1) A breakthrough for e-mentoring?

The government has announced that it wants to see broadband access for all students in their homes http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,2235297,00.html the existing digital divide being illustrated by this article in the Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jan/06/retail.internet?gusrc=rss&feed=technology

I’m sorry to start the New Year negatively, but some government policy initiatives are just so dumb all that can be done is to watch open mouthed and try to guess how the failure will be handled, this is one of them.

There are of course many ways in which every home could be connected to the internet and that would be a good thing. Unfortunately, be it wireless or cable, it is the running costs of the connection, not the installation cost that is the problem. Commercial suppliers are in intense competition for profitable customers, no-one is going to want to be supplier of choice to disadvantaged families living in poverty. This problem could be overcome by implementing a policy of universal and free at the point of use internet connections for all homes in the UK. Of course, the cost would have to be met out of national or local taxation, something which this junior education minister is not in a position to decide and as it would drive the all important ‘middle England’ to foam at the mouth – ‘council tax to pay for immigrant scroungers free internet porn’: it isn’t going to happen.

So, with a morbid fascination, all we can do is to try and speculate how the inevitable utter failure of this initiative will be handled? My bet is that home access will be redefined as ‘easy’ access, which will mean a local library or school. Yes, that should do the trick!

Most ill thought-out policy initiatives of this kind are quietly allowed to disappear; remember Gordon Brown’s computers for disadvantaged families’ scheme? Unfortunately, this one will have a long term negative effect, because part of the policy will be implemented; that of schools having to make student educational performance available through the internet. Consequently, the division between the connected and the unconnected will become even more profound, as the relatively advantaged will have improved access to near real-time information about their child’s educational progress and have a mechanism for direct and continuous communication to teachers and schools. The upshot will be that those without a home connection will be even more disadvantaged than they are now. This initiative will have the exact opposite effect of what is being intended: it will deepen the divide between the haves and the have-not’s.

2) Mentoring, tutoring, teaching

Just before Christmas, the government brought a new bill to parliament which will alter the guidelines and law governing the way that children in care are looked after. There are many provisions to this bill, but one section includes the proposal that all cared for children should have a designated teacher in their school. I thought it interesting that coverage of this legislation seemed to merge teaching, tutoring and mentoring as essentially a single type of activity, so in the Times Educational supplement the designated teacher was described as a mentor http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2463245 . This is not an isolated instance in the educational world, for example, a new e-mentoring product is being advertised which combines mentoring with eliminating truancy http://www.bettshow.com/page.cfm/Action=Press/PressID=33 . I accept that no one has a copyright on the definition of mentoring. However, at The Brightside Trust we have instinctively seen mentoring relationships as being a voluntary relationship in a relatively free social setting. I’d say this was the case across the mentoring community, for example, in most business mentoring schemes it is not usually seen as a good idea for someone with direct management responsibility to also be someone’s mentor. This is not the case in schools where teachers as responsible adults always stand in authority over children and the notion of the volunteer seems to be in the old military sense of volunteering, ‘you, you and you’. I think the power relations between teachers and pupils are fundamentally unbalanced and cannot flip-flop between an authority and a mentoring relationship. Any suspension of such power relations is dependent on the good will of the powerful, the teacher, and most children will be well aware as to how fragile such interactions are. I think the government would be wise to look to the existing system of independent visitors for cared for children (see the existing NCH example http://www.nch.org.uk/getinvolved/index.php?i=117) to provide mentoring in what are overtly voluntary relationships rather than to see this as an appropriate role for a designated teacher.

3) Confused of London Bridge

There was much press coverage of a government sponsored report that found the reading performance of children in England had fallen in an international comparator study from third to 19th in the world http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/28_11_07_pirls_report.pdf Here's a link to a BBC summary, if you don't fancy reading a very long report http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7117230.stm . I found this confusing, as I had only just finished reading another study, which argued that standards of reading had remained the same for 50 years http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7075015.stm Yet another international study, the OECD PISA study, also found a decline in the UK’s educational position, where fifteen-year-olds were found to have fallen from 8th to 24th place in math’s attainment over the past six years, in reading their ranking has dropped from 7th to 17th and in science from 4th to 14th., http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/04/nedu404.xml , the full report can be found at http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/2/0,3343,en_32252351_32236191_39718850_1_1_1_1,00.html
I’ve tried to follow government explanation for this slippage but frankly I am not clear. I think the main claim is that the UK system is improving but other countries are improving more rapidly. Also, there have also been suggestions of statistical unreliability as slightly different systems of data collection have been used between countries, while some statisticians have warned that a single year’s statistics are intrinsically unreliable, you need a series, and should base any analysis on multiple years of evidence.

This short season of educational standards reporting was further complicated by the American consultants McKinsey, who published the results of an extensive investigation into the world’s best performing school systems http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/ukireland/publications/pdf/Education_report.pdf They found that the quality of teaching staff was consistently the most important factor in educational achievement.

4) Transfer points

There seems to be increasing acknowledgment that transfer and transition points in the education system can often serve as the trigger for susceptible students begin to exhibit challenging behaviour. For example, the move to secondary school http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7072870.stm . This importance of transition points has been taken up by government http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/nov/20/children.drugsandalcohol and it also features in the rational for the new education bill, http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/educationandskills/docs/Raising%20Expectations.pdf This paper goes well beyond the much publicised raising of the education leaving age to 18. For example, on page 15, different types of students are identified as being potential beneficiaries of mentoring. Maybe we could approach government with suggestions as to how this could be achieved.

5) Poverty and disadvantage

A quartet of reports analysing disadvantage and poverty in the UK have recently become available. While not happy reading, these do map out the terrain we face.

Barnardos produced a vivid report into the experience of poverty in the UK http://www.barnardos.org.uk/poverty/poverty-findout.htm

HEFCE have released a study into the dynamics of disadvantage in a single geographical area with multiple social difficulties. The Guardian summary can be found at http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2196860,00.html This report reviews the ways in which different forms of disadvantage can be compounded and then become very difficult to address http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2007/rd16_07

The latest Joseph Rowntree Foundation poverty study as summarised in a BBC report http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7121667.stm and the full report http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/2152-poverty-social-exclusion.pdf
Finally, a report from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) Working out of Poverty: A study of the low paid and the working poor by Graeme Cooke and Kayte Lawton. The authors find that there are now 1.4 million poor children living in working households, the same number as in 1997. Since that year the number of poor children in workless households has fallen from two million to 1.4 million. This finding of families remaining in poverty, even when an adult moves into work, is a very difficult one for the government, as the anti-poverty program is premised on the idea that the main way out of poverty is employment.
Key points
· More than a million children in Britain are living in poverty despite the fact that at least one of their parents is in work
· Overall poverty levels in 2006 were the same as in 2002.
· Child poverty in 2006 was still 500,000 higher than the target set for 2005.
· Overall earnings inequalities are widening.
. Disability rather than lone parenthood is the factor most likely to lead to worklessness.

6) Gordon Brown’s vision for education is now on video

http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page13664.asp This speech is 36 minutes long, but if you want to be inspired by the dear leader himself, here it is. Among other things, he announces that there will be an investigation into how to increase the numbers of disadvantaged groups going into higher education by the national council for educational excellence. This is a new government advisory body http://www.policyhub.gov.uk/news_item/educational_excellence07.asp and I’m sure they’d be pleased to hear from The Brightside Trust. Meanwhile, the Conservative’s continue to develop their vision for schools http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/09/ntories109.xml