Between two extreme views there is always a third way.

Another Sunday, another surfeit of education stories.

Will Hutton writing in today’s Observer seems to have divided many informed opinions on my Twitter timeline this morning.

Hutton is essentially advocating Sir Michael Wilshaw’s OFSTED reforms and extols the ‘no excuses’ mantra.  Even if teachers find Sir Michael’s management style to be rather crass and authoritarian they ought to embrace his drive to improve educational achievement he suggests.

According to Hutton those who are set against these proposed reforms are of course the same old pantomime villains, the teaching unions. Chris Keates  of the NASUWT  is singled out and accused of  behaving  irresponsibly  when she complains about Sir Michael and his relentless ‘trashing of the [teaching] profession’. This Hutton tells us is ‘puerile game-playing at the expense of schools, their teachers and pupils’.

The problem is that the truth and the solution probably lie somewhere between these extreme views and most teachers I know are taking this third way when they are working tirelessly to add value to every child they teach.

The one truism in this whole article is the admission from Hutton ‘that to try and make any progress in the face of swingeing cuts in capital budgets and frozen teacher pay is to ask close to the impossible’

In my own state school, where I am in charge of after school activities, it’s dedicated and selfless teachers who are making the real difference in transforming children’s lives. There is no extra cash or financial incentive to run these clubs or in providing catch-up sessions but they are happening and flourishing.

I’ll admit it, teachers do make excuses.  But guess what, so do politicians. Hardly a day goes by without a coalition MP blaming everything on the last lot. George Osborne has turned this into an art form as the economy stutters on the brink of another recession.

What we need to do as a profession is to agree a ‘commitment target’ based upon pupils prior attainment. A target that is reasonably challenging and impressive (centred on literacy + numeracy) and one that we will all commit to and if we don’t meet it we’ll be putting our jobs at risk. In return we need a culture of trust and enduring confidence in teachers and a belief that every child, teacher and school matters. 

Finally, if this new OFSTED framework is to redefine teaching and learning, we need an undertaking from parents (no mention of them at all in Hutton’s article) that they will give schools their total support.  Primary socialisation happens in the home, not the school and good parenting is as important as good teaching.

Thanks Twiggy but NO thanks

Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary sets out his BIG idea today. He believes that pupils need to be acclimatized to a

‘work-like timetable’.

 He also states that 21st century schools are

‘still organised like factories’.

(I’ll bet Twiggy has NEVER worked in a factory in his entire life!)

Whilst this speech will go down like a lead balloon in the staff rooms of England, this idea may not be quite the turkey it first appears.

However it does come with a major caveat.

It must not be compulsory and the experiences for pupils must be of the highest quality.

After school activities are often the best experiences on offer and can be transformational to the life chances of many pupils. In fact sport is totally reliant upon teachers giving up their own time and expertise to organise and coach youngsters.

If he made it an aim to get most youngsters involved once or twice a week in a challenging after school activity then I couldn't see too many teachers objecting to this aspiration.

But this speech has too many unanswered questions. It would certainly have to be funded and teachers would have to agree to it.

 

Wake up and FIGHT

January takes its name from the Roman god Janus, who is often depicted as a two-faced god since he looks both to the future and the past. It was in this tradition that the Guardian asked an eclectic group of educational stakeholders to offer up their own ‘edu-wishlist’ for 2012.

It through up some interesting viewpoints as you might expect from such a diverse range of individuals. First we had AC Grayling advocating the abolition of school examinations, (yeah, like that is about to happen sometime soon) to the frankly bizarre. The [nutty] Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education, who stridently believes that ALL teachers' contracts ought to be changed at their annual appraisal. He suggests that teachers would have to show that they'd improved in order to keep their jobs! Where else in professional life does this exist?

Do doctors, lawyers and police officers have to demonstrate improvement? Of course not. (and it is completely flawed in terms of employment law).

However, it was the piece penned by the perfume prancer, Toby Young, that caused me the greatest offence. In his haste to ingratiate himself to the puppet master, he claimed that Gove had ‘restored discipline to the classroom’. When challenged to produce some real and meaningful evidence, Toby sent me this link from the Daily Mail

This statement typifies the misleading premise that right wing cheerleaders, such as Toby Young, always make. They start off by setting up a false assumption - that our schools are in state of constant chaos. (Hmmm, no they’re not Toby...any REAL evidence?).

Of course it’s complete and utter nonsense and plain old scaremongering to suggest that state schools are out of control and thanks to Gove it’s all now being sorted out.

People like Toby Young will continue to denigrate teachers and pupils in state comprehensives because it suits their agenda. It’s only Free Schools and Academies that can be talked up because that’s Toby Young’s politically motivated policy.

And in this one sentence, Toby Young surrenders any educational objectivity he may claim to have.

So here is MY new year resolution. To wake up and fight against these false accusations.

The Toby Young‘s of this world must not be allowed to make such sweeping statements that do so much harm to the teaching profession and pupils alike without being challenged.

If Toby wants to be such a ‘suck-up’ to Michael Gove then fine, just don’t spread such malicious lies about the state of our schools.

Non political school commissioners or DfE policy gaff?

Incoming OFSTED chief Sir Michael Wilshaw has today, advocated the appointment of local trouble-shooters whose so-called job it would be, to identify failing schools and sack incompetent heads. He believes that spotting failing schools should not be down to him alone. Sir Michael believes that identifying and helping schools early requires local trouble-shooters or school commissioners to make the necessary interventions and report their findings directly to the Secretary of State.

Brian Lightman the General Secretary ASCL speculates upon this sudden policy U turn in his blog. Brian Lightman is a keen observer and is quick to spot the political implications of this move and rightly sees this as a ‘ devastating critique of government policy’.

The point is that this is a political move and as such the timing of this move is equally important, 3 days before Sir Michael takes up his appointment as head of OFSTED.

In the Times Sir Michael outlines his proposals. He called on ministers

'to appoint dozens of these commissioners in local areas to decide whether to close or merge academies, or replace head teachers or governing bodies where standards were unacceptably low'

'They could be modelled on commissioners which monitor school standards in the US'

Why oh why are we constantly looking at US models of education and how can we believe that these posts would ever be non-political?

Brian Lightman concludes that education policy is being made all too often by individuals or by politically motivated think-tanks such as the IPPR.

He calls for a Crown appointment of a Chief Education Officer who would be an expert in this field and be politically independent similar to the Chief medical officer’s present role.

Education is crying out for objective, non political accountability.

Michael Gove has centralized academies and turned Whitehall into the largest LA in the country. His goal has been to create more autonomy for schools.

How could the DfE ever hope to monitor and manage all these divergent schools successfully?

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Gove has asked Sir Michael to trail this new policy initiative on his behalf as he tries to cover up a DfE policy gaff. After all, Gove could never be seen to backtrack on a policy he himself created.

There’s nothing unaffordable about public sector pensions

Writing on the PoliticsHome website, Conservative MP Brandon Lewis argues that the Public sector is not immune to change and that the coalition government has made a ‘fair’ and ‘generous’ offer.

So the premise of his argument rests solely on the key measure of ‘affordability’.

This, as anybody who has actually taken the time and trouble to read the Hutton report  knows, is something of a myth.

What page 23 of the report shows is that even without the Hutton reforms, the cost of public sector pensions on the key measure of affordability (as a percentage of GDP) has already peaked and is set to decline markedly over the years ahead. That's because public sector pensions have already been quite significantly reformed, the two main changes being higher employee contributions and the shift from RPI to the generally lower CPI for indexing purposes.

Whilst Brandon Lewis is right to say that in general  private sector pensions have suffered,  (when Lab abolished the tax credit on dividends)  this alone is not a good reason to be equally pernicious to the public sector. Brandon’s policy is a "race to the bottom".

What he really proposes is a move to the leveling of public sector pensions down to the disgracefully low standards that rule in the private sector?

What Brandon Lewis also fails to tell his readers is that the Office for Budget Responsibility projections, as shown in the bar chart beneath, show much the same thing. Far from rising as a proportion of GDP, the cost of public sector pensions is set to decline even assuming no further reform.

This graph clearly shows that the PS pensions peak in 2012-13 and that at 1.4% of GDP they are most certainly affordable. This is no demographic time bomb!

What Brandon Lewis is really saying is that whilst he thinks it’s fair that taxpayers fund the NHS, Police and Schools within a universal tax system, he doesn't think it’s fair that the nurses, police officers and teachers have a pension that is more favourable than those in the private sector.

It’s this perceived ‘unfairness’ (or the politics of envy) that Brandon finds objectionable.

Whilst he and his fellow MP’s have only been paying very little into their own defined pensions scheme since 2006 and enjoy probably the best gold-plated final salary pension available to any public sector employees, I feel he is on rather shaky ground.

The public sector pensions are most definitely affordable it’s just that this government has other priorities.