That Education Secretary? He’s not on the Level you know.

Posted Thursday 27th June 2013

You know how it is when you have a constant pain, a toothache perhaps, and it hurts so much you don't notice that your arm has fallen off? Well we’re all so intoxicated by the daily flatulence from the DfE that we sort of overlooked yet another bad smell. Maybe this one is a bit more like an itch that is so, so thrilling to scratch even though you end up bloody and sore.  When I spoke with 12 primary heads about this week’s latest noxious news they all giggled. Because, Education Secretary Gove, your thinking is so messed up  we now have to laugh.

At the moment, children are assessed on an 8 point scale starting at Level 1 and generally hitting levels 6 and 7 by age 14. In a well taught school students know what level they are at and what they need to do to get to the next level. There are level descriptors on walls showing what knowledge, skills and understanding are assessed at each level and we praise their effort and ambition and applaud attainment of the next level.

Gove is doing away with assessment, at levels 1-8 because, “Parents don't understand them.”

Apparently, the abolition of levels, "Will help to ensure that schools concentrate on making sure that all pupils reach the expected standard, rather than on labelling differentiated performance." (June 6^th 2012) I haven’t a clue what he means.

By June 13^th 2013 Gove recited a little speech abolishing levels, just as 11 year olds had sat his new Level 6 tests, demanded by Gove, to test the most able. And just as Ofsted has recommended expectations of secondary school attainment be raised to 4 levels of progress – for next year – there will be no levels to measure.

So how will we hold schools accountable? And how will we hold the government  accountable without levels? Oh no, Michael, people might see a plan here: Wreck the education system and remove the measures for showing your demolition. Your Year Zero figures will doubtless impress.

Gove says, “Schools will be able to introduce their own approaches to formative assessment.” We can make up our own system of notlevels and Ofsted will inspect us using our assessments which will be in non universal notlevels. Every school may use different systems. Honestly, I am not making this up.

As  Headteacher I now have to think of new ways of measuring, testing, recording and reporting.

Could we use the music scale EGBDF. I can see a weakness in that this scale allows a mediocre middle grade (B) and might encourage expectations of an average, and as the mathematical genius Gove told the Select Committee, all schools have to be above average.

How about we measure children on the likelihood of making it to Oxbridge: measure their ability on family income, private health and education, house price and model of car. The USANDTHEM scale, simplified to US for a straight pass/fail, like the old 11+ separating the elite at age 11.

With all scales one needs to work out where it starts and ends. With the DONKEY scale for measuring common sense from politicians it really doesn’t matter which end of the donkey we start with.

I think Gove has decided he invented and now owns the universal system of numbers and counting. Only last month he smugly announced the replacement of our GCSE grades A*-G with the numbers 1-8. They must be different 1-8 numbers to the ones he’s abolishing for 14 year olds.

So, Gove’s new number scale at 16 is 1-8 with the potential to make it 1-9 or 1-10. The now abandoned A* worth, say, 96% but when a student achieves 100% he can give them a 9 or 10 and of course, Spinal Tap fans, I bet Gove’s scale can go up to 11.

We know that Gove likes anglocentric history, where we jolly good britisher chaps taught the foreigners to play cricket in our benevolent empire. His new history curriculum, devised by him, will make sure children tackle history chronologically. In junior schools we could measure progress on the Henry Scale: Henry I, Henry II, Henry III up to Henry VIII. Or if we want to tie in with the new curriculum and go further than roman numerals we could follow the scale Conquer, Rape, Attack, Pillage, based on the Iceni Queen Boudicca family experience of the Romans and, of course, easy to recall as an acronym.

Yr 7 will be doing Ethelred the Unready, Tom the Small-minded, Billy the Kid,  Harry the Longdrawnout and Macavity the Mystery Cat. Will parents really find this less confusing than the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4?

By Year 13when they might get to study contemporary history everyone can be measured on the great man scale – the OMICHAEL scale, with O being finally the ultimate achievement – maybe called an O level?

I quite like the idea that we should use the Mr Men Scale for assessment. I’m unsure of the correct order but Mr Self Denial, Mr Having a Laugh,  Mr No, Not me Guvnor, Mr 3 wise Monkeys, Mr Failure and Little Miss Perfect will be in there.

Achievement could be measured by organs in any order appreciated by our education secretary. Dear parent, Mary has achieved a lung grade in Biology, an Ear grade in Music….and an Eye grade overall. (I Levels!)

This is getting very silly, I know but how about the Small, Bigger, Very Big Indeed, Bloody Enormous scale for intellectual capacity?

Finally, I reckon I have the Gove-friendly scale

Dim
Rather average
Jolly good
Spiffing
A mickle above a muckle (because many a mickle makes a muckle)

Dennis O'Sullivan

Stop Press:

Looking for what next to abolish or destroy Michael turned to his wife and purred , “Shoes, shoes…..” He had read that in some countries some kids walked miles to school without shoes and one of them went on to Oxford University. Sorry about the image of Gove purring. I hope you don’t have to sleep with that.

Unlike MPs and Bankers, Teachers Earn Every Penny.

Posted 23rd May 2013

I want to address and dismiss performance related pay (PRP) for teachers but the bombastic Gove appals me again, and again, I dread his daily edicts.  He now dismisses headteachers who disagree with him (the mild mannered National Association of Headteachers) and the teachers unions with whom he will meet but not negotiate. Yesterday he has told Northern Ireland and Wales Education ministers to go away if they oppose him. They are all, “enemies of promise.”

Turning to new “laws” on teachers’ pay:  I think it is fair to propose that teachers would like to be paid more. The (PRP) logic seems straightforward.  The job of teachers is to promote student achievement. Therefore pay teachers more for better results and they will get better results.  Apparently this approach temporarily raised sales of Mars Bars, albeit at the expense of reduced sales of other chocolates.

There is nothing wrong in examining and developing the best practice in our schools. There is nothing wrong with getting rid of policies, people and roles that restrict student achievement. There is nothing wrong with providing staff  training opportunities which lead to progression, better pay and promotion. Good heads should be able to identify good teachers; good schools should be led by a vision and should be able to value its staff and their likelihood of achieving the vision.

Mr Wise Monkey Gove’s new education law says that teachers can only progress on the main pay spine according to performance related criteria. We all know that will mean exam results as we live in a results driven system. Get me more GCSEs in English and Maths and I must forgive all sins: shout and bully the kids, deal rote learning cards to the innocent , repeat and repeat and repeat the narrowest ranges of knowledge; go mnemonic-wild, drill and recite in some  Dickensian nightmare and jump up and down screaming, ”Pass! Pass! Pass!”

Before becoming a teacher I spent a week in a boys’ school in Neasden at the time of their Annual, Big Deal, End of Summer Term General Knowledge Test. The Remedial class, housed in a separate building, came first across the whole of the school. I was stunned by this contradiction to my lower expectations but just as I was fitting the barbed wire underpants I was told that they had practised the questions, over and over, throughout the year. Maximum performance pay to that teacher!

Whilst the PRP policy laudibly aims to attract and retain the best teachers schools will not receive one penny of additional money so for every teacher getting extra pay it seems likely that another teacher will be paid less. The better your classes do, according to the most objective measures we can muster, the more you get paid, as long as we can pay someone less.

If we pay by results then our teacher of Year 11 Set 1 Maths will do nicely, whilst our Set 8, who make slower progress, should earn their teacher a pay cut. Both sets had different teachers two years previously, and different teachers four years before that.  These teachers should be rewarded or fined for the foundations they laid. The junior school teachers who did or did not correctly instil times tables mastery should be hunted down and deified or imprisoned as part of PRP. Goodness knows who gets the money when we have team teaching, split classes or additional help.

Apparently, teachers should be rewarded with extra money for students behaving well. Is that the silent ones or those lively team players in simulations and group challenges?  Notices proclaiming, “Noise costs pay!” could replace stunning art displays.  Ofsted said Chauncy students’ behaviour was impeccable – do I get the cash or should it go to the cook and the caretaker?

Detour into what our detractors call the real world and we find the best example of PRP: the bankers. They received millions of pounds in bonuses to sell mortgages to unemployed no-income families.  Bankers fixed interest rates to make a killing and sold needless insurance and profitless endowment policies to millions of people in order to earn their bonuses. Bankers are credited with causing our current world-wide recession and yet fantastic bonuses are still being paid whilst low income working families are battered by austerity budgets throughout Europe. PRP will take away your shame.

Painfully I once worked with glass fibre matting in a Park Royal factory. I was on a 22 day contract with a promised bonus for early job completion. Without protective clothing my skin was torn by billions of needle-sharp fibres ripping it apart at every move. There were two of us working and we toiled dramatically well and quickly to complete in 8 bloodied days. Relieved to be gone we received our pay with a £2.50 bonus – about 6% of what we saved our employer. So what price helping a child pass History GCSE?

Trying to get MPs to do what they are employed to do is nigh impossible. Liberal Democrats should lose all their pay for promising not to raise university tuition fees and then raising them, The Tories should lose theirs for failing to reduce our national deficit whilst blaming the poor, and Labour should be pilloried in stocks and rendered penniless for failing to provide any opposition.

Back to teachers. Yes, they want more pay and their unions will take them out on fruitless one day strikes to press for better pay. One does not have to go all the way with new age thinking or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to know that teachers respond to higher order aspects of humanity. Teachers are not MPs or bankers and they will not be driven solely by money; even keeping them poor will not stop them. There is, unfortunately, empirical evidence for this.

School staff work together as a school or it is probably a poor school. Teachers respond to a degree of autonomy, the freedom to try new ideas with the respect and recognition that comes from student, parent and colleague appreciation. They want to be challenged rather than alienated from their labour. They work best when trusted and they work to an old fashioned notion of vocation: doing well by their students according to moral imperatives. And, they enjoy their work, are happy, involved and excited when it’s about teaching and achievement.

10 years ago our school was given around £25,000 from central government as a reward for raising achievement. We split it equally between, teachers, assistants and caretaker alike. They all contributed to the students’ achievement. That is my kind of PRP at work.

I know that some headteachers  are wondering if the new PRP scales will give them the opportunity to tell some teachers that they are not good enough to progress. We should already be doing this as part of our daily work and using established systems for dealing with under-performing staff, with a timetable for improvement or exit. Waiting for the PRP hammer is at best unwieldly, at worst, cowardly.

 

I think it is the headteacher’s  job to protect and improve the pay and conditions of our staff, not to scurry around looking for opportunities to put them down. In 35 years I have seen the quality of teaching soar and if Mr Mad Swivel-eyed Gove was left to praise himself entirely alone with a mirror in an otherwise silent cell there could be endless options to help us create a magnificent world-class education system.

 Dennis O'Sullivan

 

Let's teach them a lesson they'll never forget

Posted on 18th March 2013

I am rushing to write this before the self- imploding party of government loses its leader – the U turn specialist Cameron, in favour of the literally well- heeled Teresa May. Mrs May's unmoving hostility to the gathered mass of the Police Federation won her the sort of drooling applause normally reserved for some winking innuendo in the hanging and immigration debates at party conference.

Eastleigh is not my favourite town : I once reversed a lorry into a ditch there and had to be removed by a crane late on a Friday night, in the days when Friday nights were very important to me.

The Tories lost the recent Eastleigh by election –the one caused by the sudden realisation of the, “I am totally innocent of these charges” Lib Dem MP Huhne, that he did break the law, did pervert the course of justice and is now in prison. Their vote went down by 14% whilst the Lib Dems’ went down by 14.5%. The former was “disappointing” (Cameron) and the latter was “a stunning Victory” (Clegg). Such stunning Maths! Which brings me, again I’m afraid, to Michael Gove.

Having told the parliamentary select committee to find something useful to do, rather than waste his time with their tiresome questions - and this is the sort of accuracy in paraphrase that protects me from his spin doctors’ assaults – Mr Gove showed his mastery of stalinist mathematics. He was asked to explain his proclamation that each individual school’s results need to be above average for them to be classed as “Good.” Gove insists all schools must be at least “Good” How can all schools achieve above average anything? He stared with that look of contempt designed to tell critics that when Michael Gove is in charge of his dream (North Korea in Westminster) they will know what it is to waste a dictator’s time.

This is the man who has claimed the authority to decide on all curriculum matters from birth to 19 for all children. Well, not quite all, of course, the no league tables, No-Ofsted private schools can teach whatever parents pay them to do.

But, follow closely and suspend disbelief: my senior sources in the Department for Education have informed me that Michael Gove has no interest in education and does not want his present job. On the way to being crowned primus inter pares of the Conservative Party his burning desire is to be Home Secretary where he can push home his 100% unwavering support for a class society. The DfE advisors on education all ran away from Mr Gove some time ago, leaving him with a couple of “Special Advisors” who spend their time defending accusations of bullying and definitely not being the authors of the scalding twitter account (“@education)at which Mr Gove’s previous employer, also Mrs Gove’s current employer, Rupert Murdoch, might have giggled. Oh and “primus inter pares” is the title, when translated from the latin, of a novel by the autobiographically confused, disgraced and imprisoned sometime Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party , Lord Archer, “First Amongst Equals.”

On his way to Home Secretaryship Gove has competition from Justice Secretary Chris Grayling. You can tell much about a man from his nickname The man who, "stood six foot six, weighed 245 pounds and sent a Lousiana fella to the Promised Land"  in a dispute over  a Cajun Queen was of course, Big John, (Big Bad John if he was outside of hearing range). The new pope has adopted the name of a man who was kind to poor people and animals and created the nativity scene so frequently part of the primary school curriculum. They called him Saint Francis. So when you hear that Grayling is known as Attack Dog you just know you are not in for a move to the liberal left.

Thing is, I agree with Grayling on his recent policy suggestion. I call it a suggestion; it’s more a “vote for me, nod and a wink.” Here’s the thinking of the attack dog: £245 million is spent on incarcerating 1,600 young criminals in England and Wales each year. 70% re-offend. Everyone knows, and it really is everyone, that most of these kids have lousy literacy skills. Grayling told BBC Radio that he wants youth detention centres to, "focus much more on education.” He says he is considering proposals to turn some centres into, "secure colleges," to improve re-offending rates.

He wants, “better value and better outcomes,” and,” People with skills in education will be called upon to contribute solutions.” Can you see where this is going? Grayling has done the maths, although wildly confusing the figures, and he says,” Young offenders cost three times what top private schools charge.” Top Tories always say they want more children to benefit from the top private schools; extending privilege it’s called. The best schools should be encouraged to expand. Private schools build character. Cameron (Eton()Gove (Gordons) Osborne (St Pauls) Clegg (Winchester )and others in power certainly can’t be accused of being out of touch on this matter. How wonderful for a young offender to benefit from elite education and to have a top politician as mentor!
Those of you harping back to Huhne now in prison for at least a couple of weeks more, Archer, the 600 or so MPs caught up in the expenses “scandal” the election fraudsters, those taking their bestest buddies on foreign office jaunts, or the MP in post karaoke punch up last week, shame on you. They have all reformed and will not re-offend. But having been to the darkside of criminality who better to empathise and mentor young offenders?

Grayling said he, “was not necessarily thinking of Eton,” but,he was. He is giving them a hint that they could step into the forefront of the Big Society, take on responsibility for the misguided, teach them away from Ofsted, exam stats and league tables and show them how to use their old school tie to turn away from crime, or at least avoid prison.

You get Eton for a bit over £32,000 a year and it’s not as if you need any particular skills which you would need for The Royal Ballet School at £38,500 . I am sure the private schools will want the chance to show us the way. Big Society Rules OK; Go for it AD; Go Dave’s, or Teresa’s, doggies.

Dennis O'Sullivan