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
Saturday, 16 February 2008
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.