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

 

"He had a mind like a steel trap; only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut"

Posted 7th November 2012

As a lover of language that scythes through doublespeak and rhetoric I have been driven to look at our education policy makers’ use of comparisons to assess school performance. 

Most will recognize the metaphors I used in the sentence above and it is up to you whether you think they are well employed. Robbie Burns, the famously successful pursuer of young ladies wrote vividly and so simply.

“My love is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June :

My love is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.”

Burns was hoping we visualised the beauty of the flower rather than the hurtful thorns attached. Comparisons must be between objects, places or ideas that clearly have similar features. If you were trying to describe a beautiful beach somewhere you might choose another beautiful beach so Malibu might be like Bali. Comparing Tottenham High Street to the Champs-Elysées stretches our imaginative powers too far for successful communication.

Mr Gove compares us to Finland. Here’s education in Finland – guess which bits he likes:

• School starts at age 7           
• Everyone gets free school meals 
• No uniform
• Less time spent in the classroom than in any other European country              
• Exams at 18 only   
• Mixed ability schools
• No league tables  
• No inspections
• No grammar schools  
• No private schools 
• No university fees

Well, the bit he likes is that they are doing well in international league tables. Could it be the government wants to create an education system like Finland’s? Every word from central government howls against this heresy.

In Finland there is, an emphasis on active and experiential learning, clear vocational and academic routes at post 16, and high status teachers trained and trusted to educate young people without continuous meddling from government ministers set upon making a name for themselves.

Last week Ofqual completed its investigation into its own disgraceful behaviour over the students’ English GCSE grades and decided to blame the teachers. Some schools, local authorities, unions and professional organisations are taking legal action against this anti-education, immoral act. We know we will be soft-soaped, led up the garden path, taken down a blind alley, treated to filibusters and red herrings; but I just hope Ofqual and Gove get to wear the barbed wire underpants; how I wish that was not just another comparison.

Dennis O'Sullivan

Bring back O Levels? Don't be silly!

Posted 12th September 2012

When I took my O-level in English in 1968 they might have asked: What do you call someone who believes that everything was better when they were a boy? Of course we had multiple choice questions – a sort of pin the tail on the donkey/the answer is already given/don’t worry about spelling etc. 

So choices might have included:

1.) A recidivist fantasist who failed his driving test 6 times.

2.) A nostalgia- tinted obsessive who wore a kilt at his English university

3.) A self- inflated person somehow made secretary of state for education

The trick was in knowing which of the three correct answers was the one the examiner wanted. However, in what was largely a fact and date learning curriculum,  we spent many, many lessons doing past papers to learn how to second guess the examiners and the teachers all targeted their lessons on the questions most likely to be on the exam papers. Whole periods in history were omitted in favour of likely exam questions – my grammar school didn't much like studying The English Civil War, The rise of Trade Unions or anything suggesting Catholic clergy did anything untoward.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the spontaneous utterance of one’s thoughts (How many MPs fiddled their expenses ?

a) virtually all of them including ministers in all major political parties

b) very few and they went to prison for theft

c) these people are in charge of our country – they wouldn't be so immoral)

The problem comes when the utterer has power over young people’s lives, their futures, their careers, their self respect and their contribution to society. Even more so when their agenda seems to consist of saying,”You’re rubbish.”

20 per cent of children sat O-levels, so 80 per cent didn't get qualifications. Will we be happy with massive failure? In America, where the universities rank very highly on international scales, 71 per cent graduate High School and use this as a passport to further education or jobs. Why, on earth should we be looking instead to Singapore for a way forward.

The population of Sigapore is

a) about the same as USA

b) just like the UK’s

c) 5 million and 63 per cent of adults had no secondary education at all.

By the way in 1968 it was cold and we had no central heating, 2 TV channels, no computers, no mobile phones, few motor cars, many biased newspapers and very few ever took foreign holidays. Teachers did not need to be qualified and schools were crumbling Victorian celebrations of outdoor toilets. But, we had millions of manual jobs in coal mines, shipyards and docks and working mothers did some cleaning, office  or some shop work and generally stayed at home.

We can no longer dismiss 80 per cent of our population to educational failure in an unskilled economy. Yes, there are simple changes necessary to stabilise GCSEs: one exam board would be a start, an end to multiple qualifications for a single study would help, making A* grades exceptional might be useful. And no-one is doubting the importance of literacy, numeracy, communication and ICT skills. Oops, I forgot: Mr Gove has just removed ICT from the curriculum.

Dennis O'Sullivan