NEWSLETTER
No 75, Winter 2011
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRMAN
The Daily Telegraph investigation into exam board corruption (8/9 December 2011) exposed yet again a cancer within the educational establishment. But why, for so long, and by so many, has a blind eye been turned to this cheating?
The teaching profession, as a ‘beneficiary’, kept quiet. But what about the so-called independent exam regulator? It, too, was a dog that did not bark. One of the most significant comments recorded by the Telegraph’s undercover reporters was made by Steph Warren, an Edexcel geography examiner: ‘There’s so little [content]’, she said, ‘we don’t know how we got it through [the regulator]’.
The failure of our exam system is matched by the failure of our national curriculum with which it is entwined. The evidence of this failure grows. It comes from employers, from universities, from ministers and from our relative economic decline.
Confidence in the review process is tempered by experience. Too often, those responsible for the mess continue to exert the guiding hand. Belatedly, but to be welcomed, the government has understood that the national curriculum and the public examination system must be revised at the same time. It is also looking to learn lessons from the best education systems such as Singapore, which still uses the O-level exams, long 'banned' in this country.
In our view, the national curriculum should simply list the content to be covered each year in each subject. It should then be left to teachers to choose how to teach this content. Internal school exams, meaningful national tests and rigorous public exams at 16 and 18 should be used to ensure pupils are attaining the required level of knowledge and understanding. If we get the exams right, the curriculum will look after itself.
Meanwhile, a major problem looms: a new national curriculum, beginning in year 1, will take eleven years to implement, if it is planned to go through to age 16. It will take thirteen years before it impacts on higher education. By that time Mr Gove’s stewardship at the education department will be a distant memory and who knows what state of decline our economy will have reached. A possible solution is for a 'catch-up' curriculum to run alongside the new one. Problems, problems, problems!
Had the government acted 20 years ago on the advice it received from the Campaign for Real Education, our education system would not, now, need serious surgery. Will it ever learn? (CJM)
BETTER HISTORY IS WORSE
For its review of national curriculum history, the government appears to be relying on an off-shoot of the trendy Historical Association styling itself as the ‘Better History Group’. Under the guise of restoring 'traditional' history, the proposals it has published are a stifling strait-jacket of political correctness and unhistorical distortion. In contrast, proposals by the History Curriculum Association, published on our website, would protect the integrity of subject knowledge whilst allowing teachers the freedom to think for themselves.
WHITEHALL CAN’T STOP SPINNING
The areas of doubt mentioned earlier are not the only aspects of reform that are not as clear as they could be. Minsters claim that they now publish all facts and figures relating to school performance and costs on the Department for Education (DfE) website. Anyone, we are told, can now make easy comparisons.
We have a suggestion for ministers: that they try to compare a few local schools on their own computers. Almost certainly, they will end up deeply frustrated. The information is very extensive. But extracting it in meaningful form is practically impossible.
There are two ways to hide information. One is to keep it secret. The other is to present so much worthless data that important facts get lost in the fog. That has happened here. Embarrassing facts are either obscured, or not published at all.
Why, for example, are capital costs per pupil not easily accessible to compare? New academy schools are largely funded by taxpayers with money distributed by Whitehall. Look for their revenue (or capital) costs per pupil and all you see is ‘No data’.
In the meantime, two Bath parents, Richard and Lisa Speigal have created a website for their area that shows how to do it – key facts that are clear and informative (www.bathmums.co.uk/schools). But they had to work ridiculously hard to source the data from multiple government departments and it should be much easier.
The DfE spends millions of pounds on information technology. Isn’t it time it was effective and honest?
WELCOME NEW DEVELOPMENTS
A key improvement in the new Education Act gives teachers more powers to maintain discipline. But Lord (Norman) Blackwell’s much-needed amendment, which would have placed a statutory duty on all state schools to cater for their brightest pupils, was quietly rejected.
Fortunately, plans by a few politicians to make sex education compulsory in all primary schools were also rejected. It will remain up to governors and heads (and parents, we hope) of individual primary schools to determine their policy on this contentious issue. Yet the DfE is still ‘consulting’ on changes to lessons in personal, social and health education, under which sex education is taught. The danger has not disappeared.
Good news, too, that geography, history and a foreign language may be compulsory up to the age of 16. Also that the Labour government’s ill-conceived diploma qualification is to disappear. Almost £300m was spent developing this alternative to GCSEs and A-levels – more money wasted. Meanwhile, we welcome the appointment of Sir Michael Wilshaw as head of Ofsted. In future, inspectors will report on only 4 key measures: the quality of teaching, standards of achievement, school leadership and discipline.
FREE SCHOOLS MAKE PROGRESS
Those who were disappointed when only around 16 new ‘free schools’ opened this year will be glad to hear that another 80 or so have been approved to open in September 2012. These include one in south London led by Katharine Birbalsingh, the deputy head who lost her job last year for speaking out against low expectations and poor standards.
There will also be around a dozen new ‘university technical colleges’ and a similar number of specialist maths colleges for 16 to 18 year-olds.
MANIPULATING OUTCOMES
Ministers acclaim ‘elitist’ schools. Yet they compel universities to manipulate their student intake to compensate for failing schools (for which ministers, not universities, are responsible).
AQA, Britain’s largest exam board, recently proposed that the exam points awarded to young people should be marked up or down according to the school they attended. So when youngsters apply to universities, the achievements of those from weak schools could be inflated and those from high-achieving schools could be down-graded.
These proposals, announced by AQA’s Dr Neil Stringer, would provide a perfect excuse for under-performing schools. And, of course, they would damage the best state and independent schools, whose pupils would be unfairly penalised.
Disappointed that social mobility has stalled, universities minister David Willetts calls for ‘real progress’ in what he calls ‘fair access’ to top universities. Everyone wants to improve social mobility and help youngsters from poorer homes to go to the best universities. But this should be based on merit, not social engineering. In 2009-10, universities spent almost £400m on recruiting and retaining under-privileged students. Wouldn’t better state schools provide a fairer way forward?
WASTING TAXPAYERS’ MONEY?
‘The just school is characterised as a political institution that is non-selective and compulsory. [This means it is] comprehensive in admission and compulsory in membership…The just school provides a physical space where children are removed from the influence of their parents… Parents can be more relaxed about the time they spend with their child when they know that the state requires the majority of the child’s time to be spent in a political institution… I argue that the special principle of justice and the just school trumps certain kinds of parents’ rights of school choice… A conception of justice that includes children must include a conception of the just school.’
The disturbing proposals above are extracts from a paper entitled The Just School by Dr Philip Cook of Leicester University. Along with some work on ‘child citizenship’, it was funded with a £30,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. The ESRC’s current annual budget is £203m, mostly provided by the government. Is all this money being carefully used?
SCHOOL FUNDING STILL IN CHAOS
On 21 October, the TES reported that some new academies face massive, unexpected costs for pension support – costs that were previously met by local authorities. The DfE admitted it has ‘no clear plan for how to resolve the problem.’ Parliament’s public accounts committee reports that ‘per pupil funding for schools with similar characteristics can vary by as much as 40%.’ In evidence to the committee, DfE boss Sir David Bell admits that the funding system is ‘based on historical decisions made in the 1980s’, that have ‘just been rolled forward and rolled forward.’ A report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, School funding reform: an empirical analysis of options for a national funding formula by Haroon Chowdry and Luke Sibieta, notes that, each year, most primary schools are allocated between £3,000 and £6,000 per pupil and most secondaries get £4,000 to £7,000. (Some get much more than that.)
These huge variations are mostly caused by ‘add-ons’ that owe more to political than educational requirements.
Reforms to the funding system are promised. But the government’s ‘pupil premium’ (an annual £430-plus add-on for each pupil on free school meals) is not entirely helpful: in pursuit of the extra cash, headteachers are putting pressure on parents to apply for free school meals, whether or not they will be eaten. This will not reduce public spending. Nor will it facilitate the introduction of a simpler, fairer, transparent new system.
PRIMARY SECTOR MUST DO BETTER
This year’s primary test results show that the proportion of 11-year-olds reaching level 4 in English and maths (the expected standard) has improved by 1% to 74%. But the proportion achieving level 5 in English fell by 3% to 29%.
Even more serious, 4 out of 10 of those who had shown high ability when they were 7 years-old failed to achieve their potential at 11. In effect, this means that more than 50,000 children went backwards during their last 4 years in primary school.
National reading tests showed that 1 in 10 boys left primary school with a reading age of 7 or below. And the overall percentage achieving higher scores for reading fell by 7% in a single year.
SWISS TEACHERS FIGHT BACK
Alarmed by declining standards in maths and the natural sciences in Switzerland, Swiss teachers have strongly criticised the new teaching methods and textbooks used in primary schools. Current Concerns, No 18, 24 September 2011, reports that grammar school teachers have noticed that ‘today’s students lack the basics necessary to understand grammar school textbooks, although the textbooks are appropriate in terms of content and didactics’. ‘They have trouble with numeracy over ten and they do not know the multiplication tables. The calculator is needed even for simple calculations, and incorrect results are often not realised’.
These conscientious teachers complain that the new teaching materials have ‘sacrificed a systematic structure of mathematics for false theoretical ideas’, which presume that children ‘do not like practice and repetition, but instead develop everything by nature’. Children are constantly confronted by ‘changing mathematical issues’ and various problem-solving strategies under the banners of ‘self-centred learning’, ‘individual learning’ and the ‘spiralling principle’. So pupils waste time ‘pursuing erroneous ways of learning on their own’.
The new teaching materials, it is reported, provide ‘something for everyone and a bit of everything, but nothing is developed in a step-by-step fashion so that one could build upon it with certainty’.
Teacher training in Switzerland has also changed to accommodate the ‘new’ maths. So dedicated teachers abandon the profession or retire early. The article ends with a plea for Swiss educationists to stop using children and teachers for ‘experiments whose disastrous consequences have been obvious… for years in England or in Germany’. (Please email us if you would like a copy of the complete article.)
Incidentally, many parents and teachers in Switzerland share our concerns that ‘progressives’ are pressing for sex education to be made compulsory in their primary schools, just as they are doing here.
LOCAL UPDATE
Camden: Parents of pupils at Hampstead School are horrified that the school has chosen to use transcripts of the obscene phone calls made by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to ‘Fawlty Towers’ actor Jonathan Sachs as part of an English GCSE exam. Jacques Szemalikowski, the school’s headteacher, claimed that the transcript was ‘totally appropriate’ for pupils as young as 14. ‘We are in the real world’ he said, ‘And children live in the real world’. We have also been informed that on a similar matter at the school, children have been warned not to tell their parents. If true, this is extremely serious.
Kensington and Chelsea: It seems that the battle between parents at Cardinal Vaughan School and the Catholic Diocese of Westminster may finally have been won by the parents. One of the best comprehensives in the country, Cardinal Vaughan has 7 applicants for each place. This year, 11 former pupils went to Oxbridge. But everything was threatened when the traditionally-minded headteacher approached retirement. To ease the appointment of a ‘progressive’ new head, the Westminster Diocese appointed several compliant new governors, who rejected two excellent in-house applicants in favour of someone who was obviously unsuitable. Meanwhile, even the courts found against the parents, who had taken legal action in defence of their school. However, on 15 October, The Daily Telegraph reported that Michael Gove had telephoned the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, to tell him that, as education secretary, he might use his statutory powers to order an investigation into whether the governing body had acted unreasonably. Within hours, the governors had reversed their previous position and appointed Paul Stubbings, one of the internal candidates, as the new head. But why did it all take so long?
Poole: Poole High School is an 1,800 pupil, partially selective comprehensive school, where pupils are required to take a 3-hour test as part of the school’s annual admission process. Those who achieve high marks join the ‘express class’. This year’s test required 11-year-olds joining the school next September to write a letter to David Cameron arguing that he should not cut public sector pensions. Parents were incensed and the school has apologised. The teacher who set the test has been ‘formally rebuked’. Nevertheless, many people are wondering how this could happen in a well-managed school.
Suffolk: Thanks to years of hard work by Diana Sharp and other volunteers, Stour Valley Community School in Clare finally opened in September as one of the first new free schools. Several after-school clubs are now operating and the school is extremely popular. Sandeep Christian, the head of English, is anxious to promote English language and literature. ‘A central part of the curriculum at Stour Valley Community School is the teaching of traditional texts’, he says. He hopes ‘to develop in students a real love of the English language through focusing on classic English poetry.’ Why aren’t there more like him?
RECOMMENDED PUBLICATIONS & NOTICE
Drugs – it’s just not worth it by Mary Brett, a biologist and former head of health education at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, is packed with truthful, up-to-date information about drugs. The harms caused are explained in simple scientific terms. £3.00 including p & p from www.cannabisskunksense.co.uk
Unhealthy Confusion reveals that central government’s Healthy Schools Programme is being used by local authorities as a vehicle to impose a liberal, permissive type of sex education on pupils in many parts of the country. The report can be downloaded free from the Family Education Trust website: www.famyouth.org.uk
Head, Heart and Hand: Education in the Spirit of Pestalozzi by Arthur Bruhlmeier (translated by Mike Mitchell) aims to familiarise English-speaking readers with the thoughts of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the Swiss educationist and philosopher. £12.00 from Sophia Books, 40 Devonshire Road, Cambridge, CB1 2BL.
*Many good schools are now offering International GCSEs and Cambridge Pre-U exams as more rigorous alternatives to standard GCSEs and A-levels. Twenty seven Pre-U subjects are now on offer, all with their exams at the end of the 2-year courses. They are all accredited by Ofqual and funded for use in the UK. Further details at www.cie.org.uk, then navigate to the Cambridge Pre-U page.
SNIPPETS
Only 22 per cent of youngsters – 152,000 – took GCSEs in English, maths, two sciences, a humanity and a language last year. This is a reduction from 50 per cent – 293,000 – in 1997 when the last Labour government took power. Daily Mail, 22 August 2011.
[Edexcel coursework] definitely scores; we let you do anything you want at A2 [second year of A-level]. So weak kids, you can get them through on anything really. Edexcel A-level English examiner Jennifer Smith at a seminar for teachers. Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2011.
The boys’ common entrance [for independent schools] at 13 is more advanced than GCSEs…A friend with children in a state school and private school says that the difference is summed up for her by the English lessons. ‘My 13-year-old son at our local secondary is studying The Simpsons with reference to Shakespeare, while my 11-year-old daughter on a private school scholarship is doing Macbeth with some light relief from Jane Austen.’ The Times, 5 October.
Education standards are at risk as pupils are increasingly allowed to submit essays digitally using email, memory sticks or even presenting PowerPoint displays…Prof Carey Jewitt, from London University’s Institute of Education, said students' handwriting skills were ‘absolutely appalling’, adding that many failed to get the practice they needed at home or in the classroom. Other academics warned that a failure to teach children to write may stunt their development and hold them back in the classroom. It comes after the publication of primary school exam results this summer showed that pupils perform worse in writing than any other core subject. A quarter of 11-year-olds failed to reach the standards expected for their age in writing. Daily Telegraph, 15 October 2011.
[After the pension reforms] a teacher retiring on a salary of £37,800 will receive an inflation-proof pension of £25,200. And no-one currently within a decade of retirement will see any difference at all. Schools minister Nick Gibb in the TES, 11 November 2011.
The pushing of philosophy in schools appears to be yet another manifestation of the ‘too much, too soon’ syndrome. I can only assume that it is just another symptom of the massive cultural anxiety that exists around children being left behind, with the attendant erroneous view that to introduce children to adult-centric activities earlier and earlier is somehow good for them. I fear that, in the long run, the very opposite will be the case. Letter in the TES from Dr Richard House, 21 October 2011.
It makes no sense that 19 per cent of schools are judged outstanding overall, but teaching is judged as outstanding in only 4 per cent of schools, says Sir Michael [Wilshaw]. You should not be able to have one without the other. Not least because it does a disservice to schools that are truly outstanding. Daily Telegraph, 2 November 2011.
The History teachers embrace innovation and creativity…Our programme of study includes themes as varied as 'Jack the Ripper' to 'Spies, espionage and James Bond'. From Tendring Technology College’s website. One of the school’s history teachers has won a Teacher of the Year award in the National Teaching Awards.
https://gateway01.lpplus.net/schools/TTC/website/Pages/HistoryDepartment.aspx
And finally…We wish all our supporters a happy and successful New Year. Please keep in touch in 2012 – your information is valuable and we use it wherever possible.