Last year, only 176, of the nearly 30,000 pupils who got three grade As at A-level were eligible for free school meals: that’s ½ of 1% ! http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2259334,00.html Now, based on my personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I suspect that at least some of those golden 176 were children of recent asylum seekers and refugees; also, I suspect that a few will have been at private schools on scholarship programs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Consequently, I’m left wondering if any of the 176 who gained 3 As came through the mainstream school system. I might try and get a friendly Tory MP to ask the question. Perhaps that’s why Blair used to say education, education, education – there were three of them.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
1 Stunning: well, it should be
2 Crisis, what crisis?
The public accounts committee (PAC) recently reviewed university dropout rates and their report was generally critical of the efforts being made by the universities http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article3423483.ece . The headline of their investigation was that nearly 25% of students fail to complete their degree courses and that course drop-out was more prevalent amongst students from disadvantaged backgrounds; that despite many millions of pounds being spent by universities to supposedly address the failure rate, which had not improved over time http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/leading-article-dropout-waste-784623.html . Problem, what problem, seemed to be the view from HEFCE http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/news/story/0,,2259840,00.html
3 Mistake
Under the new legislation, the government are going to allow some young people to leave education and training before the age of 18 if they can show they are in difficult personal circumstances http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7258913.stm. In my opinion, the government seem to have learnt nothing from the experience of incapacity benefit. Building in these exceptions is a bad idea; it will mean the very types of people who are now teenage NEETs will remain so, as they will leave the education system of the back of one of these exceptions. Yes, it will be hard to keep all young people in education and/or training until 18 but that was bound to be the case. We didn’t need a legislative change to keep those in education who would remain in it anyway. Government should stiffen its resolve, and remember what happened when education leaving dates were raised in the past – within a couple of years they became generally accepted.
4 Strength through work
I thought this was a good example of the arguments about single parents in employment http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/feb/23/workandcareers.familyfinance. Note the calculation at the end, which shows how essential the in-work benefits are to make work pay, even at this marginal level. This cost is important when calculating the cost of single parents working to the rest of society. I often find that liberal advocates of tax credits are shy about the costs of these schemes. I calculate that this person’s untaxed income without benefits would be £88.32 gross, way below the level of benefits income; it has to be toped-up with negative income tax and housing benefit, to make the worker marginally better off. I’m not against the project; I just don’t think we can hide this truth as it has major consequences for the welfare budget as a whole.
5 Advice
6 It was good enough for the Foreign Secretary and Nance
A study claims to show that middle class kids do educationally OK even when they attend less fashionable comprehensive schools. I know it is asking a lot of parents or guardians to make such a choice and possibly sad that their children’s good performance seems to be because they stick with their own, but it would make schooling in the UK so much easier if everyone did it. http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2258392,00.html
7 Your call is valuable to us
While there has been much debate recently about top grade A levels and elite universities, in my opinion, the equally important arena for improving skills and educational qualifications in the UK, that of the workplace has tended to be neglected. This article considers the practical advantages and costs that someone working in a call centre faces when considering investing in a work based qualification http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/feb/18/2
Saturday, 16 February 2008
1 Bargain
According to this article, over the past 5 years the money spent on university widening participation schemes for the disadvantaged has amounted to £211,500 per extra student recruited http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=512336&in_page_id=1770 . I guess that we will be hearing more of this statistic when the government gets round to launching their plans for the next phase of Aimhigher, which were due to be published in January and yet, strangely, have yet to appear. I remain convinced that part of the reason for such limited success has been a strategic underestimation of the real and specific difficulties of attracting disadvantaged students into higher education. A recent piece of Sutton trust research, this time on university choice, sheds light on the subject http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2256262,00.html full report at http://www.suttontrust.com/reports/StaffordshireReportFinal.pdf
2 Mentoring for the gifted and talented
The government has moved to combine with what they see as the academically elite recruits in their ‘Teach First scheme’ with disadvantaged, but bright pupils, in a bid to raise their applications to Russell group universities. Pupils on free school meals and who have also been identified as "gifted and talented" will receive support from Teach First Advocates in applying for highly competitive courses http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7217619.stm The government sees this as a mentoring program and it will include participants from the Teach First scheme who have ceased teaching in schools and are now working outside of the education sector.
3 Attitudes to the poor and poverty
A report from the Joseph Rowntree Trust looked at public attitudes to the poor and poverty using data from the British Social Attitudes survey http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/1999-poverty-attitudes-survey.pdf . In summary, I think this survey shows that the majority of British people are sympathetic to those people living in some form of absolute poverty, such as those suffering inadequate nutrition or being unable to sustain life without going into debt but not towards those in relative poverty. Attitudes to the poor also seem to be hardening, as in the latest British Social Attitudes survey, one-third of the 3,000 people interviewed believed that poverty was "an inevitable part of modern life" and a rising number laid the blame on the poor themselves; 27% of those surveyed thinking that poverty was due to "laziness or lack of willpower", up from 19% in 1984. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/23/socialexclusion
4 Is this the future?
Last Sunday, Gordon Brown took the opportunity to place an article in the Observer newspaper where he tried to explain both the moral inspiration and the analysis that lies at the heart of this government’s education and economic policy: that educational opportunity and achievement is not only vital for personal development and personal economic success but is also essential for the economic success of the nation http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/10/gordonbrown.education This argument is not new, it is built on the findings of the Leitch report of last year, which analysed the prospects for the UK’s economy for the next 20 years. This report was met with almost universal praise at the time of its publication and is now often wheeled out as an incontestable reference point. However, I fear that it makes a number of assumptions which are rarely discussed and which may cause problems in the future. First, for the most part, the report assumed that skills are the same thing as educational qualifications. The UK experience is that this is sometimes a fair assumption but sometimes it is not. Second, there is the much quoted assertion that by 2020 the number of jobs that require no qualifications will have shrunk from 3.6m to just 600,000. As this excellent article shows, this was an assumption about the nature of the future labour force not a projection of labour needs. http://education.guardian.co.uk/further/story/0,,2248309,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=8 I do not think these factors negate Brown’s admirable vision for the future, but I wish that his policy makers would face up to these types of complication when developing programs, rather than ‘discovering’ them through the failure of well meaning but simplistic policy initiatives .
5 Halt, who goes where?
A Government plan to construct a national database of the educational careers and achievements of all UK citizens seems to be underway http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/13/nschool313.xml While some may see this as part of a secret liberal plot to destroy the British way of life, I prefer to dwell on a more mundane consolation; that any such database will be a significant boost to educational research, as it will make the tracking of detailed educational outcomes a much more practical venture. A major difficulty for any such research, until now, has been the lack of any mechanisms to track individuals once they have left the schooling system. This has been true even when they have only moved into higher education, as school and UCAS reference codes were different and not easily matched. If this database is implemented, then I would expect to see some early results, especially in areas such as assessing the effectiveness of widening participation schemes into higher education. It would also facilitate longer term assessments into the significance of education and training for people’s lives.
6 Dads Army
Some suggestions, however bad, just seem to keep coming around http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7245122.stm yes, I’m sure that’s what disadvantaged pupils need: being taught by battlefield survivors who are working through the psychological trauma of their futile cannon fodder years. Why stop at teachers? Surely there is a role as detached youth workers where they could bring their insights to cross community dialogue http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/15/communities.uksecurity .
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
1 The government plan for children
The publication of this plan is intended to be a major policy statement that will shape children and families policy for the rest of the time of this government. I know people complain that they don’t have time to read this kind of long report, so here’s the minister in charge, Ed Balls, telling you about it, jackanory style http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6sAnrRe7Xk If this inspires you, then there is a summary that covers the main points http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/childrensplan/downloads/Childrens_Plan_Executive_Summary.pdf or even the whole plan at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/childrensplan/downloads/The_Childrens_Plan.pdf .The children’s plan is intended to be both a guide for the department’s work and a reference point for existing and future initiatives. If you intend to read one summary, of one government plan this year, I guess this is it.
2 University challenge
The government’s planned expansion of higher education continues to be rolled out http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7201228.stm. These plans for expansion are being supplemented by new widening participation initiatives such as the ‘First to go campaign’ http://www.dius.gov.uk/press/03-01-08.html However, this expansion seems at times to be contradicted by practice, for example the news last week that there was a major under spend of widening participation monies at some universities http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2245216,00.html?
If universities are unsure as to how to spend this money I’m sure we could help them.
3 Welfare reform, the skilled workforce
5 Private parts
There has been a flurry of articles over the past month about the significance and proper role of private schooling in the UK. Most of this has been triggered by the recent changes to charity law and the ways in which private schools will have to ‘earn’ their charitable status. This produced a mighty volume of largely predictable words in defence of public schools such as this http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=MDHURZQLC4LFZQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2008/01/16/dl1601.xml A smaller voice has taken the opportunity to criticise private schooling and argue strongly against their claim to special tax status. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-bakewell/joan-bakewell-theres-nothing-charitable-about-buying-privilege-770918.html you may have noticed that this article includes a swipe at one of the countries leading private school headteachers, Anthony Seldon, who I felt tried to break out of this rather obvious trench warfare by raising a number of important points in a major article in The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/dr-anthony-seldon-enough-of-this-educational-apartheid-770182.html In my opinion, if private schools can control their annoyance they would be wise to follow this advice and resist the temptation to hunker down and wait for a conservative government. Indeed, for me, the argument about private schools benefiting from tax breaks is a minor discussion, I think the major point made by Anthony Seldon is that the existing situation is one where private schools and the remaining state grammar schools act as a sort of cartel, an apartheid, controlling and limiting advancement and excellence ‘the stranglehold is almost total’. I’m not sure if his solutions will be enough but I think it is a far more interesting discussion than tax liability.
6 Camilla who?
In my opinion, a potentially important contributor to the debate as to why some young people in the UK are adopting openly anti-social and violent life-styles is Camilla Batmanghelidj. For example, in this article Camilla reflects on the trial and sentencing of those young men who beat to death Garry Newlove, ‘children are not born criminals or killers’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/01/18/do1805.xml –
I recognise that Camilla’s explanation is focused on the most disadvantaged of disadvantaged children and is not an analysis of youth culture in general, but I find her unhappy remarks insightful. Unfortunately, I fear Camilla will be marginalised in any policy debates in the UK, as her analysis poses very difficult questions for government and policy makers. Those who shape the policy debate in the UK would rather not have the adequacy of their policy-pronouncements measured against this benchmark and consequently I fear that Camilla, while being widely praised for her work with damaged children, will rarely be invited to the social policy ball.
7 The great energy debate
So far, the debate about the future of energy generation in the UK seems to have been dominated by the choice of nuclear or renewables. I’m concerned that the question of energy affordability and fuel poverty has been marginalised. In particular, I’m worried that there is already a consensus that fuel will be much more expensive in the future, whatever the source. If this is the case, then the disproportionate losers will be the socially disadvantaged, especially the most disadvantaged, who are already paying punitive energy supply charges through the use of pay-as-you-go key meters. These people also tend live in the least energy efficient and lowest standard of housing, especially since the abandonment of national minimum standards in 1980 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Morris_Committee Unfortunately, the likelihood of improving their housing stock, through the implementation of high quality insulation or other major energy saving building modifications, does not appear to be very great. I fear that a harbinger of how Housing Associations (HA) and local authority housing regimes will respond to this challenge has been the way that they have responded towards tenants who request permission to install water meters in their homes. For example Mosaic, one of London’s largest HAs, will only allow tenants to have water meters fitted when the tenant agrees, in advance, to pay any costs associated with installation of the meter. As the water supply is usually to a flat, where the plumbing is often a jerry-built bodge, rather than a standard street supply, there can be considerable damage to kitchen fixtures when plumbers trace and modify the pipe-work. The result, few dare risk the cost. The energy debate becomes even more abstract with discussion of how people might offset energy costs by generating their own supplies. Such schemes, though varied and imaginative, are all irrelevant to people living, for example in a third floor flat who are prohibited by the terms of their tenancy from fixing anything to the external wall of their home or making structural changes. I’m not arguing pro or anti-nuclear, frankly I’m more worried that that the narrow debate we seem to be having ignores the ways in which a future premised on more expensive energy will of itself increase social disadvantage and division in the UK.
Monday, 7 January 2008
1) A breakthrough for e-mentoring?
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
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.