End of Term Report: Go Now Michael Gove, Make Haste, But Quietly Please

End of Term Report: Go Now Michael Gove, Make Haste, But Quietly Please


I have been struggling with what seems to me to be a mightily appropriate metaphor but it is one so brutal it may offend; unless one sees it as a metaphor of course.

              “And I hope that you die

               And your death’ll come soon

                I will follow your casket

                In the pale afternoon

               And I’ll watch while you’re lowered

               Down to your deathbed

               And I’ll stand over your grave

             ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.”

I use Dylan’s angriest song, "Masters of War," to show my anger at the destruction of state education.

The news that Gove has been sacked as Education Secretary rushed joyfully around our schools. He had done his job, smashing a state education system that he despised and his fellow privately educated ministers ignored. He’s off now to be Chief Whip, flattering Cameron and telling fibs about Theresa May whose job he coveted. His wife, the barely readable Sarah Vine, hides his underwear (The Times 04-05-11) so there’s a more useful way he can while away the empty hours - searching for his knockers. He owes Murdoch money but he may join The Daily Mail, editing the newspaper that should not speak its name, cobbled for people that share his fantasies and challenged lifeform.

http://games.usvsth3m.com/slap-michael-gove/

 So end of term, how did it go Michael?

You introduced many new exams, the most dangerous at age 16 and 18 where you return us to speedwriting memory tests which will mess up children’s opportunities, and the silliest at age 5 when teachers interview tots for 30 minutes – a sort of viva, I guess. The private schools threw out your new exams and carried on with iGCSEs. Now that many of us have copied, “from the very best the independent sector has to offer,” (Gove in My Academy Spring 2014) you are finding all sorts of ways to stop us as they are not fit qualifications. Goodness knows what will happen to all those Eton boys whose qualifications are rubbished at university and job interviews when up against comprehensive graduates.

 You rewrote the History Curriculum. Your own view of history is unique, biased and unsound. We do not understand history by starting at Year zero at age 5 and progressing chronologically through Ethelreds and Caesars, great men of each century, until we reach the benign misunderstood First World War generals at age 16. To you history is unconnected great British men and there are no themes and certainly no lessons to be learned studying the development of state education.

State schools have no money because you cut us to pay for your toys. With increased costs, government capital funding diverted to your toy schools and 6th form funding slashed by at least 20% in the last 3 years you have sent us all to the brink of financial disaster. A 6th Form college has just replaced lecturers with unqualified facilitators. The Education Funding Agency has now decided that a 6th Former doing 3 A Levels is part time and therefore lower funded. Call it theft and be done.

 Teachers have been insulted and their unions ridiculed. You raised the retirement age, gave us new pay policies, pay structures, performance management and a 1% pay rise for the next 4 years, if we can meet your exam only targets.

Your childhood must have been miserable for you to believe our children should learn by rote. Drama, Art and Music are relegated to “prep.” You seek control of our schools directly from your untutored office. You have been the most interferingly unlistening, unadvised political ideologue in the history of state education. You may rewrite history, but we will remember you.

 You spent £2 million insulting teachers by prattling on about what skills the 200,000 redundant ex-military men could bring to our classrooms. You managed 42 and the DfE added injury, “Entry requirements were deliberately high to ensure top-quality recruits…(they will need) GCSEs at Grade C in English and Maths.” Nothing more?

And just this month there is the idea that retired people could fill the gaps in our staffing. Perhaps a sacked politician could teach a lesson a week of KS3 Maths. Continuity means nothing to you.

                     “You that never have done anything but build to destroy

                       You play with my world like it was your little toy”

 You sent the anti terrorist squad to investigate possible political interference by muslims in Birmingham and then your mate at Ofsted, announced no notice Ofsted inspections. First visiting, surprise, surprise a 95% African Caribbean school in North London. You’re anti European Community anti some religious groups running schools and very pro some others – Christian and Jewish religions – running theirs. You put down multi-cultural society and integrated communities and lecture us on British Values. Values like fair play, equal opportunity, honesty and integrity?

It’s only school dinners, nutrition v obesity, but you dropped school meals standards for academies in 2010, and after lunch with the Leon restaurants sent them, pals of Cameron from schooldays to investigate in 2012. Now you attack school meals standards in 2014. Opportunity knocked, Michael?

You rob our students of their earned exam success and your mate, Glenys Stacey, last seen howling at a departing, mocking audience of school leaders, “I am independent of Gove, honest; we never meet, believe me…” Michael says he doesn’t want kids studying great American literature at GCSE and it immediately disappears from the syllabus. Great independent minds thinking alike?

 Gove and Stacey reckon there’s too much preparation of students (state school only, not those doing “prep” of course) She wants teachers to tell her, anonymously when we engage in bad practice: teaching to the syllabus, counselling, coaching, study skills, mnemonics, mind maps and mock exams. Some schools warm up the kids before an exam, give them a banana and a bottle of water and then have professional invigilators in air conditioned well lit halls. Halls with clocks. For exams to be fair, “ungamed,” state school students take exams in the dark, wearing blindfolds and mittens. They should not be told what the exam is about or how long it is.

You brutally condemned people who disagree with you, “Yada, Yada!” you chanted on Question time, “bad academics” you called the professors who told you to stop meddling. And the rest of us,? Seems we are, inelegantly, “The Blob.” Your special advisers tweeted @toryeducation against all counter Gove views. You denied knowledge of them and then obeyed orders to tone them down. Oops! You refused freedom of Information requests for your files on spurious grounds and were ordered to comply. Lying, Cheating and Dissembling is not very British, Mr Gove.

 Do you remember when that Parliamentary Select Committee mocked you for saying that all schools have got to be above average. Liz Truss ordering us to do better than the Shanghai selective schools. Schools which do not admit the sizeable local servant class. Around 95% of the Chinese school system is years behind us with an early leaving age, massive truancy and illiteracy all conveniently discounted from the results published by the OECD as PISA.”

You deliberately misled about international exam tables and you were mugged in every country you visited. When they took you to their model schools you slathered and salivated and told us to better them. When you visit English schools they send the bad boys on a trip to “a long way away” (Secret Teacher, The Guardian 20-06-14) and you must think we paint walls freshly every day. A week ago, your staff wrote your congratulatory speech on a visit to my friend’s school four hours before you arrived.

 Enough of your past; here’s your legacy

Four University Technology Colleges, triple funded, have been inspected by Ofsted. One is Outstanding (well done you) two have orders to improve (that’s a 3 they got) and the 4th achieved a mighty 4 (Special Measures.) 1 out of 4 is embarrassingly awful.

 The Bedford Free School head, Mark Lehain you paraded at conference, strutted your stuff to blue rinse applause, NUT are on strike today, he gloated, so we have sent recruiting leaflets to families telling them we don’t strike. Clap, clap, clap. Ofsted came; they got a 3 and he bleated that it was too soon to be judged.

When Gove visited a UTC last week he had to talk about the failure to open the Fulham Free School. A very cross headteacher, Alun Ebenezer, felt let down. I swear he did say, “This is an outstanding school.” It hasn’t even opened.

Lord Toby Young, darling of the Free School, founder of the West London Free School cannot keep a headteacher; I guess we aren’t necessary, but three heads in two years? And when,Toby, will you need the publicly funded 2nd building?

Academy chains are so admired by Gove as they are in perfect position to introduce the Tory dream grammar schools. 14 such chains, yes 14, managing over 170 schools have been barred from taking on more schools because of concerns over, “education standards and financial mismanagement.” (Daily Telegraph 19-03-14). The 34 strong E-ACT chain has been ordered to relinquish control of 10 schools following Ofsted inspections found serious weaknesses in the quality of education. Kids being failed, Michael.

 Grace Academy, which runs three schools in the Midlands and was set up by the Tory donor Lord Edmiston, has paid more than £1m to companies owned by the governors and their families. Lots of shocking figures in this article including one family member earning, “£367,732 from Grace Academy over the last six years for consultancy work.” (The Guardian 12=01-14)

The TKAT chain boasted to the parliamentary select committee, they had dispensed with,“within weeks of conversion, 26 out of our 40 headteachers and many other senior staff.” ((BEN 29-01-14)

The Prospects Academy chain was forced to close (BBC News 20-05-14) after 2 of its 6 schools were deemed inadequate. More public money squandered on another ill-thought-out gamble with children’s education.

 Tory Party darling, Katharine Birbasingh (Gove calls her “often”) had had many jobs in her 10 year teaching career when she wowed conference with disturbingly disloyal pictures of her failed students. Lost her job for that but has been given her own free school in Wembley. Joy of joy, to see the very attractive and happy children’s faces on the school’s website. Oh dear, they have no school, no site and no students. Stop using photos of kids Burba and stick to writing your who to shag, “Singleholic” nonsense.

Finally, almost, and briefly you will appreciate, Free School funding – a.k.a. diverting money to open free schools. “Free schools budget trebled to £1.5 billion” (BBC 11-12-13).The average cost per free school is £6.6 million – twice what the DfE claims, according to the National Audit Office (NAO December 2013) The NAO says there have been problems, “financial mismanagement claims at 3 open free schools… More than a quarter of all spending on school buildings – £241 million has been on free schools in areas with no need for extra places” the NAO claims. The Public Accounts Committee claimed, “one in four desks at free schools were empty.(POA December 2013. In May 2014 Gove raided the education budget for another £400 million to shore up his free school lunacy.

But are they any good? “The percentage of free schools given Ofsted’s lowest, ‘inadequate’ rating is now nearly twice as high as the rest of the state sector.” (Observer 14-05-14) and this means that 11% of kids in frees schools are badly taught. Children are being failed.

By Tuesday of last week I had read 470 students’ reports of ambition nurtured by their teachers. I spoke with 200 parents and awarded 650 prizes on Wednesday. On Thursday I welcomed 166 nervous children for their first day at secondary school and that evening I was moved by Facebook praise, smiling children, relieved parents and our tireless, uncomplaining staff at the end of another 12 hour day. The following day we welcomed 1058 children aged 4 – 11 to our school, Beverley cooked with 245 of them in one go! Bag packing at Tescos for our Air Ambulance charity; a carwash in the rain for Peacechild International and sponsorship of many walkers to treat Children’s Cancer raised £1600.This is our community and we are proud of it. That evening we danced, sang, wigged out as 40 or so acts at our rock concert filled the halls. Our Art Exhibition wowed hundreds. This is what we do, and another 16 hour day ended as parents and staff mopped the floor.

 You can never and most certainly will never be part of this, Michael. You wont ever see it and your imagination, stuck in yourself and your dreamless machinations, will never, ever enjoy what we do.

If unbridled optimism is all we've got, if spirit is all we have to oppose the devil then I’ll settle for that.

I want to do this forever.

You can't stop me .

 Bye, Mickey.

 

The Eyes Have It

Wednesday 21st May 2014

Have you ever noticed that characters in novels look deeply into other’s eyes? I don’t know how often you make direct eye contact with people – personally it seems a bit seedy to me - but apparently there’s a lot to see there, and hard boiled detectives see more than most. In Dennis Lehane’s latest, quite good ”Live by Night” a character attacks some men because, “ they’d come upon him with a threat in their eyes so clear wasn’t no point in waiting for it to leave their mouths.” I think that’s brilliant.

At another point the hero is robbing some gangsters of and comes across a waitress,“ Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the centre of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.” Heck!

Later, before the sex started, “She stared at him the way she had in the payroll office, like she could see the intestines curled inside him, the pink of his lungs, the thoughts that journeyed among the folds of his brain.”

So, can you spot a liar, a fraud, a charlatan? Can you see the blankness of the apathetic, the indifferent or the bored? Le’ts check the eyes of Mickey Gove, the DfE tweeters, our national press, the BBC and politicians of all hues. Their eyes were ablaze and their scorn plentiful when dubious analysis from the OECD gave birth to the headlines that we were “plummeting down “ international education tables. (December 2013)

On the 8th May news was released that contrary to this we are apparently 6th in the world and 2nd in Europe.Time for righteous praise from our leaders or even ruefully, apologetically smiling eyes?

These rankings are based upon an amalgamation of international tests and education data - including the OECD's Pisa tests, and two major US-based studies, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls).

Triangulated no less.

Well, well, well.

I waited, for the deafening applause, the beaming smiles, from a corrected media; front pages splashed with congratulatory messages to teachers, the call for a national day of joyful celebration bannered across news bulletins, tears of relief and possibly a letter from the grateful Queen of All England to be read out in classrooms. I waited.

I turned on the BBC News. Halal meat is prepared in halal style; Scunthorpe United finish 2nd in Division 3 and Mavis the cat has been found in a shed in Wycombe. The new education tables, the results, the international comparisons, came and went quicker than a passing glint in a regretful eye.

So, the news should have proclaimed: “Gove jumped on dodgy data to wreck our schools.“ Perhaps admitting to using incomplete, corrupt and incorrect information: Gove Is Well Sorry.”(The Sun)

So, surely, the next headline, after the glassy-eyed apology,

                                                          “Gove Resigns In Shame”

Well what would you expect from an honourable man, from a scholar of heroic deeds, a man with a fearsome supply of urgency pills who compares himself to brave “Horatio at the gate?” Of course he will resign.

Opus Dei style self flagellation and heavy grade barbed wire underpants for Mickey for the rest of this parliament, and Shakespearian banishment beyond. Of course, he will do the honourable thing because now he can see that our education system needs nurturing and developing, not wrecking.

He misled everyone. He proved incapable of rationale thought and balance supported by expert advice, instead, sweeping away the foundations of a world class education system for his own jaundiced, ideology, sacrificing millions of kids to perpetual practice for SATs, GCSEs and other dull repetitive tests.

Of course he will resign. For Govey is an honourable man who read about the age of chivalry and falling on one’s sword.

No doubt he will be round my house, in sackcloth to do my garden as penance for his anti-childhood sins. Sadly, for a man so immense in his own refection Gove now becomes the forgotten man, a bit like the once admired Gary Glitter - confined to the hidden pages of popular culture, an example of mistakes to be punished. An insecure man with so much to be insecure about, and no, I don’t want to be in your gang either.

Having worked in three schools in the last 35 years I can shamelessly, categorically state that we are doing so much better now. But we are being driven backwards by Gove’s stuff. Back to the 80s

…when many kids were failing, their schools couldn’t recruit decent qualified teachers. Mining, car plant, shipyard and docks jobs disappeared and it was students’ fault. The lack of ambition was endorsed by the state. Unemployed people were counted on disability lists to be statistically hidden. My first act as a Head of Year in 1983 was to bury a 14 year old gas sniffer called Mickey. There were riots of the disaffected, by the disillusioned in the cities.

With Gove’s nonsense, unopposed by all political parties, “more students will fail more exam,s” and this will show the students, struggling to pass demanding exams now, that there is no point. He’s also talking about quotas for each grade, so no matter how hard students work with their teachers there will be no criteria for success. As much as we improve our teaching normal distribution curves will screw the students and the schools.

Primary schools have year 5 children doing SATs practice papers a whole 12 months before their tests from fear of public comparison tables. Secondary school English and Maths teachers and headteachers are leaving the profession, driven out by the unrelenting attack on state education: the weekly backdated changes to assessment, the drive for pass marks rather than standards, the wholesale dumping of the curriculum for 4-18 year olds and this centralised, dogmatised, unscientific and frankly incorrect interference reflecting almost complete ignorance of the great things students and their teachers have been doing. Together we have been raising standards and achievement, encouraging hope and ambition, creativity and responsibility, communication and fair play and even suggesting that hard work will be rewarded – you know, all the things employers say they want.

So, back to the eyes. Somewhere in Chelsea, where the mickey-taker conducts his morning ritual, “Mirror mirror on the wall…” and the usual sneering snigger now unmasks a salivating pestilence as he celebrates his victory over a three quarters way decent education system. His hands rubbing together so rapid in their glee that the skin flakes in clouds of foulness, and as he searches his own eyes skin peels away from rotted eyelids, gore drips from the scales beneath,
and he stares, between the tiny slits of membrane at his own reflected eyes, grunting, “Education education education, I’ll show them bloody education!” as the reptilian metamorphosis completes.

Gove casts a damp deformed shadow obscuring the progress we have seen in the last three decades. Our system needed tidying and developing, not unseeing vandalism, and we should be encouraging the best teachers I have ever known.

The voice on “Alice’s Restaurant” resonates, the original 1967 version now. Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody, complains joshingly that the audience don’t sing along loudly enough. He says, “I’ve been singing this song for 25 minutes now, I can sing for another 25. I’m not proud, or tired.” Well, I’ve written nearly 40,000 words in the last 22 blogs and by tomorrow morning I will have been metaphorically hit 15,000 times.77 USA people reading, “How to choose a secondary school this month” makes me wonder if I’m on Michael’s reading list over there at Concordia College.

Feel invited to post a comment, maybe a suggested future topic. Or if you are my local MP and you don’t like my politics or you are the Hertford Headteacher who told my friend, “Dennis is mad,” there’s an all encompassing invite to post a few words.

And next time you see Gove on TV look into his eyes, look deep into his eyes.

Dennis O'Sullivan

Modern Education Reality: The Trouble With Fat Kids Is They Can’t Get Up Chimneys.

 My computer adopted a luddite approach to this 20th blog, eating whole sections of text in an instant and repeating single letters forever. Glancing at the screen showed what I had hoped to be literary, incisive, somewhat cross, incredulous and frustrated prose to be complete incomprehensible nonsense.

I am grateful to Mr Gove for inspiring me to write. In the four decades since I graduated with a decidedly unearned degree in politics I have rarely encountered a politician capable of spouting such garbage. I remember yawning at rabid Trotskyists declaring themselves the new leadership of a soon to be grateful working class, encountering racist nationalists who were as thick as they were wrong and the scariest of all, a group of animal rights activists who showed me a gun. As a committed anarcho- syndicalist with a penchant for individualism and a spot of libertarianism I attended an international conference of Wicked Messengers. We drank and some smoked to enhance clarity and decided Liverpool’s renegade Big Flame, would no longer be welcome in our thoughts. A little later my own group, Southampton Solidarity, stayed up all night to make sure we were able to greet the gasworkers’ change of shift to show them our support. We couldn’t find the gasworks.

 I was sort of affiliated to an even stranger international group – The Situationist International who were fantastically and artistically creative, slogan heavy and quite odd. “The Revolution in Everyday Life” by Raoul Vaneigem seemed such a brilliant anti blueprint from the barricades of Paris in 1968 alongside “The Society of the Spectacle,” decrying the template of life in a goldfish bowl watching 50 inch TVs. Unfortunately the situationists were big on expulsions and they swiftly expelled each other. In my version, Guy Debord, the other founder ended up in a supposedly drunken row with Vaneigem and they expelled each other in 1972. The SI died, except that in a typical twist one member had never been expelled because he was a long term resident in a mental hospital.

Why did I associate with such people? Debord made a lengthy film of nothing much: blank screens, incoherent dialogue and occasional static ending in 30 minutes of silence. He wanted to “problematize reception.” Intellectuals watched the film at the trendy ICA cinema in London, possibly in 1968. As the first audience left they passed the queue for the second sitting and not one mentioned the nothingness. This brings me back to British politics and education in 2014 – I have to keep blathering on about the nothingness, the lack of coherent thought and the obscene and real indifference to children’s education.

 By the way, I would like to thank the 11 readers from Ukraine diverted into my prose. I have to warn that I have recorded over 100 visits from Russia, meaning they outnumber you by about 10 to 1. Just like their army, I fear.

 Gove drops subjects he thinks are useless. Media Studies is rubbished and only partly because The Family Gove were and will be paid well by the corrupting Murdoch empire. As Churchill might have said, never has so much been paid to so few for so little. Politics is out so that students can't contextualise his preening selfish pursuit of unwarranted glorification. RE doesn't count either as the pope never beatified the man who sees himself as more saviour than saint following a visionary chat with Satan. PE has to go to ‘prep’ as the chances of anyone considering the younger Gove to be an athlete is probably limited. You know how cruel people can be to new recruits. In Laurie Lee’s “Cider With Rosie a child spent a considerable time on his first schoolday following the instruction, "Wait there for the present." Go get a rubber hammer, striped paint or dooberry firkins are anecdotedly frequent instructions to apprentices.

Can you believe Gove’s cruel peers had him sign up to the inter house gurning competition telling him he was a natural. Those privately educated wags foresaw his future as an amateurishly created plasticine recreation of alien life form using selfies to frighten miscreant babies.

 A shock announcement from @toryeducation where Gove’s “Special Advisors” (Henry de Zoete and Dominic Cummings) are definitely not the authors: Gove to be New England football manager. A gurning Michael swooned, “I have nothing but admiration for the young fellows who daily kick a ball around a field of grass mowed so brilliantly by fabulous groundsmen, of whom I am forever in awe. I must apologise again to Mr Smithies my old PE teacher for I fear I was a total washout on the footie field. running around and that sort of thing. But of course I can manage the England team. I am humbled to be in the same changing rooms as the chaps whose names I will soon commit to memory. I believe in the 2 3 5 system that worked for a month in 1966 when Britannia ruled the goals and a brave Britisher, Pickles the dog, saved the world cup. I will answer my country's call and issue instructions on how to header the ball, how to get mud off one’s shorts and where to buy dubbin for cleaning boots. Always cross with the laces pointing inwards, don’t you know.

In his powder blue polyester tracksuit Gove expanded his sporting nouse, “Low expectations have been the cause of society's ills. Autistic kids just need a firm push from better teachers, better doctors cure cancer and everyone can be an opera singer. Insults from recently exposed members of The Blob (anyone anti Gove’s way of thinking) that our boys may be affected by Amazonian heat is another attack by the enemies of promise.” Mickey, as he likes to be known now he’s earned a reputation for taking it, has hastily summarised his team tactics for victory in Brazil in a " Everything I know about footie" short tome likely to emulate his blank paged “Everything I know about Education,” number 9 in the 2013 Amazon chart. It was the Amazon chart which got Michael energised....Amazon, Brazil, footie; had god summoned after a game of word association?

2nd minister for approbation, Elizabeth Truss, has been to China and learned how to be good. Use chopsticks, that's what they do in top of PISA League Shanghai. (Children will struggle to learn to use chopsticks, will get thinner and be able to clean our chimneys. QED.) Despite the fact that the Shanghai education experts cannot account for 200,000 of their child population in their school results, we have got to, got to be like them. Embrace the rule that migrant workers in Shanghai are not allowed to have their kids educated in the area. Fancy a spot of apartheid anyone?

Minister Truss’s policy seems to be that school age kids should stay in school during daylight hours and only go home to sleep. Despite opposition from The National Day Nurseries Association and the Pre School Learning Alliance, sort of experts I guess, Truss says we can raise the contact ratio from 1 adult for every 8 four year olds to 1 to 30 because that sort of work, well, how hard can it be? It doesn’t need teachers either – just “sufficient numbers of staff.” None of it is skilled. None of it matters, Let’s cheapen it. The reason for childcare and early years teaching? We need mums at work, in flexible part time jobs. Mums must go to work but must be at home to welcome the kids at the end of the day; it’s bad parenting if not. Schools must open 8-6 and in the holidays with no mention of quality provision, control or inspection; schools are buildings of containment. We need to give employers greater flexibility in managing the female dominated, part time, zero hours, minimum wage, labour force and schools should play their part in keeping the kids off the street while mum’s at work. At the same time ministers are sympathetic to term-time holidays, it’s not like the kids will miss anything important. I needed four professional qualifications to do what I do; Truss just needed a desire to succeed Gove.

One of the big anti-immigration arguments is that we should force British workers to do unskilled manual jobs when the schools have trained them as demoralized, uneducated, drearily dull, ambitionless, unskilled workers, used to spending longer days in schools, where Gove’s desired pedagogy relies on a daily grind of six one hour lectures and recitation of facts. As economies move from the Industrial Age to the hyper connected digital age with 3 billion people connected via the net, we want to graduate automotons. On such a cruel sea do we float, where our masters are stuck in a golden age of worker servitude.

 The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reports that the UK “has a higher proportion of low-skilled jobs than any country in the OECD, except Spain….30% of workers were overqualified for their jobs, and there were far fewer graduate jobs than graduates…..22% of UK jobs required no more than a primary education compared with less than 5% in Germany and Sweden.” It is hard to blame our schools for this lack of economic progress. The briefly insulting then ingratiatingly creepy Vince Cable says teachers know nothing about the world of work. Minister No 3 should get out of the way. Think on this, Mr Cable: We have increased the supply of skills now we need to improve demand for those skills by increasing the number of higher skilled roles available. Supporting Gove’s stated aim to have more students failing more exams is not enough.

 We are deskilling our workforce and again this is shown in our free schools and UTCs where unqualified people are put in charge of children’s futures. I watched on TV a British employer whose factory make models of fighter planes from the time when we won the war all on our own. Chinese labour costs have gone up, British labour costs have plummeted. There were a group of very young white men walking around a big table, picking up tiny model bits, one by one as they walked round and round and round, filling the bags to be put in a box in a way that we now do more cheaply than chinese workers. A fifth of UK jobs need only primary school education? In the words of Luka Bloom, “Take me now God that I’m almost ready..”

 The government’s own Social Mobility Commission has found that “private school alumni were 7% more likely to gain an elite job in the media or law than those with the same degree who went to state schools.” Just who are the enemies of promise here?

I want to speak with optimism of teachers’ love of our subjects and missionary zeal for learning, sometimes dormant, afraid to speak their names in a cynical materialistic daytime TV world. Our job is to summon the howls of anguish and to take that torment into the educational transformation of the lives of young people and their communities. It really is better than just waiting around to die.
Dennis O'Sullivan

Taking the PISA

I know that the car boot death mayhem on Eastenders and the laughably blood-rich Hollyoaks is the reality of life in London and Chester. MPs know that Benefits Street is the reality of poor people's lives because they assume everyone's a thief. They base this insight on themselves having a higher rate of convicted criminals than the country as a whole and an impressively inclusive honour role for those caught innocently, they say, fiddling their expenses. So it’s empirical, scientific, intellectual and justified nonsense, based on soap operas.

The insulting Michael Gove believes that schools don't teach the poetry of Sassoon, Brooke and Owen, nor do we read the diaries of the soldiers, nor did I ever teach “All Quiet on the Western Front” for a German  point of view. Trips to The Battlefields? Look at the First World War as a “world war” including the world-changing three years of Russian anti Austro-Hungarian imperialism? Nah, I just shoved on the telly and said that Blackadder is the absolute truth.

Gove admires the leadership of, “great patriotic heroes,” generals struggling in an industrial war.

Ignoring the millions of dead already sacrificed, he doesn’t understand satirical TV either. Looking at WW1 and the pity of war makes us, “left wing undergraduate academic cynic(s)” and in his education fiefdom Gove will determine how his history is taught.

Gove has now claimed hero status. Faced with leftie teachers, he felt like “Horatio at the Bridge,” a reference to the pro empire Macauley’s poem where Horatio, holds off 3,000 enemies, and is remembered as the lone warrior against the hordes.( Radio 4 January 2014) Will a statue do, Michael?

Moving on:

Imagine two goalposts so far apart that you have to build a wider stadium to contain them. You have the ball at your feet such a tiny distance from this gaping gap that it is quite impossible not to score . Step forward the Labour spokesman on education, the public schoolboy from the telly,Tristram Hunt. A mere tap and he would score vital election points. With his unnecessary, bureaucratic anti Teacher Licensing Scheme, in one clumsy move, Hunt missed the goal, fouled the spectators and sent the ball into his own goal.

Labour have got nothing to say on education: no leadership, no policy, no charisma and no ears. Because if you can't score against Gove with virtually the entire education crowd roaring you on you deserve historical anonymity. Mind you, Labour seems to be doing better at the “Mine is Bigger than Yours” game on immigration, benefits and public spending cuts.

Last month, the results of the OEDC’s Pisa tests were announced. Labour and Tory politicians played the blame game, The Daily Mail howled whilst teachers worried and wondered. The BBC’s usually thoughtful  Reeta Chakrabarti presented her analysis which pretty much went: I talked to four Korean boys and they found the test easy and then I spoke with two English kids and they said it was hard. Therefore we are thick.

While all sorts of press people inaccurately recorded the UK “plummeting” we stayed in the same mid 20s position. We can do better.

Headteachers did not necessarily take the tests seriously and administered them grudgingly.  I heard from a head who gave no preparation time, did the tests on a Friday afternoon with no preparation with a disgruntled student group. Germany, Switzerland and Spain all reacted to previous poor league standing by prioritizing the content and conduct of the tests - what Gove calls “Gaming” when he doesn’t like the results. Let’s hope a Reading position of 19^th satisfies the Germans.

We have no way of knowing which schools took the tests. About 4,000 15 year olds in each of the 65 reporting countries sat the tests. I know only of two secondary modern schools who took part. Secondary moderns are for those kids in places like Kent who have failed a selection test at age 11. Those who pass go to grammar schools and are at the wealthier end of our society, “those who are eligible for free school meals are less likely to secure a place in a grammar school.” (The Sutton Trust 2014)  Could it be that the selection of schools to be tested is skewed academically according to desired outcomes?  We know that public (private) schools take bright kids on scholarships, to bolster their results as their paying intake involves wealth not brains. These kids are barred from Pisa tests but in the high tabled Finland, without private schools, testing their population might be more representative of the country as a whole. Pity Kyrgyzstan who were bottom in the 2011 tables, tested during a prolonged strike by their impoverished teachers.

 Pisa tests 15 year olds so if some15 year olds are not in the school system the results will be skewed, and if you have a high dropout rate they will not be there for the tests either. Who is going to do better at the tests: those who have no secondary schooling or those staying on past the end of compulsory schooling? China will do well in the 2015 tests if it continues to educate around 60% of rural students – with the poorer  children out at work and out of tests.

The tests themselves, the results and their interpretation are riddled with unacceptable weaknesses.

Each Pisa test is not taken by all the 15 year olds tested.  By Pisa’s own admission, it would be impracticable to do the full 4 ½ hour test with all kids. Some countries have a Reading Result when no one took the reading test. The Rasch statisical model used extrapolates from the actual answers how each student would have done in questions they were not asked.

Not surprisingly this model is questioned - Professor Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University: expressed “considerable uncertainty” about the model. Svend Kreiner of Copenhagen University added. “I don’t think it’s reliable at all.”
 
Defending his work Pisa guru, Andreas Schlecher says, “The model is an approximation  of reality.” “Large variations in single country ranking positions is likely,” and “people shouldn’t pay too much attention to the precise country rankings.”

There is much criticism of the model   concurring that  Pisa’s administrators work out what the scores would have been if all the students in all the countries answered the same questions.

If the questions asked in one particular country were switched with another, league standings vary bizarrely, “with the UK finishing anywhere between 14^th and 30^th, Japan between 8^th and 40^th and Denmark between 5^th and 37^th .”(TES Dec 2013) 

In the 2006 tests, half those tested were not asked any questions on reading and half were not tested on Maths, although full rankings were issued for both subjects. Kreiner says “this in itself is ridiculous.”

8 of the 28 reading questions were deleted in some countries  because the OECD itself considered them ”dodgy,” but only in  some countries.  Little wonder that Dr Morrison of Belfast University deems the model, “valueless,” “utterly wrong,” and stated, “it will never work.”

As worrying is the attempt to ask the same questions in different languages. An article on Cloning, “A Copying Machine for Human beings,”  became incomprehensible translated word by word into Norwegian.” I wonder how particular metaphors and other linguistic nuances translate accurately in and out of the various languages of the Pisa test.

Kreiner, a student of Georg Rasch the creator of Pisa’s statistical method condemned the tests in 2011, “I am not actually able to find two items in Pisa’s test that function in exactly the same way in different countries…Therefore you cannot use this model.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

Gove has called Pisa delivery man Schleicher, the most revolutionary post war educationalist. What a laugh if all the world’s education politicians get us to teach Pisa style, teach to the test until every country scores brilliantly, whilst their kids can't shake hands or smile with feeling, appreciate art, drama and music or  kick a ball correctly. You may recall the chilling image of the 5 year old Koreans trying to clamber onto the bus taking them to their extra evening schools, which 80% of them do.

The very dangerous Goveite Schools Minister Elizabeth Truss, bound as Gove’successor, as I desperately pun her name, has said that individual schools could take the tests “to compare themselves against the world’s best education systems.” (Nov 2013)The government-friendly NFER is offering trials of this. Soon, we will all be doing these tests as yet another flawed accountability measure, and yet another bloody test.

With a nod of thanks to those in America making 1851 blog hits, I thought I’d mention USA  performance – like ours it’s stagnated with position 24, 28 and 36 in Reading, Science and Maths respectively. Like everywhere, the middle class schools in wealthy areas did better than average and many of my UK doubts apply to the USA. However,  despite such poor Pisa performance America has more millionaires and the highest GDP in the world, scores highly on creativity – the odd film, book and musical item, entrepreneurship and industrial patents  granted and, of course, has more Miss Universe winners than any other country.  

Back to the tests.                                                                                                                       

If you were born in 1983 you were the first year guinea pigs, for tests at the end of KS1 (aged 7), KS2 (11), KS3  (14) new  GCSEs (at 16) and new A Levels at 18. The school was judged by your success in these tests so you were taught to these tests, practised for these tests and judged by them. And, before my 30 year old daughter revisits her, “I was so bored,” rants, the teachers were too. So if we are going to be judged by Pisa testing I will personally guarantee we move above other countries

We get the Department for Education to choose a fair cohort of schools who take the tests seriously, prepare the kids for the sort of approach required, set mocks, give each kid a banana and decent air conditioning and tell them the tests are really important.

With scientific integrity I tested Diane Carey on the easily available Sample Pisa Reading questions. At first she struggled, then, when she saw model answers she soared to total success. And as a Maths teacher she said that an hour’s preparation of her 15 year olds would lead to a 20% increase in scores. It’s like a cryptic crossword: easier once you know the style.

There is nothing inherently wrong with tests: like an MOT car test they can show you what needs improving. However, Goodhart’s Law is instructive: “Once a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure,” and the danger is that Gove finds true love with Pisa: diagnosis, judgement and imposition on flimsy evidence.

Politically, the tests are a ball to be kicked in the direction your team faces. We should kick our way, teach the curriculum that’s best for our students, whilst doing a little prep for the international tests by which they will be judged.  

But if you really want, I can train sheep to answer your questions.