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.
Monday, 7 January 2008
2) Mentoring, tutoring, teaching
3) Confused of London Bridge
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
5) Poverty and disadvantage
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
Monday, 19 November 2007
1) Mentoring Research
2) What Skills
Unlike some people, the recent release of immigration figures didn’t make me think fondly of Enoch Powell; rather, it made me think again about the situation of the unemployed in the UK http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article2801894.ece. The Leitch review, as has been discussed here before, has predicted that unskilled employment will shrink dramatically in the UK over the next twenty years, and in an economy where there is movement of labour across the EU, it will mean the few remaining unskilled jobs will be contested by migrant labour. This double whammy of a reduction of unskilled work and greater competition for that unskilled work is very bad news for our home grown young NEETS. In the past, these young people could drop out, drift, and when reality bit back, possibly when they became responsible for a child, they would find a job and rejoin the mainstream. This looks an increasingly difficult project, as the jobs they will be able to find will be temporary and paid at the minimum wage. The group I think that are least well prepared for this new reality are white working class boys from areas where traditional heavy labouring work has disappeared over the past 30 years. Many of these young men remain locked into a macho culture that is rooted in a way of life that no longer exists. They proudly identify themselves as straight talking, no-nonsense, hard working, real men. Unfortunately, for them, their adopted culture tends to downgrade or denigrate those personal skills which are essential, even for the low wage, low skill, work of the future. Although my evidence is largely anecdotal, the reason NEETS cannot find work or training isn’t because their GCSE results are weak, it’s because they turn up late for work, argue with the supervisor, ignore customers and clash with their colleagues. Better to employ a willing eastern European, whose English may be poor, than struggle with one of our home-grown NEETS who you know will be unreliable and may cause trouble. Once again, I think this shows that the educational needs of the most disadvantaged and disaffected are at the level of discipline and non-cognitive skills rather than GCSEs grades. That’s where apparently trivial matters such as school lunch breaks and places to socialise, are important, especially for those children with the less developed social skills http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2209798,00.html .
3) Size Matters
Are secondary schools too big? http://news.independent.co.uk/education/schools/article3158166.ece It’s a simple point: we developed large comprehensive schools in the 1970s because of the need to combine existing grammar and secondary modern schools in most geographical areas. It wasn’t because they were seen as an optimum size. Shame we didn’t discuss this before committing billions of pounds on the schools rebuilding program http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6935505.stm . Still, maybe breaking down the large schools into smaller units and treating them as separate units could be a way of combining some of the advantages of large units (bulk purchasing, niche services and products) with the advantage of smaller units. The closer relationships of the smaller units would seem to make it less likely for a failing child to be overlooked and to make the transition from primary to secondary schooling less of a formidable leap.
4) Criminal Thoughts
OFSTED recently commissioned an e-survey by MORI to provide a ‘snapshot’ of school students attitudes and experience of schooling http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2212044,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront Although it’s not recorded in this article, the survey found that around 50% of students think they’ll go onto university, which is a much lower level of expressed intent than we are finding in baseline surveys of our e-mentoring projects, but about the right level of expectation given the reality. It was however, the problem of bullying that caught the attention of many commentators and this ‘coincided’ with Ed Balls announcing more money for anti-bullying schemes http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7094827.stm . Peer mentoring anti-bullying projects are not new, many have been running for years, but it’s difficult to know how useful they are, as I don’t know of any serious attempt to measure their effectiveness. I was reflecting on the apparently widespread experience by children of bullying and theft http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7036880.stm and how this is combined with a perception by children that the school authorities did little about it. I began to wonder if this was related to adult’s perception of crime in modern Britain, today. It has been a puzzle to government, police and some commentators as to why the fear of crime seems to be rising when the chances of being a victim of crime is in decline. Many blame the lurid and voyeuristic reporting of the press. While I can believe that this reporting can trigger a response, might its resonance be rooted in the largely forgotten memories of childhood, when crime was rife and no-one acted to stop it. Is it this experience, which is still lurking in the subconscious of many adults, the reason why they are vulnerable to such stories? For if one grows up in a society where crime both pays, and is ignored by the authorities, then you are more likely to believe, later in life, that crime is widespread, getting worse, and that the police won't do anything about it.
5) Choice and Disadvantage
Another report, another apparent blow to the Government’s schooling program http://education.guardian.co.uk/newschools/story/0,,2210064,00.html. The full report is to found at http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/files/12803.pdf . While the government feigned disappointment at these findings, in truth, I think they will find it useful, as they continue to try to re-orient government policy towards a more directly interventionist program of support for disadvantaged students. I would combine this review with the new HEFCE targets and policy. There is a feeling in government that policies to address educational disadvantage have not been sharp enough, not positive enough. However, this will inevitably raise the old problem of whether it is appropriate to limit the choices of the non-disadvantaged, in order to aid the disadvantaged. It’s the old problem; did the existence of high quality grammar schools also produce low quality secondary moderns?
The old Blairite educational team, which this government has inherited, is a delicate alliance, united in little, beyond a belief in meritocracy and finding a ‘third way’ to improving opportunities for the disadvantaged without restricting the choices of others. The key political question for the next period is how much will the old Thatcherites and Social Democrats, who make up the rump of the education team, stand for any restriction of choice in the education system. Their commitment was always to creating opportunities for the disadvantaged, while not restricting the choices of others; indeed for them, choice was the key to improvement and opportunity for all. This thin basis for unity may in part explain the routine blaming of bad teachers and teacher training for any bad news in the education system. It is a therapeutic howl, first developed by the ‘black papers’ lobby in the 1970s, and vented ever since, by both labour and conservative politicians alike. Like a football chant, it seems to have more to do with reinforcing group solidarity rather than being a factual description and analysis of the world. However, I doubt whether this shared chant will be enough to hold them together. I think for many of New Labour’s new found friends, any restrictions on student and parental choice would be the end of the affair. Expect to see sparks over A levels and Academies.
6) The Future
I’ve been told that the government are about to release a major report that they hope will ‘correct’ the impression that the life quality and life chances of disadvantaged children in the UK are not improving. This report, it is said, will lay the basis for the government’s new 10 year strategy. I sure it will be given a high profile launch, but fear not, I will post a link here as soon as it appears.
Sunday, 28 October 2007
1 E-mentoring as aftercare?
2 Scots do it differently
3 Too clever Eddie
However, the newspaper responses were almost entirely focused on whether the announcement of these new non-vocational diplomas, combined with a delay to the review of A levels until 2013, was indicative of a government manoeuvring to replace A levels with the new education diplomas, as had originally been proposed by the Tomlinson report http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2197531,00.html
The background to this is that Blair’s former education ministers buckled under pressure when presented with the Tomlinson report and refused to get rid of A levels. It’s going to be a recurring problem for the Brown government, how to reverse policies brought in by the Blair government, often by individuals still in the Cabinet, without admitting the reversal. The preferred strategy seems to be to make the changes by manoeuvre and stealth, accompanied by the mantra ‘circumstances have changed’. I think the press commentators were basically correct, this government would like to adopt the Tomlinson proposals, and in particular it would like to abolish A levels. Ed Balls thinks he can manoeuvre into a position where he can argue that diplomas have become the qualification of choice and that A levels can be phased out. Just one problem Eddie, the approach you’re adopting won’t work. The diplomas will not be seen to flourish as long as A levels are on general offer. Sometimes you cannot manoeuvre cleverly while presenting yourself as the unbiased Renaissance man making a rational choice.
Look back to 1988, when Mrs Thatcher abolished O levels. Thatcher abolished O levels in the teeth of opposition from her own party, her own supporters and her own supporting newspapers. She didn’t finesse the change, she didn’t manoeuvre, she knew that wouldn’t work, so she just did it, poleaxed them with a single blow, and that was the end of the debate and the end of O levels. Sometimes you just have to do it, Eddie. Take a leaf out of Mrs Thatcher’s book; some might say you’ve already borrowed the entire first volume, so what harm in one more page. As long as we have A levels there is no chance of diplomas being seen as an equal alternative, just as there was no chance of grammar and secondary modern schools ever having, to use the ministerial jargon of the 1960s, ‘parity of esteem’. Kill the A levels Eddie, shut your eyes and think of Maggie.
4 Future perfect
Limiting welfare, as a strategy to end poverty is, of course, nonsense, but as a way of getting some people to move into the workforce and out of poverty, has been shown to have some success during periods of full employment. In that regards, the Cameron policy is on a similar trajectory to that of the government. Unfortunately, it doesn't look to me as if the target of halving child poverty by 2010, which was the first and easiest part of this strategy, will be achieved. Today, the government are announcing a new unit to co-ordinate their anti-poverty drive, this will involve officials from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department for Children http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7066838.stm I’m not sure what they plan to do, but the link with the DWP suggests a further increased emphasis on getting carers into work. This is a worthwhile enterprise, which I could see The Brightside Trust being involved with, but ending child poverty by 2020, I'm afraid there's a lifetimes work here.
5 Young people today: I say bring back national service
These American origins will not feature strongly in the UK launch, as the aim will be to build on the Brown vision of Britishness. The movement will strongly feature the union flag and it will be projected as a force building national unity through community development. There will be an emphasis on the way that it unites individuals from all classes and ethnicities in a common endeavour. Politically, the quasi-military style will play well in middle England where it will be spun as instilling discipline into our feckless youth. It will also be presented as a practical way to mend the broken bits of society rather than just moaning about it (Cameron).
Still, a significant question remains, should this movement take its name from its inspirational founder and be called the Brownies, or maybe the brown shirts, oh no, I guess all forms of brown trousering is out; so the brown socks it is. Forward the brown socks, always loyal to our movements historic pledge, ‘a little community DIY or death’.
Monday, 8 October 2007
1 Sweet Dreams
These investigations often find their way into the national news and have for many years acted as a spur to social policy. For example, this project which literally mapped out the increasing social divisions in the UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6984707.stm . If you look round their website you'll find many similarly insightful reports. What I particularly like, is the way that their findings are often both surprising and counterintuitive. For example, http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/pdf/2123.pdf found that “Just 14 percent of variation in individuals' performance is accounted for by school quality”. I was genuinely surprised by this finding, as I had assumed that individual school quality was overwhelmingly important to overcoming educational disadvantage. I guess I had formed this opinion on the basis of government policy and statements of the past 20 years, which, in my opinion, have assumed individual school performance to be fundamentally, indeed at times, exclusively important. For us, as a charity addressing disadvantage, I believe this finding potentially broadens not only the site or focus of our work but what we see that work achieving. For example, the way mentoring and e-mentoring works towards overcoming disadvantage must be seen as much more than a school supplement.
It also suggests that understanding social disadvantage needs to be more imaginative; for example, I felt the approach adopted by the ‘dare to care campaign’ who asked children what they thought defined living in poverty was interesting. Not having a mobile phone featured strongly in the replies.
http://www.daretocarecampaign.com/News/Missing-school-trips-makes-you-poor---say-British-.aspx
2 Private Parts
3 Do you feel lucky?
‘The Cabinet Office has opened a consultation on the working of a new £10million risk capital investment fund for social enterprises. Many social enterprises find it difficult to access risk capital, leaving a gap in their finances. The risk capital investment fund will fill this gap and help develop better access to private and independent investment in the future.'
I don't know if it's a conscious revival of an old movement, but there were Victorian social housing companies that informally used the slogan ‘philanthropy and 5%'. It was a sort of ethical investment campaign of the 19th century, where money was raised to build social housing while guaranteeing the investor a moderate return on their money. I guess this is intended to be a similar model, so I cannot see this fund offering a high return to investors.
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/third_sector/documents/consultations/consultation_risk_capital.pdf
However, if we at The Brightside Trust had a ‘sure fire hit' of a project, and wanted to raise between £250,000 and £2 million, might this be an appropriate vehicle for funding. Do we have anything to contribute to the consultation exercise, given our experience of funding successful projects?
4 Calm before the storm
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2176286,00.html .
However, I think this mild mannered debate could get rather edgy rather rapidly. There is great unease in the Brown government that progress in reducing social disadvantage in the UK seems to be slow. The government are still committed to their very ambitious objective of ending child poverty by 2020, so there is real frustration that something as ‘easy’ as opening up higher education to the socially disadvantaged seems to be making little progress. Equally, on the basis of recent discussions I've had with some Aimhigher staff, they too are frustrated, but in their case because of what they see as government’s inability to stick to a consistent strategy or to let them get on with the job. Instead they find they have to cope with ever changing demands and guidelines. I predict this will come to a crunch next year, when schemes which cannot prove in detail that they are working with disadvantaged students, in the terms laid out by HEFCE, will suffer a ministerial biting. Remember, Gordon Brown only allowed himself one class struggle moment in the last 10 years, when he attacked Oxford University’s admissions procedures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Spence_Affair
As an end note, I notice that john Denham mentions that every secondary school is to have a higher education partnership and “We'll soon be setting out how formal partnerships through academies and trusts can be established.“
5 Young at heart
http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/files/images/In_and_Out_of_Sync_Final.pdf
The report identifies four conditions that are essential for developing innovative products, services and models on a large scale and in a sustainable way:
demand for the innovation within society;
good supply of ideas in workable forms;
effective strategies to connect supply and demand, and to find the right organisational forms for putting the innovation into practice;
ongoing learning and the ability to adapt to changes in the external environment.
I believe this is what we have been doing at The Brightside Trust, but I'm not sure that we have been doing it in an overt and systematic fashion, perhaps we should.
Monday, 24 September 2007
Disadvantage defined
For anyone working on widening participation related projects these guidelines are essential reading. As they are to be implemented from autumn 2007, I would suggest checking that you are HEFCE compliant as soon as possible. I particularly liked the rule of thumb that “Aimhigher partnerships and HE providers should aim to ensure that around two-thirds of participants in widening participation activities are from the target group.” The good news is that we appear to be ahead of the government’s game, as we have been evaluating our work in the terms that HEFCE recommend for the past 12 months. The only slightly surprising feature is the modified categorisation of adult employment which we can easily incorporate.
Overall, I welcome these guidelines, as they are relatively tight and proscriptive and should help us engage with disadvantaged populations.
HEFCE has promised universities and Aimhigher assistance with local data in order to identify qualifying neighbourhoods and schools. In the past, a number of universities have said they found this data difficult to obtain: frankly this claim is disingenuous. Even without HEFCE help, excellent school and neighbourhood data can be easily marshalled from two major on-line sources. If we find that partner organisations are claiming that a lack of local data is making evaluation difficult, then we at the Brightside Trust can show them how to construct their own local map.
Firstly, the government’s national statistics office, neighbourhood statistics http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/LeadHome.do;jsessionid=ac1f930bce6048c8bb53e5240d89babfb8ebe040ced.e38PbNqOa3qRe34LbxuNah4ObNj0n6jAmljGr5XDqQLvpAe?bhcp=1 Why not try your own postcode and see the range of datasets that can be drawn upon. If looking in detail, I recommend choosing the ‘more areas’ tab in section 2 and then selecting ‘lower layer super output area’, as your unit of choice. This has emerged as the fashionable unit of analysis among the pointy head analysts of neighbourhoods in the UK and will be the HEFCE unit of choice when they get their act together. Indeed, if you really want to be part of the ‘in’ crowd, use the other tab on the data sets screen to get a view of the range of stats available. Note lower layer super output areas can be found by postcode, so as long as you know a student’s postcode then you can define their neighbourhood as disadvantaged or not. For individual school details, ask the student which school they attend and then draw on the OFSTED website http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/portal/site/Internet/menuitem.2daefc8f97e956fe628a0d8308c08a0c/?vgnextoid=ba6a8587fd24a010VgnVCM1000008192a8c0RCRD, where every school in the UK’s latest inspection report can be downloaded. This provides considerable detail of both the schools performance, including the strengths and weaknesses of individual subject departments as well as the demographic and social profile of its pupil population.
There can be no excuses for non-compliance!
So, I hear you ask, how are people going to bend the rules. I know where I’d begin: there are some small neighbourhoods which are sharply divided between advantaged and disadvantaged, especially in cities, especially in London. For example, neighbourhoods in Islington where multimillion pound properties stand over the road from Victorian council flats. Even with lower layer super output area small area analysis, these neighbourhoods will average out as disadvantaged (each area has around 2000 people). Who’d care to bet that some universities haven’t already identified the post codes of these ‘golden’ lower layer super output areas and will be especially welcoming to its residents.
Wednesday, 5 September 2007
1 Gangs, Shooting and Anarchy
I think we need to understand a little more before prescribing a fix. In pursuit of that, I think Camila Batmanghelidjh has written an interesting article
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2893902.ece
This line of argument chimes with my own experience from when I ran a group for 14 year-old boys on the edge of school dropout and offending. It was a condition of group membership that they attended school and kept out of trouble with the law. One day I received a report from the police juvenile bureau that one of the boys had been caught stealing a vehicle. I spoke to him about what had happened and he told me, in a matter-of-fact fashion, that he had stolen a steam roller (if this is what they are still called) from a road repair site. I couldn’t believe the stupidity of it, I asked him, what were you thinking of; how were you going to outrun the police on a steam roller; what was the point of taking it, you couldn’t sell it - All good rational questions and, of course, completely irrelevant. He shrugged, no answer. The point I only later came to understand, was that he didn’t think because he lived in a world where there wasn’t any point in ‘thinking’. Without outlining his personal history, his life had been chaotic; he couldn’t plan or rely on anything or anyone, so before he did things he didn’t ask himself consequences-type questions. Rather, he lived in the present, and took it from there. This tended to short-termism in decision making and also to doing what made him feel good at that moment. I agree with Camila, this is nihilism, not anarchy.
However, I’d like to ask a trickier question: are these children so very different from the rest of modern British society? The way the press are speaking of gang members they are seen as self evidently, ‘the other’, the jackals of society, living by a different philosophy, uniquely selfish and dangerous to those around them. However, when the gang members look at ‘us’, what do they see? I would say they see a society dominated by a similar ethos of amoral individualism. This ethos includes a similar disregard for others and a disrespect for the law when it is thought to be interfering with an individual’s immediate desires. If we brought a Liverpool gang to London Bridge, might they look no further than the respectable middle class commuter cyclists disregarding all traffic laws and caring nothing for the safety of pedestrians as they hurtle along the pavement? If they asked the cyclists why they do this, they’d be told it’s because they are in danger from the car drivers who care nothing about them, and who similarly breach traffic laws whenever they think they can get away with it, including dangerously making calls on their mobile phones. Our child thugs might then point out that many more children are killed each year by wilfully careless car drivers than by gang members with guns. Also, when people speak of having alternative adult role models for these children, who do they have in mind? Sports personalities perhaps, but what lessons can be learnt from them. It seems to me, that many footballers and their partners are appalling individuals leading trite and dissolute lives. Or perhaps we should introduce them to the City folks who make money out of selling arms to repressive regimes and asset stripping third world countries of their natural resources, what is our juvenile gunman going to learn from them - to increase his prices perhaps. Or the Daily-Mail-reading-60-year-old who rants about the law being flouted, while they park in the parent and baby spaces at the supermarket, allow their dog to run loose and foul the local playing field, and drive home from the golf club drunk as a Lord. Is our visiting crew really so different, when they individualistically and amorally pursue their own self-interest with no concern about the impact on others. I’d go further; I’d ask who came first, who is imitating whom.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advising hugging a hoodie; they’ll either hurt you or steal your money or probably both. You can call these children feral, if you like; life for them is indeed a sort of opportunistic scavenging in an unpredictable and unstable world. There are many more children growing up in chaotic environments than is often acknowledged, for example, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2327918.ece
Finally, I suspect when the young person who committed this latest shooting is caught, their explanation will seem wilfully inadequate. However, rather than reacting with anger about that, I suggest, accept it at face value and see this shooting as a product of lives lived as a series of reactions to events, not as some diabolical strategic gang initiative that went wrong, and then, most sadly of all, recognise that the reasons for murder can be truly banal.
2 You(test)Tube
Video is a bit slow and I couldn’t see a way to directly embed into this blog. Why not try http://www.scivee.tv/node/53 - OK, it’s a specialist taste.
3 This Year’s Physics GCSE Paper.
1. C, 2. B, 3. C, 4. B, 5. C, 6. B, 7. B, 8. C, 9. A, 10. C, 11. D, 12. D, 13. A, 14. C, 15. C, 16. D, 17. A, 18. D, 19. A, 20. B, 21. D, 22. A, 23. B, 24. D, 25. C, 26. C, 27. C, 28. C, 29. B, 30. A, 31. D, 32. C, 33. A, 34. D, 35. A, 36. D, 37. C, 38. B, 39. D, 40. C
Sunday, 12 August 2007
1 Star Turn
2 Whistling Eddie
3 Tough Choices
4 Everyone’s Favourite Philanthropist
5 Young People Today
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,,2136106,00.html I would argue that the history of youth clubs in the UK, since at least the 1960s, has been a cycle of promotion and then cutback, every 10 to 15 years. I’m worried that the establishment and running of youth clubs is seen as unproblematic; believe me they are not. The proposal to give ‘young people’ control of 25% of the budget is frankly bonkers. This could only be implemented if a carefully selected group of young people were given very closely proscribed choices, which they would not see as controlling the budget. Result: disenchantment and rejection all round. There are many practical questions, not least, how difficult it can be to engage some individuals in a controlled fashion. For example, in my experience, as soon as a youth club is established there are exclusions – the excluded then either hang around the door, where they are at best a nuisance and often resentful and dangerous and/or they are elsewhere on the estate acting as an even more concentrated group of antisocial individuals.
I’m worried that this is another new Labour house built on sand. New Labour has been good at using the weight of public prejudice to advance progressive policies, a kind of political Jujutsu, using their opponents’ weight against them. The danger is that while simple answers appeal to prejudice, they are not enough to guide successful policy. Certainly among some sections of the press there is an open contempt for social workers of all kinds, who are said to be more concerned about political correctness than taking effective action. Implicitly or explicitly, it is assumed that this is a straightforward occupation if you are practical, down-to-earth and have common sense: youth clubs, what’s to know?
In my opinion, youth work among disaffected young people is difficult and in many ways I think it’s getting more difficult. I thought this when reading an extended article about Eton Manor, a youth club that ran from the early twentieth century until the 1960s in a rough part of Hackney http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2133792,00.html . Reading the Eton Manor story, it’s the differences between the 1960s and now, that struck me. For example, I’d forgotten that it used to be common practice to have a shooting range as an appropriate activity for disadvantaged boys; I guess to encourage them to join the military. What of Eton Manor that would work today? I cannot see a system based on class deference to old Etonians being a success; but role models, like the boxer, seem just as relevant; upgrading the shooting range to a drive-by shooting range – perhaps not.
In my opinion, once again government are underestimating how difficult these things are. My fear is that after bunging a load of money into ill thought out schemes they will then silently back away. If this happens, then the cycle of promoting youth services, to only see them cut back and marginalised a few years later, will continue.
Saturday, 21 July 2007
1) Good News
2 ) welfare reform, the government green paper
Availability for socially useful work used to be a requirement for claiming benefit. The last reference I’ve found to actually mobilising the unemployed for work was the winter of 1946/47 when unemployed men were used to clear snow.
But, transferring single parents onto job seekers allowance, after the youngest child reaches the age of 7, is a new proposal. It is more stringent than the recent Freud report proposed and more than the Conservatives in their recent policy review were arguing.
I was surprised when this government paper hasn’t generated much interest. I guess journalists think that after the predictable protest, the government will back down. I disagree, I think this will happen. I recognise I could be wrong, ( I am the person who stood up in a Labour party meeting in 1979 and said the election of Margaret Thatcher didn’t matter, as she wouldn’t last 6 months) but I don’t think the government are going to back down on this one. The reaction of the single parent pressure groups was entirely predictable. The hostile reaction of the left of the Labour party will also be entirely predictable. Yet, the government have brought this forward, why? I think there are two reasons: it will play well in marginal constituencies and it provides cover for further expanding welfare expenditure.
This kind of initiative plays well with the lower middle classes who make up a crucial component of the population of most marginal parliamentary seats. These often previous Tory voters have recently been looking once again at the Tories in a favourable light. Suggesting single parents should be looking for work when their youngest child is 7 outflanks the Tories on their right and in a way that really hurts. Labour is apparently getting tough with single parent benefit scroungers while flaky Dave wants to hug a hoody, this drives them nuts. This same social group are also going to be dangerously exercised by the housing building program that Brown has already announced. These ‘natural born conservatives’ don’t want a mixed tenure housing development in their own backyard but their sons and daughters can’t leave home because of house prices. Buckling under these contradictory pressures the Tories find themselves with a policy of both supporting increases to the housing supply while opposing building in every area. This weakness will be remorselessly attacked by the Labour party, hoping to attract the votes of the young people, whose highest priority is housing, while confusing the parents who would be glad to see the back of their adult children but don‘t want urban sprawl.
Secondly, shifting single parents into the workforce makes the case for more welfare spending: how so? It looks to me like the Bill Clinton strategy; no not the lying on oath, I mean the strategy he adopted to force the Republicans to support increased spending on child care centres for the poor. He argued that if single parents were to end their lifetime dependence on welfare then there first had to be affordable care for their children, if they were to go out to work. In return for a major increase in child care spending Bill Clinton ended the entitlement to long term welfare benefits for single parents in the USA.
Liberal critics of this strategy predicted that children would be dying on the streets of the big cities of the USA when the winter came, as the then homeless single parent families would be without shelter. In the event, a few poor people did die but no more than usual. There have also been some real success stories, people who when forced into the labour market have flourished. The links between the Democrats and the UK’s Labour party are strong with a constant exchange of people between organisations. I think this Green Paper has been developed after a detailed review of the American political and practical experience.
As I have gone on about in the past, this government needs to spend more money if it is to put in place the measures and organisations that are needed to get close to key targets such as ending child poverty by 2020. The question is how to get more tax money out of the middle classes; I think the answer is to play to their prejudices. So, although this has had a slow start I think it will become an important feature of the government’s legislative programme; or maybe its time for another 1979 moment for me.
3) Catch the wave
As for the rise in the new wealthy: if you are interested take a look at this new book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Richistan-Journey-Through-Century-Wealth/dp/0749928239/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/026-6725407-0987623?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184857996&sr=8-1 Why the title, Richistan - because with their relatively large numbers, separation from the rest of society and their tendency to gather together, the author sees the western European new rich as a country – Richistan. Like all other countries, there are social differences and the author develops an interesting categorisation or typology of the rich. For example, he discusses how the lower rich in the USA, the single digit millionaires, tend to be Republican and conservative, while the billionaires, the seriously rich, tend towards liberal and Democrat. This is a fun easy read and it might even be useful when trying to understand what we are doing at The Brightside Trust, especially chapter 8, Performance Philanthropy. I am placing my own copy of Richistan in The Brightside Trust library; I may not have the billions but I can adopt the lifestyle.
4) The digital divide
5) Academies, why are we doing this, Ed?
This change distracted me from the thought that Ed might be demonic - as I thought exemption from the National Curriculum was one of the defining characteristics of the Academies program. For me, this change raised the question, what then are the defining features of an Academy? The starting point used to be they were free from state control and that included freedom from the national curriculum. It used to be said that they would be directed and endowed by successful businesses and the entrepreneurs who ran them. In practice, businesses brought in a minimum of 2 million pounds. But Ed announced that "from today, I am abolishing the current requirement for universities and high-performing schools and colleges to provide £2 million before they can sponsor an Academy. “ So, a cash gift is not a defining feature. Could it be that universities have a similar level of competence at running successful organisations as successful entrepreneurs and businesses? This strange thought drew me to look more closely at the list of universities that Ed named as the advance guard of universities wishing to sponsor Academies. It included Queen Mary, University of London, who had only 3 days earlier featured in another list, one drawn up by HEFCE, of failing universities, which the Guardian reported under the headline ‘Secret list of universities facing collapse, Papers name 46 institutions in crisis’ http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,2120991,00.html .When combined with the pedestrian progress universities have made in their widening participation programs, I’m afraid I feel it reasonable to ask the question, wouldn’t it be wise if these universities were to concentrate on improving their own performance, rather than visiting their flawed talents on a secondary school. So, its not a proven track record of running successful organisations that is the stuff of Academies. Still puzzled, I turned again to Ed’s speech "But the test of whether an organisation can be a potential sponsor should not be its bank balance, but whether it can demonstrate leadership, innovation, and commitment to act in the public interest."
How does this apply to the likes of Peter Vardy, car salesman and Christian fundamentalist, who was allowed to be an early sponsor of an Academy. Was being one of the North-East of England’s largest second hand car salesman proof of a commitment to act in the public interest? It also shows that universities educational expertise cannot be a reason or criteria for sponsorship because the early sponsors such as Vardy had little or none.
Perhaps the importance of Academies was to get schools out of local authority control? Again, that seemed to be the case at the start of the program, but of late local authorities are being allowed to sponsor academies. http://www.sunderland.gov.uk/Pages/press/pritem.asp?Id=10058 - so it cannot be that.
Perhaps, then, it was all a ploy to raise money to build new schools in poor areas in a way that didn't outrage the middle classes. But, the government are already committed to rebuilding all secondary schools in England anyway. So, it cannot be that either.
The only common attribute that I can identify, that seems to be a common feature across the Academies’ program, is that they are more demanding of the school staff. Staff from the schools that are being replaced have had to apply for jobs at the new Academies, there is no automatic transfer. It is also made plain at recruitment that they will be expected to deliver better academic results and the opportunity is also often taken to extend the hours staff are expected to be at the school.. Can it be that this whole exercise of creating Academies is only a device to change the working culture and ethos of state school teachers and support staff? Is this it: I don’t know. Even if it is, I’m still puzzled as to why the justification and the content of the program is jumping around and appears to be manifestly contradictory.
6) Bad News
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
1 It’s the Family, Stupid
I want to mention 3 new departments that may be of interest to the work of The Brightside Trust. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the Department of Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBER).
In my opinion, the press and TV coverage of the recent changes to the UK government has been overly dominated by the story of the prime-ministers. Even this narrative, not helped by the release of Alistair Campbell’s diaries, has been largely focused on the personalities and styles of Blair versus Brown. In so far as the cabinet reshuffle was noticed it was seen in terms of who is Blairite and who are Brown supporters. Little or no interest has been shown in the changes to departmental structures that have taken place.
In my opinion, this is a mistake, as important reconfigurations of policies and strategy lie behind the restructuring of Whitehall departments. I think this will become apparent over the next weeks and months, if only because Ed Balls the new secretary of state for education will be making speeches that are not primarily about education; they will be dominated by discussion of families and poverty.
The background to this is twofold. First, the government’s improvement programs for UK society, seemed, to many, to have stalled. In particular, the Brown team have been stung by the way in which social mobility does not seem to have improved after10 years of Labour government. There still seems to be an underclass, which is both socially disadvantaged and socially disruptive. Also, the government is failing to get close to its target of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020. In particular, they are worried by research which has shown that socially disadvantaged children are already a year behind educationally, by the age of 3, and as other studies have shown, lower educational achievers are not socially mobile: Labour wasn’t working! Secondly, the Conservatives are making ‘fixing our broken society’ the central theme of their campaigning.
Ed Balls should not be seen as another secretary of state for education, his brief isn’t just to ‘run and improve education’. This new department is Brown’s main instrument to bump start social change. The key mechanism to this is education, however, this department is more than that, it is recognition that unless the basis for fully taking advantage of educational opportunities is in place, then the offer is only partly taken up by the disadvantaged. Consequently, the new department should be seen as facilitating maximum educational consumption, as well as ensuring the best possible products are on offer. Gaze upon the departmental structure and responsibilities http://www.dfes.gov.uk/aboutus/whoswho/ministers.shtml
It is worth noting that higher education (HE) is not part of the remit; it is in the new Department of Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS). I don't like this split: I recognise there has to be limits to the size and scope of Whitehall departments, but I think this division will be problematic, especially when it comes to the widening participation agenda. I think DIUS will be drawn away from the less exciting widening of opportunities and skills agenda and will focus on world beating innovation through, for example, scientific invention in elite institutions of higher education. I see a real danger of these two icebergs drifting apart and this drift will be pulled by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBER).
If one looks at the ministerial structure of DIUS
http://www.dius.gov.uk/pressreleases/press.htm you will see our old supporter Bill Rammell is listed. It was widely reported that Bill Rammell ‘keeps the job he had …since 2005 at the new DIUS.’ (Times higher july 6th 2007). I think this is to underplay his new role. I think that he is the person on whom this strain of balancing widening participation in HE with promoting world class institutions will fall. I know that asserting that there can be contradictions between egalitarian and meritcratic objectives is hardly a revelation, but as the different emphases cause the different departments to bump and conflict over the detail of policy, it will fall to Bill to sort out. His problem is that resolution of these contradictions isn’t just a matter of cleverly balancing ideas; these contradictions are real and will be played out in nearly every resource and/or policy question that he has to decide. To complicate his position even further, I don’t see this as a zero sum game. There will be win-win options in the multiplicity of options out there, but Bill and his people are going to have to work hard to find them. They are really going to need to understand the nature of the things they are dealing with, situation by situation. We, and others with genuine expertise, can help in this, if given the chance.
Compare Bill’s brief to that of his colleague Ian Pearson: Minister of State for Science and Innovation, who has a much clearer, almost Wilsonian brief, excitement of the white hot heat of the technological revolution, kind of stuff. I think it likely that the Brightside Trust’s work will bring us into contact with this minister, as well. However, he is dealing with an entity that in terms of its ideology, interests and outlook is a fairly homogenous body; in short, if he keeps doing what’s been done in the past, albeit with a few added flourishes, then things will almost certainly work out and nobody will get too excited. He will be able to showboat around: the worst that could happen is that he spends the equivalent of a couple of hours stuck on a mud bank; Bill, on the other hand, if he just goes with the flow, will almost certainly hit the rocks!
In my opinion, if the egalitarian momentum of the social mobility strategies of the work of the Department of Children, Schools and Families is to be carried forward into higher education then it needs to be married in detail and practice to the meritocratic ethos of the global market and innovation, and that is hard to do.
More specifically, in this organisational split, I see the danger that the WP social mobility agenda will derail at 14+, when children start to leave the nurturing environment of the DCSF and enter the ‘adult’ world of FE and HE. I do not like the way that responsibility for the new 14-19 diplomas is with the DCSF while responsibility for the running of FE colleges is now split between DIUS and local authorities. I am worried that this new structure makes disadvantaged lower achieving students marginal at age 14: this is too early for them to left to their own resources and devices. I would argue that we know the processes of disadvantage continue even beyond university entry and that without a sustained program of widening participation and support, then there will not be any increase in numbers of disadvantaged students entering and succeeding in higher education. The danger is that the gains of the DCSF years will unravel for many students at aged 14. This organisational split is yet another problem for the new 14-19 diploma rollout. Unless Bill Rammell really gets his act together, then the whole Brown project will be in trouble!
Finally, the third new department, http://www.berr.gov.uk Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBER). DBER’s brief is to work closely with DIUS, especially in areas of scientific research and innovation, this could be relevant for some Brightside Trust projects. However, for me, in the short term, its significance was to show how the British civil service is still world class. Within hours of the announcement of this new ministry, they had resolved the major question of the reorganisation - what name should the ministry to be known by? They are calling it Chris. This proves there have been real efficiency gains by Whitehall in recent years, I can remember when Iraq invaded Kuwait, it took 2 days of pondering in the foreign office to define the important question - will the new country be called Kuaq or Irate. Makes you proud to be British, well it does Gordon.
2 Quick Fix
Some are claiming that the systematic use of a particular teaching method, synthetic phonics, is, of itself, enough to end illiteracy. I suspect the active involvement of parents in the process is at least part of the reason for its success, not just the change of teaching methods, however the success documented in this article is a remarkable achievement.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/primaryeducation/story/0,,2122127,00.html
Friday, 22 June 2007
1) What can we expect from Gordon Brown?
2) It’s that man again
First, a little background information from me: If one looks at the effect of government tax policy over the last 10 years, then I think you can see a consistent strategy of shifting a little money from the middle classes towards getting unemployed parents into work and supporting low earning parents in work. In particular, we have seen the introduction of child tax credits and working tax credits which, as I illustrate below, have generated significant sums of money for some people. However, as has been characteristic of Blair’s general welfare strategy, these payments, or what has been in effect the introduction of negative income tax for some, have been downplayed. I think this is because it was thought it wouldn’t meet with the approval of middle England if they knew the sums involved and who was receiving them. For example, according to Frank Field “In 2006, a lone parent with 2 children under 11, working 16 hours a week on the minimum wage, gained a total net income of £487 a week, largely due to tax credits.” (page 21) I note that this is from a part-time job which, as far as I can see, as the minimum wage is £5.35 per hour would otherwise generate gross earnings of £85.60. I can well believe Frank Field has intentionally chosen this example as one of the system’s ‘big winners’. However for him it illustrates the inequity of the present system as “In order to attain the same weekly income, an equivalent two parent household needed to work 116 hours a week; an extraordinary 100 hours more than the single parent” (page 21)
In this vein and in this detail, Frank Field discusses how the benefits system is both assisting and apparently hindering the government’s attempt to abolish child poverty. Unfortunately, I cannot say, read this report and the working of the welfare system will become clear. I myself am still looking for a ‘welfare benefits for dummies’ type of publication, but I think it significant that no-one came forward to challenge Frank Field on his facts when this report came out.
What I do know is that large sums of money are involved here. I calculate that if the money that has gone into the welfare to work schemes and benefits, had gone instead into income tax cuts, then we could have seen a general 3p in the pound reduction to the basic rate. This will not have escaped the attention of the Conservative party who often speak of sharing the benefits of economic growth between state spending and the tax payer.
3) The Magic Roundabout
I find it surprising that despite vicious periodic attacks and a continuous wall of sound and prejudice about what they call progressive education, theme based teaching and learning has continued to thrive (see for example the likes of the Daily Mail, this article by Max Hastings ‘education today is a form of child abuse’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_page_id=1787&in_article_id=461356 ). This is all the more surprising as this opposition has been continuously supported by politicians, beginning with Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in 1979, continuing through the Thatcher years and then through the Major and Blair years.
It has been convenient for opponents of modern teaching methods to counterpoise ‘progressive education’ to ‘rigorous subject based education’. It doesn’t seem to matter that this is a largely pointless debate, as teachers have always done both. In my opinion, allowing this question to dominate educational and schooling discussions has been very misleading and unhelpful. As the TES articles above make clear, teachers are very careful to mix theme development with structured learning in ways that they feel appropriate.
Are we destined to go round and round for ever in a sterile and often puerile debate opposing rigorous teaching to learning by exploration? No matter that anyone who has spent 5 minutes in a classroom knows that these two things go together and that developing enthusiasm is the precursor for engaging children in learning. This is especially so in primary school. What’s more, we need the imaginative combination of both and will only achieve this by giving teachers permission, time and resources to be creative. Unless they are allowed to stimulate a fascination with education in their students then the much vaunted life-long-learning that is said to be essential to the country’s future prosperity will not happen. Remember: the old style school system used to turn most people off education for the rest of their lives.
4) The right to roam
What I liked was the map that showed the geographical area over which 3 generations of children were allowed to move around unsupervised. For this generation it had diminished to almost nothing.
I’ve seen many interviews with parents who when asked as to why they restricted their children’s liberty to roam, usually cite three things: the growth of traffic, making roads more dangerous, the growth of crime and in particular the increasing threat of abduction and murder of children by paedophiles. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand how children can wheedle their way into your affections and how parents and guardians will want to do all they can to keep them safe. However, when one looks closely at these expressed parental fears then some interesting facts seem relevant.
First, the peak year for children killed in traffic accidents was 1922. I’m not playing with numbers here, I’m not saying relative to the increase in traffic, I mean in absolute numbers; half as many children are killed each year in road accidents today as there were in 1922, despite a 25-fold increase in traffic. The parents of the grandfather in the Daily Mail example should have been more fearful of traffic than the parents of today. Child mortality rates have consistently fallen since 1900 and continue to fall http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=952
In 2002 there did seem to be evidence of increasing child abduction. It jumped by 45% in a single year. However, as a Home Office briefing subsequently explained http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r225.pdf this was closely linked to a change in the way the Police understood and recorded this crime. According to the NSPCC child murder has been constant, for at least 30 years, at the rate of 79 per year.
Why don’t these facts influence parents? I can well believe that panic is stoked by a sensationalist national press and TV. For example, the coverage of events such as the disappearance of Madeline McCann is probably part of the reason for this besieged mentality.
But, for me it still leaves open the question as to why people are apparently so susceptible? I think it has something to do with a changing consciousness about death. In short, I don’t think our modern consumer society can cope with it. I’m not saying it was a trivial matter to loose a child a hundred years ago, but it was not unexpected or unbelievable. Whether through disease, warfare or childbirth, the death of your children was part of life. You didn’t welcome it but you prepared for the possibility and then coped when it happened. I know from my own family history this was why ordinary Victorian families began giving their children two or more forenames; so that in the event of a child’s death the family forename, as well as the family surname, would continue. For example, my great grand father’s name was William Thomas Twineham, his older brother William Albert Twineham died in 1916 at the battle of the Somme. Consequently, despite the older son’s death, a William Twineham went on to the next generation. Compared to them, the modern western consumer seems ill prepared. When faced with the possibility of unwanted outcomes we panic and barricade the doors.
The result seems to be a generation of children who will be less prepared to cope in the world when they eventually have to take flight. Also, keeping children locked up in the home might not even work in the short-term. Remember, most sexual abuse of children is carried out by adult male family and friends. As a child you might well be better off taking your chances, with other children in the woods, than being home alone with your uncle!