaching unions have a choice – spend the next four years doing battle with us and doing down the profession they represent in the process, or stepping up, seizing the opportunities and promise offered by the white paper and helping us to shape the future of the education system.”

The best hope for kids is that teachers and unions opt for the four year battle and, in doing so ‘do down’ the profession she represents, so fingers crossed.

It’s not just school that some of us find difficult. Those who don’t fit at school, are different, can’t cope, reject or just don’t achieve, don’t always just leave school and start to thrive. Ordinary life (a job, a home, a family, ‘Match of the Day’ and the rest) is too much for some of us because of what we are or what we’ve been through. Rough sleepers, small groups drinking cider or lager in parks, people hiding in their bed-sits, having panic attacks at work, hiding from bailiffs, ‘wasting’ GPs’ time with another imagined illness, taking prescribed or illicit drugs, living in abusive relationships, crying again, smashing a glass in the pub, waking at mid-day wondering where these cuts and bruises came from…… could have been us….could still be us if something goes wrong in our life.

We’re pack animals so it’s hard to value difference whether it’s colour, creed or lifestyle but we should do it and it should start in our schools. Ironically public schools often get this right and focus on the whole child while what we can (just) still call state schools are pressured to concentrate on assessment, labeling and exam ‘results’. I can understand why teachers are disenchanted and resigning or just tunneling furiously. Rigour, that favourite word of government when screwing up educational reform, leads to rigor mortis and leaves no room for, indeed will not tolerate, difference. We need to get back to valuing young people for what and who they are not for the number of ‘good’ grades they do or don’t or just plain won’t represent. Hot house plants don’t thrive when they leave the hot-house!

What a Piece of Work is Man –

I’m not that young any more – in fact I’m knocking on a bit and I’ve never subscribed to the view that age inevitably brings wisdom, not least because it also brings senility and a certain narrowing of perspectives. I’ve spent most of my sentient life trying to get a better understanding of three things: me, the world I live in (in a planetary rather than a local sense) and what my species is really like. I think, belatedly, I’ve realised something quite important about the latter.

I’ve known for a long time that western man (and woman) has, over a thousand years or so, felt free to exterminate native peoples encountered as we explored and pillaged the globe; we have followed something very unlike the Star Trek Prime Directive that there can be no interference with the internal development of alien civilizations. The work which illuminated this understanding for me was “ Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples” by Mark Cocker.

Generally, the driving force behind extermination was greed; either ‘they’ were on land we wanted, or they were on land on top of gold, silver, diamonds – you name it – we wanted. Our perception of native peoples shifted from innocents living in an earthly paradise to sub-humans who would be better off Christianised and doing the work we needed doing if we were to prosper. Whether it was offering a bounty for every native ear or scalp (depending on the continent involved), selling wallets made from the breasts of native women or just sending the army in to protect our civilising missionaries, we were good at genocide for profit and saved their souls along the way – a bit like the Auschwitz I, slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Makes Free)’ made by prisoners with metalwork skills and erected by order of the Nazis in June 1940 – a strange kind of freedom and a strange kind of saving.
So, you’ll understand, I haven’t a particularly high opinion of my kind, although some of my best friends are human. Of course we are capable of amazing things, including goodness and self-sacrifice as well as great evil or irresponsibility. I’m less sure now, though, that it is western humanity that carries the guilt, since other cultures seem not to be immune. I’m also not as sure that it’s entirely our fault or that it represents some kind of moral struggle we are destined to run and re-run until the second coming. I think there’s another paradigm which explains what we have done and continue to do; it has to do with ideology if not morality. It’s called free market economics.
My new learning came from another book, not this time about the extermination of native clans and races: this one is about the extermination of any living thing which we encountered. It turns out that when indigeneous Americans, Tasmanians and Africans were killed, it really wasn’t personal.
The book is “The Unnatural History of the Sea: the past and future of humanity and fishing” by Professor Callum Roberts. It makes for desperate reading, not only, or even largely, because he keeps trying to place Grimsby in Yorkshire. It tells the story of our pollution and overfishing of inland waters, of our turning to coastal sea waters, then to distant western waters, then to distant world waters, then to distant deep waters. It speaks of the extermination of colony after colony and species after species of water creatures. As ‘limitless’ fish stock diminished we improved our technology so that we could hoover up (often literally) the few that were left and then moved on to another species until we pretty well ran out of species. If we bumped into otters, dodos, auks, lobsters, shrimps (again you name it) we hunted them to the brink too. Along the way we transformed the sea bed, trawling much of it into flat, near lifeless sludge supporting only bacterial life.

Some species of coral can live for over 4,000 years — longer than any other animal that lives in the ocean. Deep sea and cold water corals were once thought an impossibility – prescient rather than mistaken, since they probably soon will be. As for warm water corals, the Caribbean has around 8% left alive it seems. The book doesn’t mention the role coral plays in carbon capture, only its age, incredible beauty and the part it plays in sustaining an ecosystem, a food and life chain of astonishing complexity.
What do I conclude from all this, apart from having my worst fears about the kind of animal I am confirmed?
Well, what could drive people to systematically destroy the environment and the animal life which are vital to our own survival? Why would we industrially fish out in a few years fish stocks which are, potentially, one of the best forms of renewable energy – life itself? You’ve guessed it haven’t you? It’s greed; it’s a competitive market in a finite resource and the scramble for profit now – whatever the cost later. We keep doing it: it’s the nature of the beast. Collectively we will destroy anything inanimate or living if there is money to be made, whatever the medium and long term consequences; all our history tells us that and we can’t change. Some of the most powerful city-based civilisations died out in part because they destroyed their immediate environment, cutting down all the trees to burn or build with. No trees = no city, but that’s tomorrow’s problem. But to get back to this finite resource thing, it’s not just oil or water or rare earths, or fish, or glaciers or whales – it’s the planet.
Free markets don’t make for responsible stewardship – ever. We can’t be trusted to act responsibly if there’s money to be made. Of course we, in our free democracies, elect governments to be responsible for more than their own survival but that doesn’t work either does it? A politician’s time frame is four or five years and, ideally, civilisations should aim for a bit longer. Democracy is about bribing key parts of the electorate every few years, lying or being ‘economical with the truth’ and recognising that the electorate have a short memory; after all, ‘they’re all the same aren’t they’ is probably truer now than in the pre-Blair years, though the Labour Party seems to have rediscovered its value base. Why do politicians do it? because it works of course. They bribe and we respond. We probably get the politicians we deserve. The EU Common Fisheries Policy quotas were framed by scientists, modified by civil servants to placate politicians and then raised by politicians to placate us, so that we could have cheap and plentiful fish now – well then as of 2012. Arguably, a dictator who didn’t have to court popularity would be as likely (more likely?) to rule in a disinterested way as long as some money could be funnelled into Swiss accounts. I have a feeling though, that a party standing on a principled platform of consuming less now so that our children would have a future might do rather well. That’s why the Green Party are prospering and why the Labour Party membership is soaring now its led by someone brave enough to say New Labour was old Conservatism. After all, even the ‘we’re all in it together’ calls of this benighted government have made most people think sacrifices have to be made to save the banks (and bankers). Surely saving the planet is (almost?) as important.
I grew up in Grimsby (on the Lincolnshire coast). I remember the ‘Cod Wars’ when those pesky Icelanders tried to stop us fishing in what they said were their waters. At the time no-one mentioned overfishing. I live near Newlyn now – a tiny place by comparison but the largest fishing port in the country because Grimsby and ports like it stopped catching much fish a long time ago. If only there were a National Trust for the seas.
In his conclusion to “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” published way back in the 1930s, Weber lamented the loss of religious underpinning to capitalism’s spirit.

“This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.

In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”

So what do we need? We need regulation not untrammelled market freedom. We need supra-national decision making at EU and UN levels (I wonder if this is the real reason why the Conservative Party so hates the EU; not the loss of sovereignty but a brake on the stampede for profit and edge of the cliff mayhem). We also need politicians to be kept out of the loop on regulation. And we need probity and a dedication to public service.
As a senior citizen, I look at the policies of our coalition Conservative government and despair: a free market in education, a free market in health, cutting regulation and freeing the entrepreneurs, limiting employment rights and pouring scorn on EU legislation and bureaucracy. The stakes for us are incredibly high. They only stand to lose money, most of which is ours not theirs in any case. We stand to lose everything.

Sharing expectations and winning hearts and minds

Once the classroom becomes the place for oppositional behaviour from a significant number of young people the game is up. Teachers will find themselves faced with dissidents, passive observers and, occasionally, the odd supporter/sympathiser.

There are few worse places for an adult to be than the classroom when self-esteem is consistently attacked by a group of young people. It happens quite often in my view but it is avoidable, even in a school (and there are some) where oppositional behaviour is the norm.

What creates positive classroom relationships? Google ‘climate for learning’ for the big picture; you’ll find stuff like, “A positive, caring, respectful climate in the classroom is a prior condition to learning.” John Hattie, ‘Visible learning’.

Creating that climate starts with your induction programme with a new teaching group and the first few lessons which model relationships and shape expectations.

Most schools have some sort of induction programme. At secondary level they focus on easing transfer and establishing the school’s expectations of new students, which, sadly, usually means rules.

There should be a subject induction too of course at secondary level and, personally, I don’t think it’s a great idea to start by emphasising hard work and loading kids up with homework.

It’s worth spending a lot of time on induction (planning and delivering); think of it as an investment.

Here’s one set of activities which are worth trying for sharing expectations and winning hearts and minds. Activities like this might mean the classroom is a place to enjoy rather than a place which you struggle to control.

A Couple of Ground rules:

They have pretty well all chosen to sit with one or more friends because new schools are scary. That’s fine but explain that, over time, everyone in the room will be working with everyone else in the room (including the teacher);
in these lessons everyone in the room helps everyone else. That doesn’t mean there’s no competition; it means everyone in the room (including the teacher) is competing against their own past best performance and helping everyone else in the room to do the same.

Aim of the lesson: to work out what we want from school and how to get it.

Activity 1: Put a few near desks/tables together to form work groups of four or five. On a piece of scrap paper each pupils/students jot down four things they need to get from school and four things they’d like to get from school. They don’t talk about it with others in the group, just spend time thinking about it.

The teacher and 1 of the groups will do the same task from the teacher’s point of view rather than the pupils’, i.e. what four things the teacher needs to get from school etc. The teacher has pre-prepared his/her aspirations to show later.

Activity 2: Pupils/students pass the papers round until everyone in the group has seen all the answers, then group discussion and questioning around what has been written. Each group builds its composite list.

Activity 3: Having agreed a composite list, pupils/students work individually then as a group to produce a composite list of what they have to do and what has to happen if their first list is going to be achieved.

Activity 4: Whole group sharing: each group in turn offers 1 point not already given to build a composite list from activity 1-3 and activity 4. Leave space for comment and discussion. It’s a good idea to leave the teacher list till last; first take the group’s ideas and then share your own.

What you’ll end up with is a two-way contract (make something of it!), a collaborative rather than an oppositional classroom and some identified strugglers with awkward attitudes or self-evidently low self-esteem. If you’re not one of the ones with the low self-esteem you’ll know how to help these young people along with the rest of the group.

Set to Fail

My daughter was interviewed a couple of years or so ago for a PGCE (teacher training) programme. Predictably, one of the questions she was asked was whether she would rather teach a ‘mixed ability’ group (more properly mixed attainment since ability is a moveable feast) or a setted one. Fortunately she was applying for an English specialism so her impassioned defence of ‘mixed ability’ teaching did the trick; a maths PGCE interview might not have had quite the same outcome. Her experience did make me wonder why this remains such a controversial topic and why, against all the evidence, the pendulum seems to have swung again firmly towards setting and streaming.

mathslesson — ‘You do your job and I’ll do mine’ from ‘Man in School’, Terence Parkes, Pitman, 1972

The issue is one where both old ‘new labour’ and the Conservative party come down firmly on the side of more ability grouping (I’ve no idea where their coalition partners are on the issue, probably firmly on the fence). For David Cameron it’s the key to driving up standards and I’m reminded of Prince Charles’ exclamation a few years ago: “What’s wrong with an elite for goodness sake?”…(‘as long as I’m in it’ being implied but unsaid). Actually, to be fair, the Tories do have another way of raising standards: they aim to create a competitive school market by opening lots of schools and engineering surplus places for all, but I’ll come back to that another time.
Teachers and managers feel as strongly as politicians about it; many teachers are fiercely supportive of a setted and streamed environment, particularly if they’ve never taught in any other way or if they work in a school with a significantly skewed intake. After a working lifetime in the business I’ve come to the conclusion that the issue has its roots in social class not standards – not a surprise to many I guess – but more seriously I also think it is significantly responsible for the systemic failure of our education system.
Here’s my case. There is very little evidence to sustain an argument for setting by attainment having any but a negative impact on attitude, attainment and achievement.
Defenders of setting (forming teaching groups at subject level by attainment, high, middle and lower for example) talk in terms of being able to tailor their teaching more precisely to the needs of their groups, being able to organize smaller groups of those learners needing most attention and being able to stretch higher attainers rather than have them ‘held back’ by the rest. If only life were that simple; unfortunately, teacher expectation determines learner attitudes and teacher expectations are depressed when it comes to lower sets. There have been a number of case stgudies where teachers mistakenly thought they were teaching a high set when it was a low one and achieved the expected results for that high set. Common sense tells us that the obverse result can be obtained when teachers know they have low sets. What’s worse, setting itself is seldom based simply on measured attainment but takes into account behaviour, attitude to learning and other, less defensible variables such as the season of birth for example; lower sets often contain over-many boys and summer-born pupils (more of that below).
Is there incontrovertible evidence that setting causes more problems than its supporters claim it solves? Of course: just ask any teacher whether they would rather teach set one or set four on Friday last thing. The repertoire of teaching and learning strategies teachers deploy narrows as sets get lower and an emphasis on learning gives way to one on behaviour and control. Behaviour declines as the sets get lower, partly because attitudes to learning and self-image do too and partly because lower set learning activities are just less interesting – worksheets are very popular! The casualties of current practice have been described as having,

“an inability for clear self expression; a feeling of disillusion or defeat and low self-esteem”

(Ruddock et al, 1998).

One of the most depressing lessons I observed as an inspector was PSHE with a low set of about ten boys and one, isolated girl. It seemed at the time to epitomise everything that was wrong with ‘ability grouping’; there was absolutely no chance of the lesson making the slightest difference to the understanding, attitudes or skills of the young people concerned (but not involved). It was a church school but I struggled to find any Christian principles in that deliberate, if unconscious, organising for failure. All teachers know what it feels like to encounter groups like this – dispiriting at the least and, at times, humiliating too.
If you are an ‘experienced’ (i.e. old) teacher, you may remember an HMI report a few years ago which came down strongly in favour of more setting in primary schools in order to raise standards of achievement. Chris Woodhead was HMCI then and I’ve always supposed that he may have had a hand in the report’s conclusions; he certainly played a key part in publicising them and the report was a pretty big news story. I took the trouble to read the report, partly because HMI’s voice carried authority then and partly because I’ve always been pragmatic about the organisation of learning – if there was evidence I wanted to see it and have it inform my thinking and the messages I gave to schools about improvement. The conclusion I came to was that the politicisation of HMI was a done deal and that as a piece of scholarship or research it was a shoddy document. I could find no link between the body of the report and the conclusions. I hope that, at the least, the HMI involved argued long and hard before submitting to the report’s publication. Here are some key findings from the report:

Safeguards need to be built in to avoid low self esteem and the negative labelling of pupils which can occur in lower sets.
A simple comparison between the current National Curriculum test results attained by the setting schools in the survey and non-setting schools in the country as a whole shows non-setting schools to be performing slightly better.
The quality of teaching in mathematics and English was highest in the upper sets in all age groups. This reflects the fact that upper sets are frequently taken by subject co-ordinators or specialists.
The weakness of lower set mathematics teaching is a particular concern, given that in many schools one of the stated intentions of setting is to help raise the performance of lowest attaining pupils.
Too few schools monitor the gender or ethnic composition of sets.

‘Setting in primary schools’ A report from the Office of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools.

So let’s have more setting shall we?
An Institute of Education report by Judith Ireson, Susan Hallam and Clare Hurley published in the British Educational Research Journal in 2005 found that setting had little or no effect on average GCSE achievement in a school. It also found that setting could have a profound effect on individual students and GCSE achievement was greatly influenced by social disadvantage.
This report bears reading. Findings include the use of setting criteria which have nothing to do with attainment levels, confirming that lower sets generally contain boys, summer born and socially disadvantaged learners. Sammy Davis Jr. once remarked on the golf course that his handicap was that he was a black, one-eyed Jew: let’s hope male, summer born working-class pupils can sing and dance because they are unlikely to be high achievers!
In 2005 a literature review, ‘The Effects of Pupil Grouping’ (Research Report RR688) was commissioned by the DCSF (as was). Its publication was very low key, presumably because it too found against ability grouping.

Results from meta-analyses consistently show only limited academic gains in cooperative/collaborative classes compared to traditional classes, but pro-social and pro-school attitudes improve significantly in co-operative/collaborative classrooms and where relational and other training are integrated into the classroom (programmes such as SPRinG). These results contrast strongly with set (or ability based) classes, where there is little attainment advantage associated with this type of grouping and actual attitude and behavioural disadvantages especially among the lowest attaining pupils.

The report continues:

There are no significant differences between setting and mixed ability teaching in overall attainment outcomes. Studies suggest little evidence that ability grouping across KS3 contributes to raising standards for all pupils; but at the extremes of attainment, low achieving pupils show more progress in mixed ability classes and high achieving pupils show more progress in set classes. Especially with regard to attainment, studies have not shown evidence that streamed or set classes produce, on average, higher performance than mixed-ability classes. Pupils in lower groups are vulnerable to making less progress, becoming de-motivated and developing anti-school attitudes’.

The report references:

telling evidence of a relationship between the ability grouping of pupils and disaffection, particularly among pupils in the lowest groups. These groups of young people have often been found to be over-represented among those associated with the outcomes of educational and social parameters of disengagement.

The previous government didn’t get everything right in the world of ‘education, education, education’; Tony Blair (remember him) was, for example, a real fan of setting but changes to key stage 3 content and process engaged more learners and the diploma had the potential to do the same at key stage 4 and post-16. The reforms sprang from a clear recognition of the relative failure, however gifted and hard-working our teachers, of what we did to engage, challenge and stimulate young people. That nice Mr Gove had a different analysis of the problem though and has largely blocked that improvement avenue, ably supported by Morgan Mini-Gove.
It wouldn’t have been enough in any case would it? If comprehensive schools have failed, not because they’re have worked hard to level down, as their critics in this and the previous government would have it. They have failed because they have organised internally, through banding, streaming and setting to demoralise and demotivate many young people and limit their attainment and achievement.

The old tri-partite system of secondary, technical and grammar schools has been applied within instead of across schools so that schools which badged themselves as comprehensives simply maintained the old status quo of segregation by social class. We make our own problems for learners and teachers and then pathologise disaffected learners who respond by giving up.

Of course I’m biased. I’ve taught in setted and ‘mixed ability’ situations. The best work I’ve ever seen came from KS4 students in my English classes. It didn’t have a lot to do with my qualities as a teacher; it had to do with an ethos which encouraged students to compete with their own best performance in everything they did, with open-ended assignments and with continuous assessment and feedback over time. The highest attainers produced work of A level standard in year 11 and enjoyed it and every group was a joy to teach. GCSE and tiering dished a lot of that of course but that’s another story.
There are quite profound consequences, economic, social and individual springing from the social and anti-social groupings we manufacture in our schools and the cost of addressing them continues to rise. So, if we want social cohesions rather than social disintegration it might be an idea to build our curriculum around well-resourced social and personal education and organise groups for learning not for convenient but often mutually demoralising teaching. We should make clear to children that we value them for more than their potential to hit 5+ A*-Cs – then they just might begin to value themselves.

Remember the dead hand of local authority control

There could be a new role for Local Authorities if we get a change of government at the next election; at the least they will have to deal with free schools going bust because they’re not economically viable, surplus places where anyone and his dog have been allowed to open schools, exercising some scrutiny of academies which underperform and, dare I say it, intervening when required. They could do rather more if an incoming government were brave enough and wanted to restore local democracy and accountability. They could even restore a school improvement mission, by which I do not mean a standards, accountability and Ofsted mission. They could restore a focus on teaching and learning…kind of make schools have something to do with education for a change.

posters — ‘Organised Labour’, Ffrom ‘Man in School’, Terence Parkes, Pitman, 1972

I was lucky enough to work as 14-19 phase and link adviser for a local authority a few years ago. The county secondary schools had been almost entirely organised on a 11-13 and 14-19 basis and I had a chief officer who was willing to give me my head. Statistically the authority performed extremely well at KS3 and about average at KS4 compared with statistical neighbours. This suggested issues around continuity and progression and the authority persuaded its heads that the review might be timely. There was plenty of suspicion that it might presage a reorganisation so initially there wasn’t much trust about.

We set up a cross-phase steering group, looked at attainment data in detail, sought the views and opinions of all secondary headteachers and leaders and produced a report with clear recommendations for improvement aimed at the authority and schools.

Continuity and progression was indeed the key issue. Action taken included:

two consistently underperforming subjects D&T and MFL were identified (through NCER subject residual analysis) for support and advisory teachers were seconded from schools to lead their improvement; subject focussed improvement plans were developed and implemented;
additional funding was obtained from elected members to assist with equipment and training in these subject areas, conditional on common planning across cross-phase ‘families’ of schools;
further funding subsidised the purchase of common added value measures across all schools (Midyis and Yellis) and support for their effective use;
and
induction guidance was developed and produced to ease phase transition.

All this took place in addition to the consistent support for individual schools based around regular headteacher/adviser dialogues and a central training programme.

Around 60 secondary schools worked in partnership with a Local Authority in the best interests of young people. The result, oddly enough, was consistent improvement in attainment and achievement which outstripped our statistical neighbours. KS3 continued to outperform KS4 (not least because KS3 was an output indicator for 11-13 schools) but the crucial measure of KS2 to KS4 improvement showed that overall we did better than our statistical neighbour authorities and improved at a faster rate. The system of school organisation worked and could be made to work even better. An improvement strategy underpinned by research and data analysis, characterised by partnership working, transparency and trust and funded by elected members made a difference.

Of course it couldn’t last and could never happen now. Ofsted focussed on school performance not system performance. Free school meals uptake at 14-16 was bound to be low compared with 11-16 schools and added value KS3-4 always looked distinctly average. KS2 to KS4 added value was clearly not relevant so our upper schools were often severely judged. Link adviser work became an Ofsted dominated script to be repeated every year. The introduction of SIPs and an even more bureaucratic script and process fractured the relationship between LA advisers and headteachers. High schools wanted to teach KS4 so the county structure fragmented. Academisation was the final straw. The advisory service virtually disappeared as it has since across the country. School improvement has been devolved to school level and meta-analysis and widescale improvement programmes are long-gone along with national advisor networks where good practice could be shared and built on. A number of schools, once high achieving, are in trouble and while it may be deemed the local authority’s responsibility (even if they are academies) there’s really not much the authority can do any more.

Not to worry, market forces and rigour will sort it all out and at least schools can escape that local control, as long as they exchange it for academy chain and Govian (Morganatic?) oversight …………..oh yes and control.

What’s the worst thing a student ever said to you?

“Why don’t other teachers talk to us the way you do?”

Doesn’t sound too bad does it? and I can think of more upsetting responses, for example the girl who burst into tears because she didn’t think she could do the work I’d set – that really didn’t make me feel great. I’m not sure what you’d have said to the tears. I said,

“This is only school; it’s not the most important thing in life and if you don’t understand the work it’s not your fault, it’s mine.”

Not much rigour there is there? what would that nice Mr Gove think or indeed his mannakin? I ask myself that a lot; it’s a kind of touchstone across education, training and adoption practice for me – I ask myself what he would think and think the opposite.

The context for the question “Why don’t other teachers talk to us the way you do?” was the end of a lesson with a really nice mixed ability group. We were sitting in a circle reading and discussing a text (in those days we used to read and discuss whole books); one of the higher attaining students mentioned the upcoming mock exams and the fact that he did not expect to do well and there was general agreement.

I was taken aback by the lack of confidence and expectation of failure – where had that come from?

So I said, “Don’t let anyone, ANYONE, tell you you’re not at least as bright, AT LEAST AS BRIGHT, as the people teaching you.”

It was an easy thing for me to say because I believed it. I went on to contrast what we expected of them with the kind of behaviour we displayed; they were expected to concentrate, pay attention and not complain while sitting through a constant diet of what was, on the whole, pretty boring stuff. If they complained they were punished. Most of us, on the other hand, seemed to think we knew everything and were always right – the last thing we could tolerate was dissent, a threat to our discipline. Colleagues seemed to think they were in a potential war zone and without repression we would all be lost.

I guess it’s different now – all that climate for learning stuff will be properly embedded; assessment will be formative and summative and fit for purpose; we’ll have a mix of teaching styles and strategies; dissent (AKA independent thinking) will be encouraged; teacher expectations will be high and learners will be confident and encouraged – in your dreams!

We now have a curriculum which is less relevant than ever, a manic preoccupation with testing rather than learning, the kind of rigour that brings rigor mortis, a dilution of teacher training and an approach to educational provision that prohibits local authority involvement in planning provision but allows anyone else (particularly if they are slightly mad or from the private sector) to have a go – a bit like the health service I suppose. What’s not to like?