Could it possibly be time to just stop weighing the pig?

About the only upside I can see to the covid pandemic is that it has thrown a lot of things up in the air and forced us to reexamine some long-held assumptions. Nowhere is this more the case than in education. For instance, with home-schooling, millions of parents have been confronted with the reality of getting students through the post-Govian National Curriculum, and have come to see what a soulless task it is in some areas. It is no coincidence that fronted bloody adverbials have come under such attack and ridicule over recent months.

Even more significant though is the way that the GCSE fiasco last year caused many people to ask themselves quite fundamental questions about the whole purpose of that tier of national examinations. There have been those who have been posing those questions for years of course, but until the pandemic they were dismissed as soft liberals seeking to avoid accountability for schools. Now, at last, the question is being seen as a genuinely valid one - should we have GCSEs at all?

I do not propose to weigh into that debate here, because who cares what an ex-Head thinks anyway? Instead, I would like to pose an even more fundamental question: is it time to take the focus off weighing the pig entirely? I recognise that this is a rather radical question, and easily pilloried, because for as long as a national education system has existed, the idea of testing, and ranking, the children within it has been central. Indeed, tests are often seen as the end product or even the purpose of education. Each key stage (or, Key Stage, more recently) has always been defined by some sort of terminal assessment that sorts the wheat from the chaff and determines subsequent progress, whether these be the 11 plus, O-levels/GCSEs or A levels. And it is important to remember that, in the UK at least, these tests are not seen as diagnostic (used to determine the sensible next stage) but hierarchical (used to decide who deserves to progress to a higher tier of the next stage and who does not). Tests are there to be passed or failed.

This thinking permeates all of our attitudes about education, so that judgements about schools and teachers depend on them as well. These judgements too have become hierarchical rather than diagnostic: an inspection of a school determines whether it has passed or failed, and its place on exam league tables decides whether it is better or worse than others. And that, of course, determines the popularity of the school and hence the nature of its intake, because the market is king.

But surely this is inevitable, isn't it? Life is about success and failure, and education exists in the real world, not in a Utopian fantasy of lets-be-nice-to-everyone, doesn't it? Hence the need for those Govian watchwords: toughness and rigour.

That is a reasonable argument in a sense, and it derives from a fundamental human competitiveness that has driven progress for centuries. The problem is, it is an approach to both education and life itself that is becoming more and more problematic, and is being increasingly questioned. It is not just that the price of failure within such a system is becoming more of an issue - endemic drug addiction, the creation of an underclass, and right-wing populism might all be traced back to some people's sense of having lost the race, and the bleak life-chances for those who fail within the education system certainly can be - it is also that people are beginning to understand that competitiveness and meritocratic hierarchies don't always yield the best results. Forward-looking and successful businesses now put far greater emphasis on collaboration, teamwork and creativity than on goal-driven competitiveness.

There is another grave price to be paid for the competition-focused approach to education, namely the effect it has on the curriculum. I used to work in ILEA, and was part of what now seems like a renaissance of thinking about education. The focus shifted from a knowledge-based curriculum (recite the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England) to an enquiry-based one (examine these historical sources and ask how reliable and/or biased they might be). An enquiry-based curriculum was much harder to test, and so this approach led to the development of innovative approaches such as Assessment for Learning and 100% coursework GCSEs. However the problem for Gove and his like was that systems like AfL were no good for putting the screws on teachers or 'bog-standard' comprehensives, so back we went to a nice, simple, factual (and in my view largely pointless) knowledge-based curriculum that could be tested in 'rigorous' exams and Key Stage assessments.

I wrote a post some time ago posing the question of whether education should be 'tough', and I think it is even more valid now. Another lesson that the pandemic has taught us is that notions of winning and losing are often illusory and unhelpful in this context. There have been, for instance, surprisingly few reports of people cheating or jumping the queue to get vaccinated. Why? Because it is largely irrelevant where you come in that particular race: nothing much is going to change for anyone until everybody else gets vaccinated too. It's an analogous situation to a group project in school, or a small start-up company in the real world: the performance of the group as a whole is far more important than any individual's position within that group.

And the point is, that sort of focus is actually much more likely to yield concrete beneficial effects in the real world than a dog-eat-dog, competition-focussed one. What is the point of beating your co-workers in every conceivable test, if your company goes bankrupt because of the whole teams' dysfunction?

In a sense, too, this is a pretty uncontroversial view for most teachers. There are very few who believe that the most effective learning comes when students are pitted against each other. Ask any teacher, or any inspector, to pick a lesson where learning was at its best and I can almost guarantee that they will choose one where students were working collaboratively rather than competitively. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with competitiveness (it is a natural impulse in young people), but we learn best when we spark ideas off other people, and we do that best when we are working with, rather than against them. The controversy comes when we start thinking about ways to measure how successful teachers (and schools) are being, and whether they are enhancing or damaging students' life chances. We need assessment for that, don't we? And assessment means competition, surely. Which means tests of some sort and establishing of rank orders.

Well no, not necessarily. In the last paragraph I actually referenced an assessment that teachers and inspectors carry out all the time: the assessment of the quality of learning. Because that for me is the crucial measure of success of any education. And note, I said the quality of learning, not teaching. Where students are empowered with the ability to learn, to question, to be creative and to work with others they are given a gift that is of incalculable value, not just to themselves but to society as a whole. If you were setting up an innovative start-up, would you prefer somebody with those skills, or somebody who had used more fronted adverbials in a piece of creative writing than any other student and scored nineteen out of twenty in a test of the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England?

Occam's chainsaw

I loathe Michael Gove, but I have to say I am often grateful to him for clarifying what it is I do and don't believe. It isn't quite as simple as saying that 'Gove says it therefore it is wrong' (though that is an entirely reasonable starting point), it is more a question of the faux-reasonable and pseudo-intellectual style in which he pontificates provoking a stronger than usual reaction in me.

Take his recent performance as chair of the new commons 'Brexit' committee in which he "pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process." Clearly proud of his erudition he invoked the image of Occam's razor as the tool to be used in this sort of debate. And something about the posiness of that reference really got me thinking.

Occam's razor (named after the English Franciscan friar of that name) is the scientific principle that simpler hypotheses are preferable to more complex ones, and that therefore scientists should seek to reduce rather than increase complexity in their hypotheses. Michael Gove, clearly delighted by this idea, sought to apply it to the Brexit process, and why not? Throughout the referendum campaign he and his colleagues sought again and again to reduce the complexity of the arguments involved until they essentially came down to one sentence: "Take back control." Control over what was never clearly defined, and neither were the mechanisms by which this amorphous control was to be regained, nor the other consequences that might ensue. Occam's razor, see! Everything else could be left as vague and unspecified assertions about immigration, £350 million a week, new trading opportunities, return to pounds and ounces... anything you want really.

The thing is, of course, that that is not remotely how William of Occam intended his philosophical razor to be used. The point for him was that simpler hypotheses are better because they are MORE EASILY TESTABLE. Gove and his cronies have used their version of the razor to achieve the exact opposite. By airily dismissing any discussion of any of the intrinsic complexities of the questions in hand they have come up with sweeping generalisations that almost by definition can never be tested. When will we know that, as a country, we have 'taken back control?' The only way literally to achieve that would be to remove ourselves from any and all trans-national agreements (the UN, NATO, the International Criminal Court, the Commonwealth...), banish any and all multi-national companies from the UK and replace parliament with a system of rolling plebiscites, with everything from tax to street-lighting decided by referendum.

Is that what the Brexiteers were arguing for? Who knows. Maybe some were, but there is no way of knowing, and that's the point. Once a political aim becomes so simplistic and general that it is completely untestable then you can read into it whatever you want.

And it isn't just in the Brexit debate that this distorted Occam's razor has been weilded. Trump' campaign was all about simplistic, generalised and utterly untestable statements like "Drain the swamp" or "Make America great again." Even the apparently testable ones like "Build the wall" and "Lock her up" were really there as rallying cries rather than statements of intended policy, as Trump's rowing-back since the election has made clear.

And there is a wider seam of this sort of stuff that goes way beyond election politics. I happened to come across a Facebook argument between my brother (a mathematician and scientist) and various climate change deniers. My brother's posts were long (sometimes overlong, to be fair), thorough, nuanced and well researched. What he was often met with was memes. I happened across the same phenomenon in the bizarre world of the flat-earthers and wrote about it here.

But what Michael Gove, with his faux-philosophical intervention on the subject, prompted me to realise was that occam's razor remains a very useful image in these circumstances. A razor is a tool one uses with circumspect precision to remove hairy irrelevances to reveal the living essence of the person (or issue). Once a razor has been applied properly (and carefully) one can see clearly who or what one is dealing with, and so come to sensible and robust conclusion about them. What Gove, Farage, Trump, the flat-earthers and their like are wielding is what I would like to call occam's chainsaw. By recklessly destroying all complexity, relevant or irrelevant, from an issue and reducing it to puddle of minced flesh suitable to be formed into a meme they remove any possibility of any further debate. How are you supposed to argue with "take back control" or "make America great again"?

However the converse of this is also clear. Just as one should never, under any circumstances, use a chainsaw to shave with, so one should immediately reject any response to a complex issue which reduces it to a meme.

Or, to express that as a meme:

Summer babies, or why does no one commenting on education understand education?

Just a little one, but I mention it because it seems to me indicative of a general trend. Pretty much everyone nowadays feels free to pontificate on any aspect of education they want (generally related to how shit British schools are) without the need actually to understand what they are talking about.

This morning Nick Gibbs announced a change in schools admission rules to allow parents of 'summer babies' (those born in July and August) not to send their children to reception class as soon as they are 4 but to delay school starting if they felt that to be more appropriate for their child. He said, "Parents know their children best and we want to make sure summer-born children can start reception at the age of five, if their parents think it is in their best interests. We are going to make changes to admission rules - but we want councils and academies to take immediate action."

Pretty uncontroversial, one might think. It has long been known that summer babies suffer a deficit throughout their school career, to the extent that August born babies are 20% less likely than average to end up in 'good universities.' A more anecdotal (but nevertheless fascinating) indication that I have myself tested and found to be true is this: at the beginning of a school year ask a teacher to name all of their year 11s from the previous year. The chances are that the names they fail to remember are those of the July and August-born students.

Quite why this happens is open to debate but it seems most likely that the experience of their first year in school, when they are only just four whilst others are nearly five, sets the tone for summer babies' entire school career. At that age the differences in maturity and confidence can be very pronounced and probably the youngest children become locked into a pattern of diffidence and insecurity from the start.

 What was also unsurprising this morning was that Nick Gibbs made it pretty clear that it was Local Authorities' inflexibility that was the problem here- that the only thing standing in the way of concerned parents doing the best for their children was the dead hand of local bureaucracy. The BBC certainly went along with this implication, as did the papers. Even the Mirror (not known for its instinctive support for the Tories) wrote, "Schools and councils, which are responsible for admissions, often say summer-born pupils must go straight into year one and miss out on the reception year altogether. That means parents can feel pressured to send their child to school before they are ready."

Case closed, surely? This is a much-needed reform, with the government stepping in to remove a needlessly bureaucratic piece of regulation.

Well, yes and no, and this is where the issue of commentators not understanding education comes in. Because there is a reason that schools and local authorities are so intransigent about the year of entry of children into the school system, and that is because they are forced into it by the government itself! Anyone actually involved in the school system would know this, yet as far as I am aware the point has not emerged in this morning's commentary.

The thing is, a school's exam results (and therefore its position in league tables, its Ofsted ratings, even its freedom to avoid compulsory academisation) is based on age cohorts rather than year cohorts. So for instance GCSE league tables (such as the crucial 5+ A*-C including English and Maths figure ) include only the results of students who reach the age of 16 during the academic year in question. Summer babies who have been allowed to enter the school system a year late would be in Year 10 when they reach 16 and so would have no GCSE results to report. Because of their late start they may well do really well, and get a whole hatful of A*-Cs by the end of Year 11, but those results will simply not count in any analysis of the school's success or otherwise. Instead the students concerned will be counted amongst the utter failures- those who have achieved nothing at all.

Let me give a simple example to illustrate the point. Say there are 200 students in each year group and 20 of them are summer babies who have been 'kept back.' Then say 90 (45%) of the year group got 5+ A*-C, including 15 of the 20, who are now not the youngest but the oldest in their year. Excellent! Good result, surely. Errr, no. Because the 'kept back' students' results don't count, though the equivalent 20 from the year below DO count towards the total cohort. So the result the school has to report is not 45% but 37.5% (75 of 200 students). Which, unfortunately, is below the government-imposed 'floor target.'

So the school involved will quite likely be put into Special Measures and flagged up as a failing school.

So the problem is not the admissions rules set by Local Authorities but the system of counting exam results set by Government, as any educationalist could tell you. And yet, not a single mention of that in all the reporting of this I have seen.

Sigh. At least I don't work in schools any more.

Something sad is happening to schools

Having left the schools sector three years ago I have had little direct contact with it until just recently. Over the last few weeks though I have met a number of people who are still, or were until just recently, teachers. Their stories are all different but the overall impression I have got from them has been sadness, and to some extent regret at having given over their lives to teaching.

This is not a post about how hard-working and stressed teachers are. I think for decades we overplayed that hand, without understanding the stresses and difficulties other professionals face and with insufficient appreciation of the 11 weeks of annual holiday. However it is interesting that British teachers have always had that sense of themselves. It is, I think, no coincidence that of all the countries I know anything about Britain is the one in which teachers are given the least automatic respect by the rest of society. So perhaps it has been in response to this that British teachers have long defined themselves instead by their masochistic insistence on their own levels of hard work and stress.

I freely admit that banging on like this has probably not, over the decades, won teachers a great deal of sympathy and I do not want to re-enter the old and pointless debate about just how comparatively hard teachers work compared to other professionals. The fact is though that teachers are (and throughout human history always have been) crucial to the future of society, so it matters how they feel about their jobs, because how they feel about them partly determines how well they do them, and how well teachers do their jobs affects an entire generation.

The problem is, if the current and recently ex-teachers I have met recently are anything to go on, then how teachers feel about their jobs at the moment is not encouraging. Of course there are people in all sorts of jobs who are pissed off, bored, over-stressed or just knackered, and negativity about your work is far from confined to teachers. What I am talking about though is something different. The staff I have talked to weren't so much whingeing about how hard they were (or had been) working or complaining about the pace and scale of change, or even bemoaning the lack of recognition for their hard work. What they seemed to be saying, and what marked these conversations as different to me, was that it all seemed such a shame. They weren't so much angry or frustrated or bored or exhausted. The only word for how they seemed to me to feel was the one I used at the start of this post: sad. They were variously sad that the job just didn't have the sense of purpose it used to, sad that skill and effort seemed no longer to be recognised and sad that children no longer seemed to be at the heart of what they did.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, once memorably told a group of headteachers that "If anyone says to you that 'staff morale is at an all-time low' you know you are doing something right," and Michael Gove expressed his antagonism towards the teaching profession (the core of what he called 'the Blob') even more directly: "As long as there are people in education making excuses for failure, cursing future generations with a culture of low expectations, denying children access to the best that has been thought and written, because Nemo and the Mister Men are more relevant, the battle needs to be joined."

It is not just denigration from the powers that be that has saddened teachers though. The near-universal academisation of schools has stripped out many of the extended learning communities that teachers relied on to validate their practice and their sense of themselves as valued and valuable contributors to the fund of human understanding. Curricula that teachers have committed to and helped to shape over decades were swept away by Michael Gove in favour of anti-intellectual 'traditional' structures in which rote-learning again has a place and teachers reduced to transmitters of static knowledge.

The best and most successful private sector companies have learned that the path to innovation and improvement lies with empowering and listening to ordinary employees, thus securing their buy-in to the ethos of the organisation, and also learning from their on-the-ground expertise. Programmes like Undercover Boss may be artificial constructs but the thinking behind them is what lies at the heart of any properly forward-looking company.

Yet in schools there seems to have been a relentless effort of recent years to push in the other direction. Heads have been encouraged to become more draconian with their staff, to stamp out 'merely satisfactory' performance (and performers). Teachers' innovative and thoughtful ways of supporting students into and through their GCSEs have been denounced as virtually cheating and the target culture, which has been so widely derided elsewhere, has become the be-all and end-all of everything in teachers' professional lives. Teacher communities of various sorts (Local Authority based, exam syllabus based, curriculum development based) have been demolished as the unprecedented centralisation of both curriculum development and school organisation has taken hold.

And where in all this is the scope for individuality, for creative thinking and for active commitment to the school, the local community and the children with all their varied needs? No doubt there is still excellent teaching going on and no doubt there are staff who live full and rewarding professional lives. The thing is though, if I were still a teacher in the schools sector I might well be tempted to do as many of those I have recently met have started doing- put my head down, keep quiet and hope nobody noticed me too much. That way I might be able to make it to retirement and the still reasonably generous teachers' pension without my job taking an excessive toll on me.

The thing is, is that what we want the nation's teachers to be doing? Maybe it isn't too late to reverse what I suspect may be a catastrophic collapse in ordinary teachers' sense of playing a crucial role in the massive project of finding the best way to educate the nation's children. What would be needed though would be a Secretary of State for Education whose starting point was not that Britain's school system is broken and needs radical reform or that the means to do so was principally about disempowering the entire education establishment and taking the reins entirely into his or her own hands.

What we would need instead is someone who is prepared to listen to teachers again, to give them a voice and the fora in which to develop and express it. We need someone who can convince teachers once again that what they are doing is important and worthwhile and valued- that they can and should want to learn how to do it even better, but that the best people to help them do that will inevitably be colleagues in their and other schools. We need someone who sees exams and assessment as something that teachers should be central in shaping, rather than, as now, something to catch both students and teachers out and discover their inadequacies.

What we need is someone whose commitment is to the development of education in this country rather than the development of their own career through taking on the education establishment.

The Today programme and its attitude to scientific study

I was half listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning when an item came on about learning poems by heart. It was introduced by a long clip of Alan Bennett talking about Larkin's I Remember I Remember. I enjoy listening to poetry read well and at first was interested to hear the guest being interviewed by (I think) Justin Webb talking about the importance of its sound to the understanding of poetry. He compared the textual analysis of poetry with trying to engage with a piece of music by looking at the score and I was sort of with him even then, despite the huge value I have always found in the textual analysis of poetry.

However it was when he segued into extolling the virtues of learning the times tables by rote that I began to wonder what this item was actually about. I had to piece it together- I had missed the start of the interview and never got the interviewer's name- but it appeared that he was from the University of Cambridge and that he was announcing a large-scale study to examine the benefits of learning poetry by heart. This was presented by Justin Webb as a scientific study, though a key element appeared to be getting people to post favourite remembered lines of poetry on Twitter.

If this was an item about a scientific study then it revealed something that I have noted many times about the Today programme: they simply do not understand the scientific process. How else could one explain an item announcing a scientific study into the benefits of learning poems by heart that consists almost entirely of discussion and illustration of those supposed benefits? No scientist would start a study into something by explaining what the outcomes of that study were going to be, and anyone who did so should not be considered a scientist. Yet routinely on the Today programme (and elsewhere) this is how scientific studies are presented.

I have no objection whatever to an item for National Poetry Day extolling the virtues of learning poems by heart. Just don't call it science.

What are schools for?

There has been a flurry of debate following Michael Wilshaw's comments about behaviour management in schools and I don't want to enter the debate as to whether behaviour in schools actually is a problem or not (for what it is worth, I believe that there is a certain type of teacher and of parent who will always complain that behaviour is deteriorating). Instead, I wanted to reflect on much broader questions about the relationship between students and their schools, and the central issue of what schools are actually for.

On the face of it there seems to be a pretty clear consensus about the purpose of schools: just look at school slogans. Usually heavy on abstract nouns ("achievement", "success", "challenge", "diversity", "tolerance", etc. etc.) they pretty universally present the notion that schools encourage students to learn and prepare them for adult life. Easy.

Except of course, it isn't. It is for instance clear to anyone who has ever had children (or indeed has ever been a child) that children learn best when they are enjoying what they are doing. However most schools (even those with the imperative "enjoy" in their slogan) do not put much of a premium on students actually having fun, at least not in lessons. Schools see a clear duty to take learning seriously, and to transmit that seriousness to their students. How could they otherwise, with the Damoclean sword of league tables hanging over them?

Similarly, it is clear that the best way to develop life skills and interpersonal relationships is to be given the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Yet the schools that Mr Wilshaw admires are those that give students no opportunities whatever to do this. Effective behaviour management, according to his prescription, involves intervening immediately a student does anything like swinging on a chair or talking to a neighbour.

One would think that students would learn best (both in terms of academic learning and social skills) from teachers whom they saw as human beings and to whom they could relate in a natural, unstructured and responsive way. Yet the most "successful" teachers are generally those who lay down and rigidly enforce non-negotiable codes of conduct for their students. Once I was walking behind two students on a corridor and one (unaware of my presence) said, "Mrs ___ is a really good teacher. She never listens to you." This sounds absurd, but what he meant by it was that the teacher in question never listened when you tried to make up excuses for why you had not done your homework.

I struggled with this issue throughout my career as a teacher. A part of me wanted to relate to each student as an individual- to afford them trust and give them responsibility for their own decisions. Yet another part of me recognised that that simply made me a soft touch, so that eventually none of my students would ever do their homework. It is a shame though. Fear of the consequences of not doing Mrs ____'s homework is certainly an effective motivator, but to what extent does it lead to real learning?

In a similar way, students who learn to walk in silence on the left of the corridor and stand up when a teacher enters the room are certainly receiving a training of sorts in appropriate modes of behaviour, whereas the classrooms of the liberal and "nice" teachers are always where the fights break out, but to what extent is behaviour training internalised as a mode of interaction with the world? It is certainly possible to create a school ethos in which students are universally quiet, submissive and polite, but are we sure that that will make for better members of adult society?

I am genuinely not sure. One argument would be that people adopt habits of being around other people that can stick with them and inform their entire lives. Another argument is that "repressive" school regimes simply store up resentment and hatred which are never addressed within the school system. Certainly my experience is that the incidence of bullying is in direct proportion with the rigidity of school codes of conduct and discipline.

I would never argue for a Summerhill approach to schooling. I believe that schools are important social institutions, and to some extent should model the functioning of society as a whole. So I strongly believe that schools have to have codes of discipline and clear statements of acceptable behaviour, with structures of rewards and sanctions to reinforce them. I also believe that students have to perceive a clear authority structure, and know who makes the decisions and where they fit into that process. I think schools do have both to teach and to model ideas of citizenship with all that that implies and that students need to learn to thrive within an environment of constrained freedoms.

The problem, as I have argued in a previous post, is that what schools often seem to tell us instead (and tell their students too) is that as a society we really do not like our children. Take the crimes identified by Michael Wilshaw of "talking to your neighbour" and "swinging on your chair". These are entirely normal behaviours of children who are enjoying being in the company of others and enjoying what they are doing. And yet they are to be eliminated if PROPER learning is to be carried through.

Next time you are working with a group of colleagues on a particular problem, imagine that as soon as you started discussing it in an animated fashion, or someone told a joke, your boss glared at you and told you to be quiet and get on with your work. How long do you think you would stay in that job? And how successful would that company be? Yet this is how we are to treat our school children, apparently.

Surely there is something wrong with that.

The astonishing lack of an evidence base to support education policy

Maybe I am late to the party on this, or maybe it is because I have been out of education for a while that I can look at the situation with fresh eyes. In my last post I commented on the lack of evidence presented to support the government's line on setting by ability. However it turns out that this is far from the only area in which the government seems utterly uninterested in evidence when it comes to education.

To illustrate this point, it is really unclear to me where one should even go to find evidence that the government might be using to inform its policy-making decisions. Ofsted apparently conducts no research other than its 'surveys' of groups of schools and its dataset seems to consist largely of its own inspection reports. This is useful in its way, but hardly rigorous or objective as a means of cross-checking the assumptions that no doubt underlie said inspection reports. There is in fact an enormous wealth of such objective data available: Ofsted has access to a huge amount of achievement, attainment and contextual data for every school they inspect, but there is frustratingly little real analysis of this in any of Ofsted's reports or surveys.

I did eventually track down the "Research and Statistics" page on the DfE website. There are 143 publications about schools by the DoE, which sounds promising. However the very large majority are evaluations of specific trials, or papers about research priorities for the future. In fact I could find fewer than half a dozen that impacted in any way on the massive sweeping changes the government has been carrying out. "The evolving education in England" seems a promising title, but in fact the paper makes clear from the start that it does not contain any analysis of performance, but is simply a "temperature check." Not the sort of evidence I was looking for.

Ah ha! But there is also "Attainment in Academies at Key Stage 4". Finally, some data to support the government's policy of near universal academisation. Except that it doesn't, of course. The analysis in fact shows that outcomes at academies are broadly the same as those in "similar schools", despite the significant boost to funding that these academies received. There are ups and downs- academies for instance do less well by students in receipt of Free School Meals but are improving faster.

OK, so what about "Do Academies make use of their autonomy"? Even more inadequate as evidence to support policy, I'm afraid. It is full of emphatic statements about how marvelous it is for a school to become an academy, but remarkably devoid of evidence to support its claims. Here is an example of a key finding:
"This [autonomy as regards curriculum] is helping them raise standards for their pupils"
and the evidence provided?
"- Two thirds believe these changes have improved attainment"
Note, it says "believe". Not "can demonstrate" or even "have shown."

So what about Free Schools- that other enormous experiment? Well there are 850 documents available by search on the DfE's site, and a further 5 from Ofsted. I have to confess that I gave up after the first three pages of results, but I could see nothing that contained any sort of research or data analysis into their effectiveness. Nothing at all.

So what about PISA then? This is the one piece of objective data that Gove appears to have paid any attention to, repeatedly using its findings to rubbish the entire UK education system he inherited. I have to confess that until today I simply had not looked at the PISA test process or data. In fact their 2012 report makes for interesting, and on the face of it puzzling, reading. The focus in that report is on maths, and whilst "Pupils in England showed greater motivation to learn mathematics than the OECD average and reported a high sense of belonging and satisfaction with school," on the other hand "In mathematics, 19 countries significantly outperformed England."

Why is that then? Why are children who enjoy and are confident in maths not apparently learning it as well as those in other countries? Perhaps looking at the tests themselves might give a clue. Well, yes. Here are some sample questions: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/form/ . They are like the worst sort of maths textbooks from when I started in teaching. Textually dense and full of utterly irrelevant details and imagery they wrap up simple mathematical questions in nonsensical "real world problems" in such a way that the student actually has to decode the "real world problem" into an actual problem before they can answer it. This is a skill that is of no relevance outside maths lessons and the UK education system has quite rightly moved on from that approach, so students are less skilled at it than they might be in countries with more old-fashioned approaches.

Which is perhaps why students from countries with much more formal education systems do better in PISA tests. It doesn't really matter if you do not have as high a "sense of belonging and satisfaction", or even if you "enjoy the study of mathematics". If you have spent your entire school life endlessly practising pointless and artificial maths "problems" like those in the PISA tests then eventually you will get quite good at it.

But is that seriously the only evidence Gove had for tearing down decades of good practice, action research and pedagogical innovation in his time as Secretary of State? It was perhaps naive of me to think that the current regime retained some sort of commitment to evidence-based policy making. Clearly they haven't.

The old mixed ability/setting debate

The old debate about mixed ability v. setting has been given another airing, with Nicky Morgan denying rumours that the government planned make setting effectively compulsory by ensuring that a school could not be granted an 'outstanding' rating unless it set students by ability. Michael Wilshaw has long been in favour of setting, apparently, and David Cameron is a strong advocate. Interestingly, the plan to make setting compulsory has reportedly been axed not because it is bonkers, but because "it would run counter to the longstanding Conservative commitment to enshrine the independence of academies from policies set by the education department."

All of which suggests that the case for preferring setting to mixed ability teaching has already been made, and it is simply a question of how far the government should or shouldn't go in enforcing its policies on academies. So, given the need for evidence-based policy-making, where is the data that supports this case?

Ah, well. That's the problem, and the point of this post. You would think, wouldn't you, that a government that seems so clear on the correct answer to the setting/mixed ability debate would have some pretty good evidence to support its decision. Well, if they have then it certainly isn't accessible from the DfE website. As I have mentioned in a previous post the DfE website seems to have been stripped of anything much to do with education at all. A search for "mixed ability" or for "setting" reveals nothing at all germane to this issue and there are no links whatever to any other source of evidence or research.

So what about Ofsted? Well, hurrah, there is a research paper there (just one). It is entitled The most able students and has a foreword by Michael Wilshaw himself. It is this paper that is most often cited by those making the case for setting as against mixed ability teaching, but there are actually a number of problems with that. First, the tone is polemical from the start, which is not what one would expect from an objective, academic analysis. The first sentence is "Too many of our most able children and young people are underperforming in our non-selective state secondary schools."

Secondly, there is actually very little in the report that is relevant in any way to the setting/mixed ability debate. In the page and a quarter that contains the twelve key findings only one sentence has any relevance to that question: "School leaders did not evaluate how well mixed-ability group teaching was challenging the most able students." This is not in itself a key finding, but part of the unpacking of the sixth key finding, that "Many students become used to performing at a lower level than they are capable of."

Thirdly, the only evidence adduced for the above (part of a) key finding is lesson observations by Ofsted inspectors and no figures are given to support Mr Wilshaw's statement that "in too many lessons observed by inspectors , teaching is not supporting our highest-attaining students to do well. We know from our inspections that this is particularly the case in mixed ability groups." How many is too many? In my opinion one would be too many, but what does Mr Wilshaw mean? We have no way of knowing.

It is odd, to say the least, that no attainment or achievement evidence is presented to support or challenge the idea that setting is superior to mixed ability in this regard. Ofsted and the DfE have all this data of course. It would have been be easy enough to examine rates of achievement and attainment in subjects and in schools where students are set by ability and compare them with schools and subjects where they are taught in mixed ability groups. So why not make such data readily available? Why not refer to it in Ofsted's 'research'?

Perhaps the explanation is that this data did not make the case that Messrs. Wilshaw and Cameron wanted it to make. It is frustratingly hard these days to get hold of any national achievement data, but the only relevant piece of research I could find on the DfE website is this. It is dated July 2009, but it's the best I could find. It shows that rates of progression for Maths (in which almost all schools set by ability) are actually slightly poorer than those in English (where a larger proportion of schools teach in mixed ability groupings). The most definitive analysis to date that I am aware of is still Ability Grouping in Education from 2001. Its conclusion, broadly, was that neither setting nor mixed ability teaching made any significant difference to academic outcomes for children. Hardly a ringing endorsement for setting by ability.

I suppose I should pin my colours to the mast: as an English teacher and a head teacher I was always more persuaded by the case for mixed ability, not least because it forces teachers to engage with the range of abilities and weaknesses that exists in any group of students, whether set by ability or not. However had anyone presented clear evidence to me that setting by ability raised achievement then I would have been quite prepared to consider changing my position.

Only no one ever did. And no one, it seems, has presented such evidence to Messrs Cameron and Wilshaw either.

Evidence-based policy-making? Yeah, right.

Is learning supposed to be tough?

I am already officially fed up of hearing how tough Gove's new National Curriculum is. There may be a mention of the curriculum changes somewhere which does not include the word 'tough', but if so I have yet to find it.

Leave aside for a minute the important (but so far, it seems, unasked) question of whether learning a string of facts is in fact tougher than acquiring the skills to make use of them. What about the core issue: should toughness be a central criterion for a school curriculum?

On the face of it this seems a no-brainer. We are, as we never cease being reminded, living in an increasingly competitive world and education is one of the key tracks on which the race for global supremacy will be run. The analogy of competitive sport is always there and the implication of that analogy is clear: if you want to race competitively you have to train, and train hard. Toughness is key and a trainer who goes easy on you is doing you no favours at all.

But education is not athletics, and learning is not the same as running in a race.

For a start, athletics is predominantly (not purely of course) about physical prowess. To do well you need your muscles, your heart and your lungs to be capable of operating at peak capacity, and physical systems like the adrenal gland, the central nervous system and the pituitary gland can all facilitate that process. It is what evolution selected them for after all. Tough training feeds into all of the inbuilt mechanisms the body has for getting fitter and stronger, and the body even provides a positive feedback mechanism through endorphin production- the so-called runners' high.

Learning really isn't the same. We use various sports-based analogies (getting match fit for an interview; training for an exam) but the development of mental capacity just isn't a physical process in the same way. Proponents of Brain Gym approaches briefly tried to persuade us it was, until it became clear that the only capacity that Brain Gym activities build is the capacity to do more Brain Gym activities.

So is toughness (another favourite word is 'rigour') the best way to speed up the process of learning? Certainly there is a satisfaction in having worked hard to acquire a new skill or new set of knowledge, and in some circumstances, certainly, an awareness of the difficulty of what you are attempting to master is a strong motivator to put more effort into it. Surely we all remember some occasion when we worked seemingly day and night to get some killer essay finished or to revise for a particularly tough exam. Doesn't that show that toughness spurs us on to feats of learning we would not be capable of otherwise?

But is it just coincidence that that is precisely the sort of learning that goes immediately out of one's head once the essay is handed in or the exam finished? Sure, adrenaline increases the brain's working capacity in the short term, and toughness is a good tool to promote the production of adrenaline. So we can psyche ourselves up to cram in large amounts of fact-based information ready to regurgitate it in response to some 'tough' exam question. But that isn't all that learning is.

There is absolutely no doubt that the most profound and longest term learning takes place when we are doing something we find rewarding, fulfilling and fun. It's why people always retain far more about things they are interested in than things they have to learn. Many is the pub darts player who was always crap at maths at school, yet can work out a 3-dart finish to a score of 123 in seconds (3 * 19 + 2 * 17 + 2 * 16). Or the football fanatic who could never remember dates in history at school yet can tell you immediately who Southampton beat in the 2003 FA cup semi-final (Watford).

And to what extent does 'toughness' in a school curriculum offer opportunities for students to enjoy their learning? Mr Gove (and now Mrs Morgan) are clearly with Gradgrind on this- it shouldn't..

And all of this is argued from the viewpoint of the successful. Learning, even more than athletics, is also about one's emotional state, and there is nothing more dispiriting, disempowering and inimical to future success than repeated failure. Yet the new 'tough' curriculum seems designed to build in failure and the fear of failure into every step of a child's journey through school. Children are now expected aged nine to know the 12 times table by heart. This seems to have no purpose in this age of ubiquitous smartphones but to make those who can't do it feel inadequate (12 is an interesting choice, by the way. It goes back, of course, to the days when there were 12 pennies in a shilling). My daughter struggled with her times tables all through secondary school, giving up entirely once she saw through my attempts to make them seem important to her. She is now a Cambridge graduate.

There will be many who struggle to remember the kings and queens of England. Why? Because it has utterly no relevance to them, and the only purpose in learning them is because it is difficult to do so- toughness replacing usefulness or relevance in order to convince children that they aren't as clever as they think they are.

And given that the huge issue with so many kids today is that they don't think they are clever at all, that is an insane thing to do.

An unthinkable solution to the Higher Education quandary

In my last post I bemoaned the increasing numbers of students on 'vocational' Higher Education courses. As of course have many others. The problem is that any sort of alternative seems to be fraught with difficulties. I don't believe that increasing the number of technical training courses is the answer, as I argued in my last post, and simply eliminating any degree course that did not meet some high-minded ideal about the pursuit of knowledge and understanding would be a retrograde and elitist step that would take us back to the 1970s.

So what can be done about it? First, it is important to recognise why it is that this increasingly utilitarian approach to higher education has taken hold. The central and unquestioned aim of any nation today is economic growth, and higher education is seen first and foremost as an engine of growth. Whether at a national or an individual level the aim (we are told) has to be to increase both production and consumption, to maximise economic activity. If we fail to do that we are failing to keep our place, whether as individuals or as a nation. If economic activity declines, or even fails to grow, then we are doomed.

This level of economic activity is even described (interchangeably) as our standard of living, and it is fair to say that until fairly recently in the rich West, and today in poorer countries, that is a reasonable connection to make. If increased economic activity means moving from a subsistence economy without clean water or adequate healthcare to one with these facilities then level of economic activity = standard of living.

The thing is though that in the rich West we are long past that point. Now the connection between level of economic activity and standard of living is pretty much defunct. For a start, increasing economic activity seems to go alongside increasing economic inequality, and inequality is bad for everyone's standard of living, even the richest. Secondly, a large proportion of the population of Western countries are at the stage where an increase in their personal economic activity will be likely to decrease rather than increase their standard of living. Once you have everything material you need to lead a comfortable life, relentless pursuit of the newest electronic devices and the means to pay for them leads not to improved standard of living but to affluenza.

In broader terms, national economic growth goes hand in hand these days with incomprehensibly vast gambles on the financial markets. Some ludicrously high percentage of the world's economic activity is actually in the form of abstruse and vastly complex financial transactions with no actual goods changing hands but literally trillions of dollars wafting to and fro on the electronic breeze. We have already seen the catastrophic damage this sort of thing can cause, and I don't believe that anyone believes that we will not face another global financial meltdown at some stage. Where economic activity is pretty much abstract anyway there is really nothing to control its growth.

So, whilst the pursuit of economic growth was (and is still for most countries) an essential phase in reaching acceptable standards of hygiene, nutrition, housing and healthcare, can it possibly remain as a realistic aspiration for those countries which have already exceeded the level of economic activity necessary to achieve those goals? Is there not a danger of something like the notorious potlatch of native American tribes, where vast amounts of valuable goods are simply thrown away in order for the relentless machinery of economic growth to keep turning? Should the richer nations not be focussing on actual standards of living- including contentment, social cohesion and stability- rather than simply on economic growth? That would involve a massive shift in direction of course, and individual aspirations would have somehow to be decoupled from the relentless acquisition of more and more increasingly irrelevant affluence, but perhaps soon we will be forced into that change of direction. I honestly cannot see our current obsession with economic growth as sustainable.

So what has all this got to do with higher education?

Well the question should be, I believe, how higher education can contribute to raising standards of living, rather than levels of economic activity. And as a passionate educator I absolutely believe it can. Everybody can and should be able to benefit from the unique opportunities higher education provides actually to learn to think- to explore and question and imagine and create. This is what we, as a country and a world, need to invest in, if we are to see a genuine improvement in living standards across the globe. And invest we must, because you can't ask a young person effectively to shell out up to £9,000 a year just to be taught how to think, with no clear prospect of a job at the end of it. Yet if as a society we make it possible for those young people to take that time, then we have a chance of ending up not with David Brents but with the next generation of filmmakers and artists, social entrepreneurs and creative thinkers. And those are the people we are really going to need.

This is a Utopian vision of course. It would involve substantially raising taxes, so that today's middle managers might have to make do with a Ford Focus and an Asus tablet rather than an Audi TT and an iPad. It would mean the UK losing its international ranking on the GDP growth tables. It would mean a fundamental rethink, so that the goal for young people was not to be a millionaire and live in a big house behind electric gates, but to be contented and involved and creative.

And none of that is going to happen, is it? So shall we just carry on saddling generation of generation of young people with unaffordable student debts so that they can get on the first rung of that much-vaunted ladder towards increased prosperity, increased affluence, increased isolation and (if I am not being too dramatic) the ultimate death of their souls?

Thinking the unthinkable about Higher Education

It is an inevitable fact that in a lot of areas of life those who make policy are of a different generation from those it principally affects. This is particularly true of education, an area where the experience of the policy-makers' generation (my generation) and that which it chiefly affects (today's young) is very different indeed.

I have written in a post some time back about how privileged my generation was, and nowhere more so than in the expectations placed on those who went to university. Most of us received generous grants, there were no fees and there was no pressure on us to find a graduate-level job as soon as we left. Some courses were principally vocational of course, but even those studying medicine were, as I remember it, more focussed on where the next pint (or 15) was coming from than what their future employment prospects were going to be like.

University study was in retrospect seen largely as an opportunity for intellectual exploration offered free and without condition to (an admittedly small proportion of) the nation's youth. Certainly there were tabloid stories of students spending their grants on drink and drugs without attending a single lecture, and the occasional moral panic about student militancy and sit-ins and revolutionary fervour, but such behaviour came to be seen as an intrinsic part of Higher Education: the actual course almost secondary. And yet a university degree had genuine currency, once the possessor got their act together sufficiently to start looking for jobs, giving a significant boost to lifetime earnings.

Then, over time, politicians woke up to the fact that these indulgences were being offered only to a tiny minority of the population and a massive expansion in Higher Education began, to the point where the HE participation rate is now around 50% and suddenly we find that the whole game has changed. Now, university degrees are far less about intellectual exploration and self-discovery and far more about preparation for the world of work. It is a ruthless market out there (as today's young are constantly reminded) and no one can afford three years of self-indulgent time-wasting.

The language of utilitarianism is everywhere. Universities advertise their wares on the basis of the proportion of alumni now in graduate level employment, and most crucially the whole thing is now far from free. University education involves a massive financial commitment from the student nowadays and as with any financial commitment they expect a return on their investment. Indeed it seems that that sort of hardening up of attitudes was pretty much the point of the tuition fee rises- since various studies have shown that they will raise no money at all for the government.

Higher Education, it seems, has become a tool for economic advancement above everything else. At an individual level students are told over and over again that without a degree their lifetime employment prospects will be minimal, and nationally investment in HE is seen as crucial for the UK to compete in tomorrow's high-tec global economy (or some such cliched formulation).

All this has happened quickly but incrementally, and with no significant national debate on the point of principal. The debate has been all about the level of tuition fees, the iniquity of student loans and the unfairness of access to the elite universities. What has seldom been asked is whether it is right for 50% of the country's population to be studying university degree courses, or whether it is right for the principal purpose of said degree courses to be improving employability.

A proportion of today's students certainly are following what one might characterise as HE-appropriate vocational courses- medicine, for instance, or engineering. Another tranche (largely the most able and/or middle class) are studying traditional degree courses. Many of these will duly proceed to graduate-level employment- the maths and science graduates as city traders and the Arts graduates as teachers or social workers, as civil servants or working in the charity sector.

But what of the rest- now the majority? Most of these will currently be on a variety of broadly business/management oriented courses at a selection of lesser-regarded universities. They may not have shelled out the full £27,000 in tuition fees but they will still be accruing a pretty substantial debt, and for what? Principally, it seems, to mensure that the next generation of David Brents have an even more secure command of management-speak bullshit with which to bore and demotivate their workforce.

I am not denigrating 'mickey-mouse degrees' here, neither am I seeking to undermine the right of the less well off or the less academically able to as extensive a period of education as I benefited from as a young man. What I am questioning is the justifiability of encouraging huge numbers of young people to go to university and saddle themselves with a mountain of student debt in order to follow supposedly vocational courses that neither afford them any significant vocational skills nor give them space and encouragement to broaden their minds more generally.

Neither, incidentally, am I joining the traditional clamour for more technical training courses. It is a seductive argument that what the less academic (whatever that means) need is to be taught a trade. However I do not personally believe that it is as simple as that. It is not just a question of disparity of esteem, and the fact that a return to technical training colleges would set in stone a whole social system based on class division of employment. The other problem is that the world is changing so rapidly that training for a particular trade might soon be seen as having been as cruelly useless as teaching Sheffield lads of a generation ago to work in the steel industry. "We will always need plumbers," the cry goes up. Well maybe, but recently British plumbers have found themselves out-competed by their Eastern European colleagues, and changes in technology are making a lot of the old plumbing skills (like soldering joints) redundant.

So what is the answer? Well it seems to me that before attempting to find an answer to this quandary, society actually has to consider some much deeper questions first. Which I think means another blog post... -->

It is time to reclaim the word "reform."

Now that Michael Gove has left the DfE his name seems more than ever inextricably linked with the word "reform(s)." I suspect astute news management here: by constant repetition of the phrase "Gove reforms" when referring to the unprecedentedly disruptive and reactive changes brought about in his time as Secretary of State, Gove and his henchmen have inveigled into the public consciousness a link between what he did and the largely positive connotations of the word "reform."

I have written here, here, here and here (for example) of some of the casually destructive things Michael Gove did to education whilst in office and this is not another post bemoaning the changes he brought about. Rather I would like to focus on the word "reform" itself, to pose the question as to why so many commentators see fit to talk and write about Gove's education reforms.

The etymology of the word reform is simple- from the Latin reformare, the prefix re- meaning back and the verb formare meaning to form or shape. So in purely etymological terms the word reform would seem to imply a process of putting things back to the way they were. Not so inappropriate then, for Michael Gove's attempts to reestablish a half-remembered version of 50s schooling.

Except that words acquire most of their meaning through a combination of usage and connotation (a concept I have explored here for instance). To take usage first, consider some of the other contemporary uses of the word reform: we have Obama's healthcare reforms; repeated calls from Cameron and others for EU reform; and vague talk of political reform, usually in countries sufficiently far away that reform becomes a less threatening concept. Because actually the connotations the word reform has acquired in current usage are all to do with change, and moving forward not backwards.

The other key feature of the usage of the word reform is that it has long been defined in opposition to two other words: reaction and revolution. From the Protestant Reformation to the Reformist Movement reformers have long been defined as being the opposite of reactionaries. Reform is emphatically not about turning the clock back any more, whatever its etymology might be. These sorts of usages are also notable in their virtually socialist connotations: the process of reform has always been about defeating the reactionary forces of an oppressive higher power. Maybe not so appropriate for what Gove sought to achieve then.

Similarly, reform is now clearly established as the opposite of revolution. Revolutionaries seek to overturn (etymologically as well as by usage) whilst reformers work from the ground up, bringing in more organic, gentler changes. Indeed revolutionaries have often seen reform as inimical to their aims. Dario Fo put it well when he said, "They want a revolution, and we'll give them reforms- lots of reforms; we'll drown them in reforms."

This sort oppositional definition of words is actually how we come to refine their meanings. What is reform? Well, it isn't reaction and it isn't revolution, so it's something in between. And as a result, since reform is by definition (or by usage anyway) not an extremist position, the connotations it has come to acquire are almost universally positive. Reform has connotations of gentleness, of looking to the future, of responding to the needs of the weak and oppressed, of high-minded idealism.

And yet we allow the word to be linked to what Michael Gove did to the English education system in his time as Secretary of State!

I propose a different word. For a start, the prefix has to be de- (from the Latin for "down from," "away from," or "out of" and implying reversal or negation.) So deform maybe? Hence Gove's deformations of England's education system. Not quite, I don't think. Deformation is far too slow and organic a process. We need something more dramatic to describe what he did.

Disruption is another good word. Etymologically it seems to mean "breaking apart," which seems appropriate. However again, connotations are key, and the problem is that disruption has strong connotations of temporariness. After a disruption normal service is resumed. Pretty quickly, so long as Network Rail isn't involved. So no, disruption simply isn't the word, because the damage Gove did will take decades to undo, even suppose anyone tries.

We need another word. I know, not reform, or disrupt, but destroy. Yes, that's it. That seems a much better description of what happened. So not Gove's reforms, but Gove's destruction.

Yup. Happy with that. Carry on.

The DfE website: another casualty of Gove's Stalinist regime

I wrote a piece yesterday about the writing out from history of the entire concept of Assessment for Learning. One of the most extraordinary things I discovered was the removal from the DfE website of any document whatever on the subject, and this led me to investigate further. If under Gove such a central document as the AfL National Strategy document could have been expunged from the government's Education website, what else has disappeared?

So I visited what used to be www.dfe.gov.uk and my first surprise was that that address no longer exists. The website is now at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education, and lest one think that this is simply a matter of web redirect, look at the URL: the word "education" appears only after the third backslash. So what? I hear you ask. Well, what this means for instance is that the default behaviour of the site's search box is to return results from any of the government departments. So if you put in the word "learning" and hit return without changing any of the default options you will get a large number of results dealing with subjects as diverse as driving, justice and births, marriages and deaths. The first link that returns anything remotely to do with learning in schools is the 25th. Put in a more generic term (but one that is central to the effective delivery of high quality education in schools) like "leadership and management" and fewer than one in ten of the results returned are anything to do with schools at all.

This is not the only change though. The first visual impression of the site is of something put together by one of the more budget school website providers back in the late 90s. Carry out a search for instance and the only way back to the Department for Education's section of the site is via your browser's "Back" button. Click on the Gov.Uk link at the top of the page and you get to this page which has no mention of the DfE on it anywhere!

This is extraordinary stuff. With the internet now firmly established as any teacher's (or school leader's. Or anyone's) primary tool for research and planning how can the DfE provide a website that is so appallingly badly designed and unwelcoming for its users?

And even that isn't the main issue. It is when you do finally track down the content on the site that you face the biggest surprise: there isn't any. Or hardly any, at least. The DfE website used to be crammed full of advice and guidance, case studies, examples of best practice, curriculum resources and a myriad of links to external sites of all sorts that might be of use to the web-savvy teacher or school leader. And now?

Well, the resemblance to a late 90s school website continues as regards content too. There are a number of policy documents, all pdfs and written in the sort of quasi-legalese that marks them out as the sort of thing one takes to a tribunal but otherwise leaves prominently displayed but unread on one's shelf. There are some press releases on the main page, and some of what the site calls "Collections" of guidance douments. Ah ha! Here we are, I thought. And found this. Guess how many of these documents have anything to do with the delivery of education to students in school? Give up? I'll tell you, thirteen, and all, it turns out, the same quasi-legalese pdfs from the policy document section.

There were only two links to external websites that I could find, one to the DfE performance tables and one to the "Get Into Teaching" website. The latter incidentally must represent an as-yet unreformed aspect of the DfE's work that Gove never noticed: it is colourful, informative, packed full of content and actually useful.

Maybe I am missing something. Maybe there is a wealth of government guidance, case studies and sharing of best practice somewhere else on the web, but if so I would be delighted if someone could point it out to me. Out of curiosity I visited the Scottish government education websites and the contrast could not be more dramatic. Even the main departmental schools site is worlds better than the English equivalent, but as well as that there are two other enormous sites: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/ and http://www.gtcs.org.uk/. There used to be an English equivalent of the latter of course- the General Teaching Council, or GTC, but Gove killed it off and its website is no more.

So aside from anything else he has done, Michael Gove has been responsible for the wholesale removal from the internet of anything that could reasonably be considered useful Governmental advice and resources for school teachers and leaders. It is not just the scale of his scorched-earth policy that amazes though, but its intention. This is a Stalinist elimination from the public sphere of anything ever produced by "the Blob" of those who know anything about education. In fact it is almost akin to Mao's policy of anti-intellectualism and what I find utterly extraordinary is the apparent lack of public outcry against it.

What has happened to Assessment for Learning?

There are unquestionably advantages to not being employed in the education sector any more: I get to enjoy the summer holidays for one thing. As a head the summer holidays were no kind of break at all, and the looming key dates of exam results and start of term would start haunting me before the summer term had even ended.

However not being in the thick of things does mean that I can lose track of what used to be central concerns of mine. If educational issues don't make the news (and it is generally only scandals and stories of failure that do) then I rarely get to hear of them any more. Occasionally I do get curious though, and this morning, for reasons best known to myself, I put Assessment for Learning into Google and chose "News" as the search type. After the first 5 pages of search results I was forced to admit that there was simply nothing from any UK site about developments in AfL.

Yet this is the time when pedagogues do their most creative thinking. These are the precious weeks when, freed from the daily grind of Year 9 Geography, teachers plan and share ideas and look to the future. With the new academic year approaching and "Back to School" sections already opening in supermarkets (it's the beginning of August for God's sake! Why do they DO that?) there seems to be nothing to reinvigorate the nation's teaching profession in the crucial business of effective assessment for learning.

I then searched the Department for Education site, and more scarily still there was nothing there either on what I would call AfL. It is as if the phrase has vanished. As if a concept that was utterly central to my thinking for years as a teacher and head has slipped quietly away while my back was turned.

This is maybe not that surprising once I come to think about it. Despite impassioned pleas such as this to Michael Gove I am not aware of him ever having said anything on the subject of Assessment for Learning. Assessment was for him, it is clear, nothing to do with learning at all. Assessment meant testing and nothing else. Testing was there to determine who had succeeded and who failed and what was tested was principally to be knowledge, not skills, and certainly not something as woolly and amorphous as learning. AfL, it is pretty clear, was a product of the Blob, and so to be ignored and marginalised.

Just to be clear on the issue, by assessment for learning I do not just mean the old National Strategy document (which I eventually tracked down in the government's web archive) but a broader way of thinking about education that actually engages with how students learn and how teachers can support and assess that learning. Experienced educationalists know all this stuff of course, but if the Department for Education doesn't then maybe I should clear it up.

Assessment is crucial to effective teaching. There is still a weird belief that, because many teachers are critical of the SATs, the revised GCSEs and A levels and league tables in their current form that they are anti-assessment. This is utter crap. Any teacher with any experience of education in the real world knows that assessment is something without which they simply could not function, because unless you know what students know, understand and can do then how can you possibly decide what to teach and how?

For effective assessment there have to be targets against which performance can be measured. I know the language of targets is anathema to some (because of its ubiquity these days) but actually the setting of targets has always been central to the relationship between teacher and pupil. What is a conversation like, "That's excellent Jasmine. How about putting in a bit of conversation too? Remember what we learned yesterday about speech punctuation," if it is not setting targets for learning?

However there is often insufficient thought given (or no thought at all, in Mr Gove's case) as to the different types of learning targets teachers can set. Personally, I find the following diagram useful in this context:

Learning outcomes are the only part of this diagram Michael Gove thought about. They are things like exam results, thought they can be smaller things too, like producing a piece of software that works, or being able to conduct a conversation in French. 

Barriers to learning are obvious really. If a student isn't in school then they are unlikely to be making much progress and if they mess around in class they will impede their own and others' learning. So removing those barriers is a necessary, but certainly not sufficient, step in achieving learning outcomes. 

Learning behaviour targets are what a lot of teachers spend their time and energy setting students when they have to write reports. They are things like, "Do your homework," "Always bring a pen," or "Work collaboratively with other." These are crucial behaviours of course, and without them students will be very unlikely to reach their desired learning outcomes. However they are no guarantee of getting there. A student who just doesn't understand calculus can dutifully turn up to every lesson on time and properly equipped, every week plugging away at homework they simply don't get and working collaboratively with a group of peers who also do not understand calculus, and if that is all they do they will never make any real progress.

The key to this diagram, and what assessment for learning is all about, is the box in the centre- learning gains targets. If students are to achieve meaningful learning outcomes they need to know what specific things they will have to learn in order to get there. Good teachers knew this before the term AfL was ever coined, and gave students targets like: 

Embed analysis of how writers use language to create effects in your essays 

Learn the past subjunctive tense of some key verbs and practise putting them into sentences from memory. 

Break a complex calculation into simpler steps, choosing and using appropriate and efficient operations and methods. 

Develop your use of a wider range of media and techniques in creating work 

The best teachers also assessed their students' progress against these targets, which is why their students made such significant progress towards the broader learning outcomes targets. The government's Assessment for Learning strategy, whilst cumbersome and bureaucratic, was at least an attempt to embed and validate that approach- to force everyone to recognise that you cannot simply deliver content to students and then test whether they have absorbed it or not (whatever Michael Gove might think).

So if assessment for learning as a concept really has slipped away in the brief time since I was a head then I despair even more as to what is happening in education. And thank my lucky stars yet again that I don't work in schools any more.

Of Trojan Horses and loose cannons

I have finally read Peter Clarke's report into the so-called Trojan Horse allegations about Birmingham schools. I have to say that I have been left holding two conflicting views about the issue but I think there is a central point here that has so far been ignored in the discussion of the incidents.

My first reaction to this whole affair was that it formed a part of the current government's ant-UKIP-backlash-backlash attempt to appease the more rightwing and islamophobic elements of its own party and of the electorate as a whole. It also felt to me like a skirmish in the internecine war between Michael Gove and Theresa May that led eventually to Gove's demotion: Gove's spin-doctors using it to brief against May for failing to tackle Islamic extremism in society and May seizing on it to to blame Gove for inadequate supervision of schools.

 The image of the Trojan horse may not have been invented by Micahel Gove or Theresa May (it came from the original anonymous document that sparked all the furore) but it is a telling one. The original Trojan horse was a means by which armed soldiers were smuggled into the heart of the city which they then attacked and destroyed from within. This seems very much the fear of a proportion of the more narrow-minded and islamophobic rightwingers who live amongst us and whose extremist views are rarely challenged. In fact the report carries no implication of jihadist radicalisation of students in these schools.

The closest I could find to evidence for anything similar was an account of a visit to a Year 10/11 assembly by a preacher called Shaykh Shady Al-Suleiman. There is no indication of any specifics of what this assembly contained, but this passage of commentary is included to show how "extremist" it was: "Some students made comments to staff along the lines of ‘Oh my God I can’t believe what he has just said - there are people dying in Afghanistan’ and talked about it for days afterwards. Some students wondered why he had been talking about them being oppressed in this country." Hardly sounds to me like a jihadist call to arms. As this is the only evidence I could find of attempted radicalisation of students within these schools it is hard to justify the widespread use of the term "Trojan Horse" to describe what went on.

Much has been made of the promotion of a conservative form of Islam within these schools, and of this there is more evidence. However it is not clear to me the extent to which the schools involved were creating or simply responding to a pervasive climate of religious conservatism, given that the very large majority of the students were from religiously conservative households. Much is made for instance of an incident when a group of girls who had been sent out to a tennis coaching programme were then sent home when they realised that some of the tennis coaches were men, and the teacher responsible for arranging the trip was forced to write a letter of apology.

As someone who has worked for many years in schools with students from socially conservative households (by no means exclusively muslim) it is clear to me that the teacher involved did make a serious error in not checking whether the coaches would all be female. As liberal-minded Europeans we may not like it but the fact is that an awful lot of families living in this country would object strongly to their daughters being placed in close physical proximity with an unknown adult male, particularly whilst skimpily dressed in PE kit.

In another issue, the report has been used to suggest that Birmingham Council were remiss in not responding to and following up the allegations contained in the "Trojan Horse" letter. The implication is that Birmingham knew what was going on but were too concerned with political correctness to do anything about it. The report seeks to provide evidence for this view by suggesting that Birmingham knew before they even got the letter that something was amiss. However the only piece of direct evidence I could find is extraordinary- a passage from an internal email that mentions"growing concerns amongst head teachers that some governing bodies of schools with large numbers of pupils from an Islamic background, or at least groups of influential governors within governing bodies, were putting unreasonable pressure on head teachers to raise standards and/or address other issues of concern." According to this, the much-feared Trojan horse was a means of raising standards and addressing other areas of concern! Hardly a plot to massacre the city.

In fact, reading between the lines, it is pretty clear that officers in Birmingham council suspected the letter to have been written and circulated by a head teacher as part of their battle against their own governing body, which the head felt was submitting him/her to undue pressure. This implication is very clear in an analysis of the letter produced by Birmingham in 2013: "The document seeks to imply that there is manipulation of local authority officers to deliver an overall plan. Very few of the facts are accurate. The document reflects the views of some head teachers, who have expressed their concerns to a number of elected members, local authority officers and governors" (italics mine).

So there is certainly an element of this whole saga that is feeding off the islamophobic paranoia of little-Englander UKIPers to emphasise the need for a firm hand against these weird veiled fifth-columnists with their silafi this and their jihadi that. Ironically, much of what is alleged to have been promoted within the schools investigated would be far more distasteful to the liberal Guardian readers amongst us than to said UKIPers: homophobia; strict codes of dress and comportment; the elimination of any pre-sexual contact between male and female students; and religious conservatism.

And yet.

As an ex-headteacher who was, in effect, "hounded out of office" myself there is a great deal in this reports that rings true to me on another issue entirely. The report blandly states that "I have seen no evidence to suggest that there is a problem with governance generally," yet it really is not clear how the author could possibly be in a position to make a judgment about governance generally.

In fact, what the report highlights is precisely that issue- the problem with governance generally, in schools up and down the land and the new academies and free schools in particular. Those with no direct experience of governing bodies may be surprised at just how antiquated and amateurish the system of school governance is. It was developed in an era when schools had little autonomy, being under the direct control of local education authorities. So governors were there to be "critical friends" and give the head teacher some perspective on the views of parents and the wider community as to what was going on in the school. In the most enlightened schools they played this role effectively, but the whispered truth was that actually governors really didn't matter.

And this was just as well in a way, because there have always been major potential problems with the entire system. In theory governing bodies have a constitution and their functioning is bound up in a range of regulations, guidance and even legislation. Yet in fact, far too often, they end up being a group of more (or less) well meaning amateurs, with little understanding of educational issues and sometimes very odd personal agendas who meet for a couple of hours late into the evening every month or so to engage in futile and repetitive debates about uniform and behaviour.

A proportion of all school governors must be elected parent governors, and on the face of it this guarantees effective representation from the parent body. In fact, in every school in which I have been involved, so few parents are prepared to put themselves forward as governors that anyone who does is elected unopposed. Indeed in the few instances where candidates outnumber available parent governor vacancies the unsuccessful candidates are often shunted into the governing body anyway as some other category of governor.

So rather than being elected representatives of the parent body, parent governors can often be individuals with time on their hands and a specific axe to grind, generally in regards to the treatment of their own son or daughter. I am not, of course, saying that all are, but there is effectively no mechanism in place to prevent anyone with such a self-serving agenda acceding to the governing body.

A (smaller) proportion must be staff governors. However here, as well as the unwillingness of staff to put themselves up for election (governing body meetings typically finish after 9pm, and staff will often have been in school since 7 or 8am) there is the issue of status. Staff governors are quite often mistrusted by the rest of the governing body. They will for instance routinely be excluded from the part 2 (confidential) sections of meetings, even if parent governors are allowed to remain, and their contribution to debates close to other governors' hearts (but of which they know little) such as how to manage student behaviour will often be ignored. Unsurprisingly this often gives rise to a feeling amongst staff that the position of staff governor is utterly unrewarding and pointless, unless for some reason you want it on your CV.

In theory governing body constitutions ensure internal democracy too. However in fact a forceful and politically astute governor with one or two allies can generally very easily become elected chair. It is a job that most (largely amateurishly well-meaning, often elderly) governors would not dream of standing for and many will be happy to vote for anyone who is prepared to do so. Once chair, the politically astute governor can very easily pack the governing body with allies. There are always vacancies, and I have many times witnessed a chair appointing to the governing body some crony whom no one else had any knowledge of, then getting that appointment ratified by a show of hands in which other governors were too embarrassed, or cared too little, to show any dissent.

The head of the school, who is generally an ex-officio governor, has to learn to manage the governing body with a mixture of assertiveness, smarminess, lowdown politicking of their own and regular schmoozing with the chair of governors. Generally this works, and so long as the head can bear to sit through endless hours of pointless, ill-informed commentary on just why the students in the school aren't half as well disciplined as children used to be in the old days then they can get on just fine with only minimal interference. And, to be fair, just occasionally governors actually can act as critical friends, and give the head new perspectives on issues of concern.

However should the shit start hitting the fan the head will soon discover that governing bodies, for all their amateurish incompetence, are not subject to any effective means of control. Should a parent governor for instance start conducting an overt campaign against an individual teacher, purely on the basis that their son or daughter does not like them, the head will find there is little they can do. Parent governors once elected cannot be removed, and the head has no powers whatever to address unprofessional behaviour on the part of a governor. There are internal disciplinary procedures for governing bodies, but the bodies concerned are often extremely reluctant to use them- governing bodies are a social grouping as much as anything else. And what if the governor behaving unprofessionally is the chair of governors?

All of this used to be simply an irritation, and one that courses such as NPQH taught heads to manage and/or survive. However increasing numbers of schools are being taken out of any sort of direct supervision or control from their local education authorities (because they are academies or free schools) and governors are suddenly finding that they have an extraordinary degree of unfettered and unsupervised power over everything that happens in the school. In particular they find that, should they want to, they can make the headteacher's position untenable, and there will be very little the headteacher can do about it.

One section of the report- the Slatley Story- made very uncomfortable reading for me. My position vis-a-vis my governors was not as extreme as Mr Bains but I saw a large number of parallels that brought back painful memories. The head's position (as ex-offico member) on the governing body is often a very difficult and isolated one. When things are difficult the head can find himself/herself the only representative of and apologist for what is going on in the school. As well as being the only one with any actual educational expertise they will be the only one with direct experience of life in the school on a daily basis. And should the governing body start coming to a view informed by a mixture of gossip and their own prejudices then the head's educational expertise and direct knowledge can come to be seen (perversely) as a problem rather than an asset. I have actually been told by a governor, when making a point about what makes for effective behaviour management in the classroom, "You would say that. You're a teacher!"

In addition, as the head is often the only representative of the school with whom governors come in direct regular contact, he/she can easily become a focus for any resentments about the school the governors may hold. Many people have negative views about schools, and governors are no exception. Partly this is a result of our society's negativity about its state education system, partly because of a generalised fear of the sort of loutish teenagers who typically pour out of the gates at 3.30 and throng the local bus stops. Sometimes it is also because the governor's own child is going through a difficult adolescent phase and the governor sees the school as a useful scapegoat for their own anxieties. So should things start getting difficult there will always be governors who turn against the head, at which point the head will suddenly find just how isolated their position is and how truly ungoverned the governing body can be. It is bad enough when the head has the local authority to go to for support (as that is something local authorities are not always capable of or willing to supply) but if the school is a free school or standalone academy it must be truly awful.

So whatever the degree of concern one should have about the apparent attempted back-door conversion of a few Birmingham secular schools into faith schools the real issue this report raises is the one that it dismisses in half a sentence. Because actually there is a serious problem with governance generally, and one that needs to be urgently addressed.