 Matrix Pills (c) ThomasThomas CC BY-NC 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomasthomas/258931782 The government have just announced that they are to make the Netflix series Adolescence free to show in all secondary schools. The move reflects a wider concern about the waves of disinformation and radicalisation flooding the lives of young people. Radicalisation of young people is not a new issue. When I began my career, I can remember concerns being raised about pupils being drawn into post-9/11 Islamic terrorism, as well as racist movements such as the English Defence League. Indeed, I had to raise concerns about pupils on the latter front more than once in my time in the classroom. More recently we have seen the concern over the rise in toxic masculinity, the influence of Andrew Tate and online Incel communities.
What is common in almost all of these groups is that they seek to ‘red pill’ those who fall into their orbit. By this, I mean that, they try to show why the world as most people experience it is a lie and attempt to ‘awaken’ their victims with a new set of truths – the ‘red pill’. These ‘truths’ commonly play on a victim’s existing fears and prejudices, encouraging them to abandon the complexities of the real world in favour of the simplified ‘red pill’ narrative and its equally simplistic (and often violent) solutions. These new truths quickly become embedded through repetition and connection with a community of likeminded people. A sense of belonging is engendered and the truths become enmeshed with a person’s sense of self.
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 “All Is Vanity,” by Charles Allan Gilbert, Life, vol. 40, no. 1048, 27 Nov. 1902, p. 459. Digitized by Google from the collection of the Harvard University library. On Tuesday morning I managed to set aside some time to read the DfE’s interim curriculum and assessment review. It is a report so seemingly uncontroversial, that even Nick Gibb struggled to find problems with it when interviewed on the Today programme. Yet, as I reflected on it, I found it more and more troubling. I mean, it’s even made me dust off my login and blog for the first time in ages. It’s not so much what the report says, but what remains unsaid that worries me. Let me explain.
What is said? On the whole, I found the report to be measured and sensible. There are no sweeping claims about teacher blobs or Marxist teachers destroying the education of children. Nor does it make wild claims about a system in crisis, or the need for radical change. In fact, there is a welcome, if cautious, recognition of the challenges faced by pupils with SEND, and of the need for a slimmed down curriculum, even if it is unclear how these things will be addressed. There were even some nods buried deeper down in the document that there might be some appetite for a broadening of what curriculum entails. So, the first tranche of Ofsted reports from the new framework have now been released. I thought this would be a good time to reflect on their content and consider what they reveal about the new, and much touted, curriculum focus. It should be noted of course that there are still only a handful of reports to look at, so this is very much initial reactions.
A quick review Before I get into what we can glean from these reports, I think it is worth revisiting some of the hopes and fears I had about the new Education Inspection Framework when it was first announced. I have summarised these briefly below. I'm afraid today's blog, a bit like yesterday's is a bit of a rant. More to the point, it is a response to yet another partially researched claim, namely that Grammar Schools (Schools for Everyone TM?) are more effective than their comprehensive counterparts. Indeed, the Telegraph ran an article a few days ago stating that this was a ringing endorsement for May's flagship education policy. Here I wanted to unpick some of the claims being made about Grammar Schools, and ask that we take a moment to be cautious before endorsing a systemic change based on limited evidence. I am fairly sure I have my calculations right here, however please let me know if you think I have made a mistake.
The Progress 8 Issue The claim that Grammar Schools outperform state Comprehensives does have some basis in evidence. This can be seen in the latest GCSE statistics published by the DfE. The Telegraph explains that...
here's been a lot going around on Twitter recently about reducing the marking load of teachers. Much of this is to be applauded. I have seen some really nice ideas for dealing with feedback more effectively from Ben Newmark, Toby French, Tom Bennett, even the Michaela bods. However, I have a major worry: school marking policies won't actually change!
In the current educational climate, school approaches, and especially those relating to marking and feedback, are driven by a few key factors:
So here's the rub. If schools want to achieve the first aim, the following drivers are often counter productive. * I am not going to discuss the reductive nature of the first educational goal, though that in itself plays a major part here too. Nor will I be dealing with the impact of a narrowly target driven system which means that some schools are in the habit of changing their policies more frequently than I change my socks. Indeed, some schools I have worked in have been so malleable in their policy approaches to teaching that they have become almost invertebrate. In the course of five years in one school we shifted from a focus on Kagan groups and peer marking, to flipped classroom, to next-step marking, to triple marking, to digital marking, to purple pens of progress, without ever stopping to think about the impact of any of these approaches. ** I could write a whole blog on the rise of the purple pen as a gateway pass to Deputy Head status, but I think I might leave that for another day Bad Advice and Poor Models As people have been pointing out all week - good feedback does not mean detailed written marking on every child's work. Yet, if we look at some of the "Outstanding" schools and "Teaching Schools" which have been set up as beacons of excellence, we see such policies being advocated. This "Outstanding" Teaching School for instance says:
This school has not been formally inspected since 2007 so it seems somewhat remiss of the DfE to allow it to advise other schools to follow such policies. (see http://www.harrogategrammar.co.uk/content/uploads/2015/04/Learning-21.01.15.pdf and http://www.harrogategrammar.co.uk/content/uploads/2014/02/Policy_AssessmentRecordingReporting23.01.13.pdf) Another "Outstanding" school has a marking policy which demands extended written feedback in a rainbow of colours: http://www.rossettschool.co.uk/parents/policies/marking/ (last inspected in 2010) 
These two examples are far from the only ones, nor are they the worst cases. Countless others come out of the wordwork in conversations with teachers up and down the country - sadly not all put their marking policies online. The big worry is that these "Outstanding" schools (many of whom have not be inspected in nearly a decade) shape the approaches taken by "Good", "RI" and "Inadequate" schools in significant ways as they strive to model the "excellent practice" of their "betters".
The Ofsted Factor But the problem doesn't stop there. In every school I have been to, there has always been someone with the job to read Ofsted inspection reports and pull out and apply key approaches deemed necessary to attain the elusive "Outstanding" grade. Yesterday I suggested that Ofsted, through their reports, has been key in encouraging schools to implement poor marking practices. When I mentioned this, I was promptly slapped down by Ofsted's Sean Harford. There has been something naggingly familiar about the grammar school debate which has been raging on Twitter recently. True I have heard many of the arguments before in educational discussions, but this was something more. It only struck me when I began editing a chapter of my upcoming book on C19th America. I have copied a page of the book for you below. In many ways I feel it encapsulates exactly the same lines of argument that we see currently, simply replace "slavery" for "educational inequality" and "slaves" for "low SES children" and you are away. I think this reveals not only the lines of debate, but also, with hindsight, some of the main faults in each. Worryingly I look ahead to how this debate was resolved and the long term failure of such a solution...   I have long been a fan of Tom Bennett’s no nonsense approach to behaviour management. I have recommended Bennett’s blog many times to trainees and NQTs nervous about expectations in the classroom (as you will see from these pages). As such, there are many things I like about the ITT behaviour report (one of the long-awaited responses to the Carter review) which was published on Wednesday:
So far, so vanilla. Yet I also feel there are a number of fundamental issues with the approaches suggested by Bennett and his team. The following points are very much a response to the report and to Tom's blog "Let's fix this together" published today. As a rule I try to let some of the more extreme posts on Twitter pass me by. I find it is better for my blood pressure. However, the recent blog by Anthony Radice, the self-styled “Traditional Teacher” was just so abrasive and wrong-headed that I have felt the need to pick up on some of the points he raises.
In his post, “The Ideas Behind Forced Academisation,” Radice uses Hirsch to create a kind of apologia for the policy of forced academisation being pursued by the government. I do not really want to get into my own views on this issue, save to say that the process tramples on much democratic accountability and needlessly removes co-operation from the school system. Instead I want to focus on why Radice’s argument does not stand up to scrutiny, whether it is closely based on Hirsch or otherwise. Radice begins by taking Hirsch’s assumption that progressive notions in education “became so widespread, to the point where young people could spend many years under the care of expensive professionals, and emerge lacking even the most basic knowledge of the history, geography and literature of their own country.” This assumption rests on an unstated belief that there must have been a golden age of some sort before progressives took hold of education in schools when all children left with a clear grasp of all required adult knowledge. The simple fact is that this is not upheld by historical investigation. For a really detailed study of how history education in particular has performed and developed over the last century, Radice may wish to look at Cannadine’s “The Right Kind of History.” One core aspect of Cannadine’s findings of history teaching in the 20th century is that the idea that there was a golden age of history teaching is largely a myth. What he does show is that more and more children have been given access to history education as time has moved on, resulting in a thriving discipline which values both pedagogy and knowledge. Radice goes on to suggest, in line with Hirsch, that the spread of progressivism was the result of parents being “pushed out of educational decision making” to make way for the educational experts. Even a cursory glance at the Academies programme shows that parents are being completely sidelined in the new world of MATs. Indeed, the CoOp who have suggested an alternative MAT model, in which parents maintain a democratic role, has been rejected multiple times by the DfE. Radice also suggests that parents values of hard work and discipline were overridden by progressive teachers. Once more, I am not sure the realities agree. To go back 75 years, my grandmother’s brothers both opted not to attend school, not because of the “crazy” educational theories being peddled there, but because they were seen to be more valuable if they put their hard work and effort into earning a wage to help the family survive. I don’t doubt that if they had gone, they would probably have found the experience much more rewarding in the long run, but the simple fact is, that was not a choice they could make. In many ways, progressives sought to encourage a generation of children to stay in education. Granted, they may not have always got the balance right; and granted, they may have at times denigrated the value of subject knowledge; but to term them “high priests of the new gnostic religion” is stretching the truth somewhat. One might also criticise the “dusty guardians of pointless facts”, but I won’t because I don’t believe that! Not content with his attack on progressive teachers, Radice continues to show how Hirsch proves that university education departments were also part of a master plan to control the teaching of subjects and claim their academic credibility. What is interesting here is that there is seemingly no engagement with the current state of university education. Whilst I am sure I could find examples of people in education departments playing down the role of knowledge, I have yet to meet one in person at any HEI I have been in. A brief glance at the course of the Cambridge History PGCE would reveal a course steeped in knowledge, but also supported by pedagogical thinking. Indeed, I have spent every PGCE session since joining my current HEI showing how knowledge is a core around which meaningful pedagogy is practiced. To say that there is no pedagogy worth knowing trashes decades of fantastic work by professionals dedicated to developing pupils’ knowledge. It is also interesting that Radice does not note that history as a discipline had to establish its own place in universities during the nineteenth century, and that almost all subjects barring theology have had to fight to validate themselves as worthy of study. Just as historians spent a generation or more arguing over whether history was a science or an art, so educationalists have debated the role of knowledge within their field. What we see today is diversity, but certainly not a group of people who are endeavouring to “rule supreme” over a domain divorced from knowledge. Later, Radice echoes Hisrch in characterising progressives as “anti-knowledge” in an absolute sense. This again does not hold up to scrutiny. More accurately we might say that many progressives are against a particular type of knowledge, or value other forms of knowledge in addition to that cultural capital Hirsch is so keen on. An important point here is that cultural capital is of course a currency set by the dominant culture. Whilst traditionalists might say we can liberate students by giving them this capital, many progressives argue that we should change the currency. I wonder if Radice believes that we should still learn our church history and catechisms by rote? This was definitely the cultural capital of the pre-Enlightenment world, but it is no longer! To take another example of the above, many of the problems which have come about in the Deep South of the USA in the last decade might be traced back to the fact that education authorities there are controlling what has currency. Texas textbooks tell the tale of loyal slaves fighting for the Confederacy, whilst a recent McGraw Hill publication referred to slaves in the C18th and C19th as “workers.” The cultural capital here is controlled by interests which seek to create a particular type of society. It is this blind acceptance of the currency of education which many progressives seek to challenge. There are however two points on which I will agree with Radice. First, I think that there is an issue in the teaching profession in terms of awareness of educational debates. For me, this has been caused by two main factors: an excessive focus on high stakes, nationally published examinations; and the decline of educational theory as a core part of university courses. The former has been driven by successive governments of all colours. The latter has come from a demand for more “practical” teacher training and a push for teachers who can be deployed to deliver externally controlled curricula. Whilst there is some truth in the “knowledge light” classroom claim, it is certainly not driven solely by extreme progressive agendas. Finally, I would agree with Radice that forced academisation is a kind of “creative destruction” (incidentally not really connected to the points being raised before). However, I would take this in the way Schumpeter originally intended: that Capitalism is fundamentally a process of change, and that in being a process of change it is ultimately doomed to fail. I will outline Schumpeter’s explanation here in brief because I believe it illustrates nicely why the Govian approach to educational reform is also doomed to fail:
Initial Teacher Training, some of the most successful and important History PGCE courses were not likely to be viable to run from 2016. Meanwhile, school based training still had a bank of reserved places, despite struggling to fill these in many cases in the past. Now, I have no inherent opposition to schools providing ITT, if it is done well, however I would argue that much of this has been driven by an ideological desire to break up university control of Initial Teacher Training. Just like the unfortunate Despenser, university education departments have been accused of formenting strife, being disloyal to the cause of traditional education, and ignoring the practicalities of training classroom teachers. What is bitterly ironic is that many of the places which are facing the prospect of being forced to shut their doors, are at the forefront of the fight against the dumbing down of education, exam driven practice and pandering to Ofsted’s latest whims. The stage has been set for the final execution of university based ITT, for it to be divided up for academy chains and private education companies to fight over. Much like the execution of Despenser, the process has been long and painful.
Well it seems Mr Hunt is in the firing line on Twitter once again for an article posted on the Sunday Times suggesting that, if Labour does manage to solve their infighting and get elected, as education secretary, he will bring in a kind of teaching MOT. Now this is not an entirely fresh piece of news. Indeed, as I rolled my eyes at the outcry and started thinking about my blog, I stumbled across this piece I wrote in January on the exact same theme! Now, to save you from my usual blog length, I will not repeat anything I have already said, but I do want to reiterate my call to get beyond the rhetoric around licensing teachers and consider the potential for positive impact.
"Money it's a crime. Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie." So sang Pink Floyd on their 1973 classic, Dark Side of the Moon. So what has got me to thinking about money this week? Well two things really: let me elaborate.
Yesterday I received my budget for the 2014-15 school year. I run a large department with over 260 GCSE and 100 A Level historians as well as a good number studying government and politics. Now, thanks to a range of issues, including falling rolls, and the general squeeze on education at the moment, my budget for next year has been reduced by nearly 30% from last year's figures. With this kind of cash, I worked out that I would barley be able to cover the costs of my photocopying (which has been growing exponentially as our dwindling stocks textbooks, most dating back to the mid 1990s or earlier disappear into the ether) and materials. After some reflection, I was left puzzling quite how I was going to make ends meet. The second trigger for my thoughts was reading the following tweet on the DfE Twitter feed, in which one academy head was quoted as saying:
The "Teaching MOT" - the ticket to a smooth running profession or just another way to be fleeced?1/11/2014 So the latest furore which has erupted in the world of teaching is a suggestion by the Shadow Education Secretary, Tristram Hunt, that teachers should be licensed in order to stay in the profession, and that a Royal College of Teaching be set up. In an interview with the BBC Hunt noted that teacher should have "the same professional standing" as lawyers and doctors, "which means re-licensing themselves, which means continued professional development, which means being the best possible they can be," (Of course, if Hunt is serious about giving teaching "the same professional standing" as law and medicine, he might want to consider the pay and conditions of teaching as well as the licensing aspect!). He went on to say that "if you're not willing to engage in re-licensing to update your skills then you really shouldn't be in the classroom," Twitter seems to have exploded with anger at the proposals: @sharpeleven: I think @TristramHuntMP may have lost #Labour hundreds of thousands of votes with his idiotic bash-teachers grandstanding. #NoToLabour  The AndAllThat.co.uk teacher blog is moving from WordPress onto the main website. From now on you will find non-topic related content here.
You can still access the archives from the WordPress site by visiting http://andallthatweb.wordpress.com . I will endeavour to transfer the content over the next few months. Mr F  It is now several days since the publication of the revised National Curriculum proposals; days in which my initial disbelief and incredulity have become a sense of deep, immutable despair over the future of our profession. Many excellent responses have already been penned in response to Mr Gove’s proposals for the reform of the History curriculum but nothing yet has quite encapsulated the disappointment, the anger I feel about this abomination, this ahistorical, jingoistic mess which is being peddled to our children disguised as a “history curriculum.”
Let me be clear from the start, I am not against reform. Indeed some of the key changes to the History GCSE are long overdue and in some cases I am frustrated that reforms have not gone far enough. Yet the revised History curriculum offers little in the way of real reform, little to develop the historical profession and even less still to the students it aims to educate. I had been genuinely excited by the prospect of a greater role for History in the National Curriculum. Back when creating departmental documents in 2010 I noted, “This is an exciting time to be a History teacher and an historian. It is clear that History is set to play a much larger role in school curricula than it has done over the last 10 years of Labour government.” How bitter then my disappointment with what we have been given. It transpires that there is at least one aspect of the new curriculum which will avoid criticism: second-order concepts remain. There, that’s it! The rest of the document appears to be the combined wet dreams of reactionary Tories, Daily Mail readers, Empire apologists and neo-liberal crusaders throughout Britain (or should I say this “Sceptred Isle?”) I have to say that writing about examinations does not rank amongst my favourite pass times, yet as the GCSE fiasco has emerged, I have found myself constantly asking, who is really surprised? Every teacher surely has felt the pain of results day when you have no idea if your results are your doing, their doing or the doing of an examinations committee…. Accountability? You must be joking. I sat and longingly read the details of the Queensland examinations system which puts schools at the centre…I took the quote from the opening page of the document:“It cannot be over-emphasised that the mode of assessment dictates the nature of the educational experience and the quality of the relationship between teacher and pupils. Assessment is not something separate ??? a tool ??? by which education may be evaluated; it acts upon the educational system so as to shape it in accordance with what the assessment demands. You cannot have, at one and the same time, education for personal growth and a totally impersonal system of assessment. Assessment should be a bond between teachers and taught, not something which threatens and antagonises.
To humanise assessment, then, we have to make of schooling a more co- operative enterprise between teachers and pupils, and an opportunity to develop the whole range of human competencies, leading up to informative profiles. This should be the pattern of things for the immediate future; it is the way to shed the dreary, and often unjust, grading techniques of traditional education.Hemming (1980, p. 113???14)” …and then I wrote this: |
Image (c) LiamGM (2024) File: Bayeux Tapestry - Motte Castle Dinan.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
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